The beach was dead. Literally. All the new ghosts washed up on the palm-treed shores, twisted and confused in their own sheets. Jester typically liked to watch them from his beach chair as they struggled to pull the long, obscuring white cloth from their faces, their bodies. But that wasn't how it worked here.

They weren't allowed to see each other. They weren't allowed to divulge personal information. They were, after all, dead and divested from their lives. So what did it matter? It didn't. Jester flicked his cigarette into the window of a sand castle some kid had built too close to his feet. The kid made a raspberry sound, rippling the sheet in front of his face, and then promptly turned the cigarette into a sparkler that shot right back at Jester, toppling his chair with a crackle.

"Hey!" Jester scraped sand from the inside of his sunglasses with a finger. "Find your own piece of beach, twerp."

The kid shrugged and continued adding delicate details to his castle. A shingled tower here, a cupola there, a drawbridge with a little sandman and sandhorse running across it. Quite talented really. Most ghosts only got that talented if they'd been dead a long time. But Jester didn't remember seeing this kid on his beach before, and he knew all the dead people here. Watched them because he was bored. Made sandpits for them to fall into because he was bored. Tricked the new ones into thinking this was a hierarchical afterlife that they could move on from if they played by the rules. Made them fan him with palm leaves because he was bored.

Jester was always bored. But right now he was just annoyed.

"Seriously, there is a whole beach here, pick your own space." Jester righted his chair, sweeping sand out through the plastic gaps in the seat.

"No," said the kid carelessly, poking new windows into his masterpiece. "I'm playing with Sissy and you're in the way."

"You're playing with—" Jester ran a hand down his face-sheet in exasperation. "Kid, you're dead, your sister can't see you. Even if she were dead too she wouldn't know it was you. Now scram!"

"You scram, angry man." The kid balled his fists and planted his flip-flopped feet. "Sissy says you're rude and don't deserve to be king of the beach."

"I was the first one on this damn beach, you little piss squirt." Jester jerked his thoughts around him, bending the essence of whatever this limbo hell was, and dropped an RV right on top of the sand castle.

The kid stared at his destroyed work of art, head angled down and still. Then he looked up and deposited a school bus onto Jester's beach chair, crushing it flat with a squashing creak of plastic. With a haughty sniff, the kid said, "Mean kings get mean subjects," then skipped away, laughing as he ran to the ocean. His arms were wide, the muted breeze that always seemed just a little stale flapping the sheets around him like he was a flying squirrel.

"JJ's right, you know," said an amused voice. "You are a mean bastard. Don't you have better things to do than annihilate joy with RVs?"

Jester lurched around, his sheets fluttering, his sunglasses slipping. All the dead were occupied. Lighting cigarettes, playing volleyball, tanning their sheets, or aimlessly wandering the shore. The aimless wanderers were his favorite. Sometimes they tripped over their own feet, fell in the water, and then started flailing and screaming because they forgot they were dead. But this voice, it was none of them. It was right by his ear and yet nowhere to be found.

"Who the hell said that?" he swept his arm around, determined to hit something.

The invisible person laughed at him. "I'm right here, idiot. Can't you see me?"

And then he could. First just her outline, and then the outline filled in, just a bit, just enough to glimpse—like a hologram—her face full of freckles, her raggedy cutoffs, and the smile that was as tangled as her beach-sand hair.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Especially since Jester was pretty sure she wasn't dead.

"What the hell are you?"

"A person," the not-dead girl said. "Just like you, although you don't act like one."

This flew in the face of all the rules he'd ever learned on the beach. Not that she wasn't dead, but that she could be here, even if it was only a sort of here, and talk to him.

"But," Jester said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say and he was mad about it. "You're not supposed to—"

"Deal with it," said the girl with a cat-ate-the-mouse grin. "After the way you smooshed my little bro's sand castle, you're about to become the first dead person ever haunted by a living one."