When All the Girls Are Sleeping

by Emily Arsenault

  Star took her laptop, typed a few words, clicked a few times, and then handed it back to me.

  THE FOX SISTERS AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM

  The Fox sisters’ story began in 1848 in Hydesville, New York. Sisters Kate and Maggie, ages 11 and 14, alerted their mother to some mysterious noises they were hearing in their humble home. They convinced their mother that the sounds “responded” to them—such as answering with a requested number of knocks. Their mother and some of her friends became convinced that they were communicating with the spirit of a peddler who’d been murdered in their house. Friends and neighbors soon descended on the house, followed by curiosity seekers and reporters.

  Kate and Maggie’s sister Leah (who was several years older than them, and raising a family on her own after being abandoned by her first husband) took them to her home in Rochester—and found that the mysterious “rappings” followed the girls. The sisters’ story garnered the interest of several local religious leaders and intellectuals. Soon, under the direction of their older sister, Kate and Maggie performed the phenomenon in a public hall in Rochester, and then at several different venues in New York City. Still managed by their elder sister, Kate and Maggie became well-known mediums, and traveled extensively, giving séances in many US cities. They drew the attention of public figures such as James Fenimore Cooper, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Horace Greeley. Sometimes they summoned important historical figures in their séances: the spirit of the late Benjamin Franklin was a frequent crowd-pleaser.

  There were many skeptics, but still the Fox sisters’ popularity grew, and so did spiritualism generally. Numerous copycat mediums began to emerge—many of whom hailed from the Foxes’ native upstate New York.

  Maggie became involved with a Catholic man, Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, who discouraged her from her spiritualist activities, which he considered fraudulent. Maggie stepped away from spiritualism during her common-law marriage to Kane (whose family rejected Maggie), but returned to mediumship after his untimely death in 1857. Kate married a fellow spiritualist, Henry Jencken. As Kate and Maggie aged and the pressures of public and family life mounted, both women began drinking heavily. There was frequent tension with their sister Leah, who had parlayed her spiritualist prominence into surprising societal respectability. She remarried a Wall Street banker and had a more stable life than her younger sisters—whose relationship with spiritualism became conflicted over the years of personal struggles.

  In 1888, Maggie made a public confession at the New York Academy of Music, claiming that spiritualism was a sham. Supported by Kate, she admitted that the initial knockings on that fateful night were made by an apple on a string, and that later she and her sister perfected the skill of cracking their knuckles and their toe joints to make the mysterious rappings. Maggie was paid $1,500 to make this statement, a fact that spiritualists often point out to discredit it (along with the fact that she recanted about one year later). While Maggie tried to resume spiritualist activities, they were never as popular as before. Leah remained a prominent spiritualist until her death in 1890. Kate and Maggie died in 1892 and 1893, respectively—both penniless.

  “So an early instance of poltergeists showing up around teenage girls,” I offered.

  “Oh…it’s so much more than that, though. Those two girls were huge for the tradition of, like, séances and things like that in 19th-century America…and other countries, too, as it spread. They pretty much started that whole movement. They were famous mediums while they were still teenagers, even. I wonder if Sarah and Leonora’s aunt knew them when they were girls, or just when they were older.”

  “But what does that mean for Sarah Black, you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I’m starting to develop a theory. If their aunt, who at least partially raised them, was friends with the Fox sisters, and very clearly a big believer in spiritualism, then that probably rubbed off on them. Maybe then Sarah or Leonora—or both of them—had spiritualism in their upbringing. Maybe they brought that here.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Then…well…I’m not sure where we go with this…but if Leonora was sort of a spiritualist, maybe she, like, did séances and stuff. Tried to conjure her sister after she died. Which could have started the whole Sarah Black anxiety that got people thinking about a Sarah ghost haunting the halls.”

  “Or it really did unsettle Sarah’s ghost and set her to haunting the halls,” I offered. “Or unsettled some other spirit by accident.”

  Star hesitated, stretching her mouth downward with exaggerated skepticism.

  “Let’s not go there immediately,” she said.

  “Well, what if Sarah Black herself was big into spiritualism? What conclusions do we draw then?”

  Star thought about this. “I don’t know.”

  “Would a spiritualist be more inclined to become a ghost, you think?” I persisted.

  Star smiled nervously.

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious, asking that question.”

  “I can’t either,” I admitted. “It just felt like the natural next question, to me.”

  I turned back to the laptop article and stared at the picture of the young Fox sisters. The one on the right wore white, and looked sad and troubled as she looked directly into the camera. The one on the left had on a darker dress. Her gaze was shifted sideways, looking away from the camera. She appeared more bored and preoccupied than her sister. It was sad to think of what their charade—or their ordeal, depending on how you looked at it—did to their lives eventually.

  “Star?” I said, without looking at her.

  “Yeah?” she replied.

  I looked from one sister to the other. I couldn’t decide which girl was more painful to look at. Whether the pain came from lying and faking or genuine ghostly experiences, it was clear to me they were both suffering there in their pretty dresses. I closed the laptop and handed it back.

  “I haven’t told anyone this,” I said quietly. “It was Taylor who took that video of Jocelyn.”

  Star slid her laptop onto her desk, avoiding my eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “That’s not a surprise. Why are you, uh, bringing that up now?”

  “You’re saying you knew that?”

  Star shrugged. “Most people kind of knew. I mean, who else would do something like that? Even Charlie was mortified, right? It probably wasn’t any of his close friends.”

  “Did Jocelyn know?” I asked.

  Star sat on her bed, cross-legged, looking at her hands. “Of course Taylor was definitely one of her main guesses. But she was so upset, catching the person wasn’t really at the top of her list of priorities. It was hard enough for her just to get through the day, those first few days.”

  “Yeah. I can imagine.”

  “But…” Star’s voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Can you?”

  I hesitated. I’d suffered lots of small humiliations at home before I’d come here to Windham. And then spent a few years scared to death of repeating them somehow. And yet—

  “Probably not,” I muttered.

  “And you didn’t answer the question,” she said flatly. “Why are you asking me about that now?”

  I couldn’t tell if there was a little anger in her voice.

  “Because something about seeing those girls…that picture,” I stammered. “Um, thinking about what could have been in their hearts when that picture was taken.”

  Sad heart. Sick heart. God sees the heart.

  Star stared at me for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Do you know there were a few days there when I was worried about Jocelyn hurting herself? Like, for real?”

  Star seemed to be waiting for my reaction to this, but I couldn’t find words quickly enough. It wasn’t surprising, but Star seeme
d to think it was. She got up and started to rustle aimlessly through the papers on her desk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I was kind of relieved when she went home,” she mumbled. “Relieved that it wasn’t me who would have to be watching her, worrying. Isn’t that so terrible?”

  Star’s hands came to rest on top of a manila folder. I thought she was going to show me yet another old piece of paper from her endless supply—but then realized she was only waiting for me to reply.

  “No. It’s not terrible. You knew she was safer at home. With her family.”

  Star shrugged. “I don’t know if that was really true. Some of us are safer with our families. Some of us are not.”

  “You?” I whispered, because I felt she wanted me to ask.

  “Yes. Definitely safe. But Jocelyn…there were issues. I won’t go into it. She wasn’t thrilled to go home to them, I’ll just say that.” Star paused before glancing up at me. “And you?”

  “Me what?”

  “Your family? Safer than here or not?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said. The more pressing question for me had always been whether I was safer for them.

  Star studied me for a moment. “And Taylor’s?”

  “I wish I knew,” I answered. “I’ve wondered that a lot. I wish I knew more about her family. I know that her mom came here for high school, that both her parents made a ton of money, that her dad was an investment banker and her mom was a lawyer. That she had one brother who was nice to her and one who wasn’t.”

  “How not nice was he?”

  I shook my head. “She never elaborated much. She used the word asshole a lot. I wouldn’t overthink it.”

  Star considered this, then nodded.

  “I could have proven it was Taylor that did it,” I said. “To Jocelyn. I had the evidence.”

  Star fell back into her desk chair, letting her arms hang. “What evidence?”

  “The burner phone she used to send out the video.”

  Star looked around the room—presumably so she wouldn’t have to look right at me.

  “That’s where she stored it?” she murmured.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But you didn’t want to snitch on your friend,” she said slowly, charitably.

  “It wasn’t so much to do with being a loyal friend,” I said. “I blackmailed her with it.”

  Star looked skeptical. “Blackmailed her…to do what?”

  “To leave me alone. To let me ditch her without her doing something like that to me.”

  Star breathed. “Ohhh.”

  “Isn’t that so terrible?” I said, repeating her words. I didn’t mean the repetition as mockery, but I wondered how it sounded to Star.

  Her face was blank. In her hesitation, I considered her odd question a moment ago: That’s where she stored it? Like this was a question she’d considered before. Could Star have stolen Taylor’s laptop—temporarily—to look for concrete evidence of what she’d done to Jocelyn?

  “Oh, no, no,” she said, her second no and her exuberant head-shaking giving away her polite insincerity.

  No wonder poltergeists hang around teenage girls. We lie, lie, lie about everything, all the time, out of the absolute necessity of being nice. The tension is probably like candy to them.

  Star and I were both silent for a minute.

  I didn’t feel bold enough to ask her the question that was on my mind. So I switched gears.

  “Star,” I whispered. “Why did you ever agree to be my roommate?”

  Star glanced at her phone and sighed.

  “Star?” I prompted.

  “Because I was lonely,” Star said. “And my best friend was gone. Same as you. Now…are you hungry?”

  “Not really,” I said. The words best friend seemed to linger in the air between us.

  “I’m going to see if there are still any Doritos in the machine.”

  “Fingers crossed,” I said, so fake-cheerful I think it startled Star.

  She left and didn’t come back. And I didn’t see her at dinner.

  45

  Come on, now.

  Of all the weird and crazy things.

  Star is not a thief, for one. She doesn’t have it in her.

  And Alex is not a ghost.

  Waifish girls are a dime a dozen here at Windham. And everywhere, really.

  Alex isn’t Sarah Black. Alex most certainly isn’t dead. With the exception of these last few days, Alex is one of the most “alive” people I know. And the resemblance is vague. Like when you see two girls with the same color hair together, and assume they’re sisters. Like that. Mostly just like that.

  And there’s no real pattern of Sarah haunting girls who looked like her. Because Taylor had been the visual opposite of Sarah Black. She was tall and muscular with dark hair.

  And I think that I was studying Alex in that picture way too hard—because the alternative would be to study the other girl in the picture.

  Haley. Fourteen-year-old Haley.

  No fear in her eyes. She hides it well. No smile. No frown. She can’t decide how she feels and isn’t willing to commit. Because to commit would be to lie, no matter what.

  And there is no feeling worse than lying.

  Even emptiness of any feeling at all.

  46

  Three Nights Left

  February 10.

  They want me to sleep through it, those girls.

  I hate those girls.

  But they cannot make me sleep forever. They will see.

  Come that dark night, another girl will fall.

  47

  Thursday, February 7

  I was awake before Star.

  I watched her sleeping for a moment, wondering if I’d thanked her enough for all of the sleuthing she’d done about Sarah Black. She seemed to enjoy it. But was I taking advantage of her? She seemed a girl people could easily take advantage of—what with her worrying everyone hated her at the drop of a hat. I hoped Mark Byrne wasn’t taking advantage of her. I hoped the romance was a real thing.

  These were the thoughts that were bouncing around in my brain as I shuffled to the shower and back. When I returned, I wondered if she was awake yet. I started to push through the door when something caught my eye.

  A small heart—slightly smaller than my hand. Carved in the front of the door. Off to the left, opposite the doorknob. With letters scratched inside:

  I stood frozen, my heart pounding. It didn’t take a lot of fancy code breaking to figure out those letters. I Made Her Jump.

  On my door. Overnight.

  In only a matter of minutes, everyone would see this: Star, Anna, Alex, Maylin. Everyone. I flew back into the room.

  “Morning!” Star said, pawing through her sock drawer.

  “Morning,” I mumbled, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I raced to the closet, nearly wiping out on the slick hardwood floor in my socks, yanking the pull string of the overhead light.

  Stickers. Stickers! That was the solution, for now. I knew I had some somewhere. Yes. In the purple plastic bins with the old hair accessories and other junk.

  “You okay?” Star called.

  “Um. Yup. Yeah,” I stammered, seizing upon a large square World Wildlife Federation sticker with a panda on it. I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten it. Probably a free bumper sticker, and of course I didn’t have a car.

  I rushed back out, closed the door, peeled the sticker off its backing, and slapped it on the heart. It just barely covered it. Exhaling, I entered the room again.

  “What’s up?” Star said, staring at me, a single sock hanging out of her hand. The sock was blue with sea turtles on it.

  “Just kind of scatterbrained this morning,” I said. “I don’t think I’m
really awake yet.”

  I figured I could explain about the sticker later. I’d come up with something—say my tree-hugging brother had sent it to me, or whatever. For now I couldn’t think of a good fake reason why I’d done it first thing in the morning.

  * * *

  Morning classes were a blur. Thankfully, Mr. Cortes didn’t call on me. I wouldn’t have been able to answer. My body moved from class to class, and my face kept on its practiced look of obedient intellectual curiosity.

  But my mind was reassessing everything I thought I knew about the ghost.

  Sarah Black. Yes, I thought the ghost was Sarah Black. I thought Sarah Black might be haunting Alex this year, even if I could never get her to admit it.

  But then why was she at my door?

  Was she haunting both of us now? Was my theory—about Alex being singled out—entirely incorrect? Was the ghost less discriminate than I’d thought?

  Or—two ghosts? One in a black dress, one in white?

  Like the Fox sisters. But they had no direct connection to Windham, aside from the Black sisters’ aunt knowing them. They were older ladies by the time the Black sisters were teenagers at Windham.

  Maybe the ghost had been Sarah Black but was no longer. If Taylor died the same day, Taylor could be the ghost now. I had to stop denying that possibility.

  And who would Taylor want to harass in Dearborn?

  Me, of course.

  But—no. Rationally, no. Someone was just trying to terrify me. And they were doing a great job. The question was, who would want to do that?

  I’d covered the heart and letters with the same kind of impulse that I’d wiped the words away from Taylor’s window. I was scared of them. I was ashamed of them. It was almost as if I could have written them.