From Bad to Cursed

by Katie Alender

  “You know, those aren’t toys,” I said, trying to keep my voice as light as possible.

  “Oh, really?” replied a voice I knew. “Because I bought it at a toy store.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw Lydia Small in the central position. Her long dyed-black hair was in a deliberately messy updo, and her brand-new eyebrow ring glinted in the candlelight. Her fingertips rested lightly on the planchette, a little wooden piece that moved around the board, and the other two girls had their fingers on either side of hers.

  Lydia and I were friends for freshman and part of sophomore years. But lately things were pretty strained. She couldn’t get over the fact that I could possibly prefer to hang with anyone besides her and the rest of the pretentious, black-clad Doom Squad. And I couldn’t get over the fact that she was insufferably annoying.

  “Hurry, ghost of the Ouija board,” she said in an oogie-boogie voice, “tell us something interesting before scaredy-cat Alexis runs away.”

  The other two giggled. I stood with my back to the wall.

  “What was that?” Lydia said, lowering her ear to the board. “What did you say?” Then she looked up. “The ghost wants to know if you’ve always been boring, or if it’s something that happened when you started hanging out with clones—hold on, I’ll answer.”

  I sighed. “Grow up, Lydia.”

  She leaned down to talk to the board. “The answer is B,” she said. “Clones.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I should try harder to be unique…like you and the other fifty people at school exactly like you.”

  The door opened, letting a slope of light fall across the room.

  “Lexi?” my sister’s voice asked. Her hand groped the wall and flipped the light switch, blinding us all and bringing forth groans of protest from the girls on the floor.

  The light popped off again. Kasey stepped in, with Megan behind her.

  “What is this, a Losers Anonymous meeting? You guys are totally killing the mood,” Lydia said, getting to her feet. “I’m going to get something to eat.” Her minions followed her out.

  Kasey stood motionless, staring down at the Ouija board. After a second, her body gave a little jolt and she looked up. “Megan said you were looking for me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I am,” she said. “Just tired.”

  I knelt, grabbed a candle, and blew it out, then reached for another. “I can’t believe they would leave these burning.”

  “Um…Lexi? You should maybe…see this.…”

  While I’d been focused on the candles, Kasey’s eyes were locked on the board itself.

  I looked down and froze.

  The planchette was moving.

  It glided from letter to letter, making a light scratching sound against the board.

  Megan breathlessly rested her hands on my shoulders, bending down to watch.

  “It already said B-E,” Kasey whispered.

  The movements seemed feeble, but it was perfectly confident about where it was headed.

  C-A-R-E-F-U-L

  “Will do,” I said, trying to figure out how to get the three of us as far from this situation as possible in the smallest amount of time. “Let’s go, you guys.”

  “No, Lex, wait,” Megan said, grabbing on to the leg of my jeans. She knelt on the floor.

  Kasey was standing with her palms flat against the floral wallpaper. “It’s not my fault,” she whispered. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know, Kase. It’s all right—we’re leaving. Megan,” I said, looking pointedly at my sister. “Come on.”

  “Shh,” Megan said, not moving her eyes from the board. “Be careful? Why? Who are you?”

  The pointer wobbled and began to move again. Megan grabbed the pad of paper and little wooden pencil from the open box and wrote down each letter.

  In spite of my eagerness to go, I found myself watching its progress.

  E-L-S-P-E-T-H

  Enough. I tried to tug Megan toward the door, but she leaned forward, her eyes blazing. The bow from the front of her shirt dangled almost to the board. I had a horrible vision of something reaching up and grabbing on to it.

  “Elspeth,” she asked, “why do we need to be careful?”

  E-X-A-N-I-M-U

  I yanked my arm free and slapped my hand on the planchette, holding it still. Under my palm, it pulled insistently, trying to get away. I turned to look into Megan’s indignant eyes.

  “We talked about stuff like this,” I said. “About not doing it, remember?”

  “This could be important, Lex,” Megan said. “She’s trying to tell us something.”

  “We don’t even know who she is!” I protested. But before we could get into a debate, the door opened with a crash.

  Lydia and her followers came back in, smelling vaguely of cigarettes. “Oh, whoa,” one of them said. “It’s dark.”

  But my darkness-adjusted eyes could see fine.

  And what I saw was: the pointer turning around and around, faster and faster, until it spun in place like a top.

  Just as Lydia turned on the light, I backhanded the spinning planchette across the room. It hit the wall with a clatter.

  “What are you doing?” Lydia demanded. “That’s not yours!”

  “Relax,” I said, relieved that no one else had noticed the spinning.

  “They blew out all the candles!” one of the girls whined. “That sucks.”

  “Alexis sucks in general,” Lydia said. She looked at Megan, who was still clutching the paper and pencil. “And that’s mine too!”

  “Let’s go,” I said, my hand on Kasey’s arm.

  We were on our way out when Lydia called to me.

  “Hey!” She stared at the pad of paper, which Megan had handed back to her. She looked at us, half-questioning and half-accusatory. “Elspeth? Why did you write that down?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “What’s the matter, Lydia, are you scaaaaared?” one of the girls asked.

  Lydia scowled. “Shut up! I’m returning this stupid game. I’m going to get my money back.”

  “No you’re not,” the second girl said, laughing. “Look, this piece fell in a candle and melted.”

  “Sorry, Elspeth!” the first girl cackled, and they dissolved into a fit of giggling.

  I could feel the heat of Lydia’s glare on my back as we closed the door behind us.

  Megan checked her phone. “My curfew’s ten thirty. Are you guys staying, or do you want a ride?”

  Staying was the last thing I felt like doing. I found Carter at the end of the hall, still surrounded by preps. I heard the words “outreach” and “social consciousness,” but he abandoned the conversation to draw me close to him.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Megan’s taking us home,” I said. “Kasey’s worn out.”

  His brow furrowed. “I can leave now if you need me to.”

  “No, don’t worry,” I said. “You stay. Schmooze up some votes.”

  Megan stared at the road and tilted her head thoughtfully. “Do you think Elspeth—”

  “Megan, no,” I said, trying to use the tightness of my voice to remind her that Kasey was in the backseat. “Seriously.”

  “What?” she said, pausing at a stop sign. “There are ghosts everywhere. You know it as well as I do. And so does Kasey.”

  “But we don’t have to be their friends!” I said. “Rule one: Don’t be friends with ghosts.”

  “She was nice, though.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Kasey’s weary voice came from the backseat. “About Sarah.”

  Megan was stunned into silence, and I was, too. I’d never heard Kasey mention Sarah—the evil ghost who’d possessed her the previous October, thirteen years after murdering Megan’s mother.

  “Thank you, Kasey. See?” I said. “Kasey thought Sarah was nice. And look where it landed her. You want to spend a year in a
mental institution?”

  I TURNED AWAY FROM the brightness of the muted television and rested my eyes on the ceiling. The glow from the screen made the whole room flicker like a rainbow campfire.

  And then I heard it—

  A footstep in the hall.

  I froze. All my concentration shifted to listening for another sound. The flashing TV hovered on the outer fringes of my awareness. I felt like I was seeing, hearing, breathing out of my ears.

  Another step.

  I was on my feet and standing at the entrance to the hallway so quickly I felt a little light-headed. I balled my empty hand into a fist.

  Kasey stood perfectly still in the middle of the hall, her body angled toward our parents’ bedroom door. Her long, old-fashioned Christmas nightgown hung to her ankles, still creased from being folded in its gift box for eight months.

  I’d seen her like this once before—silent. Waiting. Plotting.

  Against our parents, against me.

  Slowly, hesitantly, she raised her hand.

  “Kasey!” I said.

  She jumped about a foot in the air and landed hunched over, clutching her chest.

  “God, Alexis!” she hissed. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  I didn’t move any closer. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “Going to the bathroom,” she said. “What are you doing out of bed? It’s one o’clock.”

  I shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “So you’re playing security guard? You think I’m going to try to kill everyone?”

  “No, of course not.” Although…hmm. Maybe that was what I was doing.

  Kasey reached for our parents’ doorknob.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “I need to pee, Lexi,” she said. “Do you have to analyze every detail of everything I do?”

  “I’m not trying to analyze you,” I said. “I’m trying to keep you from peeing on Mom and Dad’s carpet.” I pointed to the door on my right. “Bathroom.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Everything looks the same in this place.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  I went back to the couch, feeling virtuous for not pointing out that it was, after all, her fault that we’d had to move to Silver Sage Acres.

  A minute later, Kasey drifted into the room and sat on the loveseat, her arms crossed in front of her. “Why’s the sound off?”

  I shrugged. We stared at the silent infomercial.

  As I started to nod off, Kasey spoke. “How about we skip school tomorrow?”

  “I don’t really do that anymore,” I said. “Besides, everybody knows you never skip your first day.”

  She curled her knees under herself. “Maybe I can catch chicken pox between now and eight o’clock.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, trying not to think of the bazillion things that could make it not fine. “I’ll help you.”

  “I wish I hadn’t missed the first week. Everybody else knows each other, and I don’t even have my schedule yet.” She went pale—or maybe it was the blue light from the TV. “I don’t know where anything is.”

  “Mom can take you a little early,” I said. “They’ll have somebody show you around, point out where all your classes are.”

  Kasey clamped her mouth shut and gazed at me through her wide blue eyes. She seemed to be a tiny ball of a person—even her toes curled inward. “Lexi? Is there any way I could ride with…you?”

  All weekend I’d been waiting for some bit of my little sister’s personality to work its way out from under her odd, fragile shell. And now, with that one question, she was being herself for the first time—her old, wheedling self. Mom and Dad used to call her “Slick,” and Dad always said Kasey could sell a broom to a vacuum salesman.

  Even if it was her needy side that came back first, it was a glimpse of Kasey.

  The real Kasey.

  The first glimpse I’d seen in a really, really long time.

  Megan didn’t even blink when she saw my sister standing beside me in the foyer the next morning. “Hi, guys. Ready to go?”

  By the time we were all buckled up, Kasey looked liked a prisoner about to walk the green mile.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being nervous,” Megan said, looking at her in the rearview. “You’ll be all right.”

  “I’m not nervous,” Kasey said, but her voice wobbled, betraying her.

  We had to maneuver a little to get her out of the backseat with her shortish, tightish denim skirt on. When she was safely on solid ground, no risk of flashing her underwear to the entire parking lot, I started walking toward the double doors with Megan.

  After going about thirty feet, I got the distinct feeling that we weren’t being followed. Sure enough, Kasey was rooted in place by the car, gazing back out at the road like she might make a break for it.

  “Um,” I said to Megan, “I think I’d better go with my sister.”

  She shaded her eyes to look back. “Seems like it,” she said. “See you in Chem.”

  I walked over to Kasey, who held her backpack in front of herself like a shield.

  “Kasey,” I said, “you have to go inside. Otherwise it doesn’t count as going to school.”

  “I changed my mind,” she said, her voice an octave higher than normal. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “The good news is, nobody asked.” I gave her a gentle push.

  As we walked toward the front office, I saw a bunch of people I knew. But Kasey didn’t seem to recognize any-one—not even the kids she’d gone to school with for years. Nobody acted like they knew her, either. Maybe her generation had shorter memories than mine. I blamed texting.

  Kasey couldn’t stop gaping at the kids in their happy, animated groups. She gradually slowed to a stop in the middle of the corridor.

  I raised my eyebrows and waited.

  She took a breath and held it, her chest rising without a fall. “I don’t have a locker.”

  “They’ll assign you one,” I said. “They’ll even give you a lock.”

  “Near yours?”

  “No. Near your classes.”

  Kasey started gnawing on her fingernails. Why did she look so childish? She was fourteen—only two years younger than me.

  “Listen.” I pulled her fingers out of her mouth. “It’s going to be fine. I’ll help you. I can show you where—”

  “Stop acting like I’m a baby!” she said, yanking away from me.

  People peered at us curiously. Kasey was pretty, maybe even beautiful, even with her hair in a hurried ponytail, and her denim skirt, Minnie Mouse T-shirt, and Converse tennis shoes.

  I lowered my voice. “Kasey, it’s only high school. If I did it, you can do it.”

  As if her shoes were made of lead, she pushed one forward, then the other, and we were walking again. When we got to the front office, I pointed at the registrar and leaned in to hug her.

  She jerked back.

  “Okay,” I said, stepping away. “Have a good day, then.”

  “No, wait, I didn’t mean…” She flapped her arms helplessly. “At Harmony Valley, we weren’t allowed to touch each other.”

  “Well, news flash, Toto,” I said, stinging from her rejection. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “Nice camera,” the girl said. “How many megapixels?

  Mine’s twelve-point-one.”

  “Oh, it’s not digital,” I said. “I shoot film.”

  She blinked. “But how many megapixels?” She pressed a button and the flash shot open, startling her. The dozen-megapixel beast took a hard landing in the grass.

  I watched her wipe blades of damp grass from every part of the camera except the lens. When she was finished, she looked up, still waiting for an answer.

  “Um…nine-point-seven?” I said.

  “Cool.” She smiled. “Let’s go to the library. I really like the bricks there.”

  I followed without protest.

  During one of their many Kasey-themed phone c
alls with the Surrey High guidance counselor over the summer, my parents had slipped up and mentioned my photography hobby. This prompted said guidance counselor to mention the school’s photography class, which prompted said parents to bug me endlessly about enrolling in it.

  I’d given in partly to make them happy and partly out of curiosity.

  But it was a massive mistake.

  That day, I’d been paired with a senior named Daffodil or Delilah or something, and sent out to take some exploratory photos. Never mind that there was nothing worth exploring at Surrey High, but Daffodil/ Delilah insisted we hike all over the campus, examining tree bark, sidewalk cracks, and now the bricks in the library wall.

  I’d taken four photos. Film is expensive.

  But digital is free, and Daffodil couldn’t get enough. She had me scroll through eighteen identical images of a pinecone so I could tell her which one was the best. I chose one at random.

  “That’s my favorite, too!” she said.

  I wished I could be charmed by her enthusiasm, but the words that kept creeping to the edge of my tongue were dangerously noncharming. So I opted for silence, under cover of which I plotted out the main points of the argument I’d use to get unenrolled from the class.

  As we changed course to head for the bricks, something across the courtyard caught my eye—a late- arriving student and her mother. The mother was young and pretty, sitting in a wheelchair. The daughter was a study in awkwardness. She wore denim overalls over a shiny, cheap-looking pink shirt, like a dance recital leftover. Her stringy hair hung loose around her face, with an enormous fake sunflower pinned above one ear.

  I thought there was something odd and stilted about the way she moved until I noticed that she walked with a cane—like, an actual old-people cane.

  I snapped a couple pictures of them and then noticed that the girl was looking right at me. I blushed and turned away, the camera still hiding my face.

  LUCKILY, THIRD PERIOD WAS English with Mr. O’Brien, who knew me from sophomore year. He saw my pink hair and occasionally prickly attitude as evidence that I was one of those temperamental creative types. In other words, I got away with a lot in his class.

  I asked if I could go to the office about a personal issue. He said he hoped everything was okay and wrote me a hall pass.