Crossing Over Read Online Free

Prizewinning banter, Kat, great job.
    “The window,” he said.
    Wait. What?
    “The window?” I asked.
    I did not see any windows anywhere in the direction Ben was pointing, which was by the altar and the golden towered thing
with the statues, a painted blue sky peeking out from behind.
    “Sid said there used to be a huge stained glass window there,” Ben replied. “And the sun would come directly in during mass
and everyone complained it was too bright and too hot. So they eventually plastered the window over and built that.”
    The window was bad.
Trop claire, trop chaude.
Too light, too hot. But who had been telling me this?
    People get information from the dead in all different kinds of ways. Both my mom and I are what you call clairvoyant—we see
ghosts. We can interact with them and talk to them and stuff, but the main connection at first is usually visual. But some
mediums doit differently—and the ones who hear voices are called clairaudient. I wasn’t supposed to be one of those.
    In the seven months since I’d turned thirteen and seen my first spirit, it had taken all that I had to start getting used
to the fact that I saw dead people. One way or another, I knew I was going to be able to deal with it.
    Unless I started hearing voices, too.

Chapter 4
    When we were all back in our seats on the bus, Sid and Mrs. Redd began another of what I was sure would be hundreds of head
counts. I thought life might be considerably improved if we returned to the U.S. with a couple fewer Satellite Girls than
we’d come with, but I wasn’t making policy. Sid counted in English, and Mrs. Redd translated his counting into French, like
we were at the United Nations or something.
    “
Seven, eight, nine
…” Sid pointed to each person as he counted.
    “
Sept, huit, neuf
…” Mrs. Redd echoed. She didn’t point, because I guess there was no way to accurately do that in French.
    Jac had sloshed some of her Sprite onto the floor and was bent over double mopping it up. I tucked my feet under me so my
sneakers wouldn’t get sticky, and out of sheer boredom began silently counting along with Sid. When he got to seventeen, he
gave a satisfied nod and stopped counting.
    Except I got to eighteen.
    I guess I counted someone twice.
    Jac was still in cleanup mode, so I counted again. And came up with the same result. Four adults including Sid, and eighteen
students.
    But there were only seventeen of us on the trip. There had been only seventeen of us in the cathedral, and seventeen in the
gift shop behind the little chapel.
    I leaned into the aisle and examined each row as nonchalantly as I could. We had pretty much taken the same seats we’d had
for the trip up. In the back, I could see Shoshanna and Brooklyn, orbited by other girlcraft I recognized only too well, totaling
one planet (Shoshanna) and six Satellite Girls.
    Directly in front of the girls were four Random Boys, two of them super jocks and loud, one of them a sporty hanger-on type,
and a techno guy named Phil who had successfully morphed his image this year from geek-freak to geek-chic. When someone’s
iPod or cell phone got messed up, Phil became even more popular.
    Lumped together on the other side of the bus were the only four kids not in our French class: They were from the Foreign Students
Club and had therefore been eligible to join the trip. I knew and liked the quiet, sweet-faced Mikuru Miyazaki, an exchange
student from Japan, who sat with her lethally overprotective brother, Yoshi. Next to them was the terminally silent Alice
Flox, and directly across the aisle was the bubbly and outgoing Indira Desai.
    Then, of course, there was the seat I was most trying to pretend I wasn’t looking at, in which sat Ben Greenblott. Across
the row from him, in the window seat with her face pressed to the glass was… was…
    Who was that?
    She was nondescript from the back. Her hair was shoulder length, sandy colored, and straight. She wore a beige sweater that
my mom