Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  After carefully considering how much I wanted to confide in Trey about the progress Mischa had made, I told him, “Mischa found out that Violet’s mother had stillborn daughters before and after Violet was born. There were five sisters—or, well, four that we know of for sure—just like Jennie said. I personally think the spirits of those sisters are who provide Violet with the predictions she gives people. Do you think your dreams might come from them too?” I intentionally didn’t phrase my last question the way it had formed in my head, with an addendum about those spirits being Trey’s half sisters.

  He mulled this over, clearly uncomfortable discussing it. “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “That day out on the track when we confronted her? The way she described how the things that show her people’s deaths are, like, spirits, or ghosts? How they tell her things without her really hearing voices? That’s how my dreams are.”

  The expression on my face must have told him exactly what I was thinking: There had to be a connection between his experiences and Violet’s. So he added, “But if you think I know anything about how Violet does what she does, you’re wrong. Like I said, before my mom told me I might see her at school in September, I didn’t even know she existed.”

  “What other kinds of dreams have you had?” I asked. “Ones that weren’t about Olivia?”

  “Just really dark stuff.” He seemed a little bashful about sharing details. “Mostly dreams about how I would die. They always start off kind of innocent, like I’ll be walking along the side of a road for a while and then come across a bridge, and I’ll dream that I climb over the side. Even though I won’t want to jump into the water, I’ll feel the sensation of falling, my arms and legs flailing around in the air, and then just as I hit the water, I wake up. And I can sense them suggesting what I should do. Like chanting, but more like pushing my thoughts, egging me on.”

  Voices. I decided to take a risk and tell him about the phenomena I’d been experiencing since leaving home. “I’m going to tell you something, but please don’t ever tell Mischa or Henry.”

  He rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on one arm. “I’m listening.”

  “Since I arrived at Sheridan, I’ve been hearing weird things. It’s not really an audible kind of hearing, more like this sensation of a chorus inside my head. It doesn’t happen very often, only when I’m supposed to notice something or pay attention to details for my own safety. And then other times I feel this weird prickling across the top and sides of my head,” I whispered. “I think it only happens when something bad is about to go down, like if a fight’s about to break out and I should keep my head down.”

  He tapped the tip of my nose. “And this has only been happening since you got to Sheridan? Why do you think it only happens there?”

  I didn’t tell him that it had also been happening since I got back to Willow, because then I’d have to tell him about the letter I pilfered from his mailbox, and I wasn’t sure how he’d react. Instead, I replied, “I suspect it has less to do with Sheridan and more to do with maybe some kind of door being opened between me and the spirit world when Jennie saved my life at Olivia’s party. That girl at the bookstore told me that sometimes it’s just one event that makes you know better what to listen for. Like, maybe everyone can technically receive those kinds of messages, but after you’re aware of it the first time, you’re more aware of it afterward.”

  “Wow.” He smiled at me. “You really are a medium. Maybe you could get your own show on cable, reconnecting people with their dead loved ones.”

  “Pass,” I joked. “But I bet that’s what it is for you. You have a door open to those spirits too. And sometimes they climb through and inspire your dreams.”

  Trey rolled over onto his back. “I really don’t like the sound of how you just put it, like they can crawl in and out of my head.”

  I was reminded of the old wives’ tale about dying in real life if you die in your dreams. “Geez. Do you still have dreams like that?” I asked.

  “The one about Olivia was the first I’d had in probably a year. And it was weird, because it was about her death and not mine. I was freaked out about it because I’d thought I was done with the dreams, you know? And then to have that dream out of nowhere, so vividly…”

  Our conversation was making my chest hurt. Violet’s spirits visited her to supply her with visions of other people’s deaths. It was sounding like her spirits had come to Trey to try to coerce him toward his own. “Trey, that’s… just awful.”

  “It is, but I always thought it was just me, you know? That I was messed up to be having such weird dreams. Until Olivia died. Then I realized that they’re part of something bigger.”

  We both froze when we heard footsteps in the hallway outside his doorway, and I slid lower beneath the blankets, hoping that his lumpy comforter would effectively conceal the shape of my body next to his. I heard the metallic click of the doorknob twisting and then a creak as the door opened inward. As Trey pretended to be asleep, his breathing grew heavier. I held as still as I could until I heard the door creak again and then softly clap shut.

  For another minute or so we remained still, listening as Trey’s mother walked back down the hallway. Then I pushed the blankets off my head and whispered, “She really checks on you every hour?”

  “All night long,” he confirmed. “Not to freak you out or anything, but I think she realized I was going over to your house every night. I don’t know whether or not she said anything to your mom.”

  The heat of shame crept up to my face. I chose to believe my mom didn’t know anything about Trey keeping me company at night because she hadn’t said anything to me. It would have been much more like her to corner me into an awkward conversation about safe sex at her earliest convenience. But the amount of effort that our moms were putting into keeping us separated over the break made me wonder if perhaps my mom did know and had just thought better of saying anything to me.

  To change the topic, I said softly, “I’m really curious about the five dead daughters. Why do you think Violet was the only baby that survived?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “But her father must have been plenty annoyed that my mother had me without any problems while his wife was going through all that at the same time.”

  I hadn’t thought about the timing of it all too much. What had been going on in the Simmonses’ marriage that Mr. Simmons had cheated on his wife while she was struggling with fertility issues? “Do you know how your mom met him?”

  Trey shook his head. “She didn’t give me details. And honestly, I don’t want to know. She was in college and dropped out. After her freshman year at the University of Chicago, she ended up back in Willow with a newborn. Exactly where she didn’t want to be. That’s all I know about it, other than she married Walter before I was born.” He fell quiet for a moment and then asked, “Did you tell Mischa and Olivia’s brother? About me and the Simmons family?”

  “No,” I assured him. “I don’t want them to think you were, like, working with Violet.”

  He stared into my eyes for a long moment before saying, “I hope that’s not what you think. I mean, I’m doing time in a military school because of her—and I’d do it all again—but, McKenna, I would never, ever do anything to hurt you. You have to believe me.”

  I wanted to believe him. But it was getting late, my eyelids were growing heavy, and I needed to get back to my own room before I fell asleep and before it stopped snowing, since I was counting on snow covering up the tracks I’d left. As I climbed back outside through his window frame, he said again, “I don’t think crashing Violet’s New Year’s party is a good idea. Please promise me you won’t try to do that without me.”

  “I won’t. I swear,” I told him, hating that I was heading back out into the cold, hating that I couldn’t spend the whole night in his arms, and hating myself for becoming a habitual liar. Despite the fact that I believed everything he had just told me about his dreams, it didn’t seem advantag
eous for him to know that I still had every intention of confronting Violet at her party. Lying to him, or more specifically, my reason for lying to him, tied my intestines into knots as I crept through the snow along the fence to try to obscure my footprints once again.

  The next new moon would fall on January twenty-fourth. I would be far from Willow, back at Sheridan with no phone privileges, no Internet privileges other than heavily monitored browsing usage for classwork, and no possible chance of talking my way into a few days of leave. The entire junior class would be on its ski trip in Michigan. Mischa, Henry, and I were going to have to find a way to play the game again with Violet on the night of her big party, or we were going to miss our chance.

  Back in my own bedroom, I crawled into bed with my phone, knowing I wouldn’t get any sleep until I had been able to determine the connection between Trey’s mother and Violet’s father to better understand what had happened between them. I Googled “Michael Simmons,” “Wisconsin,” and the word “banker.” His professional portfolio on the website of Tall Trees Finance, the investment bank for which he worked, popped up as the top result.

  There it was—the answer I was looking for. In Helvetica font. It had been there all along, if only I’d been looking for it. Michael Simmons had received his MBA from the University of Chicago three years before Trey was born. His professional experience indicated that he’d been an adjunct professor in the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business the year Trey’s mother would have been a freshman in the undergraduate program. At the time, he was also working as a junior associate at a small investment bank.

  My discovery proved nothing other than that they were both in Chicago, on the same campus, at the same time. But it also connected the dots. They could have met any number of ways; Trey’s mom had been pretty, and Michael Simmons must have been even more handsome eighteen years ago as a young professor than he was now as a middle-aged businessman. Out of curiosity, I looked at Vanessa Simmons’s LinkedIn profile, which stated that the year Trey was born, she was a staff attorney at a law firm in Chicago that specialized in tax law.

  As I drifted off to sleep, it occurred to me that I hadn’t told Trey that I’d tried to protect Tracy Hartford’s life with advice from the pendulum, or that his mother had violated the terms of a contract she’d signed shortly before his birth, which he may not have known about. I also hadn’t told him or Mischa about how Violet had threatened me at the hospital. Keeping straight which information I was sharing and withholding from everyone was already becoming a heavy burden. Even though I was back in my own town surrounded by my closest friends, I felt more alone than ever before.

  Violet’s words to me at the hospital… If you’re successful, you’re going to be very, very sorry that you messed with me.

  The last thought I had before I drifted off to sleep was how infuriatingly ironic it would be for the secrets I was keeping to somehow give Violet an advantage over me.

  CHAPTER 10

  HER LIPS TURNED BLUE AS she desperately tried to breathe—even just enough to cough. But she couldn’t get any air into her lungs. Blood vessels burst in her eyeballs and on her eyelids, making her look like a monster. She dropped her phone as she collapsed, knowing as soon as she hit the floor that she had already taken her last breath. Still, she ferociously clung to hope even as her soul left her body, and she lay on the floor.…

  That night I dreamed about Mischa choking. She ran up and down the hallways of Willow High School as her face turned blue, with kids ignoring her even after she fell to the floor and writhed there, her hands clamped around her neck. I woke up terrified that Mischa had let the candle burn out, and panicked for a full hour after texting her while I waited for her response. She didn’t reply until after her morning practice session at the gym, at which time I had already contemplated calling her landline to ask her mother if she was okay.

  It’s burning! she texted back with a flame emoji. But it’s melted a lot after just two days. I don’t think it’s going to last a whole week.

  The snow had continued falling steadily after I’d gotten home from Trey’s house, all through the night and well into the morning. Mom greeted me in the kitchen with the announcement that she wasn’t going to drive to Sheboygan, after all. Everything in our area of Wisconsin was coated with a thin sheet of ice, making the roads extremely dangerous.

  Although I did want to spend time with her, it was already Friday, and Violet’s New Year’s party was in four days. Having Mom around all day put a serious damper on contacting Mischa and Henry about exactly how we were going to infiltrate the Simmonses’ mansion to carry out our mission to play the game again. Being trapped at home all day made me impatient and eager. There was still so much to do, so many preparations to be made, that I felt completely vulnerable and ineffective.

  At Henry’s suggestion, I did my best to draw a map of the inside of the Simmonses’ enormous house from what I could remember. The house was set quite far back from the road at the end of a long private drive. The property was encircled by a tall brick wall, and it was at least a mile in every direction from any other houses in the area, so there was little chance of an annoyed neighbor calling the cops to make a noise complaint even if Violet’s party raged until the break of dawn. From what little of the house I’d seen, I suspected most of the party activity would be held in the huge front parlor under the intimidating oil painting of Grandmother Simmons hanging on the wall. But I remembered that a set of stairs led from the hallway near the kitchen down to the basement, and it was entirely possible that Violet had a basement like the one at the Richmonds’ house: fully renovated for entertaining guests.

  Over text messages, Henry, Mischa, and I made plans to regroup in person later that afternoon, after some of the ice was supposed to have melted, using the excuse of going to the movies to see a holiday comedy to convince my mom to let me out of the house. Just in case my mom was suspicious, I researched movie times and told her, “We’re seeing the twelve fifteen showing at the Ortonville Mall, so I should be home by three.”

  “This makes me very uncomfortable, McKenna,” Mom said. “You’re technically still in a lot of trouble, and I don’t like the idea of you gallivanting around.”

  “I know, but Mom! I won’t be able to leave school again until April for spring break, and I’ll be in Florida then. This is my only chance to hang out with my friends before the summer,” I argued, trying very hard to not sound like I was whining. My mother hated whining as much as she hated dishonesty.

  She looked up from her laptop to frown at me. “Just remember what it was like to sit in that courtroom and have everyone look down on you,” she said. “And I’d better not find out that Trey Emory is meeting up with you at any point today.”

  It took every ounce of control I had to resist rolling my eyes at her.

  Mischa and Henry gave their parents the same details about our outing just in case my mom got proactive about confirming my whereabouts. Exactly an hour before the movie was scheduled to start, they picked me up in Mr. Richmond’s Mercedes. From where I stood in the living room watching out the front window, I hoped that Trey didn’t happen to be keeping an eye on our driveway. It probably would not have thrilled him that I was spending more time with Henry, but as it turned out, including Henry in our effort to overpower Violet had some advantages that I couldn’t have predicted. He was friends with Pete Nicholson’s older brother, the person Violet had recruited to supply booze for the party.

  “I could ask him what he’s up to for New Year’s,” Henry suggested on the way to Ortonville. “I’m not best friends with the guy, but that wouldn’t be weird. I mean, his brother went out with Olivia for, like, as long as I can remember. He knows I’m back in town.”

  “Yeah, but is he actually going to the party, or just buying the alcohol? I mean, Justin Nicholson must have better things to do on New Year’s than to hang out with a bunch of high school kids,” Mischa said. “I mean, he’s old enough to go to an actua
l bar.”

  “A bar around here?” I asked sarcastically. “If the weather’s bad and he can’t drive to Green Bay, I doubt he’d want to ring in the New Year at the Carousel.” The Carousel was our town’s one and only bar, typically open and rumored to be busy at six a.m., when workers at the oil refinery in between our town and Ortonville changed shifts. It was not exactly a hot scene.

  “It can’t hurt to ask,” Henry insisted. “Then, at least, I can get inside the house and find a back door or something to let you guys in.”

  Gaining access to the house was going to be the first big challenge we faced in trying to get Violet to play the game again the night of her New Year’s party. I suggested that Mischa’s boyfriend, Matt, tag along with some of his friends from the wrestling team and text us once inside, but Mischa was dead set against involving him in any way. Besides which, she said, “I’ve told him everything that bitch has done, and especially now, since Stephani? I don’t think he could be around Violet for even one minute without attacking her.”

  It took us a while to find parking at the mall, which was packed despite the previous night’s inclement weather, since every store was promoting sales that suggested prices had dropped by over 50 percent in the last three days. We walked past the nail salon that was managed by Candace’s mom, which reinforced our purpose for strategizing that day. The last time I’d seen her had been at Candace’s wake, when she’d been out of her mind with grief.

  By the time we found an available table at the food court and settled in for a conversation, Justin Nicholson had texted Henry back and confirmed that he was, indeed, going to be hanging out at Violet’s house on New Year’s Eve. “What’d I tell you? It’s the party of the year,” I muttered. I withheld comment as Mischa tore into a large order of french fries, the disturbing memory of Violet’s prediction for her still fresh in my mind.