Haunted Heroine

by Sarah Kuhn

  “There was a lot of drama,” Shelby said. Her gaze seemed to be focusing more as she answered our questions, her mind forced to think about something other than her missing friend. “It did seem like everyone was extra stressed last night. Or maybe just extra, period. Our Taco Bell run was so nice—even though it was kinda late for me—because it was just a few of us. Talking.” She gave me a little smile. “But then, like I said, I started feeling gross . . .”

  “Right,” I said, that hunch still tickling the back of my mind. “When did you notice that?”

  “It was after all that Taco Bell. Well, really, it was after my fourth cup of punch,” Shelby said. “I remember because I downed a whole cup right before we went back to our room. I didn’t want to waste it. I . . .” She frowned. “You know, come to think of it, I felt weirder and weirder every time I had more punch. Do you think there was something strange in the punch?”

  “I’m starting to think that might be the case,” I said, connections fizzing through my brain. My eye went to the plastic cups littering the ground, those bright pink punch stains. It sounded like the punch had been magically spiked in some way—that’s where our hypothetical truth serum must have come from. “Do you know who made it? Maybe we can talk to them.”

  Shelby shook her head. “What does this have to do with Pippa?”

  “I just have a thought,” I said. “About weird things being connected.”

  Shelby frowned at the punch stains, toying with the ends of her hair. “I don’t know who made it.”

  “Was it the bartender?” Aveda speculated. “She seemed very enthusiastic about the punch. When she wasn’t being completely unhelpful and asking for tips.”

  “Who?” Shelby said, looking utterly confused.

  “The bartender,” I said. “You know, the girl who was standing back there for the whole party. Cute blue dress, flippy hairdo?”

  “And asked for tips,” Aveda repeated, unwilling to let that particular offense go.

  “I don’t know what you guys are talking about,” Shelby said, her confused look deepening. “There was no bartender.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “WHAT THE FUCK!” Aveda snarled, throwing open our dorm room door. “Did we really just imbibe magically-spiked punch and hallucinate a whole freaking bartender?”

  “We hadn’t had anything to drink when we first met her—that’s why we met her,” I said, gently closing the poor, tortured door behind us. “Anyway, maybe Shelby just didn’t see her. Or maybe she wasn’t at the bar when Shelby was getting something to drink . . .”

  I frowned, trying to make sense of it all. Bits and pieces from the night before fluttered around the back of my brain. I thought I’d been making connections, but now I couldn’t quite get them to cohere into a clear picture.

  We’d sent Shelby back to her room with the suggestion that she keep asking around about Pippa’s whereabouts. She hadn’t seemed thrilled about that idea. I got the feeling that Shelby didn’t have a ton of friends outside of Pippa, or the desire to make friends, period. Pippa had become besties with her through sheer force of will. I tried to reassure her that we still didn’t know for sure if Pippa was missing. And then I’d sent about a dozen texts to Pippa, hoping against hope she’d answer. I couldn’t seem to stop worrying for both of them. I just wanted them to be okay.

  And I wanted Shelby to realize life could be okay. She seemed so sad, so unsure of everything. She really did remind me of Mouse Evie.

  We’d also managed to convince Shelby to give us Pippa’s bracelet, which we’d sent back to HQ for supernatural scanning—along with one of the punch-stained cups. I also asked Scott if he could use the bracelet to do a locator spell, try to find Pippa that way.

  “How can we find photos from last night?” Aveda said. “Surely some of those kids were taking them, hoping to capture a timeless memory.”

  “Social media?” I said. “This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be documented in the school news.”

  “We’ll look on my phone, then,” Aveda said, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Since you refuse to enter our modern digital world.”

  “I used to update all of your accounts,” I retorted, taking her phone from her and pulling up Instagram. “That was enough to convince me that I do not want any of my life on the internet, period.”

  “Except some of it is, since you’re a big-deal celebrity now,” Aveda teased.

  “Yes, and notice I was all too ready to go into hiding as soon as the latest exclusive scoop broke,” I countered. “Maybe I’ll stay here forever—then Maisy can never write another story about me again.”

  I tapped on the phone screen, searching out Pippa and Shelby’s accounts. Neither of them had posted anything from the night before. I tried searching for Natalie David, but she was apparently too cool to even have an Instagram.

  Hmm.

  “How do we find more photos from this party if we don’t know the names of any other students here?” I said. “Did you get the names of the kids you talked to last night?”

  “First names, but I barely remember any of them,” Aveda said, studying the phone screen. “I was too busy, ah, enjoying myself. Let’s call Bea, this seems like her area of expertise. Oh, and you can ask her about looking for Julie.”

  “Yes!” I said, snapping my fingers. “Dammit, I still need to text Tess, too. And call Doctor Goo. Ugh . . . why do I keep forgetting things? Pregnancy brain?”

  “More like overwhelmed brain,” Aveda said, as I handed her my phone. “You were interrupted from those tasks by a very quickly developing investigation—remember what Shelby said last night? Have some of that compassion for yourself.”

  “Eh,” I said. “It’s hard for me to feel that way when I keep messing up.”

  Aveda raised an eyebrow at me, but let it go.

  I kept poking around on Instagram on Aveda’s phone, taking care to not accidentally like something and start a rumor that Aveda Jupiter was suddenly obsessed with memes involving cats dressed as circus clowns or something.

  “Hey, guys!” Bea grinned at us from the phone screen once again. “What’s up, does Aveda need help with those ‘science-y’ terms already?”

  “No,” Aveda said, giving her an indignant look. “I will have you know I successfully educated plenty of the developing minds of Morgan yesterday with no help whatsoever.”

  “Oh god,” Bea groaned. “I don’t think Evie is going to be the one burning down important school structures this time around.”

  “It’s about something else,” I said, ignoring that. “How do we find pictures from last night’s dorm party on Instagram? We still don’t know many of the, er, ‘fellow kids.’”

  “You guys went to a dorm party?” Bea hooted. “Man. I wish I could have witnessed that.”

  “A private, casual event like that wouldn’t have a hashtag, would it?” Aveda said, giving her a look.

  “Actually, it might,” Bea said, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. “I gotta admit, this ghost gig is super fascinating to me, so I’ve been doing a little research on the locale. Morgan College is known for being intimate and very tight-knit, like a big sorority—and the people who go there are really proud of going there.”

  “Really?” I said. “Provost Glennon told me they were having image issues.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be the story with the current student body,” Bea said. “I could see them making up their own hashtags for every single event, no matter how niche.”

  “How do we go about finding that?” Aveda said, tugging at the end of her ponytail in frustration. “That’s like trying to guess someone’s password—only it’s for a sprawling group of people, so you can’t just start with their birthday or whatever.”

  “Passwords are easy to guess no matter what,” Bea said cheerfully. “Scott keeps trying to lock me out of his Netfli
x so I won’t mess up his preferences every time I go on an anime binge, but I know he’s always gonna choose Aveda’s birthday as his password, so—”

  “So anyway, where should we begin?” Aveda said, rolling her eyes. “Please notice that I’m not asking which of my accounts you’ve illicitly logged into, Beatrice.”

  “You’ll never know!” Bea sang out. “I actually wouldn’t go hashtag to start. The simplest thing to try first would be the location—search for posts that are geo-tagged to the college, or even specifically to the dorm.”

  “Good idea,” I said, navigating to the search bar and tapping in “Mara Dash Hall.” Instagram took me to a location page, which then took me to all the most recent posts that had been tagged to the dorm. “There are quite a few photos from last night’s party,” I said, nodding as I scrolled through. “Let’s see if we can find the bartender . . .”

  “Ooh, is the bartender the supervillain?” Bea crowed. “Are you guys already wrapping up this case?”

  “Not sure yet—on either count,” I said, my gaze still trained on the stream of photos. There were endless group selfies: students laughing together, drinking together, having a good time. Pictures of people dancing around the rec room. At least one shot of “Eliza and Angelica” singing their hearts out with the caption “Our new TAs are karaoke BAMFs!”

  “Ooh, we look fierce,” Aveda said, peering over my shoulder. “And look how well we’re maintaining our glamours!”

  “We are,” I agreed. “We look exactly like, er, them.”

  “Ugh,” Aveda said, her voice twisting with annoyance. “But why did nobody take a photo of the bar? The punch? Anything in the area we actually need to see?”

  “Here’s one,” I said, holding on a photo that featured a girl smiling broadly and toasting the two punch bowls with her cup. “And . . .” I zoomed in on the area behind the bar. Which was decidedly empty. “There’s no one there.”

  “Maybe that was a moment when the bartender stepped away or was just out of the shot?” Aveda said.

  “The bartender was pretty much glued to that spot the whole time we were there,” I said. “Until we looked over and she was just . . . gone.”

  “But does that mean we imagined her?” Aveda said. “I mean, again, we hadn’t even had any punch when we first saw her.”

  “Hey, check Stories,” Bea piped up.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “Oh my god, Evie, you are so social media inept!” Bea shrieked. “We need to talk about this in our next joint therapy session. They’re those little snippets at the top—people post them and they go away after twenty-four hours.”

  “Yes, I’ve posted many of the unique fight moves Lucy and I have created together in Stories,” Aveda said. “They’re extremely popular. Here, the girl who posted this photo has some up . . .”

  She tapped her matte black nail on the girl’s avatar, and we were greeted by a series of images from the party—they followed the same pattern as the other photos we’d seen, students dancing and laughing and having fun. The last picture was a wide shot of the rec room, really showing off the full range of chaos. I saw myself—well, Eliza—squashed into the corner couch, Pippa gesturing dramatically at me with her punch cup while Shelby stared into space. And behind us was the bar with its two punch bowls and no one behind it—wait.

  I brought the phone closer to my face, scrutinizing the image. Then it abruptly disappeared from view.

  “Where’d it go!” I exclaimed, shaking the phone.

  “It’s Stories, Evie!” Bea said, giving me a massive eye-roll. “You’re only supposed to look at it for a second, it’s temporary, ephemeral—”

  “Here, trade phones with me,” Aveda said, passing me the Bea phone. She took her own phone back from me and tapped on the screen. “We can get it to come back, we just have to go through all of this girl’s party pictures again.” She tapped on the screen a few times, the girl’s documentation of the dorm party flying by until we landed on that last picture. “Okay,” Aveda said, pressing her finger to the image. “If I tap on the photo like this, it will hold for us—what do you see?”

  “It’s right . . . there!” I said, jabbing my index finger at the spot behind the bar. “Do you see it—or am I hallucinating again?”

  Silence fell between us as Aveda scrutinized the picture. I turned my phone toward the image so Bea could see it too.

  “Holy shit,” Bea breathed out. “Is that . . .”

  “Yes,” Aveda said, tapping her nail against the small part of the image we were fixated on. It showed, right behind the punch bowls, a smudge of a figure—the dark-haired bartender. Looking eager and ready to talk up the punch, her hair-flip bobbing excitedly.

  But there was another element we hadn’t noticed in person: a faint blue aura that emanated from her form.

  “That,” I said, jabbing the image with my finger, “is a motherfucking ghost.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AVEDA AND I spent a good hour trying to find another photo of our ghost bartender, to no avail. I did manage to accomplish a couple of other things, however. I finally texted Tess, asking how they were doing and if I could stop by their room later. And I made an appointment with Doctor Goo, who graciously accommodated me at the last minute. I jetted over to her office before classes so she could run a bunch of tests—and she very warmly assured me that I was fine, the baby was fine, and it didn’t look like I’d fucked anything up. I also asked if she could test my blood for possible supernatural elements, which she agreed to—but with the caveat that it would take longer, and the results might be inconclusive.

  And after all that, I managed to return to Morgan before I needed to don my TA persona once again.

  I was shocked to find that I had not, in fact, been fired or reassigned from Richard’s class. So I tried to play it cool, doing my best not to interrupt his lecture this time. I noticed he was less gasbaggy than usual, casting frequent curious looks my way. I just pretended to be absorbed in the fake notes I was going through. I’d managed to convince him—at least momentarily—that I was Eliza Takahashi, and I didn’t want to do anything else to blow our cover.

  Pippa was, of course, absent, and Shelby had apparently decided to take the day off too. I found myself casting long looks of my own at both of their seats.

  After reconvening in our dorm room, Aveda and I spent the rest of the day digging around online, trying to find information on the bartender ghost, and I checked in with Bea about calling Bay Area hospitals in an effort to locate Julie.

  Unfortunately, both of those leads were dead-ending. Bea texted after a few hours that she hadn’t found anything yet, and Aveda and I couldn’t locate any other bartender photos from the party, or any mentions in the many articles detailing all the Morgan College hauntings. Nothing about a ghost frequenting Mara Dash dorm parties. And Tess still hadn’t texted me back. I texted them, Shelby, and Pippa again to check in on them all. I was trying not to worry too hard about Pippa since we still didn’t know if she’d decided to hole up somewhere or what, but I couldn’t stop the anxiety ball in my gut from spinning out all the worst-case scenarios.

  By the time dusk rolled around, we were both climbing the walls.

  Or to put it more accurately: Aveda was climbing the walls. I was ready to face-plant and pass out for a few blessed hours, my pregnant body once again reminding me that I needed to take better care of myself.

  “I’ve sent every scrap of info we know about Julie to Bea,” I told Aveda, stifling a yawn as I plopped onto my bed. “Julie has an Insta she doesn’t update very much, but I figure maybe Bea can use her young-person research methods—in addition to calling all the hospitals—to help us track her down.”

  Aveda smirked at me. “When did we stop being the young persons? Er, people.”

  “As you’re always pointing out to me, I was never
a young person,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. “Stick-in-the-mud Evie, isn’t that what you used to call me? Anyway, if we’re truly dead-ending, maybe we should turn in early and sleep the Odinsleep. My pregnant ass is tired as fuck.”

  Aveda stopped in her tracks and cocked her head at me, wheels turning. Her Idea Face was back. “Evie,” she said slowly. “I had a thought.”

  “Why do I already feel like I’m not going to like this,” I groaned.

  “Remember that red-haired woman at the reunion, the one with the nametags?” she pressed. “She kept talking about how there were all these noises and unexplained occurrences at the library build site. Maybe we should—”

  “No.” The word flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. I took a deep breath, trying to calm the violent stab of resistance that shot through me at the very idea. “I mean, I don’t remember the library being one of the famous haunting sites, you know? And it wasn’t part of either of the incidents Provost Glennon suggested we look into.”

  “I know,” Aveda said, measuring every word carefully. “But we’ve already established that we can’t trust Provost Glennon—and that you don’t necessarily know all the ghosts around here. You’d never heard of the bartender either.”

  I shrugged. “I think our time would be better spent pursuing the leads we’ve established.”

  “Which is kind of nothing right now,” Aveda said, throwing her hands up in frustration. “Why not pursue this? Why not—”

  She was interrupted by her phone buzzing on the nightstand.

  “Oh, look, Scott’s calling,” she said, picking up her phone and waving it in the air like she’d just won a prize. “Maybe he’ll save us from all this dead-ending—do not fall asleep!” she yelled at me, noticing my drooping eyelids. “This could be important. And we’re not done talking about the library.”