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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  I ate my spaghetti in silence, fuming about having to talk to my dad later that night (especially since he hadn’t bothered returning my call from the previous week), about my mom bringing a puppy into the house when she was completely ignorant about what kind of danger she was exposing it to, and Hannah’s power play. Either Hannah was onto my investigation of her and this was her first counter attack on me, or she had some strange, unfounded genuine concern about my dietary habits. Whatever the case, I had certainly underestimated her sneakiness. I was going to have to be far more strategic than I had anticipated, and I had reason to believe that I was significantly outmatched. Despite not being especially hungry, I finished every last bit of spaghetti on my plate without saying a word to prove to my mother that I wasn’t avoiding food, and called my father from my bedroom on my cell phone.

  “Your mother tells me you have a boyfriend,” my father greeted me when he answered the phone, without even saying, “hello.”

  “She exaggerates,” I informed him. “I’m just going to the Homecoming dance with Trey Emory from next door. Remember him?”

  My father claimed to remember, but he was probably lying. I didn’t think he made much of an effort to remember the life in Willow he left behind.

  “In all seriousness, McKenna, your mom called me today to tell me you’ve been having a rocky junior year so far. It sounds like you’ve been going through some pretty heavy stuff.”

  I hesitated before replying. My dad was a pretty knowledgeable guy, so there was a strong likelihood that he might have been able to provide some valuable insight about the game we’d played at Olivia’s party, and the possibility of another explanation for Hannah’s seemingly paranormal abilities. “Actually, do you remember when you taught me about group hypnosis, Dad? Like about how the military makes soldiers chant to get them psyched up for combat?”

  My father remembered.

  “Well, what about in cases when the chanting makes something happen?” I suggested. “Like, do you know, that game, ‘Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?’ When girls tell a story about one girl dying, and everyone else lifts her up with their fingertips?”

  “McKenna, do you mean to tell me that instead of underage drinking and experimenting with drugs, you and your friends have been playing silly horror games?” my father asked with a heartfelt laugh.

  “Dad! This is not funny. One of my friends is dead! Mom told you that, right?”

  The line went silent as my father considered my outburst. “You’re right, McKenna. I am truly sorry for being insensitive; that’s a terrible loss for someone your age to suffer. Games like the one you mentioned can be explained a variety of ways. The simplest explanation is that a young woman your age—when her weight is evenly distributed and lifted from several points—may not seem so heavy. That effect combined with the distraction of chanting, or even the possible light hypnosis of the game’s participants from the chanting, can make the body seem weightless. You have to let go of the idea that some kind of… supernatural power had anything to do with your friend’s death. I don’t know how to put it more plainly: there’s no such thing as ghosts. Perhaps it was a coincidence. People die in car crashes all the time. If you’re having difficulty with grief, I’d be more than happy to arrange to have you talk with someone at the University.”

  All of my dad’s former colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Sheboygan, were the kind of psychiatrists who treated the criminally insane and researched new medications to control schizophrenia.

  “No thanks, Dad,” I declined. But then I had an idea. If group hypnosis was what my dad claimed was responsible for our belief that we had levitated each other, then maybe hypnosis was responsible for all of the weird stuff I was still experiencing. Maybe I was still hypnotized! Maybe we all were, and that was why Candace had gone so far off the deep end. Thoughts assembled in my head with the rapidity of machine gunfire: there was a possibility that if Trey and I were wrong about Hannah, this might be an alternate explanation. “But actually, my friend Candace is having a very hard time dealing with Olivia’s death. She might need to talk to someone.”

  My father was thrilled to offer up the services of his former colleagues. He told me he would email me the names and contact information of psychiatrists he recommended.

  “One more thing, Dad. When you were growing up, did you know of any families in Willow named Simmons?”

  He paused and actually thought about my question for a minute. “Give me a moment here, McKenna. You’re asking me about ancient history. Simmons… Simmons. I can’t recall having any friends or classmates named Simmons. But I’m pretty sure there was a real well-to-do family in Weeping Willow back then by that name. They had something to do with construction. When the library expanded, the new wing was named after them.”

  Owning a construction company certainly seemed like a possible way for Hannah’s grandparents to have amassed enough wealth to afford that big house out in the woods. At least it was something for me to go on. If Dad was right about the library, I could start my research around the building’s expansion.

  That night, wrapped in Trey’s arms, I shared with him my plan to use Candace as my guinea pig. If I could convince her to visit the psychiatrist and have removed whatever hypnotic spell she might have been under, I could determine if it improved her overall state of mind. And if it worked for her, then I would have good reason to believe that it would work for me.

  “And if it doesn’t help Candace, then you’ll believe this is real and not in your head?” Trey asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe we’re all still under some spell. If we are, then I’m probably just perceiving every little thing that’s happening as part of this.”

  Trey pushed my hair back from my face and said carefully, “What about the thing in this room? I wasn’t hypnotized, and I believe that was real.”

  I knew what he was saying was true, and it somewhat disproved my theory, or maybe my hope, that everything that had been happening was a trick of the mind. Hannah’s mom calling my mom, messages from Jennie on a long-lost toy in the garage? Things were getting too serious for my brain to handle. I needed a reason to believe that maybe there was a plausible explanation for everything. “I know, Trey. But it’s been over two weeks. We jumped so quickly to the conclusion that ghosts and evil spirits were responsible that maybe we just… should have taken a moment to be rational.”

  Trey leaned in and gave me a moist kiss on the lips. “Rational,” he whispered. “If you’re ready to be rational, and stop believing in ghosts, then I might say—rationally, of course—since I’ve been a little in love with you since around the seventh grade, and we’ve been sharing a bed for the last two weeks, that it might be a rational next step for us to do more than cuddle.”

  His warm palm slid beneath my t-shirt and pressed against my stomach, traveling upward. I could feel his breath, hot and moist, on my neck. My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t breathe in air fast enough. I buried my hands in the dark mop of hair on his head and pulled his face closer to mine. I leaned back and yearned to feel the weight of his body on mine. His lips were pressed against mine again, his tongue delving deeply into my mouth and I thought to myself as my heart sped recklessly, this is normal. This is—

  In unison, we both became aware at the same time that the breathing sensation in the room was back. “Just kidding,” Trey muttered. He jumped off of me in a fraction of a second.

  I clutched my comforter tightly, pulling it up closer beneath my chin. We both sat upright, looking around the room for some kind of evidence of the disturbance that we both felt. Across the room, on the doorknob to my closet, my attention was caught by my student ID, which I kept on a lanyard and often hung there at night. It was moving, ever so slowly, around the door knob. As if a hand I couldn’t see was revolving it around the knob in a jerky, unsteady circle.

  “Trey, do you see that?” I whispered, surprised to see my breath trail through the cold air in my bedroom as white steam
.

  “Yeah,” he said faintly. “I see it.”

  The cast iron frame of my bed began rattling ever so slightly, and what began as a barely noticeable vibration rapidly grew stronger. I could see the movement of the footboard, and hear the frame’s joints making metallic clinking noises.

  In, out.

  “Holy…” Trey murmured, inching closer to me, watching the footboard at the other end of my bed move. I didn’t dare turn to look, but I could sense the headboard behind my pillow moving, too. The clanging was growing more violent. The footboard was pulling away from the rest of the bed, then snapping forward, its left side rocking up and down at a different pace than its right side. I began to seriously wonder if the screws holding my bed frame together might become loose enough from so much motion that the whole frame might fall apart, letting my box springs and mattress fall to the floor.

  “Is it trying to throw us off the bed?” I asked Trey, terrified.

  “I think so. Maybe if we jump off, it’ll stop.”

  My mind immediately went to the dark, scary gap between the floor and the bottom of the bed. One of my greatest childhood fears was that there might be a monster lurking down there, patiently waiting to grab my ankles with cold, wrinkled hands the moment my feet graced the ground. Jumping off the bed seemed to me as terrifying as staying on the bed. But the entire bed was beginning to rock and shake, and it was making so much noise that my mother simply had to hear it.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “On the count of three… Three, two, one.”

  Trey threw back the comforter and we both hopped off the mattress and onto the carpeting. Before we even landed on the ground, the bed frame stopped vibrating, and the clammy, sickly feeling that washed over me whenever the spirit was in my room had vanished. Immediately, I felt like a complete idiot, standing in my bedroom in the dark, out of breath from fear, having sweat a damp pool into the back of my t-shirt purely from terror. Trey and I stared at each other from opposite sides of the bed, shaking our heads, trying to recover from the shock of the experience. It was by far the spirit’s most aggressive episode, and I could only assume that it had not taken kindly to our make-out session.

  “Whatever that thing is, it didn’t seem to appreciate us fooling around,” I said in a very quiet voice.

  “Yeah, not a romance fan. Point taken,” Trey said.

  Suddenly I heard the door to my mom’s room open further down the hall. “McKenna? What’s going on in there?”

  My eyes shot wide open in panic. “Hide!” I mouthed at Trey, who looked around wildly. There would be absolutely no logical excuse I could give her for his presence in my bedroom at nearly three in the morning, especially not when he was barefoot, wearing nothing but sweatpants. Instinctively, he dodged toward the window, and I shook my head and hands wildly.

  “Don’t! It’ll be too loud,” I insisted. I had closed the window after he’d climbed through, and the frame always squeaked when it was raised. I pointed to under the bed. “There!”

  He looked at me with pleading eyes for a moment, surely imagining the same scary possibilities in those few inches of darkness that I had just considered before leaping off the bed. But after a brief hesitation, he got down on his knees and wiggled beneath the bed on his stomach. My mom knocked on my door firmly before jiggling the locked door knob, and said, “McKenna, open this door. What on earth are you doing in there?”

  Thinking fast but not necessarily coherently, I grabbed my ear buds off my desk and stuck them in my ears. With my iPod in one hand, I opened the door to my room, instantly feeling guilty when I saw my mom standing in the hallway with her robe wrapped tightly around her. “Hi,” I said foolishly.

  “Do you want to tell me what all that racket was about just now?” she asked, sounding cross. I could hear the puppy down the hall stirring and whimpering in her crate.

  “What racket?” I bluffed, blinking my eyes innocently.

  My mother peered into my room suspiciously, reached in through my doorway and flipped on the light. “The clanging and knocking around I just heard in here. It sounded like you were jumping on your bed.” I tried very hard not to think about Trey under my bed, and hoped he was holding his breath, curled into as tiny a form as possible so that my mom wouldn’t discover him in my room. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I should be more afraid of my mom’s wrath—if she were to find out that Trey had been sneaking in through my window every night—than of the evil spirit occasionally paying me a visit.

  “Oh, sorry,” I adlibbed, taking my ear buds out of my ears. “I was listening to music because I couldn’t sleep. I guess I was dancing a little more than I realized.”

  My mother looked at me with a very dubious expression. “Get some sleep,” she told me sternly, “and don’t lock your door.”

  I sighed loudly as she walked back down the hall to her own room, and although I closed my door, I stood behind it, listening with the light on, before even addressing Trey again. As I suspected, I heard my mom return down the hall, her bare feet padding on the hard wood floor, moments later. Maude scampered behind her on their way to the kitchen.

  “What’s happening?” Trey whispered from beneath the bed.

  “She’s letting the puppy outside,” I whispered back, hearing the sliding door in the kitchen open, and the puppy’s claws scratching across the deck as she scurried over it on her way to the grass to relieve herself. I waited until I heard my mom reenter her room with Maude and settle in for the rest of the night before I turned off my light. Trey rolled out from under the bed and we both looked at my pile of blankets, confused.

  “Do you think if we both get back into bed, it’ll come back?” Trey asked.

  I shrugged. My honest suspicion was that it would. If I gave my mom reason to walk back down the hall and knock on my door again, there was no way Trey would go unnoticed. My room simply wasn’t that big, and even the closet wasn’t too great of a hiding spot. “Maybe I should go,” Trey said, looking at my empty bed and scratching his head.

  “No!” I insisted, really not wanting to be left alone in the room.

  We ended up stacking my pillows on my bed to look like my body, and piling blankets on top of them. The two of us lay down on my floor on the far side of my bed where my mother wouldn’t automatically notice us if she were to open the door, and kept a safe distance of a few inches in between our bodies, not wanting to take any chances again. For safe measure, I set the alarm clock feature on my mobile phone to wake me up far in advance of when my mom would normally check on me to make sure I was getting ready for school.

  “You realize that we are sleeping on the floor,” Trey told me before I nodded off. “This is officially completely insane.”

  It was undoubtedly insane. But even still, there was a part of me that was hopeful that the shaking of the bed could be explained by some logical, natural phenomenon. There were two things I was certain I had to do in order to move my investigation forward in both directions: explicable and inexplicable. First, I would find a way to get Candace to agree to a psychiatric appointment in Sheboygan. And second, Trey and I would attempt to make contact with the spirit directly, if that was really what was disrupting our lives so forcefully, on our own.

  Hank’s Hobbies and Crafts was the only toy store within town limits, and it was as unlikely to keep a Ouija board in stock as the fertilizer and feed store. The only toy store for miles that might carry an item such as a Ouija board was the big store at the mall in Green Bay. I couldn't ask Trey to drive there with me, knowing that the last time he was there, in that parking lot, was the day he'd offered Olivia a ride home with him. Obtaining the Ouija board was going to be my solo mission, and I hated the thought of it. My hope was that my mother would let me borrow the car on Thursday when she wouldn't be making the drive to Sheboygan, but I had, of course, not considered the impracticality of my request. Since earning my license I had never yet driven the car alone, and Mom had never taken out an auto i
nsurance policy for me. I had been covered on her policy while I was a student driver, but now that I had my own license tucked away in my wallet, I no longer had coverage.

  “If you can wait until Saturday, I’ll give you a ride,” Mom offered cheerfully at the breakfast table on Thursday morning. “We could have lunch at that new Italian place where they have the great breadsticks.”

  I bit my lower lip, failing in my request to borrow the car under the guise of needing to buy more things for the rescheduled dance. “Homecoming is tomorrow, Mom. Going to the mall on Saturday does me no good.”

  “Then I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll go tonight,” she said, taking a sip of her tea.

  “No, that’s okay,” I quickly refused, not wanting for her to witness my strange purchase. There was no doubt in my mind that my mom would be alarmed if she knew I was buying weird occult toys.