by K. C. Neal
“I have blue, too,” I said. “Do you want that instead?”
“No, I like the purple,” Hannah answered, and Genevieve nodded her agreement.
I really, really wished Ang were there. I took a deep breath and started mixing the hair dye in a small plastic bowl.
“So, um, we’ve never really talked much before…” I said, hoping they’d chime in and give me some clue as to why they were sitting here in my bathroom.
“I know, so weird,” Genevieve said with a little frown. “We were talking about that on the way over. We always thought you seemed cool, but, I don’t know. We’ve been friends with Sophie for so long…”
I forced a nonchalant smile as I handed them my old t-shirts.
“Yeah, she and I aren’t exactly BFFs,” I said, and they both giggled.
“How come you hate each other so much?” Hannah asked.
“Oh, we used to be friends, but you know … sometimes, stuff just happens.”
The truth was, Sophie and I had been pretty good friends in grade school. Our moms carpooled us to gymnastics and ballet, and we went to each other’s birthday parties and sleepovers.
Things started to change in fifth grade, the year Ang moved to Tapestry. I started spending more time with her and less with Sophie. That was about the time Sophie got really interested in boys, and all she wanted to do was talk about who was the cutest and which of them liked her. She started getting much more competitive in gymnastics and ballet, always trying to show me up. It drove her nuts that I was better than her at both.
But it wasn’t until a fifth grade slumber party at Sophie’s house that things changed for good. There wasn’t any big fight or anything, but a couple of days later, Sophie moved in with her aunt, and she had been horrible to me ever since. Not just regular Sophie-mean, but targeting me, humiliating me, and generally looking for ways to make me miserable.
“Okay, are you ready?” I turned to the girls. “Pull out a chunk of hair that you want dyed, and pin the rest back.” I handed them each a hair clip, those ones that look like jaws of pointy teeth mashing together.
I folded each of their dye-saturated strands in foil and set the timer on my phone. We had fifteen minutes before I could wash out the dye. It felt like an eternity.
“Um … so why did you decide to talk to me after all this time?” I said, hoping I sounded less awkward than I felt.
Hannah pulled her mouth to one side. “I guess it was after the bake sale. We were both just like, yeah, why shouldn’t we be friends with Corinne?”
“But the other day at the coffee shop you didn’t seem too excited when I offered you the cookies.”
Genevieve scratched at the back of one hand and stared at the floor. “Yeah, that was weird. We were all into it last week, but by yesterday … I don’t know, not as into it. But then after we saw you, we remembered that we really, really wanted you to dye our hair.”
She smiled at me in a hopeful way that appealed for my approval, and I felt a little bit sorry for her. I knew she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, but she seemed a little confused, and I had a sneaking suspicion that the yellow bottle from the pyxis was responsible.
I asked them what kind of music they liked, and they both relaxed a little. Before I knew it, the timer went off. I had each of them bend over the sink so I could shampoo the dye out of their strands.
“So this is permanent?” Hannah asked.
“Semi-permanent,” I said. “It’ll wash out in a few weeks.”
“Oh, cool. Then maybe we could try a different color.”
I wanted to laugh. I still couldn’t believe they’d let me do it. I had them pose together and I snapped a picture with my phone.
After the girls left, I texted Ang the pic and told her to call me as soon as she could. My phone rang a few minutes later, and I gave her the report.
“Oh my God, Corinne.” Her voice squeaked with glee. “Wow. I don’t think they’re faking. I mean you dyed their hair.”
I grinned. “Yeah, I don’t think so either.” My grin faded. “But what do you think it means about the pyxis?”
We both fell silent, reluctant to try to put the answer into words.
|| 12 ||
THE NEXT DAY IN the coffee shop, the bell on the door announced the arrival of almost the exact same horde of dance team girls who had been there the previous afternoon. But this time, they crowded around the counter and gaped at me like I was an adorable puppy in a pet store window.
“Hey!” said Jen, a senior dance team co-captain who used to be in my gymnastics classes. “You did such an awesome job on Hannah and Genevieve’s hair!”
“Oh, yeah, I should open my own salon, huh?” I tried to force a smile, but I knew it was weak. My eyes flitted from one cheerful face to the next. I could feel Ang’s stare boring a hole in the side of my head.
A few of the other girls chimed in, and then they just stood there grinning at me.
“So … can we get something started for you?” I asked.
They all ordered their coffees. Ang was pursing her lips so hard they were turning a little white, but she waited until we were alone before she turned to me. A faint case of nerves made my stomach flutter.
“What in the world is going on?” she asked, her hands on her hips, surveying the room. I saw the insight hit her, and her green eyes went wide. She looked at me with equal parts surprise and accusation. “What did you do, Corinne?”
“I, um, may have gotten rid of some cookies yesterday,” I said, shrinking away from her a little. I started twirling a strand of hair around my index finger.
“To a bunch of Sophie’s friends?” She shook her head. “You did that on purpose. We talked about this.”
“Oh, whatever,” I said. “It was only, like, eight girls. The experiment was your baby, and you ditched me yesterday, so I had to make all the decisions.”
“Eight girls? We don’t even really know what we’re dealing with here, and you’re trying to use it to, I don’t know, get at Sophie or something.” Ang was straining to keep her voice low enough that no one would overhear. “That’s not right at all. That’s what she’d do if she had the pyxis.”
I folded my arms and glared at the floor in front of Ang’s black ballet flats, but I couldn’t help silently acknowledging that I was playing with something I didn’t understand and couldn’t really control. But it wasn’t fair—she should take responsibility. It was all her idea in the first place.
A middle-aged lady was approaching the counter, so I pulled my face into what I hoped was an appropriate expression. But I felt as if my insides were shrinking, and my lungs wouldn’t expand enough to let me take a full breath.
When our shift finally ended, Ang stashed her apron, grabbed her bag, and barely looked at me as she said a terse goodbye. She didn’t even check to make sure I had a ride home from work.
That night, I sent her a bunch of texts, and even left a couple of voice mails, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to distract myself by reading The Great Gatsby for English Lit, but it was hard to concentrate with a cold ball of anxiety rolling around my insides. I’d never gone more than half a day without talking to Ang. I wanted to run over to her house, but I thought it might be better to give her a little more time. Besides, she couldn’t avoid me forever.
I arrived at school early the next morning and sat on the floor in front of the locker I shared with Ang. But the minutes ticked by, and she didn’t show. When the first bell rang, I sent her a text.
Where r u???
I waited as long as I could, and dashed to class just before the late bell. I didn’t see her all day and started to worry. Was Harriet after her, too?
I trailed behind a pack of kids on the way to the coffee shop, threw my bag behind the counter, and searched the place for Ang. With no luck, I finally went over to the café kitchen.
“Hi, sweetheart, how are you doing?” Dad said, barely giving me a glance. He flipped a chicken breast around in a fl
our mixture and set it in a large metal pan. “I’d give you a hug if I wasn’t covered in flour.”
“I’m good,” I said, realizing it was a complete lie. “How’s your day been?”
“Lots of full tables.” His enthusiasm sounded forced and his eyes looked tired. But that was nothing new.
“Have you heard from Ang? I didn’t see her today, and she’s, um, not answering her phone.”
“She called in sick this morning. Tell her I hope she feels better soon.”
“Oh yeah, I will,” I said. I was relieved she was home sick and not tied up in a dungeon somewhere with Snake Eyes, but I still felt terrible. How could I not know my best friend was home sick? How long was this silence going to last?
After work, Brad and I stopped at Ang’s house so I could drop off some soup for her, but her mom said she was sleeping.
That night after dinner, I was itching to pull the pyxis and from its hiding place. Focusing on a mystery might keep me from dwelling on Ang. Plus, I hoped to learn something new because I thought it might make her happy.
I sat in my room, staring at the names on the crumbly piece of paper from the secret compartment. I had about a million questions, and, more and more, I believed my grandmother was supposed to be here, explaining all of it to me. But she was gone.
Pyramidal union formed 1915
P: Ruth Jensen
S: Daniel Smith
G: Catherine Abel
G: Louise Sinclair
Pyramidal union formed 1951
P: Doris Conner
S: Harold Sykes
G: Dorothy Conner
G: Evelyn Wellington
Pyramidal union formed
P: Harriet Jensen Corinne Finley
S: Mason Flint
G: Angeline Belskaia
G:
I examined the first set of names on the list, the one that started with my great-grandmother. She’d died long before I was born. I wondered what life in Tapestry had been like in 1915. Did teenagers party at the cove back then? I grinned at the thought of serious-faced girls in long dresses and boys in suspenders hanging out on the beach on warm summer nights, watching for twilight rainbows.
The year—1915—nagged at me. That was a year I knew. I sat down at my desk, navigated to the Tapestry town website, and clicked on the history page.
There it was. My pulse sped as my eyes raced down the page. Nineteen fifteen was the year of the epidemic. The bank robbery. The fires. The McClintock murders. Was it a coincidence?
I grabbed my phone, excited to tell Ang what I’d found, but paused. I’d already sent her a ton of texts, and it was nearly midnight. Besides, this seemed like something we should talk about in person. Maybe the superstition surrounding the McClintock murders or my paranoia about the pyxis made me cautious, but I wasn’t going to text it to her. It could wait.
That night, I tossed and turned through a series of bad dreams. In one of them, I watched helplessly as my grandmother stood on the beach at the cove while the black fog swallowed her. I tried to scream, to warn her, but I felt like a spectator watching from afar. My grandmother and the fog faded, and Mason and I ran, hand in hand, on the dirt road leading away from the cove.
Mason’s hand slipped from my grasp, and I blinked against the glare of a blindingly white room, empty except for Aunt Dorothy, who lay encased in a glass coffin on a slender glass pedestal that appeared much too fragile to support its load. Her chest rose and fell with such long pauses between breaths. I stared for a few moments to make sure.
The urge to rescue her welled up in me, but I didn’t know what to do. I could see no visible opening in the coffin, no hinge or latch. My hand felt heavy at my side, and, looking down, I realized I grasped the neck of the white pyxis bottle.
Then I remembered Grandma Doris’s instructions. I began to approach the coffin with careful steps when a blaring fire alarm shattered the silence in the white room.
The persistent beep of my alarm clock hammered at my ears, and I groped for the snooze button.
Remembering the stark room with Aunt Dorothy encased in glass, I sat up in bed. I needed to get to Danton to give her the white liquid. But how? I was pretty sure Ang wasn’t up for doing me any favors. The café tied my dad’s every waking hour to Tapestry. Mom worked in Danton, but it wasn’t like I could ride with her and then hang out all day while she was at work. I doubted she’d be interested in making another long drive just to take me to Aunt Dorothy.
Then I remembered my appointment to take the driver’s license exam in Danton next week. How could I have forgotten about something that huge? It must have been a sign of my overly-stressed brain. My parents had coerced Bradley to take me, so now I just needed to convince him to stop at Aunt Dorothy’s retirement home. Then, I’d somehow get her to take some of the white liquid.
That was it. It’d have to work. And then, maybe all the strange dreams would stop.
|| 13 ||
THE NEXT DAY, ANGELINE was waiting at my locker. I smiled at her hopefully and started to ask how she was feeling.
She held up her hand. “I still think what you did was wrong.” She folded her arms. “But the silent treatment thing isn’t very mature. I can’t avoid you forever, and I don’t want to, of course.”
I let out a relieved breath and tried to look sufficiently penitent so she wouldn’t change her mind. I still thought she should take more responsibility for what happened, but I didn’t want to argue any more.
“I swear I wasn’t trying to do anything I shouldn’t. Seriously, Angeline, I want to figure out what all of this is so we don’t do anything stupid with the pyxis. Or let anyone else do anything stupid with it. And I realized something last night that I have to tell you about—”
The first bell interrupted me.
“Oh, crap.” I scowled and grabbed my geometry book from our locker. “Guess I’ll have to tell you at lunch. How are you feeling, by the way? You still sound a little stuffy.”
“Way better.” She gave me a quick hug and turned down the hallway the opposite direction I had to go for geometry. “See ya!”
During lunch hour, we ate our sandwiches, and I caught her up on what I’d discovered about the date of the first pyramidal union.
“I wonder if there’s some kind of Tapestry historian or historical society that could help us?” Ang said.
“I bet my dad would know. He seriously knows every person in Tapestry. He even knows stuff like who their parents and grandparents are, and how long their family’s been here.” I laughed. “Maybe my dad should be the town historian.”
“And there might be an archive of old newspapers somewhere. Or historical artifacts or something.”
I started to feel a little hopeful. “There’s gotta be, right? I mean, some of the families have been here for generations. Somebody has to be saving that sort of stuff.”
We both chewed thoughtfully for a couple of minutes. One tiny concern nagged me: what if we ran into another Harriet Jensen as we dug around? Were there other people out there who wanted to get their hands on the pyxis?
“Hey,” I said. “I keep having these dreams where Grandma Doris tells me I have to give Aunt Dorothy some of the white liquid from the pyxis.” I set my sandwich down and looked at Ang. “I don’t know how to explain it, but they’re more than dreams. It’s like it’s really her. I know that makes me sound slightly insane.”
“Wow.” Ang raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think you’re insane.”
“Gee, thanks.” I said. I chewed my bottom lip for a second. “Next week when I go to Danton to get my license, I’m going to go see her.”
“What do you think will happen?”
“No idea. But I’m going to do it anyway.”
* * *
That night, I dreamed about my grandmother’s kitchen. Grandma Doris and I were side-by-side at the counter making cheesecakes with graham cracker crust from scratch. A glass jar of my grandmother’s homemade, deliciously red-pink raspberry
syrup sat on the counter, ready to be drizzled over fat wedges of cheesecake. Aunt Dorothy occupied her usual spot, bent over one of her crossword puzzle books in the breakfast nook. I pressed the crust mixture into the bottom of a springform pan while my grandmother measured ingredients into a yellow ceramic bowl, the chipped one she always used when we baked.
Some part of me had the sense that I should ask Grandma Doris about the pyxis, Harriet Jensen, the list of names, and all the rest. But I couldn’t bear to bring it up and shatter the moment. I’d ask her after we got the cheesecakes in the oven, I promised myself.
But when I glanced out the window over the sink and saw the dirty gray fog piling up against the glass, I knew I’d waited too long. My heart in my throat, I turned to scream that we had to run. But I was alone. The crust mixture turned to ash under my fingertips, and in place of the raspberry syrup was a pyxis bottle filled with muddy, brown liquid.
I heard the front door swing open with a faint groan, and my breath caught in my chest. Footsteps shuffled heavily in the entry, and I watched the kitchen doorway, too terrified to move. A shadowed form appeared, and I knew with a certainty that chilled me to the center of my being that this person, or creature, wanted me dead. Not just dead, but completely erased, wiped from existence. Adrenaline coursed through me, and I willed my body to spring into action, but it was like trying to move underwater.
With the shadow creature in front of me and the black fog pressing on the window, I felt the world closing in. I was going to die.
I woke up thrashing, with a scream dying in my throat. Terror still gripped me, and my legs tensed with the urge to run. I shivered hard, freezing in my pajamas. I reached out to pull my bedspread around me, and I switched on the bedside lamp. Light flooded my bedroom.
Just a dream, just a dream, I mentally chanted over and over. I sat up and raked my fingers through the tangled mess of my hair. My hands were ice-cold.