Chasing Forever Down (Great White Surf Saga, #1) [Wattpad Featured Story] | ✔

Chapter 2: Chasing Paper Stars

"You tried hooking up with a ghost?" Linzi's voice is completely serious coming through the earpiece of my cell phone.

"No!" I fall back onto my bed, preparing to explain it to my best friend one more time.

"He was very much alive," I assure her. "And I was not hooking up with him."

But now the mystery around Spence Burks has spread outside of my little galaxy and into the universe.

I roll over so I'll stop forming pictures of drumsticks and stars out of the texture on my ceiling. At this rate, I'll end up drawing myself into a padded room, and I know I'm not crazy.

"Can you just come over? You're the only one who actually believes me," I say.

Linzi makes it to my house in record time and manages to get past my parents without discussing the undead. She grabs the book of corporate families as soon as she gets into my bedroom and flips it directly to page twenty-seven.

"He's cute," she says. She stretches out on my bed and looks at me with that same sympathetic face Mom gave me in the kitchen. "You're positive it's him?"

"For the millionth time, yes. I'm completely sure. It was him, and he's not dead, and I'm tired of saying that," I tell her again. My frustration is about to erupt like a massive volcano.

"No twin brother?" she asks.

"Only child," I remind her.

"Damn. Guys that cute should come in twos," Linzi says.

She traces his face on the page with her index finger.

It's not about his looks, though. Yes, he was cute, and he was fun, and any girl my age would probably fall to pieces over him, but that's not why I have to find him. He understood everything I'm feeling, everything I want in life that I can't ever imagine being within my reach. And for once, I felt like it was there, that it was close enough to grab. I'm so sure he's done it, and I need to know every secret of the trade from a mastermind like him.

"I know! Separated at birth! These things happen, you know. I've seen it on talk shows," Linzi says.

She twists her hair around her finger while she thinks. Her eyes glow with excitement as the thoughts rush through her brain like paper stars realigning across a beautiful galaxy. I already dread hearing her next theory.

 "What if," she begins again. "He went somewhere and something bad happened to him? Like he has amnesia and doesn't know who he is but somehow he found his way back here, like he's trying to find his past?"

I shake my head. "He knew his past. He knows what it's like to feel..."

I stop before I say the word 'trapped.'

Linzi stares at me waiting for the rest of the sentence.

I inhale and attempt to come up with something other than how he totally came back here for a reason and understands me in a way that even my BFF doesn't.

"He didn't want to be found," I say. "He was too secretive. He knows exactly who he is, and he didn't want anyone else to know he's alive."

 "So he faked his death! Ohmygosh, this is so exciting," Linzi says, her voice changing from a CSI who just cracked the case to a squealing girl in .02 seconds. "So how do we find him?"

I rack my brain for any tiny piece of info he may have slipped last night, but his bases were covered well. He always had a comeback.

"I don't know. Everything was so off about him. At least we know who he is now, even if he's supposed to be dead. We can figure out who he was before he died, but I don't know how to figure out who he is now. And all I have to go on is a stupid paper star," I say.