Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  Mischa had far too short of an attention span to ever qualify as a legitimate detective. We shut down our library research and drove to her house to try to determine our next move. I texted Violet back with a lie, saying that I was visiting my grandparents and wouldn’t be able to join her and Tracy for a movie until Sunday. I just wanted one afternoon to myself, one afternoon to gossip about the homecoming dance and be a normal junior in high school.

  When we arrived at the Portnoys’ house, Amanda summoned us up to her room, calling out to us as soon as she heard the garage door open into the kitchen. “Mischa! Get up here! Have you seen this?”

  We scrambled up the stairs to Amanda’s room on the second floor, which was practically wallpapered with pictures of YouTube stars. She sat at her desk with her back to the door, completely engrossed in something on her phone.

  As we entered the room, we saw that she was looking at highly unflattering pictures of Candace attacking Violet at the dance the night before, shared with her on her Instagram. “God, look at that. Candace looks like a maniac.” Candace’s hair was a blur, her face was flushed with rage, and her expression could only be described as demonic. “Who posted those photos?” Mischa asked defensively.

  “A bunch of idiots from the football team. I already asked Brian to have them untag Candace. But, God, like, what’s wrong with her?” Amanda clucked her tongue. While the pictures were horrific, the comments were worse. They were mean-spirited, brutal, and many had been posted by girls and boys alike who Candace had probably considered to be her friends. “I feel so bad for Candace. I know you guys like her, but her high school life is totally over.”

  Mischa motioned for me to follow her down the hall to her room. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. What if we try to find kids from Violet’s old school and ask them about her?” Mischa suggested, her eyes sparkling. It seemed like a great way of finding out if anyone had thought Violet had something to do with the four kids who’d died in Lake Forest the year before. Mischa wasted no time in searching for memorial pages for the two deceased kids whose names we knew. The parents of the girl who had been captain of the pom squad at Lake Forest High School had set up a private group called “Remembering Rebecca.” We were unable to see any of the posts, but could browse the members of the group, and I asked Mischa to stop scrolling when the photo of a guy our age whose name was given as Eric appeared on screen.

  “Hold it right there,” I commanded. “That guy. Violet told me that she dated a guy named Eric and broke it off when she moved here because of long distance.”

  Mischa looked at the picture of the handsome, smiling jock skeptically. “Violet said her old school was really big. Don’t you think there would be a lot of Erics in a big school?”

  I couldn’t explain how, I just had a strange feeling that we were looking at a picture of the Eric, the one who’d dated Violet. “Well, this Eric cared enough about Rebecca Shermer to join her remembrance group on Facebook. It would kind of make sense that Violet was friends with Rebecca Shermer if she was one of the kids who died, right? And if Violet was dating Eric . . .”

  That afternoon, Mischa composed slightly mysterious messages to several kids who had posted to the remembrance pages for Rebecca Shermer and Josh Loomis, the freshman who Violet had once babysat, and to Eric. She explained that she was a student at Violet’s new school in Willow, Wisconsin, planning to throw a surprise party to celebrate Violet’s Student Government victory. She asked everyone she contacted to reply with discretion to maintain the surprise, and urged those who couldn’t attend in person to send along best wishes that she claimed she would print out and include in a card to present to Violet at the party. I had to admit, it was a pretty brilliant plan for Mischa to have come up with. It was improbable that anyone would say they’d want to attend the party in person and drive all the way up from Illinois, and we would be able to tell a lot about how people perceived Violet from their responses. Best of all, it was unlikely that anyone would reach out to Violet and tell her that people at her new school were inquiring about her past. Mischa also sent a request to join the “Remembering Rebecca” group, but we knew it was not too likely that Rebecca’s parents would admit anyone to the group whose name they didn’t recognize.

  “Check this out,” Mischa told me hours later over the phone as I watched television with my mom. “I’ve gotten three responses so far. Molly Vega said, ‘I don’t really know Violet that well. Good luck with the party.’ Then, Mike Goldsmith wrote back and said, ‘I don’t have anything nice to say about that girl.’ And then . . . wait for it . . . Keeley Alden said, ‘I would advise you to stay as far away from Violet as you can. Sorry you’re stuck with her now, but at least she’s not at our school anymore.’ ”

  “Freaky,” I said. My mother looked up at me from her newspaper at the other end of the couch with vague interest.

  “And that guy? Eric? The boyfriend, right? He wrote back and said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with Violet Simmons. Don’t ever contact me again.’ And he just updated all of his privacy settings so I can’t see anything on his profile anymore.”

  So we weren’t the only ones who had discovered Violet to be a bit of a bad-luck charm. Unfortunately, no one from Violet’s old high school wrote back to Mischa with any specifics about why she was so disliked. We didn’t have any concrete evidence that she had ever led any other students in a game like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, so whatever she had done at her old school to earn such a negative reputation remained unknown.

  * * *

  After another restless night sleeping on the couch, I agreed to see a movie with Violet and Tracy at the small mall in Ortonville on Sunday afternoon despite a stern warning from Mischa. I feared finding myself alone with Violet, feared being in a moving vehicle with her. It was very likely there would be some kind of reprimand in store for my having communicated with Mischa at the dance on Friday night, and I was afraid the longer I put off apologizing, the more severe the punishment would be.

  “Is your nose okay?” I asked, trying to sound as chipper as possible as I climbed into the back seat of Tracy’s car. Violet’s nose appeared to be fine, but it looked like she had bruises beneath her eyes, heavily masked with porcelain-colored concealer. She and Candace must have bumped heads pretty hard when they’d hit the floor.

  “Yeah, it’s okay. Not broken, just sore,” Violet said from the front passenger seat.

  “I’m so sorry about that. Candace is just . . . out of control. She’s in the psych ward again. Who knows when she’ll be released,” I said, feeling rotten to the core for sounding like I was glad that Candace had been locked up.

  “Yeah, geez. I know. My dad wants to have her thrown out of school. She’s a danger to herself and other students,” Violet said absentmindedly, flipping through stations on the radio.

  I held my comment.

  As we reached the corner of Martha Road, and the empty lot was just outside Violet’s passenger-side window, Tracy commented, “Isn’t that where your old house used to be?”

  I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. Of course it was, and I passed the corner of my own street every day, but I couldn’t remember the last time someone had so ignorantly asked me outright about the fire. The empty lot looked unassuming, overgrown with long, dying yellow grass, as it always did. “Uh, yeah,” I said uncomfortably. “My parents bought a house down the block rather than rebuilding.”

  “God, I would buy a new house too. Who would want to live on the site of a fire like that? I mean, ew. It’s, like, a perfect plot for a horror movie,” Tracy said, furthering my belief that she was the most insensitive girl in the world.

  When we arrived at the mall, we were fifteen minutes too late to see the romantic comedy that Tracy and Violet had used as bait to get me out of the house. Violet studied the movie times for the theater on her cell phone with a wrinkled brow, insisting that she couldn’t understand how the wrong time for our original selection ha
d been listed on the theater’s website.

  “We’re probably just missing the previews anyway,” Tracy said with a shrug, but when we attempted to buy tickets for the movie that had already started, the pimply teenage boy at the counter refused to sell them to us for that screening. It was a crowded Sunday afternoon at the theater, and families with young children swarmed around us as we tried to decide what to do. Our options were to buy tickets for the next showing of The Scent of Love, starting almost three hours later, or to see one of the other films playing that afternoon: the kiddie cartoon or blockbuster 3-D action flick, both beginning within the next half hour. “I guess I could see Brethren,” Violet said. “At least there are hot guys in that movie.”

  Brethren was a high-velocity action movie set in the Middle East about a group of hotshot special operative agents who take on a ridiculous assignment to assassinate the head of a terrorist organization. We bought our tickets and each took a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses out of the bin in the theater’s lobby. The movie was terrible, but exactly the kind of movie that would earn millions of dollars at the box office. I started to lose interest after the first twenty minutes, when it became clear that the subplot about two of the special-ops guys not getting along well was going to ruin every critical scene with cheesy one-liners meant to be funny. Halfway through the movie, the special agents planted a bomb in an open-air market that caused a rapidly spreading fire at nightfall, moving from stand to stand, incinerating everything in sight as hot desert winds assisted in its expansion. The swirling fire on-screen, the crackling of flames and popping of wood throwing sparks, was simply too much for me. It’s just a movie, I reminded myself, but I felt my breath growing short and could have sworn I smelled smoke. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and my heart was racing. I felt like I couldn’t get any air into my lungs, and I was getting light-headed. Tearing off my 3-D glasses, I stood, and without even excusing myself, I stepped over Violet and inched my way out of our row of seats, desperate to get outside and away from the roar of the blaze.

  Once out in the hallway, I wiped the dampness off my face with the sleeve of my cardigan. The silly jingles of the video game machines left unattended in the hallway to cycle through their game trailers comforted me as my breathing returned to normal. In the ladies’ bathroom, I splashed cool water on my face. Even after I felt calm enough to return to my seat, I waited a little longer, studying my reflection in the mirror. It was crazy to wonder, but had Violet intentionally made us miss the screening of The Scent of Love so that instead we’d have to see Brethren? Had Violet known about that horrible fire scene from the trailer, or from commercials? She must have known how traumatic it would be for me to see a scene like that, especially in 3-D. I found myself dreading my return to my seat in the theater, childishly wishing once again that I could just call my mom to ask her to come and get me.

  Moments before I reached to open the heavy door to reenter the theater, I heard my phone buzz in my bag. I saw Mischa’s name appear on the screen, and I retreated back down the hallway to talk to her in privacy.

  “I figured it out,” Mischa said over the phone.

  “Oh, yeah? What?” I asked, feeling like somehow Violet could hear us even though she was in the middle of the crowded movie theater.

  “Candace called me. She’s feeling better and she’s being released tomorrow afternoon. And guess what? Her father decided she needs a change of scenery. He’s taking her to the Big Island,” Mischa said, sounding very pleased with herself.

  “Oh my God, Mischa,” I said, feeling nauseous, my stomach lurching. “Waves! She could drown at the beach.”

  “I know. Don’t you get it? Nohi. It must have been a message from Olivia. It means no H-I. No Hawaii.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THAT EVENING, I GREW INCREASINGLY uneasy as the sun began to set. The sky turned from pink to gold and then began to darken, and I suspected that since Mr. Cotton had put events in motion to take Candace to an area where she could potentially drown in deep waves just as Violet had predicted, Olivia’s spirit was going to turn violent. It was making sense now to me why Olivia had wanted me to be alarmed at homecoming by the song she had singled out: I was supposed to have prevented Candace from attacking Violet. Because the attack had led to her trip to the psychiatric ward, and her hospitalization had inspired her dad to book a vacation. I saw it all clearly now; I was failing to protect Candace so completely that I was actually helping Violet’s prediction manifest.

  “Turning in soon?” Mom asked in the living room after bringing Maude inside from her last wild frolic in the backyard for the night. Her tone suggested that I should turn in, seeing as how it was a Sunday night and I had school in the morning.

  I was pretending to be thoroughly engrossed in a television news program about a serial killer who had lived in La Crosse. “Yeah, I just want to see the end of this,” I assured her.

  “Are you sure you should be watching something so troubling right before bedtime?” she nagged me. “You don’t want to give yourself bad dreams.”

  Avoiding eye contact with her, I said, “I’m not having nightmares. I’m sleeping just fine.”

  “Then why have you been sleeping out here on the couch?” She raised an eyebrow skeptically at me before disappearing down the hall. “Good night, sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she called.

  When the show finally ended, I turned off the television and was startled by the absolute quiet in the house. I turned on the light in the hallway and switched off the lamp in the living room, already creeping myself out with thoughts about what might await me in my bedroom. Since Maude had shown an interest in whatever paranormal activity Olivia was stirring up in my bedroom, I had started keeping the door closed. While it kept the puppy out of my room, it created a moment of panic for me each and every time I had cause to open it and peer inside. In that fraction of a second before I was able to flip on the light switch, my heart always stopped beating in distressed fear of what might await me on the other side.

  I leaned forward, putting my ear to the door to listen for any strange sounds coming from my bedroom, and then, hearing nothing suspicious, I reached for the doorknob. My hand recoiled and snapped back to my chest before I even realized what had happened; I gasped in surprise because the doorknob was scalding hot to the touch. My fingertips felt singed, but when I looked down in the darkness expecting to see blisters rising, they appeared to be fine. There was nothing about the appearance of the doorknob that would have suggested that it was hot. I tapped it again lightly with the tip of my index finger, and finding it still to be alarmingly hot, I weighed my options.

  I considered trying to sneak out the front door and over to the Emorys’ house, but the front entrance of our house would definitely be too noisy. The side door in the kitchen, with its busted spring, would also create a noticeable amount of noise. There was no way out of the house through the garage unless I used the automatic door opener, which would definitely wake my mom out of a deep slumber. Before I even took a look in my bedroom, I knew there was no way I could sleep there for the night, and the thought of sleeping exposed, on the couch, and irking my mother more, was also not appealing. If it was Olivia playing games with me, simulating a fire in my bedroom just a few hours after I’d been terrified by a fiery movie scene was downright cruel.

  So I made the decision to cross my bedroom as quickly as possible, slip out the window, and dash over to Trey’s. Using the bottom of my T-shirt to protect my hand, I turned the knob and threw the door open, finding my bedroom to be suspiciously quiet and cool. I quickly closed the door behind me, tiptoed across the room as fast as I could, climbed through the window, and lowered the screen again. Wearing only socks on my feet, I unlatched the gate in the fence surrounding our backyard and opened the gate to the Emorys’ yard. I knocked on Trey’s window lightly with my knuckles, hoping he was still awake. The room behind the blinds was already dark. Just as I began to panic because he wasn’t answering and a cold wind
was blowing, the window lifted, and he smiled at me.

  “McKenna Brady! Why, what a nice surprise,” he joked.

  “Can I come in?”

  It was disorienting to be in Trey’s bedroom in the dark. He bashfully cleaned up a pile of dirty underwear on his floor and tossed it into the back of his closet. The room had a salty, safe smell about it, like dirty sheets or old gym shoes. As we crawled into his narrow bed and he lowered his flannel sheet over me, he warned, “You definitely have to wake up and go home early in the morning. If my parents find you in here, your mom will kill you, and then you’ll be a ghost who haunts me.”

  “Olivia’s angry at me. I really messed up at homecoming,” I confessed. I told him about the hot doorknob, and about how Candace would be flying to Hawaii with her father in two weeks, right after midterms.

  “The book says that the more acclimated a spirit becomes, you know, as a ghost, the more comfortable they become with their powers,” Trey explained matter-of-factly. “She’s probably just trying to find more effective ways to communicate with you.”

  I snuggled beneath Trey’s blankets again alongside him and said suddenly, “Violet tricked me into seeing a movie today with her and Tracy, and there was this scene with an out-of-control fire that really upset me. Okay, maybe she didn’t know that scene was going to be in the movie, but I think she did know. Am I totally paranoid?”

  “Maybe a little paranoid,” Trey told me, wrapping one arm protectively over me. “Lots of movies have scenes with fires in them.”

  “Yeah, but this particular scene was intense. I had to leave the theater and collect myself, and all afternoon I’ve been wondering this same thing, this same thought again and again: Why me and not her?”