Ghost of a Chance

When Hirono Rivera's parents drag her from Spokane to Dorn, Washington — a fog-bound tourist town pretending to be a Scandinavian seaside village, where the biggest landmark is their newly purchased pizzeria — her survival plan is simple: keep her panic attacks quiet, keep her sarcasm sharp, and keep every stranger at a safe distance until she can escape back to her real life. Then something opens her bedroom door on the very first night, and the moving boxes stop being the scariest thing in the house.

The something is a boy. Transparent, apologetic, hopelessly polite, and visible to exactly one person on Earth: her. He can't remember his name, so Tom is the name he goes by. He learns to change the TV channel and counts it a victory. He haunts the attic above her bedroom, tap-dances on the floorboards, and slowly becomes the safest friendship Hirono has ever had.

There is just one problem with Tom: he has a face, and Hirono has seen it before. It belongs to Lively Sumner, Dorn High's reigning Popular King — arrogant, untouchable, very much alive, and completely unaware that half of him is drifting around a pizzeria family's attic. As Hirono and her fearless new friend Collins pull at the threads, the pieces stop adding up in any ordinary way. A boy named Zeke Campbell has been in a coma since last May, and everyone in town believes the same tidy story about how it happened. Lively can't remember an entire night and has learned not to ask. The Campbell family keeps its mountain fence high, its stories straight, and its secrets load-bearing. And Tom is carrying a memory that gets worse the clearer it becomes: a bonfire, a rifle, a boy begging someone he loved to put it down.

Then Hirono learns the truth about what Tom is — the part of Lively that fell into the cold water that night and never came back out — and the universe starts collecting its error. Tom vanishes the moment his living double stands in the same room, and when he returns he is thinner, fainter, running out of film, leaving Hirono one request she doesn't know how to keep: watch over Lively. Because the Campbells are done waiting, the wrong story is starting to crack, and the closer the two halves of the same boy get to the truth, the closer they get to losing each other for good.

Armed with a best friend who plans everything, a therapist who deserves a cape, and one fading ghost with a crooked grin, Hirono makes a promise that covers both of them: she will not let the boy who's alive be destroyed by a lie, and she will not let the boy who isn't fade before he finds out who he was. Ghost of a Chance is a small-town paranormal mystery about first love, found family, and the pieces of us that survive the worst night of our lives — about a universe that made an error once, and the girl stubborn enough to fix it in both directions.