“Is that what they found in your locker?”
Harmony bit off the excess of rolling paper and spat it on the ground. “They didn’t find shit. The dog might have smelled it, but there wasn’t anything they could use against me. Just a coat with a couple of seeds in the pocket.” She lit the end, blew out the burst of flame, and took a drag. “Here, this will help you relax.” She held it out to Brea.
“You know I don’t do that.” She pushed Harmony’s hand away. “Is that another gift from Lance? Like the car?”
“See, now that’s not fair. He lent it to me.”
Brea gave her a look of disbelief. “You should have told me. You know, my father called and I think after this whole car theft thing, my mother’s going to ship me off to him for the summer.”
Harmony took another long hit and talked while holding it in, making her voice sound awkwardly stilted. “At least you have a father. I don’t even know who mine is.”
“So, what, that makes it okay to do what you want? To steal cars? To screw random guys?”
“You want to know what happened with Lance? Honestly, I didn’t think he’d wake up. I put a couple sleeping pills in his drink and I thought I was in the clear. I also didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to go to the cops after having sex with a minor. I was going to bring it back.”
“And what did you tell Adam? I mean, he posted bail. You obviously had to tell him something.”
“I told him what he wanted to hear. That’s the great thing about being damaged goods, Brea, you can get away with just about anything. Besides, he knows the situation. I’m staying with him because it beats the alternative. There’s hot water in the shower, food in the fridge, and a fuck in the bed. He gives me what I need without making me feel like a freak.”
“Well, if you’re so honest and he’s so understanding, why did you ask him to leave just now?”
Harmony took the board out of her bag and set it on the level patch of ground between her and Brea. “Because he doesn’t need to know everything.”
“Because you haven’t told him about Tom.”
“You’re right. I haven’t. What am I supposed to say? That I think a ghost is trying to kill me? That he makes me cut? That I see things that aren’t there? Adam accepts that I’m crazy, Brea, but that’s asking too much—even from him.”
Harmony set down the planchette. In the daylight, the board looked harmless. It was just a lettered piece of wood and a spade-shaped indicator. A game, Brea told herself, steeling her nerves to use it. She placed her hands on the planchette.
“Let’s just get this over.”
Harmony snuffed the joint out in the grass and pocketed the roach. “About time.” She scratched a spot on her head where the shortest of the cut was starting to grow in. “God, this itches. Is there anyone here that wants to speak with us?” The cemetery was quiet except for the sound of crisp leaves and the occasional whirring of tires out on the highway. “Hello? Does anyone want to talk to us?”
H-E-L-L-O
Brea looked up at Harmony. “That was fast.”
“Who is here? What is your name?”
T-O-M-G-T-O-M-G
“G? that’s new.”
“Does your last name start with ‘G’?”
N-O
“Will you tell me your last name?”
N-O-N-O-N-O
“Ok, I get it. Tom, is this you?”
The planchette moved to “yes”.
“If it’s really you, what year did you die?”
1-9-9-6
“That was easy. What month did you die?”
The planchette slid to the end of the number line and started counting down backwards. Nine, eight—slow at first—seven, six, five—faster.
“Brea, pick up your hands.” Harmony held hers up.
Brea followed. “Why, what’s wrong?”
“Goddamned Tom. He’s always pulling this shit. Letting him go through the letters or numbers backwards could release his spirit.”
Brea backed away. “Release it to where?”
“Theoretically, release it to possess someone…but I don’t believe that can actually happen.”
“See, this is exactly the kind of crap I was talking about. This is why I don’t want to mess with this thing.”
Harmony lit a bundle of dried sage and wafted the smoke around them. “It’ll be fine now. Just put your hands back. He’s finally talking. I can’t stop yet.”
“Well I can.” Brea stood, backed up, and tapped her foot on a flat marker buried mostly in the ground.
“Brea, it’s fine. I swear.”
“I said ‘no’.”
Harmony reached up, grabbed Brea’s arms, and pulled her hard to her knees. “How about, it’s not a choice, then? We do this or he wins. He won’t talk to me alone anymore. I tried.”
Brea slapped her away. “See, this, right here, this is my too far.” She stood again, limping from the pain in her right knee where it hit a half-buried grave marker.
“It’s all about you, isn’t it? Little miss perfect. If you don’t help me, how are you going to get home? Tom knows about you. He’s watching you, too, and it’s only a matter of time. He’ll get what he wants from both of us.”
Brea opened her phone and started to dial Jaxon.
“Who are you calling? Abercrombie? You think he wants to help you?” Harmony scoffed. “You know what I know about him? He’s only with you to keep you away from me.”
“What are you talking about? Harmony, now you’re sounding paranoid.”
“It’s not paranoia. I heard him say it to that jock, retard buddy of his that day they crashed my locker. You asked me where I was, remember?”
The call went to voice mail and Brea dialed again. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I was in the janitor’s supply closet down the hall from our lockers. I saw you on the phone and I saw Jaxon, and Rachael, and what’s-his-name. He said his father needs some zoning thing approved by your mother. It’s a hoax, Brea. You’re the butt of his fucking joke.”
“You’re crazy. You just can’t stand the idea that I could have someone, too.”
“Think about it. You or that slut Rachael? If you were Jaxon, who would you pick?”
“You’re lying.”
“You believe that? After everything we’ve been through? All the times I helped you out? You think I’d lie about something like this?”
Finally, Jaxon answered the phone.
“Hello?” Brea wandered off, talking quietly so Harmony couldn’t hear her.
“You think I’m lying?” Harmony shouted. “Ask him about his new Audi.”
Brea hung up and stomped over to where Harmony was sitting. “You know what? This paranoid track you’re on, you’re going to end up just like your mother.”
Harmony lit up a cigarette. “Funny you say that, you’re already like yours.”
14.
Jaxon’s late model Passat pulled up to Oakwood in record time. If he’d been doing anything at all, he must have dropped it when she called.
Brea dismissed what Harmony said about him, though she couldn’t help but wonder about the details.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she said and kept her face turned toward the window.
“No problem.” He reached for her hand but she pulled away. “You want to tell me what happened in there?”
Brea kept from making eye contact. “What makes you think anything happened? I came with Harmony and Adam. He’s not back and she’s not ready to leave. That’s all.”
He flipped down the visor and opened the lit vanity. Her face was splotchy and her eyes were swollen from crying, visible apparently even from her profile “Let’s try this again. Want to tell me what happened?”
She pulled back her hair and sniffled. “I don’t want to talk about it. Just promise me you’re not going to say anything to my mother about me being here, okay?”
“Of course I’m not going to say anything, but you should know better than
to skip school with Harmony of all people. Joan would eat you alive if she knew.”
“Joan won’t know.” She hated that he was on a first name basis with her mother.
He handed her a Kleenex from his center console and brushed back the lock of hair that had fallen from her ponytail. “What do you say we make this my fault? You know school called her and told her you skipped. We’ll tell her it was a pre-prom date.”
Prom. She felt on-the-hook accepting his alibi. “I didn’t say yes, you know.”
He pulled out on Route 32 in the opposite direction of her house and school. “You will.”
“You’re always so sure.”
A couple miles down the road from Oakwood Cemetery was Miller’s Pond, a location popular with the driving-age teens because of its seclusion. Brea knew where it was, but had never been. Jaxon, on the other hand, obviously had.
He pulled down the gravel drive and Brea felt her whole body tense. Their secret dating made it easy to avoid telling him she was a virgin. Most of their time together was spent at her house and her mother insisted on the bedroom door staying open. There was no reason he should know, at least until now.
“Jaxon, what are you doing?” Her palms started to sweat.
“You spent the day with the narcotics twins and you’re worried about what I’m doing?” He laughed. “Relax, would you?”
“I really just want to go home.”
“Brea, you’re acting nuts. What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t want to be here. Please…”
He set his hand on hers. “I just want to talk. That’s it. It’s really nice here.”
He was right. He parked at the edge of a clearing overlooking the pond. The trees had not yet lost all their leaves and the red and gold color reflected on the water’s surface.
“Is this okay?”
Besides nerves, she saw no real reason to be scared. “Okay.”
He pulled up the emergency brake and turned up the radio.
“I have something for you.” He rifled through the door pocket and handed her a ticket for Shriekfest—a horror film festival hosted for the first time by the Summit Theater in Reston. “I bought two of them for Mitch and me, but he’s going to Maine for the week and I don’t know anyone else that would want to go. No obligation. I just thought you might like to go.”
Gifts, especially considering how she’d been treating him, made her uncomfortable. “I can’t take this.” She pushed the ticket back at him and he crossed his arms, refusing to take it.
“Then throw it out. It’s yours. Do what you want with it.”
“I’ll pay you back.” She put the ticket inside her bag and thanked him.
“I don’t need the money, Brea. I need a date for prom.”
Need, she thought, might be an overstatement.
“I…” The whole fight with Harmony negated their plans for the Bloody Mayhem show.
“All right. One last try.” He reached across her and popped open the glove compartment, handing her a small, turquoise box wrapped in a white satin ribbon from inside.
Signature Tiffany’s.
She’d never had anything from there, but had seen the box in magazines. She smiled.
There’s no way Harmony was right. He wouldn’t go this far if it was true.
“Oh, boy.”
“It’s not going to bite.” He pulled the ribbon tail and the bow dissolved. “Your mother helped me pick it out.”
He opened the lid and she let out a small, unintentional whimper.
It’s beautiful. Of course it’s beautiful. Probably cost a fortune, too.
“You like it.” He smiled, proudly.
“I…I can’t take it. It’s too much.” She set the box down between them.
“Nothing’s too much.” He lifted the silver key necklace out of the box and leaned over her. “One last time, will you please go to prom with me?”
The cool silver rested against her chest, an unintentional sign of ownership.
“Yes,” she said, slumping slightly forward. “I’ll go.”
There was no other answer.
15.
The town library was a ramshackle one-story building that was once someone’s house. The floor plan had been opened up, but it didn’t change the feeling. Harmony was still high when she got there.
She walked around, confused, having no real idea the best way to find Tom G’s obituary with only an unreliable year of death.
A middle-aged librarian in a floor-length skirt and turtle neck asked if she could help.
“I need to find an obituary,” Harmony said. “From 1996.”
“Those would be downstairs in the archives. We don’t have fiche, but we have bound copies.”
She led Harmony down a narrow stairway into her idea of a spooky basement: low ceilings, broken up floor, moisture, and a lot of beams and wires. It was dimly lit and smelled of mildew.
“Let me see.” The librarian scanned the bindings. “It looks like 1996 are from here down. Are you all right? Anything I can do for you?”
Her eyes were as red from the joint as from crying. “No, I’m all set. Thanks.”
Harmony pulled up a chair to the splintering wooden table and searched through the first few volumes.
It wasn’t long before she got a headache from reading in near-darkness and she was about to give up when she saw an obituary ripped from the paper: Gerald Thomas Shippee of 6 Maple Street. Only the first line was there.
6 Maple Street.
It was the house where her mother had overdosed.
16.
Harmony stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. It was after eleven and Adam’s bedroom was dark except for the flame of the lighter and the scant moonlight seeping in between the blinds. He leaned over and lit his cigarette off hers.
Adam turned on the bedside lamp. “So Brea just up and left? She just walked out of Oakwood alone and unprovoked? Just like that?”
He’d been asking since he picked her up from the library.
The partial obituary repeated in her mind. His name wasn’t Tom, it was Gerald. Gerald Thomas Shippee and the one person that could help her make a connection between her, him, and that house, her mother, was nowhere to be found.
“Yes, just like that.” Harmony kicked off the sheets and got out of bed. “God, will you let it go?”
The cool air shrunk her skin and made it goosebump. She grabbed a towel hanging from the doorknob and wrapped it around herself, and then snuffed her cigarette out in the saucer they used for an ashtray.
“It just doesn’t sound like Brea. How did she even get home?”
“She called Abercrombie.” Harmony slammed the bathroom door.
“Who the hell is Abercrombie?”
Harmony pressed her back to the wall and slid to the floor thinking about what Brea said. “You’re going to end up just like your mother.”
Schizophrenia was poison, one that took her mother’s responsibility, happiness, and love and left Harmony with the remaining shell. A skeleton-thin body the drugs and men used as they saw fit. She wanted to cry, but knew it would only bring Tom back. He thrived on weakness. She stifled a whimper.
“You all right in there?” Adam must have heard her.
“I’m fine,” she said, but she was lying.
She needed to talk. She wanted to tell him what happened with Brea but it meant admitting Tom and she knew better. He would think she’d gone beyond crazy. He would have her back on those pills, back at that hospital—back on that ward. She thought about her time in the psychiatric unit and broke down.
“I’ll never go back,” she whispered.
A weight pressed down on her chest, crushing her and sucking the breath from her lungs like a vacuum. She gasped and tried to breathe through her nose, but could barely get air.
The lights flickered and the mirror turned black.
The room became a freezer.
“I won’t let you do this to me.” She wiped her running n
ose on a wad of toilet paper and when she pulled it away, it was covered in blood.
“Shit, oh shit.”
She reached with a shaking hand for the finger nail clipper and used the fold out scraper to disassemble the disposable razor on the side of the bathtub. The flimsy casing splintered, cutting her hands and filling them with tiny, plastic thorns until there was nothing left of the razor but the strip of sharp, silver metal from inside.
She slid the thin metal along the inside of her arm and the blood dripped in small red dots on the ugly, green linoleum.
“I know your name,” she whispered. “I’m going to stop you.”
She sunk the pointed tip of the razor into the fleshy part of her thigh and the blood rolled down in perfectly tear-shaped droplets.
She let out a shrill, pained cry and Adam was immediately at the door.
“Harmony, open up.” He pounded the jamb with the heel of his hand. “Harmony, do you hear me? Open the goddamned door.”
Her mind said, “reach on over and unlock it,” but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She was Tom’s marionette. A doll for him to play with.
She dragged the razor toward her hip and let out another scream. Cut after cut, the razor tore through her, dulling increasingly, until the wounds skipped in dotted lines and she felt faint. Tears fell to her lap diluting the blood running down her thighs and swirling in Rorschach-like pools on the floor.
“Help me. Please.”
“Back away from the door.” Adam’s tone was nothing short of desperate. He kicked hard and the door bowed, but didn’t give.
Harmony’s hand fell to her side. The bent and dripping blade hit the floor.
Adam grunted, let out a guttural howl and kicked again, this time hard enough that it splintered the jamb and sent the door crashing into the wall behind it. The knob buried itself in the drywall.
Harmony was on her side, transfixed by her tattoo: Summerland.
“I’m ready,” she said and went limp.
Adam dropped to his knees by her side. “What did you do?”
His hands were hot on her cool, damp skin. She was clammy and sweating. He wrapped towels around her wounds to tourniquet the bleeding.
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