Anna sat there for about a minute, saying nothing. I stared at her defiantly.
She got up.
“Okay,” she said, exhaling. “I’ll let you get to your studies.”
I was shaking when she closed my door quietly. I took a breath.
I grabbed a pen and notebook off my desk and carefully wrote the words I MADE HER JUMP. Taking another breath, I stared at what I had just produced. I pictured myself carving those words into a door. What would I use? A nail file? A pocketknife?
I owned neither (I used emery boards, not a nail file). And yet, I could see myself digging those words into white paint, leaning in hard till my hands hurt.
Hurt like the girl in Lucia’s story. The girl snow-angeling so hard her hands were raw.
Like that?
Hurt like the faces of those Fox sisters, those poor sad fakers who probably pretended to be haunted.
Like that?
Like both.
Because I felt those words. I’d felt them from the first second I’d seen them scrawled on Taylor’s window:
I felt I could have written them.
I MADE HER JUMP.
It was true. In a sense.
I wasn’t there in the room that night, so I didn’t literally make her jump.
But I wasn’t there. Exactly. I was not there for her.
I had discarded Taylor. After all those years of being afraid that she would discard me.
I MADE HER JUMP.
If anyone did, it was me. No wonder Anna believed I’d carved those words. No wonder someone thought they saw me do it. If anyone would write them, wasn’t I the most logical candidate? And Anna didn’t even know I had a history of sleepwalking.
I could almost convince myself I had done it. Almost.
But I had to ask myself, too: If Anna thought I had done it, why now? She’d not thought it was me yesterday. There’d not been any suspicion in her demeanor then—when she’d come to tell me that Star was in the infirmary. Unless I’d missed it. So whoever the “reluctant witness” was, she’d gone to Anna in the last twenty-four hours.
Why now?
I narrowed my eyes at Star’s bed. Again I had to wonder if she was really sick, or just didn’t want to face me. Did she maybe know Lily Bruno?
Why now?
53
I haven’t been that girl in six years, so why do I feel like she’ll be right there waiting for me after graduation? Like she might link me by the arm when I walk out of here in June, and still be hanging there by my elbow when I head off to college?
She’s as persistent as any ghost—wan and needy and not knowing whether to scream or smile. All she wants is attention, and that is what I so desperately don’t want to give her.
She’s strong in her weakness, in a sense.
She is the one who sat in my mom’s second lawyer’s office—the one that was costing my mom a fortune. Even at age eleven, I understood that. I also understood that this lady—this lawyer—had really nice shoes.
I was staring at her black pumps with the single thin silver strap—dressy, but not flashy—when I promised myself I would grow up and out of this. Be a woman who could afford those kinds of shoes. A woman who could afford them through smarts and strength and never have to lie or cheat or weep to get by.
But I was weeping in her office, while I stared at her shoes. I was saying that the reason I was so scared when my dad was pounding on the door was that “I didn’t want to have to think about him hurting her again.”
What I was worried about was the time on the stairs—when they had been fighting and it had not been clear who had really hurt who. There had been several times like that. And I was talking more about not wanting to think about any of it again. Not wanting the responsibility of having to describe or judge what I had seen. Because…I had never really seen him hurt her for sure. There was no “for sure” between my parents. I knew that now, but had not known it then.
But I knew that this thing needed to end somehow. Everyone was running out of money and patience. I was running out of something less identifiable. Or had I already run out?
And then she had questions, and I gave her answers. Solid, clean answers instead of the messy ones that roiled in my head. My spoken answers told a story that was a little more straightforward, a little more violent, than the one I struggled to remember. It was a story with an ending. I could tell it was the story she wanted, at long last, to hear.
I knew the power of my words—of my exact arrangement of words, which I knew was not quite true. Maybe I did not know it in that moment, but I knew it immediately after—the next time I saw my father for a pizza visit and it felt like the fight had left him and he was going to be happy with pizzas and monthly weekends because he could not bear the things I might say next.
That girl who did that—and then started sinking after she’d done it—I don’t hate her.
I just want her to disappear.
And yet, when I imagine myself carving those words on that door, it is her I see doing it, her tangled hair falling in her face, her fingers trembling before they tighten around her utility knife, her nail file, her screwdriver, her whatever. Holding on tight to keep from sinking.
54
One Night Left
All the whispers. All the voices.
They all say the same thing now.
Haley Haley Haley.
It all comes down to her.
The voices might get to her, in the end.
55
Saturday, February 9
THUNK THUNK THUNK.
I sat upright.
“Star!” I whispered when I’d recovered my breath, eyes adjusting to the pitch black.
But then I remembered that Star wasn’t here. I was alone.
“Who is it?” I called dumbly, like every nearly dead horror movie victim on my dad’s TV.
I was shaking. I didn’t want to get out of my bed. I was afraid that darkness would swallow me while I was between its warmth and the light switch.
I grabbed my phone. It was 2:18 a.m. Tomorrow was the 10th.
The ghost was letting me know she was coming for me.
I breathed in and out and told myself that wasn’t true. Seriously, maybe Star had pumped me full of ghost research to put me on edge, maybe to distract me. It was starting to feel a little suspicious, how helpful she had been. Now that she was gone.
So probably the knock had been in my dreams, and I had awoken afraid it was real. It wouldn’t be the first time. When I was younger, I used to dream of that time my dad pounded at the locked front door, yelling for my mother to let him in. Except hadn’t that always been more of a BANG BANG BANG than a thunk thunk thunk?
What difference did it make now?
I thought about what Star had shown me—about the Fox sisters. About their knuckle cracks and their apple on a string.
I typed the Fox sisters into my phone and found the picture of them I’d seen the other day—in which they were young—about my age. One in a black dress, the other in white. I imagined them knocking on my door. And it helped me relax.
Those girls weren’t scary to me at all. I could relate to them. It felt understandable—inevitable, even—that they’d messed with people’s heads. They’d said what people wanted them to say. They felt the adults around them wanting it—their parents, their older sister, the newspaper people who swarmed around them. It was how they survived. Or even, for a while, how they had thrived.
I steadied my breathing and turned on the lights. If I heard another thunk thunk thunk, I would imagine one of those girls’ faces attached to the ghostly fist delivering it. So if I heard it again, it would feel sad, but not scary—and maybe even familiar in its intention.
I took out my phone and tapped on Contacts. My father wasn’t one of my qu
ick-dial numbers.
“Haley? Is everything all right?” was how he answered.
We hadn’t spoken since Christmas. We’d talked on the phone, but it was my mother’s year to have my brother and me for the holiday.
“Kind of. I mean, yeah. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“Two in Massachusetts,” I offered.
“They don’t have, like, a lights-out time there?”
“Sort of. But they don’t really enforce it for seniors. We’re supposed to be old enough to figure out when we need to go to bed.”
“Ah. That makes sense.”
“I used to stay up way past my bedtime even when I was a kid, remember?”
“Umm…I guess.”
“When you would watch your scary movies downstairs…did you know I would sometimes sneak part of the way down the stairs and watch them through the banister?”
I heard my dad running a faucet, then a clatter of what I assumed were dishes in a sink.
“Hmmm…I think one time I remember you doing that.”
I felt a tear fighting its way out of the corner of my eye.
“It was because I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “Same as now.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be sorry,” he replied. “It didn’t bother me any. And it was probably a good cultural education for you, those movies. Classic horror.”
I was silent. Not for that, Dad. I’m not sorry for the movies. That’s not what I’m sorry for.
“How’s Patsy?” I asked.
Patsy was my dad’s beagle mix.
“She’s good. She’s here curled up by the pellet stove.”
It occurred to me that my father probably would’ve been interested to hear about the Dearborn ghost, if I’d thought to tell him about it earlier, when things had first started. What with his old horror-movie habit and all. But it was too late now to explain everything. The story was too crazy, and I was too tired.
“Sounds cozy,” I murmured.
My dad told me a story about Patsy’s latest encounter with the mailman. Then he asked me how school was. I gave a rote answer about it being a lot of hours of studying, but I was doing okay.
“It sounds like a lot of hard work, but you’re lucky to be there,” he reminded me.
I decided not to tell him he was lucky to be by a wood-stove with a sweet dog named Patsy. That I often wished I was there, too.
We said goodbye.
56
Thump thump thump went my heart and my memory all morning long, its tone alternating between scary and familiar. I ate my Cheerios like a zombie, by turns trying to shake the noise from my head and then trying to access it again.
Thump thump thump.
Did I imagine it? Because tomorrow was February 10?
Probably.
Was I crazy?
Maybe a little. But not crazy enough to carve those letters on my own door. So the question was, who could hate me enough to say that I did?
It was Saturday. So after breakfast, I got back into bed and stayed there for a couple of hours to think on it.
Jocelyn Rose kept coming to mind. But she was long gone. So Star, of course, came to mind next. Jocelyn’s close friend. Best friend? I had not thought of them that way until she’d said it the other night.
I needed to get to the infirmary to grill Star. But first, I had someone else I had been meaning to talk to. Especially now that I didn’t trust anything Lily had said—which brought the night of Taylor’s death back into question. It was Lily’s account versus Jayla’s—and I needed a third account to confirm Lily might be lying.
According to the Cosmic Comics website, they were open from one to five on Saturdays. I called after one o’clock and asked if Tricia would be in.
“This is Tricia,” said the woman who answered. “And I’m in till five. Can I—”
“Okay, great,” I said, and hung up, not wanting to waste another minute.
I bundled up and walked the two and a half miles to Cosmic Comics. I could have asked Anthony for another ride, but I didn’t want to burden him again. And I felt like being alone anyway. I walked as fast as I could, focusing on the fog of my breath and the steady THUNK THUNK THUNK of my boots on the sidewalk.
* * *
Cosmic Comics was cooler than I’d imagined—painted black with little decals of stars and galaxies and posters of superheroes. Behind the front desk was Tricia, with her familiar baggy-blouse look and long, loose brown braid. I’d seen her a lot in the joint Dearborn-Barton dining hall last year.
She nodded at me as I came in, barely looking up, and at first I busied myself in the store, pretending to be browsing. Eventually I found some My Little Pony comic books—which I used to read when I was nine or ten. The Friendship Is Magic series was still going after all these years. I picked up a copy of the latest one and brought it to the counter.
“Hi there?” I said. “Tricia?”
“Yes. You look familiar. Are you a Windham girl?”
“Yeah. I’m a senior now.” I ran my hands over the clear plastic protective cover of the comic book. “My name is Haley. You probably recognize me because I hung out with my senior friend there sometimes. Taylor Blakey.”
“Oh.” The easy smile fell from Tricia’s face. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Um. Thanks.”
My phone buzzed. I looked down at it, meaning to be quick, but my heart caught in my throat. The text was from Anna:
Hello Haley. I just looked for you in your room. I need to meet with you at 4:00 to talk. I assume you can accommodate that since you did not put in for any off-campus car trips today or the Derby shuttle. Let me know? Thanks.
Ugh. What now? I thought. But I typed a K in response before I returned the phone to my back pocket.
“It was just about a year ago now,” I said. “Exactly a year tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Tricia pulled her braid forward, smoothing it against her chest, petting it like a kitten. “You doing okay?”
“Kinda. I don’t know. I’ve been talking to Jayla and Lily. The two girls who were there when she died, you know? Her neighbors.”
“Yeah?” Tricia studied me. “Does that…help?”
“I don’t know if I’m looking for help,” I replied. “I’m looking for the truth. They have different stories. Jayla said she heard screaming before the jumping. Lily says she didn’t.”
“Mmm-hmmm. Yes, I remember that. But—”
“Who do you think is right?” I interrupted.
Tricia sighed.
“Jayla,” she admitted.
“Yeah?” My voice cracked with surprise. I had expected her to be diplomatic, to be noncommittal, to say that everyone processes trauma differently.
“Yeah,” Tricia said softly.
“Why?”
“Well, I think Lily was so shaken she doesn’t remember things exactly as they were.”
There it was. Different memories. Everyone telling their truth. But I didn’t buy it.
“What makes you say that?” I asked gently.
“She said that the first thing she heard was Taylor’s window screeching open. But that’s probably not true.”
“Why not?”
“Well, maybe you know Taylor’s little secret about her window? Since you hung out with her so much?”
Tricia raised one eyebrow. I shook my head.
“She was constantly opening and closing it to sneak a puff or two,” Tricia said. “I definitely smelled the weed on more than one occasion. And you don’t need to pretend you don’t know that, Haley. I don’t work at Windham anymore.”
“Yes, but…that was the secret?” I asked.
“No. H
er window. The snowboard wax was the secret. The police investigators noticed it. She had it on there pretty thick. Probably applied it regularly.”
Taylor’s snowboard wax. I’d thought she’d kept it around to remind everyone what a cool hobby she had, or rather, could have if she tried. Apparently, it had multiple purposes.
“She put snowboard wax on her window?” I asked.
“On her window frame. To keep it from squeaking, I’m sure.”
“Are you sure it was her?” I said. “Could someone else have done it? Like, right before she died?”
“No. It was her. She’d done it for months before that. The custodians went into the rooms over the holiday break to reseal the windows to help with the heating. They noticed how slippery-smooth her window was, and the wax she kept by the window. They mentioned it to me, thought I’d want to know. Like, they thought maybe this meant this girl was sneaking out her window sometimes, something like that. But I didn’t say anything to anyone about it. I knew it probably had something to do with her smoking. But it didn’t seem worth making a thing of. Especially…you know…Taylor’s family.”
I nodded. We all knew why Taylor got away with little things at Windham. Another thing Tricia could admit now that she didn’t work there anymore.
“But it does make me think Jayla’s account was more accurate, I think,” said Tricia. “I said as much to the administration and the police. But in the end…what did it matter, really? She was either screaming or not screaming before she jumped. If she was screaming, she might have been suffering from some kind of hallucination from all of the THC. If she wasn’t, it was maybe more of a suicide. If Jayla was right about the screaming, then they could blame it more on the drug. Which I guess is a tiny consolation for the family, in a way. But minimal consolation, really. I agreed with the administration that it wasn’t worth pressing the issue. Jayla and Lily were clearly both pretty traumatized by what they saw that night. Why make it worse by questioning the details?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded.
Traumatized…or lying. And it seemed like someone would have more of a reason to lie to deny screaming than to confirm screaming. Especially someone who seemed to be lying about—or obfuscating—other stuff. Maybe about the Fleming scholarship? Which sounded more like a weird under-the-table thing than a real scholarship. Could Taylor have been connected to it somehow? Her family had so much money, after all. But somehow it didn’t all connect.
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 29
