by Aarsen, Zoe
“I think,” Trey hypothesized slowly, “if we just put it in a place where Hannah will never be able to get her hands on it again, we’ll be in much better shape than we are now. And this hair will disintegrate in water. So if it’s the hair that holds the power, that’s easy to deal with right now.”
He fished around in the pocket of his coat until he found a book of matches.
“Trey! I’m driving!” I shrieked, overcome by my fear of fire. I didn’t want to smell burning hair or see smoke in the car with me while I needed to be focused on the outrageous speed at which I was driving down the rural highway, passing occasional cars while three police cars with sirens blaring chased us.
“This is the police. Pull over.”
The police officer riding shotgun in the car closest behind us had rolled down his window and was barking out orders to us using a bullhorn. “It’s okay,” Trey assured me. “If I burn the hair now, we’ll be halfway done with the job even if the gas runs out.”
He was right, so I took a deep breath and tried my best to ignore him as he lit the edge of the golden lock. The hairs curled and blackened quickly, filling the car with a sickening, sweet odor and a ton of smoke.
“All done,” Trey said, lowering his window just enough to slide his left hand through so that the remaining ashes could blow off into the wind.
“You are under arrest. Pull the vehicle over to the side of the road.”
Ahead of me by about forty feet in traffic was a logging truck, piled high with freshly cut trees secured with an elaborate network of cords and hooks. It was taking up more than one lane, and passing it was going to be impossible without swerving into oncoming westbound traffic.
“What do I do, what do I do?” I asked Trey.
Trey placed a steady hand on my right thigh to calm me down. “Watch for a gap in oncoming traffic, then dip into that lane and gun it.”
Listening, I watched, and then he added, “And pray like hell there isn’t a car right in front of the truck when we get around it.”
I took a deep breath after a blue Volvo station wagon whizzed past us on the left, and I threw Trey’s mom’s car into the oncoming lane and hit the gas. Almost a hundred feet ahead of us, cruising at the same speed we were, a maroon Kia was approaching us, threatening to hit us head-on if I wasn’t able to pass the logging truck and merge back into the eastbound lane. For some unfathomable reason, the driver of the logging truck picked up speed, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to get ahead of him before the Kia smashed into us.
“Jesus!” I screamed. At the very last second before impact with the Kia, I realized that if I tried to cut off the truck driver at the speed at which he was traveling, he’d clip the back of our Civic. I swerved further left into the second westbound lane, narrowly missing an oncoming Jetta. My stomach lurched as I heard the horrific whur of gravel beneath our spinning wheels. We had veered onto the side of the road but fortunately I had recovered the car before it had spun off beyond the gravel, into the tall grass and pine trees.
“Oh my god,” Trey whispered, his voice full of vibrato from the bumping along of the car over the gravel. He was clutching his car seat with both hands, the locket still tucked in the palm of his left hand.
“We’re good. I’ve got this,” I exclaimed, unable to believe that we hadn’t been annihilated by one or both of the oncoming cars we had just dodged, both of which had slammed on their brakes after we passed them, skidded, and were halted in the middle of their respective lanes. With no immediate oncoming traffic in either westbound lane, I hit the gas again once getting back on the pavement, not wanting to floor the car while still on loose gravel. We soared in front of the logging truck, and its driver slammed on its brakes. Behind us, we heard the distant squealing of brakes as the police cars also braked hard to avoid slamming into the back of the truck.
Unlike in chase scenes in movies, the ties holding the logs in place on the back of the truck did not tear open, causing mayhem and destruction to the police cars. But the distraction did give me enough time to pass a Chevy truck ahead of us on the highway and gain a sizable lead on the police.
“That was awesome, but I think later when we have time, I’m going to wet my pants,” Trey confided.
I forced a smile. I’d only had my license since August and at this point I was pretty sure that after my mad dash for White Ridge Lake, I’d never be licensed to drive again.
It was less than a minute before we heard the sirens soaring behind us again, and the situation only became slightly more dire when there were two more police cars waiting for us at an intersection about two miles before we entered the lake region. At Trey’s urging, I blazed through the intersection without stopping, and the two new police cars joined in the chase after us.
“These two are a little late to the party,” Trey quipped.
I almost wanted to cry with relief as we passed the smallest body of water in the cluster of lakes that were located north of Lake Shawano, the much larger body of water to the south. Ahead of us, I could see the lime green metal of the small bridge that spanned the expanse of White Ridge Lake. We were so close. So close.
And then the Civic rolled to a stop.
The gas tank needle was jiggling to a stop above the E, indicating that our luck had run out and we were finally completely out of gas. It was probable we’d driven the last mile entirely on fumes.
“No, no, no!” I yelled, slapping my palms against the steering wheel in frustration.
“No time to waste. Let’s go,” Trey urged me. He handed me the locket before rocketing out of the passenger side of the car. I followed his lead, hearing the police cars slamming to screeching halts behind us, no doubt leaving streaks of black rubber on the asphalt.
“This is the police! You are under arrest! I command you to stop and put your hands above your heads!”
I ignored the commands of the police as Trey and I ran the last few feet toward the small bridge with all of the energy we had left in us. We ran to its center, and I hesitated just for one second, looking down into the lake’s gray depths. The lake looked especially gloomy that day beneath the miserable cumulus clouds that had rolled in, with black trees, barren of their leaves for the winter, crowning the lake’s edges. Feeling the weight and the cool metal of the locket in my right hand, I leaned back, and whipped the gold necklace as far as I could into the gentle ripple of water below. It sank without even making a splash, and moments later I felt the strong hands of police on my arms, handcuffing me. I turned toward Trey on my left, who was also being handcuffed and led back toward the police car. He was smiling that perfect smile of his, that precious, rare smile that only I ever got to see, the smile he had reserved for me alone since we were little kids.
It was over, at last.
EPILOGUE
Our unassuming little house on Martha Road looked surprisingly different when I came home for winter break. It was smaller than I remembered it being just six weeks earlier when I’d watched it shrink out of view through the back windshield of our car. For the first time, I noticed that the shingles on the roof could use some attention, the brown paint on our shutters was peeling, and our little metal mailbox was rusting in one corner. I knew it wasn’t the house but rather my perspective that had changed during the weeks I’d been away, but it was still unsettling to see my childhood home for the first time with fresh eyes.
Mom had put forth an unexpected, uncharacteristic amount of effort and had decorated the front bushes with glimmering white Christmas lights. I fought a swelling of homesickness rising in the pit of my stomach, reminding myself that there was no reason to miss home when I was right there, where I belonged. It was pointless to dwell on the fact that I’d be headed back to Michigan in just ten days.
“Nice,” I commented from the front seat of the car as we pulled into the driveway. I meant it. The lights looked really cute, and it was touching to see her getting into the holiday spirit for a change. I couldn’t recall Mom ever even
taping up cut-outs of Santa in the front windows before. It made my chest ache a little to even think it, but maybe my being sent away had been good for her.
“They were Glenn’s idea,” she said, blushing a little.
Somehow, miraculously enough, Mom had struck up a bit of a flirtatious friendship with Maude’s vet in the weeks since I’d been away at boarding school in Michigan. As it turned out, they had been classmates together at the University of Sheboygan in the graduate veterinary program, and Glenn was recently divorced. Considering all of the many, many laws Trey and I had broken on our little crime spree in November, I had gotten off somewhat lucky when the district judge had sentenced me to attendance at a behavior modification program, also known as minimum security prison for girls. My new school was pretty horrific, but even more than the uniforms, bad food, uncomfortable beds and strict curfew, the worst part was not having any control over my own private communications. Cell phones weren’t permitted on the campus of the Dearborn School for Girls, and neither was unmonitored internet use. My only communication with Trey for the last six weeks had been ten minute phone calls on Sunday nights on the pay phone in a very public hallway in my dormitory.
While I had been sent to what boiled down to a reform school in Michigan, Trey had been sentenced to a military academy further north on the Canadian border. There literally weren’t any programs for girls who had gotten into as much trouble with the law in the state of Wisconsin as I had, so my mom had been given the choice of two schools, one in Michigan and the other in Minnesota. She had begged the judge to reconsider, claiming she had absolutely no explanation for my behavior on that fateful Saturday other than the severe post-traumatic stress of suffering the loss of two close friends in just two months. The judge hadn’t bought her pleas on my behalf, and even worse, the middle-aged male judge had seemed touched by Hannah’s overly dramatic, tearful recollection of the events of November 2nd. But there was no shortage of military-style behavioral correction facilities for boys in Wisconsin. Trey’s parents had chosen the first on the list provided to them by his attorney, eager to appease the court and move on with their lives.
There were butterflies in my stomach as I entered the house, knowing it would only be a matter of hours until Trey arrived home the next morning. We had barely had time to hug goodbye before being sent away to our respective schools back in November; neither one of us daring to risk additional contact in the face of more punishment. The house smelled as it always did, faintly like coffee and toast. Maude had grown considerably; her head now almost reached my knees.
“Is there anything special you’d like for dinner?” Mom asked.
There were a million special things I wanted for dinner, anything other than the bland roast chicken legs and meatloaf served at Dearborn. It had been four weeks since my last real meal, the huge chef’s salad I had enjoyed at the airport in Florida with Dad and Rhonda when they’d sent me back to school after I spent Thanksgiving with them. But even though I would have loved to answer, “Deep dish spinach pizza from Federico’s,” I really didn’t want to travel into town and risk running into anyone. I didn’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of what was going on at Weeping Willow High School anymore. Mischa had been transferred at her own insistence to St. Patrick’s, and she had been writing me letters detailing her painful adjustment to life under the rule of nuns. Amanda was still at Willow since she was only one semester away from graduation, but I had a feeling she limited how much information she shared with Mischa about school gossip. Cheryl and Erica sent me long, hand-written letters covered in stickers and illustrations of things going on at the high school, but they didn’t concern themselves with the lives of the popular people. Cheryl had started dating Dan Marshall, and most of her letters were about their dates and how much she liked him.
I set my bags down on my bed in my bedroom, suddenly very aware of how exhausted I was. My back ached, my neck felt sore, and the anxiety of the last few weeks of being dropped into a loud, noisy dorm full of girls who had ended up there because they had either gotten pregnant, become addicted to drugs, beaten up their foster brothers and sisters, or run away from home repeatedly, evanesced from my muscles. I had never felt threatened or in danger at Dearborn, mostly because Trey had been coaching me through the experience. “Don’t try to make friends,” he had advised me during our first brief phone call. “Keep your head down. Act dumb if other kids try to befriend you. Don’t do anything to stand out.”
The effort that went into remembering not to smile, suppressing my arm from rising in class when I knew answers, and generally trying to remain invisible—even right down to avoiding second servings of food items that appeared to be popular in the residence cafeteria—was extraordinarily tiring. But finally I was home, in my own safe bedroom, sitting down on my familiar bedspread and laying back. I spread out, stretching my arms wide like an eagle, remembering with a hot pang of desire the last time Trey had crept through my window to spend the night in my bed. It had been the night before we’d toppled Hannah, the night before that locket sank to the bottom of White Ridge Lake. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to picture it there, that dull gold trinket, dark and cold, wedged into the slick silt bottom of the lake, far beneath the silvery white bellies of musky resting in the deeper depths of the lake for the winter. It comforted me to think of it there, wherever it had landed, far from Hannah’s reach.
I may have nodded off only for a few seconds, but was brought back to reality in a heartbeat when I suddenly heard unexpected music. It was a mechanical, slightly off-tune version of “It’s a Small World After All,” one that was so chillingly familiar, I could hardly believe I was hearing it. I sat straight up and looked at the shelf above my bed, where the ceramic music box I’d been given as a child was inexplicably back in its place. I had boxed up all of my music boxes in the fall to prevent Olivia’s spirit from tinkering with them, and the box had been on the top shelf of my closet. My jaw fell open, watching the music box slowly spin and crank out its little tune, sounding more broken and melancholy than ever.
“Mom?” I called out, sounding very alarmed. “Did you put all of my music boxes back up on the shelf?”
My mom appeared in my doorway within seconds, as if she had been waiting down the hall for me to call her name. “Yes,” she admitted. “Your room looked so empty and desolate while you were gone. I put some of your childhood things back out to make it seem a little more like you weren’t so far away. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shook my head, not wanting her to sense the danger in my room that I already sensed. “Not at all,” I assured her. “Hey, what if we ordered a pizza from Federico’s for delivery?”
“Great idea,” she agreed. “Spinach and mushrooms?”
Once she was down the hall again, I crawled over the top of my bed to silence the music box, my heart beating as if it were a brick being thrown against the front of my rib cage repeatedly. I had to contact Trey, but there was no way to reach him until the morning when he got home to Willow. The tiny brown hairs on my forearms stood on edge, and I could feel a prickling along the back of my neck. There was no denying it. We had messed up, big-time. Olivia was back to make sure we knew it.
The locket wasn’t the object tying the spirit to Hannah. It had been a decoy, and I saw it so plainly sitting back down on my bed that I wanted to punch my hand through my window in rage. In my head, I recalled the day in November when we had taken the locket away from Hannah, how she had allowed concerned parents to attend to her in the parking lot as Trey and I sped off in his mom’s car. If the locket had been the real object, she would have followed us. She would have chased us all the way to White Ridge Lake. She would have tried to run us right off the road. I inhaled deeply, trying to calm down and collect my thoughts. Trey and I had been so relieved to dispose of the locket and be free from the curse of the game, it had never occurred to us that we had failed. But of course we had failed; the locket was, looking back now, so obvious. And now we were
both in situations where it would be infinitely more difficult for us to continue investigating Hannah.
All these weeks, Mischa had still been at risk and hadn’t known it. Who knew how much time she had left? Who knew how much more power Hannah had amassed in the month she’d been free from my interruptions? Who knew if she’d played the game again, predicting the deaths of Tracy, Melissa, and the new crop of popular girls who had taken over at the high school?
But if it hadn’t been the locket, what could it have been? What other object could have tied Hannah to her grandmother’s dark spirit? I rose and walked to my window, hearing the whistle and squeal of heat coming from the steam radiator beneath the sill. Across the way, I could see lights on at Trey’s house, and his younger brother setting the table for dinner. I wondered how the kittens that Trey had left behind in his brother’s care were doing. I wondered if Olivia’s resurfacing meant that I’d never again in my life enjoy a peaceful night under the stars, caring for kittens and hoping for a kiss from Trey.
And then my eyes refocused as my warm breath left a smudge of steam on my window. In that puff of steam, I saw a line drawn with perhaps a fingertip. I stood back, and for a few minutes watched as wet heat from the radiator filled the lower half of my window with more steam. There was an unmistakable image drawn on the window, possibly intended for me to see in a moment exactly like this one, when steam on the glass revealed it to me.