The Haunted House Project

by Tricia Clasen

  My phone buzzes a few minutes later, and when I look at the name, my shoulders slump in disappointment. Not Isaiah. It’s Gisela.

  I’m so frustrated that I can’t talk to Isaiah that I pick up. She should know how mad I am.

  I can barely understand her through her tears. “I’m so sorry if you’re mad at me, but I’m worried about you.”

  I let her blubber for a few minutes, and then I say, “Is that it?”

  She sniffs. “Are you mad?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What’s going to happen? You know, with Mrs. Carter.”

  “Hopefully nothing. Do you understand how serious this is? Do you want my family to fall apart and for me to end up in foster care or something?”

  She stammers a no.

  “Okay, then just leave me alone. You took what I said and made a way bigger deal out of it than you needed to. It may have really messed things up, but I think I got it worked out for now.”

  “But, Andie, you sounded so weird. This isn’t normal.”

  “Do you think you could have talked to me about it first? Given me a chance to explain more? No, you just went and blabbed.”

  “I didn’t know what would happen.”

  “No, because you didn’t ask. No one does. You know, today was the first time anyone actually asked me how I was doing, and Leah only did it because she was trying to cover up or felt guilty or something.”

  Suddenly, I hear Becki’s voice instead of Gisela’s. “Andie, you don’t need to be so mean to her. She feels bad enough. We understand things aren’t good, and we feel terrible that your mom died, but we can’t talk about it all the time.”

  Her words are like ice. They cool me instantly in a way I didn’t know was possible.

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. We can’t talk about it all the time. Or at all, really. It might interfere with time spent talking about more important things like nail polish colors or stupid boy bands. I can see why it would be a problem. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you never have to think about my dead mother again.”

  Then I press the end button. I try Isaiah’s number again. Voice mail. This time I leave a brief message because I have to talk to him. “Please call me. I’m sorry.”

  I pick up my pace. I just want to be home. I run up the stairs to my room and promptly cry myself to sleep.

  I wake when my phone buzzes again in my hand. I jump when I glance at the screen and see his name.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You said that on your message.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I don’t know what I did.”

  “You didn’t do anything. It was my fault. I made a huge error in judgment, and I was just wrong.”

  He’s quiet on the other end. “Thanks for calling me back,” I say. “I was worried you wouldn’t talk to me again.”

  “Funny, I was thinking the same thing.”

  I hesitate. “I told one of my friends about the experiment. She told Mrs. Carter. I thought it was you.”

  “Me? But I’m helping you with it.”

  “I know, and I can’t explain why I didn’t think it was her. It’s just that she and I have been friends for so long. I never thought she’d do that.”

  “But you thought I would.”

  I go quiet. “I was listening to the wrong voices in my head.”

  “Be careful telling people about voices in your head,” he says. Then I hear him laugh. “Get it?”

  I shake my head. “You goof.”

  “I aim to humor.”

  “You do more than that. You’re a good friend, Isaiah.”

  “You’re telling me I missed school for nothing?”

  My heart sinks again.

  “I mean, I was going for the perfect attendance award and everything.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You dork, I’m only kidding.” He laughs at himself, and then adds, “So, other than that, how are things?”

  “You mean other than being betrayed by my best friend and my dad failing to show up at the library yesterday? Fantastic.”

  “Andie, don’t take this the wrong way … you know I’m all about helping you with this plan, but at some point, you promise me you’ll get more help, right? Maybe this is bigger than what you’re trying to do.”

  My muscles tense. Of course it is. I know that. I’ve always known that. But my dad doesn’t even want me to go to the guidance counselor, so I don’t know what else I can do.

  “I need to give this a shot first.”

  “And if it doesn’t work, then you’ll talk to someone? I mean, someone who really knows something, not just Carter, who is a sorry excuse for a counselor.” I hear the venom in his voice.

  “What’s your problem with her?”

  “Nothing really. Just not a fan, that’s all. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Come on, Isaiah, that’s not all.”

  I hear him huff on the other end. “Fine. You know how I said Jeffrey made all that stuff up before, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, sixth grade was rough. I used to go see her. She said I should apologize to him and that might make things better. Maybe Jeffrey was just embarrassed, she said.”

  “Oh no.” I have a feeling I know where this is going. In real life it usually isn’t as easy as just apologizing to a bully.

  “Yup. Let’s just say he didn’t accept my apology and I never went back to Mrs. Carter.” My feelings toward her and about her are getting more and more complicated. The Brian incident, the phone call to my dad, the way she acted today, and now this?

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s why I don’t trust her, anyway. But there’s got to be someone else who can help you,” he says.

  “I don’t know for sure what I’ll do if this doesn’t work,” I finally tell him. “I’ll figure it out later.”

  Whether or not that answer is what he wants to hear, he doesn’t ask me any more about it, and I’m relieved. I hear noises downstairs, and I get up and open my bedroom door.

  My dad calls out, “Anyone home?”

  “Hold on,” I say to Isaiah, and then I call out, “I’m up here.”

  Dad steps out of the kitchen and looks up the steps. “Have you eaten?”

  I shake my head and point to the phone. He nods. “There’s food here when you’re done.”

  I hang up quickly with Isaiah. I might not have a plan, but I don’t want to miss a moment when my dad seems normal. I smell the pizza before I get halfway down the stairs and my stomach twists, telling me to hurry up, reminding me that I failed to eat lunch and was too angry to snack. It growls to the beat of food, food, food.

  It’s not just pizza, but there’s also breadsticks and chicken wings. It’s a feast. We haven’t had a spread like this in ages.

  “Hey, Candy. Hungry?” Dad’s smile crawls all the way up to his eyes.

  “Wow,” I say, but I don’t get anything else in because I’ve already grabbed a piece of pizza, picked a sausage off the top, and shoved it in my mouth.

  “We’re celebrating,” he says.

  I chew twice and swallow. “Huh?”

  “I got a new job today.”

  My eyes go wide but my stomach does a flip, and I stuff more pizza in my face without asking him to elaborate.

  He babbles as he gets a glass of water. The job is entry level and it doesn’t pay quite as much as he’d like, but given the economy … he trails off, not mentioning any of the other reasons why he should be grateful for whatever job he can get. I want to be excited. I want to believe that this is it. We’re going to be okay. But I’ve been down this road before. He’s started jobs before, but then there are the bad days, then the long nights out; he’s late a few times, and then he just stops going.

  Before I decide how to reply, Paige walks through the garage door. “What smells so—” She stops mid-sentence, examines the room, and says, “Whoa.”

  Like me, she doesn’t take m
uch time to process the situation before attacking the food. The only pizza I’ve had recently was the two-dollar frozen kind. Definitely not like takeout.

  I expect Dad to fill her in, but I glance at him and I realize he’s nervous. Paige is a bigger threat than I am.

  “Dad got a new job today,” I tell her. Please don’t ask him how long it will last, I beg her with my eyes.

  I see the struggle on her face as she looks from me to him and back to me. “Oh? Where?” She stays calm and asks in a very matter-of-fact way, which must kill her, especially since I can feel the vibration of her shaking foot under the table. Her eyes squint slightly, but they’re focused on her pizza. Maybe she’s a little afraid of what his answer might be.

  I study him for signs that he might be embarrassed to tell her. I remember his red cheeks when he told us he was going to sell cars. I also remember Paige’s nasty tone when she yelled at him for not even being able to sell a used Toyota.

  My Before daddy worked at a bank. He had a title I could never remember, but from what I could tell, it was a good job. That’s why Mom stayed home. After Daddy didn’t do well in jobs that had titles.

  “It’s at a bank, actually. I’ll be a loan officer.”

  I don’t know how that’s similar or different from what he did before, but it doesn’t sound bad to me. I bite my lip and lean in, wondering if Paige will feel the same.

  “I didn’t know you were looking to get back into the banking industry.”

  I almost giggle, because it sounds like something you’d hear old guys with bald heads and big bellies say. Not Paige with pizza sauce on her cheek and strands of hair falling loose from her ponytail all around her face.

  “I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, honestly. There hasn’t been much out there in any industry, but it turns out an old colleague of mine now runs the loan department at this credit union. And he was … well … he just understood.”

  Paige nods. I smile. This is good.

  “Anyway, I start Monday. I’ll be there seven thirty to four thirty. Is that a conflict for anyone?”

  I see Paige bite her lip, probably to keep from laughing since Dad’s never here anyway. But we both shake our heads.

  And then, for one whole hour, I don’t think about my mom. I forget about Gisela and Mrs. Carter and my project with Isaiah.

  I eat wings and choke when the sauce burns my throat. Paige tells stories about a bad customer, and Dad describes his interview in more detail.

  I wonder if it will always be like this. In order to get a hint of regular, everyday life, I’ll have to suffer through a whole lot of craptastic first.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I head back to my room around eight, planning to do homework. I do have classes other than science, and I’m way behind in English reading and math worksheets. The problem is that once I’m back in my room, my mom’s journals call to me again. I haven’t opened them at all today, and I miss hearing her words. I can afford to stay up late one night. I’ll set a limit, I tell myself. Just one half hour. Maybe she’ll help inspire me to figure out what to do next.

  It can’t be a coincidence that my dad has a job and we all sat down together to eat dinner for the first time in months less than a week after I started haunting them.

  A half hour turns into two hours. This journal is mostly about my mom’s frustration with Paige. She goes on and on for pages and pages about life with a teenager.

  I called my mom last week. My mother managed to spend ten minutes telling me how everything I was doing was ineffective. I guess some things never change. She used to say the same thing about my study habits and my college major.

  The one good thing about her criticism is that it took me right back. In the blink of an eye, I was a teenager again, listening to her constant barrage of complaints. No wonder I hated her then.

  I thought about every conversation Paige and I had in the last week, and—surprise!—I’d spent most of the time trying to tell her what to do, how to think, and which clothes to wear. No wonder she’s starting to hate me. New goal: bite my tongue more. Not on the big stuff—drinking, drugs, sex, etc. But it won’t kill me to let her put blue streaks in her hair.

  The streaks were ugly. In a rare moment of weakness, Paige even confided in me that she regretted getting them done, but she’d never have told Mom that. I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that eats at Paige. The things you wish you would have said or the ones you wish you hadn’t.

  I’ve got a few.

  Like, “Mom, I really was the one who broke your pearl necklace. I know you always suspected, but I was too scared to be honest about it.”

  Or, “I didn’t really mean to say you were the most embarrassing mother in the room.”

  Wherever you go after you leave this world, I wonder if you still remember all that. Would it be better if you did or didn’t?

  It’s late, but suddenly I have to hear her voice. Not just her words, but her actual voice. There must be videos somewhere. I tiptoe down the stairs. The living room is dark, but I don’t turn on a light, not wanting to attract any attention. I open the cabinets under the television and rifle through boxes. Mostly, I find old DVDs from when Paige and I were young, like Disney cartoons and stuff. There are some unlabeled silver discs, and I keep them in a pile next to me. I figure I’ll test them out on my computer.

  I remember the video camera used to be in the cabinet in the sunroom/office. My mom picked the sunroom at the back of the house for an office because she didn’t want to be far from everyone and stuck in the dark basement. So my parents put in a space heater for the winter and a window air conditioning unit for the summer.

  Five big windows line the long exterior wall of the sunroom, and tonight the light of an almost full moon streams in. I haven’t been out here in a while. Maybe no one has. The dust on the desk is deep enough to write a name in it. I doubt anyone has bothered to open a window or run the AC in months. Paige and I both have computers in our rooms now, and Dad, well, he hasn’t been around enough to need it.

  I open the cabinet, which is overstuffed with office supplies and general junk. Some people have a drawer. We have a whole cabinet. Batteries and Scotch tape, sheets of paper, and a box of miscellaneous electronics chargers. I don’t see the video camera, but I spot the bag for her digital camera right away. It’s got yellow daisies all over it. My mom wanted a fancy one, so Paige and I insisted Dad buy it for her for Mother’s Day one year. That was the year she decided she was going to be a photographer. She carried the camera with her everywhere. We couldn’t escape the lens. She insisted we not pose and would yell at us if we so much as smiled at the camera. She said the best shots weren’t staged, and she was practicing finding the right aperture. Whatever that means.

  I hit the power button, but it’s dead—of course—so I dig through the bag for a charger and then drag everything to the office computer to plug it in so I can see the pictures on a bigger screen. I scroll through the most recent pictures on the camera, but all that does is make me sad. None of them are of my mom, since she was the one behind the camera. I need to see her face; I’m afraid I’ve forgotten details.

  Apparently, no one has taken a picture on this camera since she died. I know it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. For a second, it’s like life is frozen in the Before. Where Becki, Gisela, Leah, and I run through a sprinkler and squeal as we go down the slip and slide. Where Paige lounges in a bikini but sticks her tongue out at the camera when she catches it shooting her.

  Even though she’s not in the picture, I can see my mom smiling. I wish I could hear her laughter. I go back to the cabinet and look again for the video camera. I find the bag stuffed in the back. It’s plain gray.

  Unlike the digital camera, the video camera still has some charge in it and turns on right away. I press play, and it’s a gold mine. The screen fills with her face. Her eyes are droopier than I remember. She has a few more lines around them, too. I sit cross-legged on the floor by the closet,
staring that the tiny screen.

  “It’s May fifteenth and time for the end-of-year choir concert for Andie.” She smiles bigger and the crinkles around her eyes grow deeper. “Another day, another school activity.”

  That’s the last of her talking, as she turns the camera around and zooms in on my face. My mouth opens wide, and I join the choir in hitting a note so bad I imagine birds anywhere near the building fell from the sky. I press the red button to stop the video. I realize I’ve been playing it louder than I meant to.

  I didn’t hear anyone come into the room, but as soon as it’s quiet, I hear the shuffling of feet, and then his shadow covers my face, making the office as pitch dark as the living room.

  “What are you doing?” he asks. I can’t get a read on this tone. He doesn’t seem angry, but could he be scared?

  “I wanted to hear her voice. I was looking for some video.”

  His face is a blur, so I have no idea how he registers what I’ve said. But I see him nod his head slightly. “There isn’t much.”

  “I know.” I hold up the camera. “This is from a long time ago.”

  I hear him sigh. Then it’s quiet, so still even the air doesn’t move.

  Finally, he steps toward me, and I don’t know what he’s planning to do as he walks behind me and approaches the desk. As he starts clicking the mouse, I get up and head toward him.

  “She downloaded most of them here. She’s not in many of them, but sometimes you can hear her voice. They’re all in the folder titled ‘Video.’ Think you can find it?”

  I croak out a yes as he starts to walk away. I don’t want to let him go. I feel like this is one of those moments that are likely to take him in the wrong direction. Instead of getting a message, he’ll feel cruddy again. I can’t have that, not with the new job and everything.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Have you watched them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I take it they didn’t help?”

  He exhales slowly. “It’s a double-edged sword, Andie. You want to hear her. I know what that’s like. But then you do, and you miss her fresh all over.”