by Zoe Aarsen
And then we saw her. Violet. She was descending the grand staircase that led from the front parlor up to the second floor under the stern frown of Grandmother Simmons in the enormous oil portrait that hung on the wall. She was wearing a tight, strapless gold dress, nothing at all like the fashionable but conservative outfits she used to wear at the beginning of the school year. She’d always been slim, but it was plain for everyone now to see that she was in excellent shape, with a body that would make any girl our age jealous. She held hands with Pete, who walked down the stairs behind her, smiling as if she were a toy he was showing off.
Even before we spotted her, she’d seen us.
She smiled directly at me. Patiently, knowingly.
She made a hand signal to the DJ from the staircase, and the music cut out. In that instant, as the party went silent, the tables were turned. There wasn’t going to be any way that we could privately coerce her into one of the house’s smaller rooms to play our game, or even drag her away from her guests against her will. She had full command of the situation. Everyone who had been talking, dancing, or jumping up and down on the sofa looked around in wonderment as Violet leaned over the railing of the staircase to address us. “McKenna! Mischa! I’m so glad you could make it! And you brought Cheryl with you too. That was very kind of you.”
My former classmates from Willow gathered around us and stared, some smirking as they sipped their drinks, others looking me up and down in judgment. I heard someone behind me whisper the word “crazy,” which was followed by cruel giggling. Someone else said, “Cheryl Guthries,” as if it was hilarious that Cheryl was at the party.
“We’re here to play a game,” Mischa called up to her, but I nudged Mischa in the ribs and shook my head. Violet already knew what we were there to do. She had already put precautions in place to prevent us from getting anywhere near her.
“Cool!” Violet purred. “I love games. How about a game of keep-away? And by that, I mean you guys keep away from me.”
Before I even had a sense of what was happening, I was lifted off my feet from behind by someone. On my left and right, Mischa and Cheryl were both raised off the ground by muscular-looking football guys wearing varsity letter jackets from St. Patrick’s. They carried us toward the front door, where Hailey West smiled patronizingly at us as she held the door open. “Bye! Thanks for coming!” she teased. “Happy New Year!”
Once back out in the freezing cold on the Simmonses’ front steps, I was surprised to be hurled down to the snow, landing clumsily on my back at the bottom of the cement stairs. The stairs weren’t very tall, and the fall hadn’t been bad, but if there hadn’t been snow on the ground, I probably would have been at least bruised from the impact when I landed.
Henry whirled around, swinging at the guy who’d dragged him out of the house, but the guy was much brawnier than him and shoved him back on the shoulders with the stern warning, “This is not a fight you want to start, bro.”
The Simmonses’ front door closed and clicked shut. The music resumed, and we could see kids start dancing again through the front window. In silence, Mischa, Cheryl, and I sat there on the snow, trying to make sense of how our plan had fallen apart so quickly, while Henry charged at the front door and beat his fists against it. “Let me back in! I want to talk to Violet!” he roared.
I looked up at the sky, which was crystal clear. Stars shone down on us, and my eyes began watering even though my brain commanded the rest of my body not to cry. We’d failed. Not only had we blown our big plan to make Violet play the game that Jennie had recommended, we’d also totally revealed our hand. Now she knew what we were after, she knew with certainty that Cheryl and Henry were working with Mischa and me, and she’d made good on her promise to make me sorry for protecting Tracy’s life.
Worst of all, Mom was driving me back up to Sheridan in nine hours. My ability to do anything to break Violet’s curse was about to be taken away.
CHAPTER 13
ON THE RIDE HOME FROM Violet’s house in Mischa’s car, I told the others about the little New Year’s paper scrolls and that the message in Jason’s had been more or less a death prediction.
“That bitch,” Mischa hissed from behind the wheel. Our most immediate order of business, having failed, was that Mischa’s candle had burned out. And according to Jennie, She will always be next until she’s dead. I didn’t remind Mischa of this fact, but I was sure it was on her mind.
“So she predicted the deaths of a bunch of kids—all tonight?” Henry asked. “Why would she do that? Is she going to kill everyone in one giant tragic event?”
I hadn’t mentioned the way in which Violet had threatened me at the hospital to anyone, but now it felt like I needed to fill everyone in. “She cornered me at the hospital when Cheryl and I went to visit Tracy Hartford last week. I think she knew I was there to try to protect Tracy from whatever she’d done to her, so she told me she was going to make me regret trying to stop her.”
“Wait a second,” Cheryl piped up from the back seat. “You came to the hospital to try to save Tracy?”
“Of course. When you told me she had meningitis, it seemed pretty obvious that she was going to be Violet’s next victim,” I said.
For the rest of the drive home, Henry mused aloud about ways in which we might protect Mischa until we had a chance to formulate a new plan, but Cheryl stared out the window without joining the conversation. All of this was probably a lot for her to have to process in one night, and I didn’t know how to make any of it easier to understand. I really didn’t want to have to explain anything to her about how I’d been in contact with my dead twin sister for guidance on how to thwart Violet’s murderous activities.
Cheryl and I made it back to her house and into her bedroom through the window over the garage before one in the morning, although neither of us could sleep.
“That’s not what was supposed to happen tonight, was it?” she asked.
“No,” I confirmed without elaborating. “I don’t mean to leave you in the dark, but the less you know, the safer you’ll be.” My head was spinning long after we turned out the lights. I wondered if Violet’s most recent victims had to read their predictions in order to accept their fate, or if the simple act of Violet typing them up and printing them out was enough to issue the death sentence. I was specifically worried about whether or not Cheryl was doomed now too. I hadn’t told her or the others that I’d seen a scroll on the tray for her, but the fact that there’d been one freaked me out. I hadn’t bothered reading the prediction that Violet had written for Cheryl when I’d had the chance in Violet’s kitchen, which seemed like a hasty mistake in hindsight.
Cheryl turned off the lamp on her desk and urged me to try to get some sleep. For over an hour, I listened to my phone buzz with incoming messages, hoping that the irritating noise wasn’t keeping Cheryl up. When I finally heard her lightly snoring, I got up from the cot her mom had set up for me and pulled my phone out of my bag.
The texts were, not surprisingly, coming from 000-000-0000, ID Unknown. Olivia. She was furious with me that I’d failed once again to stop Violet. I was furious too—that our communication was so one-sided. By now, it would have been helpful if she’d figured out more effective ways to instruct me so that I wouldn’t keep messing things up. I tapped out a text reply:
I’m sorry! Just tell me what to do!
To my utter shock, when my alarm went off at seven in the morning after I’d barely gotten any sleep, I saw that Olivia had summoned the energy to respond with what I perceived to be actual instructions. My phone had already been activated, the security code already entered. My phone’s map application had been opened, and my entire screen was filled with a map of a section of land topped by a blue cutout indicating water. I knew instantly what section of the country this map was showing me, and knew exactly what Olivia was implying when a red bullet appeared over Mt. Farthington as the map finished loading. It was the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, and the address of Fitzgerald�
��s Lodge near Mt. Farthington had been entered into my phone.
Would you like to access more information about Fitzgerald’s Lodge? my phone asked me.
“Sure, why not?” I muttered and tapped YES. Cheryl was already awake and using the bathroom, so at least she couldn’t hear me talking to my phone as if I were totally nuts.
Michigan. Olivia wanted me to go to Michigan, which was where Violet was taking the junior class on their ski trip. I thought about Jason Arkadian’s prediction describing the end for him as “dark and cold,” and a chill ran down my spine. My first hunch was that Violet was going to do something on that ski trip to kill a lot of people. If I hadn’t been worried about setting off all of the smoke alarms at Cheryl’s house by burning a little palo santo, I would have immediately asked the pendulum about it.
The website for Fitzgerald’s Lodge was everything I expected: an image gallery of a cozy ski resort that claimed to make the best hot chocolate in Michigan, roaring fireplaces, a luxury spa, and a variety of runs for beginners, intermediate skiers, and experienced ski enthusiasts. They offered snowboarding and skiing classes, had two highly rated restaurants on-site, and boasted nightly karaoke in the lodge. And, of course, they offered discounts for student groups.
Violet had been putting that ski trip together since shortly after Olivia had died. Maybe it had been a part of her big plan all along. The day Mischa, Trey, and I had confronted her out on the track at school, she’d actually made me feel kind of sorry for her. But now I had to wonder just how deeply evil she really was to have put this much strategy into organizing the party as well as the ski trip.
And since I’d botched my one shot at playing the game again with her while at home in Willow, if kids died in Michigan, some of their blood would be on my hands too.
Mom would be picking me up from Cheryl’s in less than an hour to go home, fetch my bags, and hit the road for the Sheridan School for Girls. If I was going to try to strategize a way to intercept Violet on the ski trip, I had a lot of arrangements to make with Henry before my phone was taken away. I was lost in thought when Cheryl returned to her bedroom and sat down on her bed. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about what happened at Violet’s house last night,” she said. “But if there’s any way I can help you finish whatever it is you need to do, all you have to do is ask.”
As I folded the blanket that her mom had provided to me for the night and looked over at Cheryl sitting there in her pajamas, I imagined how all of this must have seemed to her. Ever since we were little kids, I’d known Cheryl to be a profoundly good person. I’d perhaps attributed a lot of that goodness to lack of opportunity to be selfish or manipulative, because I thought it was easier for someone to be virtuous if they were ignored by boys and excluded from things like parties. But now it was easy to see how wrong I was. Cheryl was just as much of a powerhouse as Mischa, she just viewed other people and their actions through a different set of criteria. For her, accepting the reality that we were combatting a classmate who had been murdering kids in our town must have been shocking.
“I appreciate that, Cheryl, but I’ll only ask as a last resort. Maybe in the fall you thought I was crazy, but now? After Olivia and Candace, and Stephani? What Violet’s doing is very intentional. No one is safe,” I replied. I pulled off and folded the sheets that her mom had spread out on the cot, not wanting to leave a mess behind for Mrs. Guthries to have to clean up after I left.
Cheryl nodded. “I get that now.” Her voice was low and gravelly, and she hung her head as she picked at the dirt under her fingernails. “I was upset that you didn’t want to be friends anymore because you wanted to be popular. But I do understand that you’ve been dealing with things that are a lot more important than going to concerts and twirling flags.” When our eyes met, her mouth sagged in a guilty frown, which pierced my heart because I was the one who’d been a lousy friend these last few months. “I’m sorry that you didn’t feel like you could tell me what was going on sooner.”
I set the stack of sheets I’d folded on the cot and sat down next to on her bed, wondering if this would be the last chance I’d ever have to rectify the damage I’d done to our friendship in September. “I didn’t tell you because it sounds unbelievable that a girl at our school can make someone die just by telling them a story. You probably wouldn’t have believed me, and even if you had, I wouldn’t have wanted you to confront Violet. But it’s all real, and if I can’t figure out how to sneak away from my school and stop her within the next few weeks, Mischa will die before January twenty-fourth. Maybe other people too.” I stopped short of adding, including you. Cheryl didn’t deserve to know that Violet had placed a prediction for her on that tray.
Cheryl’s eyes still looked so sad. “But I see her every day,” she reminded me. “I could spy on her. I could transfer into her classes this semester and take notes on who she’s talking to.”
I could see that Cheryl was intent on helping, and I feared that she might go rogue and attract even more unwanted attention from Violet if I didn’t allow her to believe she was aiding us in one way or another.
“Just go on the ski trip,” I urged her, figuring that if Violet’s prediction for Cheryl might come true even if Cheryl hadn’t read it, she was already in more jeopardy than I could protect her from. “It’ll be a huge help if you can keep me informed about everything related to the trip—who’s going, how you’re getting there, who’s rooming together… everything. Pretend at school like tonight never happened and be in Michigan at the end of the month with everyone else.”
CHAPTER 14
TIGHT CORNERS, LADIES. WE CAN’T have wrinkles.”
Guard Robinson, the staffer at Sheridan responsible for watching those of us on laundry duty, stood near the entrance of the laundry room in the basement of the Huron Building, my dorm at Sheridan. There were two large dormitories on campus, intended to keep the younger girls separated from the older girls, but in my opinion, the separation strategy would have made more sense if the extremely dangerous girls had been kept away from the less dangerous girls. There were plenty of younger girls at Sheridan who I avoided with as much caution as girls my own age, some of whom were on laundry duty with me that night.
Being assigned to laundry chores on January 22 was a significantly miserable setback in my plan to escape from my campus that night. It was almost six o’clock in the evening, and according to the haphazard plan that Henry and I had whipped up on New Year’s Day, in half an hour, he, Mischa, and Trey would be waiting for me nearly half a mile away on the road that encircled my school. During the three weeks I’d been back at Sheridan, I’d been questioning my pendulum nightly about whether or not we’d be able to play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble with Violet on the ski trip, and unfailingly it had assured me that we would. Now it was go time, and I was trapped in the custody of the toughest guard on campus.
I had butterflies in my stomach as I withdrew piping-hot gym clothes from the dryer to fold as Robinson watched us. This wasn’t the way the evening was supposed to have gone down. I was supposed to have been on cafeteria duty. If I’d been there, doing pre-dinner prep, I’d have had my winter coat with me from crossing between my dorm and the cafeteria facility. I’d have been able to slip out the back utility door of the cafeteria, where trucks dropped off big shipments of vegetables and government-issued blocks of cheese, so that I could have made my way toward the rural road that led to my school to wait for my ride.
But instead, for whatever reason, my name had been printed on the laundry list the previous day. I’d debated making some kind of appeal to Mrs. Freemantle, the disciplinary advisor in charge of assigning weekly chores to students, but had ultimately decided that it would be best to not bring attention to myself that week. I couldn’t really blame that on Violet’s spirits; it was just one of the infuriating aspects of attending a reform school and not having any control over my own life. Regardless of the reason why I was unexpectedly folding laundry on a Wednesday nigh
t, I was freaking out. I had only minutes to figure out how I was going to rectify this situation, and none of the possibilities I’d been entertaining for the last thirty hours or so seemed like realistic options.
I already knew from having been on laundry duty back in November that at the end of our shift, we’d pile our organized bags of students’ clean laundry in carts that would be wheeled upstairs by the facilities crew for delivery to dorm rooms. The eighteen of us on duty would form two single-file lines, Robinson would count us, and we’d march up the stairs to our rooms to prepare for dinner. From there, I’d unenthusiastically greet my roommate Alecia out of social obligation, grab my coat, and we’d both stand outside our room in the hallway, dressed for the cold, at attention until Guard Carlitos, the resident assistant responsible for our floor of the dormitory until nine o’clock on weeknights, blew her whistle. All of the girls on the second floor of Huron would follow Carlitos from our dorm across the freezing-cold courtyard to the cafeteria. After our awful meal of chili and rice or chicken patty sandwiches, we’d be marched back across the courtyard to our rooms for homework and lights-out at ten.
If I didn’t make my escape before returning from the laundry room to my dorm room, my chance to split unnoticed would be shot for the night. There was no way I could fall out of line while crossing the courtyard to the cafeteria. Any girl who spotted me would snitch. Although there was camaraderie at Sheridan, my classmates definitely did not extend it to me.