I asked because the girl on Caroline Bromley’s left had her arm tucked around her, and her head was cocked so it was almost touching Caroline’s.
“Yeah, isn’t that interesting? That’s Leonora Black. All three were friends, at least for a little while. I know because some of Abigail’s student letters mention both Caroline and Leonora. I don’t know if they stayed friends with Leonora, though. If they did, Leonora didn’t keep in touch writing letters like Caroline and Abigail after they’d graduated. At least—that I know of.”
Star opened another folder and rifled through it. I waited politely, unsure if I wanted to read a bunch of old letters right now. What I really wanted was someone to talk to about Thatcher’s video—about the strange whisper in Taylor’s room. But I didn’t know Star well enough to trust her with all that. Bringing up the Winter Girl had felt about as close as I could manage.
“Here’s two where she mentions both of them,” Star said, handing me two photocopies, both of which she’d annotated in pen at the top:
AA: Caroline, LB.
I read the first:
November 10, 1888
Dear Eleanor,
Isn’t November so dreary this year?
I am eager for my Thanksgiving visit home. I try not to talk about it in excess, as my dear friends Caroline and Leonora do not have the means to do so themselves. They go home only for the Christmas holiday. Oh, how I wish I could bring them with me!
Since our last letters were in October, I’ve not yet told you about the All Hallows celebration here. It was great fun. There was a literary theme of fantastical stories. Caroline, Leonora, Sally, and I all dressed as characters from Alice’s Advemtires in Wonderland. Can you believe they let me be Alice? Caroline and Sally have fairer hair than me, but they wanted to be the silly Tweedle twins, as they are shorter and look uncannily alike. (And I believe Sally would have been loath, nonetheless, to receive the attention of playing Alice. As a twin, she could shrink behind Caroline.) Leonora, with her stature, was the queen. I spent the night saying “Curiouser and curiouser!” When called upon in class the following day, I wished to keep repeating it.
I am eager for another letter from you.
Your friend,
Abigail
May 1, 1892
Dear Mother,
Happy May Day! Are your daffodils happily blooming?
Graduation is only a month and a half away now. I am poised to be salutatorian. Surely you will tolerate my boasting. You know I would never do so out loud, with the girls and the teachers. But quietly here with youhuzzah! Perhaps you will hide this letter from Father.
I do hope Leonora and Caroline and I remain friends after we leave Windham. In recent weeks, I’ve felt a division between the two of them that I am at a loss to repair. Neither seems willing to explain. They don’t argue, but don’t seem as sweet to each other as they once were. Possibly they are both trying to lessen the pain of the final goodbye in June.
I am counting the days until you come for graduation.
Yours affectionately,
Abigail
I looked up. “Are these the only ones?”
“No,” Star replied. “She writes about Caroline and Leonora a lot, but these are part of a handful that mention them all together, like a trio.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“But what really got me thinking about the ghost was this girl here,” Star said slowly. She reached for the old dormitory photo and slid her finger over to the image of a tall girl at the end of the back row. Her mouth was turned down in a rather severe way. And her gaze was intense—almost mean. She was standing slightly apart from the rest of the girls. Or maybe it was just that the girl immediately next to her was leaning away from her.
Star tapped the sheet with the tiny scrawled names. “It says her name is Sarah Chase.”
“Ohhh,” I said. Everyone knew that the Winter Girl’s name was Sarah.
“I mean, is it just me, or do you get the creeps looking at her?”
“Hmm,” I said, studying the tall girl.
She didn’t look like a friendly person—I had to give Star that. But that was often true of people in such old photographs.
“I wonder at what point people decided it was okay to smile at a camera?” I said softly.
Star opened the Coke and poured it into two mugs.
“Right after the Second World War, maybe?” Star said. “I feel like I see more people smiling in pictures after that. Maybe people had more to smile about then. And more people had cameras. So it was less of a formal thing where you had to be serious about it.”
She used to live here, I thought, eyeing the severe Sarah Chase. Maybe even in this room. When the school was smaller, almost all of the girls stayed in one building.
“When did this become the senior dorm?”
“I think that was established sometime in the late ’40s or early ’50s, when enrollment went up. This couldn’t have been the whole group of residents that year, though. Maybe it’s just all the girls in one grade, or something.”
I tried to shift my gaze away from the girl, but something about her expression kept drawing me back in. I felt like she knew I was looking at her. Like she knew something about me, and disapproved. I thought again of the faint whispering in Taylor’s phone footage.
I felt the mug being placed into my hand but wasn’t able to close my fingers around it. And in the next second, the mug was on the floor in pieces. Coke sliding across the hardwood and browning the edge of our indigo rug.
“Oh!” Star jumped. “Sorry. I should have made sure you had it.”
“No, it’s my fault,” I said. “I’m out of it.”
I started picking up the mug pieces as she wiped up the Coke. Then she poured half of what she had left into a different mug, which she placed carefully on my desk.
“Do we know anything about Sarah Chase?” I asked.
Star shrugged. “She’s not really connected to my research about Caroline. She just…caught my eye. I haven’t looked her up in other documents or whatever.”
Star hesitated, glancing warily over at the new mug of Coke she’d given me—as if it was now, in light of our conversation, embarrassing in some way.
“Hey, where’s my Twizzler?” I said. “It’s not a Twizzle without a Twizzler.”
“Right! Uh…They’re in my drawer.”
She fumbled around at her desk, opening a couple of drawers before finding the package of candy. She pulled two out and dropped one in each of our drinks.
We sipped silently for a moment before Star said, “I wonder what kind of treats Caroline and her friends had when they lived here.”
“A cup of cider with a cinnamon stick, maybe,” I said, grateful for the awkward change of subject and suddenly realizing she’d called me her friend.
This was our first year as roommates and not just classmates. I wondered at what point that had happened. Sometime before the holiday break, probably—when we had stayed up late guzzling soda and finishing papers and labs due before we all went home.
Last year Star’s old friend and roommate, Jocelyn, had left abruptly around November—after the fiasco with the make-out footage. My junior- and sophomore-year roommate, Maya—with whom I’d gotten along fine, but who wasn’t really a close friend—had requested, and gotten, a single for her senior year. I didn’t want a single room. Particularly following Taylor’s death, I was admittedly reluctant to consider sleeping alone in Dearborn. I’d known Star since we’d been on the same floor freshman year. We’d never been friends, though.
Taylor had always thought Star was kind of dopey. Sometimes she referred to her as Star Crunch or Little Debbie. Although the nickname was fitting, I thought Star was a really pleasant and easygoing person. So last spring I asked if she’d room with me.
And I wouldn’t ever tell her about the nicknames.
“I’d like to think something a little more scandalous.” Star sucked on her Twizzler. “A hot toddy, maybe.”
I smiled. My phone vibrated and I glanced down to find an email notification with a message from Thatcher. I swiped quickly to read.
It looks like she took the video on 2/7/18.
“Another Twizzler?” she asked. I hadn’t even bitten into my first one, and I was still trying to make sense of the message.
Thatcher didn’t clarify that the date was only three days before Taylor had died. He didn’t need to.
“Haley?” I heard Star say as I felt my fingers tingle again. I gripped the mug tight, focusing on not dropping this one.
“Uh, sure,” I replied, putting my phone down and silently taking the candy.
6
I can hear Star’s rhythmic breathing. She’s already asleep.
It always feels the same, in a way, lying in the dark and listening to your roommate sleep. Still, over the years, I’ve gotten used to my different roommates’ unconscious quirks.
Star’s are long, deep breaths—like a sleeping baby in a cartoon. Maya, before her, would make curious, conversational little sounds in her sleep. “Hmmm? Mmmm?” And freshman year, Alex was a dead-silent sleeper except in the middle of the night, when she would occasionally huff and puff like a diminutive dragon, and a few times seemed to wake up with a quick, defiant yelp.
When you’re an insomniac, you learn to live with the sounds of the people who sleep next to you in the dark. Those sounds become the rhythm to which you run the reel of your unwanted thoughts.
Tonight, as on so many nights, mine are about Taylor again.
This time—Taylor screaming.
Not the actual sound of her screaming, which I never heard myself. But the question of whether she ever screamed at all that night. The night she died.
The girl who lived on the right side of Taylor’s room—what was her name?—said she heard Taylor screaming in her room before she jumped. The girl who lived on the left side of her—her name was Lily—said there was no screaming. That there was some commotion, and then she heard Taylor’s window screech open and then something outside—and that’s what woke Lily up. And when she looked out the window and saw Taylor on the ground, she started screaming. So that’s probably what the other girl heard.
It’s always felt important to me to know which girl was correct. Because who screams right before they deliberately jump out a window?
In the end, everyone decided the truth lay somewhere in between. That both girls were half-right. That Taylor probably didn’t scream before she jumped, but on her way down.
But now, after seeing Thatcher’s video, I wonder. What else might have been happening in her room that night—that made her scream?
7
Twelve Nights Left
How does a ghost break through silence? How does a ghost convey words? How shall I?
Scream them like the banshee that I am now? Or whisper them like the sweet, soft-spoken girl I once was? Write them in smoke or wind or water?
I have no friends here to teach me how.
I am all alone. I have to figure it out myself—how to push the weight of the words from my world into theirs.
8
Tuesday, January 29
My phone alarm dinged gently.
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Star sitting at the edge of her bed, arms twisted behind her, braiding her long wet hair down the back of her neck.
“Hey,” she said. “The Coke didn’t keep you up, did it? You sleep okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, yanking open a drawer and picking out a black jersey dress and dark purple leggings. I threw them on, deciding I didn’t need a shower.
After I’d pulled on my clunky black boots, I grabbed my book bag, threw open the door, and was relieved that it didn’t feel especially cold. A few minutes later, after I’d brushed my teeth, I was tromping toward the stairs, eager for breakfast.
Except.
Except that as I reached for the door that opened to the stairway, my eyes darted instinctively toward the hallway where Taylor’s room was. The fourth-floor halls formed a long U, with the shorter bathroom hallways capping each end of the long main hallway. Taylor’s old room was down one of those shorter hallways by the smaller bathroom.
And the door was open.
Again?
I couldn’t tell if I was really breathing. Letting go of the stairwell door’s handle, I stepped toward Taylor’s old room. My boots now made my feet heavy as I moved closer to the doorframe.
When I reached it, I looked in. And the room was mostly empty. On the wood floor was a box of cleaning sprays and a case of brown paper-towel rolls. Next to the window was a vacuum cleaner. I breathed.
And the window was closed.
I stepped closer to it to make absolutely sure. Then I reached back and touched the door behind me. I’d watched enough horror movies to know this was when the door is supposed to slam closed, locking me in.
But the door stayed put. It didn’t even squeak at my nudge.
In this moment, I remembered sitting on Taylor’s rug one night while she sat on the bed. We were both doing homework, but as she typed, she was singing “Jingle Bells” as a cat would: Meow meow MEOW, meow meow MEOW, meow meow meow meow MEOOOOOOOOWWWW.
This had always been one of her more charming eccentricities—that she liked to sing like a cat. I always had the feeling that this was something her family had laughed at too much when she was five or six, and she was still trying to milk it.
I stepped closer to the window. I couldn’t help myself. I hadn’t been in this room since we were friends, but I wanted to see the view from the window.
How far down was it? How had everything looked to her right before she did it?
I shook the thought away. It had been dark when she jumped. So it didn’t matter. She’d probably just seen blackness, and hurled herself into it. It must have looked completely different than it did now in daylight.
And yet I felt myself moving closer to the window, just to see. Just for a second. And then I’d get out of here. And tell Anna about the open door, like a good little Windkin. As Taylor would have put it.
The window was frosted. As I stepped closer to it, a gasp escaped me.
There were letters etched in the frost.
I MADE
I stepped closer. There was a second line beneath it, squished in between the first and the bottom of the window.
It wasn’t as clear as the first line. I squinted at it.
HER JUMP.
Before I had time to think or even breathe, I leapt forward and furiously wiped the words from the window.
And then.
Thunk thunk thunk.
I heard my boots against the wood floor before I really understood that I was running back to my room. The white doors of my dormmates blurring before my eyes, terrifying me with their uniformity, their sameness with Taylor’s. When I reached ours, I pushed it open and nearly fell back into the room, slamming the door behind me.
I tumbled onto Star’s already-made bed.
“Haley!” she gasped. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled into her quilt. “But…Taylor’s door is open again.”
“Oh,” Star said uncertainly. “Okay.”
“Can you tell Anna?” I asked, my voice calmer than I felt. “I mean, if you think she needs to know. I don’t really feel like talking to her.”
I wasn’t sure why I said that. It just felt like I needed to thrust the burden of my discovery on someone else—quickly. Because I felt significantly less sane than I had five minutes ago.
“Well…sure,” Star replied.
She sounded al
most gratified to be given this assignment.
As soon as I had this thought, I instantly felt bad for having it. Star wasn’t like that. It was the kind of thing Taylor said about her. The kind of thing Taylor said about everyone, really.
“I’ll go find her now,” Star said, leaving the room.
Sure thing, Star Crunch, a mean little voice called after her in my head.
“Shut up,” I murmured, although I wasn’t sure to whom. If anyone.
Once I caught my breath, I realized I hadn’t even mentioned to Star what I’d seen written in the frosted window. Or that I’d wiped it away. So when Anna went in to check things out and lock the door again, it would be as if the words had never been there.
* * *
The spontaneous evening hall meeting was held in the downstairs study area—the one with the big maroon wingback chairs and the stodgy lace curtains. The one that parents liked to sit in when they visited because it was pretty—but no one actually liked to study in because it was drafty and uncomfortable and the floorboards groaned at the slightest movement.
Since there weren’t that many chairs in the room, most of the seniors sat on the musty oriental rug. Anna stood in front of the old fireplace shouting, “Quiet, everyone. I want this to be a very quick meeting.”
I knew where this was going, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. Once the chatter in the room stopped, Anna clapped her hands resolutely.
“Okay. So. Look, everyone. Twice this week, fourth-floor students have awoken to the corner room, Room 408—that is, the housekeeper’s supply room—having its door unlocked and open and the window open as well.”
I felt a few stray gazes being directed at me (the former friend of that room’s last occupant), but I tried to ignore them.
Anna hesitated. “Umm, or rather, the window was open the first time. Today it was just the door.”
I felt my pulse quicken as I thought of what was written on the window. I probably should’ve told Anna or had Star tell Anna. But it was so cruel I was beginning to wonder if I’d really seen it.
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 4
