by Aarsen, Zoe
“Fifteen hundred boys,” Candace repeated dreamily. “I can’t even imagine so many boys under one roof.”
“Where are you from, again?” Olivia asked Hannah.
“Lake Forest,” Hannah said. “Outside Chicago.”
Chicago. I’d only been there once. My mom had gone to college there, long before she’d met my dad when they taught together at the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan. She’d been a graduate student teaching Introduction to the World of Natural Science as a requirement for earning her Master’s Degree in Biology, way back when she still wanted to be a veterinarian. He’d been an established Psychiatry professor, ten years her senior, already having an established taste for girls younger than him. My poor mom wouldn’t realize until she was no longer a young girl that his preference wouldn’t change. I felt a pang of guilt suddenly for leaving my mom home alone on a Friday. Before I became popular, Friday nights were when we watched all of our favorite British sitcoms together until our faces hurt from laughing. She was probably relieved to have some time to herself, but I still felt uneasy about it. I felt a little sorry for myself, because I was the only girl in the basement who felt the burden of her mother’s loneliness like a weight pressing down on my chest.
“God,” Olivia muttered. “I can’t wait to get out of this place and live in a real city.”
We all lost interest in the movie quickly, none of us particularly caring about the plight of the citizens in the town being invaded by vampires since all we wanted was for Ryan Marten to have more screen time. I was starting to get a little sleepy, but I knew very well what happens to the first girl who falls asleep at slumber parties. I stood and stretched, and excused myself to go upstairs to use the bathroom.
“Me, too,” Candace announced, and followed me up the stairs leading to the kitchen.
“One of you can use my bathroom on the second floor,” Olivia called after us.
We reached the top of the stairs and I suddenly felt strange—like a burglar—in the Richmonds’ house. I could sense a television on upstairs upon one of the house’s upper floors. The ice cream cake had already been cleaned up by Mrs. Richmond, and the kitchen was quiet other than for the buzzing of the stainless steel fridge.
“Olivia’s room is to the right at the top of the stairs,” Candace told me as she stepped into the bathroom off the kitchen and flipped on the light.
I remembered the approximate layout of the Richmonds’ house from when I’d played there as a little kid. As I walked down the hallway toward the front of the house, where I could ascend the staircase which led up to the house’s second floor, I stopped to peek through the front windows at the driveway where it looked like a red Toyota had been parked next to Evan’s blue pickup truck. The Toyota had a big pink bow on it. I immediately looked away, feeling guilty about spotting Olivia’s grand birthday present before she did.
On the way up the stairs, I heard a door open on the second floor, and music leaked into the hallway. Suddenly Evan was at the top of the stairs, smiling at me. We crossed paths in the middle of the staircase, and he was carrying a plastic cup in his left hand, presumably on his way down to the kitchen for a refill of whatever flavor of soda he’d been drinking.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied, realizing in a hot panic that I was wearing very, very short red shorts and a tank top as pajamas that I hadn’t really intended to model for any boys when I’d stuffed them into my backpack earlier that morning in preparation for the slumber party.
“You shouldn’t sweat Homecoming so much,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, blushing furiously, hoping he had not overheard our discussion in the pool.
“It’s just a dumb dance,” he said with a friendly smile, his eyes locking with mine intently. “Just a bunch of idiots clapping their hands to bad music. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t go.”
“Well, that’s a relief, because I don’t think I’m going to go,” I said, only aware as the words left my mouth of how true they were.
“I mean, you could go,” Evan backtracked, studying my face. “I mean, I might happen to be back in town next weekend for my last radiology appointment. It would be kind of fun to be back in the high school gymnasium one more time. It would also be kind of fun to spy on my sister and ruin her big night of romance. If the only thing keeping you from going is not having a date, that is.”
My heart was beating awfully fast. I felt like I might have been starting to perspire under his gaze.
“Are you, like… asking me to the Homecoming dance?” I asked with a confused smile, desperate to not be making a pathetic, wrong assumption. If I was, and if Evan told Olivia that I’d jumped to a silly hopeful conclusion about him asking me out on a date, I would die of embarrassment.
“I guess I am,” Evan said. “I mean, if that’s allowed. I guess since I’m not technically a student at Weeping Willow anymore, you’d have to ask me.”
“Uh, okay,” I said, having a hard time believing that this was actually happening. That Evan Richmond was actually asking me— me—out. “Olivia might get kind of mad, though. You know, about you being there, as you said, to ruin her big night.”
Evan smiled his killer megawatt smile. “Come on, McKenna. She’ll get over it. It’ll be fun. I know my sister pretty well and I think she’d rather have you come to the dance with me than not go at all. So, what do you say?”
I danced across Olivia’s dark bedroom, taking care not to step on any of the discarded clothing or shoes littering her floor on my way to the adjoining bathroom. It might have been the happiest moment of my whole teenage life, being asked to Homecoming by a college guy, way, way cuter than any of the guys who still went to Weeping Willow High School. I smiled at my own reflection in the mirror over Olivia’s bathroom sink. My nose was peeling a little bit from my fading tan and my hair was wavy from having air-dried after the quick shower I’d taken before dinner. I was going to have to remember to thank Rhonda for the millionth time for making so many salads for me over the summer, and for dragging me with her to dance aerobics classes.
Briefly, as I washed my hands, I wondered if Trey Emory would be going to Homecoming. The mere thought was so ridiculous that I rolled my eyes in the mirror. Trey Emory would not wear a polyester suit and dare to show his face in the high school gymnasium, or do the step-and-clap dance beneath red and black streamers. It would just never happen.
Back in the basement, the movie was ending, and Candace was turning off the lamps on both sides of the couch to make the setting spookier for ghost stories.
“You first, Mischa,” Olivia insisted. “Mischa tells the best ghost stories,” she informed Hannah.
Mischa’s eyes began glowing with enthusiasm. “Okay… what about Bloody Heather?”
“Oh, man,” Candance whined. “You always tell that one. I’ve heard it, like, a million times.”
“Yeah, but Hannah’s never heard it,” Olivia said.
I had a vague idea of the story they were talking about, but I couldn’t recall ever having heard it in detail, either. Ghost stories were one of the many things that kids who had older siblings heard before everyone else. Important information about dating was another one of those things. I didn’t have older siblings, and my only older cousin, Krista, had moved away from Willow with Aunt JoAnne and Uncle Marty when I was in seventh grade.
“Okay, okay,” Candace relented. “But tell the abridged version. If you tell the whole thing, it’ll take all night.”
I wasn’t in the mood to hear a ghost story; I was still so excited about my exchange with Evan upstairs that I could barely sit still. It had already crossed my mind that despite what Evan had said, Olivia was going to be furious if he actually came to Homecoming as my date. Mischa might be upset, too, if there was a possibility that her older sister might assume I was trying to push Evan’s ex-girlfriend further out of the picture. One trip upstairs to the bathroom had complicated my night infinitely, I was re
alizing as the initial rush of excitement passed.
Mischa dropped her voice mischievously to a low whisper as she began excitedly telling the story. “There’s a stretch of Route 32 that passes the St. Augustine cemetery. It’s way on out past the airport, and my family used to pass it every summer on our drive up to our summer home near Lake Superior—î
“What ever happened to that summer house? We should totally go up there over Christmas break,” Candace interrupted.
“My Uncle Roger lives there now year-round since he lost his house. Now stop interrupting,” Mischa scolded. “Anyway. So a couple miles before the cemetery, there’s this little bar called Sven’s, managed by this old Swedish couple. It’s nothing fancy, just a crappy little sports bar, you know the kind, with florescent beer signs in the windows. So, my mom’s boss goes in there one night after work last winter to watch the Packers’ game. Has two or three beers, probably shouldn’t drive home at that point but figures it’s okay because he’s eaten a big sandwich and doesn’t feel drunk and everyone in the bar keeps saying a blizzard’s on the way. At this point it’s maybe, like, ten o’clock at night? Not too late. But late enough that it’s dark, because it’s December, and the roads are really empty because it’s like, a Wednesday or something and there’s really not much traffic up there because it’s just farms in every direction.”
We were all listening carefully, leaning in to be able to hear Mischa better. The television was still on, but playing music videos on mute.
“So he’s driving along, and snow’s just starting to fall. At first, there are just a few tiny flakes that he sees in his headlights, then the flakes start getting fatter, heavier. He’s so busy watching the snow, he almost doesn’t even see this girl walking along the side of the highway as his car approaches her. From the back, she looks young, you know, like our age. She’s wearing a red skirt and carrying her shoes in one hand. He passes her, thinking the last thing he needs is to get into some kind of trouble with the police or with his wife for picking up a young girl on the side of the road, but then he slows down because he realizes he’s being ridiculous. It’s cold out, the snow’s getting heavier, and this girl isn’t wearing a coat, so he thinks maybe she’s in some kind of trouble and just needs a ride home. He might realistically be the only person to drive by for hours. So he backs up a little, and lowers his window to ask her if she needs a lift.”
“The girl is, like, super thankful, like, thank you so much, it’s so cold out, and whatever, and she gets into the back seat of the car and pushes all of his flyers over to the other side of the seat. My mom is a real estate broker,” Mischa explained for Hannah’s information, not realizing that I’d also never heard her tell this story before and benefitted from the explanation. “So, her boss’s car had all these open house flyers in the back seat. And he’s like, trying to be polite and considerate but really wants to know what this chick’s story is, so he turns down the radio and checks her out in the rearview mirror. He said she was really pretty, with long blond hair like Olivia’s, and dark eyes, and she wasn’t shivering at all even though it was really cold out and she was just wearing a sweater. There were snowflakes stuck to her eyelashes and she didn’t even seem to notice.”
Mischa’s lips began to hint at a smile; I could tell she was enjoying how tense we were all becoming, hanging on her every word. She began slipping in between the present and past tenses in her haste to push the entire story through her mouth, telling the story as if it had just occurred days ago.
“He asked her where he could drop her off, and she gave him some street address on Bluegrass Lane and some directions on how to get there. The thing was, the address she gave him wasn’t even too far from where she’d been walking, which coincidentally was right outside the gates of the cemetery, only my mom’s boss didn’t realize that until later because he’s so used to driving past there on his way home from work. As he turns the corner onto the street where she told him she lived, he asks, Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing out so late at night by yourself without a coat on? And she doesn’t answer right away, but he’s busy looking at the numbers on the houses he’s passing, driving real slowly to try to find her house, and then he looks in the rearview mirror again, and almost has a heart attack. Because she looks back at him, and this time her whole face is bloody. Like her nose is bleeding, her eyes are bleeding, there’s blood gushing out of her mouth—”
“Ew!” Olivia shrieked, even though she’d presumably heard Mischa’s retelling of this part of the story, as Candace said, millions of times.
“And she reaches up for him like this,” Mischa said, her brown eyes huge and round, lifting her arms forward like a zombie, “Her mouth was moving and he thought she was trying to tell him something but he was so freaked out, understandably, that he swerved his car hard to the left and it went off the road into this little ditch right in front of someone’s house. After he hit the brakes and looked back in the rearview mirror again, the girl was gone. Gone. He got out of the car to see if maybe somehow, in the blink of an eye, she’d jumped out of the back seat. But she was nowhere. It was like she’d never existed at all. Except all of those flyers in the back seat of his car were drenched with blood.”
“Wow,” Hannah said solemnly, believing every word of it.
“So then, of course, he looked up and realized that he’d just run his own car off the road right in front of the house that the girl said was hers. He completely freaked out, got back in the car, drove all the way back into town in the blizzard and straight to the police station. At this point he was thinking he was going to be framed for murder or something if that girl was missing and her blood was all over his car.”
“This is the best part,” Candace informed us.
“So he stumbled into the police station, heart pounding, sweat—just like—pouring off of his forehead because on the whole drive back into town he was terrified that he was going to look into his rearview mirror and see her back there, bleeding all over the place again. He ran up to the cop on night duty at the front desk and was like, The craziest thing just happened. I saw this girl walking along the side of the road, I asked her if she needed a ride, and the policeman just looked at him, and was like, and then you looked in your rearview mirror, and she was gone.”
I got a chill. It was a dumb story, but Mischa was doing an admirable job of making it scary.
“And my mom’s boss was like, Yeah! How did you know? And how freaky is this? The cop was like, we get people in here all the time every winter, saying the exact same thing. Blond girl on the side of the road, carrying her shoes. Always right by the St. Augustine cemetery. Sometimes they look in their rearview mirror and she’s all bloody. Sometimes she’s just gone. She always gives them the same address, on Bluegrass Lane. It turns out, this girl named Heather Szymanski, or some Polish last name like that, had been hit by a car after breaking up with her boyfriend at Sven’s forty years ago. She was walking home from the bar and whoever hit her just left her on the street to die. And it was in December of that year. My mom’s boss looked the whole thing up after he calmed down about it, and this girl’s parents actually lived on Bluegrass Lane back in the Seventies when this all allegedly happened. So, the legend is, the ghost of this girl only appears to people leaving Sven’s, driving home past the cemetery. It’s only men who see her.”
“Oh my god that is so scary,” Olivia said. “I feel like I’m going to barf.”
“What about the blood?” Hannah asked. “On the flyers?”
“Oh yeah, that,” Mischa said, annoyed with herself for having left out a detail. “He had brought the flyers into the police station with him as evidence, like, you know, Check out all this blood, this really happened. He was waving the flyers around like a mad man in the police station, but by the time he’d told the cop what had happened and looked down at them in his hand, the blood was gone. They were just plain old open house flyers, no different than they’d been earlier that day when he’d been handing t
hem out. Split-level ranch, three bedrooms, one bath.”
“So what about your mom’s boss?” I asked. The daughter of a psychiatrist, I could never distance myself from the emotional aftermath of anything. No matter how horrific the ghost story had been, my thoughts always drifted to the psychological recovery of the victim.