The Harder the Fall

by Lauren Barnholdt

  When we get to my house, I invite Ellie in for a snack. I’m hoping my dad isn’t home yet. Something tells me he’s not going to be too excited to listen to me and Ellie talk about how me and Brandon are finally official.

  “We should go on a double date this weekend,” Ellie says. “With our boyfriends.”

  I giggle. It sounds so weird, her saying “our boyfriends.” But in a good way.

  I open the refrigerator and pull out a package of carrot sticks and some hummus. Ellie’s a vegetarian, so I like to keep healthy snacks on hand. But she shakes her head.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “News like this calls for junk food.” She gets up and starts going through the cupboards, pulling out anything she can find that’s bad for you. By the time she’s done, there’s a small pile on the table of Cheetos, Oreos, Mike and Ikes, and sour cream and onion chips. She’s even managed to find some old Halloween candy.

  “I don’t think we should eat these,” I say, picking up one of the fun-size chocolate bars and giving it a look. “I don’t know how long they’ve been in there. They could be from, like, three Halloweens ago.”

  Ellie reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out a tube of cookie dough. “First we will make cookies,” she declares. “Then we will snack while we wait for them to bake, and then we will eat the cookies.”

  “Perfect.” I reach into the bag of Cheetos and pop one into my mouth.

  Ellie pulls out a cookie sheet and starts arranging the dough, making the cookies way bigger than you’re supposed to. “We need big cookies,” she decides. “And we need them with M&M’s in them.”

  She opens a package of M&M’s, and we both start pushing the candies into the cookies, making little designs with them. We’re giggling and having a good time when Lyra decides to show up.

  Whatever. I’m not going to let a ghost ruin my good time. So really, it’s just a matter of ignoring her, la, la, la.

  “Kendall!” she cries. It’s the first time she’s used my name, and it’s kind of startling. Also, she’s screaming, which isn’t really nice. Doesn’t she know that you’re supposed to use indoor voices when you’re, you know, indoors? I turn my back to her and take the sheet of cookies and slide it into the oven.

  “Kendall!” she says again.

  If she’s waiting for me to answer her, she’s in for a long wait. I mean, I couldn’t talk to her even if I wanted to. Ellie’s standing right here.

  “Kendall, please,” Lyra says. I look over at her. She looks like she’s been crying. Wow. Her face is a blotchy red mess, and her hair looks all tousled, like maybe she’s been pulling at it or something. “Please, I . . . I just remembered something.”

  Oh, now she remembers something? Yesterday it was all, “Oh, I don’t remember anything” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about” and “I guess you’re on your own.” Now that I’m actually in the middle of a social engagement and having fun talking about having my very first real actual boyfriend, she remembers something. So typical.

  Well, it’s too bad if she’s upset. She’s just going to have to wait.

  “Those cookies smell delicious,” I say to Ellie. Then I pop some M&M’s into my mouth. No point letting the extra ones go to waste, right?

  “They are going to be delicious,” Ellie says. She plops down in the chair next to me. “Is your dad going to be mad when he sees all the food we ate?”

  I shake my head. “He doesn’t care. And even if he did, he wouldn’t really be able to say anything. He has a lot of making up to do.”

  Ellie nods. I finally filled her in last night on the phone about all the drama that went down at the apple farm.

  “Kendall!” Lyra screams. “Please, this is serious. I have to tell you something. And it’s really important.”

  Doubtful.

  “It really is,” she says, like she knows what I’m thinking. “I swear.” She tries to pull on my sleeve, but of course her hand just floats through my sweater. Then she bites her lip and looks right at me. “Kendall,” she says, “this is important. It has to do with Brandon. And with his mom.”

  “This better be worth it,” I mutter fifteen minutes later as I walk across the street with Lyra. We’re going to the cemetery. My dad will be getting home soon, and I knew I would need total privacy if I wanted to be able to have a real conversation with Lyra. It’s one thing to be talking about Brandon with Ellie while my dad’s around. It’s another thing altogether to be talking to a ghost that no one else can see.

  “It’ll be worth it,” Lyra says. “I promise.”

  I sigh. Once Lyra brought up Brandon, I couldn’t just ignore her. Especially if whatever she has to tell me somehow involves Mrs. Dunham.

  Of course, I couldn’t just leave Ellie in my kitchen, so I had to get her out of there. I made up some stupid excuse about how I had just remembered that my dad was coming home early, and how he didn’t want me having friends over. Which was completely ridiculous, since I had just told her that my dad didn’t care if she was over and eating snacks with me. But I kind of panicked when Lyra brought up Mrs. Dunham, and I couldn’t really focus enough to come up with a suitable lie. I even shut off the oven and left the cookies we were making half baked.

  “Okay,” I say, sitting down on the bench by my grandma’s grave. I open up to a fresh page of the notebook I brought so that I can take some notes. I love notebooks. I know it’s old-school, and that I could just make notes in my phone or whatever, but it’s nice to actually write things down. Plus notebooks are fun to shop for. I have all kinds of notebooks—notebooks to write down new hairstyles, notebooks to write down ideas for when I grow up and become a famous author, and notebooks where I take notes on what the ghosts tell me so that I don’t forget anything when I’m trying to help them.

  “Okay, so,” Lyra says, taking a big breath. “Last night I was a little bored, you know?”

  I nod. I can understand that. I mean, ghosts don’t need sleep, and they can’t touch anything, so what are they really supposed to do? They can’t turn the pages of books, they can’t turn computers on . . . they can’t even really spy on anyone at night, because everyone is usually sleeping. Although there was this one ghost who used to go watch TV with this guy Dale who lives down the street from me—Dale is always up late because he works nights.

  “So,” Lyra continues, “I went back to my old house.”

  “Went back to old house,” I write in my notebook. “Your old house that you used to live in?”

  “Yes.” Lyra nods, and then tugs on her hair. “I just wanted to go back there, you know? Just to see it. But when I got there, it was empty. And everything was all boarded up.”

  I frown. “Didn’t your mom sell it?”

  She nods. “Yeah, but I guess maybe the new people haven’t moved in yet or something. It looked like there was a bunch of work being done, so maybe the new owners are waiting until it gets finished to move in.”

  “House empty,” I write down. “Okay,” I say. “So then what?”

  “So then I decided that maybe I’d go and look around at some other houses.”

  Uh-oh. I can see where this is going. “You went to a boy’s house, didn’t you?”

  She shakes her head, and her eyes get all wide. “No!”

  “It’s okay to admit it,” I say. “I’d probably do the same thing.”

  “No! I didn’t go to a boy’s house.” She takes a deep breath and readjusts her glasses. “I went to my best friend’s house.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah, that makes sense. I’d do that, too.”

  “Anyway,” she says, “I was there, and I was just sort of wandering around outside her house. Rachel has this really cool tree house in her backyard, and so I floated up there and just hung around for a while, remembering all the good times we had. And then I noticed that her bedroom light was on.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I went up to her room.”

  “And?” God, this girl talks slow. Get to the punch line, alre
ady. I doodle a flower in the margin of my notebook.

  “And Rachel was lying on top of her bed, crying.”

  “Oh.” I frown. “And you think it was because of you?”

  “Well, that’s what I thought at first,” Lyra says. Her voice is cracking a little as she talks about her friend crying. It’s really sad, and I get a lump in my throat. I don’t know what I would ever do if I didn’t have Ellie. Or my dad.

  Suddenly I feel like a complete brat for giving my dad a hard time about Cindy. I mean, he’s still here. I still have him. To get upset about something so small is kind of crazy, especially after how good my dad has been to me. It can’t have been easy for him to raise a daughter all by himself, and yet I’ve never heard him complain or get upset about it. Not even once.

  “But when I got closer, I could see that Rachel was looking at her phone and reading texts,” Lyra says. “Her phone kept beeping with new ones, and every time she’d look at the phone, she’d start crying even harder.”

  “Wow,” I say, scribbling away in my notebook. “So someone is texting her.”

  Lyra nods.

  “So who was it?” I ask.

  “Who was what?”

  “Who was texting Rachel?”

  “Oh,” Lyra says, shrugging. “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How could I?” Lyra says. “After Rachel got a few more texts, she shut her phone off and then put it in her desk drawer.” She holds up her hands. “And in case you’ve forgotten, these hands can’t do much with solid objects.”

  “I didn’t forget,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  Lyra takes a deep breath and then stares out into the cemetery. The sun is starting to move down behind the trees, and the branches throw shadows onto the dirt path that winds through the graves. A breeze kicks up, and the leaves move and rustle.

  I give her a second, letting her collect her thoughts before she goes on with her story. I’m dying to know what else she found out—especially the part about Mrs. Dunham—but I know this is difficult for her, and I want to give her a second to regroup.

  But after a minute or so, Lyra still hasn’t said anything else.

  I clear my throat, hoping that maybe the sound will jolt her out of whatever brain fog she’s in. But it doesn’t. She just continues to sit there, not saying anything.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Hi,” she says. She swings her legs back and forth under the bench.

  “So then what?”

  She frowns. “So then what, what?”

  “So then what happened?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to just stand there watching her cry.” She wrinkles up her nose. “That would be creepy and highly inappropriate.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes. This from a girl who snuck into her best friend’s bedroom late at night. I mean, she’s obviously not exactly the best judge when it comes to what’s inappropriate and creepy.

  “So then what did you do?” I ask patiently.

  “I left.”

  “And then what?” I hold my breath, waiting for her to tell me what happened with Mrs. Dunham. She must have run into her or something on the way back. Ghosts are always more active at night. I’m not really sure why. I mean, it’s not like anyone can see them during the day anyway.

  “And then I came back to your house.”

  “And you ran into Mrs. Dunham on the way?”

  “Who?”

  “Brandon’s mom!”

  “No, I didn’t run into her.” She shakes her head. “But I should let you know that she’s always in your room at night.”

  “She is?”

  “Yeah.” Lyra jumps off the bench and starts pacing. “She just sort of sits there, watching over you. It’s very weird.”

  “Does she look . . . angry?”

  “Sort of.” Lyra shrugs. “What’s the deal with her, anyway? She doesn’t like you or what?”

  “It’s complicated,” I say.

  “She’s probably just super-protective of her son,” Lyra says, nodding like she knows all about it.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, snapping my notebook shut. “Why did you say that you ran into Mrs. Dunham if you didn’t?”

  “I never said I ran into Mrs. Dunham.”

  “You said what you had to tell me had something to do with Brandon’s mom!”

  “Oh.” Lyra bites her lip and then looks down at the ground. “Well, I knew that was the only way you would listen to me.”

  I stare at her, aghast. “So you lied to me?”

  “Not lied, exactly,” she says. “I mean, I did see Mrs. Dunham later in your room. And I was going to tell you about it. So technically what I said wasn’t a falsehood.”

  “Technically what you said wasn’t a falsehood?” I repeat. “Oh, no way are you getting away with that explanation.” I leap up from the bench and start walking back toward my house. I’m mad at her now. And I don’t want her to think that I’m going to just forget about it.

  “Kendall, please,” she says, calling after me. But I keep going.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, rushing to catch up to me. “I’ve just been having a really hard time. It was hard seeing Rachel crying like that.”

  I slow down just a little.

  “I don’t know how,” she says, “but I just feel like those texts have something to do with me. Like it was somehow my fault that she was crying.”

  Now Lyra is crying, and that kind of settles it. I mean, I can’t turn my back on someone who’s crying. It just wouldn’t be right.

  I sigh and slow down a little more. “It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to make Rachel stop crying, and we’re going to make sure that you move on.”

  She nods and then wipes her nose. I wish I could give her a hug, but it’s not really possible.

  “How are you going to do it?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say honestly. “Any ideas?”

  “My brother Micah was kind of close to Rachel,” she says. “Maybe you could find a way to ask him if he has any idea about what’s going on with her.”

  Great. The last person I want to be around looks like he might hold the key to me helping Lyra to move on.

  That night I have this super-amazing dream where Brandon and I are having a picnic up on a cloud. It’s crazy beautiful. We’re just floating along, eating crackers and cheese as we look down at everything below us.

  “You’re amazing, Kendall,” he’s saying. “I can’t believe how lucky I am to be with you. It would be really horrible if I ever ended up with someone ridiculous like Madison Baker.”

  I’m nodding and agreeing, and he’s just about to lean over and kiss me when I start to hear Mrs. Dunham’s voice.

  “Get out of my dream,” I tell her crankily. But she doesn’t listen.

  She just keeps saying, “Kendall Williams, leave my son alone. Kendall Williams, leave my son alone.”

  She keeps chanting it over and over, and when I wake up, I can still hear it in my head, reverberating like some kind of annoying cheer at a football game.

  And then I realize why. It’s because Mrs. Dunham isn’t chanting in my dream. She’s chanting right here, in my room. She’s over in the corner and she’s looking at me and saying, “Kendall Williams, leave my son alone.” Her hair is all crazy and her eyes are all bright, and she looks really agitated.

  Honestly, it’s pretty creepy.

  “Stop it!” I say to her. I can’t really yell, because if I do, my dad’s going to hear me. I throw a pillow at her, but of course it just flies right through her body. “Go away!”

  But she just keeps chanting.

  It’s getting louder and faster, and I close my eyes and hope that if I ignore her, she’ll go away. But the fact that I’m trying to ignore her does nothing except seem to make her angrier. She moves closer to my bed, and she’s screaming now.

  I march over to the door and flip on the light. I look her right in
the eye and cross my arms over my chest.

  “Listen,” I say, “I like your son. He likes me. I’m not going to do anything bad to him, so get over it. We’re probably not even going to get married. We’re only in middle school, for God’s sake!”

  I’m hoping if I show Mrs. Dunham I’m not a pushover, she’ll disappear. And I’m also totally willing to be reasonable. I can admit that I might not marry Brandon. (Notice I didn’t say definitely. It can totally happen. I was watching a wedding show the other night on Bravo, and the couple getting married had been together since they were thirteen. Totes cute!)

  But appealing to Mrs. Dunham’s logical side doesn’t seem like it’s working. She balls her hands into fists at her sides, and if she wasn’t a ghost, I’d probably be afraid she was going to hit me.

  Instead she closes her eyes tight and gets a look of intense concentration on her face.

  My pulse speeds up and my stomach starts to do flip-flops. I’ve never seen a ghost do anything like that before, and it’s making me anxious.

  “Hey,” I say, “what are you doing? Maybe we should just take a time-out and talk. If you got to know me, you might—”

  But before I can finish what I’m saying, the lights in my room start to flicker on and off. Mrs. Dunham still has her eyes closed in concentration.

  “Hey!” I say. “Stop that!”

  But the lights just keep flickering.

  “What are you doing?” I demand. “Stop doing that!”

  But of course she doesn’t listen. The lights are flickering faster and faster now, and I reach over and hit the light switch. But the lights don’t go off. They just keep flickering, on and off, on and off, faster and faster until I start to get dizzy.

  “Please stop!” I’m yelling now, but I don’t even care. I kind of want my dad to wake up and come in here at this point. Who cares if he thinks I’m crazy?

  The sound of something humming fills the air. It’s almost electric, like the kind of thing you’d hear if you got too close to an electric fence. It gets louder and louder, until finally there’s a loud pop.

  And then everything goes dark.

  Chapter

  8