The Haunting of Sunshine Girl

by Paige McKenzie

  “Sure.” Nolan smiles. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Anything. Something. Actually . . .” I smile back. “I know exactly what I want to talk about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “You know all about my life and my dramas, and now you think that I’m not even technically human, and I barely know anything about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I purse my lips, trying to remember what I already know about Nolan. He’s lived in Ridgemont his whole life, and his family has been in the Northwest for generations. His grandfather was his favorite person in the whole world.

  “So your grandfather was your dad’s dad?”

  “Technically, I had one of each,” Nolan answers with a smile. “But, yes, the grandfather you’re thinking about was my dad’s dad.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Nope. Only child.”

  “Me too.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you know.”

  “Well then, why did you say so?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Just making conversation.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Have you ever gotten a grade below a B-plus?”

  Nolan furrows his brow mock-seriously, as though he’s mentally reviewing all the grades he’s ever gotten. “Nah,” he answers finally, “though all this ghost hunting did cut into my study time this semester.”

  I laugh out loud. I’m practically sleepwalking through finals myself. “Hope I didn’t mess with your GPA.”

  “If my grandfather were still alive, he’d have told me that grades weren’t nearly as important as helping a damsel in distress—especially when that distress is paranormal.”

  “Hey!” I protest. “I’m not just some helpless damsel.”

  “No,” Nolan nods in agreement, “you’re not.”

  By the time we get to Levis Hall I know that Nolan always wished he had a little brother, but his parents didn’t have any luck getting pregnant after him. I know he loves dogs but never had one of his own, though he did grow up with a pet rabbit. (“Not the same thing,” I said, and he agreed.) He actually likes Ridgemont, and the lack of sunlight doesn’t bother him in the slightest, though he can understand that it might bother someone who hadn’t grown up here.

  We sprint through the parking lot and up the stairs to the professor’s office. Once again there’s no other person in sight, but I don’t care. I don’t even care if Professor Jones is there or not; we’ll pick his lock if we have to—not that I know how to pick a lock, but that seems beside the point. We just need to get our hands on his books.

  Or Nolan’s hands on them, anyway. Thank goodness the one believer I happened to befriend since we moved to Ridgemont also happens to be an honor student with a gift for research. What are the odds of such a lucky coincidence? Maybe one day—when we’re not sprinting upstairs and I’m able to actually catch my breath long enough to say more than a syllable at a time—I’ll ask Nolan and he’ll actually want to do the math to calculate the odds.

  Ashley would think it was nerdy, but I think it’s wonderful.

  As we race down the hall I get a bad feeling. I mean, a worse feeling. (I was already pretty saturated in bad feelings to begin with.) It’s cold, but it was cold the last time we were here. But something about this cold feels different.

  My heart is pounding, but we did just run up the stairs and down the hall, and anyway, my heart pounds all the time these days.

  Maybe it’s a luiseach thing. Maybe our—their—temperatures drop and their hearts pound when something paranormal is about to happen?

  A cold gust of wind slams the door to Professor Jones’s office just as we’re about to step inside.

  “So now the ghost professor’s office is haunted?” I say nervously, trying to make a joke, but Nolan doesn’t crack a smile. Instead, he leans his weight against the door and pushes it open.

  Professor Jones’s office is empty. I don’t mean he’s not there. I don’t even mean that his books and papers aren’t there, or that maybe he just up and retired since we saw him last. I mean this place is empty.

  The desk is gone, the chairs are gone. There are dark wood built-in bookshelves behind the place where his desk used to be, but they’re covered in dust like no one’s actually placed a book on them in years. It’s dark out—past six—so no light from outside streams in. I try turning on the light switch by the door, but there’s isn’t even a bulb in the fixture overhead. The windows are open, and air from the outside is making the curtains wave and billow so that they look kind of like little kids dressed up in sheets on Halloween.

  It’s so cold in here that every breath I take is painful, sending icy air into my lungs until I think my throat will freeze.

  “Dammit!” Nolan shouts, kicking the ground. I shake my head; just a few days ago books and papers would have gone flying had he swung his leg out like that.

  “This isn’t possible,” I say slowly, my teeth chattering as I slam the windows shut. Nolan shrugs his leather jacket off and puts it on my shoulders. “You look like you need this more than I do,” he says. He’s only wearing a black sweatshirt underneath but doesn’t seem nearly as cold as I am.

  Nolan reaches into his jeans pocket for his phone. “I’m going to call him.”

  “We don’t know his phone number,” I protest, but that doesn’t stop him. He Googles “Professor Abner Jones” over and over again until he finds a home address—just a few miles away from the university—and a phone number.

  My breath catches when I hear someone on the other line picking up.

  “Is Professor Jones there?” he asks. I can’t quite make out what the person on the other end is saying, and I look at Nolan desperately.

  “I’m sorry?” he says, his voice dropping lower. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly . . . could you just—please—say that again?”

  Moving more quickly than maybe I’ve ever moved before, I reach out and grab Nolan’s phone and hit speaker just in time to hear the person on the other end reply, “My husband died seven years ago.”

  “Your husband was Professor Abner Jones?” I ask. My voice is high and squeaky.

  “Yes,” the woman on the other end of the line answers. She sounds tired—too tired to ask who we are and why we’re looking for her late husband.

  “I’m so sorry we disturbed you,” I say quickly and press end before Nolan can stop me. I back away from him and his phone, almost crashing into the empty bookshelves.

  “Okay, let’s start with the most obvious explanation,” my voice trembles, echoing what Nolan said when I first showed him the video of my mother cutting herself. “Someone else was pretending to be Professor Jones, just to mess with us.”

  “No one knew when we were coming here or even that we were coming here at all. Sunshine,” he adds softly, “I think the most obvious explanation is actually that—”

  “Don’t say it!” I moan. “I mean, I know you have to say it, but can you just wait a second first?” I sit down on the dusty ground and take a deep breath, wrapping his leather jacket around myself, soaking up its warmth.

  “Has it been long enough yet?” Nolan asks finally.

  I sink into a slouch. “Okay, fine.”

  “I think the most obvious explanation is that Professor Jones was a ghost.”

  I nod. “This place had everything—the creepy feeling, the cold.” I pause and bite my lip. “It didn’t have the smell, though.”

  “The smell?”

  I nod. “Yeah, the moldy-dampy-musty-smell that saturates my house and only gets stronger when the ghost is near.” I run my fingers along the floor, expecting moisture, but instead it’s completely dry.

  “Just when I think I’ve figured something out,” I look around, perplexed. “Anyway, why would a ghost help us?” I say finally. “We’re trying to get rid of a ghost.”

  Nol
an lowers himself into a crouch beside me. He runs his fingers through his hair, the gesture I’ve come to recognize as a sign that he’s working something out. “We don’t know exactly what we’re trying to do. Or who exactly we’re trying to get rid of.”

  Before I can answer—or protest, or burst into tears, or scream in frustration—a splitting sound fills the air. I scream, and Nolan shifts so his body is covering mine.

  Because a wooden beam in the ceiling above us is splitting open.

  “What is it with ceilings today?” I wail, crawling as fast as I can toward the door, sliding across the dusty floor. Nolan follows behind me as the splitting sound gets louder and louder, until it turns into a booming sound like the sky is falling.

  Just before Nolan slams the office door shut behind us I turn around just in time to see the entire room collapsing in a cloud of dust.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he shouts. Dust makes my eyes sting, and Nolan can’t stop coughing. We sprint toward the stairs; even though we’re running and covered in sweat, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cold. The splitting sound just gets louder and louder: it can’t just be the professor’s office that’s collapsing. But there’s no time to turn around and look.

  We run through the parking lot to Nolan’s car, which he kicks into gear like a race car driver.

  “Wait!” I shout, before he can pull out of the parking lot.

  “Are you crazy?” he answers. I turn around and look at the building we just ran from. It looks like Levis Hall is letting out an enormous breath, its windows blowing out, its doors falling off their hinges.

  “It just looks like some dilapidated old building now,” Nolan gasps. “A place frat boys sneak into on a dare or something.”

  I stare out the window as we drive through the campus. No one else seems to notice the explosion that took place just seconds before. I remember the look that girl gave us when we asked for directions to Levis Hall.

  “Maybe it was always just some dilapidated old building,” I suggest. “Maybe we just couldn’t see it that way until now.”

  “But how?” Nolan asks, and I shake my head.

  “I don’t know,” I answer.

  Somehow the ride home from the university feels shorter than the ride there. I lean forward in my seat and play with the radio, but I can’t find anything I want to listen to, so I switch it off. Silence fills the car. I’m still wearing Nolan’s jacket, and I slouch so that the shoulders are up around my ears. I breathe in the scent of the old leather: soft as butter, warm as wool, and speckled in dust from Levis Hall. I pull the sleeves down over my wrists, longer even than my oversized sweater. Still, nothing has ever felt like it fit quite so perfectly. I wish I had a mirror so I could see how it looks, but I settle for eyeing my reflection in the window. This jacket is the coolest thing I’ve ever worn. I wish I could enjoy it.

  “Something has been bugging me,” I say finally.

  “Just one thing?” Nolan asks, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “You said that luiseach birth rates were low, right?”

  He nods.

  “And you think I’m the last luiseach to be born, and even if you’re right, clearly I don’t have a clue how to do whatever it is that luiseach do, right?”

  He nods again.

  “Okay, but if no luiseach are being born, then wouldn’t, like, dark spirits or demons or whatever they’re called be taking over the planet by now?”

  Nolan doesn’t answer right away. He turns the steering wheel, leaning into the curves that will bring us back into Ridgemont.

  “I don’t know,” he answers finally, lifting a hand from the wheel to brush his hair back from his forehead. “Maybe there are fewer dark spirits than there used to be?” We both know it’s a weak guess.

  “Maybe the dark spirits started winning,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe that’s why this is happening to my mom. There’s no luiseach to protect people like her because the luiseach are dying out, being defeated by dark spirits left and right. Maybe that’s why no luiseach are being born—because there aren’t enough luiseach left to procreate. The dark spirits are killing them.”

  The idea is terrifying. I mean, if everything we’ve read is true, then luiseach are kind of essential to the survival of the human race. I slouch lower, wrapping the jacket around myself like a blanket.

  Nolan shakes his head. “No. That can’t be it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because every article I read, in every language, agreed on one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A luiseach’s spirit—its soul, its essence, or whatever you want to call it—has an advantage over a mere mortal’s.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It cannot be taken, damaged, or destroyed by a ghost or a demon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  What Are We Fighting For?

  “Snow weather,” Nolan says as he pulls into my driveway, rolling down his window to point at the clouds above us. They hang heavy and low, but somehow the evening sky is bright. I nod in agreement, even though the truth is I have no idea what constitutes snow weather—it never snowed in Austin.

  “Do you want me to come in?”

  I shake my head. “What for? You already know what’s going on inside.” It comes out sounding nastier than I’d intended. I attempt a smile, but the muscles in my mouth refuse to cooperate, like they’re reminding me that I don’t exactly have anything to smile about.

  “I know, but I could stick around. Maybe keep you company till your mom comes home.”

  I shake my head, thinking of the way she behaved the last time she came home and found Nolan in the house, the long shadow that followed her from one room into the next, and the spider on the kitchen floor. I shudder.

  “What’s the point?” Now my cranky mouth muscles aren’t just preventing me from smiling; they’re also making me say cranky things. “There’s nothing you can do to help her. We didn’t find any more answers today.”

  Just more questions, I think, but don’t say. I rest my elbows on my knees and drop my face into my hands.

  “I’ll keep searching,” Nolan promises. “There’s got to be more online. Or maybe . . .”

  I look up. “Maybe what?”

  He presses his lips together like he knows I won’t like what he’s about to say. “Maybe your powers will just kind of . . . I don’t know, kick in or something.”

  I unclick my seat belt and twist to face him. “My powers?” I ask, a lump rising in my throat. I swallow it down. I’m not much of a crier. I didn’t cry in third grade when I fell off a seesaw and broke my nose. Not in eighth grade when I overheard some not-nice boy in class refer to me as a weirdo. Not in tenth grade when I tripped in gym class and sprained my ankle and had to walk around with crutches for two weeks. Mom says I didn’t even cry much as a baby.

  But then I’ve never felt quite this hopeless before. “How can you still be so sure that I’m a loos, louise, loony—blah, whatever you call it!”

  “Luiseach,” Nolan says quietly. We both know full well that I know how to pronounce it by now.

  “Whatever,” I answer. “I’m not one. I can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a luiseach would know what to do in a situation like this, and I most decidedly do not.” Jane Austen–speak, kind of. “All I am is a girl who’s terrified about what’s happening to her mother. And who doesn’t have the slightest clue how to save her.”

  The lump in my throat refuses to disappear. Hot tears spring to my eyes. Mom will be home soon, and I don’t even want to see her. For the first time in my life I’m the kind of kid who wishes her parents would stay out later so she could have the house to herself.

  But I’m pretty sure there isn’t another kid on the planet who has the same reasons for wanting to be alone that I do.

  I’m tired. I’m so tired. I’ve been keeping such a close watch on her, staring at h
er across the dinner table to be sure her knife doesn’t slice into her skin instead of into her steak or chicken or whatever we’re eating. (Or not eating, as the case may be. I haven’t exactly had the greatest appetite lately.)

  And I’m tired because I haven’t slept through the night in months. Lately it’s not ghostly noises that wake me but my own anxiety: two, three, ten times a night I slip from my bedroom to hover in Mom’s doorway, listening to the steady rhythm of her breathing, in and out, in and out, in and out. I watch her chest rise and fall in the darkness, like I think that it’s going to stop at any moment.

  And I’m tired because I miss my best friend. Not Ashley and not Nolan, but my mom. I miss watching movies together and eating pizza together and the way she makes fun of me. I miss taking Oscar on long walks together, and I miss her scolding me when she catches me raiding her closet for the zillionth time. We barely even talk anymore. We just sit in the house in silence. I don’t think she even notices the way I stare at her. It feels like she hardly notices me at all.

  And I’m too tired to explain any of this to Nolan. In fact, suddenly his involvement in all of this feels all wrong, as mysterious and illogical as the rest of it.

  “What do you care, anyway?” I say suddenly. “You didn’t even know me three months ago. You can’t possibly be that concerned about the fate of a girl you barely even know.”

  “I don’t barely know you—” he begins, but I cut him off.

  “Haven’t you already gotten everything you need?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The stupid, stubborn lump in my throat has turned into stupid, stubborn tears shaking in the corners of my eyes. “For your extra-credit project! I would hate to be the reason your perfect GPA didn’t hold up.” My voice sounds different from how it usually sounds.

  Further proof that I can’t be a luiseach. They’re full of light—isn’t that what Nolan said? I have literally never felt so dark.

  “I told you, I don’t care about that—”

  “So you were just in it for your grandfather? Well, now you have your proof, so you don’t need me anymore.”