by Zoe Aarsen
I’d told my mom that Mischa and I were going out for coffee, which wasn’t a lie; we just hadn’t sat at the coffee shop as I’d maybe allowed Mom to believe we would. While we were there, the coffee shop owner had side-eyed me while the barista, who was a sophomore at Willow High School, had made our lattes. I hadn’t realized how much of a local celebrity I’d become, although I shouldn’t have been surprised. The chase on which Trey and I had led police up to White Ridge Lake back in November had been front-page news in the Willow Gazette.
“Look, I wish we could just drive to Chicago right now and get started, but I need to get home because I told my mom I wouldn’t be gone long. But the store’s open until six today,” I said, hoping Mischa would understand the speed with which we were going to have to move if we stood any chance of making progress before the next new moon passed through the sky in our region of Wisconsin.
Mischa asked, “Is your mom going to let you leave the house again?”
“Not sure,” I said honestly. My mom and her insistence on keeping me on the right side of the law may very well have been just as big an obstacle in us saving Mischa’s life as Violet’s secrets were. “I’m going to tell her that I need to go Christmas shopping to buy her a gift. I don’t know if she’ll fall for it, but it’s all I’ve got.”
I had to convince my mom to let me out of the house. There was little chance that Sticks & Stones, the occult bookshop that would be our destination later in the day, or any bookshop for that matter, was going to be open on Christmas Day. There was also pretty much no way Mom was going to let me run wild with a friend when she’d already told me she’d invited her boyfriend over for Christmas dinner. Mom had started dating our dog’s veterinarian, Glenn, in the weeks I’d been gone. Although she hadn’t wanted to talk much about it, it seemed like it had gotten kind of serious, fast.
We were both quiet as Mischa drove me home. She was most likely wondering if Violet’s prediction that she’d choke would come true before December 26.
On State Street, we lingered at the intersection by the shopping center as three consecutive police cars raced past.
“Geez. Has there been a crime wave on Christmas Eve?” I joked. There was practically no crime in Willow, and it was odd to ever see more than one police car at a time except in the parking lot at either the police station or the donut shop managed by Matt Galanis’s mom.
“Stephani deMilo ran away from home,” Mischa informed me. “At least that’s what everyone’s been saying. She went out for a run yesterday morning and never came back.”
The police cars cleared the intersection, and Mischa gently eased on the gas. “That’s weird,” I replied. “Stephani doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d run away.”
“Yeah, well, I bet it had to do with the whole Shannon-and-Nick thing,” Mischa said, confusing me.
“Stephani liked Nick Maxwell?” I guessed. “I thought she’d been going out with Michael Walton’s brother since they were in junior high.”
“No! God! Have you been living under a rock? Stephani and Shannon were hooking up for, like, a year! It’s not like it was some big secret. But then I guess Stephani just found out that Shannon’s also been hooking up with Nick, and she went ballistic.”
“Stephani deMilo’s bi?” I asked in surprise.
Mischa rolled her eyes at me. “Yes, um, hello. Did you seriously not know that?”
I didn’t remind her that before September, I hadn’t ever sat with the popular girls in the cafeteria before, and I knew precious little about Stephani deMilo’s life. Before Olivia had welcomed me into her circle, I’d been as out of the loop on the details of the lives of Willow High School’s hipster crowd as Principal Nylander probably was. Stephani’s family owned one of the biggest commercial farms in the county, and she drove a powder-blue Mini Cooper convertible to school every day. She dyed the tips of her long dark hair royal blue. “I had no idea.”
Something about the police searching for Stephani troubled me, even though I had bigger things to worry about than a rich senior with a broken heart.
The sun would be setting in less than six hours. But only the tiniest sliver of a moon would appear in the night sky because tomorrow night there would be a new moon. Everything I’d learned about Violet up until that point led me to believe that Mischa would choke before the sun came up again. Violet didn’t like to cut it close with deadlines.
Back in November, when I’d been sent away from Willow, I never would have thought I’d find myself back in this awful situation of racing against time to figure out what Violet had done to my friends—and how. But now it was more urgent than ever to figure it all out, because if I wasn’t able to save Mischa’s life, I’d feel partially responsible for her death.
CHAPTER 2
IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT GOING to this satanic cult store today, we need to leave Willow by one o’clock. It’ll take us over three hours to drive down to Chicago, and it’s pointless to go all the way there and not have enough time to ask questions before they close,” Mischa warned me as she pulled into our driveway. “Plus, it’s supposed to snow more later on.”
“Fine. Pick me up at one. And it’s not satanic,” I grumbled. Only as I was about to close the passenger-side door of her car did I happen to notice something strange next door on the front lawn at Trey’s house: a FOR SALE sign.
“What the…”
Trey hadn’t mentioned anything about his parents’ intention to sell their house on our phone calls, which made me wonder if he was even aware that his house had been put on the market.
“Is Trey’s family moving?” Mischa asked from behind the wheel of her idling car.
“Don’t know,” I replied as if in a daze. It shouldn’t have mattered if the Emorys were moving. Trey was a senior, and I was a junior; under different circumstances, if we were finishing out our high school careers in Willow instead of at boarding schools, we’d both be making plans to leave this neighborhood anyway. But Trey’s family had lived next door to my house since we had moved in when I was eight. I couldn’t imagine any other family occupying that house, or looking out my bedroom window and seeing someone other than Trey staring back at me from across the yard.
“Very weird,” Mischa said. She sounded far away. “My mom always knows about every house for sale in Willow, and she didn’t mention that Trey’s family was selling.”
I mumbled to Mischa that she should come back to pick me up at one. Numbly, I walked across my yard and up the steps to the front door of my house, unable to tear my eyes away from that FOR SALE sign. As I reached into the pocket of my jeans for my key, a strange sensation that had become familiar in the last few weeks came over me. My scalp tingled as if I’d just used peppermint shampoo, and I waited, listening, already knowing what would shortly follow. These creepy but comforting vibes were some of the weird things that had started happening at Sheridan that were making me wonder if I was either going insane, or in need of the advice of an expert in paranormal phenomena.
A soft chorus of harmonic voices chanting, letter, letter, rose in volume from a hiss of whispers to a rhythmic cheer inside my head. My eyes drifted toward the metal mailbox mounted on the wall next to the Emorys’ front door, and before I even knew what was happening, my feet began moving back down the steps and in that direction. Mail had already been delivered on our block, and I could see envelopes peeking up through the top slot on the mailbox.
One of them must have been what the voices wanted me to see.
As I crossed the patch of grass between our houses, I didn’t have to look up and down Martha Road to know that there weren’t any people around making the sound I was hearing. The voices had surfaced as soon as I’d arrived at the Sheridan School for Girls in mid-November. At first they’d been as soft as a whisper, so quiet and unintelligible that they kept me awake and staring at the ceiling some nights, wondering if I was totally losing it.
Over the course of the last few weeks, the voices had grown louder
, and their messages had been clarified. I didn’t know who the voices belonged to or why I was hearing them. However, once they’d risen in volume enough for me to understand them, they seemed to consistently warn me about dangerous situations. My third weekend at Sheridan, I heard the voices caution me against eating the corn bread served in the dining hall, which struck me as odd guidance since that was typically the only edible food at dinnertime. The following Monday morning when I reported for my turn at kitchen duty, I realized why they’d encouraged me to avoid it: There were maggots in the cornmeal.
From that point onward, despite my being a little concerned about my sanity, my ears sought out the comforting guidance of the voices above the din of my school’s hallways and classrooms. Even though I was the only one who could hear them, I was convinced they were real, coming from somewhere, as real as the crunching of my boots on the frozen grass. However, I hadn’t told anyone else about this. I had a sickening hunch that the voices had waited until that year—the year I’d entered into some kind of death game with Violet Simmons—because maybe I had something in common with her.
Something evil. Or at least something dangerous.
As I ascended the front steps to the Emorys’ porch and lifted the top of their mailbox, I hoped none of our neighbors on Martha Road happened to be peeking out their windows at that very moment to notice me riffling through my neighbors’ mail. There were two Christmas cards, both in bright red envelopes, but neither of them caused a spike in the level of tingling across my scalp. A cable bill, a coupon flyer from the grocery store… still, no additional tingling. And then an official-looking letter with a computer-generated address label on stationery from Ekdahl, West & Strohmann, attorneys-at-law.
With that envelope against my fingertips and my eyes focused on the return address, the volume of the voices increased—the letter, the letter—and the skin across the top of my head prickled. This was it, what they wanted me to see, but—
I heard a car turn the corner at the end of our block and shoved all of the Emorys’ mail except for the letter from the law firm back into the mailbox. As I folded the letter from Ekdahl, West & Strohmann in half and slid it down the back pocket of my jeans, I turned to see Mr. Emory’s Hyundai Sonata approaching. It pulled into the Emorys’ driveway, and I saw Trey’s familiar profile in the back seat.
My heart leapt in my chest when he waved at me. It took every ounce of restraint in my body to keep myself from dashing down the steps to intercept Trey before his dad’s car disappeared into the Emorys’ garage. As the garage door automatically raised, Trey hopped out of the back seat and trotted over to me, ignoring his mother when she also got out of the car and shouted, “Trey!”
Assuming it would only be a matter of seconds before our respective parents interrupted us, I ran down the cement stairs, and leapt into Trey’s arms. He hugged me so tightly it felt as if he might break one of my ribs.
“Hi!” I whispered, feeling my eyes flood with tears of joy.
His warm lips pressed against my mouth, and we kissed as if the world were ending around us, even though his mom was still hollering from the driveway for him to get inside the house.
“I missed you so much,” he said, his lips buried in my hair. I leaned back to take a good look at him. As impossible as it may sound, I’d kind of forgotten just how hot he was. His hair, which used to be long enough to tuck behind his ears, had been shaved off, which only served to make his aquamarine eyes look larger and bluer. His face looked leaner, and his jaw was better defined, as if he’d matured into more of a man in the six short weeks he’d been away.
“Same,” I managed to say.
“It’s, like, amazing to see you. I can’t believe we’re both here, together again.”
Not only had we not seen each other in six weeks, but our phone calls had been monitored by our respective schools, and neither of us had access to e-mail. We’d never had a chance to discuss what we’d done the day we’d stolen Violet’s locket because staff members listened in on our conversations on both ends (supposedly to report any mentions of self-harm, but I suspected primarily just to keep tabs on us since we were both considered to be violent). We’d been too shy to express our true feelings for each other over the phone when we knew we had a captive audience. There had been many nights when I’d lain in my bed at Sheridan trying to block out my roommate’s snoring, wondering if I’d ever see Trey again.
It was so good to see him that I didn’t even want to blink for fear he’d be gone when my eyes reopened.
“Trey! Come on. Inside,” Mrs. Emory demanded from where she stood in the driveway. Mr. Emory had already driven the car into the garage, and he and Trey’s brother, Eddie, both slammed their respective car doors.
“Just a second, Mom,” Trey yelled over his shoulder without tearing his eyes away from mine.
Suddenly unable to bear the thought of spending the afternoon in Chicago with Mischa and without Trey now that he was right in front of me, I blurted, “Try to meet me out here at one o’clock. We have to go somewhere with Mischa.”
Mrs. Emory put her hands on her hips and shouted, “Trey, now!”
He raised an eyebrow in confusion at me and asked, “Go where? Is this, like, a Christmas thing?”
I shook my head from side to side, frowning. “No. It’s, like, a Violet thing.”
The brightness in Trey’s eyes seemed to dim as the meaning of what I’d just said sunk in. His smile faded.
“What do you—”
“Just go,” I urged him as his mother walked toward us. “Don’t make your mom mad. But try to meet me out here at one.”
Thin, weary-looking Mrs. Emory reached us and pointed toward the open garage door. “McKenna, your mother and I are in agreement that you and Trey will not be spending any time together this week. It’s just too soon after the court proceedings to risk the two of you violating the terms of your punishments,” she told me.
Trey rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Mary Jane? We just wanted to say hello.”
“Need I remind you that you’ll be eighteen in seven months? Do you want to be transferred from your school to a prison, Trey? Why don’t you give the Simmons family more of a reason to consider a civil suit against our family and see how that turns out?” she snapped at Trey. “Let’s go. In the house.”
Trey trudged over the lawn to the garage door behind her, and nodded at me over his shoulder, which I understood to mean that he’d do his best to somehow get out of the house at one. I was going to have to find a way to tell him that we hadn’t beaten Violet’s game and that I was pretty sure the curse on Mischa was still in place. He’d probably driven home with his family that morning from Northern Reserve Academy thinking that if we were lucky, we’d get to spend a few hours in privacy at some point over the next week.
In actuality, we’d be lucky if neither we nor Mischa died before New Year’s.
Considering the amount of trouble we’d managed to get into less than two months earlier, our parents were probably wise to try to keep us separated. I’d been charged with failure to observe a traffic signal, exceeding speed limits, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. Quite an impressive record for a girl who’d previously never even served a detention in her entire sixteen years of life. I’d been very lucky that Mrs. Emory hadn’t added vehicular theft to the list, since technically she had loaned her Honda Civic to Trey and not to me on that fateful day when he and I had sped off to White Ridge Lake to hurl Violet’s locket over the side of a bridge.
Behind me, my mom had opened the front door and stood in the doorway. “Come inside. I’ve got Christmas carols on and sugar cookies in the oven.” She’d been in a turbocharged parenting mood since picking me up from Sheridan. I usually spent lengthy stretches of the summer with my dad and his wife, Rhonda, in Florida, so the weeks that I’d been in boarding school weren’t the longest amount of time I’d ever been away from home. But this separation had been particularly hard on both of us because it had been so
abrupt, so unexpected. She’d saved trimming the tree for my arrival, and I’d tried to seem excited for her benefit.
In our foyer, I kicked off my boots, buzzing with excitement now that Trey was just a hundred feet away from me inside his own house.
“Mary Jane and I have been speaking, and we think it’s best that you and Trey not spend so much time together while you’re home for the break. Maybe this summer we’ll feel differently. But for now…” She drifted off, cutting right to the heart of what she’d been vaguely suggesting for the last two days.
My mom was no dummy. She was still—underneath all of her Christmas spirit—very cross with me for not confiding in her the reason why Trey and I had gotten into so much trouble in November. To anyone who didn’t know the details, it seemed like we were just bullying Violet, the new girl who had joined the junior class after moving to our town from the suburbs outside Chicago. It appeared as if for no good reason at all, I had attacked her in the school hallway during the basketball game against Angelica High School, chased her all over school property, knocked her to the ground, and stolen the beloved heirloom locket she’d inherited from her grandmother.
“I know, Mom,” I told her gently. “I’m not looking for trouble. I just wanted to say hello. That’s all. Hello.”
The reaction Candace had gotten from people she’d told about the game we’d played with Violet had served as a warning to me; school administrators had panicked about her mental health, and her mom admitted her to the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Even though my mom took me seriously, no adult was going to believe me that Violet had manifested Olivia’s and Candace’s deaths.
My mother’s mouth remained in a firm, disapproving line. “Well, that’s just how things are. I figured you were out there catching your death in the hopes of welcoming him home.”
My death already caught me. According to Violet, I’m already dead, I thought grimly.
