Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  Candace ended the call and hit redial. “This chick is so going to get it. Why the hell did we agree to play all those stupid games last weekend?” She waited again for Violet’s voice mail to begin, her head cocked in annoyance, and this time left a furious message. “Violet. This is Candace. It’s pouring rain, and Olivia’s stuck at the mall in Green Bay. I think you can figure out why I’m calling you. You’d better call me back as soon as you get this.”

  I felt sickened with anxiety. We sat at the rest station as the storm raged on for another fifteen minutes. Finally, there was a sudden pause in the rain, and we all looked up at one another, surprised by how abruptly the pouring had ended.

  “Should we make a run for it?” Jeff asked us.

  “Olivia’s stuck at the mall in Green Bay, and her car won’t start,” Candace informed the boys. “Since the game’s canceled, we should go pick her up.”

  Pete said, “That’s, like, an hour from here. At least. Why didn’t she call me?”

  Taking Candace’s lead, I jumped in. “Her phone’s dead, and we might get there faster than her parents.”

  Pete didn’t need much convincing. “Let’s do it. Maybe someone will let her charge her phone inside the mall.”

  We cleared our snack trays and stepped outside the rest station, surprised at how crisp and clean-smelling the air outside was after such heavy rain. Something kept us from rushing for the car; we stood outside the doors of the rest station for a moment with our collapsed umbrellas tucked under our arms, looking around in wonderment at the soaked parking lot.

  One of the truck drivers—not the one with the beard who had cautioned us about the flash floods earlier, but an older one with an enormous belly—opened one of the rest station doors and leaned out of it to address us. “You kids might want to wait it out another five minutes or so.” He looked up at the sky skeptically. “Smells like hail.”

  Pete smiled politely and responded in the voice he reserved for teachers and parents, “Thanks for the warning, but we have to be on our way.”

  The truck driver shrugged at us like we were just a bunch of dumb kids, and we began walking toward Pete’s car. But we had barely gotten halfway across the lot when the first ball of hail struck the ground. The first few balls that I saw were thimble-size clumps of ice barreling down at the blacktop of the parking lot at an incredible speed, smashing to bits when they made impact with the ground and the cabs of trucks. Behind me, I heard Candace shriek, and in front of me, Melissa pulled the hood on her sweatshirt over her head to protect herself. I struggled to open my umbrella and gave up on it. Within seconds, the hail grew much larger—incredibly large, like little rock-hard Ping-Pong balls flinging down upon us from the sky. They hammered against the trucks in the lot and the hoods of parked cars, sounding like gun shots when they made contact. I felt hail hitting my back, my shoulders, and my head, and it hurt so much that I could barely think straight as all of us turned around and ran back to the rest station. It was difficult to even see where I was going as the hail accumulated on the pavement, slippery and crunching beneath my boots.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Pete held the rest station door open for us as we dashed back inside, shivering and breathing heavily from the adrenaline. We stood there in clumsy silence watching the hail fall, just trying to calm down and make sense of the weather around us. The hail was coming down so steadily that we couldn’t even see Pete’s car in the lot.

  “This is just nuts,” Pete muttered to himself.

  “It’s, like, biblical,” Jeff added.

  When the storm came to an abrupt stop a few minutes later, we walked to Pete’s car only to discover that a large ball of hail had struck the very center of the windshield and cracked it, sending ripples through it like a stone thrown into a pond. It left a dent that looked like an elaborate spiderweb at the point of impact. “Oh crap, dude,” Jeff said to Pete.

  Pete whipped out his cell phone to call AAA for a tow. “Great. Now we can’t even go get Olivia.”

  * * *

  Over an hour later, as we watched a tow truck drag Pete’s car away through the small mountains of melting hail, we bickered over whose parents should be summoned to fetch us. Oddly, the storm clouds had passed over, revealing a peaceful blue sky that was quickly darkening as night approached. We hadn’t heard back from Olivia yet, but Candace was adamant that everything was probably fine—quite possibly just to convince herself that was the case.

  “She kept saying her phone was about to die. That’s the only reason why she hasn’t called,” she insisted.

  I felt in my bones that something very, very bad had happened. It was the same way I always felt when I woke up from having my nightmare about Jennie and the fire, like something had changed and it was not only awful, but irreversible, too. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call my mom. I couldn’t explain why, but as soon as I heard her voice, I began crying.

  “McKenna, where are you?” she asked. As I suspected, she was in her office at the university, absolutely clueless about the storm that had just pelted most of central Wisconsin with hail.

  “Outside Oshkosh,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “We got caught in a really bad hailstorm and Pete’s windshield was destroyed.” Mom sounded baffled about why I was so emotionally distraught. “But you’re okay, right? Why do you sound so upset?”

  I couldn’t tell her, obviously, that I had significant reason to believe that one of my closest friends was probably being violently killed just outside Green Bay at that very moment. And that my evidence to support this theory was entirely based on an uncanny paranormal story told by one of my weird friends, who may or may not have had psychic abilities. “I just really wanted to go to the game, and now it’s postponed,” I lied.

  “Do you need me to come and pick you up? How are you kids getting home?”

  I swallowed, and was about to request that she come and get me when Candace mouthed, My mom is on her way.

  “I’m getting a ride home with Candace’s mom,” I said, kind of wishing my mom would come and pick me up anyway.

  As it was just kind of the way things operated in high school, Pete’s mom arrived almost an hour later to fetch him and Jeff, and she waited at the rest station until Melissa’s mom arrived in a Mercedes. Then both moms went inside and purchased coffees while waiting for Candace’s mom, who we all still thought of as Mrs. Cotton, even though she’d been Mrs. Lehrer for several years since she remarried. Pete’s mom drove a huge SUV in which we all probably would have fit, but we were still at an age when everyone’s parents wanted to drive all the way out of town to pick up their own kid. Finally, Candace’s mom arrived, her heavy turquoise-and-silver jewelry jangling and clanging. After she insisted on going inside the rest station to get a coffee to keep her awake on the drive home with Candace’s half sister, Julia, trudging along behind her, all three of our parents’ cars departed the rest station in a motorcade. We drove back to Willow intentionally slowly since the streets were treacherously slippery from all the ice. By the time we were back within town borders, it wasn’t even eight o’clock at night yet, but Candace and I were both yawning from the tension of the afternoon.

  “Mom, can we drive past the Richmonds’ house to see if Olivia is home yet?” Candace asked from the front seat as her mom’s car rounded corners, taking us closer to Martha Road. I sat in the back with Julia, who had Candace’s height but looked nothing like her.

  Candace’s mom had a throaty, gravelly voice just like her daughter’s. “Oh, Candace, that’s all the way on the other side of town, and the streets are so bad.”

  “It’s really important, though,” Candace insisted. “She hasn’t texted me back in over two hours, and the last time I heard from her, she was stuck at the Bay Park Square mall in Green Bay”

  Candace’s mom made a right turn onto Martha Road, and just past Julia’s head I caught a glimpse of the empty lot, silent and still as it always was, as we rolled down the block toward my house. “You c
an call her house when we get home.”

  Candace’s mom slowed to a stop in front of my house.

  Immediately, I noticed two odd things: Lights were on in my house, indicating that my mom was already home from campus, and the Emorys’ house was completely dark. The Emorys’ house was never dark on a Friday night. Trey’s dad was always visible through the front window, watching television in the living room once he got home from work. Trey’s brother, Eddie, was always using the game console attached to the television whenever Mr. Emory wasn’t watching television. And the Emorys’ kitchen light was basically on twenty-four hours a day. It was jarring to see the house so dark and empty.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, climbing out of Candace’s mom’s car.

  “Call me immediately if Olivia contacts you,” Candace ordered. Once inside my house, I couldn’t resist the urge to text Henry to see if by chance he’d heard from his sister, which I knew was a long shot since he was at school and not planning to drive up to Wisconsin until the next morning. My anxiety grew when he didn’t text me back. I waited until after Mom and I had finished eating pizza before I made the very bold decision to call the Richmonds’ house out of concern, despite knowing that it would be really awkward if Olivia’s parents answered the phone. I was prepared to apologize for interrupting their Friday night, and inquire politely about whether or not Olivia had made it home from the mall. My fears about Violet’s grim story aside, there was still a legitimate possibility that Olivia was stranded in the parking lot at the mall an hour away, unable to call anyone for a ride home. So it wasn’t so unreasonable, I assured myself, that as a concerned friend I would call the house.

  But no one answered.

  I texted Candace one word: Anything?

  And she texted back: Nothing. No answer. And no word from Violet.

  I climbed into bed early, assuring myself that I’d be out late the following night. I wanted to believe that in just twenty-four hours I’d be dancing with Henry, Olivia would be fine, and I’d be amused at how oddly coincidental the day’s events had mirrored Violet’s story. Around midnight, I heard a car pull into the driveway next door, and sat straight up in bed to watch Mr. and Mrs. Emory enter their house through the side door with Eddie following behind them, rubbing his eyes tiredly. They were having a serious discussion, but with my window closed, their voices sounded muffled and indiscernible. It bothered me for some reason that Trey wasn’t with them; where could he have been at that hour? For the first time it occurred to me that maybe Trey had a girlfriend I didn’t know about.

  About ten minutes after the Emorys arrived home and I finally began to drift off to sleep, the door to my bedroom opened and the shape of my mother’s body appeared there, illuminated from behind by the light in the hallway.

  “McKenna, honey? Are you awake?”

  I struggled to pull myself free from the grip of sleep to focus on my mom. Something was wrong; I knew immediately. My mother never came into my room unannounced and never woke me up in the middle of the night.

  “I’m afraid I have some really awful news, honey. There’s been an accident.”

  CHAPTER 6

  OLIVIA’S MEMORIAL SERVICE WAS HELD on Monday, and school was canceled for the day so that everyone could attend. It was a somber occasion, almost unbearably long, as students, parents, and the Richmonds’ extended family drifted in and out of Gundarsson’s Funeral Home over the course of three hours. Mom insisted on accompanying me, even though I knew that hanging out in a funeral parlor was hardly how she would have preferred to spend her day off from teaching. The Richmonds, all tall and fair, gathered near the front of the large room, speaking in hushed voices, tapping the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs. Olivia’s casket, ornate and shiny, was closed. Next to it, a huge picture of Olivia smiling in her volleyball uniform was placed on an easel, with a few of her baby pictures pinned on top of it in a sort of hastily assembled collage. I had heard rumors that Henry had been forced to identify his sister’s body at the coroner’s office because it had been so mangled that Mrs. Richmond had passed out at the sight of it. He had greeted me with a painful smile when I’d first arrived, but after a few minutes of strained conversation, he excused himself to retreat back to his family’s territory near the casket and avoided even looking in my direction.

  Over the course of the weekend, I had aggregated snippets of the story from various sources. The headline on the Saturday-morning issue of the Willow Gazette had been TRAGEDY IN GREEN BAY: LOCAL TEEN KILLED IN COLLISION. The three sparse paragraphs about the crash claimed that two local teens from Willow High School had been involved in a crash just outside Green Bay when an eighteen-wheeler truck had hit them head-on during the hailstorm. The driver of the car in which Olivia had been riding hadn’t been named, but had allegedly stumbled away from the scene with minor injuries. A picture of what was left of the car had run alongside the article. It was unrecognizable as a vehicle; it looked more like a gnarly knot of scrap metal, and the expression on the face of the state trooper who had been photographed next to the wreckage indicated that he was thinking the same thing that I was thinking: How was it possible that someone had walked away alive from that kind of an accident? The newspaper claimed that the truck driver involved in the crash was devastated; he hadn’t even seen the other car swerve into his lane through the heavy hail. Cheryl had called me on Saturday afternoon to share the rumor that Olivia’s body had practically been cut in half from the force of the collision. The shoes she had just bought at the mall were found nearly thirty feet away from the car, off to the side of the rural highway, in the woods. Not far, Cheryl added, from Olivia’s severed arm.

  Of course I wondered who had been driving her. In none of the tearful conversations I’d had with friends who’d called to talk had the name of the driver been mentioned. It didn’t seem like anyone knew with whom Olivia had spent her final moments.

  At the back of the room, just inside the doors, I lurked in a corner, watching quietly as kids from school and teachers drifted in. No one knew quite what to say to Olivia’s parents, how to stand, where to put their hands, where to rest their eyes. Everyone was hungry for more details, myself included, but it was absolutely out of the question to talk about the accident at the memorial. Soft classical music played throughout the afternoon, pumped in through the vents along with chilly air. There were enormous floral arrangements on both sides of the casket; sent from the Lions Club, the Knights of Columbus, the PTA, the faculty union at the high school, and Olivia’s dad’s accounting firm. A hanging arrangement of pale pink bud roses and baby’s breath draped over the casket’s top, held together with silky white ribbon. It was probably not all that different from the corsage that Pete had planned to place on Olivia’s wrist the night of the Fall Fling, the dance that had been canceled in light of Olivia’s tragic death. Pete had arrived not long after me and my mom, staying just a few brief minutes with his parents before hugging Olivia’s mom and dad and promptly leaving. He had nodded at me from across the room, his eyes red and swollen. Seeing a boy my own age who had quite clearly been crying made me feel very uncomfortable. His suit seemed to fit him perfectly, and I wondered if maybe it had been bought recently for the dance.

  Tracy Hartford and her mother arrived early, their faces solemn and pious. They made a point of greeting everyone who entered and thanking them for coming, as if they were part of Olivia’s family. In reality, Olivia barely even spoke to Tracy and thought she was an annoying busybody, but the Hartfords thrived on gossip and were certainly in their element that day at the funeral home. They asked everyone in attendance to sign the guest book, and they were so insistent about it, it was almost as if reaching a goal of signatures would bring Olivia back.

  I couldn’t remember having attended a memorial service or wake for Jennie, but presumably if there had been one, it had been in the very same room where we all gathered to pay our respects to Olivia. Willow was a small enough town that everyone was waked at Gundarsson�
�s and buried either at our church, St. Monica’s, which was where Jennie was buried, or the Jewish cemetery on the other side of town. Wearing my only black dress, two sizes too large for me, I picked the light blue nail polish off my thumbs and made small talk with people I recognized as they entered and left. Mischa and Amanda arrived with their parents, and Mischa and I hugged for what felt like five minutes even though we had been talking on the phone almost hourly since dawn on Saturday morning.

  “Has Candace come yet?” she asked me. I shook my head.

  Candace was having a complete and utter freak-out. As if it weren’t enough to have unexpectedly lost her best friend, her wholehearted belief that Olivia’s death had been premeditated somehow by Violet was driving her to the brink of insanity. She had called me three times since Friday night, each time rambling hysterically about how she wanted to tell the whole world about what Violet had done because Olivia would have wanted it that way. It was terrifying to conclude that Violet somehow had either been able to predict with total accuracy what was going to happen with Olivia, or even more frighteningly, that she had caused the accident. But I tried not to emphasize that I agreed with Candace when I spoke with her. We weren’t going to have any luck convincing parents or the police that Violet had anything to do with Olivia’s accident. I hadn’t heard a word from her since Sunday morning, and hadn’t even received a response when I had texted her to see if she was okay on Sunday afternoon.

  “Her mom admitted her to the hospital yesterday,” Mischa confided in me. “Julia texted me. They were afraid she was having a nervous breakdown, and she’s in the psychiatric ward.”

  I suddenly felt unbearably cold in the funeral parlor’s frosty air. A certain and unshakable fear that we had brought this unthinkable tragedy upon ourselves nestled into the marrow of my bones. We had done something so childish and irresponsible by playing that stupid game, and now, if my fears were correct, Olivia had paid for it with her life. Poor Candace. Psychiatrists weren’t going to believe her, of course. I imagined her as a patient, the patronizing looks on her attending physicians’ faces as she wildly blabbed about the birthday party game, sounding absolutely crazy.