Chapter 5
When the day finally ended I couldn’t wait to get home, but when I walked through the front door of our house, I almost turned back. Everything was a wreck—the same as it had been that morning. I marched back to Jake’s bedroom and cracked open the door. Jake was asleep, lying diagonal across the bed, wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday and maybe even the day before.
White static from the television projected ghostly images into the cluttered room. Jake’s clothes carpeted the floor, probably both clean and dirty ones. I closed the door hard and walked back to my bedroom.
Jake’s spirit had died the day we buried my dad. In a way, my dad, his older brother by ten years, had been like a father to him. From what I’d been told, their mother (and my grand-mother, whom I’d
