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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  My mother studied me across the breakfast table with one eyebrow raised. “You and Trey have been spending a lot of time together recently. Is there anything going on that I should know about?”

  I rolled my eyes. How typical of her to think that my need to go to the mall was somehow related to teen sex. For just a moment I felt a little guilty that Trey had been spending every night in my room, but then reminded myself that there was really nothing at all romantic about clinging to each other in fear until dawn, startling awake at every single chime of the clock in the living room and unexpected creak in the floorboards anywhere in the house. It was almost humorous how little fooling around we were doing. We had certainly learned our lesson the night before and wouldn’t be attempting to grope each other again beneath the blankets anytime soon. “Mom, there is nothing going on between me and Trey that you need to know about. I promise, okay? It’s just that I’ve had my license since August and eventually I would like to be able to run errands by myself.”

  ‘Well, then maybe it’s time for us to talk about you finding a part-time job,” my mom countered. “Car insurance for a teenager can be a couple hundred bucks every few months. I highly doubt your dad is going to increase his child support payment to pay for that. In fact, I’m sure he’d be willing to send you a bike helmet if you would agree to ride your bike to school.”

  I sighed and cleared my empty cereal bowl from the table. Finding a part-time job just to drive to the mall to buy a Ouija board was not a solution I could consider on a Thursday morning, the day before Homecoming, mere hours after a presumably evil spirit had rattled my bed frame. I was simply going to have to find another way to get myself to Green Bay, which was not going to be a simple feat considering there was no public transportation in our area of Wisconsin that would transport me further than Ortonville.

  “Not gonna happen,” I informed Trey on the sidewalk ten minutes later as we walked to school.

  “She won’t let you borrow the car?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder back at our house.

  “I’m not covered on her auto insurance,” I said. “I’m going to have to ask Mischa or Amanda to drive me.”

  Trey twisted his mouth a little, and then said, “Or, we could borrow my mom’s car after school, and say I’m driving.”

  All day long at school, my stomach tied itself in knots as I imagined having to drive alone to Green Bay. I wasn’t even sure I knew the way entirely from memory; when someone else was driving, I knew where to turn, but it might be different when I was the one behind the wheel. I didn’t know if Trey’s mom’s car had a reliable GPS, or if I’d have to keep a map open and handy in the front passenger seat just in case I flubbed the directions.

  At lunch time, I was extremely surprised to get a text message from Evan Richmond. Have fun tomorrow night, the message read. I felt a little strange that I had never followed up with Evan after the cancellation of the first dance to tell him I’d be attending the rescheduled event with another boy, but then again, until I had run into him at the ice cream parlor, I’d had no idea he was staying in Willow for the rest of the semester. I felt a twinge of regret that I had shrugged off his interest so casually. He was Olivia’s brother, after all. He had to be going through an awful time at home as his parents grieved. I blocked out the cafeteria chatter and the smell of the pepperoni pizza special of the day, and lost myself in the memory of my brief encounter with Evan on the staircase in the Richmonds’ house, the night of Olivia’s party. Guilt crept up on me; I already felt so attached to Trey that it felt sinister to wonder what might have been, even just as circumstances had been three weeks ago.

  “So, do you think that would be okay?” I was pulled out of my daydream abruptly back into real-time in the cafeteria by Hannah, who was looking at me expectantly for a response. Tracy, across the table from us, sucked diet soda through a straw, her cheeks hollow, as she, too, waited for my reply.

  “I’m sorry, that what would be okay?” I asked.

  “That I’d go stag to Homecoming,” Hannah said, clearly repeating something she had just explained in detail when I wasn’t listening. “Mark can’t come with me to the dance this Friday. St. Patrick’s has an away game that night and he’d never make it to Ortonville in time.”

  It seemed very much like Hannah was telling me all of this more for my information than because she was seeking any validation. Without either of us saying a word to this effect, I already knew the tables had been turned on popularity at Weeping Willow High School. Hannah was junior Class President; she could go to Homecoming alone, naked, and screaming The Star-Spangled Banner at the top of her lungs, and no one would dare to say a negative thing about her. I was no longer teetering on the edge of popularity, one foot in and one foot out, as I had been the night of Olivia’s party, either. I had my own Student Government office, a real (if maybe still a little secret) boyfriend, and secret ties to Mischa and Candace, who were still admired by freshmen and sophomore girls even though they were fading into the background of the junior class.

  I swirled my three-bean salad around on my cafeteria tray. “Oh, I mean, of course. Why would that be a problem? You’re Class President. You have to go, and at this point, I don’t know which guys in our school would even be, you know…”

  I trailed off, not wanting to complete the sentence in my head, which went a little something like, crazy enough to date you. But she and Tracy both looked up at me quizzically, urging me to finish. “Popular enough to go out with you,” I said, covering my own hide. My response seemed to meet with approval from Hannah and Tracy.

  “It’s true,” Tracy agreed, stabbing at macaroni and cheese with her plastic white fork. “I mean, the hot senior guys are taken, and it’s slim pickings among the juniors.”

  For a second, I thought I saw Hannah catch Pete’s eye across the cafeteria. He looked away immediately, and I wondered if I had seen anything at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  That day after school, Trey’s mother gave him the keys to her gray Civic. She looked reluctant to trust him, but pleased that he was volunteering to get back behind the wheel. I buckled into the passenger seat as he fired up the engine, kind of hoping that he’d miraculously overcome his fear of driving and get us all the way to Green Bay. But instead, he drove around the block and then pulled over. He took a deep breath as the engine idled, and wiped sweat from his brow.

  “Enough?” I asked gently, seeing how hard it was for him to steer the car.

  Without saying a word, he unbuckled his belt and threw it off of himself. He jerked the parking brake and climbed out of the driver’s side door. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for a first in my own life: driving in a car all alone. I stepped out of the car, prepared to walk around its back to take my seat behind the wheel. Surprising me, Trey sat down again in the passenger seat, and suggested, “Maybe you could just drop me at the Starbucks in Silver Springs, and pick me up on your way back from the mall.”

  Without him saying so, I inferred that he really did not want to be in the mall parking lot again so soon after finding Olivia there on the night she died. I agreed, and ran through my checklist of tasks before pulling away from the curb. Engine on? Check. I peeked in my rearview mirror and my side mirror, and then eased onto the gas pedal. Oddly, the car didn’t move.

  “You might want to release the parking brake,” Trey gently reminded me.

  It had been over two months since Dad had taken me for my license in Florida, and another three months before that since I’d driven regularly when I was practicing during my sophomore year Driver’s Ed class. I was shamefully out of practice at driving, and feeling very unqualified to transport myself all the way to Green Bay and back in a car that was a lot fancier than any I’d ever driven before. But Trey and I had agreed: we needed that Ouija board. It was our best shot at contacting Jennie or any other spirit who might be cooperating with Hannah. There was simply no other way we were going to obtain one. Buying one online would have required me n
ot only to ask my mom for permission to use her credit card, but also to deal with her insatiable curiosity when the box arrived at the house. I was going to have to drive to Green Bay alone, whether I liked it or not.

  I abandoned Trey at the Starbucks as he had requested, and pulled out of the parking lot, back onto the rural highway. Fortunately there was a lull in the slow, dreary rain that had fallen all day, but even that did little to ease my fears about the wet leaves everywhere on the flat stretch of highway ahead as I drove, other than relieve me of the need to locate the windshield wiper controls on the dashboard of Mrs. Emory’s car. The drive to Green Bay was a boring, unremarkable journey punctuated by few things more exciting than barns painted dreary colors, and out-of-date billboards marketing morning radio shows and local car dealerships. I was thankful that at least it was still light out, but knew that the drive back to Willow would be infinitely more difficult for me in the dark no matter how quickly I shopped. Nervously, I tinkered with the car’s satellite radio, and succeeded in filling the car’s interior with Mrs. Emory’s preferred honky-tonk country western music. I was too anxious about keeping my eyes on the road to bother trying to find a more appealing station.

  Parking was tricky, and to avoid a collision due to my sloppy turning, I parked further away from the mall’s entrance than I probably needed to, in a space fairly far from other cars. Once I stepped outside Mrs. Emory’s car and clicked the doors locked with the automated key chain, I breathed a sigh of relief, and then looked around. I was standing at the very place where Olivia must have realized that Hannah’s prediction was coming true. For a minute, I stood in the lot hugging my purse to my chest, wondering why in the world Olivia hadn’t just waited out the storm at the mall. She must have sensed when her car wouldn’t start that she was in danger.

  Inside the mall, I checked the illuminated interior map because I couldn’t remember where the toy store was located, and entered the store walking briskly, on a mission. I walked down the board game aisle feeling like a total creep, trying to ignore the mothers shopping with young children for games like Connect Four and Chutes & Ladders. My eyes reviewed the stacked board games for sale on the shelves, and I began to wonder if I had just forced myself to drive all the way to Green Bay in vain, when I should have been at home getting ready for the dance the next day. But then, on the top shelf, at the bottom of a stack of boxes of Stratego, I saw a cream-colored box with the word OUIJA printed in brown script along its side. It appeared to be the only one in stock.

  “That’ll be twenty-three dollars and fifty-four cents,” the teenage girl behind the cash register told me, snapping her gum and smirking.

  I hated that girl immediately for her knowing smirk, and I fumbled around in my wallet to hand her exact change. It was annoying that she would dare to assume why I was buying such a silly toy. I was eager for her to just put the box into an opaque white plastic bag and let me be on my way as mothers with quarreling children were lining up behind me, impatiently waiting to pay for their Barbies and Tonka trucks.

  “Here you go,” I said quickly, handing her cash and a handful of coins.

  “We sell a lot of those this time of year,” she informed me, handing over my receipt.

  Of course— Halloween! Buying a Ouija board in early October wasn’t so odd, after all. I rushed back to the parking lot with my purchase under one arm, and tossed it in the back seat before I strapped myself in with the seat belt. In the split second after I inserted the key into the car to start its engine, I became highly freaked out that the sun was setting and I had an occult communication tool for talking with the dead in the car with me.

  Get it together, McKenna. There’s no other way to get home but to drive there.

  I took my time switching music channels until I found a station playing pop music that I knew by heart, and carefully maneuvered my way out of the parking lot. I fumbled with the headlights, putting on the high beams even though it wasn’t completely dark yet, and turned them back down to low beams after someone angrily honked at me out on the highway. All the way back to Silver Springs, I drove slowly, terrified of missing a turn or street light and getting lost in the woods, feeling the weight of Mrs. Emory’s car anchoring me to the road. As I pulled into the lot at Starbucks, Trey waved at me through the window holding a large white paper cup, and met me in the lot so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through the ordeal of trying to park in a tightly jammed space.

  “You got it,” he said, sounding relieving upon seeing the bag in the back seat.

  “I got it,” I confirmed.

  He reached into the back seat and pulled the bagged game into his lap to examine it. “So, where should we test this thing out?”

  “Hey, could you put that thing away? It’s freaking me out,” I said, feeling a surge of relief pass through me as we drove past the familiar sign along the highway which read:

  WILLOW

  POPULATION 4,218

  In my head, I subtracted one from that number of residents.

  “Seriously, McKenna. Now that we have it, where should we see if it works? We can’t try it in your room. If by some incredible long shot, this piece of junk, manufactured by…” he examined the box again, reading the logo on the box, “Lomax and Company, is actually able to channel communication from paranormal spirits, and those spirits happen to be loud, we’d better not be under your mom’s roof.”

  “Where, then? Your basement?” I asked, braking at a traffic light. There was a little more traffic now that we were within town boundaries.

  “Possibly,” Trey considered the option. “Although getting you down there might be tricky unless you come over after dinner and we say we’re going to do homework.”

  I eased on the gas again as the light turned green, and we drove without talking until I turned left onto Carroll Road, the block before ours. It was already after six o’clock, and it would be close to eight by the time I finished dinner at home and helped to load the dishwasher. “Okay. Homework at your place it is. But can you do me a favor? Take this thing inside with you. If my mom finds it, the questions will never end.” I pulled over to the curb so that we could switch seats to prevent Trey’s mom from suspecting that I had been the one driving all the way to Green Bay and back.

  Throughout dinner, Mom attacked me with questions about whether or not I had tried on my dress for Homecoming recently to make sure it still fit, which earrings I’d be wearing, if Trey would be driving me to the dance, and what time I expected to be home. It was kind of baffling that she was putting so much more consideration into my attendance at the Homecoming dance than I was; I didn’t have the right answer to any of her questions because Trey and I hadn’t really made an action plan for getting to the dance yet.

  After I cleared my place, rinsed dishes, loaded the dishwasher and set it to run, I threw my backpack over one shoulder without even peeking inside of it to see which books I’d carried home. At the front door of our house, I called over my shoulder, “I’m going over to Trey’s to do homework!”

  The Emorys’ basement was nothing like the one at the Richmonds’ house. It was one giant unfinished construction project, with wiring peeking through drywall, and a toilet balanced in a corner on the cement floor that had been intended for a bathroom renovation that Mr. Emory had never completed. A bare light bulb hung from a wire that dangled from the ceiling, and a stained plaid couch had been pressed up against the wall near the stairs. Mildewing board games were stacked on a utility shelf. The entire basement smelled like decay and the air was damp against my face. I suspected there were way more spiders down there than I wanted to know about.

  Trey and I plunked ourselves down on an old rag rug with our legs outstretched, our backs pressed against the plaid couch. He opened the game board between us. The sight of it made me shiver. The word Yes was printed in its upper left corner, and No was printed in its upper right corner. The letters of the alphabet were printed in two orderly arcs, and numbers were assembled below them. Bene
ath the numbers, the word goodbye was printed in capital letters.

  Trey placed the metal planchette on which we would rest our fingers in the center of the board over the word Ouija, which appeared in between the Yes and No in opposite corners. “Kind of cheaply made, right?” he asked me shyly. “This thing might only be capable of contacting extremely tacky spirits.”

  “Ha ha,” I replied dryly.

  We could hear his parents watching television in the living room upstairs, but it seemed as if they were in another dimension. I couldn’t say why, but that Ouija board on the floor terrified me. I was afraid to place my fingertip on the metal guide; a sense of doom was washing over me, as if we were about to throw open a gate to allow terrible things from another world into our neighborhood. “I don’t know about this,” I admitted quietly. “It seemed like a good idea yesterday, but what happens if we contact something and we don’t know how to control it?”

  Trey leaned over and planted a soft kiss on my cheek. “The book says that this is our world, and we have more power than they do here. Truly evil spirits might resort to crazy tactics to try to scare us, but we have to remember that we belong here, and they don’t. James W. Listerman wrote that we have to be very authoritative when we’re communicating with them. Tell them who’s boss.”