“Maybe you should leave, Nolan,” Mom says, a strange sort of brightness in her voice. “Sunshine and I never really get to spend any time together these days. I’ve been working such long hours, you see.”
“I understand, ma’am, but Sunshine and I have a lot more reading to get through,” he gestures to the stacks of papers on the kitchen table.
“I’m sure that can wait. Schoolwork isn’t nearly as important as family time.” Mom crosses the room and brushes the papers Nolan worked so hard to gather onto the floor. I crouch down immediately to retrieve them, crawling through her shadow to get to them. A shadow that’s much, much bigger than it should be, as if she’s twice as tall as she used to be.
“Mom?” I ask softly. “Are you okay?”
“Get up off the floor, Sunshine,” she says harshly.
“Let me just get these together for Nolan so he can take them home with him.” The pages are moist in my hands, as though they landed in a puddle on the ground instead of on our dry kitchen floor. Nolan crouches down beside me, grabbing as many of the pages as he can.
“Suit yourself,” Mom practically spits. She spins on her heel and leaves the room, her enormous shadow trailing behind her.
“She’s not usually like that,” I say quickly.
“No need to explain,” Nolan answers.
A few of the papers landed clear across the kitchen and I crawl toward the kitchen sink to retrieve them.
And then I scream.
“What is it?” Nolan scrambles across the tile floor, but I’m frozen with fear, unable to answer him. I just point. On top of one of Nolan’s pages—perhaps right on top of the word luiseach—is the biggest daddy longlegs spider I’ve ever seen.
Nolan carefully slides a paper underneath the spider and opens the window above the sink, releasing it back into the wild. I stay perfectly still all the while, staring at the place on the page where the enormous spider was seconds ago: now all that remains is a large rust-colored damp spot.
Nolan closes the window quickly and crouches on the floor beside me.
“Spiders, blood—you sure are a wimpy luiseach.” Nolan tries to grin, but I shake my head, too scared to argue about what I might or might not be. I know he’s trying to get me to laugh, but I’m not sure anything will ever be funny to me again.
But it’s funny to someone. Because I swear I can hear the sound of my mother laughing in the other room.
You okay? Nolan texts a few hours later. I’m in my room with the lights off and the door locked.
Fine, I answer, though we both know it’s a lie.
What happened after I left?
Nothing, I reply. Mom stayed in her room. Guess all that family-time stuff was just talk.
She was trying to get rid of me, Nolan answers.
Why?
I don’t know.
I tell him I’m going to sleep and put my phone down, but I doubt I’ll get much sleep tonight. I close my eyes and listen for the sound of my mother moving around in the next room. I imagine her getting ready for bed, brushing her teeth, pulling her hair into a ponytail. But the thought of dozens of spiders crawling down from the ceiling quickly overtakes those images.
I open my eyes and turn on the light. No spiders in sight.
“Do you know why this is happening to her?” I say out loud, even though I can’t believe I’m asking a ghost for help. “I’ll play with you forever if you just tell me what’s going on.” I gesture to the checkerboard beside my bed: last night she beat me, and this morning I woke up to a freshly arranged board, all set for another game. “I thought we were getting to be friends,” I say sadly.
Somehow, much to my surprise, I fall asleep. Instead of nightmares about spiders, I dream about the little girl in the tattered dress, the one I dreamt of on our first night here. Tonight her dress is dripping with water, as though she just went for a swim. She’s running down a long hallway, her tiny feet leaving wet footprints on the carpet beneath them, gesturing for me to follow her. I sprint after her, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t catch up to her. She’s always one step ahead.
But she always glances back to make sure I’m still there.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Rift
At school the next day Nolan grabs me before first period. “I went back to my grandfather’s last night. I’m coming over after school again.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”
“If your mom freaks out on us again, we’ll go someplace else,” Nolan cuts me off. “But I want to do this at your place.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see how your ghost reacts.” He raises his eyebrows.
By 3:45 we’re back at my kitchen table, and Nolan is rifling through stacks of paper once more. “So I saw something when I was looking online the other night . . .” he begins, searching. “In one of these articles. I didn’t get a chance to read it carefully—”
“What do you mean?” I ask, mock incredulous. “Did you actually skim something instead of poring over it carefully?”
Nolan grins. “It was three in the morning by the time I figured out the whole Google haunted house and guardian combination. I fell asleep before I could read everything I found.”
“Wow,” I say, genuinely touched. “You stayed up till three in the morning for me? I mean,” I add hastily, gesturing at the papers strewn across the table, “for all this?” Nolan doesn’t answer right away, so I keep talking, rambling the way I did when we first met. I’d hoped I’d gotten over those Nolan-specific nerves, but apparently not. “But what were you saying? There was something else, right? In one of these articles? I could help you find it.” I reach for the papers on the table in front of Nolan and start flipping through them, like I’ll be able to find what he’s looking for without knowing what it is in the first place.
Nolan furrows his brow. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. I mean . . .” I take a deep breath. “This is all just a lot to take in.” And it is. I don’t just mean the luiseach stuff. I slide the pages back across the table, careful not to brush my hands against his. “Maybe you should handle this part. I don’t even know what you’re looking for.”
Nolan nods, flipping through the papers. “I saw something about luiseach birth rates in here somewhere.”
The house seems to shudder, like we’re caught in our own private wind tunnel.
“Golly,” I breathe, planting my hands firmly on the table like I think I can steady the whole house that way.
“Wow,” Nolan says, looking at the ceiling above us. He slides his glasses up over his forehead. A sudden breeze makes the overhead light swing back and forth like a pendulum.
I try to ignore the way I’m shivering. “Maybe the house doesn’t want me to come up with some kind of crack about luiseach birth rates.”
“Maybe luiseach just aren’t getting it on often enough,” Nolan suggests. If Ashley were here, she’d make a naughty joke, but all I can do is blush. Anyway, like Mom, Ashley would be no help if she were actually here. She’d roll her eyes at this whole conversation, insisting that finding articles on the Internet hardly amounts to proof. You can find almost anything on the Internet—photos of the Loch Ness monster, of mermaids, of unicorns, she’d say. That doesn’t mean they’re real.
I swallow a sigh. I know that when I text Ashley later, I won’t mention any of this to her.
Maybe I won’t text her later after all.
The house stills, and Lex leaps up on top of Nolan’s papers.
“Scat,” I say to my cat, but he lies down and starts licking his paws. Nolan slides his stack out from under him.
“Here it is!” he shouts. He pats Lex. “Thanks for the help, buddy.” Lex jumps off the table, like it’s his way of saying: You’re welcome. My work here is done.
“It says that luiseach live longer than the average human. But I couldn’t find anything about how often they’re born, their childhoods, that kind of thing. So last n
ight I drove to my grandparents’ again and searched through Gramps’s desk.”
“You drove all the way to your grandmother’s?” I ask.
Nolan shrugs. “It’s just a couple of hours. And this was too important to wait for.” He produces an enormous file folder, yellowed with age. “Gramps had stacks and stacks of articles.” He picks up a paper and reads aloud: “There are whispers that it’s been decades, perhaps centuries since the last luiseach was born.”
“Your grandfather knew about luiseach?” I ask incredulously.
Nolan grins. “Guess he got sick and tired of being called crazy. It looks like he’d been researching for years, trying to find solid evidence of the ghosts he’d always believed in.”
“That’s why he saved that article about Professor Jones,” I say, remembering the headline that promised proof. “And now you do have proof.”
“I know,” Nolan nods, a sad sort of smile playing on the edges of his lips. “I just wish I could have found it before he died. It’d have been so amazing to . . . I don’t know, share this with him, I guess.”
“I think he probably knows what you found. If the last few months have taught me anything . . .” I trail off meaningfully, the words I don’t say hanging in the air between us: Nolan’s grandfather could be watching us, right now, cheering us on.
Nolan nods and refocuses his attention on the article in front of him. He reads aloud once more: “Some say it’s been a thousand years. Rumor has it that this is the source of a rift within the luiseach community.”
On the stove behind us the teakettle begins to whistle, even though it’s empty and there’s no flame lit beneath it. Nolan and I exchange a look with a capital L.
“Why would low birth rates cause a rift?”
Nolan shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re just scared.”
“Shouldn’t being scared draw them closer together? You said they lived in super-close-knit communities, right?”
“Sometimes fear makes people turn against each other.”
I nod. I mean, Mom and I have always been so close, but now that I’m scared a ghost or a demon or a dark spirit or whatever might be possessing her, we have no relationship. Our own private rift.
“So what?” I have to shout to be heard over the kettle’s whine. “You’re saying that you think I’m the first luiseach to be born in a century or something?”
“Maybe,” Nolan answers solemnly. The bulb above us—still swinging back and forth—dims as he adds, “but more than that—I think I’m saying that you’re the last luiseach to be born.”
I’m about to tell Nolan that’s crazy when the bulb above us brightens, so bright that it’s blinding, like someone set it on fire from the inside. Suddenly it bursts, sending shards of glass down from the ceiling like rain.
I scream, jumping up from my chair so that it falls with a crash on the floor behind me. Oscar dives under the table like he’s ducking for cover. He’s got the right idea, because glass continues to rain down, far more glass than a single bulb could possibly contain.
Covering my head with my hands, I glance over at Nolan. He’s still seated in his chair, and he hasn’t so much as gasped. I feel like a total wimp for screaming.
But then I see that he’s holding his hands out in front of him; his left palm is covered in blood.
“Oh my gosh!” I shout.
Blood is dripping from his hand onto the papers beneath, rendering them illegible. “What are you doing?” I shout at the ceiling, certain that the ghost can hear me.
In answer, the storm of glass stops as abruptly as it began, the teakettle stops whistling, and the light stops swinging back and forth.
“Come here,” I say frantically to Nolan. He stands up and walks to the island in the center of the kitchen while I reach for the first aid kit under the kitchen sink, the same one I used when my mother cut herself.
I press a fistful of gauze into Nolan’s palm, careful not to let my skin touch his, keeping my arm straight so we’re not standing too close. “Our cuts almost match,” I say, holding up my left hand, the angry red scar between my thumb and forefinger. If Nolan’s cut leaves a scar, it will be almost in the center of his palm.
“I thought you weren’t good with blood.”
“I’m not.” I press harder. Mom says you’re supposed to apply pressure when someone is bleeding, to help staunch the flow.
“You seem okay.”
Blood is still dripping from his wound. “You might need stitches,” I say worriedly. Without warning, Nolan places his undamaged right hand on top of mine, applying more pressure.
I take a deep breath and concentrate so I can swallow the feeling that follows. The sensation is overwhelming: the muscles in my legs are demanding that I take a step backward, away from him. The bones in my fingers want to drop the gauze and slide out from under his grip. And my throat—this is something beyond nausea. It’s not quite that I want to throw up; it’s more that I want to expel Nolan’s scent from my nostrils. He’s wearing his grandfather’s leather jacket, just as he does almost every day, and my arms want to rip it from his body and tear it to shreds, just to get rid of the scent of it.
And yet . . . somehow I ignore all the signals my body is sending me and I don’t move. I won’t move. My friend is in trouble. My friend—maybe the only friend I have left, with Mom in outer space and Ashley oblivious—is bleeding, and I have to help him. Mom once said I should spend the day at the hospital to get over my fear of blood—you know, immersion therapy or something. Maybe I can immersion therapy away this weird feeling I get when I touch Nolan.
So instead of letting go of his hand, I press harder, ignoring my nausea, silently screaming at my muscles to stop trying to move in the opposite direction. I concentrate on the feeling of the callus in his right palm, pressing against the back of my hand. I stare at the creases in his leather jacket, butter-soft after so many years of use. And all the while—even though it doesn’t exactly feel good, being so close to him—there’s also a pleasant flutter of butterflies flapping around my stomach. I feel warmer than I have in months, a warmth coming from the center of my body and spreading out to my extremities.
Part of me, at least, likes Nolan’s touch.
“I think it’s stopped bleeding,” he says, lifting his hand off of mine. I remove the gauze and take a look. What had been gushing blood has slowed into a trickle. The wound is ugly and wide, but not deep.
“Guess you don’t need stitches.”
“Guess not.” Nolan steps away from me, turning toward the kitchen sink, rinsing the blood from his hand. He holds it out for me to bandage, then grabs a paper towel and wipes away the blood that dripped onto the kitchen counter.
A rush of cold air fills the space he used to take up beside me, and I shiver.
“Where do you keep your broom?” he asks, and I gesture to a long, skinny cabinet beside the sink. He sweeps up the glass on the floor around the table. Next he finds a fresh lightbulb and climbs onto the table to replace the one that broke.
“How can you be so calm?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe because I grew up believing in ghosts. For you, this is all still pretty new.”
“It’s new for you. You may have believed in ghosts, but you said so yourself—you never had any actual evidence that they existed before.”
“True,” Nolan agrees, screwing in the lightbulb.
“Was this the reaction you had in mind when you said you wanted to do this here?” I ask, gesturing at the ceiling.
“I didn’t have anything in mind, really. I just had a hunch.”
“A hunch that what?” I ask, gesturing to the ruined pages on the kitchen table.
Nolan hops down off the table. He runs his undamaged hand through his hair, brushing it away from his face. “I thought maybe someone would be really excited that we’ve found out this much.”
“Excited?” I echo. “She practically cut your hand off.”
“Not even close,” Nolan counters. “Anyway, I don’t think she was trying to hurt either of us. She was just trying to make sure we were paying attention.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Professor’s Disappearing Act
Nolan and I run out the front door to his car, sitting idly in the driveway. I don’t even stop long enough to put my peacoat on over my (two-sizes-too-big) gray sweater.
“Professor Jones must know something more!” I practically shout as Nolan speeds out of Ridgemont toward the university. I was so anxious to get out the door that I forgot to leave dinner for Oscar and Lex. I’ll make it up for them when I get home.
“Even if he doesn’t know anything, those books in his office . . .” Nolan trails off hopefully, his eyes practically glowing in anticipation of getting his hands on all that research material. “One of them will tell us something about what luiseach actually do to get rid of dark spirits.”
He thinks we’ll find instructions or something, a step-by-step guide that’s simple to follow, just like the recipes Mom likes to print off the Internet. She always said that if you could read, you could cook. Nolan seems to believe that if you can read, you can exorcise.
“I’ll spend all night digging through them if I have to.”
“Me too,” I nod, but the truth is, I don’t feel nearly as confident as Nolan sounds. There must have been hundreds of books in Professor Jones’s office. It would take longer than a single night to read them all, even with both of us there. It could take months, especially since we don’t really know exactly what we’re looking for. I close my eyes, and an image of my mother’s bleeding wrist blossoms up behind my eyelids.
I don’t know if we have months.
“Can we talk about something else?” I ask suddenly. “Please? I just need a break from all of this.” I lift my hands and gesture to the air in front of me, like that’s where the ghost is hiding. Which—what do I know?—maybe she is.
The Haunting of Sunshine Girl Page 14
