Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  “Maybe I should just walk right in through the front door,” Henry joked. “Like, just walk right up to that guard near the parking lot and say, Hey, let me in. I’m not sure how I ended up outdoors, but I need to get back inside.”

  Shrugging, I said, “Pendulum, will Henry be allowed into Northern Reserve Academy if he walks up to the guard and asks to be let in?”

  The pendulum went still dangling from my fingers. “I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.

  “Maybe it wants us to keep asking it questions, because even if I can get into the school through the front door, I definitely won’t be able to get out that way,” Henry surmised. I thought perhaps he was giving the pendulum a little too much credit for its strategic planning skills, but what did I know? Maybe Henry was right, and the pendulum was looking out for us.

  We had reached our destination, and because we still hadn’t formulated our plan of action, Henry continued driving past it.

  “Pendulum,” I said, growing desperate, “are there any areas of that fence where someone has already cut a way to pass through?”

  I held my breath as the pendulum began swinging again. “No way! Pendulum, would you be able to show us exactly where in the fence Henry will be able to get on and off campus?”

  Yes.

  We agreed to drive around the school once more, slowly, giving the pendulum time to point us in the right direction. On our approach, we noticed two more single-file lines of coatless boys walking from one building toward the cafeteria, which made us realize that it was lunchtime—quite possibly the most ideal time of day for a boy who wasn’t really enrolled at a school to slip into the mix unnoticed.

  “What’s it saying?” Henry asked, trying to keep his eyes on the slushy road.

  The pendulum was swinging back and forth, pointing toward the school in the direction of the track on the far end of its swing. “I think it means the track on the other side of the campus. Pendulum, is the break in the fence near the track?” The momentum of the swinging increased—yes.

  I was beginning to feel like we were vultures hovering over the campus as we slowly made our way around to the other side. “Pendulum, can you show me where the break in the fence is?” I asked again to make sure it understood what I wanted from it. It continued its back-and-forth motion as we drove closer to the track.

  “There?” I asked as Henry slowed down the truck and the pendulum swung higher and higher.

  “Great,” Henry muttered. “That’s, like, right in plain view of anyone who happens to be looking out any window on campus.” Unfortunately, this was true. If the break in the fence had been closer to the building, it would have been impossible for anyone on higher floors in other buildings to have seen someone pass through it. But if there was really a break in the fence where the pendulum was suggesting, Henry would have to cross the entire football field to reach the building, making him highly visible, especially against the bright white snow.

  “Do you think I should get out and just make sure the fence is really open there?” I asked.

  Henry wrinkled his brow, looking across the quiet campus through the window on my side of the truck. “Maybe we should have gotten something to cut the fence at Kmart. We could go back.”

  “I think going back there and seeing that cashier again would probably be the dumbest thing we could do,” I said, growing impatient.

  “Maybe there’s a hardware store nearby.” He pulled over and searched on his phone for the nearest hardware store, but I sighed deeply, worried that he was stalling or chickening out. We had no way of knowing how long the students would remain in the cafeteria, with most of the guards’ attention focused there. “I think we just have to go for it right now, Henry. We can’t keep driving around all day.”

  “I know, I know. I just want to be sure,” he said as he looked out over the snowy football field at the school. I didn’t know him well enough to know how he behaved when he was frightened, but it was possible that he was genuinely scared. “If I get caught, that means you have to go to Michigan alone. And I don’t like the idea of that, but you have to promise me you’ll go and finish this.”

  “I promise,” I said, meaning it in spirit but not wanting to admit how terrified I’d be to drive Henry’s truck all the way to Michigan to face Violet on my own.

  “Okay. I guess it’s now or never.” Henry sounded unconvinced. “You should probably stay here with the engine running. You know? Just in case we need to make a fast getaway, or if any cops come around.”

  “All right,” I agreed.

  “Wish me luck,” Henry said with a quick smile. He wiggled out of his winter coat before he hopped out of the truck and slammed the door behind himself. I slid over to the driver’s seat and watched him grow smaller in the side-view mirror as he trotted in his fake uniform toward the school’s property. With my right hand, I placed the pendulum gently in the pocket of Olivia’s winter coat and looked around the area through the truck’s windshield. Trey’s school was very close to Lake Superior, and it was bitterly cold there, even colder than it had been in Willow.

  Minutes passed, and my blood began to run cold. What were we doing? The whole idea of going to Michigan, probably only to get ourselves in even more trouble, seemed completely asinine. Without Henry to keep me company, I started getting nervous. It had been a while since the spirits that had been trying so hard to stop us just three weeks earlier had sent us any drastic warnings. Even if Henry and Trey were to somehow sneak away from Northern Reserve (which was seeming less likely the longer I sat in the truck waiting), surely the spirits were going to pull out all the stops in trying to prevent us from reaching Michigan.

  In fact, I was probably in extraordinary danger just by sitting there alone in the truck. Considering all of the potential threats to my own life made me a little wary that Henry had parked the truck not too far from a tall, old tree with snow caked on its branches. Each time the wind blew, tiny snowflakes drifted from it onto the windshield. If the tree were to fall, it would crush the cab of the truck and me inside of it.

  I took the truck out of park and eased lightly on the gas to move forward by a few feet. Almost forty excruciating minutes had passed since Henry had left. There was no reason to keep the engine running other than to heat the car—I was just wasting gas—so I turned it off. It occurred to me to ask the pendulum what was going on, and if Henry and Trey were okay, and then I heard a siren in the distance.

  A siren most likely meant one thing: Something had gone wrong inside the school. My pulse went into a frenzy as I tried to figure out if I should speed away or wait.

  “Crap,” I muttered. “Crap, crap, crap.”

  Then, suddenly, I saw movement in the trees on the east side of the road. I saw two white shirts emerge from the dark trees. Henry and Trey both stepped forward onto the road, rubbing their bare arms wildly and shivering. They looked both ways before rushing across the two empty lanes of the street toward the car. I was so happy to see both of them that I threw the truck into park and leapt out of the driver’s seat.

  Not even a month had passed since the last time I’d seen Trey, but it felt like it had been years. When we’d said good-bye in Willow, it had been complicated by Violet’s party, and neither of us had been ready; this seemed more like the dramatic reunion we’d both sought back in December that we’d never truly had. Trey broke into a careful run on the icy road and threw his arms around me, pressing his open mouth to my lips before I even had a chance to say a word.

  “Oh, it’s totally cool to just make out right in front of me. Just pretend like I’m not here at all,” I heard Henry mumble as Trey placed his freezing-cold hands on both sides of my face and continued to kiss me as if I were oxygen he needed to live.

  However, Henry’s voice served as a jarring reminder of the spell I’d found in the back of Trey’s mom’s diary. The mere thought that I still had reason to be suspicious of Trey’s motivation was enough to ruin the moment.

  Slowly
, I became aware of the siren still wailing in the distance. “We should probably get going,” Henry urged us, and we got back into the truck and started its engine, bound for Michigan to end what Violet had started at whatever the cost.

  CHAPTER 17

  HENRY HAD SUCCESSFULLY INVADED THE campus by slipping under the fence, strolling right into the cafeteria with slumped shoulders and a scowl, and picking up a tray in the line as if he were any other registered student at Northern Reserve Academy. The guard on duty at the front door had given him a dirty look when he’d first stumbled in from the freezing cold with snow covering his shoes, but had been too busy looking at his phone to ask how a student might have fallen almost twenty minutes behind his classmates on the way to lunch.

  “So then I saw this guy sitting at a table eating macaroni and cheese, and when I sat down across from him, he didn’t even look up at me.” Henry chuckled, casting a glance at Trey. “I had to kick him under the table to catch his attention.”

  I elbowed Trey in the ribs gently to chide him, and saw a glimmer of a smile on his lips. I was sure Henry Richmond was probably the last person he expected—or hoped—to see sitting across from him in the cafeteria at Northern Reserve Academy.

  “I wasn’t sure what was going on,” Trey admitted. “I try not to make eye contact with people, you know? So I didn’t recognize him. I thought for a second that maybe he was just a new guy looking for a buddy or something. All I knew was that the original plan had been scrapped, because I had a note in my mailbox that my leave request had been delayed until today because my aunt was having car trouble.”

  “I’ve got to say, bro,” Henry said, in high spirits, “I don’t know how you’ve suffered through the food in that joint. You’d be better off eating toilet paper and chalk.”

  I could sense Trey fighting the temptation to be friendly with Henry, and I was relieved that the wall between them was finally crumbling. Henry seemed to understand how dire it was to release whatever animosity existed between them, whether it was related to my relationship with Trey or the fact that Trey had been driving the car that Olivia had died in. We had stopped at a discount retail store to buy a winter coat for Trey with Mrs. Richmond’s credit card, and Trey had gruffly said to Henry, “Thanks, man.” That was about the maximum amount of friendliness most people could expect from Trey.

  The endless miles of flat, snow-lined road that spanned the windshield from one side to the other made me sleepy. The dullness of wintry northern Wisconsin on the drive to Mt. Farthington was like a visual lullaby. I leaned back, intending just to rest my eyes for a few minutes, and drifted off into a shallow, fitful sleep. Around three in the afternoon, when Henry considered the distance we’d put between ourselves and Northern Reserve Academy to be adequately safe, we stopped at a fast-food restaurant.

  I left the guys ordering at the register and took the waxy fountain cups that we’d been given by the guy behind the counter over to the soda machine. The restaurant was quiet at the odd hour—an older gentleman wearing a Brewers baseball cap sat in a booth alone, his jaw gently rolling in a rhythmic motion as he chewed with his eyes fixed in an upward gaze at the television mounted from the ceiling. The quiet audio drifting out of the television suggested that a late afternoon televised court show was on rather than the local news, which was a small blessing.

  Henry and I took a seat in a corner booth and smiled at each other, momentarily enjoying our victory over Northern Reserve. Trey trudged to our table carrying a tray with food on it. He sat down next to me in the booth and immediately reached for my left hand under the table, reiterating what I already knew—that it was most important to him that we find a way to stay together after whatever happened in Michigan. I didn’t want to be apart from him any longer, not even if it was only until July, when he turned eighteen and was released, and I hoped with all my heart that he hadn’t intentionally withheld information from me about the spell his mom had cast.

  “How far are we?” Trey asked after taking an enormous chomp out of his burger.

  Henry pulled up his map app on his phone to show us both the blue line stretching from Wisconsin to Michigan, the path we’d take to arrive at Mt. Farthington. “See the little red thing? That’s us. We’ve still got about eight hours of driving ahead.”

  Eight hours of driving. At that very moment, the junior class was probably assembled in the gym for a parting lecture from Principal Nylander about conducting themselves like ladies and gentlemen and representing Willow High School with honor while on the trip. I could just picture Matt Galanis, Mischa’s boyfriend, performing his impression of Principal Nylander, his head bobbing from side to side and his mouth forming words robotically, for the entertainment of Kevin Pawelczyk and Oliver Buras. Surely Jason Arkadian’s mother would be chaperoning the trip; everyone liked her because she drove a Mustang and had ombré highlights like a movie star. Hailey West and Abby Johanssen were probably sitting in the bleachers with their Coach overnight bags at their feet, rolling their eyes and whispering about how stupid and annoying everyone else was.

  And just as it occurred to me that Tracy Hartford’s mother was always a chaperone on field trips, I realized that I’d barely thought about Tracy Hartford since I’d left Willow to go back to the Sheridan School for Girls. Cheryl had said she’d been released from the hospital, but Tracy was in almost as much danger as Mischa if what Jennie had suggested was true—that the order in which Violet predicted deaths determined the order in which her sacrifices died.

  “Henry, have you heard anything about Tracy Hartford?” I asked.

  Henry’s eyes turned downward, and he drummed his thumbs nervously on his cup of soda. “Yeah. God, where to begin?” His tone distressed me even before he continued. “She’s back in the hospital, according to what Mischa heard from her boyfriend, and she’s in a coma. Her doctors have already told her parents that at this point, they have to prepare themselves for the possibility that she’s suffered brain damage. If she comes out of it. I guess she was released too early or something?”

  “Is there any chance that they might take her off life support?” Trey asked in between swallowing his bite of burger and taking a long sip of soda. His words matched my exact thoughts as if he were reading them from a script in my head.

  Henry’s eyes offered an apology as he glanced up at me before replying, “I don’t know.”

  “Geez,” I said, perhaps a little too loudly. The old man wearing the Brewers hat looked at us over his shoulder.

  I wondered if Tracy had left the stuffed toy I’d given her at the hospital when she’d been released, or if she’d put it away in a corner of her bedroom, where it was too distant from her to serve its purpose. My throat tightened with fear when I thought of poor Tracy and of Mischa, hidden away at Kirsten’s apartment, having no idea as to our progress toward breaking the curse. Mischa had to know, despite whatever she was doing there to keep herself distracted, that her situation was growing more serious by the hour.

  “Time to go,” Henry said brusquely in a low voice, startling me out of my reverie. He lifted his tray and rose from the table, keeping his head down.

  I followed Trey’s eyes toward the television set, where a commercial announced the news stories that would be covered during the scheduled broadcast. “A teenage couple escapes from local boarding schools, and law enforcement officials warn they’re presumed to be on the run—and potentially dangerous. The full story at five,” the attractive newscaster announced in a musical delivery. The screen flashed high school pictures of both me and Trey, the very same photos that were on our current Willow High School IDs.

  The vinyl of the truck’s front seat was cold enough to make me shake when we slid back inside to continue our drive. It chilled me right through the pair of jeans that Mrs. Richmond had loaned me, and my teeth chattered uncontrollably. It seemed like an hour passed with heat blowing directly on us before my muscles began to thaw.

  The grim winter-scape surrounding us on all sides b
egan to wear on my nerves after another hour on the road. We talked in spurts about how we might lure Violet away from the other people from Willow to play the game, but each time one of us began talking, we arrived at the same conclusion: Planning was pointless. We were just going to have to review our options once we got to Mt. Farthington.

  At four thirty, the sky was rapidly losing light. While darkness was a welcome change from the monotonous blank clouds and gray snow that had encapsulated us all day, it made me even more eager to reach our destination and get off the road. Driving in the dark on snowy roads was dangerous, and I had to remain vigilant so that Violet’s spirits didn’t catch us off guard. To keep myself alert, I wondered what Violet was doing at that very moment on her bus ride to Michigan.

  If Tracy was in the hospital, then with whom would Violet be sharing a hotel room?

  Would she attempt to predict anyone else’s death on the trip?

  Would the buses transporting everyone to Mt. Farthington from Willow even arrive at their destination before whatever Violet had planned for her multiple victims occurred? The waning moon in the sky was just the slimmest sliver of white.

  Finally, once it was dark, there appeared to be a break in the heavy forest that surrounded both sides of Henry’s truck after we’d driven through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a few hours. Henry had relented with his rap music and insistence on impressing us with his memorized lyrics, and had even let us switch the radio to Top 40 hits by then. It was almost seven o’clock by the time we reached the rest area in St. Ignace, Michigan, and saw ahead of us the manned tollbooths through which we’d pass to cross Mackinac Bridge, an astoundingly long suspension bridge that would carry us over the icy waters of Lake Michigan toward Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, our destination.