Possessions

by Nancy Holder

  No. No, no, no.

  “We’ll never fight again,” she said, but I knew she was asking me, not telling me.

  “Agreed.” I made myself smile, but my mouth was quivering. “Never.”

  I padded back to my bed. As I bent over, a coldness pressed against the back of my neck, and I straightened and turned around.

  The porcelain head was staring directly at me. It was positioned at an angle, not straight ahead, as Julie kept it. Which meant . . .

  That she moved it when she dusted, I told myself, turning off the light.

  Except we didn’t dust.

  The first streaks of sunlight saved me from more nightmares. I woke up panting, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

  It was Saturday, which meant free time after roll call and late breakfast at nine. The school put on all kinds of events on weekends to keep us occupied. Some were special electives that parents paid for at the beginning of the semester—extra art and music lessons, for example. There were lots of clubs, too— French, German, yoga, fencing. I had signed up for yoga, but I had yet to actually go.

  And none of the clubs started at five in the morning.

  But I was awake, and restless, so I decided to get dressed and take a walk. I wasn’t alone enough at Marlwood, I decided. I was constantly surrounded by other people. Most of the girls on campus had single rooms, except for Rose, who also shared with someone. And Alis and Sangeeta, when they moved into Grose so late in the term. Money bought privacy. Money bought so much. I thought about Julie’s pony, and I decided then and there that if Mandy had been lying about Julie’s chance to reunite with Pippin, or didn’t follow through, I would kill her.

  Then I took it back, and creaked open the front door. Theoretically, five o’clock still dwelled inside the boundaries of our official curfew, but no one had been busted for curfew violation yet, and I doubted anyone ever would. These were kids who drank wine at home and could wake up the chauffeur to take them clubbing at three in the morning. The rules didn’t apply, and probably never would for their entire lives. It would take more trouble than I was worth to treat me differently, even though I was “different.”

  I put on my new army jacket because suddenly, with the turn of the calendar page, it was bitterly, bitingly cold. I could smell winter in the air, even though, in San Diego, I had never seen snow on the ground except in Julian, high in the mountains.

  I walked past the quad as the sky turned from gray to pink, hands in my pockets, wondering if I’d been right in the first place. I didn’t belong here, and I never would. But I didn’t want to go home, where I had completely messed up my life. This was my chance to start over.

  Soon I was on the blacktop road that led to the lake. I remembered that Troy said there was a little inlet where they tied up their stolen rowboats, and I decided to look for it. The boat of Mandy’s Troy.

  People were not possessions. They didn’t just belong to another person.

  Birds were chirping by then, and fog coated the lake like whipped cream. I replayed my brief, sweet moments with Troy, and I wondered again why on earth he was with Mandy Winters. And if he ever thought about not being with her.

  As I walked off the path and onto the granular dirt, I heard a voice. At first, I couldn’t register whose voice it was, although I was disappointed that I wasn’t alone. But then I realized it was Mandy.

  Oh my God, is she saying goodbye to him? Did Troy spend the night?

  I moved quietly to my right, where a straggly line of large boulders would give me some cover. I was spying on her again. I didn’t care. I minced behind the first boulder, then the second, careful not to disturb the little pebbles beneath my high-tops. I poked my head out just as a large black bird shot out of the fog with a squawk. I jumped, startled, and whipped my gaze toward Mandy, to see if she had heard me.

  Surrounded by rushes, the shoreline curved into a small cul-de-sac—an inlet. Mandy stood beside a white metal sign on a gray pole, which said NO TRESPASSING in chipped black letters. Dressed in a black sweater and black jeans, she had on a black parka, and over that, the beaded shawl Ms. Meyerson had worn in her role as the Gypsy fortune-teller at the Jessel haunted house. She looked old-fashioned, like her house.

  There was no rowboat, at least that I could see. Mandy was alone. She was leaning forward with her face tipped down as if she were looking for something among the rushes, or in the water. Her white-blonde hair hung over her shoulders in ripples, very pretty, and nothing I could ever aspire to.

  I crept behind the third boulder, which brought me closer to Mandy. I was nervous. I ran through some potential reasons to explain why I was hiding behind a rock at five-thirty in the morning, but really, what was the point? Mandy and I would both know the score.

  I craned my neck slightly forward, all the better to eavesdrop. Despite my fluttery anxiety, I had no shame. Mandy was the enemy, and if I could get something on her, that’d be nothing but good.

  “Well, I am disappointed, sweet bee,” she said, in a slight Southern accent. “You promised me. I thought last night would go better. Here we’re already into November, and you don’t have enough. Only four.”

  I frowned. Who was she talking to? Did she have cell phone reception? Was Troy in the lake?

  “She’s gonna come out sooner or later, and when she does, we need to be ready,” she went on, in the same singsong voice.

  There was a long pause. I had a crick in my neck and I was cold. Wind blew across the lake, shifting the fog, wrapping around her like fingers. I heard a plop, followed by another one. One or two more. Mandy was dropping something into the lake.

  “I’m sorry,” Mandy said, in her normal tone of voice. “I’m trying.”

  “If y’all don’t keep up your end of the bargain, honey, I’m not sure I can give you what you want,” she said, going Southern again.

  “Oh, no, you have to. You promised,” Mandy pleaded—with herself, it seemed. Whoa. “You promised to get him out of there. It’s hell for him. They’re the crazy ones. You . . . well, you know what it’s like. It’s like it was here.”

  “Not by half,” she said in her Southern voice, her tone stony, angry. “You haven’t got the first notion what it was like.”

  “That place is not helping him. It’s killing him. If anything ever happened to him . . . I’d die without Miles. I would.”

  “No man is worth dyin’ over, honey,” she answered herself. “Not even him.”

  “You don’t know him. Miles is, he’s . . . Oh God . . . he looks out for me. Makes sure no one . . . ”

  Was she crying? Over her brother? I was seriously weirded out. If this was a mental breakdown . . . Talk about stress . . . I couldn’t wait to tell Julie. Who would probably not believe me, because at the moment, I was having trouble believing it myself.

  Maybe she was practicing for a prank.

  Practicing crying. Hard. In the freezing-ass cold, beside Searle Lake, with me spying on her. The whole thing was so bizarre that I began to wonder if I was dreaming again. I half-expected Julie to shake me gently to wake me up.

  “Please,” Mandy said brokenly. “You said you’d help us.”

  There was no answer, by which I mean that she didn’t answer herself. Mandy Winters is schizo, I thought, trying it out. She’s nuts. Or she went nuts. That’s why they sent her here.

  No one had been able to confirm the Lincoln Bedroom story, but after all that netsurfing, I was well acquainted with the Winters’ high-powered lifestyle—an endless round of charity bashes and fancy parties. I had gaped at the clothes, the cars, the celebs and VIPs—I was willing to bet her rich, powerful parents could bury any kind of scandal—lock their drug-addict son up and send their crazy daughter out of town. What if she went bonkers again and did something to put us all in danger?

  No way. I remembered my mom discussing Hillary Clinton. Hillary had held imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt, to help herself think through important political issues. What was prayer, but talki
ng to someone else about your problems? And Mandy . . . talking to herself in a Southern accent? About having four of something?

  More birds rose from the lake, squeeing and cawing. The fog started to boil away. The crick in my neck became a throbbing ache; I was chilled to the bone, and my stomach was in danger of growling. I hoped Mandy was done, but she slid down to her knees and leaned forward on her hands, gazing into the lake. Staring at something.

  I was willing to bet it wasn’t Eleanor Roosevelt. She had told us there was a ghost in the lake. Maybe she looked exactly like Mandy Winters’ reflection.

  The silence stretched on. Rushes surrounding the inlet made papery sounds in the wind. My cheeks stung with chill, and my mind was starting to travel down the yellow brick road of what-ifs. The Jessel haunted house was spectacular; she probably had leftover special effects seeded all over campus, like land mines, to scare us and make us do weird stuff because . . . why?

  “You’re the only one who knows what’s going on, sugar. Keep it that way,” Southern Mandy ordered Regular Mandy.

  “Okay,” Regular Mandy replied. “But you’ll . . . you’ll make it happen, right? You’ll get him out?” Her voice was so low I could barely make out the words.

  There was no answer. Mandy leaned farther over the lake.

  “Right?”

  Her voice echoed off the lake—right, right, right? I tipped back my head, not listening to my protesting neck muscles—to see if by chance anyone had climbed down onto the cliff to see what was up with Mandy. There was no one else there.

  Then she got to her feet and whirled around so fast I thought she’d seen me. I caught and held my breath, standing as still as I could, clenching my mouth shut so she wouldn’t hear my chattering teeth. Her face was blotchy and tear-stained, and she looked younger than I’d ever seen her look. Maybe it was the lack of makeup, or audience. Or maybe it was fear.

  Maybe when she and Miles had been busted in the bedroom, she’d lost her mind. Or maybe I was being set up. First, she let it be known that she and her two minions did séances; and then she did pranks about ghosts and haunted houses. And Lara had been working overtime to scare me when we walked back from the lake. And Kiyoko just “happened” to use a bookmark from an occult bookshop to save her place in a story about secret Satan-worshippers. Then, they let me see their black eyes of death and the weird faces. Next, there was that hysterical fit at the party, and now this.

  Whatever the case, I was on alert now. I didn’t know what I’d do about it, but I sure as hell knew I would make sure my friends—especially Julie—were safe.

  fifteen

  November 3

  I couldn’t believe I had only been at Marlwood for a week. But it was true. And it was time to check in with Dr. Ehrlenbach.

  I was terrified. As my long black skirt (my only skirt) flapped against my boots (scuffed, and resistant to polishing), I tugged on the sweater Julie had lent me—it grazed my hips, and not in a fashionable way. I touched my hair. Julie had wrapped it into a chignon and insisted I wear her chandelier jet earrings. And that I put on some lip gloss and, y’know, made an effort.

  Then my sweet best friend had kissed me approvingly on the cheek and said, “It’ll be fine.”

  Crunch, crunch, crunch on the gravel; thuddathud dathudda on the panic-o-meter. My mind raced as I poured over my many infractions: out after curfew, drinking, and I was sure I had screwed up today’s test in Spanish. Mi madre no quiere bailar. My mother doesn’t want to dance. Mi madre no quiere morir. My mother doesn’t want to die.

  At least the project with Kiyoko was on track, even if Kiyoko wasn’t. She was a jittery bag of bones. On the upside, working together at Jessel gave me a chance to spy on all of them. Something had shifted; there was tension in the air. Everyone else was usually holed up in Mandy’s room.

  Mandy looked slightly better than Kiyoko, but not much. Like she wasn’t sleeping much, either. Like her drug habit was wearing her down. Or like going crazy really took a lot out of a person. Not that I was one to talk.

  I opened the door and saw Ms. Shelley, who nodded at me and said, “Take a seat, please.”

  And then I saw Rose. She was wearing a plain black jacket, a white shirt, and a short black skirt, tights, and shoes. She looked like a bartender at a catered party. Or a hip inner-city nun. It made me sad to see all her color gone, but I understood why she’d done it. If she’d been summoned to see Ehrlenbach, she must be in trouble.

  She was perched on the edge of an L-shaped green leather sofa, beside a table topped with a vase of real fresh flowers. What I at first thought were neat stacks of magazines were actually college catalogs.

  “Hey,” she said by way of greeting. “Must be that time of the week.” I stared at her. “Dude, don’t you know I’m the other scholarship student?”

  “You are?” I hadn’t realized there were any other scholarship students. It hadn’t even dawned on me to wonder.

  “Yes, I are. I have a really high IQ. What’s your excuse?”

  I actually smiled a little. “Good essay? My dad thinks I’m fulfilling some kind of grant requirement.”

  Rose recrossed her legs and tugged at her skirt. “Well, then they’ll have to keep you. I’m not even a minority or anything. God, I could use a smoke.” I nodded, even though smoking was repulsive.

  She peered up at the clock hanging above us and let out a slow, shaky breath. “At least I’m missing biology. Today we start on fetal pigs.”

  “I had it last year,” I told her. “I said I had a religious objection to dissecting.”

  “Oh, shit, why didn’t I think of that?” she wailed. The receptionist glared at her and she hunkered forward, grimacing. “I mean golly-gosh-gee-whiz, what a stupid ho I am.”

  I almost burst out laughing.

  “We’re probably going to create our own Frankenstein monsters next semester,” she went on, pulling back her face in her Ehrlenbach impression. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Oh my God, could this place be any weirder? Do you know what I did last night? I went to a séance. At Jessel.”

  I stared at her. “You did?”

  She nodded. “I was loitering at the door out of the commons, trying to decide if I should go back to get another chocolate chip cookie, y’know, for studying, when Lara and Mandy started to go past me. Then Mandy gave me a long look and asked me what my lucky number is.”

  “What?”

  Rose snickered. “Yeah. So I said, ‘Seven.’ Even though it’s not. I don’t have a lucky number. But her eyes widened and the next thing I knew, I was getting invited to Jessel. Lucky me,” she added drily.

  “I won the lottery, too,” I told her. “I’m working on a project with Kiyoko.”

  “Then you’ve seen Mandy’s weirdatorium.”

  “No. I’ve only been downstairs. I haven’t even seen Kiyoko’s room.” I leaned forward, urging her to spill.

  “Whoa.” She rolled her eyes. “The first thing you see when you walk in is this rotted portrait. She said she found it in that library. Then, you see her Ouija board and her books about spirits and hauntings. And that crystal ball from Halloween.”

  I listened hard. “So . . . what did you guys do?”

  “We just hung out,” she said.

  Ms. Shelley’s phone beeped. I was afraid one of us was about to be summoned to Dr. Ehrlenbach’s. “Then what?” I pressed.

  “It was really stupid. They got out the Ouija board and asked it a bunch of questions, and I could tell that Mandy was moving the little plastic triangle thingy.”

  “Questions like . . . ?” I prompted.

  She waved her hand dismissively but I wanted—needed—details. “You know, like sleepover stuff. ‘Are you here, what is your name, how did you die?’”

  “And?” Chills ran along my spine.

  “It was supposed to be some girl named Gilda who died during an operation.” She chuckled at my startled expression. “I know, I heard that ghost story, too. It happened in the opera
ting theater.”

  “Yeah,” I said in a soft voice, shivering as I remembered how I’d felt in that place. The black eyes, Mandy’s freakout. Major drugs? Or was there a ghost in there?

  She must have mistaken my response as that of a true believer. “Lindsay, Mandy was moving the triangle. She was pranking me and I have to say, I was kind of insulted. It wasn’t up to her usual standards. No sound effects, no costumes. I figured it was because I’m a scholarship chick, so she doesn’t have to spend a lot of effort on me.”

  “But why do it at all?” I asked.

  “She’s bored? She’s into numerology? She’s crazy?” Rose moved her shoulders. “I’m going with crazy. I think this place is a little beyond her. All these elaborate practical jokes and stuff . . . She always has to be the center of attention, you know? Like when she ‘freaked out’”—Rose made air quotes—“at the party in the OT. Then everyone fawns all over her. It’s a textbook cry for help. And it’s very sad.” She smiled at me, not one bit sad herself.

  I nodded. “You’re right about the crazy part. She’s really losing it. I heard her talking to herself.”

  “Yeah.” Rose’s eyes widened. “Kiyoko made some comment about that when Mandy went to the bathroom, and I thought Lara was going to hit her. I’m talking serious body-blow.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “Ms. Cavanaugh, you may go in,” Ms. Shelley said.

  I nodded and got up, wiping my sweaty palms on my skirt.

  “Do you think I should tell . . . you-know-who?” I whispered.

  “Debatable,” Rose whispered back. “Mandy pays tuition. You, not so much.”

  We shared a look. Rose smiled wanly. Then I walked down the short hall. And there was the statue again. Just like I’d seen on my first day. Edwin Marlwood. He had a very fierce face. He didn’t look like a man who would run a posh girls school. More like a judge for the Salem witch trials.

  I knocked. Waited. There was no reply, but Ms. Shelley had told me to go in. So I did.

  On an easel inside the office, an architectural sketch of a round building with a canted roof was labeled, WINTERS SPORTS CENTER. Okay, that decision was made. I would not be discussing Mandy Winters with Dr. Ehrlen-stein.