The Haunting of Sunshine Girl

by Paige McKenzie

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I say, though it feels like I’m choking. “I was worried it was going to be something serious.”

  She Is Getting Closer

  Sunshine is getting closer. I can sense it each time she awakens a new power, comes to a new understanding.

  I sensed it when she first felt the cold. She perceives it as weakness—the strange feeling in her belly, the way her heart quickens, the gooseflesh on her arms—to her, it feels like an illness. But soon—once she has passed—she will learn how to harness that sensation, how to let it wash over her, to welcome it and then release it. Most of us are able to do so intuitively, but so far she hasn’t allowed her intuition to take over. When she finally began to understand just what the cold might signify, she forced that understanding away, denied what she was beginning to comprehend. She is fighting this.

  And yet, despite her fight, she is making progress. The professor was a lovely trick, if I do say so myself. I’ll have to thank Abner for his participation. It took a lot of strength to put him and his office in place, but it was well worth it. And the books were a stroke of brilliance. Just a little bit of help, a nudge to get them onto the correct path.

  They didn’t notice me driving behind them as they wended their way through the campus’s twists and turns. Soon after they left, Abner appeared at my side: She doesn’t understand, he said. This is the girl you’re counting on to repair what’s broken?

  But even Abner doesn’t know the truth. I don’t exactly want to repair anything. And Sunshine could be the reason I don’t have to.

  How convenient that she found that Nolan so quickly—another way in. If I cared about such things, I would find it touching that Sunshine’s journey is bringing him a sense of peace about his own grandfather, one of few humans who truly cared about the paranormal world. In another time, when we congregated with humans, I might have known the man. I might have validated his beliefs. But such times are long past. Such times precede even me, and I am the oldest creature I know.

  Nolan was the one to read the book, to find the word and say it out loud first. It is, I suppose, appropriate—considering what he will be to her—that he be the one who puts the pieces together. But this is not about him. It is about her.

  It is good to see just how much fight she has in her. Her will is strong, her essence forceful. I wonder how long she will go on fighting before she realizes she must put that fight to better use.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Puzzle Pieces

  On the way to school the next day I practice the speech I’m planning to unleash on Nolan the instant I see him: I’ve decided I’m not one of those guardian angel guys. I mean, we don’t even know if anyone is. We just have Professor Jones’s book to go on, and it might not even be a real book. He might have his own private printing press hidden in that building, for all we know. It certainly looked like there was plenty of available space. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but all of this sounds a little too out of this world to be true.

  The last line of the speech is the part that’s tripping me up. Because the fact that my house is haunted in the first place is plenty out of this world too. Nolan will be quick to point out that if one out-of-this-world thing can be true, why not another?

  And I’m having trouble coming up with any kind of counterargument for that.

  It’s almost Thanksgiving. I’m finally not the only student bundled up with a hat and scarf every morning. Today I’m wearing a cozy gray cardigan that’s at least two sizes too big; the sleeves hang long past my wrists, and I don’t even bother trying to roll them up because they’re keeping my hands warm. In fact, with such long sleeves, I don’t need gloves. Someone in the sweater business should totally try to corner that market: extra-long-sleeved sweaters so you don’t need gloves to keep your hands warm! They’d make millions. Or maybe not: everyone else at school is wearing clothes that actually fit them, so it’s possible that I’d be the only customer for a product like that.

  It’s a Thursday, and we don’t have visual arts on Thursdays, so my best chance to catch Nolan is in the halls between classes. But he catches me first and starts talking before I can launch into my speech.

  “I’m coming over after school today,” he declares. “I read something more.”

  We don’t have much time before class, so I try to condense my speech into a single sentence.

  “Listen Nolan, I think you might be putting a lot of faith in a tattered old book that a potentially crazy old man gave you.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Ms. Wilde leaning against a wall of lockers down the hall. There’s no way she can hear us with the sound of kids shouting and laughing, lockers being opened and slammed shut. Still, it feels like she might be listening.

  I shake my head. Get a grip, Sunshine.

  Before I can say anymore Nolan counters, “I’m not just putting faith in a tattered old book. I found more online last night.” The bell rings, and he heads to class before I can say that he’s totally undermined the rest of my argument.

  Later Nolan sits at my kitchen table once more, me across from him. This time, instead of the book laid out in front of him, there’s a stack of pages he printed off the Internet.

  “What did you do, Google the word luiseach and print all the facts off Wikipedia?”

  Nolan laughs nervously. “No. I mean, I started by Googling luiseach, but of course nothing came up.”

  I breathe a teeny, tiny sigh of relief.

  “But,” he continues and my relief vanishes, “Then I started Googling other words like dark spirits and guardian angels and exorcisms and possession. I was getting nowhere and then I Googled haunted house along with the word guardian. And I got this.” He holds up a densely packed printout covered in words I don’t understand.

  I push up my sleeves and reach for the paper, trying not to look at the ugly crescent-shaped scar on my left hand. It still looks red and angry, like it doesn’t want to heal. Mom probably has a matching mark on her wrist, I just haven’t been close enough to her lately to see it.

  “What is that, Greek?”

  “Latin.”

  “You speak Latin?”

  “Of course not. I just plugged it into a translator.” He holds up another printout. “See any words you recognize?”

  Well, I see a bunch of words I recognize like and and the and age, but I’m pretty sure the word Nolan’s talking about is luiseach, which is repeated over and over across the translation.

  “Yippee,” I say. I’m being sarcastic, but I’m actually really impressed by Nolan’s research. I could never have found all of this on my own. Partly because I didn’t want to. I mean, I want to save my mother more than I’ve ever wanted anything, but I also don’t want to be an ancient mystical warrior.

  The truth is, I Googled the word luiseach too. But unlike Nolan, I gave up before I found it.

  “Here’s something interesting,” Nolan begins, pointing about halfway down the third page. “It says that luiseach come of age on their sixteenth birthday. Until then they are unable to perceive ghosts and spirits.”

  “I turned sixteen a couple weeks before we moved here.”

  Nolan nods thoughtfully. “It’s a weird sort of coincidence, don’t you think? That you’d turn sixteen and then almost immediately move into a haunted house.”

  “But we didn’t move here until after my birthday,” I say, then quickly wish I could take back the words because they make it sound like I actually agree with Nolan’s theory. And I most certainly do not believe that I’m a luiseach. Not . . . not exactly.

  Nolan scans the pages in front of him. “But you should have felt something the instant you turned sixteen, even if it wasn’t as powerful as what you feel in this house.” He purses his lips like he’s trying to figure something out.

  The instant I turned sixteen is kind of a hard moment to determine because I’m adopted. I don’t have a birth mother who can tell me stories of the exact moment I was born, who tells me about the hours of
painful contractions and pushing hard until the sound of my cries alerted her to the fact that a new person had just sort of burst into the room. Ashley used to claim that her mom told her she was born precisely at midnight. She claimed that, technically, she had two birthdays, since her birth straddled two days.

  The things I know about my own birth are much more vague. Mom told me that I was found at the hospital in the middle of the night, past midnight on August 15. I was still covered in what she calls amniotic fluid and I call birth goo, though I was swaddled in a soft yellow blanket. They could tell I’d been born only a few hours earlier. So even though I was found on the fifteenth, we always celebrated my birthday as the fourteenth. She was absolutely positive it was the right day, she said, because science doesn’t lie.

  I can’t detect much science in the pages Nolan and I are looking at now. Mom would call them fairy stories, not facts. I wish Mom were here, spouting off scientific explanations to contradict all this insanity. But if Mom were here—the way she’s been acting lately—she’d probably confiscate Nolan’s papers and send me to my room. Enough of this ghost nonsense, she’d say.

  “What do you remember about your birthday this year? Was there anything that felt different?”

  I shrug. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Well, talk me through your day,” Nolan tries. He takes off his glasses. “Maybe it will jog your memory.”

  “I didn’t have a Sweet Sixteen party or anything. It was just me, my mom, and Ashley—she’s my best friend back in Austin.” He nods. “We had dinner and cake.” In fact, we did the same thing for my birthday this year that I had since I turned thirteen and convinced Mom she could stop throwing me birthday parties, since I wasn’t even friends with most of the classmates on her invite list. I just wanted her and Ashley, and a different kind of cake every year. Thirteen: German chocolate cake. Fourteen: red velvet cake. Fifteen: banana cream pie (not technically cake, I know, but it was delicious). And this year, sixteen, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting (no raisins—why do people put raisins in cookies and cakes, yuck). I can’t believe how much time I used to spend thinking about what kind of cake to have each year. That seems so unimportant now.

  “Mom baked a cake,” I say. “She decorated it with candles.”

  “Sixteen candles.” Nolan nods.

  “Seventeen, actually. Sixteen plus one to grow on. My mom does that every year.” Not that she believes in birthday wishes, of course. She just likes cake and candles.

  “Got it. What else?”

  “Nothing else! That was it. I blew out the candles and they clapped and then we ate the cake.”

  “Did you make a wish?”

  I hesitate. Every year I always wait until the last second to decide what my wish will be. I don’t make up my mind until I’m actually leaning over the cake and taking a deep breath. I like to pick little things—not world peace or winning the lottery. I prefer to make wishes that actually have a chance of coming true. On my thirteenth birthday I wished for Oscar to get over an eye infection that he’d had for months. On my fifteenth I wished to get a good score on my PSATs.

  But this year . . . I don’t remember. In fact, I don’t think I made a wish at all. I’ve never not made a wish before. I close my eyes, trying to remember. Did something happen to make me forget to pick something?

  I picture the evening of my birthday, the three of us sweltering in the Texas heat, because Mom insisted that we open the windows instead of turning on the AC.

  “Fresh air is good for you,” she’d say, sick and tired of manufactured coolness after another day spent in the hospital’s central air conditioning.

  The house was a little bit of a disaster area because we’d already started packing. Half our books and clothes were stacked into boxes. Oscar was circling my feet, like he knew that since this year’s cake didn’t have any chocolate in it—chocolate is poisonous to dogs—we might actually give him a taste.

  “Do you hear that?” Nolan asks suddenly. I open my eyes. Footsteps are coming from the floor above us. But not gentle, skipping footsteps. Instead, it sounds like someone is pacing anxiously back and forth.

  I look up at the ceiling and say softly, “What are you trying to tell me?”

  The steps turn into stomps, like someone jumping up and down.

  I stand up and lean over the table. Back in Texas this was the very same table where Mom put my cake, still warm in the middle. I take a deep breath, imitating the way I must have inhaled before I blew out my candles. Now my skin is covered in goose bumps and my heart is pounding. And suddenly I remember: on my birthday I felt exactly the same sensations the instant I inhaled over the cake.

  “I did feel something on my sixteenth birthday,” I admit. “It’s the way I felt when we moved into this house, except it only lasted for a second. Kind of like when you have a fever and your skin is hot to the touch but you still can’t stop shivering. And my heart was pounding like I’d just sprinted a mile.” I pause. “Not that I know what it feels like to sprint for a mile,” I add, and Nolan smiles a little.

  Was turning sixteen—and not the move to Ridgemont—the event that jump-started that not-feeling-right sensation that now follows me wherever I go?

  “That doesn’t mean I’m a luiseach,” I add hastily, stepping away from the table. “It could have been a million other things. Maybe I was coming down with something. You have to admit, this is pretty flimsy evidence.”

  I expect Nolan to argue, but instead he sighs and says, “I know.” I sit back down. “This is like trying to put together a puzzle with a million pieces and no picture of the end result to guide you.” He flips through his pages. “It also says here that luiseach are never alone. They’re aided by a protector and a mentor. And according to this, your mentor should have presented himself or herself to you by now. They’re supposed to show up to begin your training when you turn sixteen.” He runs his fingers through his fine hair. “But maybe that goes back to when luiseach lived in insular communities, and things are different now? I can’t figure it out.”

  “What about their protector?” I ask. I prefer the sound of a protector to a mentor, anyway. Some protection would come in handy right about now. “Does it say anything about when a protector shows up?”

  “There’s even less in here about protectors.” Nolan shoves the papers across the table. “And you’d think now would be the time the protector at least would show up,” he adds, echoing my thoughts. “You could use some protection, with your mom in danger.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Caught in a Web

  The sound of keys rattling in the front door makes both of us jump.

  “Mom is never home this early.” I push my chair from the table and start stacking all of Nolan’s papers on top of each other so quickly that it’s a miracle I don’t give myself a paper cut.

  I’m feeling something that I’ve never, ever felt before: nervous that my mother is about to walk into the room.

  “Hi Mom!” I say a bit too loudly. If Nolan notices my false cheer, he keeps it to himself. Maybe he’s just curious to finally get a look at my mother in real life, this person he’s heard so much about, this person he’s watched hurt herself over and over again in the video on my phone, but has never actually met.

  “Hi,” Mom answers absently, drifting through the kitchen, her eyes on a patient file in her hand. She doesn’t look up at us. I don’t think she even realizes that another person is in the room with us.

  “Mom, this is my . . .” I hesitate, searching for the right thing to call Nolan. He’s not my boyfriend, obviously. But he feels like more than just a regular friend too. My goodness, could I be more of a girl right now? Seriously, with everything that’s going on, you’d think I wouldn’t exactly have time to worry about semantics. “This is Nolan,” I say finally. “We’re in the same art class.”

  Nolan stands up, his chair squeaking against the tile. “Hello, Mrs. Griffith,” he says, sticking out his hand fo
r her to shake. He’s so adorably polite that I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning.

  But Mom doesn’t take his hand. Instead, she says, “It’s Ms.”

  “I’m sorry?” Nolan blinks.

  “Mizzzz Griffith,” she replies, exaggerating the word. “Not Mrs.”

  Mom has never asked any of my friends to call her Miss or Ms. or Mrs. anything. She’s always just been Kat.

  “Nolan and I were just studying—”

  “For art class?” Mom interrupts, her voice thick with mockery. She drops her file onto the kitchen counter with a smack. “Have to study to make the best collage?”

  I open my mouth to say of course not, but before I can get the words out, Nolan asks, “How did you know we were working on collages in class?”

  Mom shrugs as though she couldn’t care less. “Sunshine must have mentioned it.”

  I turn to Nolan and shake my head from side to side. I haven’t mentioned it. She hasn’t even asked about school in weeks. In fact, this might be the most we’ve talked since the night she cut herself. I glance around the kitchen: at the counter where she bled, at the butcher block that holds our knives, including the one she hurt herself with.

  “So what are you studying?” Mom sighs finally, stepping toward the table.

  “Nothing,” I say quickly. Too quickly. Mom raises her eyebrows, suddenly interested.

  “I certainly hope you weren’t studying nothing. I know what happens when you study nothing.”

  I blush pinker than I’ve blushed in my entire life, horrified that Mom is implying that Nolan and I were . . . blah, I can’t even think it! If only she knew how it felt when Nolan got too close.

  “Nolan was just leaving—”

  “No, I wasn’t,” he says firmly. He shoots me a look that says, I’m not leaving you alone like this.

  I try to shoot one back that says, Don’t be ridiculous, she’s my mother, but I’m pretty sure it’s unconvincing. How could I convince him when I can’t even convince myself? I glance at the wound on my left hand, a reminder that my mother did kind of sort of stab me. I mean, we don’t know for sure that it wasn’t an accident. I didn’t manage to record that part.