by Aarsen, Zoe
“No one other than Olivia sought the nomination,” Hannah said matter-of-factly. “So I was allowed to turn in my signatures this morning.”
Just then, down the hall, Mr. Dean stepped out of his history classroom and nodded at all of us. He raised his hand in a friendly wave.
“Well,” I said, still so confused about what was going on with Hannah but getting even a stronger sense that the girl was just dangerous, “it would be cool if we were all on Student Government together.”
As I returned to my locker to gather my books for my morning classes, I was already wishing I hadn’t spent the morning hanging up my own posters. I wished Mr. Dean had never bothered asking me to run for Treasurer. Collaborating with Hannah until June, given everything that had happened in the last week, seemed like a very undesirable way to spend the school year. It was becoming obvious that the only way I was going to find out what made Hannah tick was by getting closer. And it seemed either like she genuinely wanted me, more than Mischa and Candace, to be her friend. Or, maybe I was just gullible and pulling me closer was yet another sneaky part of whatever evil plan she had in play.
At lunch time, it was noticed immediately by everyone at our table that Hannah was sitting two tables away, across from Tracy Hartford. Mischa was fuming. “Who does she think she is? Does she think she can just pick up Olivia’s life where Olivia left off?”
Matt put a hand on Mischa’s back to calm her down. “She’s just running for office. It’s not a big deal.”
Nothing could calm Mischa down as she glared across the cafeteria. “It is a big deal and it’s more than just running for office.”
My focus on appearing unconcerned about Hannah was interrupted by a boy wearing a green Army jacket near the vending machines. It was, without a doubt, Trey, although how I hadn’t noticed him earlier in the day, I didn’t know. His back was to me as I watched him slide a wrinkled dollar bill into the vending machine with his right hand, and punch a button to request a can of soda. With a rattle that I couldn’t hear over the din of the cafeteria, the machine spat out the can as requested, and Trey took it with him as he trudged out of the cafeteria, back down the stairs that led to the locker rooms.
I found myself wondering again if Hannah had seen Trey in her vision of Olivia’s death. She’d seen enough to know that Olivia hadn’t been driving at the time of the crash. Had she known that Trey would survive?
With Candace still in the hospital, I was finding that my new life was starting to become disappointingly similar to the one I thought I’d left behind sophomore year. After school, Mischa had gymnastics practice with Amanda, and I avoided Cheryl’s questioning eyes as I carried my bag down the stairs from the junior hallway to begin my walk home alone. A ride from her would have been a relief, but I realized that a ride home from Cheryl would be an obligation to fulfill in the future. I’d be better off walking two more miles than opening up a channel through which Cheryl might attempt to continue our friendship.
Taking a roundabout route home with less traffic passing me, I paused about half a mile into my journey to change out of my stylish wedge oxfords and into my running shoes. A fat blister, watery and pink, was forming on the back of my left ankle. As I rounded my corner and passed the empty lot, I became overwhelmed with the hunch that something was wrong at home. I couldn’t say what it was, exactly. It wasn’t like a premonition or a vision of danger. It was just a slow suspicion, not so unlike how I’d sensed the blister forming on my foot half an hour earlier.
When I entered my house, it was oddly quiet. I stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge as was my habit, even though I had broken myself of the habit of actually eating something every day when I arrived home. Then, I realized that I hadn’t heard Moxie shake her collar. Her days of meeting me at the door were long over since her arthritis had gotten so bad, but typically as soon as I got home I could hear her rising from whichever corner of the house she had been dozing in and shake out her fur and collar, jingling her dog tags.
But that day: no jingling. I slowly closed the door of the fridge, starting to feel terrible. I had no reason to cry just yet, but I knew already that the tears would come. First I checked the dining room, where sometimes Moxie liked to lay down next to the radiator. Then, I peeked into Mom’s room, really hoping to see a lump of black and white fur at the foot of the bed, where the dog often liked to snooze.
“Moxie?” I called down the hall, not knowing where else she might be. Moxie had her spots throughout the house, her favorite places to stretch out and rest, but I didn’t find her in any of them. Finally, having already checked all of her usual places and beginning to wonder if something very odd was going on, like perhaps if Mom had taken the dog with her to work, I stepped into my own bedroom. Moxie was curled into a ball on my bed with her head resting on my pillow, a position in which she used to sleep when she was still a puppy. Jennie and I had received Moxie as a gift from our parents when we turned three because Jennie was obsessed with puppies and had been asking for one. I sat down on the edge of my bed, not wanting to startle the dog if she was sleeping, but already I knew that she wasn’t. I gently touched Moxie’s soft head, and my fear was confirmed. She wasn’t breathing, her chest wasn’t rising, her nostrils weren’t flaring in their little expand-contract pattern as they did when she was deeply asleep, dreaming about chasing creatures in the yard.
I can’t believe this is happening, I thought.
I leaned forward and rested my head on hers, wanting that moment never to end, for Moxie to never be further away from me than she was right there, on my bed. It wasn’t possible for me to know at what time she’d passed away, but presumably she’d climbed up on my bed and drifted off to eternity at some point in the afternoon after my mom had left for Sheboygan. I thought about texting Mom to let her know, but couldn’t find any words that wouldn’t be too unbearably heartbreaking. It was entirely possible that this news was going to upset Mom so much that she wouldn’t be able to drive home. So instead, after I kissed Moxie’s head a few times and stroked her fur, I went to the garage by myself and decided to try to bury Moxie before Mom got home. It would be hard enough for her to accept Moxie’s passing without having to see her immobile, not breathing.
In the back yard, I began digging a hole near the fence at the very back, where Moxie loved to dig holes, herself. After five minutes, my hands were becoming chapped from the handle of the shovel, and I was sweating. I paused for a moment to catch my breath, looking down at my progress, which was little more than a hole five-inches deep. Behind me, I heard our gate open and close, and to my great surprise I saw Trey approaching me when I looked over my shoulder, carrying a shovel from his own garage. He was no longer wearing the bright blue brace on his left arm, and without saying a word he began digging where I was digging. I wiped sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my hoodie and wondered if his left arm was healed enough for him to be using it, but didn’t dare ask.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what are we digging for?” Trey asked a few minutes later when he paused to catch his own breath.
“My dog died,” I said as calmly as I could, not wanting to cry in front of him. I felt my nose threatening to drip as I suppressed my tears. The injuries on his face distracted me momentarily from my heartache over Moxie; the swelling had gone down but had been replaced by dark purple bruising along his cheekbone and around his lip and jaw. Trey didn’t press me for more information; he just kept digging until we were both standing in front of a pretty sizeable hole, about three feet deep.
“Do you think this is big enough?” he asked me.
I nodded, really not sure. I wanted to make sure the hole was deep enough that other animals wouldn’t be able to dig Moxie up, which was a morbid and horrible thought, but a valid fear nonetheless because Wisconsin was overrun with bears, coyotes, and other kinds of beasts that might wreak havoc in a back yard.
“Where is she?” Trey asked, looking past me, toward the house. I realized he was offer
ing to go inside and retrieve her so that I wouldn’t have to. I wasn’t sure if he knew the layout of our house, but then remembered that all of the houses on our block were basically carbon copies. “She’s on my bed,” I managed to say without my voice cracking.
Trey went into the house while I stared ahead into space, day dreaming, watching my breath escape my mouth in barely visible white puffs as the day turned into evening and the warm sun disappeared over the horizon. I smelled fire and assumed that one of our neighbors was lighting their fireplace for the first time that autumn. The fireflies that had swarmed the yard just a few evenings ago were gone for the season. I swallowed hard; the thought that Moxie wouldn’t live to see another summer and bark at fireflies ever again made my chest hurt. Trey returned a few minutes later, carrying Moxie’s body effortlessly, as if she were weightless. I appreciated the care with which he gently set her down in the hole we’d dug, and arranged her paws as if he was trying to make her comfortable. I was on the edge of breaking into a tsunami of tears, knowing that it was strange to be so much more deeply saddened by the death of a dog than I was by the death of one of my own friends. Even assuring myself that Moxie was finally out of the constant nagging pain of her arthritis, and that maybe she was, at that very moment, looking down at me from heaven next to Jennie, didn’t comfort me much.
“I’ll cover her,” Trey said finally, observing that I hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d stepped back from the hole. Putting dirt on top of her was something I just couldn’t bring myself to do, I realized. I wasn’t sure if I would have found the necessary strength if Trey hadn’t been there, or if having him there provided me with an opportunity to be overwhelmed by my sorrow. But either way, I turned my back and quietly cried as Trey filled the hole again with dirt from the small mountain we’d made.
“You can turn around now,” he announced a few minutes later, when there was a soft mound of gray dirt over where the hole had previously been.
We both turned as we heard my mom’s car pull into the driveway, and the engine shut off. She stepped out of the car, still full of energy from an enjoyable day of teaching on campus, and waved at us over the top of the fence.
“Hey kids, what’s going on?” she asked, stepping through the gate. Immediately her smile fell when she saw us standing awkwardly in the yard with our shovels, the pile of dirt visible behind us. “What is this?”
“Mom,” I started, “it’s Moxie—”
My mom put her hand up to silence me, already knowing what I was about to say. She looked down at the ground near her feet to avoid looking up at us. “Alright,” she said abruptly, as if she simply couldn’t stand to hear me say the rest. “Alright.”
“It was very peaceful, Mom,” I blurted out, wanting to ease her pain in some way, but knowing that for Mom, Moxie’s death was the equivalent of one of the few remaining pieces of Jennie that she had left to cherish being ripped away from her. She was already on her way into the house, shaking her head, and I imagined that she would disappear into her room and not emerge until morning, as she sometimes did on the anniversary of Jennie’s death.
“Do you want to be alone?” Trey asked me.
I thought about it for a minute, and decided that I actually really did not want to be alone in my yard with a pile of dirt. I also did not want to be alone in my house, listening to my mom’s sobs through the wall that separated our bedrooms. “No,” I replied.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked, looking kind of uncomfortable, shoving his free hand into the pocket of his jeans. “I mean, we could have driven somewhere, but you know… my car.”
I agreed to go for a walk, and we put our shovels back in our respective garages. Not wanting to venture back into the house too far, I grabbed one of my mom’s unfashionable heavy cardigans from a hook on the wall just inside our side door, and met Trey back on my front lawn a few minutes later.
Without exchanging words, we took a left at the end of Martha Road and began walking toward one of our town’s small shopping centers. It was one of the few paths in town from my house that could be traveled entirely on sidewalk, as so many sidewalks within town limits withered off into ditches along rural highways, making it kind of difficult to take a long walk without having to worry about being mowed down by a speeding car. Dry, sweet-smelling leaves crunched beneath our feet and the chirping of summer crickets was noticeably absent. Autumn had arrived.
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Trey began once we were a few blocks away from home. “Monday night in your yard you apologized that I had been messed up in all this. What did you mean by that?”
Trey’s words pulled me out of my fog over Moxie’s death and I tried to remember back to exactly what I had said when we were on my deck. Had I given him any reason to think that Olivia’s death was related to anything else?
“I just meant, you know, that you were involved in the crash, that’s all,” I tried to explain, not especially wanting to think about Hannah at such a sensitive time. But then I got to thinking; Hannah had made mention of Moxie. She knew I had a dog. Was it crazy to think that Hannah had played a part in Moxie’s death? Other than her ongoing problems with arthritis, the dog really hadn’t given any outward signs of health problems in recent weeks. The simple notion of Hannah having done anything to bring on Moxie’s death made me so angry I broke out into a light sweat despite the cool night.
“That’s not what it sounded like when you said it,” Trey insisted after a moment. “It sounded like you knew something about the crash. And it freaked me out, you know? Because right before that truck hit us, Olivia was going nuts in my car. She kept saying, it’s just like the story. You have to pull over. We’re going to get hit. Do you know what she was talking about?”
I remained silent, not sure if it was the right time to confess to him everything from Olivia’s party. It hadn’t even been a week since he’d survived the accident, so it was crazy to think he was emotionally ready to hear all of the details of Hannah’s story.
He continued, “Because I really need to know. It’s been driving me crazy, McKenna. It’s all I can think about. What was she talking about? What story? How did she know that truck was going to hit us? She was so certain that we were going to be hit head-on that I was afraid she was going to open the passenger side door and jump out of the car. When we got hit, I couldn’t see anything through my windshield. I was swerving to the right to pull over alongside the road over to the shoulder so that she’d shut up. She just wouldn’t… shut up.”
We were on a long stretch of wooded road that preceded the intersection where a handful of stores were located, and very few cars were driving past us. It was almost dark out and the few street lights that lined the road were coming on. Somehow, the onset of night made it more difficult to tell Trey the truth. Talking about any of what we’d done after dark seemed like an invitation for more terrible things to occur. Nothing was safe in the dark. “Do you have any idea what she was talking about?” he asked again.
I took a deep breath, knowing there was no way to reverse things if Trey decided I was a total nutcase after I shared the events of Olivia’s party with him. “Okay, all of this is going to sound completely insane. I will admit that. But there’s something just so weird about it that it has to fit together somehow.” I dared to look up at him to see if he looked skeptical yet. He appeared eager to hear more, so I continued. “At Olivia’s birthday party two weeks ago, we were up late and we decided to play a game.”
“Just you and Olivia?” Trey interrupted.
“No, it was me, Olivia, Candace, Mischa, and Hannah, that new girl at school from Illinois. Hannah suggested that we play this game called, ‘Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.’ It’s a dumb game, something that kids in like, middle school play. But we were bored, so we said okay. The whole thing with this game is that one person is the story teller and makes up this elaborate tale about how one of the other players is going to die. Then, at the end of the story, the other
girls playing the game chant and raise the girl whose story was just told up with their fingertips.”
“What do you mean, with fingertips?” Trey asked, trying to visualize what I was describing.
“Exactly that,” I said. “Okay, I forgot to say that while the storyteller is telling the story, the girl who’s the subject of the story is laying down on the floor. And at the end of the story, if the game works right, she’s weightless. It’s like a spell has been cast on everyone playing the game, and that girl can be lifted effortlessly until someone sneezes or laughs or something to break the spell.”
“Okay, that sounds like some messed up kind of game,” Trey said. “I’ve never heard of a game like that.”
“Yeah, well,” I agreed reluctantly, “a lot of people say it’s a game that invokes evil spirits, but that’s just silly. My father says it’s a form of group hypnosis. Everyone playing the game becomes hypnotized by the chanting. You can do a lot of seemingly impossible things when you’re hypnotized, you know.”
“So, you guys played this weird game and someone predicted Olivia’s death?” Trey asked.
I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk in the dark and he grabbed me by the elbow to steady me before I fell. “Yeah. But it was so, so much more than just predicting her death, Trey. Hannah was the storyteller, and… I can’t even explain it. She just told the story so convincingly. Right down to minor details. She knew all of it, about Olivia going to the mall to buy shoes, about it happening the night before Homecoming. She even knew that someone was going to offer Olivia a ride home in the parking lot after her car refused to start.”