by Aarsen, Zoe
CHAPTER 15
On Monday morning, Mr. Dean shook my hand and told me with sincerity that my Rake Sale had been a huge success and was a shining example of precisely the kind of ingenuity for which he’d spent twenty-one years of his career waiting. The glow of his compliment faded before I even took my seat. I was woefully unprepared for impending mid-terms, and knew it. Not even the promise of a ski adventure in January was enough to corral my thoughts during classes when I was supposed to be paying attention. Every kid in school seemed to be buzzing with a little extra energy that week; on Friday the annual Winnebago Days carnival would open on the western outskirts of town near the lake and seniors would prowl through the crowd, marking freshmen with red lipstick F’s on their foreheads as an act of high school initiation. The carnival brought with it each year a small, strange crime wave and the roar of rock music blasted from the carnival’s janky rides, which would carry over the flat land of our town for miles. Every year, I could hear Def Leppard jams from a distance as I tried to sleep in my own bedroom. My mother was not a fan of Winnebago Days, claiming that it was little more than three-day plague of riff-raff and litter upon our town each year.
“What if we break her legs?” Mischa wondered aloud during gym on the track as we walked our laps, wearing our fall jackets over our gym uniforms. Our eyes followed Hannah on the other side of the track as she ran, with Tracy struggling to keep up with her.
“Hannah’s legs? What would that accomplish?”
“Not Hannah’s legs,” Mischa corrected me. “Candace’s.”
I stopped walking on the track and shook my head in disbelief. “What are you talking about? Are you proposing we just hit Candace with baseball bats? Why would we break her legs?”
Mischa shrugged. “Well, if she has casts on her legs, then she won’t be able to go in water. Maybe we can’t prevent her from going to Hawaii, but we can do something to keep her from swimming.”
I resumed walking, noticing Coach Stirling keeping an eye on us where she paced, carrying her clipboard, close to the double doors leading to the gym. “You have lost your mind. I don’t want to get thrown out of school, or worse, go to jail.”
After gym class, Coach Stirling barked at me as she passed me in the locker room, “Brady! Stop by my office after you’ve changed. I need to have a word with you.”
Hannah, changing near me, offered me a worried expression. A private one-on-one with Coach Stirling was rare and never a good thing. I couldn’t even guess what it was that the coach wanted to discuss with me; I had never shown much athletic aptitude and did my best to avoid her attention.
“Hi,” I said, knocking lightly on the door frame of her office, where she sat at her desk, watching ESPN coverage of the WNBA online. She turned at the sound of my voice, and closed her laptop.
“McKenna. What is going on here?”
She sounded concerned, and I wasn’t sure what exactly gave her reason to believe there was anything going on with me at all. “I’m not sure what you mean, Coach,” I said innocently. “There’s nothing going on with me.”
She rolled backward in her office chair and crossed one of her legs over the other. “McKenna, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that you lost a considerable amount of weight over the summer. While I commend you for stepping up your efforts to get in shape, I have to tell you kid, enough’s enough. Your jeans are falling off and you have circles under your eyes. I’m making an appointment for you to meet with Nurse Lindvall this afternoon so that she can start monitoring your weight.” Coach Stirling swiveled back to her desk and began writing out a pink hall pass for me.
“But I’m not trying to lose weight,” I claimed. “I’m eating a lot, I swear. I’m just under a lot of stress.”
Coach Stirling handed me the pink slip and stared me down. “We don’t casually dismiss eating disorders, McKenna. Please report into Nurse Lindvall after sixth period. She’ll be expecting you.”
To my great annoyance, the school nurse forced me to suffer through a twenty-minute lecture about the food pyramid and an inaccurate description of how the human body converts food into energy. There was no point in telling her that I was eating plenty, but probably losing weight simply from sleeping on either the couch or restlessly in my next door neighbor’s bed to dodge evil spirits. I was asked to return every Friday morning before Homeroom for the rest of the fall semester to weigh in. This time, I didn’t even think Hannah had played a role in bringing attention to my weight loss. Coach Stirling was right; even though I wasn’t on the strict diet I had followed all summer, I was still fastening my belt one notch tighter than I had been in September, and I had to admit that my cheeks were starting to look a little gaunt.
As the week progressed, I began having terrible dreams about beaches and Hawaii. It was impossible to know if it was Olivia inspiring the dreams, or if my own subconscious was working overtime. When I would open my eyes in the morning and roll over to look through my window toward Trey’s house, often I would see him already awake, standing there, checking on me. A ukulele tune that I was pretty sure I had never heard before in my life other than in my Hawaiian dreams began playing on repeat in my head constantly. It blasted through my brain, roared between my temples, destroying any chance I had of concentrating on the days of review in preparation for our mid-terms, and at an even louder volume on Thursday and Friday, when I sat in front of computer screens in my classrooms, staring slack-jawed at the tests I could not complete.
During my Spanish mid-term, I felt the weight of a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see my teacher, Mrs. Gomez, studying my screen. Forty minutes of class had passed, and I had only filled in responses to the first five questions on the test. “Is everything alright, McKenna?” she asked me quietly so as not to disturb the other students, hard at work on their mid-terms.
“I have a headache,” I managed to sputter through the ukulele chords in my head, which were blurring my vision and making my ears ring.
“Nurse’s office,” Mrs. Gomez commanded.
So I found myself back in Nurse Lindvall’s office for the second time that week, outstretched uncomfortably on the cot, trying to drown out the imaginary music in my head with ibuprofen while I stared at the white ceiling above. While I could barely focus on anything, I felt the nebulous sensation of having failed my mid-terms closing in on me. Failure and falling semester grades would be a concern for the following week, after Winnebago Days, after Candace boarded her flight with her father and half-brothers bound for Hawaii. I could worry about my grade point average after Candace arrived back to her mom’s house in Willow safely. I made no mention of my performance on my mid-terms to my mother after school, not wanting to give her even more reasons to worry about me.
On Friday night, I walked through the Winnebago Days carnival with Trey, our arms entwined. The roars coming from the Tilt-o-Whirl, the blasting music, and the smell of kettle corn were sensory overload, and I appreciated all of it for distracting me from what I feared would happen in the next few days. “I think, for safety’s sake, we might be wise to avoid all rides,” Trey told me as we both stood in front of the rickety-looking ferris wheel, hesitating before stepping into the line to buy tickets. We saw Hannah climbing into a passenger car with Pete. She was wearing bright red tight jeans and a white leather jacket that looked new, her long dark hair hanging straight down her back. Jeff and Melissa climbed in after them to share the ride, and a tattooed carnie closed the door to the car behind them before the ferris wheel rotated slightly so that the next passengers could board. They looked like the perfect group of popular high school friends, without a care in the world. Of everyone watching them in line, only Trey and I knew that a complicated murder had brought them together.
In a town as small as Willow, it was a surefire bet you would encounter just about every single resident at some point during an event as big as Winnebago Days. We passed Mischa and Matt as they waited in line for the small roller coaster, called the Zipper. I waved at Mischa but we
didn’t slow down to talk to them; carnivals were for couples and Trey and I were in a silent world of our own. We saw Principal Nylander at one of the game stands, trying to toss a quarter into a glass jar to win his daughter a stuffed lion. We saw and ignored Tracy and Michael making out at a table near the grill where hotdogs and hamburgers could be ordered, and Coach Highland and his wife and young children swaying to the music near the stage that had been set up for a performance by Norwegian Wood, a local Beatles cover band.
Several times we passed by the small booth that I had arranged as part of the junior class fundraising effort, where Hailey West and Paul Freeman were drawing caricatures of people for a small fee to put toward their ski trip costs. The next night, Nicole Blumenthal and a group of other juniors would be selling apple cider donuts that they made in Home Ec. I knew I should have been very pleased to see Hailey and Paul so busy with customers, but my Student Government obligations seemed like too much to handle that weekend. I was grateful that the booth was too tiny for me to stand by and oversee operations.
Near a table where the PTA was selling tickets to a raffle, for which the prizes included hand-sewn quilts and salon services from the local beauty parlor, I saw Evan Richmond staring straight up at the ferris wheel, watching Pete and Hannah flirt and giggle against the night sky. I could only imagine what was running through his head, observing his dead sister’s beloved boyfriend moving onto a new romantic prospect not even a month after Olivia’s grave was dug. I wasn’t sure if Trey saw what I saw, or that I wanted him to if he didn’t, but the expression of hurt on Evan’s face affected me a like a slap across the cheek.
“Do you want me to win you a mirror with a painting of Elvis on it?” Trey jokingly offered as we passed a game stand where fancy mirrors could be won by throwing darts at balloons. We were both in quiet, sullen funks, and I adored him for trying to lift my mood.
“Nah,” I refused, “that would just be one more fragile thing in my room for ghosts to break.”
Trey pulled me closer to him with the arm that hung around my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “You know, there’s a chance that this will all be fine. That Olivia’s death was a freak coincidence and Candace will be home next weekend, safe and sound.”
I wanted to believe him, I did. But he had been in that car with Olivia. He had heard her last words.
“I know you don’t really believe that,” I replied, squeezing his hand.
When we stood in line for cotton candy and Hannah tapped me on the shoulder from behind to say hello, I felt an irresistible urge to confront her. If not for Candace’s sake, for Evan’s.
“This carnival is so much fun!” she gurgled. Pete, next to her, smiled his classic handsome smile.
It took me a second to remember that Hannah was a big city girl, and she’d probably never been to a small-town traveling carnival before in her whole life. “Enjoy it, it’s the only thing that happens here all year,” I muttered, genuinely disliking the seedy nature of the carnival. I hadn’t really been inclined to go that night, but Winnebago Days was unavoidable, and I had to check in on the booth at least once each day.
“Have you guys gone on the ferris wheel yet? It’s amazing! You can see the lights in Ortonville from up there!”
I tried to force a smile. I had managed to be civil, sometimes even friendly, with Hannah in the week since Homecoming. At times, I had even found myself liking her. “We may go on later. I am a little afraid of the rides at this carnival. Every year at least one breaks down and there’s some kind of crisis.”
Hannah looked to Pete to confirm, and he shrugged in agreement. She swatted him playfully and said, “Pete! You didn’t say a word about that when we got on the ferris wheel!”
“It’s mostly safe!” he insisted.
We stepped up to the man selling cotton candy and Trey opened his wallet to buy us each a puffy light blue ball of sugar.
Hannah’s delight with the carnival was unnerving me, making me want to scream at her that she had no right to be enjoying herself, having so much fun, so soon after Olivia’s death, and with Candace on her way to her a setting that matched her own prophesied death. “You know, Candace is going to Hawaii tomorrow with her dad,” I casually mentioned, my eyes boring into Hannah’s.
Hannah raised an eyebrow, but without acknowledging that she understood what I was insinuating, she happily replied, “I heard. I hope she gets some much-needed rest. And I have to admit, I’m a little jealous. It’s getting cold early this year. I wouldn’t mind a week in the tropics.”
I glared at her, shaking my head. Mischa had been right. She was simply cold-hearted. Her ambivalence about Candace’s life ignited a wild rage within me, something that I had been suppressing up until that point either out of a naïve hope that Hannah really hadn’t had a hand in Olivia’s death, or out of fear of her power. But in confronting her in that line, I noticed as Pete paid for their cotton candy that Hannah couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with Trey. I wondered again if she had known it would be Trey driving the car in which Olivia would die, and why she hadn’t warned him. Or why she hadn’t mentioned him to the rest of us when she had told Olivia’s story.
Remembering my solemn promise to myself that I’d be nicer to Erica, Kelly, and Cheryl after Erica saved the day the previous weekend with her refuse bags, Trey and I agreed to walk over to Bobby’s for milkshakes with them before walking back home. They were all in especially giggly and nervous moods, presumably because a guy who was a senior was in their midst. Trey was noticeably friendlier with them than he had been with Mischa, and for that I was truly appreciative.
Monday after school, my mother was waiting for me with her arms folded over her chest.
“Sit,” she commanded as I entered the house, pointing to a chair in the kitchen.
I had, not surprisingly, failed my Spanish mid-term, as well as (a little more surprisingly) my mid-terms for Calculus I and Chem Lab. I had gotten a C on my English mid-term, which secretly I was a little happy about, because I hadn’t bothered finishing The Iliad. Perhaps I’d just read further than a lot of other kids to have earned my C on the bell curve. But my grades were a complete reversal of my entire academic career up until that point. I had been a straight-A girl all the way until junior year.
“Well, during my Spanish mid-term, I had a really bad headache and Mrs. Gomez sent me to the nurse,” I said nervously, picking at my fingernails. “She told me in class today that I could retake it.”
“You will retake it. Mr. Bobek called me this afternoon to tell me that all of your teachers are concerned about you. This is your junior year, McKenna. A year from now at this time, your college applications will already be out. This is not the time to be letting grades fall.”
I listened patiently as my mom continued on for a while about the burden she faced in paying my college tuition, my need to win a scholarship, her resentment of my weight loss bringing unfair scrutiny about her parenting abilities upon her by the staff at my school.
“So, you tell me, McKenna. Where do we go from here?” she asked, staring me down, her arms outstretched and hands folded on the kitchen table. “Do you need to go into a rehab program to help you get back on track with eating? Do you need to see a therapist every week?”
I looked at my feet. The only response that came to mind suddenly seemed so perfect that I blurted out, “Candace Cotton’s parents are taking her to Hawaii because she’s been having such a hard time with Olivia’s death. I think I could use a change of scenery—”
“I absolutely agree with you there,” my mother interjected, preventing me from asking for permission to try to accompany Candace on her trip to keep an eye on her. “It’s high time your father stepped in and played a bigger role in your life. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you what’s happening this semester. You’re secretive about your friends, about what you and Trey are up to every day after school, about why you’re sleeping out here on the couch nearly every night. I’ve already sp
oken with your dad, and you’re going to be spending the week of Thanksgiving with him and Rhonda this year.”
I cringed. Spending an entire week away from Trey in less than a month felt like it would be impossible to survive. I had to fight the urge to snap at her about snooping around in my room, since that would only make her more suspicious about how I’d known she’d gone in there at a time when I had been almost a mile away. “Fine,” I said, in a weak voice.
“Your father is expecting a call from you this evening. He’s home now,” my mother informed me.
I called my father from my room from my mobile phone, not wanting Mom to overhear our conversation. Even despite going into my room for privacy, I left my door open a few inches because I was fearful that if I closed it, anything could happen while I was on the phone.
“So, what’s all this failure business about, McKenna?” he asked me. “Your mom said you tanked on your mid-terms and your gym teacher thinks you have an eating disorder.”
In the background on his end, I could hear seagulls cawing and distant voices. I presumed that he and Rhonda were stretched out at the beach watching the sun set, or lounging on their boat with their neighbor. I struggled to remember what life was like when Dad lived at home with us, in the pre-Florida days. Enough time had passed that I really could no longer imagine how things would be different if he were tinkering around in our garage instead of miles away.