The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) by Paige McKenzie

lonely aura made my skin feel icy cold as I helped him. Despite that, each time I helped a spirit move on I felt that same otherworldly sense of peace, as though I was exactly where I was meant to be, even if where I am is on an abandoned campus in the Mexican wilderness, thousands of miles away from the people I love.
    If only that were all I felt.
    “Do you see the way he’s focused?” Aidan asks, forcing me to pay attention. I nod. Lucio closes his eyes and holds his hands out as though he thinks he can physically pull the spirit toward him.
    Light spirits come to us easily like we’re magnets, just like Victoria said. But today Lucio is dragging a more resistant spirit to him. He closes his eyes, and his chest and forearms clench.
    It’s not long before she appears in front of us, a frail-looking young woman, not much older than me. Her skin is a sickly yellow, and she’s bald. It looks like she’s been fighting an illness for some time.
    I see the expression on Lucio’s face change as the spirit moves on: his grimace becomes the slightest hint of a smile as the peace washes over him. Then he opens his eyes and shakes himself like a puppy after a bath.
    “Why didn’t she want to move on?” I ask.
    Lucio shrugs. “Eighteen. Leukemia. Wasn’t ready to stop fighting, but her body was.”
    How can he just rattle it off like that? I mean, he says it perfectly nicely—solemnly even—but he doesn’t look sad. “Didn’tyou feel her sadness when she passed through you? You didn’t feel the cancer destroying her blood?”
    Lucio looks from me to Aidan. Finally Aidan explains, “Sunshine seems to be more sensitive than most.”
    Talk about an understatement.
    Each time I’ve helped a spirit move on, I sort of absorbed some part of them; I felt what they felt at the instant they died—grief, relief, surprise. And the feelings stayed with me for hours after they’d vanished. Sometimes it’s no more than a shadow: memories of the people they loved, the feeling of sunlight against their faces. But sometimes it’s the ache of their deaths, the pain they suffered, the fear they faced.
    Aidan thinks I just need to practice. A few dozen more spirits and I’ll grow a thicker skin. I’m not so sure. It feels to me like the absorption is just getting stronger with each spirit who passes through me. Like with every spirit I help move on, I hang on to a little bit more of them, and I see them a little bit clearer.
    “Now,” Aidan says. “You try.”
    He takes my hands and I close my eyes. I concentrate on feeling that electric hum he showed to Mom in the hospital that day, the echo of spirits that have moved on, the pulse of those who haven’t yet. I’m getting better at feeling connected to this energy.
    “No,” Aidan says as my focus lands on a ninety-eight-year-old grandmother named Marie. “Not her.”
    I open my eyes. “How did you know what I was about to do?” He squeezes my hands in his, like his touch explains the connection. “Luiseach can work together. For particularly tricky spirits, sometimes we have to join forces.”
    “So you’re going to help me?”
    “No.” He shakes his head. “You’re not reaching for anyone that tricky today. I’m going to watch you.”
    I get the feeling Aidan is the kind of dad who’d have thrown me into the deep end of the pool to teach me to swim. I’m supposed to be looking for resistant spirits, the kind that, left to their own devices, might turn dark. I know what’s at stake when that happens.
    So I close my eyes again and concentrate.
    Then I find him. Sixteen years old, just like me. Lived in a suburb outside Tucson, Arizona. Riding his bike home from school—his parents promised him a car by graduation—when some car missed a stop sign and hit him. He was wearing his helmet, but the impact of the fall knocked it right off of his head. He lay on the ground, blood dripping from his skull, waiting for the ambulance to come. As he waited, he ticked off