by Nancy Holder
SEVEN
“I DON’T LIKE motor scooters,” I muttered as we were led to a dark table in the back. I was disappointed. “Roadhouse” was another word for dirty, grungy bar. I hadn’t ever been inside one of those—I was sixteen, and a fake ID could only take you so far—but I remembered the fancy spa Troy had taken me to for dinner and wished we could have gone there instead.
I sat gingerly on cracked brown pleather upholstery. A varnished wood table separated Miles and me. A red glass candle surrounded by white plastic netting flickered and spit. The silent waiter in jeans and a black corduroy shirt set down two small, greasy laminated menus. We were far away from the other patrons, who were playing pool, drinking beer, and watching a basketball game on ESPN. Miles ordered two Diet Cokes and some nachos without asking me what I wanted.
After the waiter ambled away, Miles opened the messenger bag and pulled out a stack of rumpled papers, a notebook with a jeweled cover, and a joint, which rolled onto the table. I gaped at it.
“Whoops,” he said, stuffing the joint back into the bag.
“You brought drugs on campus? Don’t you know we have zero tolerance?”
“Oh, sweetie.” He stuck out his lower lip, making a sad face. “You are adorable beyond the telling.” He patted the bag, where the joint now rested. “I guess there’s no sense in asking you if you want to light up after this.”
“No.” Drugs had always been out back home in San Diego. Jane decreed that they were off-limits. A point in her favor. There were some. No queen bee was without her positive qualities.
“So.” He didn’t really care what I thought about drugs. He unfolded a piece of paper and tapped his finger on it. It was a list, written in Mandy’s bad handwriting. No queen bee is without her failings, either.
possessions:
full moon
mirror
candle
item belonging to dead person
part of dead person (hair, bone, etc.)
“Part of dead person?” I cried.
“Could you please yell louder?” He gave me a look.
“Where could she find . . . ?” I thought back to my nightmares. I had believed that the ashes of the girls who had died had been thrown into the lake. I had worried that some of those ashes had been left behind in the operating theater and that I had actually walked through them. But Celia had shown me a grave in a forest. Maybe this was why.
“I didn’t have any of that stuff,” I said. I looked at the list again. “Absolutely nothing. It was broad daylight, okay, except it was foggy. And I got . . . ” I lowered my voice as he crossed his eyes at me. “Possessed,” I hissed.
“This must have been to get the ball rolling,” he said, tapping the list. “Your girl—Celia—maybe she caught a ride on what Mandy had already started.” It was too weird that he was almost bragging on Mandy’s being first.
“Well, it was a total accident, at least on my part,” I said. “She told me she did it to hide from Belle and the other five.”
“Hide.” He set the paper aside and opened up the notebook. “They’re all dead. Why not, you know, let it go?”
“They’re angry. Terrible things were done to them. Celia . . . ” I stopped. It had become second nature to me to brace myself for repercussions when I started talking about Celia.
Miles leaned toward me, locking gazes with me. His eyes flared.
“Celia?” he whispered. “Celia, Celia . . . ”
Come to me.
Come to me.
They said if you said it five times . . .
“Don’t,” I said. “If she’s gone, I don’t want her back.”
Something flickered over his face. I was an idiot. He wanted Celia to show. He wanted to see how it worked, maybe even talk to her. Maybe he wasn’t even interested in helping Mandy either.
No. He loved her. Me? I was just convenient. Help me?
Only if it worked out that way.
I wanted to stomp off, show my outrage, but he had the transportation and Mandy’s notes. I had never fully trusted him, so it wasn’t like I was getting any big surprise here.
“Let me see everything,” I ordered him, grabbing the jeweled notebook before he could stop me. It really was beautiful, with purple and green stones set in embossed swirls decorated with gold. I had started a journal when I came to Marlwood. I’d fancied myself quite a writer. My killer personal essay was what had snagged me a place on the wait list, despite my precipitous drop in GPA. But I’d learned very quickly that some things were best not written down.
“I want to see your news clipping,” he said, “when you move back in.”
The waiter chose that exact time to return with our Diet Cokes and an oval red plastic container loaded with tortilla chips and pale orange cheese goo, a few sad little jalapeños scattered over the mound.
“Yum,” Miles said appreciatively as he scooped up a chip and carried it to his mouth. A purple flush crept up my neck. I recalled the last time he’d used that word: kissing me. He bobbed his head, inviting me to partake.
“Not big on ’em,” I said, mostly to make a point that he should have consulted me before ordering.
“Yeah-huh.” He pushed the container toward me. “I won’t, you know, dump you once we figure this stuff out. I said I’d help you, and I will.”
I didn’t believe him. “What if the only way Mandy can get free of Belle is by doing something to me?” I asked, and the purple flush continued its march across my face.
He froze with a chip halfway to this mouth. “You scamp. Celia’s already told you how to free yourself, hasn’t she? You are supposed to do something to Mandy.”
“No.” I turned the page, to another list.
possessions in basement:
portrait
group photos
china doll
mourning brooch (lock of hair?)
There was a sketch of a floor plan labeled B. For “basement,” I supposed. I blinked as I visually traced the layout of Jessel’s basement. It had the L shape that reminded me of a hunchback when I looked down on it from Grose. Running along the back, where Mandy had written DOOR, were two lines that led into the basement from a ninety-degree angle, then appeared to rise up out of the L shape at an incline. She had written TUNNEL! And continued the angle, connecting it to a trapezoid, she had marked ATTIC.
So Mandy had known there was a tunnel in the attic, which I had stumbled upon—literally—when I lost my balance trying to escape from the haunted wheelchair. I fell through the thin wall into the tunnel . . . and the wheelchair had followed me. Followed me. How had I stayed sane after that?
Maybe the wheelchair wasn’t really haunted, I thought. Maybe she rigged it up to move when I was up there. She had had access to all kinds of high-tech spook-house equipment, which her dorm, Jessel, had used to make the most elaborate haunted house that I’d ever been to outside of a theme park. She had also souped up the old library for one of her legendary pranks, terrifying two Marlwood girls, Sangheeta and Megan, as a hazing initiation to get into her superclique—those girls not realizing, of course, that Mandy was setting them up to be possessed.
Did Miles know about that? That Mandy provided girls for Belle’s ghost clique so they could possess them?
I looked at the tunnel again. The wheelchair had chased me down that tunnel, and I had eventually escaped through the door, right there. It was the first time I had seen Celia’s ghost hanging in the air. I had felt her slide right into my body. I shivered at the memory.
It’s over. I crossed my fingers.
“Hello?” Miles said, tapping the map. “Am I boring you?”
At different places around the basement there were Xs. Four. For the four items on her list, I was guessing. She hadn’t labeled them. I don’t suppose she needed to, since these were her personal notes.
“I saw a couple of these things in Jessel,” I said. “The group photos are on the mantel. And the portrait, if it’s the same one . . . ” I traile
d off. The portrait of Belle (so I had assumed) was in Mandy’s room, and it was creepy. A large daguerreotype framed in worm-eaten wood; half of Belle’s face had been eaten away by mold.
I had seen the picture when I had snuck into Mandy’s room with Rose. And that was when we had seen the kinky photographs of Mandy with Miles. It made perfect sense that I would have been in Mandy’s room at some point in my life, but I was so uncomfortable about the photographs of her and Miles that I lost track of what I was saying.
“Look,” I said.
At the bottom of the page, there was a large bubble outline in brown, with an arrow pointing to the words: body part!!!!
“You are such a liar. She did tell you how to get unpossessed,” he said. “Do you need one of Mandy’s body parts to break the spell? Will any Winters body part do?” He leered at me. “C’mon, baby, I’m happy to give it up.”
“Sorry, I’m not your type. I’m not related to you,” I snapped, still thinking of the pictures, flipping the page. A plane ticket was taped in the center of the page, surrounding by swirls and exclamation points in neon shades of puffy gel. And across the bottom of the page, YES!
“You . . . bitch,” Miles ground out. I glanced up. He was staring at me as if I’d slapped him. As I blinked, he grabbed the notebook away from me.
“What? Why are you so angry?”
He clenched his teeth. “You know why. You know exactly why.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t.”
He rose out of his seat, pulled out his wallet, and dropped a twenty on the table. Then he gathered up all the papers and crammed them into his messenger bag.
“Don’t mess them up!” I yelled at him. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t look at me as he stomped toward the front door. He was furious. Following him, I replayed the conversation. Oh. God. I had made a crack about his supposed incestuous relationship with Mandy. But so had he. Crossing boundaries. He’d said that, right? No?
He hadn’t meant that?
“Miles,” I called after him. Two guys in ball caps playing pool looked at me and chuckled. Look at those crazy kids, having a lovers’ quarrel. Hyuk. “Hey, I’m sorry.”
He let the door slam in my face. I grabbed the knob and propelled myself toward him, discovering en route that it was raining. Hard. I hadn’t heard rain on the roadhouse roof, but within seconds I was drenched. I hadn’t brought an umbrella.
He was sitting on the Vespa with the messenger bag slung over his shoulder. The engine started humming, and he pushed up the kickstand and held out my helmet. As I took it, he sat staring straight ahead, as if he couldn’t stand the idea of riding with me but knowing that he had to take me home.
I slid in behind him, wet body to wet body. I sneezed, hard. The Vespa rolled forward toward the road and I hastily put on the helmet, fastening the chin strap.
“I’m sorry,” I said as lightning crashed and thunder rumbled. He didn’t respond—I was sure he couldn’t hear me—so I tapped him on the shoulder. He leaned to the left and turned his head in my direction. I could barely make out his face through the sheets of rain; it stretched and blurred the way Celia’s did when it was reflected back to me on a curved surface—a bronze drinking fountain, a stainless steel teakettle. It frightened me. I was afraid to ride with him—but more afraid to stay.
“Sorry,” I mouthed.
He turned back around. I put my feet up on the running board and looked at the rain hitting the messenger bag. I tapped his helmet again.
“You should let me hold that,” I yelled, giving the bag a tug. “It’s going to soak through.”
I couldn’t believe he wasn’t being more careful with it. They were Mandy’s notes, possibly the key to everything. We should be back in the roadhouse, studying them. They might be getting ruined as we sat there.
Maybe he’d scanned them in his computer to archive them. But still, there might be something about the originals—something on the originals—strands of hair, ash, magic juju powder—that he wouldn’t be able to duplicate. The way he had crammed them in all higgledy-piggledy was incredibly careless. He couldn’t give them back without her knowing that someone had taken them. Maybe he’d gotten her permission? Maybe she even knew we were out together.
I tapped his helmet again. “We should go back inside. The bag is soaking through.”
The Vespa started rolling. Lightning flashed and I pulled on the messenger bag, trying to shield it with my hand, at least. As if to shake me off, he swooped the moped to the right, forcing me to grab onto him, and we zoomed off into the storm.
I was furious. He was going to regret this. Just like I was regretting my mean little swipe at him. Wow, he could dish it out, but he sure couldn’t take it.
More lightning, more thunder, and I thought about the slickness on the road. I hoped he would calm down. At least we couldn’t go very fast; if it had been a motorcycle, I might have rethought my plan to go with him.
We rounded a corner and he leaned far into it. I almost put my foot down to keep us upright, but at the last moment we straightened out. The road was dark; there were no overhead lights, and the Vespa’s beam shone weakly against the storm. I couldn’t see around his shoulders and I lost track of where we were.
Then three flashes of lightning flared one after another and I saw that we had reached the part of the road where I had seen the ghost girls screaming in my druggy dream. The wind whipped up and a low wail wrapped itself around us. I held him more tightly, leaning my head against his back as I stared out at the trees rising and falling in the wind. Blurs of white flickered through the skeletal silhouettes. Ghosts.
Not there, not there, I told myself. My heart was pounding. I wanted to get out of here.
Then his spine straightened, and he reared back against me. My grip was broken, and I flailed, fighting to hang on. I caught the messenger bag. The Vespa wobbled. He pulled back again, and I was afraid I was going to fall off the back of the bike. I craned to look around him.
Something white in the middle of the road, running at us—
The Vespa listed right, shooting for the trees, the ones filled with ghosts, and I screamed as I went flying, straight for a tree—
—and someone dangling from it, with a white face and black eyes—
“Lindsay,” I heard.
Did I smell geraniums?
Blackness.
EIGHT
“LINDSAY,” THE VOICE murmured. “Lindsay, get out of here. You’re not safe.”
My head clanged. Something dripped on my forehead and I opened my eyes, then let out a gasp when I saw a white blob. But it was the moon, only the moon. I had fallen off the Vespa at the side of the road, and it looked like I might have rolled down a little embankment, coming to rest in a circle of trees. My helmet was still on, but my clothes were sopping wet.
The voice . . . had it been my mom? Hope clutched my heart as I tried to raise myself up on my elbows. My body was rubbery. “Memmy?” I whispered.
But as I shook myself out of my confusion, I knew very well that it hadn’t been my mom. It was Celia’s voice.
So she was back—or else she had never left. I wanted to burst into tears. Except . . . I didn’t feel her presence inside me.
“Celia?” I whispered aloud.
Silence.
Then I heard footsteps through wet leaves, and I forced myself to sit up. Miles was shuffling toward me. His helmet was cradled against his hip.
“Oh, shit,” he said, seeing me. He dropped to his knees beside me and searched my face. He pushed hair out of my eyes. “God, Lindsay, are you okay?”
“I—I think so. My head kind of hurts.”
“Did you black out? You might have a concussion.” He opened up my eyelid and practically pressed his eye against mine. I pulled back. “I can’t see anything.”
He pushed back onto his feet and began to straighten, bringing me up with him by wrapping his gloved hands around my wrists. I turned and saw the Vespa at the top of the berm. It hadn�
��t slid down with us.
“What did we hit?” I asked him, glancing fearfully around as my teeth chattered together. “Was it a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think we did hit it. I think I veered in time. But it all happened so fast.”
I exhaled shakily, and we began to walk back up to the road. Miles let go of my hand and grabbed the Vespa by the handlebars, balancing it and bending over to inspect it. He rolled it back and forth. Then he touched the key, which was still in the ignition, and turned it. The engine started.
“I’m buying stock in this company,” he crowed. He waved me over and had me take his place, keeping the scooter idling, while he walked out to the center of the road. There was nothing there.
“I know I saw something,” he said.
“I did too. But it was raining so hard.”
“It was coming at us. In the middle of the road.” He ran his hands through his hair. His retro ducktail was long gone, and the wet strands were slicked against his skull. There was rainwater in his platinum eyebrows and his eyelashes glistened. He looked otherworldly.
“If it was an animal . . . ” I began. He looked over at me and shook his head.
“We need to get out of here.”
“We need the messenger bag,” I pointed out.
“Shit.” He nodded. “You stay here.”
I was grateful that I had to stay with the Vespa to make sure it kept working but a little ashamed that I was wimping out and letting him do the searching. Jane had reinforced the notion that girls didn’t need guys for anything. We wanted them, yes. But we were perfectly fine without them. It was an excellent strategy for getting them interested in us.
“Celia, was it you?” I asked aloud. There was no response. “Was it someone else, who found out that Miles had taken Mandy’s notes?”
I pictured all of Mandy’s notes scattered down the hillside, the ink run to illegibility, the paper nothing more than a pulpy mess. I was furious with him all over again. Yes, I had been tacky, but he had been incredibly stupid.
I studied the road, then walked the moped over and placed it so the headlight would shine on the strip of road where the figure had appeared. I saw nothing but rain.
