Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  “No,” I disagreed. “It can’t be you! We have no idea what we’re doing. What if we mess something up and you get stuck with the curse? I may be dead within the next two weeks. Then you’d be on your own.”

  Henry refused to look me in the eye. “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, it’s true,” I insisted. “Watch this.” I reached for the salt shaker at the center of the table and poured a little mountain into my cupped hand. Then I overturned my hand to dump it on the table, which was covered in a white tablecloth.

  “What are you doing?” Henry asked.

  I answered, “Look. It’s gone.”

  As soon as I’d gotten home from his house earlier that afternoon, I’d tossed salt to the east, suspicious that what had happened at Violet’s house that day might have changed the outcome of Mrs. Robinson’s salt test. No longer was salt that I’d touched turning red when it hit the ground. Now it was simply vanishing the instant it left my hand.

  Henry patted the tablecloth where the salt should have landed, and then licked his fingertip, touched the tablecloth, and held his fingertip up to his eye for close examination. “What the hell?!” he exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything. But I’m pretty sure that means I’m scheduled to die next,” I said, hoping that my nonchalant attitude didn’t reveal my panic.

  “Look,” Henry said with his head hung. “I wasn’t the nicest guy in high school. In fact, I was a total dick to a lot of people, including your boyfriend, and probably a lot of other people I don’t even remember. A lot of people avoided me, or were nice to me because they were afraid I’d make fun of them and get other people to join in. Honestly”—he looked up at the ceiling—“I probably even got better grades than I deserved from some teachers because they didn’t want me to confront them, and didn’t want to have to deal with my dad if I failed a class.”

  I didn’t say anything because as much as I’d grown to genuinely like Henry after getting to know him that year, much of what he was saying was true.

  “If we’re serious about using someone as bait to get the spirits out of Mischa, I’m our best bet. We might not get a second chance to do this. I mean, there’s no way Mischa’s going to cooperate more than once.” Henry had made up his mind, and he was absolutely correct on all counts.

  But still… I was never going to agree to risk his safety. Not even with my own life in the balance.

  “Candace suggested someone else,” I informed him. “And I don’t like that option much more than using you, but…” It took effort for me to lie with a straight face. “I think she may be a better choice.”

  Henry demanded that I tell him who the alternate suggestion was, and I refused; I had to first decide whether or not I could go through with risking the fate of someone so undeserving and unsuspecting. I promised that I’d call him first thing in the morning with my decision, and it felt as if my intestines were tied in knots as I waved good-bye to him from the front door when he pulled out of our driveway.

  Not surprisingly, I didn’t sleep at all that night. Around two in the morning, I admitted defeat, got up, opened my laptop, and wrote a detailed history of how I’d come to understand the curse on Violet and how it not only had claimed the lives of my friends, but had also resulted in the death of Stephani deMilo and nearly killed several other eleventh graders over the winter. Knowing better than to leave something so alarming on my laptop, I drafted the file in Google Docs, carefully wrote an e-mail containing a link to the file and a password to open it, and scheduled it to automatically send to Henry on April twenty-third, twenty-four hours after the next new moon. It was the most efficient way I could think of to make sure that he’d have all the information he’d need to continue trying to break the curse in the event that I died in the next few days.

  As I reached across my nightstand to turn off my lamp, my eyes fell upon the copy of the book that Trey had placed over my phone earlier that day. With an electric jolt blasting through my body, I suddenly knew exactly what he’d been trying to communicate to me in a way that my mom wouldn’t have understood if she’d happened to enter my bedroom before me.

  Books.

  The library.

  Trey was hiding out at the library in town. Not the library at the high school, which would have been foolish, even for him. The big library, the one that had built its second floor with a charitable donation from Violet Simmons’s millionaire grandfather. I smiled widely in the dark, delighted not only that I’d figured out where he was, but that I knew him well enough to understand his clue. After the apocalyptically bad day I’d had, my renewed sense of connection to him made my heart swell.

  His choice was a wise one: There were comfortable couches at the Willow Public Library, plus vending machines, bathrooms, and heat. The security system there was probably also somewhat lo-fi, since there probably weren’t many people in town interested in breaking in to steal anything other than the ancient laptops at the Internet stations.

  My heart was beating so rapidly that I could hear the blood coursing through my ears. Outside my window, the rising sun was turning the sky pink. I was furious with myself that it had taken me so long to figure this out.

  I needed to get to him as quickly as possible. Henry hadn’t been kidding; there’d been a story about Trey in the Gazette, and if everyone in town was keeping an eye out for him, Trey would be crazy to stick around for long. It was Saturday. If I waited until the library opened for business at ten o’clock, there was a chance Trey would have already taken off. The grim realization that this might be my last chance to see him—ever—rocketed me out of bed.

  I quickly pulled on jeans and a sweater, taking care not to make any noises that would wake Mom or Glenn, and slipped into the garage to see if Mom’s bicycle was still in working condition. Aside from having flat tires, which were easily inflated with the old pump, it seemed to be in decent shape until I realized after hopping onto it outside the garage that the hand brakes didn’t work at all.

  Fortunately, at that early hour on a Saturday, there wasn’t much traffic on the roads leading to the library, so the busted brakes weren’t a problem. But my joints were jittery, and every movement of my body felt like I was bracing myself for a fatal blow. Potential death was everywhere I looked. Now I knew what Mischa’s plight had been like in the fall, when she’d been terrified of eating and drinking for fear of choking to death. Death by air could mean anything. It could include any of the tree branches under which I rode, many damaged and weakened by the storm, falling on me. It could manifest in debris blowing in front of a passing car, and that car blindly swerving and hitting me.

  By the time I neared the library, I had convinced myself so thoroughly that I was going to die before ever arriving that I hopped off the bike and walked it toward the building as soon as it came into view. The Willow Public Library, a small brick building with an oddly modern added-on wing in the back, was located on the same street as our park district and shared a parking lot. As I grew closer, I could see the town swimming pool, still empty and desolate, as it would remain until Memorial Day. It was likely that the soccer fields would be buzzing with activity within a few hours, as soon as parents started dropping off kids for their matches. But at that hour, it was a safe bet that no one saw me roll Mom’s bike around the back of the library and rest it on its kickstand outside the children’s section.

  Then I had to figure out how to contact Trey inside the building without setting off any kind of alarms. I paced the perimeter of the building around to the front again, and settled on trying to get his attention with the book return. The oversize metal drawer led to a chute that ended in a bin behind the front desk, and assuming that Trey was on the building’s first floor, I figured he’d probably be able to hear me if I called to him through it.

  “Hey! Is anybody home?” I called into the empty drawer after pulling it open with the handle. “Hello… ?”

  Just as I was starting to feel self-conscious, I
heard a tapping noise to my left. There was Trey, shaking his head and grinning at me in amusement on the other side of the library’s clear front doors, as if whatever terrible circumstances had landed him here were of no concern.

  “I know. Very funny,” I joked. As always, upon seeing his face, I momentarily forgot about everything bad that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He was safe; we were together. Seeing him smiling at me from ten feet away was all I could have wanted… until I remembered that now I was the one in trouble, most definitely more urgent trouble than his. Everything had changed since our brief encounter at the airport less than a day ago.

  I swallowed hard, hoping that my sudden wave of sadness wasn’t showing in my eyes.

  “I was starting to think you weren’t going to stop by,” he said, scratching his head, which looked like it had been recently shaved. He had less than half an inch of dark hair all the way around his skull, making his face look thinner and his features look more delicate than usual.

  I gestured at the library. “It took me a while to figure out your clue,” I said apologetically. “How can I get inside?”

  “There’s a security system,” he said, thumbing at an electronic device with an LCD screen on the wall. “They should be trying to get more people in here instead of trying to keep them out, if you ask me. But hold on a second.”

  He walked the length of the entryway and disappeared behind the library’s front desk. I took a step closer to the door to see him better through the glare, and noticed that he wasn’t wearing socks or shoes. When he returned a moment later, he was holding an index card, which he held up to the door so that I could see it.

  “They left the security locking and unlocking instructions on the staff bulletin board,” Trey informed me. Written on the card in draftsman hand-lettering were numbered steps for setting the system at night, and disarming it in the morning. “What do you think the odds are that these are still current?”

  It was risky to turn off the security system; if Trey entered the wrong code, presumably an earsplitting alarm would sound and the library’s security firm would send someone over to investigate. But we decided to go for it, figuring it was a safe bet that our town’s librarians were organized. Trey tapped in the six-digit PIN and pressed the pound key. Then we both held our breath for a moment until the word DISARMED blinked twice on the LCD, and the tiny light at the bottom of the security panel switched from red to green.

  Trey pushed the door open for me, and I threw myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck. Before I was even aware of my emotions, the sound of sobbing filled the foyer, and it took a second for me to realize that it was coming from me. Being terrified that I might die and of the grief it would cause my parents—who’d already suffered so dearly—was one thing. But being heartbreakingly regretful that I may very well have compromised the life I wanted to one day enjoy with Trey was too much to bear.

  Although I’d missed Trey terribly, I’d forgotten what it was like to be in his presence. To look at his face. To feel his breath against my ear. It was impossible to remember so many sensory experiences in perfect detail when we were apart, but what I was reminded of as we stood there was how I never felt more like my true self than when I was with him. I’d been going through the motions in Tampa for so long… being the daughter my dad wanted me to be, playing the role of McKenna Brady, new girl at school. Even around Henry, I was hyperconscious of my behavior, the tone of my voice, and trying to come across as capable and courageous. But with Trey, I didn’t have to calculate any element of my impulses, reactions, or expressions.

  “What’s all this?” Trey whispered into my hair as he held me so tightly against his body I could barely breathe. “I’m here now. We’re together. Whatever’s happening with Mischa, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already seen.”

  He loosened his embrace so that I could wipe tears off my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “So much has happened in the last day. Amanda Portnoy—Mischa’s sister—is still in a coma, and—”

  “Wait. Before you say anything, just… listen,” he said, staring into my eyes so fervently without blinking that I wondered exactly what had been going on at Northern to cause him to leave. “I can’t stay here, in Willow. I have to leave now. This morning. I only came back here hoping I’d have a chance to talk to you, like this. I really was on my way to Florida yesterday when I ran into you at the airport, and thank God I did, or else I don’t know how I would have gotten in touch with you again. Being here—in this town—is really dangerous for me.”

  My heart ached. “Why now? You’ll be eighteen in July, and then you’ll be free to do whatever you want. They’ll probably erase your record,” I reminded him, although even as I spoke the words, I knew they’d stopped being true the moment he’d broken out of his school for the second time.

  Trey squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “I wouldn’t have survived until July if I’d stayed.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Trey knew everything there was to know about surviving reform school. He’d told me before I arrived at the Sheridan School for Girls to keep my head down, avoid calling attention to myself, and keep myself out of situations in which I might rack up social debts to other people. Even though I knew Trey loved earning the ire of teachers at Willow High School, he’d made a point of keeping a low profile at Northern Reserve.

  Trey led me farther into the library, to the bright red couches in the children’s area where story hour for kids was held. It was odd to find myself there—enveloped in its unique and peculiar smell of old paper—a place where I’d spent so much time in junior high scouring the stacks for books to check out. Dust, illuminated by morning rays of light, danced in the air around us as we sat down. The library, to me, had always been a haven, providing security and promising magic. It was ironic that this particular section of the library had been built by Trey and Violet’s grandfather, and now here we found ourselves, discussing our future, which had been wrecked by Violet and her deceased sisters, his descendants.

  “Two weeks ago, at the end of March, I had a visitor, okay? And that’s weird because I never have visitors. My mom’s only driven up to visit me twice since November. So when I went into the cafeteria that day, I had no idea who or what to expect, but the person who’d come to see me was a lawyer. Lawrence Strohmann.”

  My heart skipped a beat. That name was familiar, but in the same way as the verse of a song you can’t quite remember.

  “Ekdahl, West & Strohmann?” Trey said, and realization flooded me. Of course. Mr. Simmons’s attorneys from Green Bay, the ones who had attempted to bribe Trey’s mother into terminating her pregnancy after her affair with Violet’s father. When I’d been home in January, I’d come across a letter from them sent to Trey’s mom to inform her that she was being sued for accepting payment from them but failing to comply with the terms on which they’d agreed.

  I asked, “Was it about the lawsuit? How could you possibly be expected to come up with the kind of money they were…”

  Trey shook his head. “I think it’s connected, but I’m not sure how. He was there to draw up some sort of agreement with me. I don’t know how much of this I should believe. But he told me that Violet Simmons has some genetic disorder and will probably die before she turns twenty-one without a kidney transplant.”

  “What?” I asked in a flat, dubious voice.

  Trey exhaled loudly to express his doubt, and continued. “He was there with this huge envelope of paperwork for me to read. It wasn’t just one contract, but a bunch of them. Basically, he wanted me to agree to get tested to see if I could be an organ donor, and if I said yes, they’d drop the lawsuit against my mom. And if it turned out that I was a match and was willing to give Violet one of my kidneys, then they’d create this, like, financial trust for me that would mean I’d get money when I turn twenty-four and then more money when I turn thirty-five.”

  None of this was making any sense at all. But I remembered Viole
t mentioning how her life hadn’t been easy since the curse was lifted from her, and wondered if this was what she’d meant. “Why you?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you’re related. But you can’t be the only possible donor!”

  “Well,” Trey said with a smirk as he leaned back on the couch and folded his hands on his abdomen, “turns out I am. Violet’s blood type is B, same as mine. Her mother’s blood type is A, so she’s incompatible. Her dad is also type B, but Violet’s doctors think his kidney might be too large for her system, besides which, according to the lawyer, he has high blood pressure, which disqualifies him. Violet’s uncle refuses to have his kids tested because of the whole debacle with the will,” he explained.

  “The will,” I repeated. Violet had told me about how her grandmother had left everything to her out of guilt because she’d also passed along the curse. I vaguely remembered her telling me something about her uncle, who’d wanted to sell the Simmons mansion and split the profits with her father.

  “So I’m it. Violet’s only hope,” Trey said.

  Although everything Trey was telling me tracked with things Violet had shared with me in the past—as well as her sickly appearance the day before—something about the proposal seemed suspicious. “You didn’t say yes, did you?” I asked.

  “No! Of course not. I didn’t even take the contracts from him to read over. I wished him luck and went back to my room. But…” He hesitated and his expression changed. “The very next night, as soon as the guard on our floor stepped into the stairwell to smoke like he always does at ten o’clock, two guys came into my room wearing pillowcases on their heads and beat the crap out of me. One held me down while the other came at me. My roommate just sat on his bed, watching, like he’d known it was going to happen and was just staying out of the way.”

  “Your eye,” I whispered and reached out to gently touch the greenish-yellow bruise around his right eye. My lip quivered as I tried to imagine the scene he’d described, being attacked while utterly defenseless in an environment where the authorities didn’t care what happened behind closed doors. He probably never would have told me so, but he had to have feared for his life. Hearing the awful truth about what had driven Trey to flee Northern made me feel even sicker about having to tell him my news. “Is that how you ended up in the infirmary?”