by Zoe Aarsen
She dug the keys to her new car out of her pink leather purse and dangled them from one of her fingers. “Last chance to come with me to Green Bay.”
“Wait a minute. You’re going to the big mall in Green Bay?” I asked suddenly, the details of Violet’s story at Olivia’s birthday party returning to me. “Why would you do that? That’s scary, Olivia. It’s just like Violet’s story.”
“Oh my God,” Olivia smiled, wrinkling her forehead. “You’re not afraid to go shopping with me because of some stupid ghost story, are you? I’ve already looked for shoes at every store in the crappy mall in Ortonville. The dance is tomorrow!”
“No, of course not! That would be dumb.” My real reason for not going to Green Bay was the meeting starting momentarily in Mr. Dean’s classroom. “But you have to admit, it is scary that Violet said you’d be driving to Green Bay for shoes the day before the dance.”
“McKenna, you are way too gullible. Violet’s story was about a storm, and it’s perfectly sunny outside. Candace has been checking the weather report all week to make sure the game won’t be delayed. I will be fine.” Olivia rolled her eyes and swatted me on the upper arm. “No tacos for you, then.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” I said, hoping that I hadn’t genuinely infuriated her. As I watched her saunter down the long hallway toward the doors to the parking lot, her long pale blonde hair hanging in a straight sheet to her waist, I realized there was a slim chance that Pete wouldn’t even be waiting for me after school. That was how Olivia operated, if she was angry. Like a queen, moving all her pawns to suit her whims.
* * *
“Voting will be held on Monday of the week after next. All ballots will be counted that night. You have all of next week to promote your campaigns. The ballots will be tallied by a team of faculty members to remove any potential for cheating.”
Mr. Dean droned on and on, having documented and created a strict process for every single detail of our student elections. At least I could relax a little now that I had seen the competition. No one was attempting to run against Olivia Richmond; that would have been sheer madness. Michael Walton was being challenged by Nicole Blumenthal, who was also his only real competition for valedictorian status. Jason Arkadian smiled weakly at me across the aisle of chairs, and then proceeded to doodle in his spiral notebook throughout the entire meeting. I recalled sourly how Mischa had told me the night we were in Olivia’s pool that Jason had a crush on me, and figured it was safe to assume that he’d been cured of his crush.
Outside the classroom, a story below, I could hear the marching band loading its equipment onto the orange school bus that would deliver it to Kenosha. I remembered back to the big game against Kenosha the previous year, and how itchy and hot my navy color guard uniform had been in the atypical September heat on the night of the game. I wondered if Kelly and Erica, the girls with whom I had been closest friends on the color guard team, were boarding the bus for the long drive.
I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. It was stultifying in the history classroom, and when I turned to see if the windows at the back of the room were even open, I was alarmed to see that storm clouds were rolling in. When I’d first sat down at the start of the meeting, the sky outside had been clear and blue. But now it looked unnaturally bright outside with a thick blanket of clouds covering the sun.
I immediately thought of Violet. Maybe I was being paranoid, but she’d conveniently excused herself from our plans to go to the football game earlier that day, as if she’d known details of her story were going to fall into place. But there was no time to be furious with Violet; I had to reach Olivia and beg her not to go to the mall.
Without wanting to attract the attention of Mr. Dean, I pulled my phone out of my purse and discreetly texted Olivia. Are you at the mall? Are you okay?
She texted me back five minutes later, when Mr. Dean was wrapping up the meeting, distributing handouts listing rules regulating in-school campaign advertising. Just got here. Took forever to find parking. Posters, buttons, and stickers were permitted. Stickers found stuck on school property, like lockers, would be scraped off by the janitors. Posters defaming any other candidates would not be allowed. Advertising materials making mention of any school faculty or staff, or using profanity, would not be allowed. It made my head spin to think that Mr. Dean had spent so much time imagining all the ways in which kids might underhandedly promote themselves just to win a school election.
Finally, the meeting came to an end. It was ten minutes to four, a full five minutes after Pete had said he wanted everyone to meet in the parking lot to depart for Kenosha. I was frantic with fear that the group had left without me, just as afraid of being left behind as I was that Olivia was breezily going through the motions that Violet had already told her would result in her death. I rushed down the stairs to the ground floor of the school and pushed through the doors that led to the student parking lot.
Outside, I was stunned by the strange energy of the afternoon. The cloudy sky was bright with ultraviolet rays, and everything in the parking lot was at a standstill. There was an electric charge in the air as if something was about to happen, something static and coiled, waiting to be set into motion. I looked around for Pete’s black Infiniti, not seeing it in the first three rows of cars, and I fished my phone out of my bag to pretend to look busy. Would they really have left without me? Are they on their way to Kenosha right now, laughing because they know I’m probably standing here looking for Pete’s car? I felt like I was breaking out into a light sweat. That might have been it, the end of my brief popularity, right there on that strange afternoon.
Suddenly, the door behind me opened, and I turned, expecting to see Candace or Jeff, but instead I was startled to see Trey Emory, wearing his usual scowl and army jacket. When our eyes met he looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and he straightened his posture. “Why aren’t you on your way to Kenosha? Aren’t you going to the big game?” Trey asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.
“I am,” I said nervously, wishing he weren’t there right then, at that very moment. “But I think my friends might have left without me. I was in this meeting, and it ran kind of late.”
Trey studied me and shifted his weight from one ratty black Chuck Taylor to the other. “Well, leaving without you doesn’t sound like something real friends would do.”
I picked at my fingernail polish. My life had been much less complicated before I’d been inducted into Olivia’s world. I could have been in Cheryl’s mom’s car at that very moment, singing Lamb and Owl songs at the top of my lungs, if things hadn’t changed before junior year. “Why are you still at school?” I asked him, wanting desperately to change the topic.
Trey shrugged. “Detention. We were changing the spark plugs and wires in Coach Stirling’s car in shop yesterday and . . . let’s just say she wasn’t happy with my work.”
I could hardly believe my own ears. Coach Stirling drove a legendary piece of junk, a 1989 powder-blue Cadillac Fleetwood that was too enormous to even fit in one parking space in the faculty parking lot. The auto shop class was always working on it, giving Coach Stirling much-needed free tune-ups. “Geez, Trey! You can’t just sabotage a teacher’s car!”
Trey smiled innocently. “I wasn’t intentionally trying to sabotage it. Maybe I just suck at fixing cars.”
I thought of Trey’s Toyota and how it was basically held together with a hope and a prayer. He was in the Emorys’ driveway almost every Saturday, working on it. “Yeah, right. You probably could teach auto shop at this point.”
He looked at his shoes, quite possibly blushing, and then added, “Well, maybe I decided to use Coach Stirling’s car as the subject of an experiment because she doesn’t like my sense of humor.”
I was about to inquire further when suddenly Pete’s black Infiniti pulled into the parking lot, blaring music. Jeff sat in the front seat. Candace and Melissa, a girl I didn’t know very well, sat in the back. “Are you ready, McKenna?” Jeff
asked through his rolled-down window.
“Where were you guys?” I dared to ask.
“We stopped by my house to get umbrellas,” Candace said from the back seat. “It’s going to pour.”
I looked up at the sky. The clouds were darkening, looking much more like storm clouds than they had just five minutes earlier. Had the similarities between the day’s events and the elements of Violet’s story about Olivia’s death crossed Candace’s mind? I really hoped that Olivia would abandon her mission to find shoes and drive to Kenosha before the sky got any darker. “Do you think the game is going to be canceled?”
“It’s not raining in Kenosha. I’m checking my weather app,” Jeff informed all of us.
Next to me, I saw Trey shrinking away toward his own car. I wanted to shout after him, but hesitated for a moment, hoping he wouldn’t be annoyed with me for calling attention to him in front of the car full of popular kids. “Hey, Trey,” I shouted against my better judgment.
He slowed down just for a second and turned, but kept walking backward, not wanting to slow his pace toward his car.
“See ya,” I said weakly.
He waved quickly without saying a word, his hand low, lifted out of his pants pocket for just a flash.
I climbed into the back seat of Pete’s car as Melissa moved into the middle to make room for me. “Hi,” I said to Melissa.
“Melissa’s going to the dance with Jeff,” Candace said, explaining the presence of the girl with bright red hair and freckles.
“Has anyone heard from Olivia recently?” I asked. Fifteen minutes had passed since the last time she’d texted me, which made me nervous. Just then, my phone and Candace’s buzzed in unison.
“Speak of the devil!” Candace laughed. We both checked our phones to find that Olivia wanted our input on two different pairs of cream-colored pumps she had found at the mall. “Totally the first pair,” Candace commented, showing the pictures on her phone’s screen to Melissa for approval.
I lowered my voice and said to Candace, “Think about it, Candace. Olivia’s in Green Bay shopping for shoes, and it’s the day before the dance.” She looked at me with a confused expression before I continued, “And she drove there alone, in her red Prius. Isn’t that kind of freaky?”
“What’s freaky about that?” Melissa asked innocently.
Catching my hint, Candace blinked twice. “Oh. Right. Crap.” Instead of texting her recommendation on which pair of shoes to buy back to Olivia, she tapped a long note into her phone and flashed me a distressed frown after hitting send. She inhaled deeply and said, “Better to be safe than sorry, right?”
An hour and about twenty heavy metal songs later, we were outside Oshkosh when it began drizzling. The rain put me on edge. Everything was starting to feel eerily similar to the story that Violet had told, like the entire afternoon was an extended moment of déjà vu. I focused on trying to imagine what it was going to be like once we got to Kenosha: the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and Olivia waiting for us in the stands.
“You guys,” Candace said, as if she was trying to motivate us to do something fun, “you know what would be so cool? If we stopped at the next rest station.”
Pete and Jeff both groaned. I was secretly relieved because I had to visit a bathroom too, only I didn’t have enough of a friendship established with Pete to request a stop. With much complaining about girls and their weak bladders, Pete pulled off the highway at the next rest stop and parked. The rain was falling more steadily, dancing on the roof of Pete’s car and running in tiny rivers down its windows. Using the umbrellas brought from Candace’s house, we all made a dash across the parking lot, running in between parked trucks. Pete intentionally jumped in a puddle to douse Jeff as he ran by, and Jeff yelled a curse word at him, the legs of his jeans soaked.
“It’s totally raining,” Candace said as we both washed our hands in the ladies’ room of the rest station beneath glaring fluorescent lights. “They’re going to cancel the game.”
Melissa joined us a second later, stepping in between us to use the available sink.
“Who could we call to ask?” I wondered, not really wanting to drive all the way to Kenosha only to turn around and drive home again. At that point it would have been a huge relief to know that Olivia was driving home from Green Bay instead of to Kenosha, and to go home myself, since I was uneasy about the argument I’d had with my mom earlier that day about curfew.
Candace suggested, “Let’s text Mischa. The cheerleading squad should already be down there.”
The group of us reconvened in the small food court area of the rest station, where a handful of truck drivers sat, eating burgers and ignoring each other, as we waited for Mischa to text Candace back with an update about whether or not the game had been postponed. Through the wide glass doors of the rest station, we watched the rain shift into a heavy downpour, and a blinding flash of lightning crackled in the sky moments before an earsplitting clap of thunder shook the building.
“Call Olivia,” I commanded Candace, my voice trembling. I was convinced that she was in danger. “She’ll listen to you. Tell her she has to leave the mall right now if she hasn’t already.”
Candace didn’t argue; she whipped out her phone and opened her list of contacts.
“Jesus,” Pete muttered. “It’s like the end of the world.”
“There’s no way the game is still happening,” Melissa said, popping one of the cheese fries she had purchased into her mouth. Jeff helped himself to some of her fries, sliding into the hard plastic seat next to hers. The energy that we had carried into the rest station was steadily evaporating. Our clothes were damp, our hair was tousled, and the long drive ahead to Kenosha seemed more daunting the longer we sat still.
Candace pressed her ear to her phone, waiting for Olivia to answer, then checked its screen and announced, “Mischa.” She answered it, stepping away from the rest of us for a few minutes to chat. My breath was becoming a little rapid the more I thought about Olivia by herself in Green Bay. I wished Candace would wrap it up with Mischa and call Olivia again. When Candace returned, she reported, “Game’s off. It’s being rescheduled.”
A truck driver with a long scraggly gray beard wearing a Brewers baseball cap walked past our table on his way to dump the paper liner and napkins on his food tray into a nearby trash can. “You kids might as well sit tight for a while. There’s a flash flood warning in effect. You shouldn’t be driving on these roads right now.”
Pete rolled his eyes once the truck driver’s back was to us, but not one of us moved a muscle to get up from our table and return to Pete’s Infiniti. None of the truck drivers at the rest stop appeared to be in a hurry to leave either. All of them patiently watched the lightning flash through the station’s thick windows, drinking coffees and flipping through newspapers, content to wait the storm out.
Candace called Olivia again and left her a voice mail, sternly demanding that she call her back.
“I am completely freaked out,” I told Candace quietly, no longer able to suppress my fascination and fear about how the afternoon was unfolding. We sat next to each other on a hard plastic bench one table away from Melissa and Jeff. I thought of Olivia’s words in the hallway near my locker earlier that afternoon, when she had begged me to accompany her to the mall. She’d asked me if I was afraid to go to Green Bay with her “because of a stupid ghost story.” This was no ghost story. This was something profoundly sinister, and it felt like it was happening with the momentum of a freight train. “Violet did this. She said all of this was going to happen. She made it happen.”
“Agreed,” Candace said without elaboration. She called Olivia again, who surprisingly answered this time. “Olivia? The game’s postponed.” She paused, pressing her hand to her free ear to block out the scratchy music playing in the rest station in order to hear Olivia better. “Where are you?” She paused again, still having difficulty hearing Olivia. “We’re just outside Oshkosh, but we’re turning arou
nd once the rain stops and driving home. Can you hear me?”
Candace pulled her phone away from her ear and looked at it angrily as if she intended to fling it across the rest station. “Her phone battery is dying,” she told me, frustrated. “She says she’s fine and she’s still at the mall, but . . .”
Candace didn’t have to finish her sentence for me to already know what would follow.
“Her car won’t start.”
Our eyes locked, and a chill ran through me so violently that I actually shivered. Melissa noticed the serious expressions on both of our faces and stopped chewing. “What’s up with you two?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Candace said sharply over her shoulder. Her mouth resumed the shape of a firm line, and she looked back at me.
“Do you think we should say something to Pete?” I asked. Pete and Jeff were playing video games on their phones, oblivious to our panic.
“Hell no.” Candace shook her head. “They’d think we’re nuts.”
“Quite honestly, I think we’re nuts too. But this is too crazy.”
Candace looked like she was about to start crying, which rattled me even more. Candace Cotton—the girl who wasn’t afraid of anything—was afraid. It made me feel a little better to be in her presence, because if Candace was willing to admit that the events of Violet’s story were falling into place, I knew I wasn’t being paranoid.
“What should we do? Should we call the police?” I asked, completely serious.
“Not the police,” Candace said firmly, raising her phone again. She tapped the screen. “We’re calling Violet.”
She strummed her fingernails impatiently on the crumb-covered table where we sat as Violet’s phone rang once, twice, three times and then transferred to voice mail. Candace frowned and held the phone up to my ear so that I could hear Violet’s familiar outgoing message: “Hi! This is Violet! I’m not able to answer right now, so . . .”