by Aarsen, Zoe
“No way,” I countered. “The second pair.” We both race-texted our opinions back.
An hour and about twenty heavy metal songs later, we were outside Osh Kosh when it began drizzling. The rain put me on edge. Everything was starting to feel too similar to the story that Hannah had told. Frighteningly similar, like the entire afternoon was an extended moment of déjà vu. I wondered if Candace was thinking the same thing as me, but if she was, she didn’t let on. I focused on trying to imagine what it was going to be like once we got to Kenosha: the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and Olivia waiting for us in the stands.
“You guys,” Candace said, as if she was trying to motivate us to do something fun, “You know what would be so cool? If we stopped at the next rest station.”
Pete and Jeff both groaned. I was secretly relieved because I had to visit a bathroom, too, only I didn’t have enough of a friendship established with Pete to request a stop. With much complaining about girls and their weak bladders, Pete pulled off the highway at the next rest stop and parked. The rain was falling more steadily, dancing on the roof of Pete’s car and running in tiny rivers down its windows. Using the umbrellas brought from Candace’s house, we all made a dash across the parking lot, running in between parked trucks. Pete intentionally jumped in a puddle to douse Jeff as he ran by, and Jeff yelled a curse word at him, the legs of his jeans soaked. We burst through the doors of the rest station complex in giggles, our energy still off the charts in anticipation of the big game.
“It’s totally raining,” Candace said as we both washed our hands in the ladies’ room of the rest station beneath glaring fluorescent lights. “They’re going to cancel the game.”
Melissa joined us a second later, stepping in between us to use the available sink.
“Who could we call to ask?” I wondered, not really wanting to drive all the way to Kenosha only to turn around and drive home again. Six hours in a car for no good reason was a little excessive. I honestly would have preferred to drive back to Willow and see a movie, or even keep my mom company since it was making me uneasy to have left the house on bad terms with her earlier that morning.
Candace dug through her purse to apply lipstick, rubbing her lips dramatically together in the mirror and then smacking them when she was satisfied with their appearance. “Let’s text Mischa,” she suggested. “The cheerleading team should already be down there.”
The group of us reconvened in the small food court area of the rest station, where a handful of truck drivers sat, eating burgers and ignoring each other, as we waited for Mischa to text Candace back with the deal about whether or not the game had been postponed. Through the wide glass doors of the rest station, we watched the rain shift into a heavy downpour, and a blinding flash of lightning crackled in the sky moments before an earsplitting clap of thunder shook the building.
“Jesus,” Pete muttered. “It’s like the end of the world.”
“There’s no way the game is still happening,” Melissa said, popping one of the cheese fries she had purchased into her mouth. Jeff helped himself to some of her fries, sliding into the hard plastic seat next to hers. The smell was making me crazy with hunger, and I turned my head to try to avoid it. The energy that we had carried into the rest station was steadily evaporating. Our clothes were damp, our hair was tousled, and the long drive ahead to Kenosha seemed more daunting the longer we sat still.
Candace’s phone rang, and she answered it, stepping away from the rest of us for a few minutes to chat. When she returned, she was frowning. “Game’s off. It’s being rescheduled for Monday night.”
A truck driver with a long scraggly gray beard wearing a Brewers’ baseball cap walked past our table on his way to dump the paper liner and napkins on his food tray into a nearby trash can. “You kids might as well sit tight for a while. There’s a flash flood warning in effect. You shouldn’t be driving on these roads right now.”
Pete rolled his eyes once the truck driver’s back was to us, but not one of us moved a muscle to get up from our table and return to Pete’s Infiniti. None of the truck drivers at the rest stop appeared to be in a hurry to leave, either. All of them patiently watched the lightning flash through the station’s thick windows, drinking coffees and flipping through newspapers, content to wait the storm out.
“This is really freaky,” I said to Candace quietly, no longer able to suppress my fascination and fear about how the afternoon was unfolding. We sat next to each other on a hard plastic bench one table away from Melissa and Jeff. I thought of Olivia’s words in the hallway near my locker earlier that afternoon, when she had begged me to accompany her to the mall. Even she had been a little on edge about the memory of Hannah’s story at the party.
“Agreed,” Candace said without elaboration. Without saying a word to Pete or Jeff, she called Olivia, who surprisingly answered. “Olivia? It’s Candace. The game’s postponed.” She paused, pressing her hand to her free ear to block out the scratchy music playing in the rest station in order to hear Olivia better. “Where are you?” She paused again, still having difficulty hearing Olivia. “We’re just outside Osh Kosh but we’re turning around once the rain stops and driving home. Can you hear me?”
Candace pulled her phone away from her ear and looked at it angrily as if she intended to fling it across the rest station. “Her cell phone is dying,” she told me, frustrated. “She says she’s fine and she’s still at the mall but…”
Candace didn’t have to finish her sentence for me to already know what would follow.
“Her car won’t start.”
Our eyes locked, and a chill ran through me so violently that I actually shivered. Melissa noticed the serious expressions on both of our faces and stopped chewing her fries for a moment. “What’s up with you two?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Candace said sharply over her shoulder. Her mouth resumed the shape of a firm line and her eyes returned to mine.
“Do you think we should say something to Pete?” I asked her in a lowered voice. Pete and Jeff were playing a video game on their cell phones, oblivious to our panic.
“Hell no,” Candace shook her head. “They’d think we’re nuts. Quite honestly, I think we’re nuts, too. But this is just freaky.”
Candace looked like she was about to start crying, which rattled me even more. Candace Cotton—the girl who wasn’t afraid of anything—was afraid. It made me feel a little better to be in her presence, because if Candace was willing to admit that the events of Hannah’s story were falling into place, I knew I wasn’t being paranoid.
“What should we do? Should we call the police?” I asked, completely serious.
“Not the police,” Candace said firmly, raising her cell phone again. She tapped the screen. “We’re calling Hannah.”
She strummed her fingernails impatiently on the crumb-covered table where we sat as Hannah’s phone rang once, twice, three times and then transferred to voicemail. Candace frowned and held the phone up to my ear so that I could hear Hannah’s familiar outgoing message, “Hi! This is Hannah’s cell phone. I’m not able to answer right now, so…”
Candace ended the call and hit redial. “This chick is so going to get it. Why did you guys have to play all those stupid games last weekend? I don’t feel good about this.” She waited again for Hannah’s voicemail to begin, her head cocked in annoyance, and this time left a stern message. “Hannah. This is Candace. It’s pouring rain, and Olivia’s stuck at the mall in Green Bay. I think you can figure out why I’m calling you. You’d better call me back as soon as you get this.”
I felt sickened with anxiety. We sat at the rest station as the storm raged on for another fifteen minutes. Candace bought an icy diet soda, increasing the likelihood of another necessary bathroom break within the hour. Finally, there was a sudden pause in the rain, and we all looked up at each other, surprised by how abruptly the pouring had ended.
“Should we make a run for it?” Jeff asked us.
“Now or n
ever,” Candace mused. We cleared our snack trays and stepped outside the rest station, surprised at how crisp and clean-smelling the air outside was after such heavy rain. Something kept us from rushing for the car; we stood outside the doors of the rest station for a moment with our collapsed umbrellas tucked under our arms, looking around in wonderment at the soaked parking lot.
One of the truck drivers—not the one with the beard who had cautioned us about the flash floods earlier, but an older one with an enormous belly—opened one of the rest station doors and leaned out of it to address us. “You kids might want to wait it out another five minutes or so.” He looked up at the sky skeptically. “Smells like hail.”
Pete smiled politely and responded in the voice he reserved for teachers and parents, “Thanks for the warning, but we have to be on our way.”
The truck driver shrugged at us like we were just a bunch of dumb kids, and we began walking toward Pete’s car. But we had barely gotten halfway across the lot when the first ball of hail struck the ground. The first few balls that I saw were tiny, just thimble-sized clumps of ice barreling down at the blacktop of the parking lot at an incredible speed, smashing to bits when they made impact with the ground and the cabs of trucks. Behind me, I heard Candace shriek, and in front of me, Melissa pulled the hood on her sweatshirt over her head to protect herself. Within seconds, however, the hail grew much larger, incredibly large, like little rock-hard ping pong balls flinging down upon us from the sky. They hammered against the trucks in the lot and the hoods of parked cars, sounding like gun shots when they made contact. I felt hail hitting my back, my shoulders, and my head, and it hurt so much that I could barely think straight as I broke into a run toward Pete’s car. It was difficult to even see where I was going as the hail accumulated on the pavement, slippery and crunching beneath my boots.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Pete opened all four doors of his car with the remote on his key chain, and we climbed inside in a mad jumble. For a moment, after we slammed the doors shut, we sat in clumsy silence, just trying to catch our breath and make sense of the weather around us. The hail continued to slam down on Pete’s hood and the roof of the car, trapping us temporarily in the vehicle.
“This is just nuts,” Pete muttered to himself.
“It’s like, biblical,” Jeff added.
The hail was coming down so steadily that from where the car was parked, we couldn’t even see the rest station ahead. A particularly large ball of hail falling at a high velocity struck the very center of Pete’s windshield and cracked it, sending ripples through it like a stone thrown into a pond. It left a dent that looked like an elaborate spider web at the point of impact. We all jumped a few inches in the air. Candace and Melissa shrieked, and Candace dug her fingernails into my forearm.
“Oh, crap, dude,” Jeff said to Pete.
Pete whipped out his cell phone to call AAA for a tow. “Great. Now we can’t even drive home. My dad is going to kill me.”
Over an hour later, as we watched a tow truck drag Pete’s car away through the small mountains of melting hail, we bickered over whose parents should be summoned to fetch us. Oddly, the storm clouds had passed over, revealing a peaceful blue sky that was quickly darkening as night approached. Despite the unexpected change in the weather, the game remained postponed, and the football team was bound for Willow again, displeased that they wouldn’t have a victory to celebrate the following night at the dance. Our big night out had unraveled in the most unexpected way, undone by a freak storm, exactly as Hannah had predicted a week earlier. We hadn’t heard back from Olivia yet, but Candace was adamant that everything was probably fine.
“She kept saying her cell phone was about to die. That’s the only reason why she hasn’t called,” she insisted.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very, very bad had happened. Finally, I worked up the nerve to step back inside the rest station alone and call my mom. I couldn’t explain why, but as soon as I heard her voice, I began crying.
“McKenna, where are you?” she asked. As I suspected, she was in her office at the university, absolutely clueless about the storm that had just pelted most of central Wisconsin with hail.
“Outside Osh Kosh,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “We got caught in a really bad hail storm and Pete’s windshield was destroyed.”
Mom sounded baffled about why I was so emotionally distraught. “But you’re okay, right? Why do you sound so upset?”
I couldn’t tell her, obviously, that I had significant reason to believe that one of my closest friends was probably being violently killed just outside Green Bay at that very moment. And that my evidence to support this theory was entirely based on an uncanny paranormal story told by one of my weird friends, who may or may not have had psychic abilities. “I just really wanted to go to the game, and now it’s postponed,” I lied.
“Do you need me to come and pick you up? How are kids getting home?”
I swallowed, and was about to request that she come and get me when Candace stepped inside the rest station and mouthed, “My mom is on her way.”
“I’m getting a ride home with Candace’s mom,” I said, kind of wishing my mom would come and pick me up anyway.
As it was just kind of the way things operated in high school, Pete’s mom arrived almost an hour later to fetch him and Jeff, and she waited at the rest station until Melissa’s mom arrived in a Mercedes. Then, both moms went inside and purchased coffees while waiting for Candace’s mom to surface. Pete’s mom drove a huge SUV in which we all probably would have fit, but we were still at an age when everyone’s parents wanted to drive all the way out of town to pick up their own kid. Finally, Candace’s mom arrived, her heavy turquoise and silver jewelry jangling and clanging. After she insisted on going inside the rest station to get a coffee to keep her awake on the drive home with Candace’s half-sister Julia trudging along behind her, demanding that someone buy her some gum, all three of our parents’ cars departed the rest station in a strange motorcade. We drove back to Willow intentionally slowly since the streets were treacherously slippery from all of the ice. By the time we were back within town borders, it wasn’t even eight o’clock at night yet, but Candace and I were both yawning.
“Mom, can we drive past the Richmonds’ house to see if Olivia is home yet?” Candace asked from the front seat as her mom’s car rounded corners taking us closer to Martha Road. I sat in the back with Julia, who had Candace’s height but her own biological father’s thick, dark hair and squinty dark eyes.
Candace’s mom had a throaty, gravelly voice just like her daughter’s. “Oh, Candace, that’s all the way on the other side of town, and the streets are so bad.”
“It’s really important, though,” Candace insisted. “She hasn’t texted me back in over two hours and the last time I heard from her, she was stuck at the Green Bay mall.”
Candace’s mom made a right turn onto Martha Road, and just past Julia’s head I caught a glimpse of the empty lot, silent and still as it always was, as we rolled down my block toward my house. “You can call her house when we get home,” Candace’s mom was dissuading Candace.
“Mom, can we stop at Bobby’s and get chicken sandwiches for dinner?” Julia piped up next to me as Candace’s mom slowed down to a stop in front of my house.
Immediately I noticed two odd things: lights were on in my house, indicating that my mom was already home from campus, and the Emorys’ house was completely dark. The Emorys’ house was never dark on a Friday night. Trey’s dad was always visible through the front window, watching television in the living room once he got home from work. Trey’s brother, Eddie, was always using the game console attached to the television whenever Mr. Emory wasn’t watching television. And the Emorys’ kitchen light was basically on twenty-four hours a day. It was jarring to see the house so empty, so vacant.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, climbing out of Candace’s mom’s car.
“Call me if Olivia contacts y
ou immediately,” Candace ordered me.
Once inside my house, I couldn’t resist the urge to text Olivia again to see if she’d arrived home safely and recharged her phone. I waited until after Mom and I had finished eating pizza before I made the very bold decision to call the Richmonds’ house out of concern, despite knowing that it would be really awkward if Olivia’s parents, or even Evan, answered the phone. I was prepared to apologize for interrupting their Friday night, and inquire politely about whether or not Olivia made it home from the mall. My irrational fears about Hannah’s crazy story aside, there was still a legitimate possibility that Olivia was stranded in the parking lot at the mall an hour away, unable to call anyone for a ride home. So it wasn’t so unreasonable, I assured myself, that as a concerned friend I would call the house.
But no one answered.
I texted Candace one word: Anything?
And she texted back: Nothing. No answer. And no word from Hannah.