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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  Mischa looked outraged when she glanced up at me from tying the laces on her running shoes. “You must be insane. That girl is dangerous.”

  Girls who had changed in the row next to ours looked over at us curiously as they passed us on their way out of the gym. “Look, we probably shouldn’t talk about what happened to Olivia at all anymore at school,” I said. “Do you have gymnastics today? Can we hang out and talk about this in private?”

  “I’m going to Candace’s house,” Mischa informed me haughtily, and then added, “You can meet us there.”

  At lunch time, I sat with Hannah and Tracy and struggled to listen to their big plans for the junior class while out of the corner of my eye, I watched Pete consume his lunch at our old table, flanked by Matt and Isaac. I wondered where Mischa and Candace were, but then figured that perhaps Mischa had thought better of letting Candace observe me sitting with the enemy. Hannah and Tracy rambled on and on about bake sales and initiatives to recycle the foil containers in which we were served everything from tater tots to lasagna in the cafeteria. I shared with them my big plan to start leaf-raking and driveway-shoveling services as a means of raising money for the class trip, and Hannah’s pretty face flushed with excitement.

  “Oh my god, McKenna, that is such an awesome idea. You’re a genius!” she exclaimed, flattering me more than I wanted to be flattered by her. “What should we call it?”

  I bit my lower lip, wanting to continue impressing her despite reminding myself that I was pretending to be friendly. “I was thinking we could call it the Willow Weather Warriors. Or, maybe that’s dumb.” The Warriors was the name of our high school football and basketball teams because they were renamed after local descendants of the Winnebago tribe had publicly opposed our teams being called the Winnebagos, as they had been for decades before I ever got to high school.

  “Love it,” Hannah said, writing it down in her memo pad in curly handwriting.

  “Perfect,” Tracy added. Tracy had already started parroting everything Hannah said, clearly wanting to be first in line to be Hannah’s new best friend.

  Hannah and I walked together to U.S. History, and we passed Candace in the hallway, who glared at me as she watched us. Isaac stood protectively next to her at her locker, with one strong hand on her shoulder, and I hoped that Mischa had already taken the time to explain to her why I was spending time with Hannah. The thought of Candace truly being mad at me upset me so much that I could barely concentrate on Mr. Dean’s lecture about Aaron Burr’s historic duel with Alexander Hamilton.

  After school, I slid out of the building without even stopping at my locker, where any number of girls with whom I did not want to speak might have noticed me. I met Trey down near the entrance to the library, in front of the vending machines, and we smiled nervously at each other. The whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing still felt very new and strange. He pecked me on the cheek after neither of us knew what to do for a few seconds. It struck me as amazing all over again how cute he was even despite his stitches and bruises, and how it had taken me so long to notice.

  “I have to walk over to the Sherwood Hills subdivision,” I told him once we were outside, opening our umbrellas. “I’m going over to Candace’s house to meet with her and Mischa.”

  “I have trigonometry with Candace Cotton,” Trey informed me. “She was really spaced out. The teacher called on her once and she didn’t even respond to her own name.”

  Candace hadn’t even really looked like herself in school that day. She’d worn a cable knit cardigan, floral button-down blouse, and a pair of pink corduroys that were, although tight, not at all her typical style. She looked, now that I was thinking about it, like her mother had dressed her for school.

  “Did you find anything helpful in the library?” I asked. It had been Trey’s idea for us to do some basic, old-fashioned research into contact with evil spirits and all of the possible strange things that might have happened during Olivia’s birthday party. I had offered to look on Google; he had shaken his head as if I was a foolish child and had insisted that the research begin in actual books found in the actual card catalog. Maybe it was silly of us to think we’d find an answer as to what was going on in a book, or anywhere, for that matter. But Trey seemed pretty certain that information of value would not be found online.

  “Funny you should ask.” He wiggled out of his heavy black backpack, and withdrew from it a hardcover book, its corners rounded from wear, covered by a faded paper jacket, on which the title was printed Requests from the Dead, by James W. Listerman. “I found this. I felt weird checking it out, so I just boosted it.”

  He handed it to me and I didn’t even bother scolding him for stealing the book. A guy who looked like Trey couldn’t exactly check a book about evil out from the high school library without the librarian taking note. I examined it, trying to be careful not to let any of the slow rain falling come into contact with it, first checking its copyright page. It had been published in 1910. The book smelled moldy and the pages felt fragile, like they might crack and crumble as I flipped through them.

  “Wow, this is old,” I commented. “Did you find anything good in here?”

  “Oh, some promising stuff,” Trey said in a teasing voice. “Mainly that it seems like if old James W. Listerman knew what he was talking about, Hannah might have made herself a deal with an evil spirit to serve as a medium. Like, a conduit through which other spirits can communicate, and share information with her.”

  “Why in the heck would anyone make a deal like that?” I asked. “If an evil spirit tried to contact me, I would seriously freak out.”

  “Well,” Trey continued, seeming to have read more of the book than I had originally thought possible during a one-hour lunch break. “If Hannah wanted something from someone who was dead, then she might have struck some kind of deal with whichever spirit she was able to contact in exchange for them putting her in touch with whoever she wanted to reach. Or, if an evil spirit was pressuring her, she might have been willing to agree to anything to make it end. We can’t be sure unless we ask her. This book also says that spirits can be very deceitful and manipulative, so she may have been tricked. But obviously, don’t ask her yet.”

  “Can I borrow this?” I asked, holding up the book.

  He took the book out of my hands and tucked it back into his backpack. “Not until I read it cover to cover. This is some really creepy stuff.”

  Trey walked me to the main gate of Candace’s subdivision, and for a moment as we said goodbye, I wished I could put everything related to Olivia, Candace, Mischa, and Hannah behind me and just walk home with Trey, back to a normal life that felt like mine. But I already knew that whatever Hannah had started had ended my normal life forever, or at least until I knew for certain that I and the rest of my friends were safe.

  “Finally,” Candace said when she opened her front door and saw me. She sounded more like herself, and was smirking more like she used to before the accident happened.

  “Hi,” I said, entering the Cottons’ huge home and enjoying how it smelled, unlike ours, like potpourri and fat, red, berry-scented wax candles. “You seem more… normal than you did at school today.”

  “That’s because I take my meds in the morning and in the evening. Right around this time of day, the morning meds are wearing off,” Candace explained. In her kitchen, Mischa was seated at the table typing away on her mobile tablet, quite obviously concentrating on something intently.

  “So. About this plan of yours to stay friends with Hannah,” Mischa said, looking up at me as I took a seat at the kitchen table. I hadn’t noticed when I’d first entered the room, but Candace’s half-sister Julia was in the adjacent living room, stretched out on the couch, her bare feet dangling over the edge. “I don’t like it. What if you’re like, some kind of double agent? Like, you’re really loyal to Hannah, but just spying on us?”

  I looked at Mischa, and then at Candace, in disbelief. It seemed impossible to me that they’d accuse me of
aligning with Hannah when in actuality I was offering to stand by her against my every instinct to stay as far away from her as possible.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “I don’t really want anything to do with her! I am almost positive she orchestrated Olivia’s death, and had something to do with my dog’s death yesterday, too. I just can’t prove any of it, and neither can either of you. So unless you guys want her to get away with it and keep doing whatever she’s doing, one of us is going to have to gain her trust and find out what her plans are.”

  Mischa looked guilty and shrugged up at Candace. After a moment of hesitation, Candace appeared to be considering the logic behind my plan. She pulled out a chair and took a seat at the table. “What happened to your dog?”

  I reluctantly confessed to them about the odd conversation I’d had with Hannah on the track after Olivia’s birthday party, the one in which she had guessed I had a dog and had described Moxie. Then I told them about getting home from school and finding Moxie dead on my bed the day before.

  “That sucks, McKenna,” Mischa said, shaking her head. “I think she’s evil. Truly evil. Check this out. At her last high school in Lake Forest Illinois, four students committed suicide last year. That’s three more suicides than the high school had in its student body for the entire last decade. And it gets freakier. One of the girls who killed herself was the captain of the pom squad team on which Hannah was a member. One of the boys was a freshman and Hannah gave a quote at his funeral to a local newspaper saying that she used to babysit him when he was a little kid.”

  “What about the other two people?” Candace asked, suddenly very focused. She folded her hands on the table top.

  “I can’t make any solid connections yet, but I’ve only been looking for an hour. Hannah’s such a freak, she doesn’t even have a Facebook or MySpace profile. Anyway, it hardly matters. Think of how many times every day you cross paths with someone you don’t even know so well at high school. They could have all known Hannah any number of ways.”

  “Did Hannah ever mention why it was that her family moved to Willow?” I asked, unable to recall her ever providing us with a reason for her sudden arrival in our out-of-the-way little town.

  Candace said, “She said it was for her dad’s work.”

  Mischa snorted. “Work? What work is there to do here?”

  Candace’s dad was a co-owner at a construction company in Green Bay. Mischa’s father owned several luxury car dealerships between Willow, Sheboygan and Green Bay. My own father had given up on opportunities that were within driving range of Willow, and had headed down to Florida where he got a better job at a state university. There simply weren’t a lot of jobs in Willow for which anyone’s parents would uproot a family in another town to accept.

  Our wonderment at what circumstances could have possibly delivered Hannah into our forgettable little town inspired Mischa to begin making a list. The list essentially became my assignment. It was composed of things we needed to find out about Hannah. Was she an only child? Had she attended any schools prior to the one in Lake Forest? I would be observing her, spying on her, casually questioning her, and reporting everything back to Mischa and Candace.

  Of course, it had already occurred to me that Hannah would not be happy if she were to catch on to what we were doing. Thankfully, Mischa and Candace seemed to share my concern that it might not be in the best interest of my personal safety to become closer friends with Hannah, so we all agreed that for appearances’ sake, we would refrain from acting like friends while at school. We would let everyone think that we’d had a big fight about Candace’s refusal to be nice to Hannah, and I’d communicate all of my learnings to them over e-mail rather than by text message just in case Hannah were ever to catch a glimpse of my phone.

  We heard the automated garage door open and Julia turned off the television instantly. Candace’s mom entered the kitchen area, where we were all seated, from the garage, bringing a brief gust of perfume-scented cold air with her. She carried with her beige plastic bags from the grocery store and set them on the kitchen counter. “Hey ladies. What are we up to?”

  “Just doing homework, Mom,” Candace lied cheerfully.

  “Have you taken your medication yet?” Candace’s mom asked, opening the fridge to place a carton of soy milk into it.

  Candace sighed so loudly it was more like a dragon’s roar, and stood up from the table to retrieve her orange prescription bottles from the cabinet over the kitchen sink. Within minutes, her eyes seemed to cloud over, and the dazed and passive version of Candace was back.

  Walking home from Candace’s fancy subdivision, I felt more alone than I had ever felt during my sophomore year. My walk took me past the cemetery at St. Monica’s, and I felt a twinge of temptation to step inside its gates to not only walk past Jennie’s grave, but also to satisfy my curiosity about Olivia’s. A sign on the front gate of the cemetery stated that it closed daily at sundown. I felt my feet in motion, and as I walked past the guard station, the uniformed guard looked at the watch on his wrist and told me, “I’m closing up in about twenty minutes, honey.” I asked him for directions to where I might find Olivia Richmond’s grave and he had to look up its location on his computer. On a map, he drew a little line along the paths I should follow to find her plot, which happened to be in the opposite direction of Jennie’s grave, located in the northeast corner of the cemetery. I walked as quickly as I could down the paths that led to the unmarked plot that was Olivia’s. The headstone hadn’t been placed yet, but it was easy to assume that it was Olivia’s because the dirt covering it was still moist and brown, and three arrangements of pink roses had been placed upon it.

  I scratched my head and stood there on the path, not attempting to get any closer to the plot. It was impossible to connect my memory of giggling, whispering Olivia, her glossy platinum hair and fringy eyelashes, with this pile of dirt fifteen feet in front of me. I thought I had a firm understanding of death: a person dies, and then they’re gone. Forever. But somehow, maybe because I was older than I’d been when Jennie died, Olivia’s death didn’t have the same element of finality. She simply didn’t seem quite so far away.

  That night, I tossed and turned until I finally found myself falling in and out of a strange dream in which my reflection in the mirror was that of my old self, my sophomore year self, with a rounder face, larger belly and less stylish hair cut. This image made me recoil in disgust; it was embarrassing and also scary to see my recent transformation undone. My reflection was mouthing words, trying to tell me something, and finally I overcame my revulsion toward my own image and leaned closer to the mirror to hear.

  “I’m still a part of you,” my reflection told me. It reached for me, I felt its hand on my neck, and—

  I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart beating wildly, and realized it was only one o’clock in the morning. It was nowhere near time to wake up for school, but too late to get out of bed and poke around the kitchen for a glass of water without alarming my mom. I calmed myself in the darkness and silence of my bedroom, and I began wondering about the meaning of my dream. My father was a big believer in the psychological significance of dreams; ever since Jennie and I were little, he would ask us about our dreams and request that we retell them to him in detail. It occurred to me that maybe my dream wasn’t about gaining weight and becoming the Old McKenna again. Maybe it was about Jennie. If she hadn’t died when she was eight, would she have lost weight and become pretty in the same timeframe as I did? Would she have lost weight and become popular even before I did?

  Would Evan have preferred her to me?

  Would Trey have?

  As I wondered what it might have been like to have Jennie with me at Willow High School, I became keenly aware that I was not alone in my bedroom. A breeze blew in the light curtains that hung at the sides of the blinds over my window soundlessly. When it settled, the room felt suddenly unbearably cold, and it seemed as if I could almost feel something in my room inhaling a
nd exhaling.

  In, out.

  In, out.

  I sat upright in my bed and remained perfectly still, wondering if whatever it was would leave me alone if it thought I had fallen asleep again. My eyes squeezed shut, and I convinced myself that there was definitely something there with me. It wasn’t so much that I could hear its breathing, but more that I could feel the air pressure in the room falling and rising in the same way that Moxie’s rib cage would expand and contract when she slept. The coldness of the room and the strangeness of the odd presence around me made the exposed bare skin on my arms, resting atop my comforter, prickle with goosebumps.

  I am going crazy, I thought. All of this talk about evil spirits and predicting death is making me insane.

  Then, horrifyingly, over my bed on the shelf where I arranged the music boxes I had accumulated as a little girl, I began to hear music. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see, but knew without even looking that the ceramic Minnie Mouse my father had bought for me at Disney World was slowly spinning in circles as it cranked out its mechanical tune of, “It’s a Small World After All.” Next to it, a porcelain ballerina spun in circles on its platform to “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies,” from the Nutcracker. And on the end, a wooden jewelry box with a silver star in its lid must have opened itself to begin chiming out its version of “My Heart Will Go On.” The medley of songs that I used to adore as a little girl all played together in a jumble without my having activated any of the statuettes. The eeriness of the music and spontaneous motion terrified me to the extent that I felt nauseous. I was too scared to even make a noise.