I stopped.

                  I stared.

                  And then my jaw dropped.

                  All at once, a second round of dizziness came over me; the room was toppling to one side again, threatening to offset my balance completely. I felt ready to start swaying on my feet – and maybe this time I wouldn’t be able to stay upright.

                  Closing my eyes, I held my head in both hands and tried to steady myself. There was something seriously wrong here, and I was willing to bet the problem lay within the confines of my skull. So soon after Mitchell had made me feel sane again, even if just momentarily, I was already going out of my mind.

                  You’re imagining things, I told myself, in a much firmer voice than anybody should’ve had to use inside their own head. Don’t even think for a second this is real.

                  I repeated the words at least ten times over, frozen in the doorway of my bedroom, making a frantic attempt to believe them. I told myself I believed them, at least, if only because there was no rational explanation to what I’d just seen. And yet I was still too scared to open my eyes.

                  As my orientation faltered once more, I stumbled in the vague direction of my bed, blindly navigating the few steps it took to cross the room. Every muscle in my body was trembling, and I couldn’t muster up the courage to open my eyes. I was too terrified to see what sat near the opposite wall.

The entire house was eerily silent, and I could hear nothing: no indication that swung either way. About this, I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. Did I want to hear the steady rhythm of Reese’s breath six feet away, when I knew full well she was supposed to be in a hole in the ground? As much as I’d previously longed to see my sister again, this was in a whole other league.

                  I fell back onto the mattress, feeling it sink beneath my weight. There, at least, I felt more steady, and keeling over would be a lot safer on the duvet.

                  Holy shit, I’m hallucinating.

                  I was perched on the edge of the bed, knees spread, half-tempted to place my head in between them. That was what you were supposed to do to stop yourself fainting, right? And I certainly felt ready to, each time I thought back to the face I’d seen across the room thirty seconds ago. A face that, for all I knew, might still be there.

                  It hadn’t looked like a hallucination, but then again, was it possible to tell? There had been something about it, a strange quality that just seemed real, more solid than anything my mind could’ve conjured up.

                  And that was perhaps what had me keeping my eyes shut for so long.

                  I knew I had to open them eventually. I couldn’t sit there forever, my entire body shaking in terror, driving myself crazy just wondering. Even if I fled the room and closed the door, there’d come a point when I would have to open it again. I couldn’t evade it forever.

                  There was only one thing I could do.

                  There won’t be anything there, I recited as convincingly as I could. You’re drunk, and you’re not thinking straight. You didn’t see anything. Just open your eyes.

                  So, ignoring the way my heart felt ready to burst right out of my chest, I did.

                  And there she was.

                  My sister sat at the end of her bed, legs crossed, every bit as composed as I remembered. There was nothing off about her posture: nothing to suggest this was anything but normal. It looked almost like she wasn’t supposed to be buried six feet underground, eyes closed and with a heart that had stopped beating long before. Her hair, still that vibrant shade of red, fell over her shoulders in the tousled way I’d spent years trying to imitate, while her ever pale skin had taken on a strange glow. Dressed in her favourite jeans and a leather jacket, it seemed as if she’d stepped right out of the past, and her silently confident expression made it plain she thought nothing odd of it.

                  “What the…?”

                  It had come out under my breath, more to myself than anything, but Reese heard. “Hey, now,” she said, the smile having yet to vanish from her face. “That’s really no way to greet your twin. We haven’t seen each other in, what, six weeks?”

                  The words were caught in my throat; my lips moved, but the sound didn’t follow, and it felt like the unspoken had a presence in itself. “You’re… but you’re…” What eventually made it through was only borderline coherent. “But you’re dead.”

                  I couldn’t stop staring. Utterly transfixed, I was unable to draw my eyes away from Reese’s identical pair, strangely full of all the life she’d spent six weeks missing out on. Everything about her was exactly the way I remembered, my own mirror image, but this time unseparated by the physical barrier.

                  Reese pulled a face. “Yeah, thanks for pointing that out, Cal. Don’t you think I know that already? This shitty thing conked out on me, didn’t it?” She gestured down to her heart.

                  Words had failed me once again. This time, I wasn’t even sure they were in my brain, let alone able to make it out anywhere else. I’d been reduced to utter speechlessness, and there was nothing I could do about it.

                  “Oh, go on,” she said, with a tinge of impatience. “Say something. I didn’t come all this way here to have you stare at me gormless.”

                  The fixation of her eyes sent a peculiar chill down my spine; I found myself shivering, even though the bedroom was plenty warm enough. “What do you mean, ‘all this way’? Where have you been? What the hell is going on here?”

                  The frantic note in my voice broke out by the last question; it lingered in the air long after the words had escaped. The only certainty in the dimly lit bedroom, I found myself clinging onto it, fighting to stay orientated when reality had twisted and morphed around me. If my dead twin sister was sat on her bed, talking to me like it was the most normal thing in the world, how was I supposed to put any measure of faith in my surroundings? How could I trust the feel of my bed sheets beneath me, light from the street lamps filtering in through the open curtains, the air that cycled in and out of my lungs? None of it made sense anymore; things so familiar they’d never warranted notice had all become distorted, a blurred backdrop against the main attraction. Reese.

                  And yet, amongst it all, there was no chink in her composure. She remained in her spot, leaning back a little, as casual as ever. As if she hadn’t been declared dead in the back of an ambulance just last month. “God, Callie, you could at least act a little bit happier to see me.”

                  I felt ill. There had to be something majorly wrong with my brain; this went way past anything the lingering alcohol could induce. Had I fallen and hit my head without realising? Was I lying in a coma somewhere, and this entire scenario was the creation of my vacant mind? I could recall no point in which an accident may have happened, and yet it was miles saner than the prospect of this being real.

                  My sister was dead. I’d seen it with my own eyes as she lay in a hospital bed, all traces of life wiped from her usually effervescent features. There had been no doubt about it, even as the doctors sent countless electrical shocks through her lifeless body in a frantic attempt to restart that shitty heart. No uncertainty. Reese was gone.

                  And yet, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.

                  “Reese,” I said, my mouth already dry with the name on my tongue. “You need to tell me what’s going on here. I think I’m going mental.”

                  “Really? I come all the way back from the dead, and you’re still managing to make this about you?” She paused for a moment, in which all I could do was stare, before breaking into a smile. Her green eyes glittered. “Oh, come on, Cal. I’m just joking. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

                  “Haven’t I?” I asked.

                  I wanted an answer, a real one, but Reese just smirked. “You tell me.”

                  “No, I can’t tell you, because I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on.” I wanted to let my head fall into my hands; the thoughts racing through my mind were inducing an even stronger dizziness. I was sure there’d be hell to pay with a headache tomorrow morning, and not just from the hangover. “Oh my God. I’m going crazy.”

                  “No, you’re not.” Her voice had me looking up, and our gazes met somewhere in the middle of the room. “Trust me, Callie. You’re fine.”

                  “Just explain to me what’s going on.”

                  My tone stayed level, silently demanding, but Reese skirted past the question at the first opportunity. “I came to see you, didn’t I? Are you saying you didn’t want to?”

                  “Of course I did,” I said. “But I’ve spent the last six weeks wrapping my head around the fact I wouldn’t see you. Ever again. Because you’re dead, Reese. You’re not supposed to be sitting here right now, and I can’t concentrate on anything other than the fact I might have something seriously wrong with me…”

                  “Callie.”

                  I stopped. She was looking at me, properly now, and with such intent it felt like her green eyes were boring right inside my head. I was used to it, of course; being faced with such a sight each time I looked in the mirror had given me time to grow accustomed. And yet in ten minutes, everything had changed, sending my entire perception off kilter. My whole world was suddenly teetering on its axis, while I clung to the edge, trying not to get thrown off.

                  “Don’t think about it too much,” she told me quietly. “Just accept it.”

                  “This is all in my head, isn’t it?” I asked, even though I was sure I knew the answer. “This isn’t happening. You’re not here at all.”

                  She just smiled, oozing a sense of calm that had long since become alien to me. Raising her arm, she held it out, a silent invitation. “Why don’t you find out?”

                  For a second, I just stared, focused on her outstretched arm. The pale skin stood a contrast against the dim light of the room. It was there, waiting. All I had to do was broach the space, reach out, and I’d know for certain.

                  There was really no question about it. Slowly, I rose from the bed on my shaky legs, advancing steadily across the gap. The distance between us measured no more than six feet, and yet all at once it had turned into a gaping abyss, injecting miles into the small space.

                  I stopped right in front of Reese’s figure, and she looked up at me, still wearing the half-smile that put every inch of me on edge. Just being so close to her had my trembling intensifying, a physical reflection of what my brain was going through.

                  “Go on,” she coaxed, her gaze flickering to her arm and then back to me. “Touch it. Find out.”

                  It was what I’d been intending to do. I had to know; I could sit through no more of this, torturing myself with the lingering threat of madness, simply not knowing. It shouldn’t have been a question that ever crossed my mind. Not when the answer was so obvious.

                  And yet right at the last minute, seconds before I sealed the gap, I stopped. To reach any further was the point of no return: a moment I could never take back. Was I truly ready to find out? Would I even be able to cope upon finding out what I was certain of in the back of my mind? I knew it couldn’t be Reese, not in front of me in our shared bedroom, at three in the morning. It was a strange reaction of my grief-plagued mindset, and I was talking to nobody other than myself.

                  But, amongst all that, there was hope. And suddenly, I realised I wasn’t ready to let that go.

                  “Go on,” Reese whispered.

                  “I can’t,” I breathed back, wondering why I felt so close to tears. They were already prickling my eyes, threatening, obscuring my sister’s face like a fragment of broken glass.

                  I took a step back. Only then did my breath escape me, a lungful of air I hadn’t known I was holding in. Blinking furiously, I lowered my shaking hand and returned my gaze to my sister.

                  For the first time in a long while, her expression was unreadable. All the time she was alive, she’d been an open book – or at least to me. Though others had often remarked about not being able to work her out, I never understood what they meant. To me, Reese had always seemed like an extension of myself – or rather, I was the extension of her. We were fine-tuned, perfectly in sync, our twin connection always seeming to run a little deeper than medically correct. It wasn’t something that anybody else had picked up on, not beyond comments about us being inseparable, but it had always been there, buried deep, just… existing.

                  “What did you mean?” I eventually managed to force out. “When I walked in. You said ‘it’s about time’. What were you talking about?”

                  Slowly, the smile crept back onto her expression, and she raised herself from the bed. Once standing, I took an instinctive step back. “You think I haven’t been watching you, Callie Washington? Of course I have. I’ve been keeping a very close eye.”

                  “W-what do you mean?”

                  “I know you found the list,” she said. Taking a step forward, she followed with another, and another, until the steady rhythm led her in a circle around me. “The list that’s in your back pocket right now.”

                  My hand went there straight away, touching the top of the paper poking out over the hem. I hadn’t doubted it would be there, but I felt the compulsion to check all the same.

                  “I would’ve taken more care in where I left it,” Reese went on, “had I known I was going to drop dead the next day. But I guess that’s shitty heart defects for you, isn’t it? They don’t exactly give you much of a heads-up.”

                  She shrugged, before coming to a stop. “’Course, I didn’t exactly plan for you to go delivering anything to Mitchell Hunt, either.”

                  My throat was dry; I was struck by the sudden urge to apologise, though there was no real reason to. It had been an honest mistake, and Reese must’ve known that. And yet there it was again: the strange twist to the situation in that it involved Mitchell, which seemed to throw everything else off. “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so feeble. “I should’ve checked before I handed in all that stuff.”

                  “It’s okay. I was just worried it wouldn’t get back to you.”

                  “Mitchell wouldn’t have kept it,” I said, though I wondered where the words had come from as soon as they were out of my mouth.

                  I could’ve sworn I saw Reese raise her eyebrows, giving me a look, but she didn’t press. “I just wanted to make sure it ended up where it was supposed to. And, of course, that you’d make the right decision once it did get back to you. But I was less concerned about that one.”

                  “This was all part of a plan?”

                  “Well, not a plan, as such,” she told me. “Like I said, dropping dead wasn’t really on the agenda, but there you have it – life’s full of surprises, right? And death, too. I just figured it would end up in your hands eventually, and you’d work out what you had to do.”

                  “Why didn’t you just show up here straight away? Surely you could’ve just turned up and told me what you wanted? You didn’t need to wait for me to find the list.”

                  “Ah,” she said, her eyes glittering, “but now, Callie, where would be the fun in that? I wanted to see if you’d work it out for yourself.”

                  It took a moment for the words to sink in, and when they did, I couldn’t help but feel a little stung. “Fun?” I echoed, incredulous. “What makes you think this is fun? Nothing about the past six weeks has been fun. They’ve been the worst of my life, actually, and all you’re concerned about is having fun with it all?”

                  I could’ve sworn I saw her back up, not expecting the retaliation. Then again, I couldn’t blame her; I never before would’ve dared to argue back. Reese had always done enough of that for the both of us, whether it be with Mum, our teachers, or anybody our own age. To her, confrontation came naturally, and she was so well-practised in the art that anything from me would’ve just been unnecessary. I’d seen her argue her way out of things so often I would’ve been an idiot to take her on myself.

                  It then occurred to me that I’d only managed to raise my voice once Reese had lost her own.

                  “Look, that’s not what I meant,” she said, trying to backtrack. “This whole thing hasn’t been a picnic for me either. As it turns out, dying sucks. Really, I think I’ve drawn the short straw here. Sure, you miss me for a while, but then what? I have to sit around watching everybody get over it, stuck here wishing somebody could’ve landed me with a heart that didn’t say ‘fuck this, I’m out’ after eighteen years.”

                  “This isn’t easy for me,” I shot back. “It’s not a case of ‘missing you for a while’. It’s ruined my whole life. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.”

                  “Well, obviously. I’d be a little insulted if you weren’t entirely consumed by grief for your dead sister for at least a while afterward. I mean, I know I’ve got to take all this as a compliment. But still, you get my drift. Things get better for you, don’t they? And what happens to me?”

                  “I don’t know,” I said. “What does happen to you?”

                  She shrugged. “Fuck knows. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to be here. Honestly, if it’s possible to do the afterlife wrong, I think I’ve nailed it.”

                  “You don’t do anything wrong,” I told her. “You know how things have always been. Reese’s way turns into the right way. What if everybody else starts following you over, and the entire world ends up being taken over by ghosts?”

                  With this, I got her smiling. “Well, if that’s the case, then I apologise in advance. Though I really can’t help it if I’m a trendsetter. It just happens.”

                  “Yeah,” I said, “it does.”

                  “Anyway, back to what I came here for: the list. I’m counting on you for this, okay? I want this shit done, and if I can’t get it done myself, I might as well settle for somebody who looks exactly like me.” She grinned, and I couldn’t help but smile back, a mirror image, which felt strange for all the wrong reasons.

                  Then, I remembered something else. “There’s one more thing,” I murmured.

                  “What?”

                  I half-wondered if she already knew, seeing as she now seemed to possess a strange touch of omniscience, a side effect of her new form. And yet something told me that she would’ve already mentioned it, with no hesitation to express her opinion.

                  “Earlier tonight, I…” My voice trailed off, and I swallowed again. “It’s not just me who knows about the list.”

                  “Did Mitchell read it?” she asked. “Because honestly, it doesn’t matter that much. It was just a list. Most people knew I wanted to do that kind of stuff, anyway.”

                  “Er… not exactly.”

                  She frowned, her arched brows converging as the lines appeared in her forehead. “Then what?”

                  “It was just something that happened tonight,” I said. It felt kind of like I was trying to soften the blow, which had to be on its way sometime soon, but I couldn’t help it. “I don’t know what made me do it. I’m not sure I even should have done it, which makes the whole thing so much more confusing…”

                  “Spit it out.”

                  I looked back up at her, refocusing on her face, as much as my instincts were protesting against it. “Mitchell offered to help me with it. And I said yes.”

                  It took all I had not to wince; I was sure there was about to be a reaction, and one that would likely need preparation. And yet Reese just carried on standing there, looking on with such intent I wondered if she’d been granted mind-reading skills too. Silence lapsed between us, swelling in the empty space, upholding a presence of its own. Just as it stretched too wide, and I came to assume I’d ruined everything, she spoke.

                  “That’s okay.”

                  They were, perhaps, the two words I was least expecting – and that was the reason I could initially do nothing but blink. “What?”

                  “I said that’s okay.”

                  “Yeah, I thought that’s what I heard…” I was still looking at her strangely. “You don’t mind?”

                  She smiled, a sort of serene expression, a lot calmer than I was used to seeing on Reese. Maybe it was a new thing. Or maybe it was just something I’d failed to notice before. “Not really,” she said. “It’s number two, isn’t it? Accept help when necessary. Seems like you might be learning faster than I am.”

                  “You’re really okay with it? With Mitchell helping me out?”

                  “Yeah.” Then, after some thought, she added, “Are you?”

                  I frowned. “Why are you asking me?”

                  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, slowly, like she was considering. “You don’t seem so certain.”

                  “I’m fine.” The words didn’t come out convincing enough on their own, so I felt like I needed to compensate. “Really. I am.”

                  She just kept smiling, her expression caught somewhere between two points, though I could work out neither of them. “If you say so.”

                  I wasn’t sure what she was trying to get at; she seemed to be sensing a hesitation I wasn’t aware of, almost like she was going deeper into my head than I dared to look. And yet I didn’t question it. Something else was already crossing my mind, a playing question that had to make its escape. “How long do I have?”

                  She paused. “To complete the list?”

                  It was the obvious answer, of course, but I was already shaking my head. “No,” I said. “How long do I have here? Right now, with you.”

                  I wasn’t stupid enough to believe it was indefinite, that I could stay in Reese’s company for as long as I pleased, letting go on my own terms. If the past six weeks had taught me anything, it was that everything was temporary. A return on my sister’s part certainly didn’t come with the guarantee that it wouldn’t be taken away in seconds.

                  Reese just continued staring, wearing that serene expression once again, as if looking upon the entire situation with an air of peace. One that I only wished I could take on myself. “I think it’s time for you to get some sleep, Callie.”

                  I realised then what she was trying to do. “No,” I cut in quickly. “You can’t go yet.”

                  “You should get some rest.”

                  It may have been coincidence, but even as the words were leaving her mouth, a heavy sense of tiredness had begun to descend upon me. The weight on my eyelids had increased tenfold, while a sleepy haze began to seep over everything. “Will you come back?” I asked.

                  “Of course I’m coming back,” she said, with a smile that seemed like she knew more than she was letting on. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

                  I was vaguely aware of how I took several steps back, guided by a lower level consciousness, toward my bed. Lowering myself onto it, my eyes grew heavier as I tried to keep my focus on Reese. Stood on her side of the room, she looked taller than usual, exuding confidence from her mere stance.

                  “I’ll see you around, Callie.”

                  I could barely hold my eyes open long enough to see her turn on her heel, watching as the back of her leather jacket retreated from the room. Before long, my head hit the covers, and I descended into the sleep I was long overdue for.

                  What would come after, I wasn’t sure.

                  All I could do was wait to find out.

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Hi, guys! Another update from me, and pretty quickly too. The forcing myself to be productive through November thing is going well.

This chapter was probably one of the most difficult things I've ever had to write -- it felt like a leap into a new genre, coupled with one of the most important scenes in the whole book. No pressure, huh? But I think it turned out okay. It's 2 in the morning, so my judgement could be impaired right now, but I'm going to go with it.

Hope you guys enjoyed it, and please drop me a comment below to let me know what you thought! Yay or nay for my new spin on teen fiction? I'm very nervous to find out!