Cathy's POV

"Nick!" I cried out, "you are back. Oh, Mum and Dad would so kill you!"

My brother entered the house, moaning: "Cathy, please. There was such a storm, I nearly drowned."

I looked him up and down. He did look bad, so I decided to believe his story.

But, wait, he didn't look normal. There was this glow around him I only knew from...

Ghosts. That's when it hit me.

"No!", I gasped. "That can't be true."

Nicholas looked at me awkwardly. "What?"

"You, you..." my voice trailed off. I'm used to telling people that they are dead, though some are hard to convince. But this was my own brother, after all.

But it would be cruel to let him find it out by himself, when my family would look through him, even walk through him.

That was too much. Suddenly, I ran to the bathroom to vomit.

"Cathy, what's up?" asked Nick, who had come after me. "You can tell me, you know that, sis."

He was slightly bemused, but a bit worried just as well.

"Nick? Please touch the door."

"Cathy, just tell me what bothers you, all right?"

"Just do it."

"Ok, if it pleases you, I'll touch the stupid door, but I don't know - "

Suddenly, he was quiet. That was because, instead of grabbing the doorknob, his hand went right trough it. And then he, too, freaked.

"What's that? That can't be true! I must be going mad! Cathy, tell me I'm not mad! Did you just see that?"

"You aren't going mad", I said soothingly. "You are dead."

Nick's POV

I freaked. Either it was my little sister who was crazy, or she was playing a really morbid trick on me.

Well, Cathy had never been reasonable – I remembered the time when she tried to convince me there was a ghost in her room – but I thought that, at the age of 14, she would be too old for that crap.

I tried to smile. "See, Cathy, I'm standing here talking to you, so I can't be dead, right?"

"That's the point. You can talk to me, but Jane and Mum and Dad won't hear you. And you saw what happened with the door."

"Well, I'll just go to bed now, it will all look different tomorrow. And, though I'm sorry to say that, I have to talk to Mum and Dad about your strange behaviour."

I couldn't sleep all night, but I wasn't a bit tired. Luckily, the next day was a saturday, so I could talk to my parents first thing in the morning.

"Good morning!" I announced as I walked into the kitchen. My mum was still half asleep, as she always is, while my dad made breakfast for us.

"Mum, dad, I have to talk to you."

"Ok, honey", my mum replied, "if it's important."

"It is. It's about Cathy. Well, yesterday, when I came home from the beach, she was way strange. She suddenly started crying. She seemed to think that I was dead. It's true that I had been unconscious for a while, but she didn't even know that."

My mum looked at me like Cathy had the day before, and then whispered, "Jesse, have a look at him. Please tell me I'm wrong." My dad also looked me up and down, and then he came over to me and hugged me. My mum started crying.

That's when Jane, my other sister, came in.

"Hey, Mum, Dad, have you seen Nick? He didn't come home yesterday and I'm quite worried."

Dad hugged her, too, and said: "Janey, you have to be strong now. Your brother died yesterday."