by Abigail Boyd
For a second, it looked as though maybe she would come back. Walk towards me. Hope stirred inside my chest. But then she turned, walking behind the split staircase that led to the front door. I shook the gate again, pulling with every ounce of strength I had, but it still wouldn't move. As Jenna disappeared, I realized this was the moment I dreaded. The moment I would remember for the rest of my life with a pang of regret in my heart. The last time I would see her.
Thick smoke began to billow out of the top windows. It took me a moment in my distraction to realize what that meant. The building was on fire. My feelings of abandonment became feelings of horror. Orange flames jumped out and licked the sky. I opened my mouth to scream.
Chapter 2
I woke up on the couch in my living room. My mouth still hung open. A dream. It was all a dream. The thought hit me immediately, but I couldn't believe it. I felt the familiar pressure rise in my chest that never made it to my eyes. I hadn't cried since the day Jenna disappeared. But I had seen her...hadn't I?
Claire leaned in from the kitchen.
"Are you okay?" she asked, her brow knit with concern, reading glasses parked on top of her blonde hair. "You were talking in your sleep."
I nodded, still dazed.
"I'm fine," I muttered. I was miles away from fine. The dream, if that's what it had been, felt so real. The way dreams are in movies that they never are in real life.
The clock on the entertainment center said 5:30 pm. That meant I'd only been asleep for a half hour. Sunlight still streamed in through the slit between the curtains. I pulled them back, but no one was there. I waited, watching the street with desperate eyes, but no one appeared. The perfectly ordinary blue sky mocked me, the sun hitting the grass across the street and making it glow.
Sitting back down, I tried to catch my breath. Jenna and the orphanage began to fade as my waking senses took hold. I urgently tried to cling to my thoughts, the effort fruitless. Even as I tried to analyze the details of the dream, they disappeared.
I stood up to get a drink of water, and my legs ached. Probably from being squashed on the couch. I stretched my toes through my socks. I padded across the room into the dining room.
Our house has a relatively open floor plan; the kitchen only separated by the wall of neat, glass-front cupboards, inside which Claire's good china was displayed. Claire herself sat at the now completely cleaned dining room table. One would never know cake had been smashed onto its glistening surface merely a short time ago. The dishwasher hummed with comforting familiarity. Everything felt too real to be right, like an elaborate ruse. I brushed off my mental paranoia.
"I'm sorry if I woke you," Claire said. She sounded distracted as she sipped coffee from her metal travel mug. She refused to use the chipped ones that Hugh normally did — he was the big coffee drinker in our family and required over ten cups a day. Her laptop sat ready to be opened for business next to her.
"I'm sure your friends were just busy, Ariel," she said, unprompted. What friends? I automatically thought.
"I didn't have time to get organized beforehand, so I gave late notice," she continued. The details of the party had been the farthest worry from my mind, but her comment brought them back. To Claire, lack of organization felt like a mortal sin. If she didn't get things perfect, she might as well have completely failed.
"I'm not upset about it, Claire," I assured her. "It went fine. I didn't want a big revelry, I told you that."
In light of the situation the very idea had sounded disrespectful and more stressful than it was worth. Thankfully, it was only my fifteenth birthday and not my sixteenth, or she may have hired people to come as my guests. She didn't seem convinced. I changed the subject.
"I wondered if I could ride my bike for a little while," I said, testing out the waters of her approval. It was always safest to only dip a toe in.
"By yourself?" she asked, looking up at me. Her lips were frozen on the rim of her mug. I ignored the urge to roll my eyes. I wasn't defenseless. I wished she would stop treating me as though I were.
"It's still day time. Nothing is going to happen to me, and I'll stay on the street," I offered patiently, running my hands back and forth over the headrest of the dining room chair.
"I just want you to be safe," she said, leaning back and shutting her pale eyes. My parents barely let me go out to check the mail since Jenna disappeared, based on the idea that someone lurked behind the bushes, ready to snatch me if I took two steps out the door.
"I'm always safe. I will take my phone with me and be back within an hour, I promise." I was getting restless. I couldn't stand still, my feet shifting back and forth.
"Is your phone charged?" she grilled me.
"Oh, come on," I scoffed. "My phone is always charged. It lives on the charger." I gestured to where it sat plugged into the wall.
She still looked doubtful, so I played my only card.
"It's my birthday," I pleaded. I hated making her feel bad. But I just needed to get out for a while. And something important required my investigation.
After a moment, she said, "Fine. You can go. But you have to be back within the hour. Not a second later. Not a millisecond later." She looked down her nose at me to make sure I got the point. Her glasses started falling off her head and snagged in her hair.
I thanked her, and sped over to the door, snatching the phone. I escaped outside into the afternoon, breathing the fresh air in deeply. Pathetically, I couldn't remember the last time I set foot outside.
Summer had been blisteringly hot, but autumn was swiftly descending. Though the sun shone brightly, the dark blue of the sky interrupted only by a few errant, puffy clouds, the shadows were growing longer. They made everything look underlined. The faintest of cool breezes blew through, ruffling the trees.
I got my bike out of the shed where it had been vacationing, untouched for months. I rode the easier way, instead of through the woods, sticking to the street as I had promised. The dense traffic on the main road was due to the nice weather, since it could change so quickly in Michigan.
I've lived in Hell my whole life. Despite the unusual name, and the affinity of many of the residents to dress it up like Halloween Town all year, Hell is your typical suburban town. We were lucky so far to miss the brunt of the state's economic troubles. Many towns nearby were in danger of becoming ghost towns, but for Hell, ghosts were merely a bonus.
Cheerful rows of pastel houses and local business passed me by, thriving on nearly every street. I passed a jack-o-lantern painted on a mailbox and a plastic skull hanging out on the front porch of a grandmother gardening in her sun hat. Both typical sights. The town committee had succeeded in keeping away the big name stores, at least for the time being. We had no Walmart and only one lone fast food restaurant that was always busy at 3 AM, getting business from every truck driver and stoner for miles around.
My mind focused entirely on Jenna as I passed the familiar landmarks. We'd been best friends ever since we fought over a plastic pony ranch in kindergarten. Hardly a day went by that we didn't talk to each other since. Being without her was like being cut in half.
I hadn't heard a word from her since the night she left. Her parents were convinced she ran away. Everyone else seemed to believe that, too. Her mother apparently found "suspicious" emails that confirmed the hypothesis, though no amount of pleading with her allowed me to see them. With Jenna gone, her mother, Rachael, had a good reason to hate me, and she seized it. I don't think she'd ever liked me.
I didn't believe that Jenna would leave, but the other options were even worse. Even though I thought I knew her better than anyone, I wondered if I missed what seemed plain to everyone around me.
I turned onto the uphill dirt road I remembered led to the orphanage. The bike tires stuck in the dirt and pebbles, my legs straining to push the pedals. Unlike the main road, only a few cars were parked here, all on the opposite side of where the orphanage would be. As if everything tried to avoid the prison-like structure.
The sky was nearly obscured by towering trees. I passed long driveways reaching back farther than I could see, and wondered if houses lay beyond them. I made the only movements in the still air.
I rounded the bend and the orphanage, imposing iron fence first, came into view. I had no idea why I would dream about a place I hadn't seen or even thought of in years. But I was checking every lead, no matter how obscure. I've watched enough TV to know that people's best breaththroughs appear to them in dreams.
Parking my bike against the fence, I stood up and assessed my obstacle. The bars were cool to the touch, despite the persistent sun, as I ran my fingers across them. Odd that I could imagine it in such detail, right down to the color of the bars. From what I could remember, I'd never been this close to the orphanage before in my life.
A large sign hooked to the fence with plastic zipties read COMING IN OCTOBER — HELL'S ORPHANAGE, HAUNTED HOUSE ATTRACTION. I vaguely remembered hearing about Hell's Orphanage years ago. But the sign looked brand new. So much Halloween popped up in Hell come October it would be a full-time job to keep track of it all.
One detail in my dream had been wrong, I realized as I trailed over to the gate. No funny copper symbol. I fully expected the place to be locked up tight, and prepared myself for a disappointing ride home. But when I pushed it, the gate swung open with a lonely squeak. There wasn't even a lock, only a latch that drooped down.
I stood in place, debating my options. Technically, I would be trespassing if I went on the property. But the house looked pretty much abandoned at the moment, future entertainment attraction or not. I didn't see any "no trespassing" signs, either. I looked back and forth down the barren road, reassuring myself that I was alone. The curiosity inside me won out. If I could find even a little sign that Jenna had been here...but something told me that was a highly unlikely possibility. Still...
A cool breeze whooshed through the fence, blowing my hair around my shoulders. I took the hair elastic I always wore from around my wrist and whirled my dark hair into a messy ponytail. Jenna helped me dye it black back in May. Claire was suitably horrified, her dreams of blonde pageant hair atop my naturally-brunette head destroyed. For a month I expected her to sneak in my bedroom during the night with a pair of scissors.
Beer cans, old cigarette packs and dud scratch-off tickets littered the lawn, among other trash. The grass had given up on growing, leaving dry brown patches, looking like they ached for rain. I walked across the ground speedily, not wanting to dwell any longer than absolutely necessary, and up to the building itself.
The orphanage loomed above me, taller than it appeared on the street. Mottled gray stone walls frames four rows high of thin, long windows. Broken glass hung in the frames like teeth. It reminded me of the old factories around Detroit, rotting skeletons of old steel, holding on while everything else around them had crumbled into dust.
Rusty bars guarded the top windows. Long ago they must have kept whoever lived inside imprisoned. The thought made me shudder. I tried to imagine the place ever looking nice at all, or grand, and I couldn't. It was a sorrowful building with miserable secrets. It had never been anything but creepy, probably giving a few turn of the century people the spooks as they passed by in their horse-drawn carriages.
I nudged something on the ground with my toe. I looked down to see a black cat-shaped mask with no string. The empty eye sockets stared back at me. I stepped on it and heard the plastic crack.
Then, I hit an invisible wall and I stopped walking. Nothing blocked my way, but I didn't want to go further. I shouldn't be here. The thought shouted in my head. I saw no sign that Jenna or anyone else had been here in a long time. The split staircase sagged towards the ground, as if trying to assure me that all was well. Just a sad old house that I should leave alone. Nothing to see here.
Pushing through my fear, I made myself move and peered around the staircase, where in my dream I remembered seeing Jenna go inside. A set of padlocked doors sat there, to a basement or lower floor. Everything had the look of being forgotten. Still, I walked over and tugged on the padlock. It was locked fast.
I banged my fist on one of the metal doors anyway, and listened to the short echo, waiting for a response. The doors, I noted in passing without putting much thought into it, looked as though they were installed long after the house was built.
"Jenna?" I called out meekly. No answer. Even the insects had fallen silent.
Sighing, I walked back across the lawn and through the gate, closing myself off from the building. Shuffling over to my bike and trying to shrug off the disappointment that swiftly descended on me, I looked back up at the barred windows and wondered.
I couldn't sleep that night. The first day of school would arrive when I woke up. I knew it would be incredibly strange walking the halls alone. I had never been massively popular, never even been to a party, really, but our small circle of friends had been more than enough. Now I didn't even have that. When Jenna disappeared, many of them blamed me. I knew the reasons why without them telling me. Some of them thought I should have stopped her from leaving. Some of them thought I wasn't a good enough reason for her to stick around.
At the end of last year, we were so excited to no longer be freshman. Hawthorne High intimidated both of us, although Jenna never showed it as much as I did. Tomorrow, I would once again be at the mercy of the pack of popular girls that ran there. And now a fresh target would be painted on my back in my glumness.
I had to admit that I didn't want to move on. That's why I didn't want to celebrate my birthday. I wanted to rewind the days, the months, and freeze time on the night Jenna left. Even though she had been angry with me. Anything was better than being left behind, not knowing.
I lay on my bed with all of the lights off, save for the old green lava lamp I plugged in for company. The blue and green hue cast on the walls made my room look like an aquarium. I've never had a TV in my room, but I contemplated changing that as I drove myself crazy with questions in my head.
Eventually, I drifted to sleep, ears filled with silent thoughts.
Chapter 3
Hugh drove me up to Hawthorne the next morning. He had to get to his gallery early, so I arrived an hour before school was due to start. Idling the car in front of the stone steps, we sat for a moment in silence. I knew he practically itched to give me a pep talk, and I braced myself to pretend to agree with everything he said.
"You'll do fine," he assured me simply, leaving it at that. I felt almost let down. He had more faith in me than I did. I stepped out of the car reluctantly, and watched his Mazda drive off, wondering if I should have begged him to let me ditch. Just one day, although I knew if I took the day, it would turn into a week. Maybe longer.
Three years ago, Hawthorne High had been ripped down and rebuilt on its old foundation. I remember riding past the construction site, watching the workers dangle precariously from support beams inside. Now Hawthorne was as an impressive structure, the jewel in the crown that showed the state that Hell took academics seriously. More than a few seniors were accepted into Ivy League schools every year.
Tugging at the hem of my shirt, I hoped my choice was all right. The shirt was black with capped sleeves. I wondered if I looked too depressed in the color, or rather lack of color. I hadn't dressed in anything but pajamas and sweat clothes for a while, and I had no idea about trends. Should I have worn the blue striped one I debated, that was now lying on my bed? I contemplated picking up a magazine when Claire and I went school supply shopping, but the grinning girl on the cover with her laser-white teeth put me off.
I knew I was just putting off the inevitable. I walked up the steps and opened the door, walking inside. A small vestibule stood between me and the interior. HAWTHORNE HELLCATS HAVE SPIRIT read a banner in the school colors of purple and gold.
Last chance to run, a voice in my head coaxed. You can still get out of here.
I wrenched the glass door open instead. The smell of school flew into my nostrils, familiar bu
t not at all comforting. Like canned spaghetti, with an undertone of evil. I knew my way around now, so at least there was that. Hawthorne architecture could be a maze to the uninitiated, as I discovered last year. All the freshman and sophomore classes were conducted on the bottom two levels, yet I found myself more than once wandering around on the top floor, beneath towering seniors as they giggled at my lack of direction.
I pulled out my schedule and walked around, finding my classes to kill time. Better that I know where to go than get lost or be late. Subjects were divided into hallways, and I soon recognized the orientation from memory. Being in school felt as strange as I anticipated it would, but in a different way. I felt like I was sleepwalking through the halls, like I wasn't really there.
The only other people around were a few of the office staff and a custodian. Most people spent their off time in the commons, which was not only a cafeteria and activity center but a hang out spot. But I didn't feel like going there right now. It felt like if I did, I would set in motion the actual start of the school year. I wanted to hold it off for the few minutes of freedom that remained.
Instead I went looking for the library. Disappointment hit me when I saw it was still housed in a tiny, pathetic corner room with no windows. Not that I had expected a change. Well, I had hoped for one, but I assumed the worst. One would think that with the seemingly bottomless wallets that funded the school's rebuilding, they could have afforded a decent library. But they had other concerns.
I peered in the window at the four rows of ancient paperbacks, all probably donations from people cleaning out their cluttered closets. Hugh told me that the town library was under renovation now that Hawthorne was finished, but I didn't want to get my hopes up about that, either. Considering how Hawthorne had fared, renovating could mean emptying the nonfiction section and installing a basketball court.
