Exposed

The last bell rang at four, and Aubrey was already gone.

Well, not gone-gone. Her body turn into ghost after she read the scroll and give it to Allison then went to find him. But Aubrey herself was nothing but a chill in the air, sliding through the school hallways.

Being a ghost was weird. No weight. No breath. Just her, floating, and the words from the scroll still humming in her head. *Follow the words. Face the scroll. Speak.* That was the rule. The scroll could pull her out, and the scroll could put her back.

Now. Where was Jarred?

She found him fast. He was easy to spot, even as a ghost. She trailed him down, expecting him to head for the exit. Instead he slowed near the girls' locker room, looked left, looked right, and slipped inside.

"Oh, you dirty little rat," Aubrey whispered to nobody.

She slipped in after him through the door.

The locker room was steamy and empty. Almost. She heard the shower running, one shower, way in the back. And there was Jarred, flat against the wall, his phone held up, camera lens pointed through the gap in the shower curtain at a naked girl.

Aubrey's blood boiled. If she'd had a body, her fists would've been shaking.

The girl in the shower was humming to herself, rinsing her hair, with no idea at all that she been seeing naked.

"That's it," Aubrey said. "You're done."

She floated up behind him and dove straight into his back.

The world snapped. Her ghost stretched into him the way, and suddenly she was looking out of Jarred's eyes.

She lowered the phone and shoved the curtain shut and delete the video.

"Hey!" the girl yelped from inside.

"Sorry! Nothing! Nobody's here!" Aubrey said, in Jarred's voice, and bolted.

"Ah!! A pervert!!"

She let him, no, *made* him, jog out of the locker room, down the hall, and into an empty classroom at the end of the corridor. She locked the door.

His bag was hanging on the back of a chair. She dropped it on the teacher's desk and started digging. Wallet. Gum. Old test papers with a big red F on them. Ha. There, his phone. If Jarred had pictures on here of other girls, she was going to delete every single one and then send his entire camera roll to his mother.

She was two taps into the lock screen when it happened.

His thumb jerked under hers.

"What the—" Aubrey frowned at the hand she was wearing. It twitched again, like it had a mind of its own. "Stop that."

"Get... out..." The words scraped out of Jarred's throat, thick and slow, like he was dragging them up from underwater.

Aubrey froze. "You can talk? In here?"

"GET OUT OF ME!" His whole body shuddered, shoulders wrenching sideways. She fought him for control of his arms and barely won. "I can feel you inside me, you freak! GET! OUT!"

"I said..." He sucked in a breath through his teeth, and she felt it, a pressure building up her back from the inside, pushing. "GET. OU—"

"No no no wait, hold on—!"

The push came all at once.

Aubrey shot out of his back like a cork out of a bottle, slammed into a desk behind her, and landed on it ass-first with a crack.

"Ow! Ow ow ow—" Her body become physical again as she felt it, which made no sense and made it worse.

She looked up.

Jarred was standing in the middle of the classroom, hunched over, panting like he'd just sprinted a mile, staring at the empty air in front of him with his eyes huge.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Jarred backed up a step, one hand out in front of him. "What the hell was that? What did you DO to me?"

Aubrey slid off the desk, keeping it between them. "Okay. This looks bad."

She backed up one more step, felt the cold wall of the window behind her, and made a choice.

Jarred watched her squeeze her eyes shut. Then he watched her body come apart into thin white smoke, right there in front of him. The smoke shot through the closed window.

For a second he just stood there, mouth open.

Then he launched himself at the window, fumbled the latch with shaking hands, and shoved it open. Down on the lawn, he could've sworn he saw the smoke streaking away across the parking lot, fast, so fast, toward the neighborhood by the park.

"You're kidding me," he breathed. "You're actually kidding me."

He leaned out the window and screamed:

"HEY! GET BACK HERE! I SAW YOU AUBREY!"

She didn't stop. Not until she was safely through the front door of her own house and hovering in Allison's bedroom, and become physical again.

"Holy crap," she said, hands on her face. "Holy crap holy crap."

Allison lowered her phone. "You're back early. Did it work?"

"Sort of. Mostly. Except for the part where it went horribly wrong."

....

The other two arrived within twenty minutes, Lucia first, Lux right behind her. Aubrey told the whole story from the beginning, and by the end all three of them were staring at her.

"Wait, wait, wait." Lux held up both hands. "Say the ejecting part again. Slowly."

"I was in him. Like, fully in him. And then he just... pushed. And I flew out of his back and landed on a desk."

"He pushed you out," Lucia said flatly.

"Out. Yes. Onto a chair. My butt still hurts, which, by the way, why does my butt hurt? Wait, I think it's probably that I turned human again."

"That's not the point!" Lux said. "Aubrey. We've been in like six guys this week. Guys are supposed to be easy!"

"Well, nobody ever told Jarred that," Aubrey said.

Allison had gone quiet, arms crossed, doing her thinking face. "Okay. Let's be actual adults about this. What does it mean?"

"It means he felt it," Lucia said. "He felt everything. Which means other people *could* feel it, we just got lucky so far. Or it means something's different about Jarred specifically."

"Jarred is not special," Lux said.

"I'm not saying he's smart. But maybe not every people is easy to possess." Lucia started pacing. "But here's the part that actually scares me. He *saw* you."

"He saw you on a desk for like half a second."

"He saw you turn into a ghost and fly away, Aubrey. You said it yourself. Half a second is plenty when you know what you're looking at."

Silence. Lux sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

"So he knows," she said. "He might not understand it, but he knows something impossible happened, and he knows it was one of us, because who else would it be? We're the girls he bullies."

"He'll definitely trying to figure things out," Allison said. "And Jarred is bad, Everything about him is pervert."

"Then he finds nothing, because the scroll won't be here." Allison stood up and grabbed the scroll off her desk. It sat in her hands like it weighed ten pounds. "My house. Nobody comes to my house."

"Aubrey, what if he tells people?" Lux said.

"What's he going to say? 'A girl flew out of my back'?" Aubrey snorted. "He'd get laughed out of school."

"He doesn't have to say it. He just has to watch us. And here's the other problem, girls, and it's a big one." Lucia pointed at the scroll in Allison's hands. "We can't turn into ghosts without it. We can't get into anybody without it. If we use the scroll, we will be find out. So I think it's better, If the scroll is locked in Allison's closet, then the four of us are just... trying not to get the scroll. For however long this lasts. For now."

"For now," Lux repeated, like the word tasted bad.

"Temporarily for now," Allison said. "Which is exactly what we should be, right now, while a very curious meathead is wandering around having seen a ghost with Aubrey's face."

"How long?" Aubrey asked.

"Until we're sure he's calmed down. Or forgotten. Or both."

"Jarred doesn't forget," Lucia said. "Jarred holds grudges."

"Then we lie low, we keep the scroll safe, and we do NOT go ghosting around until we figure out how he pushed me out." Aubrey flopped backward onto the bed. "Ugh. And he's going to be so curious. I can't imagine what he will do if he finds the scroll."

The girls argued a while longer, about whether Jarred was special or just strong, about whether they'd been too cocky all week, about who was going to walk Allison home with the scroll because nobody wanted to carry it alone. By the time it was dark, the plan was simple. Scroll to Allison's house. Nobody goes ghost. Nobody wears anybody. Keep the secret.

What none of them knew, none of them could have known, was that the secret was already leaking.

Because at that exact moment, He reached her house as the sun went down. He was about to walk up to the windows, because that was the direct approach and Jarred only knew the direct approach.

"...it's not like we can just tell Jarred to his face..." Aubrey's voice.

"...he *saw* her, we can't pretend he didn't..." Lucia.

"...if he ever found the scroll, if he ever figured out what it does, imagine Jarred with that kind of power to possess people's bodies..." Allison.

Scroll. Become ghost. Possessing anyone. That was what Aubrey been inside him. There was an object, a real object, that did it, and it was currently in that house.

He should have felt something else. Instead, slowly, Jarred started to grin.

"Oh," he whispered to himself. "Oh, this is gonna be fun."

He crouched down by the windows where nobody could see him from the window, and kept listening. Then he dial and call someone.

"Hey Rafael, there's something you need to know. It involves the four girls...."