Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  Cheryl’s lips pressed into a firm line, and she stood up. “Look, I’ll go tell my parents right now that I don’t feel well and we’re going to sleep early so that you can wake up on time for your mom to pick you up in the morning. But only if you let me come with you tonight and help.”

  Those were the last words I expected to hear Cheryl say, and the condition she’d proposed was certainly not one I had ever considered entertaining. With the clock ticking away, I wasn’t in a position to tell her she couldn’t come with, even though I tried to dissuade her. “It’s going to be dangerous. Not necessarily in a way that might get us in trouble with police. But more like in a way that could get us dead.”

  My not-so-subtle warning did nothing to lessen Cheryl’s interest in joining me. We both walked back down to the living room and announced that we were hitting the hay for the night. Her parents suspected nothing and wished us sweet dreams. Ten minutes later, with her bedroom door locked from the inside, we scrambled out her bedroom window and down the sloping roof of the garage, from which we dropped off the side onto her front yard and ran to Mischa’s Volkswagen GTI.

  “No way,” Mischa said as I climbed into the front passenger seat and Cheryl hopped into the back. “A third wheel was not part of the plan.”

  I shivered inside my coat, shaking off the bitter cold. I was wearing a hoodie with a knit hat pulled down under the hood to obscure my face once we got to the party, but I was glad to have chosen to wear such warm clothes that night. “She’s part of the plan now,” I said, hoping Mischa wouldn’t be difficult about this. Kids were probably already arriving at Violet’s house. Henry had texted me to tell me that he was getting a ride with guys he knew from his own graduating class rather than with Justin, and they were picking him up at ten thirty. Our mission was on a countdown now, and we didn’t have time to argue over who was coming with and who was staying home.

  “Well, if anything happens to her, that’s on you,” Mischa snapped at me. “I’ve already got one death on my conscience.”

  Our drive across town was silent and tense. We passed the big green sign on the outskirts of town on which was printed: WELCOME TO WILLOW. POPULATION 4,832. That number couldn’t possibly have been accurate anymore, at least not to reflect how much the population had been reduced since Violet had moved to town.

  Almost forty minutes after leaving Cheryl’s, when we reached the front entrance to Violet’s property on Deerfield Road, there was no indication that anything out of the ordinary was happening behind the massive front gate. However, when Mischa slowed down so I could peer past the gate into the darkness surrounding the Simmons property, I saw a swarm of red taillights in the distance as cars parked along the private drive leading to Violet’s house. “Wow,” I said, impressed. I couldn’t even guess how many cars were there, but there were more than I’d ever thought I’d see at any high school party. “There’s definitely a party going on here tonight.”

  People in a car behind us honked at us to get out of their way, and Mischa accelerated and then pulled over so that we could watch in her rearview mirror how the guests were gaining access to the party. The kids in the car behind us pressed a button on the gate’s touch pad and then waited for someone inside the house to open the gate remotely. As unlikely as it seemed, Violet actually had someone inside the house monitoring the gate over the video security system to control who could drive onto the property and who couldn’t.

  “Glad we didn’t try to come up with a strategy to get into the house that way,” Mischa said. “Because one of us—probably me—would have ended up riding in the trunk like being smuggled across a border.” She wasn’t wrong; that tactic had crossed my mind.

  We drove to the next stoplight on Deerfield Road and hung a right, and then made another right turn onto Fenmore Lane, following the perimeter of the Simmons property. “Is there a back entrance?” Cheryl dared to ask from where she was being very quiet in the back.

  “Sort of,” I answered. There wasn’t much traffic on Fenmore Lane, which was heavily wooded, so no one witnessed us parking along the gravel shoulder of the road. Without exchanging words, Mischa and I got out of the car and Cheryl followed, and we walked around to the hatchback door to take out the small folding stepladder that Mischa had brought from home. My phone buzzed in my back pocket, and I checked it to see a text from Henry.

  HENRY 11:02 P.M.

  Here

  “It’s only three steps, but Henry thought it would be high enough,” Mischa said.

  “Well, we’re about to find out.” I carried the stepladder over to the wall with my pulse racing. Even though there was no one around, I wanted to get this part over with quickly, before anyone drove past and spotted us.

  Cheryl followed us over to the whitewashed brick wall, where I opened the stepladder and set it down in the snow. There was over two feet of snow on the ground, and I did my best to make sure the ladder had been set down in a place where it was even and its base wasn’t resting on any rocks. The first rung of the ladder was mostly beneath the snow, making it seem all the more absurd that we were trying to sneak onto the Simmonses’ land this way in the dead of winter.

  “Are you guys serious?” Cheryl asked.

  “Totally serious,” Mischa said as she climbed to the third rung and brushed snow off of the top of the wall with her glove. “Problem,” she announced. “There’s something along the top of the wall here that’s…” She took out her phone and tapped it to use it as a light for a better look. “It’s like pieces of crushed glass smashed into the cement.”

  Of course. Something sharp that would cut anyone who tried to climb over the same way we were, but without the aesthetically displeasing appearance of razor wire. “Do you have anything in your car we could put down?” I asked. “Like a blanket or a heavier coat?”

  Mischa’s eyes lit up. She had two heavy wool yoga blankets in her the back of her hatchback, and after climbing back down the stepladder to fetch them, she set them atop the wall side by side to prevent us from cutting our hands or clothes when we swung our legs over the top to get to the other side. Mischa was the first over, and we heard her announce, “It’s not that bad,” after she dropped into the snowbank on the Simmonses’ side of the wall.

  I looked at Cheryl. “Do you still want to come with? Or do you want to wait in the car?” She hesitated for a moment before saying, “I’m coming with,” and climbed up the stepladder.

  The drop from the top of the wall was more intimidating than I’d thought it would be. I was grateful that Mischa had so much athletic junk in her car and that we were all wearing heavy winter gloves, or the glass on top of the wall would have been a serious problem. Even still, Mischa was a gymnast who did backflips and handsprings every single day as part of her floor routines, so a drop into a snowdrift wasn’t as big a deal for her as it was for me. I closed my eyes, counted to three, and pushed myself toward the ground.

  Once all three of us were over the wall, we looked back at the yoga blankets, and I realized we weren’t going to be able to get back to the car this way later on. We’d have to walk all the way around the perimeter of the property—miles—or get someone to drive us back to Fenmore Lane. I hadn’t put much thought into anything that might happen after we forced Violet into playing the game, and I tried not to stress about that. I had enough things to figure out related to how we were going to find her in the crowd and separate her from her friends. Even from where we stood, on the far side of a wooded patch of land that gave way to wide-open space and then rows of rosebushes covered in a blanket of snow, we could hear the bass pumping from inside the house. The party had definitely started, and it was time for us to accomplish what we’d been planning for the last week.

  As much as the snow had worked to our advantage in some ways, I wished we weren’t attempting all of this in the middle of winter as we trudged across the Simmonses’ property. It was downright freezing, so cold outside that my toes were going numb inside my boots. I jabbed at my pho
ne with gloved fingers to check a series of text messages from Henry, telling me that the whole house was packed. The party wasn’t confined to just the parlor or just the basement—there were kids everywhere, and not just from Willow. He’d be waiting for us in the sunroom off the kitchen like we’d discussed, but he warned me that there were kids in there smoking weed.

  Our arrival would definitely be noticed.

  I decided not to share this with Mischa and Cheryl as we pressed on. By the time we reached the rosebushes farthest from the house, my nose was dripping. Despite the fact that I’d brought my pendulum, a stick of palo santo, matches, and a pocket mirror with me, I hadn’t brought any Kleenex.

  “Dang. Violet may be a cold-hearted, dirty bitch, but she knows how to throw a party,” Mischa quipped as we reached the fountain at the center of the Simmonses’ garden and looked up at the house. “It almost makes me wish we weren’t enemies with her.” Lights were on in every window, and we could see the silhouettes of kids dancing on the first and second floors. Hip-hop was blasting at an obnoxiously loud volume, and if the Simmons family had had any neighbors within a mile in any direction, I was sure a noise complaint already would have been filed with the police.

  For a second, I thought my scalp was tingling, but I was so cold that it was hard to tell. However, I took a good look around the area where we were standing just to make sure there wasn’t anything special that I was supposed to be focusing on. The only kind of strange thing about the center of the garden was that there was a bench facing the fountain, which was dry for winter. Directly behind the bench there was a much shorter row of rosebushes than all of the others in the garden. It looked as if there were five bushes around my height beneath the heavy snow, which did strike me as noteworthy, at least in how they might have related to the spell that Trey’s mother had cast by planting something in the ground. Five bushes, five dead sisters. I struggled to tap my phone to activate the camera with my gloves on and snapped a quick photo with the flash off so that I could think about the significance (or lack thereof) later.

  “There’s the door,” I said, pointing ahead to a screen door on the right side of the house. The glass panels of the sunroom were steamy, suggesting that it was a lot warmer inside the house than it was outside. My heart was pounding. I felt as if we were about to storm a castle or stage a government coup, or attempt something far more daunting than crashing a party. But as I saw the back door push open and Henry leaned outside to motion at us, I realized that it was the house that was creeping me out. I’d gotten a very bad vibe there the first time I’d visited, and now it felt as if we were forcing our way into the blackened, rotten core of the curse Violet kept casting.

  I was so numb with fear by the time my frozen legs carried me the rest of the way to the back door that the relief of seeing Henry’s smiling face warmed me up until I noticed a bright red lipstick stain on his cheek. A sensation close to jealousy overtook me until I reminded myself to calm down. Any girl at that party who recognized Henry might have greeted him with a kiss; the lipstick didn’t mean anything. Besides which, it shouldn’t have mattered to me; I was with Trey, and this volatile burst of emotion was probably just thought manipulation on the part of Violet’s spirits, meant to distract me.

  “You made it,” he greeted us and lightly punched Mischa and me on the shoulders.

  “Thanks,” I said, stepping past him into the sunroom, which reeked of marijuana smoke. A cluster of about ten kids I didn’t recognize looked over at us from where they stood on the other side of the sunroom. They seemed pretty disinterested in our reason for entering the party through the back door and went back to passing around an overstuffed joint.

  Mischa, Cheryl, and I all stomped our boots on the jute mat just inside the door to shake off clumps of snow. My scalp was already tingling beneath my fleece hood and hat, and I was trying not to think too much of it. It hadn’t tingled like that when I’d run into Violet at Hennessey’s, but I assumed I was just on high alert because of what we were about to do, and the tingles were occurring to keep me vigilant. “Have you seen her yet?” Mischa asked Henry. She had to shout to be heard over the music.

  “No,” he said. “It’s already pretty crowded, and I haven’t exactly been looking for her. I didn’t want to interact with her before you guys got here.” His eyes fell upon Cheryl, and then he looked to me for an explanation.

  “Oh,” I said, realizing it was impolite to skip introductions even though we were in the most rushed and stressful of circumstances. “Henry, this is Cheryl. Cheryl, this is Henry, Olivia Richmond’s older brother. I used to be in color guard with Cheryl, and she wanted to help out tonight.”

  Cheryl waved shyly at him. “Nice to meet you.”

  Over my shoulder, I peered through the open doorway into the kitchen and got my first glimpse of the party raging farther inside the house. A girl I recognized as a sophomore was running and laughing through the crowd carrying a bottle of champagne while a guy I’d never seen before chased her in his boxer shorts. Roy Needham, one of the stoner guys who Trey used to hang out with sometimes, was standing on the kitchen counter, rapping along with the music. Shannon Liu seemed completely unaffected by the recent death of her former girlfriend, Stephani, because she was running her tongue up and down Nick Maxwell’s neck as he poured vodka into a red Solo cup.

  “Are we gonna do this thing or what?” Mischa asked. “My candle burned out, and if we don’t get this done tonight, I’m screwed.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, pulling my knit hat down a little lower over my forehead. “Everyone stay close together.”

  I led the way into the crowded kitchen. If kids from school happened to recognize me and realize that I wasn’t supposed to be there, I was too focused on reaching the front parlor to notice. The DJ’s turntables had been set up in the house’s grand front room, and over the bouncing tops of people’s heads I could see what looked like enormous speakers standing on both sides of his table. Black and red light bulbs in all of the front parlor’s light fixtures were making it look more like a nightclub than a mansion in a small town. Every kid I saw was holding either a bottle of beer or a cup full of booze, and the vast array of bottles in the kitchen were top-shelf: Gran Patrón Platinum, Grey Goose, Maker’s Mark. Even though I’d grown up thinking of the Richmonds and the Portnoys as being wealthy because they owned big houses and luxury vehicles, the fortune that Violet had obviously dumped on this bash put her wealth on another level.

  Right as we were about to push our way through the crowd into the front parlor, I felt Mischa tug on my coat. I turned to see alarm in her eyes as she pointed back into the kitchen at something. Annoyed to be slowed down, I leaned closer so that I could hear what she was shouting into my ear. “Look! The…” Her words were drowned out by music.

  Just like that, as my eyes fell upon a silver serving tray on the kitchen counter, the tingling across my scalp burst into what felt like a blaze. There were too many people in the way for me to see exactly what was on the tray at first; Jason Arkadian and a group of girls from our class were standing in front of the tray with their fingers hovering over it as if making selections. Stop them, stop them, stop them, the voices in my head began chanting, and my feet began moving in that direction before I even had a chance to make sense of what I was seeing.

  I squeezed in between a few twelfth-grade girls wearing tight dresses on my way closer to the counter, and then impatiently elbowed two more kids out of my way. Then I watched in a panic as Jason made his selection from the tray, and everything suddenly made horrific sense.

  On the tray were rows of little paper scrolls fastened with red ribbon. A card on a little silver stand had been printed with the words, PERSONALIZED PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT YEAR.

  I felt for a second as if someone had punched me in the solar plexus. All of the air rushed out of my body as the enormity of what Violet had done hit me. Mischa and Henry both saw the tray and had the same realization. Violet had thrown that party to iss
ue as many death sentences as she possibly could with the least amount of effort, and her guests were absolutely clueless.

  Even worse, if Jason’s reaction was any indication, they were flattered by her attention.

  Petrified, we watched as Jason unrolled the scroll with his name on it and read his prediction to the two girls standing with him for their amusement. “Jason, don’t!” I shouted, but he couldn’t hear me over the music, and he was laughing at whatever was printed on the paper.

  Stop them, stop them, the voices continued.

  I marched over to the tray and picked up the scrap of paper that Jason had discarded. On it was printed:

  In the end, it will be dark and cold.

  Stunning me, there was a scroll on the tray with Cheryl’s name printed on it. Somehow, Violet had known all along that we’d be showing up. She’d known that Cheryl would be with us.

  I tore to shreds the scrolls that remained on the tray, noticing that there were at least ten empty gaps in the rows where predictions had already been removed. Hailey West, one of the girls on pom squad with Violet who had once been friendly with Olivia, recognized me from the other side of the kitchen. I heard her yell, “Who invited McKenna Brady?” and then I felt arms pulling me away from the counter.

  “Come on,” I heard Henry say behind me. “We have to find her—right now.”

  The party turned nightmarish as we barged into the front parlor in search of Violet. Word that Mischa and I had shown up uninvited spread through the crowd like wildfire, causing heads to turn as we passed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw people unscrolling their predictions. I spotted Chitra Bhakta, who’d been in several classes with me before I was kicked out of Willow High School, reading her scroll with a faint smile on her face and tossing the red ribbon to the floor. In a matter of seconds, I had overheated and found myself sweating beneath my heavy winter coat, hoodie, and hat.