The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

down, her head popped through the ceiling of the floor below.
A couple, spooning on a mattress, peered up at her.
“Get out of here!” one of them scolded her. He shot what looked like clouds out of his finger, filling the room so she couldn’t see them.
“Kids today have no sense of decorum,” she heard him say as she pulled herself back through the ceiling.
“The – the –” she spluttered. “The ghost down there made a cloud! From his hand!”
“Nice!” Rima said. “Was it a cumulonimbus? They’re his favourite.”
Harriet was aghast. “What the hell?! He just grew it from his hand.”
“It’s his power,” Felix said.
“Power?” Her voice was fraying at the edges.
Felix pushed up his sleeves, looking for all the world like a professor settling in to give a lecture. “All ghosts have a power of some sort or another. It’s something that happens when you’ve been around for a while.”
“Felix can hypnotize people!” Rima added.
He grimaced. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but sure.”
This was impossible. They must be playing a prank on her. Harriet pulled an unconvinced face. “Oh my God.”
“You’ve got a power, too. We’ll have to wait and see what it is when it manifests,” Felix said. “Everyone’s is different. I have a theory that this is why humans have loads of different myths about ghosts. Each culture invented their own stories about ghosts – poltergeists, bhoots, strigoi, dybbuk, baku, Antevorta – there are hundreds of legends, all giving them different powers. Because every ghost does something different.”
He was serious, she realized. They weren’t messing with her.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” This might be the answer to her problems. Was there a power that would let her talk to her gran, in a way that her gran would be able to hear? Or, even better – Harriet sat bolt upright – was there a power that would let her leave the building and go home?
“What sort of powers are there?” Harriet asked.
“Anything you can imagine,” Rima said, grinning. “There’s a girl who can transform clothes into different outfits! She made me this T-shirt. She owed me a favour.”
Harriet stared at the glittery T-shirt. It didn’t look magical. It looked totally real and solid. These powers must be really strong, if they could do things like that. What if her own power was something useful? It was impossible to clamp down on her hope.
“How long do they take to appear? I need to find out what my power is. Can we do that? Now?”
“It’s early days,” Kasper reassured her, while lazily watching a delicate brown mouse steal the filling from an old armchair for its nest. “Mine took so long to appear that I thought I didn’t even have a power for ages.”
“Can you even imagine,” Rima said, laughing, and did a little mock shiver. “No powers!”
“Powers aren’t all that, Harriet,” Kasper said. “You’ll be fine.”
Harriet really wanted a power. She wanted one right now. “But how do they work? Where does the magic – thing – power come from?” She hadn’t felt the slightest urge to cast magic spells yet.
“Well, when you tried to leave the hall and started disintegrating, it was because your energy was weakening with distance, right?” Rima said. “Energy is what keeps us all here as ghosts. It’s what our powers run on.”
Harriet’s head felt like it was going to explode. “What happens if you use it all up?”
“Then your time’s up,” Rima said. “You disintegrate.”
She remembered the feeling of her atoms dissolving when she’d left Mulcture Hall and shivered. “OK. This is a lot to take in. Are there any other hugely important things about the afterlife that you haven’t told me yet?”
“Nah, mate. You’re good to go,” Kasper said.
“Though I do have one question for you,” Felix added. “It’s something I’ve been dying to know. How much do Freddos cost now?”
The rest of them don’t understand Harriet quite yet. But you don’t need to be able to see the future to predict what she’s going to do.
Let’s go back to 1994. You haven’t been there yet, and it’s about time I looked back at it from this angle. It’s funny how you can see different things, each time you look. Like turning over an object to see it from different sides.
So. Here’s Felix on the first day he met Rima and Kasper. He’s nervous. He’s unpacking his things in his room when his brother, Oscar, brings him a bin bag full of clothes that had been taken to the wrong room by accident. He’s brought a girl with him, someone who has a room near by. This is Rima. Felix has no idea that she’ll become one of his best friends.
It’s strange to me, that when everyone else meets people for the first time, everything about them is completely new. Nobody has any idea of what is to come. How do you all know which stranger to remember? Which conversation to pursue?
When Oscar introduces Felix, Rima grins at him, a little shy herself. Oscar suggests that they all go and grab lunch – he wants to help Felix make friends, so that he doesn’t spend all his time alone. But he also likes Rima. She never even noticed. I don’t think she knows about his crush, even now.
As they’re walking down the stairs, talking about what A-levels they studied, whether they applied to Oxbridge and where their second choice of uni was, Felix bumps into a boy by accident. They both stumble, and an alarm clock falls out of a box he’s carrying. It smashes on the ground.
The boy is Kasper, obviously. He sneers at Felix, annoyed. Embarrassed, Felix forgets to apologize and flees down the stairs. Kasper yells something sarcastic after him, looking at the broken clock in dismay. It was brand new – a gift from his dad for starting uni. He wanted to make sure that Kasper didn’t sleep in and miss his lectures (he’d nearly missed one of his