“You saw a tree. They all look alike. How do you know it’s this particular one?”
I took a step forward and reached for the trunk. “I just know.”
The moment my fingers touched the bark, everything went black. I turned around, but instead of finding my family and friends, a girl stood there, smiling.
A dark-haired girl wearing a pink dress.
“You found me,” Charlotte Pickens said.
I was stunned, but at the same time, it felt as if I was exactly where I was supposed to be, even though I had no idea where—or when—I was.
“I think you’re the one who found me.”
“True. But thank you for letting me in.”
I looked around. It was still nighttime and we were still in Charleston, but it looked different. Smaller, somehow, like the town itself was closing in. Beyond the park it was solid black. No buildings, no trees.
“There’s not much time,” the other Charlotte said. “I can feel things slipping away.”
“How do I contact your parents?”
“I will take care of that. I need you and your friends to focus, though. Really focus on what you are doing and why.”
“The ceremony will work?”
She nodded. “It will do.”
I felt as though I was in a waking dream. Was I standing in a spirit world, talking to a real ghost?
She giggled. “Yes, in a way.”
“You can read my mind?” The thought was scary.
“Only here,” she assured me.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. How many people had ever had a chance to ask a dead person what it was like after you died?
“It’s different for everyone,” she said. “Just like being born is different for everyone. Some things are essentially the same, but the experience itself—and what happens afterward—depends greatly on who you are.”
She looked young, like the teenager I’d first witnessed running away from her parents’ tent. In my later dreams, though, she had appeared to be at least ten years older.
“You can choose the form you take,” she said. “I thought this would be best for my parents because it is how they always thought of me.”
“Have you been stuck here all this time?”
“Yes and no. I cannot move on yet, but I can leave this place.” She waved her arm at the park, which was even smaller than it had been seconds before.
“I always thought people came back to the place where they lived, not where their body was, um, well, I guess you weren’t buried here, exactly, but your ashes…”
Charlotte laughed. “I asked my daughter to scatter my ashes here because it was a place I loved,” she said. “I used to come here whenever I could. So, yes, it was a place where I lived, in a way. It was special to me.”
“Why weren’t you able to find your parents? They’ve been in Charleston all along.”
Her face darkened. “They reside in a different kind of place. Sometimes they can hear me, but they are trapped in a way that I am not. What you are about to do—it will free them.”
“Why me?” I asked. “I mean, why do they need anyone living to help them? And what happens if we can’t?”
She sat down in the grass, her pink dress fluttering around her. “It was their choice,” she said. “When they made the decision to remain behind, they imposed upon themselves their own rules, their own deadline. They did not know how powerful and binding such a decision becomes.” She smiled sadly. “It is truly amazing what one can accomplish by simply focusing on it long enough.”
It was getting darker. Charlotte Pickens was becoming harder to see and I still had a thousand questions to ask.
“Is it scary? The whole afterlife—is it what you thought it would be?”
She looked at me with her wide brown eyes and smiled. “It is nothing like I thought it would be. It’s bigger, I suppose. More complex.” Her gaze shifted to the tree, then back at me. She stood up. “It is time to go.”
“This is the end?” I asked.
She laughed. “That is one thing you learn here. There is no end.” She leaned close to me and whispered something in my ear. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but before I could ask, she was gone. I blinked, and was once again standing next to the tree, my fingers barely touching its bark. Noah was standing next to me.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
He frowned. “Out where?”
“Didn’t I just pass out?”
Noah put his hand on my shoulder. “No. Hey, are you feeling all right?”
I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I knew what we had to do. “Let’s get started,” I said. “We need to form a circle around the tree.”
We joined hands and Mom began to read from her notebook. Shane held a small, battery-powered video recorder while Dad watched the EMF reader.
“We have come here today to release the spirits of Edward and Elizabeth Pickens, to join them with their daughter and to guide them toward a new life,” Mom read. I quietly repeated everything she said and tried to focus on the words.
Noah held my right hand while Annalise held my left. We were all standing with our heads bowed and our eyes closed as Mom had told us to do. Passersby probably thought we were performing some kind of hippie tree ceremony, I thought, then quickly brushed the thought aside. I wondered if everyone else was having the same trouble concentrating as I was.
Mom kept reading, her voice soft but strong. I knew the words before she even said them. It was like a prayer with instructions. We were halfway through when I felt movement behind me. Dad was whispering something to Shane about the readings.
Focus.
I squeezed Annalise’s hand and she squeezed back. “Something’s happening,” she breathed.
A breeze had picked up. It seemed to swirl around us, almost like the air was dancing.
“We form this circle to join our energy, to provide a space where you can connect to one another,” Mom read.
I was listening to Mom but thinking about the Pickenses, too. They had searched unfamiliar places, never giving up hope that their child was alive somewhere. Would their lives have been better if they’d given up their quest and stayed home? Or would giving up have been too painful for them?
It is truly amazing what one can accomplish by simply focusing on it long enough.
I made myself listen to my mom’s words. I knew she was coming to the end of the ceremony, and I wanted to focus as hard as I could on what was being said. The breeze was swirling faster, with a stronger intensity. I closed my eyes more tightly as it whipped at my face and hair.
“Enter the circle and find your daughter,” Mom said. Her voice was louder, as if she was trying to be heard over the growing wind. “Find the peace you have been seeking and be released from your past.”
Noah was clutching my hand so hard it hurt. I opened one eye and saw that everyone in the circle was staring at the tree. I looked up, trying to see through the hair flying around my face.
“Wow.”
A pale pink ball of light glowed near the base of the tree. As the wind became more fierce, two golden lights joined it. They circled and spun and became brighter. The light grew so intense that finally I had to look down. A second later, the wind stopped completely, and when I looked up, we were standing in darkness.
No one broke the circle. No one let go of the hands they were holding. We waited, unsure if anything else would happen. Finally, my mom walked over to the tree.
“I think it worked,” she said.
“Did we get it on camera?” Dad asked Shane.
“I don’t know. What was that?”
“Did you see it?” Noah asked me.
I nodded. We let go of each other’s hands and moved toward the tree together.
“Is it over?” asked Avery. “Was that the end?”
I could hear Charlotte Pickens’s voice clearly in my head.
There is no end.
twenty-two
Ap
plying eyeliner while someone is pounding on the walls below you is no easy task. After my tenth attempt at leaning into the mirror and trying to draw a straight line, I gave up and went downstairs.
“You look great, honey!” Mom said from the sofa. She closed a magazine and smiled at me.
“I would look a lot better if I could have a minute of peace!” I said, staring in the direction of my dad.
He stopped his hammer in midswing. “Sorry about that. I’ll be done in just a second.” He eyed my dress. “It’s a little tight, isn’t it?”
I looked down at the white satin gown I had chosen for Homecoming. Avery had gone to the mall with me the week before, pulled it off the rack and declared that it was perfect. I agreed and did my best to help her find an equally perfect dress in return. She had politely tried on everything I suggested but ended up choosing a lavender silk gown I hadn’t even noticed.
“I think it looks lovely,” Mom said. “And the tiara is a nice touch.”
“The theme is ‘Masquerade Ball.’ I have a mask to go with it.”
Shane poked his head in. “What time will Noah be here?”
I tried not to groan. Shane was more interested in when Noah’s mom would be arriving. Trisha and Shane had become nearly inseparable in the two weeks since Charleston, something that had seemed sweet at first but was quickly becoming annoying. Shane spent all his free time with Trisha, talking about Trisha or planning elaborate dates with Trisha. He’d also decided that I was his official female perspective, which meant I had to approve every shirt, pair of shoes and spray of cologne he wore before he would leave on a date. It was strangely exhausting.
“Noah will be here any minute, so I need to finish getting ready.” I looked at Dad. “Done?”
“Last nail,” he said, turning back to the wall.
My parents had decided to stay in South Carolina for a while. They called it their “five-year plan” and said it was time to establish a home base. They would still travel, but now we would have a place to come back to. Dad was celebrating by covering every square inch of wall with framed pictures from his memorabilia collection. He’d dragged the dusty storage bins out of the garage and spent the weekend meticulously planning where each picture would be placed.
“A little to the left, dear,” Mom said from the sofa. Dad examined the black-framed copy of the channel guide, nodded and moved his nail over slightly.
It was nice seeing them together in the same room. After our experiences in Charleston, something seemed to shift between my parents. Mom wanted to actively research “intelligent hauntings,” an idea Dad vehemently opposed.
“Don’t you think it’s time to expand our research?” Mom asked him.
“No,” came his firm reply. “We will not open ourselves up to ridicule. This field is difficult enough without throwing crazy, new-age mysticism into the mix.”
“I’m not talking about mysticism,” Mom replied. “I’m simply talking about being open to new possibilities.”
But Dad wouldn’t hear it. In his mind, what had happened simply needed to be studied patiently and thoroughly in order to discover the reasonable explanation behind it all. Examining the footage proved impossible, though. When we sat down to go over Shane’s video footage, the tapes were blank. Not one image existed of the Circle of Seven ceremony. Instead of dancing lights, our monitors displayed black static. I knew what I had seen, though, and didn’t need videotape to confirm my experience. Neither did Mom.
But while Mom moved further away from the ideas she once held, Dad was digging in his heels. He seemed to forget that our house had been ransacked and that mysterious lights had encircled us. I hoped he would start sharing Mom’s new way of thinking, but if he didn’t, I hoped that at least my parents could accept each other’s opinions.
I returned to my room to finish getting ready. I hadn’t decorated my walls yet, but it definitely felt like my space with its piles of clothes dotting the carpet and all of my things finally unpacked. It had been nice sleeping in my own bed over the past two weeks. I had been sleeping soundly, without dreams. After everything happened, I kind of hoped I would have just one more, something short and happy to let me know that everything was good with Charlotte Pickens and her parents. I mentioned it to Noah, and he told me that it was a better sign not to have any more dreams.
“It means they’ve all moved on,” he said. “And wasn’t that the point?”
I agreed that it was. Then I agreed to go to Homecoming with him. It wasn’t a date, exactly. Avery was actually the one who asked him out. She had stopped by AV class at the end of the day and mentioned the dance to Noah, who said he wasn’t planning on going. “But you have to go!” Avery said. “I’ve worked so hard on this dance. You can come with me and Charlotte.”
So that’s how it was decided. The three of us would drive over together as friends, but I was secretly hoping that Noah and I would get some time alone together. I liked him, and my feelings had only grown since Charleston. He had seen my family at work and hadn’t run in the other direction, and that counted for something. But two weeks had passed, and the only time we’d had to really talk was during AV class, where our conversations were constantly interrupted by the work we had to do. I couldn’t tell yet if Noah saw me as anything other than a friend. Homecoming might change that, I thought.
“Avery’s here!” Mom called up the stairs.
“Oh, good,” I said when Avery walked into my room. “I need help pinning this thing in my hair.” I handed her the little tiara and a handful of bobby pins and sat on my bed.
She began to pull my hair back. “You sure about this? People might think you’re making a statement about who should be Homecoming queen.”
“It’s part of my overall costume,” I said. “Trust me.”
“I always do,” she murmured.
“You look great, by the way.”
“Thanks. This color suits me, I think.”
I smiled. “It really does.”
Charlotte Pickens’s last whispered words to me didn’t make sense at first. It took me a while to realize that she was actually giving me a message for Avery, one that I passed along a week later, after everything had calmed down a little.
We were at my house, watching the thermal camera footage from Giuseppe’s. “She said that forgiveness has its own color,” I told Avery. “She said that it appears as a unique shade of purple.”
“When did she say this?” Avery asked.
I still wasn’t prepared to tell people what had happened to me. It wasn’t that I thought they would doubt me. It was just something that felt private, something meant for me alone. Instead of revealing my experience at the tree, I told Avery that I’d had another dream in Charleston. It wasn’t exactly a lie, I reasoned. In many ways, it had been dreamlike and surreal.
“Will Jared be at the dance tonight?” I asked. Avery was finishing up with my hair, so I couldn’t see her face.
“Maybe. He said he might stop by toward the end.”
“Everything still good with you two?”
“Yes. A little awkward, I guess, but good.” Avery stood in front of me and examined her work. “This side is uneven,” she said. She began pulling pins from my hair. “I guess the weird part is how other people react to seeing me talking to him,” she continued. “I feel as if I have to justify being his friend or something.”
I liked seeing Jared at school every day. He didn’t eat lunch with us or anything, but Avery went out of her way to make sure people knew he was not to be treated badly. She even approached Harris Abbott, the captain of the football team, and asked him to pass the message along to the rest of the football players: Jared James was not responsible for Adam’s death.
I had been watching my classmates closely, looking for a change in how they treated Jared. So far, things had improved only slightly, but it was better than nothing.
“Okay. Done.” Avery smiled. “You look very regal, Charlotte.”
I stood up an
d curtsied. “As do you.”
She laughed. “I’m not going for regal. My mask has feathers.”
The Homecoming theme had generated a lot of buzz, as well as competition. In addition to crowning the traditional king and queen, we would also be voting on the masks, determining who had the most creative, the most unusual and the overall best. I knew some of the art classes had been devoting time to the project, mainly because Bliss Reynolds did a segment on it for the news.
I had another run-in with Bliss about a week after the Charleston incident. I was alone at my desk in the AV room, watching some of the daily footage, when Bliss sat down next to me.
“Rumor has it you’re the reason why Avery and Jared are friends again,” she said.
“I hadn’t heard those rumors,” I replied. I was focused on my work and didn’t feel like being bothered, but Bliss didn’t get the hint.
“Yeah, well, this school is fueled by them.” Bliss sighed. “Like the ones that started after Adam died.”
Now she had my attention. I paused the video I was watching and turned to her. “What rumors?”
“The ones about Jared, about how he caused the car crash.” She shook her head. “I didn’t believe them, of course. I guess people needed someone to blame. But when I spoke out about it, when I said it wasn’t true…” Her voice trailed off. “People only listen to the pretty girls.”
“What are you talking about? You’re pretty, Bliss. You know you are.”
She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Let me rephrase that. People only listen to the popular girls, girls like your sweet little friends.”
I was confused. What was Bliss trying to say? And why was she trying to say it to me?
“Bliss—”
She stood up. “Forget it, okay? Just forget it. I don’t know why I even tried to talk with you.”
“Bliss, whatever I did that made you hate me, I’m sorry. It was unintentional.”
For a split second, I thought I saw her eyes soften. But just as quickly, it was gone.
“Do you know how hard I’ve worked to make friends here? To gain a little respect and be taken seriously? And then you swoop in, a new girl from nowhere, and you’re all anyone wants to talk about. ‘Charlotte’s so cool, Charlotte’s so nice.’ It’s all I hear!” Bliss looked close to tears. “Well, enjoy your moment in the sun. Be careful, though. Sooner or later, everyone gets burned.”
Past Midnight Page 17
