Searching Souls (eBook)

S. A. Cahill (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-2537-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Sophia, a high school student, encounters the ghostly presence of Ethan, a living classmate. Unsure if it's a dream or something more sinister, Sophia embarks on a journey to uncover the truth, but her quest draws unwanted attention from the paranormal and the unknown.

Textauszug

Chapter One:
Who is This?

I want you to know that we are never alone. I went through a lot to keep everything I saw during the last few months a secret. After my life settled down, I needed to write it all down to sort it out for myself. I am still worried any one I tell will think I am nuts, but knowing that we don’t have to face the bad parts of life alone has helped me. So, this is the story of how I learned to have faith in the visible and invisible. I hope my story helps you.

Ethan never actually spoke to me until the first time he appeared in my room. He seemed to be glowing with a gentle glimmer from some internal source, just like the stars he was looking at through my window. I was trying to sleep, but something in my room felt different so I opened my eyes, and there he was. After getting over the initial shock of seeing a boy in my room, just a few feet from my bed, looking out of my window, I noticed that he didn’t see me so I was free to stare at him, something I could never do under ordinary circumstances. I felt as if I’d never seen anyone so clearly in my life. I wish I had started writing our story that night, but I didn’t understand that I had to tell our story until now. Only three months later, I’m already having a hard time remembering what it felt like to be so unsure that he was really there that night.

When he appeared, he looked a little more startled than I felt, but just for a second. At first, I could only see his profile then he shifted his head slightly to his left to look at something outside of the window, up in the sky. He still didn’t notice me, but when he tilted his head, it was just enough for me to see his face.

I recognized his rusty hair and his bright blue eyes. It took a lot of effort to stop myself from gasping in surprise. I didn’t want him to hear me and realize I was awake. I remembered that I saw him in church once looking bored and annoyed, with his arms folded, sitting with someone who must have been his grandmother. I thought he was probably a jerk who gets dragged to church. I also remembered seeing him around campus from time to time ever since the first morning of my first day of school.

All of the hallways in the school on that first day were clogged with students. So many of them stopped to catch up with friends, to compare their schedules, or get into their lockers that the flow in the halls were almost at a standstill in some places and it made it feel as if there were too many of them to actually fit in the halls, like a river overflowing its banks. To me, the students in the hallways were a stream of strange faces. I felt as if all of them had grown up in this fairly small community together and I was the only one who was drifting and lost. That first time I saw him at school, was in one of those crowded hallways.

In June, just two months before that first day at my new school, my parents and I had packed up our stuff and our dog to move to Sedona from Phoenix. The three of us had just watched my brother, Wynn, try to live the last year of his life with as much dignity and grace as anyone could with a brain tumor blossoming inside of his head. My brother passed away at the start of my freshman year of high school and his senior year. When my brother died, I felt as if I was almost as separated from the world as he was. My parents seemed to feel the same way as me. A few months after my brother died, a high school principal in Sedona offered my father a teaching job. My dad, my mom, and I agreed a move to a new place might help us to move on. The three of us muddled through the last few months of the school year. The fact that we had to plan the move helped those few months pass more quickly. We moved as soon as we could, at the start of the summer when school let out, so the move to Sedona didn’t really help me move on. I didn’t really meet anyone my age until school started. I meant to get involved in something during the summer to meet people because I guessed it would be hard to meet people as a sophomore transfer, but instead I ended up finding ways to keep myself busy at home almost every day. Each morning, when I was just about to wake up, I still pictured my old room in Phoenix. When I opened my eyes, I was still a little confused when I saw that I was in my new room in Sedona. I half expected to drive up to my old school on the first day of classes even though I had been to the school every day for the two weeks before school started to help my father set up his classroom.

When I saw Ethan, on that first day of school, I was trying to find my way from my locker to my first class. He was at the other end of the hall heading in my general direction. Even at a distance, he stood out among all the strangers in the school. There are only a few students as tall as him, and that rust colored hair stood out in the crowd, but there is something else different about him that just struck me. The hallway was noisy with clanking lockers and excited student chatter. Most of them seemed excited to see their friends. Some were shouting hello to each other from yards away, and others were giving each other hugs. Ethan didn’t tell anyone hello or seem to want to talk to anyone. As he got a little closer to me, I could see his eyes. He looked as if his mind was somewhere else. Yet, he didn’t drift through the crowd like me, or sort of bounce around like most of the other students. He almost glided. It would have been impossible not to notice him. I thought his hair was exactly the same red as Sedona’s mountains, and his eyes were the same clear blue as the Arizona sky. I remember thinking that it was corny to compare his hair and his eyes to the land and the sky. That’s something guys in movies do to flatter women, but he was very striking and there really wasn’t any other way to describe him. I didn’t think I would end up on his radar. I was too new in town. Despite that, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, I felt drawn to the redhead I believed would never notice me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

As we walked down the hall and got closer together, I was about to pass by him when the remote look in his eye vanished in a flash. I followed his gaze just in time to see what drew his attention. One guy was pulling the books out of another guy’s locker one at a time and dropping them on the floor. The victim tried to catch the books with one hand and used his other hand to try and stop the bully from pulling the other books out of his locker. Just as the third book was about to hit the floor, Ethan caught it and picked up the other two, then handed them to the bully. They stared at one another until the bully put the books back in the locker and both of them walked away. The victim stood alone, looking grateful and confused. As he walked away, the redhead’s eyes glanced at me for such a short time that I couldn’t even be sure he saw me before those eyes returned to that remote look. The guy I thought was a jerk the first time I saw him was actually kind of heroic. I was impressed and intimidated. Some of the other students rushing down the hall bumped into me, and I realized that I had stopped walking to watch the redhead. I realized that if I didn’t get moving, everyone would think I was a freshman.

Despite his distant attitude, I noticed the redhead every time he passed anywhere near me, but I never asked anyone about him or spoke of him to anyone. I could not forget how he quietly rescued that student by the lockers, but I knew how high school works. A single question about Ethan could have startd a rumor that I had a crush on him. Too many questions could have made everyone say I was his stalker. I was not going to become the subject of teasing just to find out more about him.

I even had someone I could have asked about him, but I was afraid. I was lucky. Just a few minutes after I saw Ethan, Felicidad, a girl in my first class, noticed I was new and looking lost. Felicidad flashed her quick friendly smile and walked over to me. She had brown curly hair that almost seemed to move around like subtle antennae even when she was standing still in front of me. She introduced herself and invited me to have lunch with her and her two friends. I was happy to have somewhere to sit at lunch and I accepted without a second thought. When I had lunch with them, I learned quickly that Felicidad is the kind of person who notices what is going on with everyone around her quickly and acts on what she sees just as quickly. I liked Felicidad and her friends, and they were nice to me, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask about Ethan, so I didn’t.

As the first week of school passed, I quickly fell into a routine of going to classes then hanging out with Felicidad and her friends at lunch. I saw Ethan each morning in the hall, and I saw him in the cafeteria at lunch. He was usually sitting by himself until another guy I didn’t know would show up and start talking to Ethan. I never spoke to him or asked about him. Then, that morning, the morning before Ethan appeared in my room, my new high school friend, Felicidad, noticed me looking at Ethan during lunch in the cafeteria. His friend, who seemed to talk a lot, was talking while Ethan sat still with the far-away look in his eyes. That far-away look generally means people aren’t using their eyes because they are playing out something they see in their minds. I wondered what Ethan was seeing. Felicidad nudged me and said, “That one would take a lot of work.”

Felicidad whispered Ethan’s story to me. She said that Ethan lost his parents in a car crash when some kids on pot broadsided his father’s truck while he and his parents were in it....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.2.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-2537-1 / 9798350925371