Haunted Heroine

by Sarah Kuhn

  “And I’m so happy you’re back too,” Aveda said, nodding encouragingly. “But, ah . . . you know, Eliza and I have a bit of experience with the supernatural. It can be very disconcerting—”

  “Nah, I’m not disconcerted,” Pippa said, her big grin widening. “I’m totally fine.”

  “Of course you are,” Aveda said, making her voice soothing. “But, Pippa . . .” She paused, considering. “Even the strongest among us needs to break down sometimes. Even the most fabulous, the people who always seem to be the life of the party. That’s one reason I’m so lucky to have Eliza, here—she’s always there for me when I really need to lose my shit, you know? And I try to be there for her. So if you have any other feelings—besides being totally fine—well, we’re all here for you.”

  “We are,” I agreed, smiling at Aveda.

  “And I am, like, extra,” Shelby said, taking Pippa’s hand. “Because I’m your ride-or-die.”

  For a moment, Pippa’s bright smile stayed in place—but now I could see the strain underneath, the way the barest hint of uncertainty flashed through her eyes. Her smile wobbled, wavered.

  Then her lower lip quivered . . . and she burst into tears.

  “I . . . oh god. I was so . . . so scared . . .” she whimpered. “I . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head as tears poured down her cheeks.

  “Hey, Pips.” Shelby pulled her into a hug and allowed Pippa to collapse against her. “It’s okay,” she said, stroking her hair. “Here, hold Carpet Ball, Carpet Ball always makes things better. I’ve got you, okay? Whatever you need.”

  “What we all need right now is Taco Bell,” Aveda said, maneuvering the car into the drive-thru, to the end of the long late-night line. “Cheesy Gordita Crunches for all!”

  “That was some nice work, Angelica,” I murmured to her as Shelby consoled Pippa. They were wrapped up in a cuddly three-way hug with Carpet Ball. “You’re pretty good at this mom thing, too.”

  “Yeesh.” Aveda shuddered. “Do not say that in front of my mother. I will murder you.”

  I grinned at her. “Spoken like a true ride-or-die.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “STILL SO DELICIOUS.” Aveda sighed with satisfaction as she polished off her second Cheesy Gordita Crunch. “It’s a good thing there’s not one of these next to HQ, or I’d be doomed.”

  “Bad news: there is,” I said, giggling. “It’s just never been on your radar. There are Taco Bells everywhere, Annie.”

  “Oh, no,” Aveda moaned, licking her fingers. “How will I tell Scott I have a new true love? I’m leaving him for this cheese.”

  “I’m sure he’ll understand,” I said wryly. “We are all helpless against the power of the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.”

  We’d dropped Pippa and Shelby off at their room and left them alone for more BFF bonding time. Now I wanted to explore the theory I’d been toying with in my head earlier, about where Pippa had been taken to.

  “Let’s call Bea,” I said, gathering up the remnants of our hot sauce trough and tossing them in the trash. “There was something Pippa said that reminded me of one of Bea’s experiences a couple months ago, and . . . well, let’s get her on the FaceTime so I can tell both of you.”

  I tapped Bea’s name on my phone and waited for her face to fill the screen.

  “Evie!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening. “Is it just me, or do we talk more now that I live an ocean away?”

  “I think we do.” I smiled at her. “I wanted to update you on the ghost shenanigans: Pippa’s been returned from wherever she was. And . . . well. Bea, I was wondering if you could describe what you remember about that dimension of the Otherworld you jumped into—the sort of prison dimension where Mom-Demon was keeping her kidnapped humans.”

  “Right.” Bea nodded, her face going thoughtful. “I remember it was total darkness, like I was surrounded by a night sky. And it was hard to move—the atmosphere was heavier, somehow. Or made of whatever the demon equivalent of molasses is. But when I reached out and tried to touch stuff, it felt weirdly nice. Like velvet.”

  “So basically exactly like what Pippa described,” I said, excitement surging through me. This was an actual solid connection.

  “It sounds like Pippa was kept in an even more contained space,” Aveda said, her brow furrowing. “Bea and the other humans in Mom-Demon’s dimension could move about somewhat freely, once they got the hang of it.”

  “Maybe Pippa wasn’t there long enough to get the hang of it,” I mused.

  “Oh my gosh!” Bea waved her arms around. “Are you guys saying Pippa was being held prisoner in the Otherworld?” She leaned in, her eyes sparking with interest. “So this means demons are definitely involved in all this weirdness, right? The students you mentioned, Tess and Julie—that’s what they were theorizing?” I’d filled Bea in on everything we’d learned from Tess about the ghost society and their and Julie’s research, as well as Victoria’s ghostly story. She always seemed to see connections I didn’t.

  “Yes, I think that’s a great hypothesis,” I said. The word “hypothesis” made me think of Nate and I felt a little stab in my heart. “Tess and Julie think demonic energy somehow fused with remnants of ghostly energy on campus.”

  “Like the demons of the Otherworld figured out how to link up with the ghosts of Morgan,” Bea said thoughtfully. “And now they’re working together. That’s a whole lot of Do Not Want.” Bea held up her hands, as if to ward off evil. “But yeah, this could be another instance of the walls between our world and the Otherworld rubbing so thin in spots—it gives the demons more ways to commune with possible evils here on Earth.”

  “So you’re saying supernatural beings of all worlds have a group text,” I said.

  “Just what we need,” Aveda snorted.

  “That also seems to go with what Julie was starting to discover,” I mused. “And somehow, Bea, it sounds like she got ahold of some of your classified research—I know that information can probably be found by anyone who’s tenacious enough, but I still wonder how she got her hands on specific reports.”

  “Sounds like a girl after my own heart,” Bea said.

  “So how do we get in on this group text?” Aveda said, throwing up her hands. “The Otherworld demons always seem to be trying to get control of our realm. Do the ghosts want that, too? Or is it more along the lines of what you said earlier, Evie: are the ghosts of Morgan sick of being trapped here and the demons are giving them a way to pass over more efficiently—”

  “—in the form of giving them some kind of power boost?” I said, completing the thought.

  “Or,” Bea said, “the ghosts’ motive could be, you know, eviler than that. They could be looking for something much more pure—like vengeance.”

  “What does kidnapping Pippa get them, though?” I said, trying to come at it from a different angle. “In either scenario.”

  “Maybe that’s specific to the location she was taken from—and the ghost who shows up there,” Bea said. “Victoria and her special punch might have gotten y’all to speak your truth, but that doesn’t mean she’s not still pissed off at how the college failed her and Jocelyn. Maybe she wants to take one of Morgan’s current daughters as retribution.”

  “That would have only hurt Morgan if Pippa had stayed kidnapped, though,” Aveda said. “And it doesn’t sound like she escaped on her own. The Otherworld basically spat her back out.”

  “We don’t know that’s what happened,” I said. “Maybe that dimension, for whatever reason, couldn’t hold her and she slipped away.”

  “Yeah,” Bea said, nodding thoughtfully. “None of the dimensions I visited seemed particularly stable. We don’t know enough about how the Otherworld works at this point to know why Pippa was returned.”

  “Argh,” Aveda said. “Why does it always seem like the more information we gather, the less we actually know?�
��

  “Let’s step back, try approaching things from another angle,” I said. “Like what Julie was trying to tell us at the hospital. Annie, is the donor list we, er, borrowed from Provost Glennon’s office still in your cape?”

  “Whoa, Aveda has a cape with pockets?” Bea crowed, as Aveda fished around for the pilfered document. “That is next level.”

  “Well, of course,” Aveda said, passing the paper over to me. I unfolded it and scrutinized its detailed grid. Names, numbers, addresses. What was I looking for? I wished Julie Vũ had given us just one more clue.

  “Take a photo and send me the doc,” Bea said. “I can scan through, too.”

  I obliged, and for a moment the three of us sat in silence, trying to find a clue amongst the boring grid of names and numbers.

  “Ugh,” Aveda said. “Are we about to pull an all-nighter studying these cursed pieces of paper? Because now that I think about it, staring at numbers until my eyeballs fall out is one college experience I don’t think I need.”

  “We can always get more Taco Bell,” I teased.

  “What, you guys got Taco Bell?” Bea shrieked. “Without me?”

  I grinned at both of them and went back to studying the paper in front of me. I couldn’t help but think back to my own grad school all-nighters, how I’d somehow learned to subsist on almost no sleep, how letters and words would start to blur into nonsense in front of me right before I fell asleep on my book.

  There was one night that had been particularly bad. It was late, I’d just gotten off a shift at the campus bookstore, and I had an important paper due the next day. I’d set myself up on the broken-down living room couch in my and Bea’s apartment. I had caffeine, I had my research, I had a full laptop battery, and I was determined to power through at all costs.

  Until Bea had called to me from the kitchen, wondering why we didn’t have the right kind of peanut butter for a sandwich she was trying to make.

  “Where’s the chunky?” she’d said, waving the jar around.

  I was so sleep-deprived and hopped up on caffeine, it had taken me a few seconds to parse her questions. “Uh. The creamy’s what we usually get?” I’d said, my voice tipping up at the end like it was a question.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Mom and I always got the chunky. That’s what we like—um, liked for our sandwich.”

  I’d had to stare at her in silence again for a moment as I tried to decipher what was really going on. Bea and Mom had a special sandwich they’d liked to make together: peanut butter, jelly, bananas, and chocolate chips. My dad and I both thought it was disgusting, and it had become a sweet bonding thing between Bea and Mom.

  But after Mom died, Bea stopped making the sandwich. She hadn’t eaten anything involving peanut butter in ages, and since we were on a tight budget, I’d just started buying the kind I liked. I hadn’t heard her complain, so I’d assumed this was fine—but she was so mercurial at that point, it was hard to know for sure. I never knew what was going to set her off, and I had limited mental and emotional bandwidth to spend on figuring it out. (Or at least this was how our therapist had put it to us in one of our joint sessions.)

  “Bea,” I’d said, trying to reason with her (trying to apply “reason” when it came to all things Bea Tanaka was always my first mistake). “You haven’t made that sandwich in . . . I mean, it’s been a long time. You don’t really eat peanut butter—”

  “Yes, I do,” she’d said, her lower lip trembling. “I totally do. I love peanut butter.”

  “—so I just got the kind I like,” I continued, my voice taking on a placating quality—as if I were speaking to a toddler. It was a tone I’d later use countless times on Aveda when I was her personal assistant and she was in diva mode. “We can get both kinds next time we go to the store.”

  “I need to make my sandwich now,” she said, her expression stubborn.

  “Well, I can’t go to the store now,” I said, my patience fraying with every word. “I have a paper to finish and I’m going to be up all night as it is.”

  “But . . . but . . .” Her faced turned red, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Bea.” I took the jar from her, still trying to decipher the mystery of this impending tantrum. It felt like a puzzle that wouldn’t fit, and I didn’t have the energy to make it fit. “Really, what’s the problem? It’s just peanut butter.”

  That’s when she’d crumpled entirely, falling to the floor in a sobbing heap. And I’d had no idea what to do. I’d watched her for a minute, trying to process where all these tears were coming from. Why a sandwich had provoked a complete meltdown.

  But my brain stuttered and stopped, unable to get beyond the simple facts of the situation:

  1. Somehow I, Bea’s primary caregiver, had totally failed her.

  2. I had no idea why.

  3. I didn’t know how to fix it.

  So I’d heaved a long sigh and settled myself next to her on the floor. My gaze kept drifting to the living room, the couch, the paper I was supposed to be working on. I couldn’t get back to that until I figured out how to get Bea to stop crying and eat something at least semi-nutritious, even if it had to involve the inferior peanut butter I’d been so foolish to purchase.

  This was one of those times when I’d wished I had a different kind of superpower. If I’d been able to magically take on this deep, dark pain she was feeling, just give it to myself, go through it for her . . . I would have. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do anything to stop her inconsolable sobs. And as long as she was sobbing, I couldn’t work on my paper. I couldn’t leave her side. I had to figure out how to fix it—that need burned through me like wildfire.

  It was moments like these that made me feel like I was failing at every single one of my responsibilities.

  In the end, I hadn’t really fixed it. She wore herself out crying and fell asleep on the kitchen floor. I covered her with a blanket and brought my laptop and research in from the couch, sitting there with her and tapping away at my paper until the early morning sun started to stream through the windows.

  I’d felt exhausted down to the bone. Like I had nothing left to give, but had to keep giving anyway.

  I’d finished the paper, but it hadn’t been very good. I still remembered racing up the stairs of Morgan Hall, trying to turn it in on time—Professor Connolly had been an old-fashioned sort, and insisted on hard copy papers turned in by a specific hour. And as for Bea, she’d treated me to sullen looks and pouting for the rest of the week, even after I finally got to the store and bought the chunky peanut butter.

  Thinking about that night now poked at the tender place in my heart I was trying to hide from people lately. Why did I think I’d be any better at handling all that responsibility now? That I could mother any better than I had with Bea? I wanted so badly to protect these students at Morgan, but I couldn’t seem to do that, not even with my supposed superpowers.

  I gnawed at my lower lip and tried to refocus on the document in front of me. What were we looking for? The names were starting to blur together . . .

  Jelana and Kelly Blonkenfeld

  Ellen and Amanda Ferreira

  Horatio Morales

  Tenya and Margaret Sit-Kussoy

  Wait a minute . . .

  My eye went back to Horatio Morales. Where had I heard that name before—and recently?

  Then it hit me.

  “Oh my god,” I blurted out. “But what . . .”

  “Yes, Evie?” Aveda said, looking up from her papers. “Did you find something?”

  “Maybe.” I highlighted Horatio’s name and held it up for Bea and Aveda to see. “I think this is Victoria Morales’s grandfather—or someone who very coincidentally has the exact same name. Remember, the ghost society mentioned him when they were telling us about Victoria and Jocelyn.”

  “But didn’t they als
o say her grandfather died?” Aveda said. “I mean, just going by how time and aging works, he’d be dead now regardless.”

  “Yeah, but they also said he died ‘of a broken heart,’” I said. “That sounded a little fishy.”

  “Only Padmé Amidala died of a broken heart,” Bea said, nodding sagely. “And Rose explained to me that there are a lot of fan theories about why that’s not actually what happened and she may, in fact, still be alive—”

  “Let’s save the Star Wars talk for later,” Aveda said. “Could this be a descendant of the Morales family?”

  “I guess it could be,” I said, turning the new information over in my mind, trying to make sense of it. “But the ghost society kept talking about how Victoria’s grandfather was her only family. One would assume their familial line died when she did. And even if it didn’t, why would anyone in that family want to give money to the college? Morgan played a big part in destroying them.”

  “All this means we need to pay a visit to this Horatio Morales,” Aveda said, her eyes narrowing as she studied the donor list. “If he’s related to Victoria, maybe he can provide some insight into what her ghostly self is up to, feeding Morgan students truth serum-spiked punch and then randomly kidnapping them.”

  “Ooh, always love that superheroine detective work,” Bea said, beaming at us. “Wish I was there to help.”

  “I wish you were here, too,” I said, returning her smile.

  And even though I’d just been mentally beating myself up for not knowing how to fix things for her all those years ago, I felt a surge of warmth. Despite everything, she’d grown into an amazing young woman, unafraid to be passionate, to love deeply, to follow her bliss. All of that was because of her, not me—I was just glad I hadn’t managed to mess her up too badly.

  Another memory from not so long ago rose up, unbidden. It was just a couple months back, when Bea had been dealing with her Mom-Demon and her cavalier attitude toward danger had finally sent my newly pregnant ass over the edge. We’d gotten into a huge screaming fight, wherein she’d accused me of not being sad when our mother had died. She had been the most sad—I’d been an unfeeling ice queen, she claimed. All the feelings I’d had so many years ago, just trying to keep it together, had come flooding back. And I’d said one of the worst things I’ve ever said to a person.