School Spirits by Nate Trinrud

High school can feel like an eternity. For some students, it literally is . . .

Maddie Graves is stuck in high school. As if that wasn’t already a nightmare—she’s also dead. But she can’t figure out how she died for the life of her.

Enter Charley, the tall boy with a Walkman who’s straight out of 1995 and Maddie’s guide to what Split River High is like on the other side. Now Maddie must also deal with being the new kid in the Afterlife, where she’s stuck with every teen who died at her school for the past one hundred years. There’s just one difference: they can all remember their deaths, but when she tries to conjure that fateful moment: nothing. The only thing she knows for sure is that she was with her boyfriend, Xavier, before she died. She thinks she was murdered . . .

It’s been years since anyone has crossed over, but if Maddie can solve the mystery of her death, she might be able to escape this purgatory. She just needs to answer the eternal question: whodunit?

At turns darkly comedic and deeply felt, sibling duo Megan and Nate Trinrud and Pulitzer finalist artist Maria Nguyen investigate what it means to come to terms with what haunts us.