Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  “We will,” he told me. “What else am I gonna do with my life except love you? That’s what I’ve always done, and what I’ll always do.”

  When we arrived at the Munson Medical Center, local police were waiting there to speak with Trey and me, but the EMTs pushed them aside and told them they’d have to wait until after we were examined. Henry hopped out of the ambulance in which he’d ridden with Cheryl and told me that he’d been able to reach Kirsten. Mischa was just fine, although getting very irritable about missing gym time. Henry told me that Kirsten said she needed to speak with me, but that it could wait until after we were released from the hospital. Evidently, the avalanche at Mt. Farthington had been a big enough news story that it had even been featured on the evening news in Chicago. Kirsten had seen it and instantly known that we must have been involved, and she’d feared for the worst—that Violet had found a way to kill all of us in a natural disaster.

  We were all led into the busy emergency room and told to change into hospital gowns. Several people from Willow were already there, receiving medical attention on beds that were separated by curtains. I caught a glimpse of Miss Kirkovic when a nurse left her little area across from my bed. She was hooked up to IVs and appeared to be either sleeping or unconscious. Cheryl and I had been placed in beds next to each other, and chose to keep the curtain partition open so that we could talk. Cheryl called her mother to let her know that she was all right and asked about Tracy’s condition. She gave me the thumbs-up to indicate that Tracy was still alive.

  I held off on calling my mom when Cheryl ended her call. Perhaps I’d had the courage to confront Violet’s evil spirits, but I hadn’t worked up enough of it yet to find out just how angry my mom was for my having run away from Sheridan.

  Nurses came along and took my temperature and blood pressure. They brought us compression socks, orange juice, and crackers, which made me realize I was absolutely ravenous. Henry, Trey, and I hadn’t eaten all day, and when I informed the nurse of that, she had dinner trays brought over for us from the cafeteria.

  We’d find out later that all ten people from Willow who had been standing at Stevens’ Pass at the moment of the avalanche had not been as lucky as we were. Jason Arkadian had broken two ribs and his leg. He had already been brought upstairs at the hospital to be prepared for surgery by the time we’d arrived. Chitra Bhakta had suffered hypothermia and would have to be hospitalized overnight. Two of Miss Kirkovic’s teeth had been knocked out, and she’d sprained an ankle and a wrist. Pete Nicholson had broken his collarbone and suffered a concussion. The three instructors from Fitzgerald’s who had also been caught in the sliding snow had walked away without a scratch.

  But no one had died.

  As EMTs attended to Violet in the emergency room, she smiled at me from her bed, which was across from mine. The new moon had risen, not a single one of Violet’s sacrifices had died, and her mother was fine. After living under the constraints of such a hideous curse for so long, it was going to take a while for Violet to believe that it was actually over. But it seemed that night that she was at least willing to believe that it was.

  * * *

  Trey and I were both interrogated by Traverse City police for over an hour, and then we were separated to wait for our parents to arrive. It seemed like the cops weren’t sure what kind of tone was appropriate to use with us, because although we were still the same kids who’d escaped from our reform schools earlier in the week, Violet had told them that Henry and Trey had pulled her out of the snow and I’d been the one to save her life by calling for help. They weren’t sure whether to treat us like villains or heroes, and the local news announcing that it was a miracle no one had been killed in the avalanche worked in our favor. The police didn’t want to spoil such a heartwarming story by taking us into custody at the hospital, and their focus on us faded as the night wore on, until it became clear that they were going to let the authorities in Wisconsin deal with us.

  My mom drove up to Michigan to fetch me that night, arriving after midnight. Her fury with me for leaving Sheridan was outmatched by her relief that I’d survived the avalanche without sustaining any injuries. I was allowed to say good-bye to Trey and Henry when I was released from the hospital, but out of respect for my mom, I didn’t go overboard with emotion. Henry’s mom and dad were both on their way over from Willow. Trey’s parents were driving up too, even though it was kind of funny that they hadn’t carpooled with my mom considering that they were making identical seven-hour journeys from practically the same starting point.

  Since the boys were in beds on opposite sides of the emergency room, I pulled back the curtain of Henry’s private area after saying good-bye to Trey. The sight of him in his hospital gown made me uncomfortable; it felt more intrusive than even having seen him shirtless in our motel room the night before.

  “Henry, saying ‘thank you’ doesn’t even start to express my gratitude,” I said quietly so that my mom, waiting outside his curtained area, wouldn’t overhear. “I don’t think there’s anything I’ll ever be able to do to show you how much having you on my side has meant to me.”

  He looked up quickly at me, barely making eye contact, and shrugged. “You did all the hard stuff. I just drove, which is what I like to do anyway.”

  I leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek. “You did a lot more than drive, Henry Richmond.”

  Just as I was about to pull the curtain back again to rejoin my mom, he reached for my hand. The touch of his skin surprised me, and we held hands for a long moment while I stood there next to his bed before he said, “Everything I want to say to you right now is probably super inappropriate. So I’ll just say this: I hope one day I’ll have a chance to tell you everything that’s in my heart. And until then, just know that if you ever need anything—anything at all—all you have to do is ask.”

  He wouldn’t look me in the eye again. I whispered, “Okay,” knowing that sometimes things are better left unsaid.

  I slept for most of the drive home from Traverse City, waking up sporadically confused and almost hysterical, believing that I was surrounded by snow again.

  Mom and her attorney spent the weekend jumping through hoops, trying to figure out how to keep me from having to go directly back to Sheridan. The attorney seemed to think we might be able to ask for an exception to be made on my behalf because of the psychological trauma I was going to face after the avalanche. He thought we stood a good chance of asking that the rest of my sentence for the antics in the fall be altered to require me to transfer to the high school in Tampa where my dad lived, and for Dad to be granted temporary custody of me.

  When Mom ran this prospect past Dad over the phone, he was all for it, which seemed to make her angry instead of happy. Even though she didn’t want me going back to Sheridan, she also didn’t want to surrender custody of me to the man who’d ditched her for a bohemian lifestyle with a younger wife. I kept my opinion to myself, which was that I didn’t care what became of me for the next five months as long as I was reunited with Trey in July.

  Mischa appeared on the doorstep of her house on Saturday morning without a single scratch on her or any memory whatsoever of where she’d spent the entire month of January. The local news anchors had a field day with the story, baffled that she’d been returned home safe and sound with complete amnesia. I watched the coverage on the news with amusement, impressed with Mischa’s acting abilities as she told the cameras that she didn’t know where she’d been and couldn’t remember anything after stepping outside the front door of her house the day she disappeared, other than that the place where she’d been held smelled strongly of incense. The police had also found abundant cat fur on her clothes, which was fortunately a vague enough clue, since they couldn’t exactly consider every cat owner in the Midwest a suspect in Mischa’s kidnapping.

  Naturally, I was dying to reconnect with Trey about all of this, but although he was at home in the house next door, both of us knew we were in way too much trouble to ri
sk seeing each other.

  It was hard for me to get even five minutes of privacy that weekend to touch base with Kirsten about how she and Mischa had decided to deal with the matter of criminality in Mischa’s extended disappearance, but I started to suspect witchcraft when Mischa called me on Sunday morning. “Do you know where I’ve been all this time?” she asked, sounding as if she truly had no idea. “Did Violet do something to me?”

  Up until that point, I thought she’d been going along with a cover story that she and Kirsten had cooked up, but it seemed like her confusion was real.

  “I don’t know,” I lied, not wanting to tell her the truth until I’d had a chance to check in with Kirsten. “I really don’t. I was at Sheridan the whole time up until I met up with the kids from school on the ski trip. I mean, obviously Trey and I planned that. You knew about it too, but you might not remember us talking about it over the holidays.”

  “I wonder if I was practicing my floor routine while I was away,” she mused. “I’ve been kind of rusty at the gym. It’s going to take a few weeks for me to get back in shape.”

  In a very surprising twist, Michael and Vanessa Simmons, Violet’s parents, made an appeal to Judge Roberts in Suamico about my case first thing on Monday morning, asking for leniency because they believed I’d saved Violet’s life in the aftermath of the avalanche. They had not, however, said anything on behalf of Trey, even though he and Henry were technically the ones who had plucked Violet out of the snow.

  I had been shocked that Trey had been allowed to return home to Willow on Saturday with his parents; I had assumed that they would have taken him directly back to Northern Reserve. It turned out that he, too, had to revisit the judge in Suamico, since we’d both violated the terms of our original punishments.

  After receiving a call from the court administrator on Monday morning, Mom left me alone to meet with her attorney for lunch in Green Bay. He was under the impression that they might be able to negotiate more on my behalf while I was in good favor with the Simmons family, but wanted to talk to her without me present (probably so that he could speak freely about what a loose cannon I was). Not long after Mom left the house, the doorbell rang, and I found Violet Simmons standing on my doorstep. Although she usually looked flawless, her skin was peeling and red as if she’d had an allergic reaction to something.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I replied, not wanting to jeopardize whatever deal my mom was putting together to try to salvage my future at that very moment.

  She wrinkled her nose nervously and adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. “I just wanted to say thank you, I guess. And give you a little bit more background about how all of this started so that you know it wasn’t my fault.”

  I was about to tell her that I honestly didn’t care whose fault it was when she continued, “I’m not a bad person, McKenna. It bothers me that you probably think I am, especially because…” She trailed off and then completed the thought. “You’re awesome. I don’t think I ever could have done what you did.”

  Against my better judgment, I let her step inside and take a seat in our living room. “I know my skin looks really bad,” she admitted self-consciously. “The doctors think it’s because I was in the snow for so long.”

  I was willing to bet that her skin had been damaged when I’d frozen her entire body during the game of Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble, but it was probably best that she didn’t know that.

  “I don’t even know where to begin. This routine has been my life for over a year. It used to be all I would ever think about—who they wanted me to claim and how I’d get that person to agree to let me predict their death, and then eventually how horrible I felt after they died. I’d hoped that things would get better when we moved to Willow. But… it wasn’t long before it was just the same old routine. And the people that they specifically requested for me to get them were the last people I wanted to die. You have to believe me about that.”

  I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to completely believe Violet about anything, but I was willing to listen. “So how did it start?”

  Violet leaned back on the couch and crossed her legs, settling in to tell me the whole story. She took a deep breath as if it scared her to simply remember back to how everything began, and picked at the skin around her fingernails as she spoke. “The first time I ever saw them was the night after my grandmother died. I was at home, in my bedroom in Lake Forest last fall. I thought I was having a bad dream, the kind of vivid bad dream where you know you’re dreaming but your heart is racing and you wake up sweating and moving your arms and legs and it takes you a while to calm down even after you realize you’re awake.”

  I’d had those sorts of dreams myself. The image of a house on fire and my sister’s silhouette in the front window waving farewell to me flashed behind my eyes.

  “But this wasn’t a dream,” Violet continued, her voice dropping to a lower key. “They appeared as kind of… blue lights. I saw them in my bedroom mirror first, as if they were reflections, but then I realized they were just orbs of light floating in my room; they weren’t a reflection of anything in the mirror at all.

  “There were five of them, and that first time they appeared, I didn’t know what they were. They didn’t exactly talk to me, like, using words, so I’m not sure how to explain this, but they made it clear that they wanted me to get one. One what? I wondered. They lifted one of my stuffed animals right off of my bed and made it levitate over me. Just one.

  “Obviously, I was freaked out about the whole thing, but I convinced myself it had just been a hallucination. I didn’t tell my parents. My grandmother had just died, and my father was super busy making funeral arrangements. My mom was already pitching a fit about his suggestion that we might have to move to Willow while my parents settled my grandmother’s estate. My mom had just been made a partner at the law firm where she’d been working since before I was born, so she didn’t want to just move to some tiny town in Wisconsin. They didn’t need the stress of having a daughter who was losing her mind, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Basically, by the time we’d buried my grandmother and I went back to school, I forgot about the lights and the floating stuffed animal. Then, one day in study hall two or three weeks later, this kid named Michael had a deck of cards. He wanted to play War, but as he broke up the deck of cards into stacks for all of us, I started getting this weird feeling. Like my scalp was tingling, in a cool way, like when someone’s braiding your hair. Or like the feeling I would get on Christmas Eve when I was a little kid, knowing that Santa was on his way. Just looking at the cards made me feel like I should pick them up, so I reached out and held them. And I said, Do you guys want to see something cool?”

  I listened intently, completely caught up in the tale Violet was telling.

  She hesitated and frowned, seeming sad about whatever followed in the story. “I didn’t know what was going to happen; I honestly didn’t. I just had this weird impulse and suspicion that if I kept going, something important would happen. When I fanned the cards out in front of me, it was like… like the cards didn’t look like cards anymore. I could see stories on each of them, almost like little frames from a movie from each of my friends’ lives. There was one of Mike Goldsmith on his bicycle, riding in the dark. There was one of my best friend, Rebecca, coughing up blood in the back of an ambulance. There was one of this other girl, Brianna, who I didn’t even know that well—she always picked at her skin with a sewing needle during class. And one of…” She trailed off for a second, seemingly lost in the memory, before continuing. “My boyfriend—I guess you could call him that—on a basketball court.

  “I asked my friends if any of them wanted to pick a card. I shuffled the deck and held the cards out so that they could choose. That first time, the lights hadn’t specified who they wanted me to get. It could have been anyone. But Rebecca was the one who took a card. I wasn’t sure what I was supp
osed to do next, so I told her to put it back in the deck. I shuffled the cards again, and then nothing happened. Everyone started joking around then, like, Wow, cool trick, Violet.

  “But I still had this weird feeling like something was supposed to happen, so I just put the stack of cards on the table and watched it. Then a single card rose right out of the middle of the deck. It was”—she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as if even the memory of that day still bothered her—“just… crazy. I knew without even seeing it that it was the card that Rebecca had chosen, and it was. Everyone freaked out. They thought it was so awesome. I mean, it was, like, the eight of hearts or something. No one but me knew that the card had something to do with Rebecca dying in an ambulance.

  “When I hung out with Rebecca that weekend, it didn’t seem like the card trick had mattered. But then the following Monday, she didn’t show up for school. I found out she’d been walking home from babysitting late on Saturday night in her subdivision and had been hit by a car that just… drove away. I didn’t know it was really going to happen. Honestly. I didn’t.”

  “Geez,” I commented. Violet’s eyes were puffing up as she began getting emotional. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen Rebecca in Kirsten’s mirror at the bookstore.

  Violet shifted positions uncomfortably and sniffed. “So, yeah,” she said. “That was just the beginning. After Rebecca died, the lights came back again. They wanted me to get someone else, and this time they opened my yearbook and showed me that they wanted this girl Brianna, who was in a few classes with me. We weren’t even friends. I mean, she was big-time into video games and mostly hung out with kids who spent all their time on Twitch. But still I knew they wanted me to tell her how she was going to die. I told them I wouldn’t do it. I mean, you probably don’t believe me, but Rebecca was my friend. They tricked me. They made me feel like I had some kind of cool magic power, and I didn’t realize…”