by Zoe Aarsen
I shuddered, remembering the last time I’d spent the night in the Richmonds’ basement: the fateful night of Olivia’s birthday party. “I really don’t like that idea,” I said. “You know how Kirsten said we should always burn sage whenever invoking the guidance of spirits? Violet played that game down here and didn’t cleanse anything. There are probably all kinds of evil spirits and ghouls down here.”
With a reassuring smile, Henry told me, “I don’t think there are ghouls down here, McKenna. Dusty board games that I can’t convince anyone to play with me? Yes. Substantial evidence on vinyl of my dad’s horrible taste in music? Yes. But ghouls?”
He opened the door leading out into the main area of the basement, and thankfully the lights were already on. The large-screen television was exactly where it had been the night of Olivia’s party, and Henry had set a pillow and two blankets for me on the sofa where Candace had slept. He’d also left a pair of button-down flannel pajamas, presumably Olivia’s, for me to wear. I dared to examine the fireplace, where I alone had witnessed the flames surge eerily from almost completely burned-out logs during Violet’s storytelling. The glass doors over it had been pulled closed, and the iron log holders were empty. The fireplace looked vacant, as if a fire hadn’t been lit in months.
Yet still, the dark, gaping hole in the wall framed by brick made me uneasy. It seemed like it had served as some kind of portal through which Violet had invited her spirits to join us the night of the party.
Henry sat down on the edge of the couch and cleared his throat, signaling that he was about to ask me something of a sensitive nature. “I feel weird asking you this, and you don’t have to answer if it’s uncomfortable for you, but did Olivia ever give you reason to believe—when she was, like, sending you messages—that she’s unhappy in the afterlife? You know, like…”
I knew what he was getting at without him actually asking. He was asking if she was in hell, or purgatory. “No,” I told him honestly. “I didn’t get that sense from Jennie, either. I don’t know if those places exist, or if they’re just theories humans invented to make us feel better about why good people die just like bad people do. Olivia has never given me any reason to think that she’s in a lake of fire or being jabbed with a pitchfork or anything.”
Completely resisting my attempt at humor, Henry hung his head and looked down at his feet. “That’s good. My parents are kind of religious. It’s been bothering my mom that she can’t remember the last time Olivia went to church before, you know, the accident.” He paused, and then continued, “It just doesn’t make sense. Olivia was never anything but nice to Violet. She invited her to the party even though she barely knew her. And Violet repaid that kindness by singling her out for death?”
I sat down beside him, all too familiar with his line of thinking. “I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering the same things, you know? Why did Jennie have to die? Why did it take so long for the fire department to show up? Why couldn’t she have been burned, but survived? I wish I could tell you that it gets easier. It gets different, but not easier.”
He half laughed. “That helps a lot, McKenna,” he said sarcastically.
“My dad likes to say that grief is like climbing a mountain. You never reach the top, but you get used to climbing.” He remained quiet, letting that sink in. “Don’t listen to me,” I said, suddenly feeling like the energy between us had become a little too intense for my comfort. Henry wasn’t my boyfriend. Our friendship was still so new that it felt presumptuous to consider him a friend, even though I genuinely liked him as a person a lot more than I ever expected I would when I still only thought of him as Olivia’s hot older brother. “I’m sure I’d make a terrible therapist.”
He cleared his throat again, this time perhaps to banish excess emotion from his throat. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be great at whatever you decide to do.” He stood up and looked around the basement again. “Are you going to be okay down here? I mean, I’d just sleep down here too, but my mom will suspect something is up if she doesn’t hear me walk down the hall toward my bedroom,” Henry said, sounding genuinely concerned about my welfare. “You can keep the television on mute, if that makes you feel safer.”
“Yeah, I guess…” I trailed off, not enthusiastic about having to pass the night alone down there. “What’s the plan for the morning?”
“I’m setting my alarm for five thirty, and I’ll come down and get you at six. Sorry, I didn’t think to bring any kind of alarm down here.”
“It’ll be fine,” I agreed, sinking into the couch and looking around. I didn’t want to tell him that the idea of borrowing an outfit from his dead sister freaked me out.
“Are you sure?” he asked, standing just a few feet away from me.
“I’m okay, I’m just… scared,” I admitted. “I don’t like sleeping alone at night. I mean, Sheridan sucks and everything, but it’s kind of a good thing that I have a roommate there, even if she’s kind of a bitch.”
“Sorry, McKenna. I’d just sleep down here tonight, but…,” he said, his green eyes lingering on me. I felt a pull of magnetism between us that I knew was exactly the wrong thing for me to be feeling toward him in that moment, especially after the serious conversation we’d just had about grief. We would be driving to pick up my boyfriend in the morning. The boyfriend I loved. What kind of an awful jerk was I to be standing in the Richmonds’ basement, not only wishing that Henry would take pity on me and sleep on the other couch for the night, but also wishing that he might just kiss me too? And yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his face, specifically his lips—
“I think that would be a bad idea,” he finished his thought, and for a second I was sure that he’d just been thinking about the same things as me. He patted me on the shoulder and then took a few steps toward the staircase. “It’s just a few hours.”
He rushed up the stairs to the Richmonds’ kitchen, leaving me to wonder if that moment of intense attraction had been all in my head, or if Henry had felt it too. I mean, he had asked me to go to homecoming with him, but that had been months ago, before we even really knew each other. A lot had changed since that night. Did he have real feelings for me? I felt myself blushing even though there was no one around to see me. Of course, if Trey knew about his mom casting a spell on Michael Simmons and had been keeping that from me, perhaps Henry had been more deserving of my affection all along. But even thinking that made my heart ache; I needed to see Trey and ask him about his mother’s diary before letting anything happen with Henry that I might regret. Almost every single night at Sheridan, I had considered asking my pendulum if Trey knew anything about the spell in the diary, and I hadn’t worked up the courage to pose the question.
I sat frozen in one spot on the couch for several minutes before moving a muscle. There was nothing I could do at that hour to change the circumstances we faced in the morning, but I could at least use the time I had at the Richmonds’ to catch up on news and get some rest. It wasn’t a sure bet that I was going to get any sleep at all during our adventure in Michigan.
I wished I had a stick of palo santo or some sage with me to burn so that I could ask the keys I’d swiped from Sheridan more questions about what Violet had planned for my classmates in Michigan. Maybe now that the event was happening sooner, the pendulum would be able to provider clearer answers. My guess was that it was going to be a big event—a fire at the hotel, an open shooter, some kind of ski lift accident—to kill many people at once just so show me what she was capable of doing. But it was unrealistic to expect that the Richmonds had anything suitable for clearing energy in their basement, so posing questions to any kind of pendulum was going to have to wait.
I turned on the television and lowered the volume to barely above mute and flipped to a local network station to see if it was still broadcasting news. After watching a brief update on the case of the missing teenager from Willow, Wisconsin, during which they featured Mischa’s sophomore school photo (which was really going to piss her off�
��goofy smile and zit on her chin), I realized I had to use the bathroom. Sleep was basically going to be impossible if I didn’t empty my bladder, and the Richmonds didn’t have a bathroom in their basement. There was no getting around it: I was going to have to climb up the stairs and use the bathroom in the hallway near the kitchen as discreetly as possible.
After changing into Olivia’s pajamas, I ascended the staircase slowly on tiptoes, not wanting any of the boards to creak under my weight. At the top, I turned the doorknob slowly, knowing very well by now that the evil spirits protecting Violet would foil me at any possible moment. The kitchen was located at the back of the Richmonds’ house, and the lights were off, but I remembered what Henry had said about his mother sitting in the kitchen when we’d first arrived. I didn’t want to be unpleasantly startled by a greeting or movement in the shadows.
After listening with the door cracked open for what felt like a few minutes and convincing myself that the kitchen truly was empty, I stepped forward and was careful to close the door gently behind me so that Violet’s spirits couldn’t slam it while I used the bathroom. I inched down the hallway, remembering how the last time I’d taken this little journey in the night, I’d caught a glimpse of Olivia’s red Prius in the driveway, waiting patiently for her to wake up in the morning.
In the bathroom, I used the toilet in the dark. But in my haste to move quickly and get back downstairs, I hadn’t heard the footsteps coming down the carpeted stairs from the second floor.
When I pushed the door outward and stepped into the hallway, I gasped loudly in surprise. I found myself standing face-to-face with Mrs. Richmond, and she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her. She wore a fuzzy red robe, and her hair was limp. I couldn’t recall ever having seen her without makeup before then, and her face was lined with more wrinkles than I remembered.
“Mrs. Richmond, I’m so sorry. I can explain,” I began in a hushed whisper, not wanting to be heard by Mr. Richmond, who was presumably upstairs. There was a chance, especially after everything Henry’s had mom been through in the last few months, that she didn’t know who I was. “It’s me, McKenna Brady. I’m a friend of Henry’s, and I was friends with Olivia.”
Mrs. Richmond blinked, and then began breathing normally again. When she dropped her hands from her mouth, she placed them over her chest, as if trying to keep her heart positioned where it belonged. “Oh my goodness. Oh, McKenna, you scared the life out of me,” she said quietly. “Oh, my.” After a moment of consideration, she reached for me and pulled me close in a very quick embrace. “What on earth are you doing in our house at this hour?”
Her simple question stumped me. There was no reasonable excuse for my presence in the Richmonds’ house in the middle of the night, when I was supposed to be an entire state away, at a reform school, which Mrs. Richmond knew very well.
“I… Henry…,” I began, not wanting to implicate Henry in my mess, but knowing I couldn’t explain how I’d gotten into the house without mentioning him.
Mrs. Richmond studied me, crossing her arms over her chest. “Come sit down. I was going to make some tea.”
I sat down at the Richmonds’ table in the dining room, where just four months prior, I’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Olivia as Mrs. Richmond had sliced an ice cream cake. Mrs. Richmond floated around the kitchen in the next room, placing a kettle of water on to boil. She rummaged around in the cabinets, preparing two mugs and filling two infusers with loose leaf tea. The entire time I waited for her, I convinced myself that she was going to call the police on me, and they were going to take me back to Sheridan. This was it: I was busted.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what you and Henry are up to?” she asked me calmly after sitting down across from me while the water heated.
“I’m not sure how to answer that,” I admitted.
Mrs. Richmond drummed her fingertips along the oak table and sat back in her chair. “McKenna, you know that my husband and I have heard the rumors from the high school. Tanya Lehrer called me shortly after Olivia’s death expressing concern about this game that you girls played the night of Olivia’s party.”
It took me a second to realize that she was talking about Candace’s mom. I always thought of Candace’s mother as Mrs. Cotton, even though that hadn’t been her name since she remarried.
“You know, I have to admit, when she first mentioned it to me, I was in such a state over losing Olivia, I just didn’t want to hear a word of it. It sounded like childish nonsense, like that matter of chanting in the bathroom with the lights off and looking for ghosts in the mirror. But since Candace’s accident in Hawaii, it’s been troubling me,” she said, watching me carefully. “Distressing me,” she clarified.
“We did play a game,” I said carefully, getting the sense without her directly asking me that she was hungry for details. “That new girl from Illinois—Violet—she predicted all of our deaths. Well, not mine. But Olivia’s, Candace’s, and Mischa’s.”
“And how did this game work, exactly?”
That’s when I began unburdening my soul with all of it. I told Mrs. Richmond everything that had happened since Olivia’s death in September. She prodded me with thoughtful questions, genuinely interested in hearing my take on things, and I realized that she was as desperate to hear what I had to say as I was to finally tell an adult the whole truth. It felt like a glorious relief to finally just share the words that had been piling up inside of me for months with someone eager to believe me, words that threatened to burst out of my mouth and ears however they could.
Never once did Mrs. Richmond shake her head at me in disbelief or question anything that I told her. She listened as if I were a perfectly rational, mature adult, and reacted as if I was providing her with an explanation for all of the suffering she’d endured since the fall. She rose from the table when the teapot whistled in the kitchen and fetched it from the stovetop, then returned to the dining room to fill both of our mugs with hot water. “Let that steep for a few minutes,” she advised me.
I described Violet’s total denial of having any involvement in my friends’ deaths and her insistence on making predictions as often as possible throughout the fall, with as many kids from the high school as she could wheedle into participating. And then, without telling her that Henry had crashed the party with me, I told her about the fortunes Violet had distributed on New Year’s.
“And what now?” she asked me. “What about Mischa?”
“I guess that’s what I’m doing here,” I confessed. “Mischa’s next. Violet said she’d choke on something. I don’t remember what, or exactly how, but we think it will happen before Friday. Henry and I want to try to stop Violet and break the curse before she…” I trailed off, not wanting to say the word “dies” to Mrs. Richmond.
“I knew something was going on. Henry’s been very secretive lately. It’s not like him to disappear for entire days like he has since Christmas Eve. I never did get a straight answer out of him about how such an enormous icicle ended up breaking the windshield of my husband’s Mercedes. My husband is so worried about my state of mind, I feel like no one just levels with me anymore. She was my daughter. I deserve to know what happened to her,” Mrs. Richmond said calmly, taking a sip of her tea. Then, taking me completely by surprise, she asked, “What can I do to help?”
At five thirty in the morning, Mrs. Richmond rubbed my arm in the Richmonds’ living room and said gently, “McKenna, it’s time to wake up.” With her approval, I’d spent the night sleeping much more comfortably on the first floor than I ever would have down in the basement by myself. Olivia’s bedroom hadn’t been offered, either because it was upstairs next to Mr. and Mrs. Richmond’s room, or because Mrs. Richmond had been treating it kind of like a museum since Olivia’s death. I didn’t know if Mrs. Richmond had ever gone to sleep, herself, that night, but she woke me up as she’d promised, right on time. She led me upstairs, where I took an indulgent hot shower and dressed in the pair of jeans and sweater that sh
e set out for me. Although I was sure that the clothes had belonged to Olivia, I didn’t recognize them.
When Henry crept down the stairs at six, dressed for the cold weather in an insulated plaid shirt and jeans, he found his mother and me sitting at the dining room table as I wolfed down a bowl of cereal.
“What’s going on?” he asked, looking first at me, and then at Mrs. Richmond.
“I told your mom everything,” I confessed. A mix of frustration and confusion crossed his face in reaction.
“It’s all right, honey,” Mrs. Richmond assured him. “But you should really eat before you guys head out. Or at least have some coffee.”
Henry took a seat as if in a daze at the table, and Mrs. Richmond moved into the kitchen to fix him a cup of coffee.
“So, you guys are heading up north before driving to Michigan?” Mrs. Richmond asked when she returned from the kitchen.
“Uh, yeah,” Henry said with obvious discomfort in his voice. “We have to pick someone up at their boarding school. Although”—he hesitated, remembering that our whole plan had most likely been compromised—“that might not be the safest course of action, since people might be expecting us—or at least McKenna—to show up there. I don’t want to get busted before we even cross the state line into Michigan.”
As she stirred her coffee, Mrs. Richmond suggested, “You may need to create some kind of distraction. Divert everyone’s attention away from him to give him a chance to slip away. They’re probably keeping a close watch on him if word’s spread that McKenna’s escaped from her school.”
Henry smiled at his mother with a strange, kind of disbelieving expression. “Mom, why are you, like, helping us? Forgive me for saying so, but this is, like… way too weird.”
Mrs. Richmond replied, “When I was a little girl, a fortune-teller at the Wisconsin State Fair told my aunt Mary that she’d die in flight. What a ridiculous thing to say, we all thought. My aunt thought she was talking about skydiving and found it hilarious. A few years later, she won a trip to the Bahamas from a radio station. While she was there, she went on a hike along with her tour group and decided to go diving off a popular cliff. Everyone else in the group dove without a problem, but my aunt hit the water at an odd angle and broke her neck. She died as they were airlifting her to the hospital.”