by Zoe Aarsen
That thought was devastating enough to make me gasp before I could reply to Henry. Eternity, all alone.
When Violet had been the storyteller conducting the game, there had never been a violent spectacle like what I’d just seen at her house… although I guess in retrospect I’d been suspicious the night of Olivia’s party that the flames in the fireplace were burning just a little too high.
But still… there’d been no windstorm. Nothing had burst into flames. Not like the hellish display I’d just witnessed.
“That was just so—so—stupid!” Henry exclaimed. “What am I going to do if you die?”
I swallowed hard, not wanting to promise him that I wouldn’t die, because I’d never felt more distracted and out of touch with reality in my whole life than I did while staring out his windshield at that moment. It seemed not only possible but likely that I’d die before I’d ever arrive back in Tampa. Before I’d ever see Trey again. And the way Henry had been acting since we’d arrived at Violet’s house that day was making the reason why he’d been FaceTiming me every day for the last few weeks very clear: He cared more about me than I’d allowed myself to realize.
I was distractedly worried about Trey, what had happened to him at Northern to make him escape, and where he was at that very moment. But I could no longer deny that I felt a powerful attachment to Henry, too. His brimming tears made me feel like crying.
“You’ll… keep trying to figure this thing out… get the curse off Mischa.”
Henry squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “What’s the point of figuring this out if you’re not here? What’s the point of”—he looked up and winced at what he saw through the windshield: gray sky and bare trees—“any of this if you’re not here?”
I couldn’t speak; the same thoughts had been occurring to me for the last few weeks about going through the motions of life in Florida without Trey. What was the point of anything if we couldn’t be together? Realizing that Henry felt that way about me made me acutely aware of how insensitive I’d been toward him. I had been flattered by his attention. I’d grown accustomed to receiving it. But while I’d been eager to end the game that Violet had started so that I could secure my future with Trey, Henry had remained involved in the effort more out of a desire to prove himself to me than to avenge Olivia.
Even though he knew I was in love with Trey.
Even though it was clear to me now that he’d left Wisconsin for France to try to get over not only Olivia’s death, but his feelings for me.
And instead, once he’d gotten there, we’d fallen into a daily habit I had to admit that—despite the conflict in my heart and my loyalty to Trey—I loved.
I wanted to assure Henry that I’d find a solution. There had to be a way to get the curse off Mischa, and with the guidance of Kirsten and Mrs. Robinson, we’d figure it out. But for the first time since my mom had gotten me up in the middle of the night to tell me that Olivia had been in an accident, I’d lost all hope that anything in our lives would ever be okay again. Maybe the only option was for all of us to save ourselves, to walk away, and to let the cursed person figure out terms for collecting souls that they could justify, in the same way that Violet’s grandmother had.
“You’ll need to get justice for Olivia,” I reminded Henry in a trembling voice, not wanting him to suspect how much darkness had crept into my thoughts. “You’ll keep searching for answers.”
He switched off the truck’s engine and turned to face me. “I don’t care about answers anymore. Maybe I used to want to understand why Olivia had to die, but answers aren’t important anymore. Just ending this—however we can—that’s important.”
“I don’t know. I just…” I wanted to give Henry a reason to believe that there was still a way out of this, even though I couldn’t connect my thoughts together well enough to decide what to do next. “Jennie said the spirits are, like, inside of Mischa. We have to draw them out of her using some kind of bait if we want to get the curse off her.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I don’t want to—”
He stared blankly out the windshield and continued, “I thought if I went to France and was in a new place, meeting new people, keeping myself busy with tennis, that all of this would fade into the background. This town. What Violet did to my sister. My parents and—and—my mom’s just, like, plummet into depression.”
I held my breath as I waited for him to admit he was angry about our routine of talking every morning. Hearing him express regret about that would have made the tears gathering in my eyes start to fall. Talking to Henry had been the best part of my day every day in Florida, in many ways even better than my restricted phone calls with Trey because I’d had to be so careful about the words I chose on Tuesday nights.
“But I don’t want to move on. I know everybody talks about how much Willow sucks and how there’s nothing to do here, but this is the only place I ever really want to be. And you’re the only person I ever want to be around.”
Henry fell silent and slowly raised his eyes to meet mine. Before I knew it, he was leaning toward me, and since he hadn’t buckled his seat belt in his haste to leave Violet’s house, he slid across the seat and took my face in his hands. His lips were on mine before I realized what was happening. From the instant our mouths connected, I knew intellectually that it was wrong, that I was only supposed to kiss Trey and him only. But Henry’s kiss felt so safe and filled me with so much warmth—it was like crawling under a heavy comforter during a thunderstorm—that I didn’t pull away.
I didn’t want to pull away at all.
And as his lips moved against mine, I realized that I wanted to keep kissing Henry forever, as if the homecoming dance hadn’t been rescheduled, as if we’d fallen in love that night, and Olivia hadn’t pitied Violet enough to invite her to her birthday party.
Maybe my life would have been better if I’d never fallen in love with Trey. The way I felt about him was incomparable to anything else in my life, but if I’d never experienced it in the first place, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. In a normal world, without evil curses inflicted on all of us by the sinister history of the Simmons family, this simple sensation of feeling adored and protected by Henry would very likely have been mine to enjoy.
But it wasn’t.
At that very second, Trey was probably somewhere in Willow. Trey, the guy who would do anything at all to protect me, even at the expense of his own safety and comfort. As he entered my thoughts, I opened my eyes, and the magic moment between me and Henry was abruptly severed. I pulled away, our lips parted, and I was plunged back into the harsh reality of what I’d just done to myself back at Violet’s house. “Sorry,” I apologized and hung my head. “This is just—we shouldn’t.”
Henry sighed and tilted his head back, his eyes fixed on the truck’s ceiling. “I’m sorry. I know you and Trey are… I just wish things were…” He paused, and then said, “You know what? I’m not sorry. I wish things were different, but I’m not sorry.”
The windows of the truck had started to steam up. All at once the cabin of the truck filled with awkwardness, and Henry buckled his belt and started the engine. Through my window, I looked back at the Simmons mansion over the wall that encircled their property and the tops of the evergreens that maintained their privacy. From where I sat, I could see only the steep gables of the house, and its many chimneys rising up from the shingled rooftop.
Forcing the kiss out of my mind, I focused on what Jennie had told me. Half. An aspect of the curse involved half the house. A cold feeling of doom had crept into my chest, and I didn’t want to think about the Simmons family or curses any more that day. I needed to get my hands on a phone or radio so that I could ask Jennie exactly what had happened and whether or not I could expect to die at any moment.
“What do we do now?” Henry asked, sounding exhausted.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Do your parents have a radio? Or could I use your phone?
I should probably try to get back in touch with Jennie. I mean”—I didn’t want to give myself a single reason to have hope for saving myself, but—“I didn’t touch the card at the end of whatever that was. Mischa did, but I didn’t. So maybe my prediction wasn’t complete.”
Henry said, “My dad has an old radio in the garage for emergencies.”
We stopped back at my house so that I could tell my mom I was going to the Richmonds’, assuming that she’d be more likely to agree if Henry accompanied me. When Mom heard us enter through the front door, she called from the laundry room, “McKenna? Where have you been all this time?”
“I walked to town,” I replied, eager to deal with her quickly to avoid becoming emotional. “And I ran into Henry Richmond at the pharmacy. He’s here.”
She entered the living room carrying a basket of laundry. It struck me for possibly the first time ever that my mom actually looked young. Even compared to the other moms in town—moms who had the gray dyed out of their hair, moms who wore yoga tights to the grocery store after their morning kundalini class at the community center—she didn’t look nearly as old and tired of life as I had grown accustomed to thinking of her as being. Perhaps she had a new energy about her because of Glenn. But it was possible she looked different to me now that I was looking at her through the lens of the likelihood that she’d probably outlive me, instead of the other way around. I pushed the thought away.
“Well, hello, Henry. I thought you were back in France at that resort job of yours.”
“I came home for Mr. and Mrs. Portnoy’s funeral,” Henry said, which was only partially true. “Plus, the resort tends to empty out over Easter weekend, so it’s not like I’m missing much.”
Not wanting to waste a single moment of my remaining time, I asked, “Is it okay if I go to the Richmonds’ house for a little while?”
The flash of objection I saw on her face made me feel a pang of guilt. I’d given her every reason to be suspicious of me. Before January, she’d been much more trusting of Henry, too, but I suspect it had unsettled her that he’d been in Michigan with me and Trey at the time of the avalanche, since Henry had graduated the previous June and had no business being on a ski trip with a bunch of eleventh graders.
Sensing her objection, Henry chimed in, “My mom’s home. She’s sorting through all of Olivia’s things to donate to charity.”
As he probably knew it would, this softened Mom’s expression. She asked how Mrs. Richmond was doing, and I told Henry to wait a second while I dashed down the hall to grab a heavier sweater.
My bedroom was startlingly cold, and my eyes instinctively traveled straight to my window, which was cracked open. Before I even saw my phone on my bed, I realized that Trey must have made it back to Willow. Heat crept into my cheeks at the thought of how Henry’s soft lips had felt against my mouth just fifteen minutes earlier. Now that I knew Trey was very close by—he may have even been in my bedroom while I’d been kissing Henry—my betrayal of him felt as bitter as I knew deep down that it was. I had no idea how he’d managed to change his flight or hitch a ride from Green Bay to town, but he’d set my phone on my bed underneath a book, right next to the weekender bag I’d brought home with me. For a moment, I wondered if there was any reason why he’d taken a book off my shelf to cover the phone, or significance to the book he’d chosen (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier). But then I reasoned he’d probably just placed the book over the phone in case my mother peered into my room and saw the phone there, which would have made her wonder how I could have lost it in plain sight.
Dread overwhelmed me as I plugged my phone in to charge its dead battery. Trey was obviously in some kind of serious trouble, but he had still found a way to return my phone, which made me deeply regret what had happened in Henry’s truck. Trey hadn’t left a note or any other sign to indicate that he’d stopped by my house, but I figured that was for my own safety as well as his, since both of our mothers were under the assumption that he would eventually find a way to contact me. After a minute or two of my phone recharging, I was able to turn it on, and was heartbroken to discover that Trey hadn’t even left me a text note or other message on it—or anything else that might have suggested to me where he was going next or how to find him.
I needed to find him. Dealing with what had just happened at Violet’s house had to be my first priority. But finding Trey was a pretty close second.
Afraid that my mom was giving Henry the third degree in the living room, I didn’t want to leave him out there with her for too long. But, unable to resist my curiosity about whether or not I’d be able to connect with Jennie on my own phone, I popped my earbuds into my ears and tapped open my radio app. “Jennie?” I asked quietly, straining my ears over the static on our channel for her voice.
All I heard was static. I double-checked to make sure the radio app was still set to AM 1354, and my chest ached when I saw that it was.
I wondered if maybe Violet’s spirits had been able to find Jennie in the dark place while she was communicating with me during Mischa’s card trick. Maybe they’d pieced together what she’d done the first time Violet tried to predict my death, and were punishing her.
Or maybe, I desperately hoped, she had just switched communication over to a different frequency to trick the spirits, and I’d be able to find her on Mr. Richmond’s radio. I stuffed my phone and my charger into my tote, not feeling focused enough to concoct a credible lie for my mom’s benefit about where I’d found my phone.
“Be home by six, McKenna,” Mom told me as I stepped past her to leave with Henry.
“Okay, Mom.”
“You’re welcome to join us for dinner, Henry,” Mom offered as we passed through the front doorway. “I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to in Europe.”
When we climbed back into Henry’s truck, I told him, “Don’t come for dinner. I’d love the company, but it’s going to be super awkward.” I went on to explain to him that Mom had a new boyfriend who was staying with us temporarily.
“Yeah… well, speaking of super awkward, I’m warning you in advance that our house is a bit of mess. I mean, more than a bit. Thing have gotten out of control with my mom while I’ve been away, and my dad’s been encouraging her to get help, but I haven’t had a chance to clean up yet.”
“What do you mean, clean up?” I asked, but then was distracted by an incoming text message on my phone.
813-555-0172 3:11 P.M.
Hey this is Ernesto from school. Call me back if you can.
My mind went blank for a second before I remembered: Yes, Ernesto. The kid who saved my life yesterday morning. “This is weird,” I muttered. “Some kid from Tampa I barely know just texted me. I don’t even know how he got my number.”
“What does he want?”
I was about to say that I didn’t know when my phone vibrated again with a second text.
813-555-0172 3:12 P.M.
My grandmother says she knows you
Without wasting a second on filling Henry in, I tapped my phone to call Ernesto. “Hey,” I said when he answered. “This is McKenna Brady. You texted?”
“Yeah. Cool, thanks. My grandmother lives in a assisted living facility called Oscawana Pavilion? She randomly called me today and asked if I know you,” Ernesto said. I could hear the television on in the background on his end of the call. “She says you work there?”
“Let me guess,” I said, wondering why tingles hadn’t broken out on my scalp yet—because this situation was a perfect example of when they usually would. My heart was ballooning with hope. “Mrs. Robinson is your grandmother?”
“Yeah. How weird is that, right? What a coincidence,” Ernesto said, sounding genuinely amused.
I had stopped believing in coincidences months earlier. “Are you there with her right now?”
“Yeah.”
I asked to speak with her, and Ernesto put me on speakerphone. Henry and I parked in front of the Richmonds’ house and sat there with the engine off while I
explained to her what had happened at Violet’s house, and how I’d fallen out of touch with Jennie. “So, what do you think? Am I next in line to die?”
Mrs. Robinson replied, “Well, you shuffled the deck and set an intention. You opened yourself up to it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but…” She was right. I had initiated this mess. “I thought my sister could trick them.”
Mrs. Robinson’s warm laugh trickled through the phone, angering me. This was serious—a timer had been set on my life—and she was laughing. “Haven’t you ever heard the expression fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? They’re on to you, girl. They know exactly what you’re up to now. None of those tricks you used before will ever work again.”
I stole a glimpse at Henry and shook my head at his concerned expression to indicate that this conversation was not going as well as I’d hoped. Figuring Mrs. Robinson wouldn’t mind, I tapped my phone to put her on speaker on my end too.
“That’s why I had my daughter call Ernesto at school and tell him to get his butt over here on the bus. I had a dream about you last night, and I just knew you were getting yourself into trouble,” she said.
“I put you on speaker so my friend Henry can hear you, Mrs. Robinson. He’s helping me,” I told her. “How can I know for sure if I’m next?” I asked. If Kirsten were around, she’d be able to see my aura. But we couldn’t drive down to Chicago just for that.
“Well, it’s a good thing you brought me all those oils, because technically you bought them, and they’re your possessions. So I can do some work tonight once the sun goes down and let you know in the morning.”
The morning. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep at all without an answer.
“What about breaking the curse?” Henry asked with eager eyes fixed on my phone. He was tightly gripping the steering wheel even though he hadn’t released the parking brake yet.
“That’s Henry,” I clarified for Mrs. Robinson’s sake. “Mrs. Robinson? This is my friend Henry. Henry, this is Mrs. Robinson, my”—I hesitated, unsure of exactly what Mrs. Robinson was besides a treasured mentor—“friend from Florida. My sister said we’d have to lure the spirits out of the girl who has the curse on her as a first step in breaking it,” I said.