Read Online The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson - Free Book Online

said. “If you won’t go with me, then I’ll stay here. There’s an alarm.”
    â€œGo with you where?” she said. And that was the essential problem. Thorpe was correct. We had no plan.
    â€œI’ve texted Callum ten times,” she said. “We need him here. If he’s here, I can go look.”
    Callum had left the hospital in a really emotional state as soon as he realized what I’d done. It was another terrible element in an already terrible series of events. I’d lost track of him in the blur of it all. But Boo was in love with Callum. Nothing had ever happened between them, as far as I knew. I wasn’t even sure if Callum knew.
    It was funny—all these important life events had happened to me, and they’d been there, and I really knew very little about either of them. I knew Boo had family in Mumbai, but she was from East London. She still lived with her parents. She was out of school and, as far as they knew, working. She had some kind of cover story for what she did. She had gotten her sight in a car accident, and her friend Jo had saved her life. Her attitude was always ghost-positive. Callum’s mother was from Kingston, Jamaica, and he had been in training to be a professional football player until the accident that gave him the sight. It was a ghost that caused the accident, which involved a live wire in some standing groundwater. Callum had hated ghosts from the start. He was in the squad to destroy them.
    Which is why this was going to be so hard. I had made Stephen into the thing that Callum despised.
    Boo’s phone buzzed. She had been gripping it in her hand the entire time.
    â€œCallum,” she said. “Finally. Thorpe must have rung him. He’s on his way here. I think I’m going to meet him outside first, yeah?”
    â€œI get it,” I said.
    When Boo left, the house settled around me. I sat on the cold, bare floor, under the faintly greenish light, Stephen’s work things around me in bags, the box from the closet sitting over by the staircase. Any other day, I would have been in that box like a rabbit down a hole, but now it sat there like some kind of silent threat.
    I crouched down next to it and pulled open the folded flaps. This was wrong—going from learning about his life in tiny spoonfuls to total access to everything because he could do nothing to stop it. The dead had no rights to privacy. Everything Stephen held dear was out there for everyone else to see and pick through.
    The box was packed to the brim. On the top were a bunch of notebooks marked with labels that read
Latin, Classics, History (English pre-1600).
School stuff from Eton. I gave these a quick page through to see his handwriting, to see what kinds of things he had learned. Mostly they were handouts, all dense and serious, like something you’d get when you were in college. Beneath these were some pieces of what I guessed was the Eton uniform—a tie, a vest with silver buttons. A few books—six novels and a book of Shakespeare’s poetry. An orange train ticket from six years before. Near the bottom, there were two photographs. One was of a dog with curly red fur. The second photo was of Stephen. There was a girl with him, her arm wrapped over his shoulders. They were kneeling in the sand, and he was crouching a bit to be level with her.
    His sister. There was something about the eyes, and they had the same dark brown hair. She was physically much smaller, her smile much wider, much bolder. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, and there were bracelets down her arm. She tipped her head against his. He was clearly younger in this photo—his face smoother and thinner. His eyes and brow still had that worried look, like something was coming in the immediate future. But he was also smiling. I’d very rarely seen him smile.
    A photo of two dead people.
    I don’t know how long I sat there holding that picture, looking at it as