Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board (Weeping Willow High)

by Aarsen, Zoe

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” we repeated.

  Unbelievably enough, Candace’s body, heavier and larger than Olivia’s, began to lift just as easily as Olivia’s had. I did not dare to look up at the other girls raising Candace with their fingertips for fear of being the one to ruin the thrill, even though my heart was racing in terror. We only got Candace about two feet off the floor when she startled and we dropped her.

  “Oh my god, that was crazy!” she shrieked, throwing her hands to her face to press her own cheeks. Her eyes were glossy, watering with excitement. “I could actually feel you guys lifting me!”

  All of my friends were bubbling over with enthusiasm then, thrilled with our success. I was quiet and smiled in an effort to appear like I was having fun, but I was really wishing that someone would pull out a game of Twister or suggest that we do something—anything—else. Hannah had become the party hero. The warm rush I’d felt surge through me during my encounter with Evan upstairs had abandoned me completely. My limbs were cold with fear, the same kind of nervous fear that overtook me when I watched horror movies. An enjoyable fear, but a sensation that I hoped wouldn’t last long. Self-conscious, I wondered if I was the only one who was a little freaked out by the grotesque details that Hannah was so easily able to conjure as elements of her stories. She spewed such disgusting descriptions so casually that I wondered if she was some kind of sociopath and we’d somehow overlooked her mental disorder over the last two weeks, distracted and awed by her big blue, innocent eyes and long lashes.

  “You’re so good at this!” Mischa exclaimed.

  “I’m okay,” Hannah admitted, not wanting necessarily to be admired for her strange storytelling skills.

  “I’ve never even been to a beach before,” Candace said, “other than at Lake Winnebago and that doesn’t even count. But it was so real! I could practically smell the salt water as you were telling the story.”

  “This is so much fun! I’m so glad you suggested doing this,” Olivia gushed. Suddenly, she pointed directly at me. “Let’s do McKenna next!”

  “No, no,” I said, holding my hands up in protest. “That would be too weird.”

  “Come on, McKenna!” Candace egged me on. “You have to. We’re all doing it.”

  Hannah’s not doing it¸ I thought to myself.

  I found myself stretching out on the floor between them all, easing my head onto the upholstered couch pillow. Hannah’s fingertips grazed my temples, cool pressure against my head, touching me so lightly that I could barely feel her skin against my own.

  “Oh,” Hannah said suddenly, the second her fingertips touched my temples. She sounded surprised. “This is going to be a tough one.”

  At my feet, Candace’s eyebrows shot up her forehead in alarm. Mischa and Olivia exchanged concerned, knowing glances.

  “Why?” I asked, looking straight up at Hannah.

  “Usually when I play this game, I get a good idea as soon as I touch someone,” Hannah explained. “But I don’t have any ideas for you. The only thing I can think of is fire, but it doesn’t feel right. I mean, I can tell a story about fire if you want. But I don’t know if it’s going to work.”

  My heart began beating furiously fast and I wanted to sit up and bring an end to the stupid game right there and then. I knew it wasn’t fair; Hannah was new in town and couldn’t possibly have known how eerie her words were. For me, the party was over. I wanted to call my mom even though it was after midnight and ask her to pick me up immediately. But I couldn’t do that. I was sixteen, not a baby, and I couldn’t even find the strength to sit up and relieve Hannah from having to tell my story. I desperately didn’t want Candace, Mischa, and Olivia to think I was too chicken to play. It felt as if my continued inclusion in the popular circle depended entirely on my cooperation with the game.

  “Don’t tell a story about fire,” Olivia said finally, with tenderness in her voice that suggested she knew how much that would terrify me. “Anything but that.”

  “No! Tell it!” urged Mischa. “Wouldn’t that be so scary, if McKenna were to die just like—”

  “Stop, Mischa,” Candace commanded, silencing her. “That’s totally messed up.”

  The basement was quiet for a moment as the girls’ eyes locked. Without a single word uttered, I sensed Mischa back down. I looked up at Hannah, and flinched when I found her looking directly down at me with an expression that told me she knew exactly why I couldn’t stand to hear about my own demise in flames. She knew about Jennie. I was certain of it, and it chilled me to the bone. I sat straight up, bolting away from her, my concern with popularity temporarily forgotten.

  “I don’t feel like playing anymore,” I announced in a shaky voice.

  “It’s okay,” Candace assured me. “Mischa can take her turn.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” Mischa volunteered.

  Mischa all too readily stretched out on the floor and gently set her head upon the pillow. I took the position at her feet, wanting to distance myself as much as possible from Hannah. I was barely paying attention as Hannah told the tale of Mischa’s death, something about choking and turning blue. Instead of devoting my thoughts to the story, I found myself wondering about Hannah. Who was this girl, really? Was it normal to have such control over this type of game, to be able to hypnotize one’s peers so casually? Had she observed more with those huge blue eyes than we had noticed since the first day of school? Did she know more about all of our lives than she was letting on?

  Perhaps because of Mischa’s eagerness for the game to work like a charm, we lifted her higher than anyone else, barely breathing, we were so charged up as we raised Mischa’s tiny body above our shoulders, level with our eyes, and then over our heads.

  It was a buzzing from Olivia’s cell phone on the coffee table that broke our concentration. Luckily for Mischa, we caught her before she fell five feet to the floor.

  “Wow, you were really high up there, dude,” Candace informed Mischa as Olivia bolted across the basement to grab her phone.

  “It’s Pete!” she whispered to all of us. “He and Jeff Harrison are—”

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  A loud knock on the basement storm window from the back yard made all of us jump in the air. Mischa screamed and we immediately heard commotion on the second floor as Olivia’s parents sprang into action. We erupted into giggles as soon as we realized that the source of the knock was handsome Pete, squatting in Olivia’s back yard with another member of the basketball team, Jeff Harrison.

  We heard the door at the top of the stairs open and we all froze. Olivia made hand motions to Pete to back away from the window.

  “Olivia, what’s going on down there?” we heard Mr. Richmond call from the top of the stairs.

  “Nothing, Dad!” Olivia chirped back in reply. “Mischa just saw a spider.”

  “Must have been some spider,” Mr. Richmond said in a tone that suggested he knew she was lying.

  Mischa and Olivia both suppressed giggles with their fingers. “It was,” Mischa called over her shoulder.

  “Get some rest, girls,” Mr. Richmond encouraged us. “It’s after one. Busy day tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Olivia said, just wanting him to go back up to the second floor and leave us alone.

  She waited until he climbed all of the stairs back up to the second floor master bedroom, her head nodding slightly as she counted his footsteps, before dragging a chair over to the window to slide it open.

  “Pete, what are you doing here?” she asked, standing atop the chair as the rest of us watched.

  “Jeff and I were driving around and I thought it would be fun to stop by and wish you happy birthday in person,” he told her, putting his hand up to the window screen separating them.

  “That is so romantic,” Candace muttered to no one in particular.

  “That’s totally sweet, but you guys have to get out of here! If my dad hears you, he’ll call the cops!”

  Pete vowed to leave qui
etly, but only after Olivia figured out how to remove the screen so that he could kiss her through the window. She fumbled with the screen in the window frame until it fell forward and silently hit the grass of the back yard, and lifted herself on her tip toes so that Pete could lean through the open window and kiss her.

  “Isaac would never be that romantic,” Candace grumbled.

  An hour later, after the screen had been popped back into place in the window frame, we restored the volume of the music videos playing on the television, and snuggled into our blankets, finally ready to go to sleep. I spread out my sleeping bag on the floor closest to the television, turning my back on my friends as I heard them all begin to breathe more deeply and then snore.

  I couldn’t sleep. Everything about Hannah’s contributions to the game, including her suggestion that we play it in the first place, was troubling me. How had Hannah, who hadn’t gone upstairs all night, known that Olivia’s parents had bought her a red Toyota? Was it possible that someone in our tiny town had told her about Jennie, even though the subject was an odd one to share with anyone new at the high school?

  My eyes began to burn with tiredness and I noticed the time on the cable box near the television was 3:31 A.M. Suddenly I sensed that I wasn’t the only one awake in the basement, and turned to find Hannah sitting up on her sleeping bag across the room, rubbing her eyes.

  “Sorry if I freaked you out earlier,” she whispered, careful not to wake the others.

  “It’s okay,” I lied, because that’s what girls say. It wasn’t okay at all, but after her impressive performance, I was a little afraid of offending her. I rolled over, turning my back to her once again. That night I barely slept, unable to shake the suspicion that the fire in the fireplace that had burned so wildly while we were chanting had never burned itself completely out.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the morning, Olivia rushed through the front double doors of her house to squeal in delight (much to the annoyance of her neighbors) in the driveway at her new red car.

  “Oh my god, I love it! I totally love it!” she exclaimed repeatedly, throwing her arms around her father, and then her mother, and then her father again.

  Mrs. Richmond made us all pancakes in the shape of the first letter of our first names, which was kind of a childish treat, but we all enjoyed it anyway. My pancake, an uneven and misshapen M, was the largest of them all, nearly twice the size of Mischa’s M, and I devoured it in silence, still unsettled by the game we had played the night before. Thankfully Evan and Charlie had left the house to drive to Evan’s appointment for X-rays before we had even stirred awake. I wasn’t in the mood to flirt or act bubbly; I wanted to repack my backpack and rush home in the safety of daylight.

  When I emerged from the first floor bathroom and began my descent back down to the basement to retrieve my backpack and shopping bags from the trip to the mall the day before, I heard Olivia uttering the words twin and fire. I knew immediately that she was debriefing Hannah about my life story, and in an odd way I was flattered that Olivia even still remembered it. All of the events she was relaying had occurred right around the time I had fallen out of favor with Olivia and Candace and the other girls who had been considered to be the prettiest and friendliest back then in elementary school. I couldn’t blame them for allowing our friendships to lapse when we were little kids. What had happened to my family was so terrible that parents wanted to keep their own children away from us, as if distance was a preventative measure to keep tragedy from striking them, too.

  My footsteps on the creaky stairs interrupted the story, and both Olivia and Hannah smiled awkwardly when I reached the basement. Only Candace turned and nodded at me with sad eyes, confirmation that I was indeed interrupting exactly what I suspected.

  “We’re going to go see Blood Harvest 2: The Reaping this afternoon,” Olivia announced cheerfully, her offer laced with falseness. “Do you want to come with?”

  “I can’t,” I lied smoothly. “I’m going to the mall with my mom to look for Homecoming stuff.”

  I was thankful that I hadn’t previously announced to my new friends that the lavender dress had already been purchased, some information I’d held back on sharing just in case a date never surfaced.

  That was the day that summer settled comfortably into fall. The temperature finally dropped noticeably by ten degrees and a sharp scent of dry leaves crept into the air, overpowering my town’s summer smells of freshly cut grass and honeysuckle bushes. I rushed home on foot, not wanting to have to wait for my mom to arrive at the Richmonds’ in her station wagon. My mom put other parents on edge. She was lucky to escape Willow on the three days each week when she taught in Sheboygan, where the only people who had known her long enough to remember about Jennie were the other professors who had been at the University as long as she’d been teaching there. Within town limits, everyone her own age remembered not only the story but the headline that appeared the next morning in the Willow Gazette: Tot Lost in Blaze on Martha Road. A lot of kids I knew had divorced parents and lived with their mom after their dad left Willow to find a new job, pursue a new wife, and start over with fresh rules in a new game. But only my mom inspired awkward kindness everywhere she went. Even the checkout girls at the grocery store smiled a little wistfully when handing over her change.

  The walk was nearly two miles, but I hurried, eager to get home to my own familiar bed to catch a few hours’ worth of sleep. Thinking about Jennie exhausted me and I wasn’t happy that her memory had been dredged up so close to Homecoming, when my life was rapidly changing in a brighter direction. There were entire stretches of days sometimes when I barely thought about her, and then, of course, when I did, I felt guilty. It wasn’t even accurate to say that I missed her; it had been so long since she’d passed away that I hardly remembered what it had been like when she’d been alive. By that autumn, I had lived on my own just as long as I’d lived with her, my life split in two distinct halves: With Jennie, and After Jennie. What had replaced the hollow longing that immediately followed her death was a distinct uneasiness, an undeniable but intangible sensation that somehow nature had messed up. Somehow, the wrong twin had been reclaimed.

  “Nature doesn’t make mistakes,” Mom was fond of saying when talking about her profession, teaching future botanists and biologists about phasmatodea, stick bugs that could blend seamlessly into their surroundings, and earthworms that aerated soil.

  But what if… I could never prevent myself from wondering. What if it did, just once?

  My mom liked to comfort herself by saying that when Jennie died, that was the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. My dad, in her opinion, just wasn’t man enough to help her through the tragic loss of a child. Truthfully, I think my dad would have packed his bags and headed down to Florida as soon as my mom started finding gray hairs, even if we hadn’t lost Jennie the previous year. What made his attention wane wasn’t the second empty bed, covered in its pink bedspread, untouched next to mine even after we moved into our new house, or the closet full of dresses and leotards that were several sizes too small for me that my mom wouldn’t consider giving away. It was my mother’s refusal to move on, to accept, and the wrinkles that formed around her eyes during all the nights when she stayed up late, drinking tea on our porch, wanting to be sure, completely sure, that all of the electrical appliances were turned off before she climbed into bed for the night. For all of his advanced knowledge of the human psyche, my father couldn’t begin to understand why he could forgive my mother for her paranoia, but couldn’t overcome his own revulsion toward her aging process.

  Someday, I feared, I would also grow too old for his affection. At sixteen, I already questioned his authority, his decisions, and expertise far too frequently for his liking. Rhonda had turned twenty-seven that summer when I had been visiting in Florida. “Ha!” my mother had exclaimed at that. My mom had just turned forty-one.

  Autumn was my favorite time of year, despite it also being a season of a lot
of unhappy memories. Among them were the anniversary of Jennie’s death, and the anniversary of the following year when Dad boxed up all of his clothes and crammed them into the hatchback of his car for the three-day drive down to Florida. Colored leaves in the trees and dry crunching beneath my shoes made me nostalgic, but comforted me. Wisconsin is basically the autumn capital of the world, in my opinion. At no time of year was it prettier in Willow, and never did it feel more like home.

  I reached our corner, and passed the vacant lot where our old house used to stand. Mom had insisted that we use the money from our insurance company to buy the only house for sale on our block at the time our first house burned to the ground. Morbid? Yes. But at the time Mom was grieving; she couldn’t stand the thought of Jennie’s spirit being alone on our old street, with us hypothetically all the way across town carrying on with our lives. It was a little weird to walk past that empty corner every day, but I could barely remember the layout of the house which once stood there. The outline of its perimeter had long since been obscured by dry, overgrown grass. In the eight years we’d been living in the house at the other end of the block next door to the Emorys,’ Mom had never once considered moving away. The lot on the corner had become town property, and every once in a while someone on the town board had an asinine idea about putting a park there. The proposal would always be shot down by no fewer than twenty mothers who vowed they would never let their kids play on slides and swing sets on the site of such a horrific event.