’‘Oh, yes. Erm – thirty-seven strokes, Alex. Thirty-eighty, if you include the one I had twice.’Alex looked up at me. ‘You need to call me M...s Young, Mrs Lonsdale – as you were here for punishment.’‘Oh – yes, I wasn’t here originally for punishment, but, um…’‘Yes, you signed the school rules retrospectively. Very… brave of you, Mrs Lonsdale. Is that note for me?’‘What?’‘I recognised Mrs Dickinson’s handwriting. I was asking if that was something Mrs Dickinson wanted you to give to me?’‘Um. I’m. I sat down at my Apple II and updated my journal from my travel notebook. I had quite a bit to add from my conversations with Jennifer, Bethany, Joyce, and Kara as well. I wrote, changed the laundry, and then wrote some more. When I finished writing, the laundry was done as well, so I folded it and put it away.I slept well on Sunday night and awoke to light snow on Monday morning. It was too cold to run, so I pushed the furniture aside and did my warm-up exercises and karate kata until I was. Being curious, I reached to touch real-Alex’s knee only to watch agog as my ghostly hand passed straight through her real flesh without touching. “Concentrate,” Evelyn whispered in my ear, taking my hand in hers. “You can do it, but you need to focus on what you want to touch.” She interlocked fingers with me and placed our joined palms over the top of real-Alex’s pants leg, stroking softly so that I could feel that ghostly touch beneath my skirt, even though it was only Evelyn’s hand I could. Everybody else came back and was assembled; now taking up half the space from before.I got up on stage and cleared my throat, getting the few conversations to stop.“OK, a few announcements before we start up doing scenes. Except for men over 40, we have enough people to practically triple cast this show. I don’t normally believe in understudies, sitting and waiting for someone to get a cold, or a broken leg, but in the case of this show, there will be a few.”They all chucked at that.“After the.