Chapter 119

“Hey, don’t come for me, bro. They said the same thing. That’s what you told me the morning I picked you up in the snowplow. ‘Live your life, life, life.’” Rip did a spooky echo. “‘Don’t obsess about us, us, us.’”

“You don’t even get how the whole thing works.”

“The ghost thing? True that, Bro-ford. No clue. Explain it to me.”

“I can’t.” I sat. “You had to be there.”

“Why can’t we?” Shelby asked. “I wonder if this sort of thing runs in families…the ability to communicate with the other side.”

“I’d bring you…if there was a way…if I ever get to go back. We could see Gramma and Grampa, and TJ.”

“Our childhood dog,” Shelby said in response to Rip’s puzzled look.

“And Max, the dog I had before Wilbur.”

“I still don’t believe you had a dog with the same name as yours.”

We’d been over that before, too. “He was already named at the shelter where I got him, Rip. Why confuse him, I figured.”