“Are you Craig?” Shelly asked the boy who stood near the open door in the hallway, although he didn’t look like the boy she remembered. He was handsome, in that buzz-cut, face-chiseled-from-marble kind of way—the kind of All-American boy she used to fantasize about when she was a teenager, but whom she never actually met. The closest she’d come was Chip Chase, who’d taken her to her senior prom, and he’d had longer hair than her own, which Shelly had pretended to like—running her fingers through the long, dark brown locks—when, in truth, she’d hated it.
This boy didn’t look like the long-haired boy she’d seen at the accident. He looked, instead, like Shelly’s brother. He could have been Shelly’s brother, had Richie lived to be nineteen. If Richie had been a college student instead of a Marine. Josie’s word interchangeable came to mind.
“No,” the boy said. “Craig’s in the shower.”
“Oh. I was hoping to speak to him,” Shelly said to this ghost of her brother, and he opened the door to let her in.