Many of the rooms showed evidence of what the place used to be. Broken windows and broken desks that spoke of the broken people who once stayed here. Metal bed frames, pinstriped mattresses still with white wrinkled bed sheets draped across. A bathroom with a rusted tub filled with fallen plaster. Fridges in styles I’d never seen before and once-colorful plastic chairs bolted to the ground, now faded with age.
I could envision people sitting in those chairs, which creeped me out. Of course it didn’t help my overactive imagination envisioned them as albinos with large, unblinking, pale eyes, black lips, and rotting fingernails.
“Stop it,” I muttered to myself.
I took a slow and steady breath before pressing forward. The walls of the next room were cracked mint green, the room empty aside from an old metal chair facing the far corner. Cold charged up my arms and scurried across my scalp.
Screw this place. I probably didn’t even have the right location. Perhaps there was no location.
As I tried figuring out the way back, I ended up in the other ward – a large room with nothing but an old stretcher. How had I gotten here? I peered over my shoulder then back ahead again. A beam of light swept over the window, and I ducked, my body pressed to the wall, my heart jackhammering against my chest. Crawling to the window, I kept low. If anyone peeked in, they wouldn’t see me. I held my breath and waited until the light drifted off.
That was too close. I needed to find my way out of here. Fast.
Back on my feet, I dusted the paint chips off my hands and quickened my pace back the way I came. Again.
This time I found the way out, but not before I heard voices carrying through the thin walls. More than one person, too. Chattering, then giggles.
Slowly, I creaked open the door I’d broken into and snuck out, then came around to the window from which the noise had echoed.
I stood adjacent the window as I spied in, not wanting to be seen. Moonlight glinted off the back of Sarah’s blonde head. There were flashes of hair and the faces of two of the other It Girls – one of the twins and the fiery redhead, Kate. Another was out of my line of sight, but I knew she must be there because the other girls kept tossing their gazes that direction as they spoke.
Sarah’s face started to swing toward the window, the glow of candlelight staining her fake-tan complexion even more orange. I shrank away and pressed my spine against the building’s brick wall, biting back a gasp as the hairs on the nape of my neck tingled so hard it hurt.
Too scared to look again, I spent the next minute standing stone still, straining to make out their mutterings. But soon the playful chatter turned into something heavier and decidedly not English. Something chant-like.
It was some kind of magic, just as I’d suspected.
One of the words they kept repeating sounded like “legba.”
What was legba?
I took out my cell phone and started recording, hoping to pick up what they were saying. A few more words stood out: Loa, Baron, Samedi.
I braved another glance in. All four girls faced an altar. Statues and necklaces and charms and chicken’s feet were scattered across the tabletop. On the ground, drawn in black powder, was the strange image Heather had sketched for me. Alongside it, another symbol I’d never seen before. On top of it lay a dead chicken.
As Sarah faced one of the girls, taking something from her hands, and I noticed one more thing on the altar. Something that gave me the answers I’d come here for: a small, ratty doll, tied in twine with its mouth stitched shut.
Next to the doll rested a painting that looked an awful like Noah. But not the Noah I saw every day. This was the Noah I’d seen in the cafeteria the day of his attack. The skin in the painting was chalk-white, with markings covering his body in red and yellow and black. Whatever it all was, this meant somehow I’d witnessed Sarah’s magic that day.
Dad’s over-boiled pasta tried to make a comeback as I remembered holding Noah’s limp, convulsing body in my arms. After the nausea passed, anger crashed through me.
Just as Sarah spun toward the window, lightning cracked the sky, and for that brief moment, Sarah was replaced by a pale woman with shoulder-length black hair, short bangs, and glossy voids where her eyes should’ve been. When the flash ended, Sarah returned, grinning, staring right at me.
Chills jolted across every inch of my flesh. As I turned to bolt, a man shouted behind me, “Hey! You can’t be here!”
I peeked in again, but Sarah and the It Girls were gone. I took off running, my shoes slapping the pavement as the night guard fell into step behind.
“Stop!” he yelled.
Yeah. That was gonna work.
I didn’t slow until I cleared the fence. The guard glared from the other side of it, but he made no effort to see if the wire fence would hold his weight as well as it had mine. But I wasn’t so concerned with him as I was with who loomed in the far distance behind him. By the entrance to the Forst building stood Sarah and the other It Girls, watching after me, the stones on their matching choker necklaces glowing green.
It was as though they had nothing to fear, no one to run from the way I did. It was as though…as though I was the only one who could see them.
But that would be crazy.
I blinked away the thought in time to realize the guard had made his way over to a gate and was trying his keys in the locks. I spun on my heel, sprinted back to my car, and peeled out onto the main road as fast as I could. A glance in the rearview mirror, and my stomach jumped to my throat. My mom stood in the street in front of the asylum.
But when I glanced again, she was gone.
I couldn’t go back. I hadn’t seen Mom. No way. Sarah must have found some way to mess with me – those hallucinations Noah said she was capable of. I couldn’t know anything for sure until I learned more about the symbols she was using and the words she’d chanted and what role Noah played in it all and why he needed me to help him.
Once I veered onto the highway, I pulled over and puked Dad’s pasta dinner into the bushes on the side of the road.
I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what was going on, but whatever it was, I was way out of my league.
9
99 RED BALLOONS
The diagnosis was schizophrenia.
I was seven years old when I kept drawing my friend, Suzy, with a mass growing outside her head. I hadn’t told anyone about the pictures, but I told Mom and Dad over and over again she was going to die. I cried myself to sleep every night until my parents brought me to the doctors who evaluated me. They called my visions hallucinations and prescribed a medication to make it stop.
It worked. But a few months later, when Suzy died of brain cancer, only my mother believed my visions were real.
Mom’s death, however, made my dad a believer, too, and that was when he took me to see the other doctor. The one who taught me how to use Hypno-Drawing to manage my anxiety. Of course, he hadn’t thought I possessed magical abilities. He called me sensitive and intuitive and said I picked up on things without realizing it.
I didn’t tell him I already went into trances and drew things. Doubted that would change his opinion anyway. I did, however, succeed in using the technique intentionally, which at least stopped the bad images from coming on their own. I could finally control my curse.
All that remained true…until I met Noah. Now visions happened in my sleep again.
There was only one difference from the sketches I made now to the ones I made in my childhood. They weren’t as graphic. Which meant I didn’t have any idea how the people I’d drawn were supposed to die.
Maybe that was a blessing. Maybe it was a curse. Either way, I now held in my hand something to prove I wasn’t imagining things. Thing was, I didn’t feel safe showing the video to anyone except Noah, and only if Sarah would loosen her hold long enough for him to get away and meet with me.
Then again, the recording only showed their physical actions that night at the asylum – it wasn’t evidence their magic worked. For that, I would have to trust Noah wasn’t lying and that what I’d seen in the cafeteria had been real.
I hated trusting anyone – especially myself – but after seeing my mom back at the asylum, I was desperate enough to believe anything. What if my curse had never left me? What if all those drawings since her death were because she still needed me? Was she trapped? Unable to cross over? She was for sure dead, but I had never seen a spirit before. Why could I see it now? And why at a mental institution of all places?
I replayed the video from my phone and typed the words into my Internet search, my mint-painted fingertips flying across my keyboard.
Legba, Loa, Baron, Samedi.
Bingo.
The first image that popped up was the drawing Heather made. I clicked it to follow the link to the hosting website. Apparently, these symbols – called Veves – were Voodoo symbols, which probably explained what had appeared to be a voodoo doll on the It Girls’ altar.
According to the site, Veves acted as beacons for the Loa – there was that word again, but it still meant nothing to me – and would represent the Loa during a ritual. Every Loa had its own veve. The one Heather had shown me was Loa Legba, and the new one I had seen on the floor by Sarah’s altar was Baron Samedi. The page didn’t indicate anything more, so I hit the ’x’ in the top right corner and returned to my Internet search.
I opened two new sites. One displayed an educational paper written in the ’90s, and the other was the Wiki profile, which indicated I was dealing with Hatian Vodou. Papa Legba served as the go-between for the Loa and the humans. Appease him, and he would grant permission to speak with the spirits of the Guinee – thought to communicate in all human languages, though nothing Sarah said that night made sense to me.
Baron Samedi turned out to be the more concerning symbol. Also referred to as Ghede, Baron Samedi controlled the eternal crossroads. Sounded kind of ominous. Ghede, if I believed the article, played gatekeeper to everything in the afterlife, including the ability to contact the dead, and when called on as Baron Samedi, was death itself.
Long story short, this guy was the “go to” for dark voodoo, though none of this told me exactly what Sarah wanted with Noah. Did she torture him for fun? How was it that she seemed able to control him? She wasn’t using magic on everyone. Her attacks against me hadn’t been otherworldly, unless I counted her controlling Noah to get to me. Come to think of it, Sarah never did her own dirty work. Her lemmings always carried out the dark deeds for her.
I sensed the voodoo doll came into play, but all those related searches returned people trying to sell them along with spells for hundreds of dollars. Probably a scam. I doubted people would honestly sell secrets to magic that dark.
A summary on using voodoo against others indicated it was allowed if the person had wronged you – revenge – but what could Noah have done so horrible to Sarah to deserve all she was putting him through now?
The Internet wouldn’t have those answers, and anytime I tried to dig deeper, I encountered more scammy websites. I wasn’t going to find authentic information this way without encountering a ton of garbage – and how could I tell the legit content from the rest? I would need to learn more, but not online.
My final search – one on voodoo shops in the area – revealed the closest location was in New York. They were closed on Sundays, and I’d already promised my dad I would help him around the house on Saturday. New York was too big for an after-school trip. I would go next week.
I shut my laptop and stared at my phone sitting on the table beside it. I needed to talk to Noah, but I couldn’t risk it tonight. Not after Sarah having seen me. She would be waiting for that.
With that thought etched into my mind, I tucked into bed and closed my eyes for eight hours.
But I didn’t sleep.
Iwas still trying to fall asleep when Heather walked into my room and opened my blinds, letting the stinging sunlight flood into my room and cast pale yellow bars on my beige carpet.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!” She smirked at me with her slightly crooked teeth and bright, freckled face.
Please let her be kidding. I couldn’t stomach eating right now. “What are you doing here?”
“Rescuing you,” she said. “You slept late, huh?”
I pushed myself to sitting with one arm then grabbed my head as a headache slammed into my temporal lobe. Yes, I paid attention at school sometimes. That was why they kept me in those godawful advanced placement classes, which only had the saving grace of being the same ones Heather and Noah shared.
“I didn’t sleep at all, actually. Did my dad let you in?”
“Yep.”
“Does he know we weren’t together last night?”
“Probably.” Heather grinned. “But neither of us mentioned it, if that’s what you meant.”
I grabbed a bottle of water from my nightstand and took a swig. Yay, room temperature water. Just what I’d always wanted. It must’ve been sitting there for a couple nights now. I replaced the plastic cap and set it back.
“Did you go bowling?” I asked.
Heather’s smile slipped out of place, the hurt beneath peeking through. “Alone?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She took off her retro red glasses and polished the lenses, then put them back on. “Just stop shutting me out. I already know what happened. Why can’t you talk to me about it?”
In my head, I laughed bitterly. She knew what Noah did, but she had no freaking clue what happened or what had transpired since. “I want to forget about it, okay?”
She sat on the end of my bed. “It started before then, though, didn’t it? You’ve been withdrawn for weeks.”
Oh, God, please don’t let this be some kind of intervention from someone who has no idea what she’s talking about.
“I’m worried about you,” she added.
“Don’t be.” I pushed my covers aside and stepped out of bed and into a pair of sweat pants. “I’m fine now. I was in a funk, and now I’m out of it.”
Heather raised her eyebrows. “What about the cut on your arm?”
“Huh?” I glanced down to a long thin scab on the inside of my forearm. Great. It must have happened while climbing over the perimeter fence. “Oh,” I said. “I got a scratch.”
Heather laughed. “I can see that! Where did you get it?”
I was too tired to process the conversation but awake enough to tell a lie. “I don’t know.”
She gave an “Uh-huh,” and then, “So you want to do something next weekend?”
I suppressed a groan. “Next weekend?”
“You already have plans,” she said, her tone sinking. Her disappointment was even harder to bear than my dad’s.
“Of course not,” I lied. If I didn’t do something with her soon, she might start checking into what was going on with me, and I couldn’t risk that. “Want to go to Chinatown?”
“Oh!” she said, her whole face lighting up. “For the Chinese New Year Parade?”
The what now? “Umm…yeah. For that.”
“It’s Friday,” she said. “Would your Dad let you miss a day of school?”
Considering the way he’d been acting lately, he would probably let me buy drugs off a street corner, so a trip to New York for a parade should be fine. “I’ll ask him, but I don’t see why not.”
Which, to be honest – for once – actually bothered me. Didn’t he care what his daughter was getting into? What turned him from overprotective-helicopter parent into this passive do-whatever-you-want-and-I’ll-look-the-other-way dad?
I sighed. I would worry about that later. On the totem pole of important life issues, dad-weirdness ranked somewhere beneath the It Girls performi
ng dark magic on my could-be boyfriend.
Now all I needed while we were in Chinatown was to find a way to accidentally-on-purpose get separated from the closest thing I had to a friend so I could track down the Voodoo shop, get some answers, then find her again before she got herself into any kind of trouble.
Yeah, Friday was going to be a cakewalk.
Too bad the cake was a lie.
Monday morning came with the dread of facing my peers. I felt every pair of eyes on me as I made my way to my locker. The whispers and giggles originating from the rumor of what Noah did to me on Friday struck my back like a harpoon. They didn’t have the gall to say anything to my face, but it didn’t make their cruelty hurt any less.
I suppose I should’ve been thankful that the school hadn’t gotten their hands on that video Sarah spreading around of Noah and me kissing. But somehow, that provided zero relief.
I fumbled with my locker combination several times before I finally got it open. Taped up inside was a blue notecard.
I MIGHT BE A JERK, BUT I WOULD NEVER HURT YOU ON PURPOSE.
I snatched it down and shoved it in my pocket, a smile tickling my lips. Damn you, Noah. If only I had some way to tell when Noah was Noah and not Sarah’s puppet.
Suddenly, the attention of my classmates meant little. I stuck my afternoon books in my locker and started down the hall for first period. I got about halfway there when a red balloon floated into my path – and not a loner. Red balloons bobbed midair on either side of the halls.
There must have been almost a hundred of them.
Attached to the bottom of one nearest to me was a note:
I THINK OF YOU AND LET IT GO.
Then I knew exactly how many red balloons floated before me.
Ninety-nine.
Only Noah knew me well enough to use that song to send a message. He was ready to fight. And the best part was that Sarah would never figure out what the balloons meant.
Something like Voodoo Page 10
