Vesper

by Jeff Sampson

  And with that realization came fear, a dread that coated me, because absolutely nothing made sense.

  “Oh . . . what?” I whispered.

  My body was much too heavy to hold anymore and my fingers gave, the bark of the thick branch rubbing my palms raw as I screeched and fell. I landed half against Megan and half against the asphalt, the heel on my left boot snapping and sending me sprawling. Correction: the heel on Dawn’s boot snapping. That wasn’t good.

  No, nothing was good. Everything I’d just done, everything I’d said and every action I’d made, came back to me in an overwhelming rush. Shivering, I pushed myself to my feet and peered over at Megan. Even in the bloodred light from the brake lights and with my vision as blurry as it always is without glasses, I could the see the mixture of anger and confusion and hurt on her face.

  “I—I don’t know what—” Wrapping my arms around my chest, I whispered, “I need to go home.”

  “Yeah,” she said, putting her arm around me to support me as we hobbled back to her car. “Yeah, you really do.”

  Chapter 6

  Em Cee and Em Dub

  The rest of the night was more or less a blur—literally, because I didn’t have my glasses. Megan drove me home and made a point of walking me to my front door. I managed to get past my dad at his computer—he only noticed me out of the corner of his eye and greeted me as “Dawn”—before crawling up the stairs, going into my room, and hiding under my covers.

  The entire time, my skin prickled as though every hair on my body had stood on end and was trying to leap free, and my fingernails and my toenails throbbed with the echoing pain you get the day after slamming your finger in a door. A massive headache beat at my temples. Add all that sudden and reasonless pain to my stinging palms and it’s a wonder I ever managed to fall asleep, but I did, like I’d just spent the day running a marathon and even the aching joints that came with that couldn’t keep my exhausted body from unconsciousness.

  I woke up the next morning before my alarm went off. For a few bleary, amazing moments, I lay there and thought, What a weird dream.

  That was when my palms began to itch. I held them up and saw little bits of skin hanging free, and spots of dried blood scabbing over.

  I kicked the covers off—I was still wearing the clothes I’d taken from Dawn’s closet, sans boots. Fumbling for my glasses, I slipped them on my face—which felt sticky and cold with day-old makeup. Groaning, I flipped myself onto my stomach and pushed myself up. My pillow looked as wretched as I felt, streaked red and purple and black from the makeup I’d neglected to wash off the night before.

  “Crap,” I muttered.

  Toppling out of bed, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The gold shirt was wrinkled and lopsided, my hair was tangled and ratted, my face clownish. I caught sight of my boobs just sort of hanging there like a desperate D-list celebrity’s version of cleavage. Immediately I hugged my chest to hide it.

  Memories of sidling up to Lucas and Jared the night before seeped into my sleep-addled brain. I had never let anyone see me so exposed, not since puberty brought the changes that made me lumpy and curvy, something to hide under baggy clothes. But all that work to go unnoticed went away last night—I’d gone out half-naked and flaunted all my flaws.

  What did the fair-haired duo that were Bubonic Teutonics think? I remembered Jared’s cocky smile. What if that smile wasn’t him liking what he saw—what if he was laughing at me? And the way I’d talked to him! Good girls didn’t act like that! I didn’t act like that.

  I turned away from the mirror, my stomach roiling. Was I sick? I once saw an episode of one of those hospital dramas where a girl got some spore in her brain and started coming on to one of the doctors, driven into insane lust by what amounted to a trivial bit of dust caught in her neurons. Had something like that happened?

  Except—what about leaping out of my bedroom window? Bounding down a street after a car, jumping over fences? Climbing onto a frickin’ moving car? How was it even possible for me, Emily Webb of all people, to do things like that without ending up a bloody splat on the concrete? I am the least graceful person I know. When I was seven and in dance class, I always played a tree or a bush or something in the recitals—stationary objects. And even then, half the time I managed to trip over my own feet while the parents in the audience tried not to laugh and the other little dancers glared at me for ruining their big night.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing. Even while I stood there, shaking and feeling like I was about to vomit all over my bedspread, part of me still liked the way I’d felt the night before.

  Some guy on the street had been a jerk, and I’d gotten back at him. I saw a cute guy I wanted to talk to, and I talked to him (even though it was in a kind of slutty way), and the world didn’t end. I leaped around like a video game character, like some sort of superhero, bounding over fences and racing down streets without breaking a sweat.

  And all of it had felt so, so good. I’d felt confident for the first time in my life. Felt like I could do anything I wanted.

  It was like, the older I got and the more I saw the other kids around me grow up, the more I harbored the fantasy of one day being a secret, perfect version of me. I’d always wished that I could be self-assured and pretty and superathletic like the heroines I’d grown up idolizing: a Buffy, a Sydney Bristow, an Ellen Ripley.

  But that wasn’t supposed to become reality. It just didn’t happen. None of this was possible. None of it.

  It had all started the night Emily Cooke died. The same night she left her house and died was the same night all this began happening to me.

  And then an idea popped into my head. A strange, totally crazy idea: What if the way I was behaving was how Emily Cooke always behaved? I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was pretty and popular and had seemed confident in herself. Could it be that maybe Emily Cooke was . . . in me, somehow? Like maybe her angry spirit was planning to use me to avenge her murder?

  I had felt, after all, like some new Emily had possessed me. And there had been those two times the night before when I’d quite clearly felt as though some unseen presence was hovering right in front of me, observing me.

  Maybe it was a bit of a leap. But she did die only a few streets away. We did share the same name. And, come on, I was flipping around like I’d become the newest member of Cirque du Soleil—maybe spirits weren’t so far outside the realm of possibility.

  And if the presence I felt wasn’t Emily C.’s spirit, then I didn’t know what that meant. Only that the thought chilled me even more than thinking a ghost was controlling me like a puppeteer.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, cradling little stuffed Ein in my lap, my eyes aimed at the floor for what felt like hours, all these conflicting emotions and thoughts swirling inside my head as I tried to understand what was going on and what I should do about it.

  My clock’s glowing numbers told me that it was 6:14. I was up an hour before usual. I couldn’t stay here, trapped in my room, thinking about the weirdness of last night. I had to get out, do something normal.

  I showered and got dressed in jeans and my baggiest hoodie before anyone else in the house was up. I shoved Dawn’s wrinkled clothes and her broken boots into my closet—they were her clubbing clothes, so I hoped she wouldn’t miss them right away—then tore the makeup-stained case off my pillow and tossed it into the laundry bin in the hallway. Just as my dad and stepmom’s alarm went off and I heard Dawn rousing in her bedroom, I flung my backpack over my shoulder, left the house, and began the long walk to school.

  “Where were you this morning?”

  I hunched over my tray of steaming, overcooked sirloin steak–like substance, pushing around serrated carrots with my little plastic spork. Megan slammed her books on the lunch table beside me and sat down.

  “Hey,” I muttered, then shoved a bite of carrots into my mouth. I couldn’t meet Megan’s eyes, not after the way I’d acted, especially without knowing what had ca
used my massive mood swing so I could at least explain.

  All around me the lunchroom hummed with noise. I looked up from my tray, away from Megan. Girls and guys sat at their tables, eating and laughing and chatting. Well, some of them, anyway. There were still tables of kids who seemed like they’d never smile again. A little memorial to Emily Cooke had been hastily put together on a corkboard near the cafeteria entrance, a picture of her stapled in the center and surrounded by poems and letters her friends had written. The cafeteria seemed emptier than usual. I guess some people had decided to stay home.

  Fingers snapped in front of my face, and grudgingly I gave Megan my attention. Her brow was furrowed, her lips tight. I could hold her eyes for only a second before slumping back over.

  “Seriously, Emily,” she whispered. “You act all crazy last night, then you can barely speak and I have to take you home, and then you’re not even there this morning when I come to pick you up. I didn’t see you in Ms. Nguyen’s class, and I thought something had happened, but I saw you in the hall. . . .”

  I’d skipped homeroom. I didn’t want to have to sit next to Megan, face what had happened. Lot of good that had done me.

  I dropped my spork in the mush of food, swallowing the lump that had risen into my throat. “Sorry, I’m really sorry,” I said. “I really don’t know what happened. I had, like . . . a mood swing or something, I guess.”

  Megan let out a sharp laugh. “Mood swing? I’ve had mood swings, Em, but nothing like that. It’s like your mood swung so hard it tossed you around the bar or something. I mean, you just about mounted the deputy in my garage last night.”

  I shoved my tray away. How I must have appeared last night to that stoner guy, let alone to Lucas and to Jared and to Megan . . .

  I suddenly wasn’t hungry.

  “I think I might be . . . sick or something? I don’t know. I didn’t tell you, but . . . it happened before, sort of. The mood swing. Two nights ago. The night Emily Cooke died.”

  “The other Emily? You think . . .”

  I shrugged and hunched down. “I don’t know. I mean, they say that she acted strange and then just left her house all of a sudden, dressed in pajamas, right? The same night I dressed all differently and almost did the same thing. Maybe . . .” I hesitated, not sure if I should share my “possessed by Emily Cooke’s angry ghost” theory. I decided against it and went with the more rational explanation. “I thought maybe there is something going around, like what happened to me is maybe what happened to Emily Cooke and that’s why she died.”

  Megan let out a long breath. “So when you said you thought it could have been you yesterday . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it really could have been.”

  Megan yanked me up by the arm before I could react. My seat squeaked backward and a few guys at a table nearby stopped talking to check us out. I remembered very suddenly Terrance Sedgwick’s stupid message, and I wondered if those guys had seen it, what they were thinking now as they watched me make a scene. Though I longed to regain the self-confidence I’d had last night and not care what anyone thought of me, I just couldn’t. Instead I blushed and gently shook Megan off.

  “No, come on,” she whispered to me. “We’re going to the nurse, right now. If there’s something wrong with you, we’re going to fix it.”

  “Yeah, okay. Okay.”

  Leaving my tray behind, I picked my backpack up from the floor and followed Megan between the tables, catching bits of conversation as I did. I felt like everyone was watching me as I passed, somehow knowing what had happened the night before.

  “Hey, watch it!”

  Megan stopped suddenly, and I nearly knocked her over. There was a thud and a clatter as leather smacked against the linoleum and pens scattered across the floor.

  I peeked up to see that Megan had dropped her backpack while almost walking into a guy I’d never seen before. An incredibly cute guy—tall, slender, with black hair and amazingly sharp eyebrows that gave him the whole broody bad-boy aura. He was even wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket, like he’d just stepped out of an old James Dean flick and was on his way to go race cars in trenches like the causeless rebel he was.

  Megan scowled down at her dropped backpack. “Twice in one day, Patrick. You seriously need to watch where you’re going.”

  The guy regarded Megan with those dark, wise-beyond-his-years eyes. Then he muttered, “Sorry.” There was a hint of an accent in his voice, but what kind I couldn’t tell.

  He sat down at the nearest table and pulled a sack lunch from his backpack. With an annoyed sigh, Megan bent down to pick up her bag and the few pens that had fallen out. As she did, I caught a whiff of something intensely . . . manly. Musky and heavy, like cologne.

  I remembered the night before, the whole smell thing. The odors around me had been intense—but not as intense as whatever this smell was. And unlike Deputy Jared’s refreshing spring-clean scent, this one made my stomach flutter.

  Is he the one?

  The thought was distant, very distant, coming from some hidden recess of my mind. But the pull to sniff was inescapable. I had to know.

  Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, and trying not to flare my nostrils like a freak, I sniffed in the direction of the new guy—and that’s when another guy popped up in front of me and shoved a piece of paper in my face.

  “Hey, want to go to a party?”

  “Uh . . .” Not knowing what else to do, I took the paper—it was hot pink and used about a dozen different fonts to basically say that there was, duh, a party. Classy. Holding the invitation by its corners, I scanned its Comic Sans and Papyrus font–scribed message, sure that I’d been handed this by mistake.

  “Leave her alone, Spencer.” Megan was beside me again, her dropped belongings all gathered.

  The guy who’d handed me the paper—short, funny Spencer from homeroom—ducked his head. “Hey, sorry, Megan, I just thought you guys might want to come, and I wanted to invite you before you left lunch. Mikey Harris is throwing his usual beginning-of-the-year party, and it’s also gonna be a tribute to Em Cee, you know? A way for us all to get together and remember her.”

  I pushed my glasses up my nose and met Spencer’s eyes. “Em Cee?”

  “Sorry, I mean Emily Cooke. I had a class a few years ago with you and her in it, and she was Emily C. and you were Emily W., so in my head I shortened your names to, uh . . .” He laughed shyly. “Em Cee and Em Dub.”

  I could feel my face go hot, and I really didn’t know why. “Em Dub, huh?” I said.

  “Wonderful, thanks for sharing, Spencer,” Megan said. “We’re not interested in any parties being thrown by Mikey Harris and his friends.” Snatching the invitation from my hand, she slapped it on the table next to the new guy and put her face next to his. “Here you go, Patrick. Join their club. Then you can start bumping into me on purpose like those snottards do, instead of doing it because you’re incapable of watching where you’re going.”

  The new guy blinked, looked askance at the neon pink piece of paper, blinked once more, and resumed eating. Megan grabbed my arm and began to pull me toward the lunchroom door now that the path was clear. Once her back was to us, Spencer gave me another invitation.

  “You never know,” he whispered to me. He put his hand in the air as we walked away. “Okay. Well, bye!”

  “Bye,” I said quietly. I glanced again at the invitation. Emily Cooke’s name jumped out at me—maybe because it was in a huge font, bolded, and italicized. Or maybe it was just because I had her on the brain. And though last night I’d been wondering who I myself had become, as I read Emily Cooke’s name just then I thought, Who were you?

  “Throw that away,” Megan demanded as she dragged me through a cluster of kids.

  I crumpled the pink invitation, but when Megan’s back was to me, I shoved it into my pocket.

  As I did, my eyes drifted back to the new guy sitting at his table, alone, seemingly unfazed by his run-in w
ith Megan’s massive hostility while he bit into a pear. He observed the view out the big bay windows that lined the back of the lunch hall, apparently engrossed by the blue peaks of Mount Rainier on the clear horizon. The farther we got from him, the fainter the musky cologne I smelled became, until I couldn’t smell anything but rehydrated mashed potato product and greasy gravy from the cafeteria kitchens.

  I turned back to Megan. “That guy,” I said. “You ran into him earlier?”

  Megan snorted. “Yeah, he’s some new guy, Patrick something. He almost knocked me over in second period too.”

  We brushed past a few teachers standing in the mostly empty hall. When they were out of earshot, I asked, “Does he always smell like that?”

  Megan guided me around a row of lockers toward the front offices. “Uh, smell like what?”

  “I dunno. He was wearing some sort of cologne. He smelled . . .” Perfect. Amazing. Stimulating. “Nice,” I finished.

  “First the deputy, now the new guy?” Megan groaned. “What the frick, Emily, are you suddenly going all boy crazy? Are you seriously transforming into one of the bobble-headed idiot chicks we go to school with?”

  “What?” I said. “No, I . . .” I trailed off. “No, I’m not.”

  “Let’s just get you to the nurse.” Eyes filled with anger, she muttered, “Trust me, Emily. You’d be better off dead like the other Emily than turning ‘normal’ like one of them.”

  “That’s a bit harsh.”

  “No,” Megan said, “it’s not.”

  I didn’t want to argue. When Megan got riled up, talking to her was impossible. So I kept silent, and I wondered, would it really be so bad to be the Emily Webb I’d been last night full-time? My body hadn’t seemed so clumsy and bloated. I had felt like I didn’t have any cares at all. Sure, I’d acted brazen to complete strangers, performed a few dangerous feats that could have left me dead. What if I could learn to get that under control?

  But what if I couldn’t?