Xmas Spirit Read Free

dusty and difficult to see through, but she was still able to bring a long empty corridor into focus. A hallway lined with . . . “LOCKERS!”
    “Hawthorne!” Charlotte gasped. “I must be dreaming.” Like one of those I never graduated or I didn’t do my homework or I can’t find my class kinds of nightmares that her perfectionist self suffered from, even in death.
    She placed her hand on the glass and reflected silently for a second. This was the last place she ever really was. Ever truly existed. Damen had walked away from her down this hallwayas she’d choked to death: the last thing she ever really saw with her two human eyes.
    Charlotte reached for the doorknob, twisted it, and walked out tentatively into the barren schoolscape. There was always something eerie to her about a school building after hours. She’d never done a lot of after-school clubs or sports, but the few times she’d found herself alone, wandering around looking for an open exit, was enough to make a permanent impression. Without kids, without the life and energy they bring, it was just a shell, a mausoleum, entirely without purpose.
    She walked slowly, brushing her hand along the lockers as she passed. If this was a dream, it was the closest she’d ever had to a lucid one. It all felt so real, right down to the cold polished metal handles on the locker doors and the industrial wax odor emanating from the floors. Sensory overload for a girl who’d been without her senses for longer than she cared to remember. In fact, it was too real, more like an hallucination, an exaggeration of reality, than a dream.
    Suddenly, a harsh and unexpected buzzing filled the air, followed immediately by a screaming stampede of students rushing out from door after door into the corridor. In an instant, the building had been transformed from death to life. Resurrected. Locker doors slammed, toilets flushed, gossip flew. Charlotte stood perfectly still, like the calm eye of a storm that was coming much too close for comfort, and let it pass around and through her ghostly frame.
    That is until she saw him.
    Her piece on earth.
    Damen Dylan.
    He was chatting intently with his pack, drawing out football plays on his palm as they walked. Charlotte silently thanked whoever had made this dream possible and gazed upon him. He was just the same as she remembered, and oddly, she had the same feelings about him. Tall, hot, charismatic, and out of her league. She tilted her head and fixed on him like a bull’s-eye, blocking out everything and everyone else streaming down the corridor, and it felt completely natural to her. Old habits die hard, she figured, so she might as well just go along with it. As he passed she unconsciously reached out to touch him. Eric would understand, she rationalized, through a twinge of guilt. It was just a dream after all. She was sure he had them too about other girls. At least at that moment, she hoped he did.
    “Damen,” she said slyly, as if he could actually hear her.
    He stopped and looked right at her. Not with compassion, understanding, or even recognition, but with confusion. Scorn, some objective onlookers might even have said.
    He saw her. He must have, Charlotte thought, but that not’s possible. Then again, maybe in a dream anything was possible. It was her dream. Before she could get a word out, she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, and she was propelled face-first into the lockers.
    “Whoops,” followed by loud, derisive laughter was all she heard as her body sagged down toward the floor.
    Charlotte was hurting. Not emotionally, but literally, physically hurting. Her shoulder, her face, her entire body. She turned her head to see who’d done the dirty deed, but all she could identify were three pairs of perfectly proportioned, salon-tanned, shapely legs traipsing expertly in high heels away from her. She knew who it was by the swing of their hips. The Wendys. And Petula. They’d bullied her successfully without even