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

by Aarsen, Zoe

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. It felt like the most honest thing to say. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if Candace would live, didn’t know how the letter H had been assembled on the Lite Brite in the garage, didn’t know how Arthur Fitzpatrick and the will of Hannah’s grandfather had anything to do with the game we’d played on Olivia’s birthday, didn’t know why Hannah hadn’t been able to predict a death for me.

  “When Rhonda taught you about calories and your metabolism, it was never her intention to create some kind of unhealthy obsession for you. Level with me, kid. Are you having problems?”

  “No problems with food,” I assured him. “Sleeping, yes. But food, no.”

  “So, what is it? Is all this student council stuff too much work? Is that kid next door pressuring you into things you’re not ready for?”

  “God, Dad, no! Trey isn’t pressuring me for anything.”

  We talked for almost forty minutes, but I still couldn’t find the words to tell him what was really going on in my life. He asked me how I’d enjoyed Winnebago Days, surprising me with his memory of the annual event. Maybe he hadn’t erased as many memories of his life in Willow as I’d presumed. He informed me that he’d be purchasing a plane ticket for me, departing from Wisconsin on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and I’d be spending nine whole days in Tampa. Rhonda wanted to drive down to Key West while I was visiting and go on an alligator swamp tour. I looked out my window, where the cold autumn night air was picking up dry leaves and spinning them in miniature tornados across the Emorys’ driveway. It was difficult to imagine cruising through a hot swamp in four weeks, wearing a tank top.

  On Wednesday morning, the high school was buzzing with gossip because Hannah had not only tried out and made the pom pon squad, our school’s version of cheerleading for the basketball team, but the girl who had been junior varsity captain during our sophomore year, Hailey West, hadn’t even made the team this year. Mischa and I exchanged eye rolls in the hallway, not even needing to utter words on the topic to know that we were thinking the same thing.

  “I will not rest until my family’s property has been restored to its rightful owner.”

  Throughout Calculus I, I thought about Hannah’s grandmother’s vow to not rest until everything that had belonged to the Simmons’ family had been given back. Hannah’s junior year was shaping up perfectly. What else could she want from us, I wondered. There was nothing Candace had that Hannah could possibly envy, so I couldn’t determine what Hannah might gain from Candace’s death.

  On Friday after school, Amanda and Mischa ditched gymnastics practice to take Candace to Bobby’s for French fries and milkshakes. We sat in a booth, watching Candace closely as she devoured her fries.

  “We’re going on a tour of a volcano,” she announced in her loud, rough voice. “On the Big Island. We’re going to a black sand beach and then we’re seeing all these volcanic steam vents in the Volcanoes National Park.”

  “Volcanoes are cool,” Mischa encouraged her. “More volcanoes, fewer beaches.”

  Candace dunked another fry in her plastic cup of mayonnaise and popped it in her mouth. “Well, my dad also wants us to try scuba diving near our hotel, which has some of the best scuba diving in the world. He’s going to look into taking lessons while we’re there. He sent me like, a million websites to look at.”

  “Candace,” I said calmly, “please don’t go near water. We know you’ve been talking to a psychiatrist about everything that happened to Olivia, but you’re not the only one who thinks what Hannah did was real. Please, please, humor us and be careful.”

  “God!” Candace exclaimed, grimacing dramatically.

  “Promise,” Mischa insisted. “Promise you won’t go near water.”

  “Okay, geez, I promise.”

  But we knew she wasn’t taking us seriously. Candace wasn’t taking anything seriously anymore. It had been a while since she’d even talked about Isaac Johnston, who she had completely freaked out at Homecoming. He had decided she was nuts beyond hope shortly after she had been released from the hospital and would not stop talking about Hannah, spirits, and revenge. Candace must have been heartbroken over their break-up, but she went from being so drugged out on anti-anxiety medication to being so pumped up about her upcoming trip to Hawaii that she’d barely made mention of Isaac.

  We drove Candace home, all the while trying to fill her head with suggestions of things about her life in Willow that she might consider while in Hawaii. Things to live for, as desperate as it seemed. Try-outs for the winter school play would be held in November, and the drama club had chosen Mame! for the production. Candace had a great set of pipes and could easily have won the starring role if she had bothered to rehearse a little, but even the mention of the auditions didn’t interest her much. Her own seventeenth birthday fell in December, and Mischa tossed out a few ideas for parties, but Candace wasn’t excited about thinking that far ahead into the future.

  We idled in her mom’s driveway for a few minutes after we watched her disappear into the house. Neither Mischa nor I said a word, but I knew exactly what she was thinking: our glimpse of Candace in her pink corduroys bounding up the walkway toward her front door, her blond hair blowing in the breeze, might very well have been the last time we would ever see her. Both of us were wondering if there was something more we could do, something more we should do, to make our concern about her trip more clear to her.

  “Are you guys ready?” Amanda asked patiently.

  Mischa shook her head, her eyes glassy with tears. I noticed Julia pull back a curtain on the second floor of the house and look down at us as we lingered in the car, her dark hair a bold contrast to the white curtain framing the window. Candace’s dad would be picking her up in the morning to take her straight to the airport in Green Bay. We wouldn’t see her again for another eight days. I thought back to Hannah’s gruesome description of how Candace’s body would be found, and I shuddered. I hoped with every fiber in my being that Hannah was wrong about Candace, or at least about her drowning at this age, on this trip.

  Saturday night, as I sat in my living room in front of the television with The Iliad in my lap, I received a text message from Candace. She had just landed in Honolulu and was waiting for her connecting flight to Kona. A picture she had taken with her mobile phone was attached to the message. The sun was beginning to set in Hawaii, the sky shades of rose and coral over the tops of palm trees. It had already been dark in Wisconsin for hours. All I texted back was please stay away from the beach.

  That week, I turned down Hannah’s offer on Monday to come over after school to watch television and bake cookies, claiming that I was informally grounded until I brought up my grades, which wasn’t a total lie. Her disappointment was palpable, but I didn’t feel the least bit regretful. I knew all she wanted to do was hear herself talk about her new romance with Pete, and her excitement about her pom pon squad uniform. It occurred to me that her invitation was oddly timed, and was perhaps a strategic tactic to try to reel me back into her clutches while Candace was out of town. I remembered my first impressions of Hannah back in September at the start of the school year; how she had seemed so meek and unsure of herself, nervously twirling her long dark hair around her fingers. Had that been an act? Had she intentionally been trying to convince us that she was shy and quiet to gain our trust?

  Mischa and I sat together at lunch in solemn silence. Our lunch table crowds merged that week. Hannah’s new status as Pete’s girlfriend entitled her to join him at the table formerly ruled by Olivia. Tuesday, she and Tracy shifted over, carrying their lunch trays without explanation or an apology. Mischa, having at least the sense to acknowledge that angering Hannah might put Candace in greater danger, slid down to the other end of the table with Matt to be as far away from her as possible without actually sitting elsewhere. Even cool, calm Matt raised an eyebrow on Wednesday when suddenly Michael departed his table of fellow band nerds and joined Tracy at the cool kids’ table.

 
During classes, Mischa’s and my cell phone buzzed in unison with carefree messages from Candace, sent to both of us. We received and reviewed photos and quick notes about food she ate at the breakfast buffet in the resort where she was staying, and at the festive luau her family attended on their second night on the Big Island. She sent pictures of plates filled with lomi lomi salmon, kalua pork, fresh pineapple slices and macaroni salad. There were pictures of dancers in grass skirts and Candace’s discarded purple lei on the dresser in her hotel room after a night of fun. On Tuesday there were pictures of her half-brothers stomping across black dried lava in the volcano park.

  And then on Wednesday, the messages stopped abruptly.

  What are you up to today? I texted Candace nervously on Thursday morning when I woke up.

  There was no reply before Trey and I began our walk toward the high school.

  I knew it was paranoid and silly, but my heart was beating irregularly from fear. Reality seemed to be operating on an abnormal timeline on Thursday, with periods slowing down and then speeding back up. I had an unshakeable feeling that exactly what Mischa and I had been expecting was actually happening, but of course, without hearing anything from Candace, there was no way of knowing. Her cell phone battery could have been dead, she could have had bad reception, she could have decided she was having too much fun to keep in contact with us. Whatever the case may have been, just like the night when Olivia died, it was impossible for me to focus on anything other than my irrepressible suspicion that events were occurring that were far beyond my control.

  By the time I sat down in Homeroom, I realized that the saccharine ukulele music that had been tormenting me for the past two weeks had curiously stopped. I had grown so accustomed to tuning it out, it was a surprise to listen for it and not actually hear it in my head. It was an enormous relief that the music had finally stopped, like putting down a heavy book bag after carrying it on a long walk home, but it was still concerning. The end of the music could have meant any number of things, but for me it signified even more greatly that I had lost contact with Candace.

  When I passed Hannah for the first time that day in the hall, she smiled sadly at me before waving, and I wondered if she had any idea what Candace was going through at that very moment. She was wearing a beautiful gray cashmere turtleneck sweater over a black skirt with leather detailing on it that made her look enviably more punk rock than she actually was. Clothes like that couldn’t be bought at any malls within driving distance of Willow; Hannah’s parents must have been ordering cool outfits for her online. During gym class, Hannah chose me first to play on her volleyball team and tugged gently at my ponytail. “Your hair looks really pretty lately,” she complimented me. “It’s getting a little darker now that it’s fall.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered, really not wanting to permit myself to enjoy her flattery.

  She smiled at me weakly, and for a second it seemed as if she had something more to say, but then changed her mind. Coach Stirling blew her whistle to order both teams to their respective sides of the net, and the moment was lost.

  Changing in the locker room after gym, Mischa was fraught with worry. “Still nothing since Tuesday night,” she told me in a hoarse whisper, not wanting Hannah to overhear. We had both been receiving the same messages from Candace, so that didn’t surprise me. “I sent her ten text messages yesterday and she didn’t write back at all. I’m starting to really, really freak.”

  I asked, “Do you remember the name of the hotel where they’re staying?”

  Mischa didn’t remember, and we spent our lunch break googling resorts in the Honaunau Bay area trying to find anything that sounded familiar. The Kohala Orchid Village and Kohala Lani Halili both seemed like contenders. We requested bathroom passes from the lunchroom monitor and from the otherwise empty ladies’ restroom we called the front desks at both hotels hoping to leave a message for Candace in her room.

  “Hello, I’d like to leave a message with the Cotton party,” Mischa said in her most mature voice after dialing the number to the Kohala Orchid Village. She nodded at me a moment later, and then returned her attention to the phone. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I must have the wrong number.”

  We had better luck with the Kohala Lani Halili. The concierge there connected Mischa to what we hoped was the suite rented by Candace’s dad. In a shaky voice, Mischa said, “Hi, this is Mischa Portnoy calling from Willow to leave a message for Candace. Me and McKenna just wanted to say hello and we hope Candace is having fun. Please text us as soon as you get a chance to let us know you’re okay.”

  “Weird hotel voicemail system,” Mischa informed me as she ended the call on her phone.

  But the afternoon lagged on without a response.

  When the bell rang at 3:15 ending the school day, Mischa nodded off her sister in the parking lot, taciturnly announcing that she would be missing yet another gymnastics practice. We walked to my house while Trey served detention for mouthing off in Advanced Physics. “Would it be weird if we called Candace’s mom to see if she’s heard from Candace today?’ Mischa asked.

  We both agreed that the answer to Mischa’s question was yes, it would be totally weird.

  My mom had left a note for me saying she had gone to campus to offer in-person office hours, and that she would be bringing home dinner. We turned on the television and chatted through a music video show on cable until Mischa grew bored and began flipping through channels. It was only then that we caught the tail end of a commercial for the evening news, during which a pretty brunette newscaster was saying, “A teen feared swept out to sea at a popular resort in Hawaii. More details at five.”

  My heart seized and my limbs felt icy, instantly. Mischa gasped as if someone had just punched her in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her. Just like that, a second later, the news segment was gone, switching unapologetically into a commercial for an energy beverage. Our lower jaws fell, leaving our lips hanging, agape.

  “This can’t be happening,” I whispered, my chest feeling too tight to even inhale normally.

  “This is it, McKenna. It’s her! It’s happening again!” Mischa’s voice sounded choked, hoarse with hysteria. She was trembling on the edge of the couch, her lower lip quivering, a layer of tears cresting over her eyes released to her cheeks by a blink.

  My mind scrambled to justify an alternative reason for the broadcast we had just seen. We obviously couldn’t wait until five o’clock to find out more information, so we turned on the laptop that Mom and I kept in the living room in her desk and wrung our hands anxiously until it powered up. Major news sites were only offering basic information about the story, and it wasn’t even a front-page headline feature yet. The press was stating that an American teenager was missing after disappearing from a beach on the Big Island of Hawaii, and authorities were hoping for a happy outcome. No names were given, and no news outlets even confirmed that the missing teen was a girl. There was nothing at all conclusive about the story having anything to do with Candace, and yet it was just too great a coincidence. We discussed once again whether or not to call Candace’s mom, and decided against it, not wanting to upset Mrs. Lehrer if, indeed, she knew there was a search on, or alternately be the bearers of bad news if by some chance she hadn’t heard about what was happening in Hawaii. My blood felt cold in my veins. I did not want to admit, for Mischa’s sake, how grave my sense of doom was becoming.

  Trey knocked on the front door before entering when he got out of detention, having already seen the headline for the news article online at school.

  “Any word yet?” he asked, seemingly quite aware that we were both freaking out while we waited for any kind of communication from Candace. He set his doodle-covered backpack down next to the couch and sat beside me.

  “Nothing,” I informed him.

  He rubbed at his nose and then suggested, “Have you tried, you know, contacting her?”

  Mischa blew up at him, her face flushed. “Of course we have! We’ve been texting he
r for two days, Trey!”

  Trey shrugged and added, “I meant, you know, with the board. Just in case she’s not exactly able to respond to text messages right now.”

  “That is just morbid, okay?” Mischa snapped. “We need to remain positive right now! For all we know, this is just part of Hannah’s game, designed to scare us. We don’t know anything for certain.” All three of us pretended for a few minutes to focus on the tacky reality television show in front of us, but the air in the living room grew thick with our thoughts. We all watched the minutes pass on the digital clock on the cable box, counting the seconds remaining until five o’clock.

  “Trey,” I said softly.

  “I’ll get the board,” he agreed, jumping up off the couch.

  Since Trey’s mom was home and might wonder about him hanging out in his basement with two girls, both younger than him, and I was reluctant to introduce any additional spiritual activity to my own bedroom, we put on our jackets and walked briskly to the corner. It had been my own suggestion that we try fishing through the spiritual world for Candace from the abandoned lot where my old house used to stand. I had been wondering for a while if maybe there was a chance Jennie would make contact with me if we summoned her from there, but hadn’t found the courage before then to suggest to Trey that we try it. That evening, my fear for Candace exceeded my fear of the abandoned lot. I had a sickening, chilling feeling before we even set the board out in the weeds and that we already knew what had happened to Candace.