by P. J. Night
“My turn,” Danielle announced, lying down where Stephanie had been just moments before.
“Then me,” said Mary Beth.
Ashley got up from where she and Stephanie were still lying, brushing the dirt and hay off her costume as she made her way over to Danielle and Mary Beth. As the seconds passed, she began to doubt whether she’d actually seen Stephanie floating. She didn’t think she’d had a lot of candy, but now she was beginning to wonder, because she was clearly seeing things. Maybe this was all just the effect of too much sugar. But at the same time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to play another round of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.
“Coming, Stephanie?” Danielle asked. But there was no answer.
The three girls turned around to where Stephanie was lying just a second ago, but she wasn’t there.
“Steph?” Ashley cried out. Still no answer.
Ashley got up and started searching the barn, but Stephanie was nowhere to be found.
“Could she have gone inside?” Ashley wondered aloud, running out of the barn.
As Ashley ran in the back door of her house, her parents glanced up at her from where they were sitting at the kitchen table.
“How’s everything going, Pumpkin?” her father asked from behind his newspaper.
“Uh, great,” Ashley replied. She felt bad lying to her parents. “Did Stephanie come in here, by any chance?”
“Not that we saw,” said her mother. “And we’ve been sitting here the whole time. Why? Did she need a break from all the spookiness in the barn?”
“No, no reason,” Ashley answered quickly. “We were playing a game, and I thought she might have come in here for something. She must be hiding somewhere in the barn. Bye, guys.”
Ashley heard her parents wishing her a good time as she hurried out the door and back to the barn. She hated lying to her parents, but she didn’t want to make them as alarmed as she was.
But when Ashley returned to Mary Beth and Danielle, she was surprised to see how calm they seemed to be about Stephanie’s sudden disappearance.
“I bet I know where she went,” Danielle said as she started eating a candy bar from her treat bag. “The last time the two of us had a sleepover, Stephanie totally left in the middle of the night. I didn’t even realize she was gone until I woke up the next morning.”
“That’s weird,” said Ashley.
“She absolutely does that, though,” Mary Beth added. “She did it to me over the summer. When I talked to her the next day, she said she wasn’t feeling well and she just needed to go home. I bet she’s halfway there already. I wouldn’t worry about her.”
Ashley didn’t know what to do. If she was still living in Atlanta, she would be totally freaking out right now, but it wasn’t that late and it wasn’t like Stephanie would get lost going to her house—Ashley lived a little farther out from the center of town than the rest of her friends, but not that far.
“If you say so,” Ashley said, suddenly remembering how well her three friends knew each other—and how little Ashley knew them.
“Want to play hide-and-seek?” suggested Mary Beth.
Ashley nodded, happy to focus on something other than Stephanie and where she had disappeared to, but she couldn’t help thinking how hard her old friends in Atlanta would’ve laughed if someone had suggested that. Hide-and-seek was a game for little kids.
“You’ll love playing hide-and-seek in a barn,” Mary Beth replied. “It’s really fun, especially at night, when there are so many shadowy places to hide.”
“Just look out for spiders,” Danielle joked.
“Home base will be inside the curtain. I’ll be ‘it,’” Mary Beth said. Then she shut her eyes. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . ”
Without making a sound, Danielle and Ashley slipped outside the curtains into the darkness of the barn. Mary Beth was right, Ashley realized as she glanced around. There were tons of great places to hide in the barn, from the stalls where horses and cows once lived to the hayloft high in the rafters.
“Eighteen . . . nineteen . . . twenty . . . twenty-one . . . ”
Well, I guess the hayloft is out, Ashley thought as Danielle dashed over to the rickety ladder and started to climb it.
“Forty-two . . . forty-three . . . forty-four . . . ”
Yes! Ashley suddenly thought. The wheelbarrow!
On silent feet, Ashley crept across the barn to the back corner, where a bunch of corroded old tools were stored. Carefully, carefully, carefully she moved aside the hoe and the scythe and stepped over the saw. There was an old wheelbarrow behind all that junk that was big enough for Ashley to hide in. Its sides were coated with chipped red enamel, and the wheelbarrow was caked with mud and . . . and Ashley didn’t want to know what else. Her muscles clenched as she climbed inside the wheelbarrow and crouched down behind it. In the darkness, Ashley grinned. It was a great hiding place!
“Ready or not, here I come!” Mary Beth called.
The only sound in the barn was Mary Beth’s footsteps. Ashley strained her ears, trying to figure out where Mary Beth had decided to search first. It was so quiet.
Almost too quiet.
Bet she’s looking in the stalls, Ashley thought suddenly. There were twelve stalls for livestock at the opposite end of the barn. If Mary Beth was looking in the stalls, Ashley could easily run to home base and be safe. But if Mary Beth was closer, Ashley knew she might get tagged.
It was a risk Ashley was willing to take. All her muscles tensed as she prepared to race across the barn. Then Ashley leaped over the side of the wheelbarrow and sprinted to the glowing circle in the center of the room. “Ollie-ollie-oxen-free!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, so caught up in the game she forgot to act cool about it.
“Aw, man! Where were you?” Mary Beth’s voice echoed across the room.
“I’ll never tell!” Ashley laughed.
Then Mary Beth poked her head through the curtains. “Come help me find Danielle.”
Ashley shook her head. “No way! You’re on your own,” she replied.
“Oh, fine.” Mary Beth sighed. “Be that way.”
Ashley sat, all alone, in the center of the barn while she waited for Mary Beth to find Danielle. Mary Beth must have gone for stealth mode, because Ashley couldn’t hear a sound.
After an interminable wait, Mary Beth’s voice echoed through the barn again. “I give up, Danielle!” she called. “You win. Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
But Danielle didn’t respond.
“Danielle?” Ashley called. “Come out, okay?”
Still, there was no response.
“Danielle!” Mary Beth yelled, louder this time.
Ashley sighed in frustration as she got up. From what she knew of Danielle, it seemed like her to pull a stunt like this—to stay hiding long after the game was over, just to prove that she’d won. Ashley strode over to the hayloft, with Mary Beth following right behind her. Ashley pointed upward to indicate that Danielle was probably hiding there, and Mary Beth nodded her understanding.
“Danielle! I’m coming up,” Ashley called. “You can’t hide forever!”
Then she started climbing up the ladder. Ashley was halfway up when she felt the ladder start to shake; she looked down and saw that Mary Beth was climbing it too.
“Hang on,” Ashley said. “I don’t know how sturdy this thing is. We better just go up one at a time.”
“Okay,” Mary Beth said as she jumped off.
There was a tiny round window near the highest peak of the roof; bluish moonlight spilled through it, providing the only illumination in the hayloft. At first glance, Ashley couldn’t see anything besides mounds of dusty, dried-out hay. Then she noticed a figure crouched in the corner.
Danielle, Ashley thought with relief. She hadn’t even realized that she’d been holding her breath.
“You won, okay?” Ashley repeated as she walked across the hayloft, kicking up clouds of dust with every step she to
ok. “Come on.”
The figure didn’t reply. It didn’t even move.
“Hello? Earth to Danielle? Did you hear me?” Ashley said, unable to keep a note of annoyance out of her voice.
Still no response.
This is ridiculous, Ashley thought. She reached out and shook Danielle’s shoulder.
Except it wasn’t Danielle.
And Ashley didn’t have a chance to figure out what it was.
Because the moment she touched the figure, its head fell off, and it rolled around the floor at her feet.
CHAPTER 9
The scream that escaped Ashley’s throat burned like acid; she screamed so loud and so hard and so long that all the microscopic cells lining her throat turned red and raw like they’d been scraped with a grater. And yet she couldn’t stop screaming, no matter how much it hurt.
“What happened? What happened?” Mary Beth yelled as she clambered up the ladder.
Ashley opened her mouth to reply, but all that came out was another scream.
“Ashley! Ashley!” Mary Beth shrieked as she started shaking Ashley’s shoulders. “Ashley! It’s okay! It’s not Danielle! It’s just a—look, look, Ashley, look at the floor, it’s just a scarecrow!”
Ashley tried to understand what Mary Beth was saying. She understood enough to stop screaming, at least. And when she looked at the ground, Ashley realized that it was a mannequin’s head. Nothing but a piece of painted plastic.
“But I—I thought—I thought scarecrows were made of sacks and old clothes and stuff,” Ashley tried to say. Her voice was hoarse.
“When Davis’s Fine Fashions went out of business a few years ago, all the farmers bought their mannequins,” Mary Beth explained. “They used them instead of the old kind of scarecrows. They worked great, too.”
Yeah, Ashley thought, starting to blush in the darkness. I bet they did, seeing as they’re really incredibly scary.
“So if that’s not—” Ashley couldn’t even say it. She swallowed hard instead and tried again. “So where’s Danielle?”
Mary Beth shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you sure she came up here?”
“Definitely,” Ashley said.
“Well, then, let’s find her,” Mary Beth said with a quiet calm in her voice for which Ashley was enormously grateful.
“I must’ve seemed so ridiculous to you,” Ashley said, embarrassed. “Freaking out over a scarecrow.”
“Nah,” Mary Beth replied as she peeked behind a hay pile. “I hate those mannequins. They really give me the creeps . . . and I know all about them!”
Then a wide smile broke over Mary Beth’s face, and she pointed at one of the hay piles at the other end of the loft. Ashley saw it, too: the toe of a shoe, peeking out just beyond the hay.
“She’s been like this forever,” Mary Beth whispered to Ashley. “Always has to find the best hiding place, always has to do everything a hundred and ten percent.”
“There’s always one like that,” Ashley whispered back with a grin.
“Let’s really scare her,” Mary Beth replied. “Let’s pretend like we’re going back down into the barn, and then we’ll sneak up on the hay pile and knock all the hay off of her.”
“You got it!”
“I don’t know, Ash, she must have gone back down after you hid,” Mary Beth said loudly. “Because Danielle’s definitely not up here.”
“Sorry about that,” Ashley said, just as loudly. “Let’s look around downstairs some more.”
Mary Beth held up her fingers one at a time, silently counting to five. Then both girls, yelling as loudly as they could, rushed at the hay pile. Their arms flailed around as they knocked the hay off the pile until, at last, they uncovered Danielle. She was sitting in the very middle of the hay pile, hiding in the small, uneven area by contorting her limbs in ways Ashley didn’t think possible. “Ha! We knew it! We knew you were up here!” Ashley exclaimed.
“Ah. You, ah, you found me,” Danielle said, her voice strangely flat. Then she straightened out her arms. Crack! Crack! CRACK! Ashley cringed at the sound of Danielle’s bones groaning so loudly.
“I didn’t know you were a gymnast,” Ashley said as she reached out to help Danielle up.
“What do you mean?” Danielle asked.
“Well, it would take someone with superflexibility to position themselves the way you did to fit in that hay pile.”
“Oh,” Danielle replied, sounding distant. “I’m actually not very flexible. I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“Did you hear Ashley freak out a second ago?” Mary Beth asked her old friend. “She discovered one of the mannequin scarecrows.”
Danielle didn’t bother to make eye contact as she stared ahead and mumbled a monotone, “No.”
Ashley and Mary Beth exchanged a glance. “Maybe we should go inside for a bit,” Mary Beth suggested. “It’s getting a little cold out here.”
Nobody spoke as, one by one, they climbed down the ladder from the hayloft and crossed the lawn to Ashley’s house. The only sound was the cracking of Danielle’s joints. Ashley certainly had heard knuckles and knees pop before, but nothing as constant and as loud as this. She began to wonder if maybe Danielle had hurt herself during hide-and-seek. What else could explain how this affliction had so suddenly come on?
As they entered the kitchen, Ashley gestured to the table where her parents had been sitting the last time she entered the house. “Why don’t you sit down here?” Ashley suggested to Danielle.
Danielle shook her head and Ashley could swear she heard the bones in her neck cracking quietly beneath her skin.
“Are you in any pain?” Ashley asked.
“A little,” said Danielle. “But I mostly feel weak—like my muscles aren’t working.”
“Okay, let me see what I can find for you up in the medicine cabinet,” Ashley replied. “Stay right here. I’ll be right back. Mary Beth, do you want to come with me?”
“Sure,” Mary Beth replied. As the two girls headed out of the kitchen, Ashley could hear pops and cracks as Danielle managed to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs.
“What’s wrong with her?” Mary Beth whispered, letting out a concerned sigh. “I didn’t hear her fall or anything. It sounds like someone’s playing the drums on her bones.”
Or they’re about to break, Ashley thought.
“I don’t know, but there must be something we can do to help her,” Ashley replied honestly, wondering if she should grab her mother. Her parents must have already gone up to their bedroom for the night as they were nowhere to be found downstairs. Ashley figured she didn’t need to bother them just yet. “My mother always uses the hot water bottle when her muscles and joints are killing her.”
“Ooh, my mom, too,” added Mary Beth. “Good idea.”
“I bet it’s upstairs in the medicine cabinet,” said Ashley. “Let’s go.”
As Ashley and Mary Beth were rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom, they heard a loud crack! from the kitchen. They thundered back down the stairs, and Ashley prayed that the noise hadn’t woken her parents up. “Danielle!” she cried in an urgent whisper.
But when they reached the kitchen, it was empty. Danielle’s chair sat in the middle of the room; her skeleton sweatshirt was draped across its seat.
“Danielle?” Ashley called in confusion. She turned to Mary Beth. “Is she in the bathroom?”
“I’ll go check,” Mary Beth replied. But she returned in moments, alone. “Not there. Not in the living room, either.”
Ashley didn’t say anything as she picked up Danielle’s sweatshirt. She smoothed it on the table, noticing, for a moment, what a good job Danielle had done cutting out and gluing each white bone to the black shirt; how perfectly they fit together; how much it looked like a real skeleton.
“So, she just . . . left?” Ashley asked. “Without saying good-bye? In just her T-shirt?”
“I’m sorry, Ash,” Mary Beth said quietly. “Maybe she was
feeling so bad that she wanted to be at home. Maybe she pulled a ‘Stephanie.’ I don’t know.”
“And what about that crack we heard?” Ashley wondered aloud.
“That was probably just the sound of the door slamming behind her,” suggested Mary Beth.
“I don’t understand. My mom would’ve driven her home,” Ashley said. “Why would she just ditch my party like that? And Stephanie, too? Are they mad at me?”
“Mad about what? You didn’t do anything,” Mary Beth replied. “I’m just sorry they acted so weird. It’s your birthday. That was so not cool of them.”
Ashley gave Mary Beth a grateful smile.
“Besides, we will still have fun,” Mary Beth promised. “What do you want to do now?”
Ashley shrugged. “Actually, if you want, we could watch a scary movie or something,” she suggested.
“That’s fine with me,” Mary Beth said.
“I’ll just go get our sleeping bags and stuff,” Ashley said.
“I’ll clean up in here,” Mary Beth said, gesturing to some of the felt bones that had come unglued from Danielle’s costume and now littered the kitchen floor.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” said Ashley. “You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s not a problem,” Mary Beth replied. “Besides, it’s your birthday. Cleaning up is the last thing you should do!”
Ashley laughed. “Okay, if you really don’t mind. Thank you. I’ll be back in, like, two seconds.”
“You better,” Mary Beth teased her. “Because there’s still a ton of awesome fun stuff for us to do tonight.”
As Ashley walked outside, she glanced over her shoulder. Through the window in the back door, she could see Mary Beth crouching on the floor, a bunch of foam bones in her hands. She immediately felt a surge of thankfulness for Mary Beth—for being so genuinely nice, so genuinely kind, for being such a good friend since the moment they’d met.
I’m lucky to know her, Ashley thought. I’m lucky to have her as my friend.
Then she turned away from the brightly lit kitchen and stepped further out into the night.