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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  “Like…” I drifted off, suspecting that approaching this territory was probably a bad idea. “Just unexplained occurrences, uneasy feelings. General strangeness.”

  Mischa took her eyes off the road to shoot me an are-you-kidding-me look. “What are you freakin’ talking about, McKenna? Are you losing your marbles, too? I’m not sure if I can handle both of my best friends being whackos.”

  “I’m not, I’m not,” I insisted, embarrassed by how flattered I was that Mischa acknowledged me as one of her best friends. “Just… there’s this word that keeps popping up in my life and I can’t explain it. Does nohi mean anything to you?”

  “It sounds Japanese,” Mischa shrugged. “Like, kodomo no hi is Children’s Day in Japan.”

  It was hard to hide my dismay. That didn’t seem like much of a clue, and it didn’t sound like Mischa had been observing any strange things like I’d been. While Mischa could surprise me the wide variety of trivia she stored in her head, there was no chance Olivia had learned how to say anything in Japanese before her death. Acquisition of knowledge had not exactly been one of Olivia’s interests.

  “Really?” I asked. “So, as far as you know, that word doesn’t have anything to do with Olivia at all?”

  We had stopped at a red light before an intersection, and Mischa stared me down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, McKenna. Are you trying to tell me that you think you’re getting messages from Olivia… from the other side?”

  I took a deep breath. “Before Candace went completely off her rocker, did she tell you that it freaked her out that Hannah knew about her half-brothers, even though Candace couldn’t remember ever mentioning them to her before? I told you guys what Hannah said to me on the track before Olivia died, that spirits tell her things. So, I know it’s far-fetched, but maybe Olivia is a spirit now, and she’s trying to tell us things. There’s been some weird stuff happening at my house, and it’s not just me, Trey’s seen it, too. I think Olivia is trying to warn us. I think… more bad stuff is going to happen.”

  The light changed from red to green, but Mischa hesitated before accelerating. “You are seriously, seriously bugging me out.”

  We drove a few more blocks before Mischa asked, “What kind of bad stuff do you think is going to happen? Are more of us going to die, like Olivia?”

  I stared out my window at my little town as we passed through, not wanting to say the words on the tip of my tongue. There was the florist, the feed shop, the pizza place that reliably delivered through snowy winters (Federico’s was its rival pizza restaurant across town that only offered take-out during winter months), and as we passed the public elementary school, I said, “Mischa, we have to stop at the library. I need to see something.”

  Without asking me any questions, Mischa turned right into the parking lot of our small brick public library, just a little further down the road from the elementary school. I’d been going there with my mom my whole life, and had never before paid much attention to the back wing of the library, which rose to two stories and featured enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. Now that I was taking a closer look, that wing of the library, which had been added onto the original structure a decade before I was born, dwarfed the original structure and had been designed in a far more modern style. It was obviously an addition to the original building, and very little effort had been put into making it look like a natural extension.

  “I don’t get it. What are we looking for?”

  I pointed to the wing of the library and turned to Mischa. “Guess whose grandfather paid for that wing of the library? I have reason to believe it might be named after him, too.”

  Mischa squinted her eyes at me. “Get out.”

  Inside, we were both stupefied to see the phrase, “This wing of the library was made possible by a gift from the Harold J. Simmons family” along with the year 1984 on a copper plaque fixed to the wall near the entrance to the wing on the first floor. I ran my fingertips over the name of Hannah’s grandfather slowly. This was the wing of the library that contained the children’s section, and upstairs on the second floor, non-fiction books about art, history, and drama were arranged. Mischa and I wandered into the wing dreamily, even though we had walked those rows of books hundreds of times during our lifetimes. We had sat in the reading lounge of this wing as small children, mouthing out the sounds of new words as we learned to read, completely oblivious to the power that Hannah’s family already had over our lives.

  “Wow, Hannah’s family must be crazy rich,” Mischa commented, looking upward at the second floor of the library, which overlooked the reading section of the children’s area. “I never really thought about the library too much, but this could not have been cheap to build.”

  We sat down at the row of computers in the media lounge and searched for Hannah’s grandfather’s name. The results were so abundant that we couldn’t possibly read through all of them. He had owned an architecture and construction firm, just like my father had remembered, and there seemed to be hundreds of search results about contracts for his firm and buildings they had constructed from the Canadian border all the way down to Chicago.

  “Ooh! What about that one!” Mischa pointed to a headline on the screen that read, Will Dispute Over Simmons Estate Settled.

  I clicked on the link and Mischa drummed her long fingernails on the table where we sat, earning herself an irritated glance from the man sitting at the computer next to ours, while we waited for the old news article to load on our screen. Our eyes devoured the story as a picture and paragraphs of text loaded. It seemed to be the case that when Hannah’s grandfather died, fourteen years before her grandmother died, his will was contested by his former business partner claiming that he had been jilted out of his half of the fortune. Harold Simmons hadn’t left Arthur Fitzpatrick anything, not a dime, and he was adamant the will Mr. Simmons had left behind was a forgery, updated and signed just a few weeks before his unexpected death. Harold Simmons’ widow, Hannah’s grandmother, claimed that all of the initial capital for the construction business had been fronted by Harold, and that all profits were contractually his own based on the agreement that the men had made when they began the company. She was insistent that Arthur Fitzpatrick was owed nothing more the handsome salary he had been paid during the time when he’d worked with Mr. Simmons.

  “Scandal,” Mischa whispered.

  The battle raged on in court for three years until finally a judge ruled in favor of Mr. Fitzpatrick, awarding him a sliver of the land, a fraction of the business profits and a contract to complete one of their larger unfinished jobs with his newly formed company. The photo that accompanied the story was of Hannah’s grandfather, looking much more elderly and stern than the man I remembered seeing in the painting in Hannah’s parlor. I was a little peeved by that; I wanted to see a picture of the spiteful grandmother. The story ended with quotes from Mr. Fitzpatrick as well as Hannah’s grandmother, Ann Simmons.

  “Finally, the court has delivered a fair ruling. I am eager to put this matter behind me, and look forward to a bright future for Fitzpatrick & Sons Construction,” stated Mr. Fitzpatrick outside the Shawano County courthouse.

  “Mr. Fitzpatrick may have been awarded what he wanted, but I will not rest until my family’s property has been restored to its rightful owner,” Mrs. Ann Simmons retorted.

  I sat back in my chair, a little winded. So, Hannah’s grandmother, who had left her grand estate to Hannah’s father, had died with a grudge. None of these facts at face value explained any of what Olivia had been trying to communicate to me, but I finally felt at least like I was getting somewhere. I texted the link of the article to Trey, and Mischa and I continued searching for more information. Arthur Fitzpatrick developed the land that he won in the dispute in less than a year after the court’s ruling. It was turned into a condominium community, sold off lot by lot. Mr. Fitzpatrick died of natural causes five years before Hannah’s grandmother did the same. We finished reading his obituary in the
Ortonville Courier and both shook our heads. He had been survived by a wife, several children, and grandchildren, but by the time of his death had relocated to California.

  “This might not even have anything to do with the grandmother,” I announced, not wanting us to get our hopes up that we were onto something big. “Hannah could just be evil, plain and simple.”

  Mischa looked unconvinced. “The grandmother was out for vengeance, and we don’t know if she ever got it. And now Hannah lives in her house. That’s something. That’s more than we knew an hour ago.”

  We discussed researching the possibility of any kind of historical connection between the Simmons, Richmond, and Portnoy families, or any connection between Arthur Fitzgerald and any of my friends’ families, but after a few quick web searches turned up sparse results, Mischa sighed. “My mom’s parents came here from Russia after World War II. My dad grew up in Minnesota and moved here when they got married. I really don’t think there was ever any connection between the Simmons’ and my family. I mean, if the Simmons’ had anything to do with any family in town it would be Tracy Hartford’s. Her grandfather was a district judge for like, a billion years. If we have to read through all these property deeds and stuff, I’m going to die of boredom. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.”

  Mischa had far too short of an attention span to ever qualify as a legitimate detective. We shut down our library research and drove to her house to try to determine our next move. I texted Hannah back with a lie, saying that I was visiting my grandparents, and wouldn’t be able to join her and Tracy for a movie until Sunday. I just wanted one afternoon to myself, one afternoon to gossip about the Homecoming dance and be a normal junior in high school.

  When we arrived at the Portnoys’ house, Amanda summoned us up to her room, calling out to us as soon as she heard the garage door open into the kitchen. “Mischa! Get up here! Have you seen this?”

  We scrambled up the stairs to Amanda’s room on the second floor, which was practically wallpapered with pictures of rock bands torn out of magazines. She sat at her desk with her back to the door, completely engrossed on something on her laptop computer.

  As we entered the room, we saw that she was looking at highly unflattering pictures of Candace attacking Hannah at the dance the night before, shared with her on her Facebook page. “God, look at that. Candace looks like a maniac.” Candace’s hair was a blur, her face was flushed with rage, and her expression could only be described as demonic. “Who posted those photos?” Mischa asked defensively.

  “A bunch of idiots from the football team. I already asked Brian to have them un-tag Candace. But God, like, what’s wrong with her?” Amanda clucked her tongue. While the pictures were horrific, the comments were worse. They were mean-spirited, brutal, and many had been posted by girls and boys alike who Candace had probably considered to be her friends. “I feel so bad for Candace. I know you guys like her, but her high school life is totally over.”

  Mischa squinted at the computer screen and then motioned for me to follow her down the hall to her own room. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. What if we try to find kids from Hannah’s old school and ask them about her?” Mischa suggested, her eyes sparkling.

  The idea made me feel conflicted. It seemed awfully sneaky to email kids for dirt on Hannah without her knowing about it. Yet at the same time, my heart raced because we hadn’t thought of trying it sooner, and it seemed like a fairly straightforward way of finding out if anyone had thought Hannah had something to do with the four suicides that had occurred the year before. Mischa wasted no time in searching for memorial pages for the two deceased kids whose names we knew. The parents of the girl who had been captain of the pom squad at Lake Forest High School had set up a private group called Remembering Rebecca. We were unable to see any of the posts, but could browse the members of the group, and I asked Mischa to stop scrolling when the photo of a guy our age whose name was given as Eric appeared on screen.

  “Hold it right there,” I commanded. “That guy. Hannah told me that she dated a guy named Eric and broke it off when she moved here because of long distance.”

  Mischa looked at the picture of the handsome, smiling jock skeptically. “Hannah said her old school was really big. Don’t you think there would be a lot of Erics in a big school?”

  I couldn’t explain how, I just had a strange feeling that we were looking at a picture of the Eric, the one who’d dated Hannah. “Well, this Eric cared enough about Rebecca Shermer to join her remembrance group. It would kind of make sense that Hannah was friends with Rebecca Shermer if she was one of the kids who died, right? And if Hannah was dating Eric…”

  That afternoon, Mischa composed slightly mysterious messages to several kids who had posted to the remembrance pages for Rebecca Shermer and Josh Loomis, the freshman who Hannah had once babysat, and to Eric. She explained that she was a student at Hannah’s new school in Willow, Wisconsin, planning to throw a surprise party to celebrate Hannah’s Student Government victory. She asked everyone she contacted to reply with discretion to maintain the surprise, and urged those who couldn’t attend in person to send along best wishes that she claimed she would print out and include in a card to present to Hannah at the party. I had to admit, it was a pretty brilliant plan for Mischa to have come up with. No one was likely to say they’d want to attend the party in person and drive all the way up from Illinois, and we would be able to tell a lot about how people perceived Hannah from their responses. Best of all, it was improbable that anyone would reach out to Hannah and tell her that people at her new school were inquiring about her past. Mischa also sent a request to join the Remembering Rebecca group, but we knew it was not too likely that Rebecca’s parents would admit anyone to the group whose name they didn’t recognize.

  “Check this out,” Mischa told me hours later over the phone as I watched television with my mom. “I’ve gotten three responses so far. Molly Vega said, I don’t really know Hannah that well. Good luck with the party. Then, Mike Goldsmith wrote back and said, I don’t have anything nice to say about that girl. And then… wait for it… Keeley Alden said, I would advise you to stay as far away from Hannah as you can. Sorry you’re stuck with her now but at least she’s not at our school anymore.”

  “Freaky,” I said. I envied that she had her own computer in her bedroom and could spend the whole night on Facebook; I shared a computer with my mom and she didn’t think I needed an iPad in addition to my own cell phone. Whenever I suggested that everyone else at school had one, she told me to talk to my father, and his consistent response was that when he was a kid he got by with a shelf full of second-hand books and he turned out just fine. My mother looked up at me from her newspaper at the other end of the couch with vague interest.

  “And that guy? Eric? The boyfriend, right? He wrote back and said, I don’t want anything to do with Hannah Simmons. Don’t ever contact me again. And he just updated all of his privacy settings so I can’t see anything on his profile anymore. Suspicious!”

  So, we weren’t the only ones who had discovered Hannah to be a bit of a bad luck charm. Unfortunately, no one from Hannah’s old high school wrote back to Mischa with any specifics about why she was so disliked. We didn’t have any concrete evidence that she had ever led any other students in a game like “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” so whatever she had done at her old school to earn such a negative reputation remained unknown.

  After another restless night sleeping on the couch, I agreed to see a movie with Hannah and Tracy at the small mall in Ortonville on Sunday afternoon despite a stern warning from Mischa. I feared finding myself alone with Hannah, feared being in a moving vehicle with her. It was very likely there would be some kind of reprimand in store for my having communicated with Mischa at the dance on Friday night, and I was afraid the longer I put off apologizing, the more severe the punishment would be.

  “Is your nose okay?” I asked, trying to sound as chipper as possible as I cli
mbed into the back seat of Tracy’s car. Hannah’s nose appeared to be fine, but it looked like she had bruises beneath her eyes, heavily masked with porcelain-colored concealer.

  “Yeah, it’s okay. Not broken, just sore,” Hannah said from the front passenger seat.

  “I’m so sorry about that. Candace is just… out of control. She’s in the psych ward again. Who knows when she’ll be released,” I said, feeling rotten to the core for sounding like I was glad that Candace had been locked up.

  “Yeah, geez. I know. My dad wants to have her thrown out of school. She’s a danger to herself and other students,” Hannah said absent-mindedly, flipping through stations on the radio.

  I held my comment.

  As we reached the corner of Martha Road, and the empty lot was just outside Hannah’s passenger side window, Tracy commented, “Isn’t that where your old house used to be?”

  I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. Of course it was, and I passed the corner of my own street every day, but I couldn’t remember the last time someone had so ignorantly asked me outright about the fire. The empty lot looked unassuming, overgrown with long, dying yellow grass as it always did. “Uh, yeah,” I said uncomfortably. “My parents bought a house down the block rather than rebuilding.”