by Heidi Lang
“If you give me my drink back,” she said.
“Sure thing.” He placed it on the table between them. “I’m Ivan, by the way.”
“Rae.”
“Nice to formally meet you, Rae.” Ivan smiled. “I was wondering if, maybe later, you wanted to—”
“There you are,” Ava said.
Rae and Ivan both looked up. Ava was standing over them, frowning slightly. “Who are you?” she asked Ivan.
“A friend from school. But I was just leaving.” He glanced back at Rae. “I’m sure I’ll see you around again soon.”
Rae didn’t say anything back as he got up and left, but her stomach was in weird knots, and she wondered if he’d been about to ask her out. Then she wondered why that idea made her so uncomfortable. Maybe because she didn’t really know him?
Ava watched him go. “What was that all about?”
“Oh, uh, nothing.” Rae took a sip of her mocha.
“Rae,” Ava said warningly.
“Ava,” Rae said back. Then she sighed. “Fine. He’s just some boy who wanted to talk to me.”
Immediately Ava’s expression shifted from annoyed and suspicious to sly. “Oh he did, did he?”
Rae shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t know. He was awfully cute.”
Rae could feel her face growing hot. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said quickly. “Also, your sandwich is getting cold.”
Ava took it, studying the label. “Didn’t realize hot egg salad sandwiches were a thing.”
Rae laughed, and it was only a little forced. Thankfully, Ava dropped the whole cute-boy thing and let her finish her mocha in peace.
12. CADEN
When Caden got home from school, he found his dad sitting on their porch swing, wearing his favorite obnoxiously bright blue button-down shirt. Caden preferred to wear black for protection, but his dad had always put more faith in blue. He claimed it helped keep him safe and brought out the color in his eyes. Caden’s mom taught him that blue was used for mental clarity and focus, but maybe that was exactly what his dad needed to feel safe.
“You’re off work early,” Caden said. His dad helped out with his mom’s Paranormal Price business, but his main job was working as a computer programmer.
“Yeah, didn’t feel like being there anymore,” his dad said, grinning.
“So why are you sitting out here?”
“Your mom has a client over for a consultation. Mr. Murphy.”
That explained the extra car Caden had seen at the bottom of their driveway on his walk up. “Any relation to my homeroom teacher?”
“Possibly. They have a vacation home up in New Hampshire that may be haunted, and he wanted to get your mom’s advice on it.”
Caden tentatively dropped his emotional shields and felt around the house. Everything seemed normal… or at least as normal as it ever did, which meant that his mom was probably doing nothing more than a simple tarot reading.
His dad patted the swing next to him. “Come. Sit with me.”
Caden hesitated. He was pretty sure his dad had been purposely waiting to talk to him. Never a good sign.
But then Caden could sense the sadness lurking beneath his dad’s cheerful words and wide smile. It made him think of a recently cleaned room with a closet jammed full of stuff, as if his dad had taken all of his messy emotions and just hidden them out of sight. So Caden dropped his backpack on the porch and settled back on the swing’s cushions.
Caden and his dad gently rocked back and forth. Today the mugginess in the air had evaporated, the wind finally cool and crisp with the hint of autumn. Leaves drifted slowly down from their branches to coat the grass, and the afternoon sky burned that brilliant shade of blue that only seemed to happen at this time of year. It felt strangely peaceful.
Caden knew it wouldn’t last. It never did.
“It’s been exactly nine months this week,” his dad said abruptly. “Nine months since your brother—” He stopped as suddenly as he’d started, the silence thickening between them. They never really talked about Aiden—at least, not after that first frantic month when it was all anyone could talk about. Caden remembered all the interviews with reporters, the increasingly desperate searches. And the endless police interrogations. He knew they wouldn’t believe him if he told them the truth, so he’d had to lie, again and again.
You wouldn’t want to interfere with an ongoing investigation, would you, Mr. Price?
Caden’s hands clenched at his sides. It still bothered him that Patrick had known exactly who he was. Just as he’d known the police had talked to him several times after his brother vanished, those “talks” becoming more and more serious, until even his classmates heard about them. It was one of the reasons why so many of them believed he’d been the one to murder his brother. And Caden couldn’t even blame his classmates, or the police. Since he’d been the last person to see Aiden alive, he was the obvious choice. And really, they weren’t wrong.
It had all happened during a routine exorcism. Just a normal Sunday night for the Price family.
Hey, kids, Caden’s mom had said that evening. They were eating her favorite dinner recipe: a slightly burnt green bean casserole. After dinner, your dad and I are heading out on a house call. We have some negative energies to cleanse and possibly a spirit or two to deal with. Want to come along and help out?
I don’t know, honey…, Caden’s dad started. He never really liked to involve Caden or Aiden in any of the fieldwork. “I don’t know, honey” used to be his catchphrase. It’s not the best idea to bring them. I mean, on a school night and everything too.
Caden’s mom smiled. This will be a safe, easy job.
And at first, it had been.
The house was a cute little cottage painted a cheerful sky-blue with yellow rosebushes overflowing by the front door. It looked like a house from a magazine. The doctor met them outside and explained that he’d been hearing noises and catching glimpses of things that weren’t there. Caden still remembered how he’d joked about it. It’s a really bad sign for someone in my profession. But when Caden’s family stepped inside, everything seemed fine. No trace of paranormal activity. Still, they lit their smudge sticks, the sharp scent of burning sage filling every room, his dad trickling out lines of salt, putting rose quartz in the corners, his mom lighting her candles.
While their parents worked, Aiden and Caden had gone deeper into the house. And then Aiden had discovered the door to the cellar.
It was painted the same off-white as the surrounding walls, and Caden could still remember the sense of wrongness when they opened that door. It crawled all over him like a nest of bugs that he couldn’t shake off. The owner of that house had definitely been messing with energies he shouldn’t have, and some of them had stuck to the cellar the way static electricity stuck a balloon to a wall.
Aiden, Caden whispered, afraid of attracting anything hanging around. Let’s go get Mom.
But Aiden wasn’t listening. His eyes were closed, his head thrown back. Can you feel it? He took a deep breath, pulling in the negative energy. This, he said, will be perfect. And he’d seemed so excited that Caden had gone along with him.
Caden should have known then that Aiden’s plan had nothing to do with cleansing negative energies…
“We’ve been back to that house, you know,” his dad said now, bringing Caden back to the present. “Your mother and I. But there was no trace of your brother.” He scowled. “And now the owner won’t let us in anymore. Claimed we were hurting his business.”
“I remember,” Caden said. His parents had been furious about that, especially after the police told them they’d be charged for trespassing if they continued going back. In the end, his parents had decided there was nothing remaining at that house that would actually help them find Aiden, and they’d let it go.
“As if it wasn’t his fault in the first place, with his meddling with the dead. As if he wasn’t the one who invite
d us there.” His dad’s scowl had twisted into something strange and ugly.
Caden put a hand on his dad’s arm. “Dad,” he said gently.
His dad tensed, then relaxed. He scrubbed his hand down his face. “I’m sorry. I just… I’m not really sure what else to do. We never should have taken you with us that night. Your mom’s work is too unpredictable. We shouldn’t have involved either of you. Maybe then…” He took a deep, shuddering breath.
Caden couldn’t bear to look at his dad’s anguished face. This was why his parents hardly spoke to each other these days. All of the “shouldn’t have”s hovered constantly between them, haunting them worse than any ghost.
“Oh, there are far worse ghosts to have.”
Caden froze, as if going still would save him. Dimly he heard his dad start talking again, his regrets, promises that they were still looking, but Caden couldn’t really pay attention. All of his focus was on the space next to him, just beside the edge of the swing.
That space was cold, and growing colder. And Caden couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what that meant anymore. The hairs on his arms and neck rose, all of them lifting as if he’d just built up a charge of static electricity. The telltale signs of paranormal activity, indicating a ghost was nearby.
Aiden’s ghost.
Caden thought of his mom’s sloppy summoning spell yesterday, and the feeling that something had been in his room afterward. She’d been looking for Aiden; apparently, she’d found him. Or he’d found them.
Caden swallowed. He knew how his brother could get when he felt like he’d been wronged. Now, at least, Caden could admit that Vanessa Sanchez’s car crash and Mark Peterson’s house fire weren’t accidents. And there had been other incidents too. Whispers that Caden had tried to ignore.
But Caden had wronged Aiden more than anyone else ever had. And Caden had seen his mom deal with enough ghosts to know that they could hurt. They could even kill. He’d never meant to hurt his brother, but there was no way Aiden would believe that. So now that he’d found them again, what was Aiden planning to do?
“You mean, how am I planning to get my revenge?”
Caden shivered, instinctively looking around, but of course he saw nothing.
“I’ll be seeing you around, little brother…”
Caden felt the space near him vibrate, and then abruptly that sense of presence vanished. He put a hand out, and the cold was gone.
13. RAE
Neither Ava nor Rae said much as they drove to the psychologist’s office. It was times like these when Rae felt the distance between her and her sister like a physical pain. She would never admit it, but she missed Ava. She missed the sister she used to have, the one she lost the week their dad vanished.
Rae closed her eyes, remembering that day. She’d come home from school expecting to find her dad waiting for her, like he’d promised, and instead finding several men in dark suits swarming around her house. Her mom was talking to two of them, her voice tight and high-pitched.
What’s going on? Rae had asked.
Nothing, her mom had said. Go to your room.
Where’s Dad?
I said go to your room, Rae. Her mom had sounded so anxious that Rae hadn’t asked any more questions, just hurried past them down the hall. Three more men in suits were ransacking her parents’ bedroom, tearing through their dressers, their closet, rifling through bedding. She slipped past them to her dad’s home office, where another man was rummaging around in her dad’s desk.
Rae watched him grab notebooks, USB drives, and even photos still in their frames, tossing them into a large cardboard box. She cringed at the sound of shattering glass as he dropped her parents’ wedding photo into the cardboard depths. She looked around, spotting her favorite photo—one of her and her dad—perched precariously on top of a bookshelf, half-hiding the small wall calendar behind it. Then she eyed the man. He had his back to her as he went through a desk drawer.
She darted forward and snagged the photo. At the last second, she tore the calendar off the wall too, smuggling both of them into her room. She didn’t know what those men were doing in her house or why they were taking her dad’s things, but she was terrified of what they’d do to her if they noticed she’d stolen these items. They scared her, these men with their identical dark suits and identical blank looks.
She opened her thick math notebook and tore out a chunk of pages from the middle, then slipped the calendar inside, tucking the whole thing back into her schoolbag. The photo she decided to hide behind her decoy corkboard. But when she popped the frame open, she saw that her dad had taped another picture to the back.
At first it looked almost human. Two eyes, nose, mouth. But the eyes were too large, and all pupil, the nose nothing more than a pair of slits, and the mouth barely visible. And its skin was gray. It was undeniably an alien. And it was peering out from behind some kind of weird cage.
Her dad must have taken this picture.
Rae’s hands trembled as she studied it. It was probably the reason those men were searching his office.
Somehow she’d known in that moment that her dad wasn’t coming back home. He was gone, but he’d left this picture, this proof, hidden behind a photo of her, which meant he’d wanted her to have it. Carefully she tucked it back behind that photo and hid both of them away.
But it was a secret too big to keep, and she had to tell someone.…
She managed to keep it to herself for almost a whole week, until she heard the rumor that her dad and another engineer from his team had run away together, and she finally went to her sister with the truth.
You’re being a child, Ava had told her. There’s no such thing as aliens, and no one took Dad. She’d had so much scorn in her voice, it had been worse than a slap. Grow up, Rae. Lots of people’s dads run off. You don’t have to invent some big fantasy around it.
I have proof, Rae had said.
No one will believe it. You should just let it go.
And then Ava had just gone on with her life, as if nothing had changed.
The worst part was that later, when Rae lost all her friends after she told Taylor that the government had abducted her father, she couldn’t go to her sister. Ava would have said “I told you so,” and Rae couldn’t take that. She couldn’t tell Ava anything anymore, and she’d felt so very alone.
“So,” Ava said now.
“A needle pulling thread,” Rae answered.
“Ha ha. Very clever.” Ava checked her mirror, slowed down. “Do you see this?”
“What?” Rae said.
“The goats?”
Rae frowned out at the road. A man, looking very ordinary in jeans and a T-shirt, was casually strolling down the side of the road with a pack of nine goats. They were all on leashes, like dogs, the ends clipped to a fanny pack he wore snug around his middle. “Huh,” Rae said. “Maybe these are the goats we’re supposed to mind. Whatever that means.”
“This is an odd place,” Ava said.
“Yeah, well, you picked it.”
Ava sighed. “I suppose so.”
“I still don’t see why you had to apply to a college as far across the country as possible.” Rae crossed her arms. Ava was extremely smart and very motivated. She’d applied to WestConn University in her junior year of high school, less than a month after their dad’s disappearance, and they accepted her provisionally; once she completed her high school degree, she was in. Rae hadn’t even known it was possible for a junior to do that, but apparently for Ava, everyone was willing to bend the rules a little. Even universities. Clearly her sister could have gone just about anywhere. She didn’t need to leave their dad so far behind.
“I’ve told you,” Ava said exasperatedly, “it’s one of the only schools that offers a degree in astrobiology.”
“But why do you need that degree?”
Ava pressed her lips together.
Rae turned her back on her sister and glared out the window at the trees blurring past. Of course Ava
wasn’t going to answer. She didn’t tell Rae anything these days either.
Ava drove the rest of the way in silence, pulling up in front of Eastbury Mall. It looked more like a strip plaza with delusions of grandeur than any mall Rae had seen before. “Doctor Anderson’s office is at the end,” Ava said.
“Doctor Anderson?” Rae thought that name seemed oddly familiar.
“Your therapist,” Ava said. “Need me to come in with you?”
“Definitely not.”
Ava smirked. “All right, then. I’ll be back in an hour to pick you up.”
“Great.” Rae got out and slammed her door shut.
She stomped up to Doctor Anderson’s office, letting the door swing closed behind her. Unfortunately, it was one of those doors that automatically measured its pace to close softly and gently. No satisfying door slamming here. The office, too, was all soft and gentle, with a small water fountain burbling in the corner, and lotus-shaped lamps in pale greens, blues, and pinks hung around the room. Behind the desk sat a receptionist, a man with a large nose and skinny eyebrows. He smiled at Rae. “Nice to see you here. Rae Carter, is it?”
Rae nodded.
“Your mom already filled out all the paperwork for you, so you can just have a seat.” He indicated a row of wicker basket–looking chairs set against the side wall. “The doctor is finishing up with a client, and then he’ll be right with you.”
Rae sat down two seats from an older woman wearing very bright pink lipstick and pulled her phone out. Her mom had gotten her one of those child-safe versions, the kind that only allowed her to call and text and take photos. Supposedly when she was thirteen, she’d be allowed to actually download some apps.
She pulled open Vivienne’s message again and stared at it. She might be busy tonight, but maybe she should invite Vivienne over tomorrow. She typed: Want to come to my house tomorrow after school? and sent it before she could second-guess herself.
Three little dots formed, like Vivienne was typing back a response, and then they vanished. And nothing.
