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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  “God, I would buy a new house, too. Who would want to live on the site of a fire like that? I mean, ew. It’s like a perfect plot for a horror movie,” Tracy said, furthering my belief that she was the most insensitive girl in the world.

  When we arrived at the mall, we were fifteen minutes too late to see the romantic comedy that Tracy and Hannah had used as bait to get me out of the house. Hannah studied the movie times for the theater on her cell phone with a wrinkled brow, insisting that she couldn’t understand how the wrong time for our original selection had been listed on the theater’s website.

  “We’re probably just missing the previews anyway,” Tracy said with a shrug, but when we attempted to buy tickets for the movie that had already started, the pimply teenage boy at the counter refused to sell us tickets to that screening. It was a crowded Sunday afternoon at the theater, and families with young children swarmed around us as we tried to decide what to do. Our options were to buy tickets for the next showing of The Scent of Love, starting almost three hours later, or to see one of the other films playing that afternoon: the kiddie cartoon or blockbuster 3D action flick, both beginning within the next half hour.

  “I guess I could see Brethren,” Hannah said. “At least there are hot guys in that movie.”

  Brethren was a high-velocity action movie set in the Middle East about a group of hot shot special operative agents who took on a ridiculous assignment to assassinate the head of a terrorist organization. We bought our tickets and each took a pair of cardboard 3D glasses out of the bin in the theater’s lobby. Hannah and Tracy lined up for snacks, and I overheard Hannah inform Tracy that I wouldn’t be eating anything because I was concerned about my weight. Tracy nodded knowingly. I thought nothing but hateful things about Tracy as she bought an enormous tub of popcorn for herself and doused it with butter at the self-serve machine.

  The movie was terrible, but exactly the kind of movie that would earn millions of dollars at the box office. I started to lose interest after the first twenty minutes, when it became clear that the subplot about two of the special ops guys not getting along well was going to ruin every critical scene with cheesy one-liners meant to be funny. Halfway through the movie, the special agents planted a bomb in an open air market that caused a rapidly spreading fire at nightfall, moving from stand to stand, incinerating everything in sight as hot desert winds assisted in its expansion. The swirling fire on screen, the crackling of flames and popping of wood throwing sparks was simply too much for me. It’s just a movie, I reminded myself, but I felt my breath growing short and could have sworn I smelled smoke. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and my heart was racing. Tearing off my 3D glasses, I stood, and without even excusing myself, I stepped over Hannah and inched my way out of our row of seats, desperate to get outside and away from the roar of the blaze.

  Once out in the hallway, I wiped the dampness off my face with the sleeve of my cardigan. The silly jingles of the video game machines left unattended in the hallway to cycle through their empty game trailers comforted me as I caught my breath. In the ladies’ bathroom, I splashed cool water on my face. Even after I felt calm enough to return to my seat, I waited a little longer, studying my reflection in the mirror. It was crazy to wonder, but had Hannah and Tracy intentionally made us miss the screening of The Scent of Love so that instead we’d have to see Brethren? Had Hannah known about that horrible fire scene from the trailer, or from commercials? She must have known how traumatic it would be for me to see a scene like that, especially in 3D. I found myself dreading my return to my seat in the theater, childishly wishing once again that I could just call my mom to ask her to come and get me.

  Moments before I reached to open the heavy door to reenter the theater, I heard my mobile phone ring in my bag. I saw Mischa’s name appear on the screen, and I retreated back down the hallway to talk to her in privacy.

  “I figured it out,” Mischa said over the phone.

  “Oh yeah? What?” I asked, feeling like somehow Hannah could hear us even though she was in the middle of the crowded movie theater.

  “Candace called me. She’s feeling better and she’s being released tomorrow afternoon. And guess what? Her father decided she needs a change of scenery. He’s taking her to the Big Island,” Mischa said, sounding very pleased with herself.

  “Oh my god, Mischa,” I said, feeling nauseous, my stomach lurching. “Waves! She could drown at the beach.”

  “I know. Don’t you get it? Nohi. It must have been a message from Olivia. It means no H-I. No Hawaii.”

  CHAPTER 13

  That evening, I grew increasingly uneasy as the sun began to set. The sky turned from pink to gold and then began to darken, and I suspected that since Mr. Cotton had put events in motion to bring Candace to an area where she could potentially drown in deep waves just as Hannah had predicted, Olivia’s spirit was going to turn violent. It was making sense now to me why Olivia had wanted me to be alarmed at Homecoming by the song she had singled out: I was supposed to have prevented Candace from attacking Hannah. Because the attack had led to her trip to the psychiatric ward, and her hospitalization had inspired her dad to book a vacation. I saw it all clearly now, but wished that Olivia had been able to find a clearer way to communicate her expectations to me.

  “Turning in soon?” Mom asked in the living room after bringing Maude inside from her last wild frolic in the back yard for the night. Her tone suggested that I should turn in, seeing as how it was a Sunday night and I had school in the morning.

  I was pretending to be thoroughly engrossed in a television news program about a serial killer who had lived in La Crosse. “Yeah, I just want to see the end of this,” I assured her.

  “Are you sure you should be watching something so troubling right before bed time?” she nagged me. “You’ve been tossing and turning a lot lately. You don’t want to give yourself bad dreams.”

  Avoiding eye contact with her, I said, “I’m not having nightmares. I’m sleeping just fine.”

  “Then why have you been sleeping out here on the couch?” She raised an eyebrow skeptically at me before disappearing down the hall. “Goodnight, sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she called.

  When the show finally ended, I pushed myself to watch another half hour of a late night talk show, and then turned off the television. I was startled by the immaculate quiet in the house after the low murmur of voiceovers on commercials had been silenced. I turned on the light in the hallway and switched off the lamp in the living room, already creeping myself out with thoughts about what might await me in my bedroom. Since Maude’s arrival, I had started keeping my bedroom door closed because she had a relentless hatred for all of my shoes and socks. While keeping the door closed spared my footwear, it created a moment of panic for me each and every time I had cause to open it and peer inside. In that fraction of a second before I was able to flip on the light switch, my heart always stopped beating in distressed fear of what might await me on the other side.

  I leaned forward, putting my ear to the door to listen for any strange sounds coming from my bedroom, and then, hearing nothing suspicious, I reached for the doorknob. My hand recoiled and snapped back to my chest before I even realized what had happened; I gasped in surprise because the doorknob was scalding hot to the touch. My fingertips felt singed, but when I looked down in the darkness expecting to see blisters rising, they appeared to be fine. There was nothing about the appearance of the doorknob that would have suggested that it was hot. I tapped it again lightly with the tip of my index finger, and finding it still to be alarmingly hot, I weighed my options.

  I considered trying to sneak out the front door and over to the Emorys’ house, but the front entrance of our house would definitely be too noisy. The back door, with its squeaky storm door, would also create a noticeable amount of noise. There was no way out of the house through the garage unless I used the automatic door opener, which would definitely wake my mom out of a deep slumber. Before I even took a look in m
y bedroom, I knew there was no way I could sleep there for the night, and the thought of sleeping exposed, on the couch, and irking my mother more, was also not appealing. If it was Olivia playing games with me, simulating a fire in my bedroom just a few hours after I’d been terrified by a fiery movie scene was downright cruel.

  So I made the decision to cross my bedroom as quickly as possible, slip out the window and dash over to Trey’s. Using the bottom of my t-shirt to protect my hand, I turned the knob and threw the door open, finding my bedroom to be suspiciously quiet and cool. I quickly closed and locked the door behind me, tiptoed across the room as fast as I could, climbed through the window and lowered the screen again. Wearing only socks on my feet, I unlatched the gate in the fence surrounding our back yard and opened the gate to the Emorys’ yard. I knocked on Trey’s window lightly with my knuckles, hoping he was still awake. The room behind the blinds was already dark. Just as I began to panic because he wasn’t answering and a cold wind was blowing, the window lifted, and he smiled at me.

  “McKenna Brady! Why, what a nice surprise,” he joked.

  “Can I come in?”

  It was disorienting to be in Trey’s bedroom in the dark. He bashfully cleaned up a pile of dirty underwear on his floor and tossed it into the back of his closet. The room had a salty, safe smell about it, like dirty sheets or old gym shoes. As we crawled into his narrow bed and he lowered his flannel sheet over me, he warned, “You definitely have to wake up and go home early in the morning. If my parents find you in here, your mom will kill you, and then you’ll be a ghost who haunts me.”

  “I think she’s growing stronger,” I confessed. I told him about the hot doorknob, and about how Candace would be flying to Hawaii with her father in two weeks, right after mid-terms.

  “Well, that makes sense. The book says that the more acclimated a spirit becomes, you know, as a ghost, the more comfortable they become with their powers,” Trey explained matter-of-factly. “She’s probably testing out new skills. But I wouldn’t bet on her being good enough yet to track you down over here.”

  He buried his head between my neck and shoulder and began kissing my neck softly, making my toes curl with delight. Suddenly, I was distracted by a strange scratching noise coming from his closet, and I sat straight up in fear.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “It’s the litter box. Patches and her family have relocated.”

  I crept out of Trey’s bed and yanked the string dangling from the exposed light bulb in Trey’s closet to turn on the light so that I could take a look. The mother cat and her kittens from the Emorys’ yard were curled up on a discarded bathroom towel. With her golden eyes, the mother cat looked up at me and blinked patiently. The chubby ball of fur which had just used the litter box trotted across Trey’s discarded running shoes back to its mother where it nuzzled into its place among its siblings.

  “Trey, your mom is going to freak! These cats probably have fleas and all kinds of other stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Trey said softly where he sat up, shirtless, in bed. “I don’t let my mom’s cat in here just in case she can catch some kind of bad illness from these outside cats. Just one of many, many reasons why my mom would have reason to be upset with me.”

  I snuggled beneath Trey’s blankets again alongside him and said suddenly, “Hannah tricked me into seeing a movie today with her and Tracy, and there was this scene with an out-of-control fire that really upset me. Okay, maybe she didn’t know this scene was going to be in the movie, but I think she did know. Am I totally paranoid?”

  “Maybe a little paranoid,” Trey told me, wrapping one arm protectively over me. “Lots of movies have scenes with fires in them.”

  “Yeah, but this particular scene just seemed too real. It made me have a real panic attack. I had to leave the theater and collect myself, and all afternoon I’ve been wondering this same thing, this same thought again and again: why me and not her?”

  Trey studied me for a moment, concerned, and asked, “Why Jennie and not you?”

  I nodded, unable to say anymore, afraid that I’d cry.

  “Don’t you remember anything about the night of the fire?”

  I didn’t know how Trey thought he might remember details from that night that I didn’t. I was the one who’d been engulfed in flames, who’d choked on smoke and watched the roof cave in.

  “The reason you weren’t killed in the fire with Jennie?” He searched for some kind of recognition in my expression.

  “You actually remember that night?” I asked. It wasn’t completely impossible that Trey would have remembered it; after all, it had happened at the end of his street and was probably the only noteworthy thing that had happened in our small town during his entire childhood.

  “I remember a lot about that night,” he insisted. “My mother woke me up because she smelled smoke. I remember watching her run through the front door and down the street in her robe, and the night sky above your house was glowing because of the flames. She had told my dad to keep me in the house, but after a few minutes he put my coat on me and we followed her to the corner, where your old house used to be. You were standing outside in the street with your dog, barefoot, in your nightgown, just watching the flames climb higher and higher. The dog was going nuts. She was barking her head off, and wouldn’t let anyone near you. I remember thinking it was just so weird to see you standing there alone. I’d always thought of you and Jennie like a pair, you know? Like two socks that go together.”

  “You knew it was me, standing there, and not Jennie?” I asked, surprised.

  Trey nodded. “Of course. I could always tell you apart. Jennie’s posture was different. Her eyebrows were a little heavier. She bit her fingernails down to the quick.”

  Unbelievable, I thought to myself, that Trey had known instantly that I’d survived and Jennie hadn’t, but my own parents hadn’t been able to tell the difference between us.

  “I don’t think I’d ever seen one of you without the other before that night. You could ask my mom about it, if you want. Back then she used to tell anyone who would listen that the dog must have gotten you up and led you outside.”

  I tried so hard to remember that night, but my memories were what they always were: little more than the unbearable tightness of smoke in my chest, the roar of the flames, and a sense of urgency that I needed to get outside. Had Moxie awakened me? Had she run through the screen door, as she was fond of doing when she was a puppy—she’d figured out how to stand on her hind legs to press the handle with her front paws and open the door— to inspire me to follow her out onto the lawn? I really couldn’t recall. I didn’t remember much about even being in the street, other than the moment when I saw my mother’s silhouette emerge in the doorway, the wall of orange fire behind her. If Trey’s mom was right and Moxie had nudged me awake, then why me and not Jennie? Would Moxie have gone back into the house to rouse Jennie if the flames hadn’t risen so quickly? There had been a gas leak in the basement, the fire department had determined during their investigation. That was why the whole house had gone up in such enormous flames so quickly, and it could have been started by anything, even a tiny spark from static electricity.

  “So if you’re wondering why you made it out and not Jennie, the answer is Moxie. For whatever reason, she was able to wake you up, but not your sister. It’s as simple as that, McKenna. You can’t question it.”

  I lay quiet for a moment, thinking about life and the energy of the universe and how something as simple as the sensitivity of my skin to a dog’s wet nose had probably made the difference between life and death for me and my twin.

  “We kept her here with us, you know,” Trey told me. “Moxie. We had her here for two or three weeks while your family stayed somewhere else. I kept hoping you’d move away forever so that she’d just be my dog.”

  I shook my head in surprise. “I didn’t know that,” I admitted. The weeks following the fire were a blur for me. I recalled distinctly missing sch
ool. After our time in the hospital and Jennie’s funeral, Mom and I went to Missouri to stay with my grandparents for a few weeks while Dad stayed in Willow at a motel and dealt with the insurance paperwork. I remembered very little about those weeks in Missouri other than the most random details: a red patchwork quilt spread over the brown plaid couch for me, turkey sandwiches prepared by my grandmother with thick mayonnaise, my mother disappearing behind a closed door to her childhood bedroom for hours on end to cry without my seeing it. But now that I was trying to remember it all, I was sure of it: Moxie hadn’t been with us.

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “That we didn’t move away forever.”

  “Don’t be sorry about that,” Trey teased, nudging me with his arm. “If you had moved away forever instead of into the house next door, I would have been watching someone else get undressed for the last few years.”

  My eyes shot wide open and my jaw dropped. “Trey!”

  “Probably some gross, hairy guy,” Trey continued tormenting me. He leaned over and took my face in both of his hands and kissed me right on my protesting frown.