by Zoe Aarsen
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
“I thought maybe her mom would let her out to come to this, but maybe not,” Mischa mused. “Maybe she’s worse than I thought.” It couldn’t be discounted that Olivia’s death had been a purely random coincidence. Even though it seemed pretty undeniable that Violet had known exactly what was going to happen, it was still hard to believe that it was true. There was simply no explanation for how she could have predicted everything, or had a hand in making all the events actualize.
“We’re stepping outside for air,” I told my mom, who was fiddling with her purse like she was ready to leave. Naturally, people couldn’t help but stare at my mom, since many of the guests in attendance at Olivia’s service had lived in our town long enough to remember the fire. Surely they were thinking that my mom had some kind of an obligation to offer words of comfort to the Richmonds, having herself lost a child in a freak accident. But my mom wasn’t like that; even after eight years, her grief over Jennie’s death was still very private. When she’d seen Tracy Hartford’s mother approach her earlier in the afternoon, she had busied herself by pretending to read Olivia’s prayer card. “You don’t have to stay. I can get a ride home when I’m ready.”
My mom looked like I had handed her a winning lottery ticket, and confessed to having some lesson plans to prepare at home. She accompanied Mischa and me outside to the parking lot, and we waited in silence, our backs pressed against the brick exterior of Gundarsson’s, until she got into her car and drove off. It was cold out, significantly colder in just the ten days that had passed since Olivia’s birthday party. Cold enough that I buttoned up my denim jacket and Mischa pulled her wool cardigan around her waist. We stood outside watching traffic pass on the highway in silence for a few seconds, our eyes adjusting to the bright, overcast day after having been in the dim funeral parlor for so long.
“My parents asked me about the game. Candace’s mom called my mom and wanted to know what we did on Friday night,” Mischa finally said, her voice flat and emotionless.
“Jesus, you didn’t tell her, did you?” I asked, suddenly fearful that rumors were going to sweep the high school that we had been invoking spirits or worshipping the devil. My stomach felt upset, like I knew I was going to get in trouble, only I was far too old to be afraid of punishment. Primarily I felt embarrassed, because the game we’d played was so childish, for middle schoolers. It would be mortifying for the entire high school to find out that was how the most popular girls in the junior class had spent a Friday night.
“No! Of course not,” Mischa exclaimed. She thought for a second, and then added, “I said we were telling ghost stories, but that was it. I mean, I feel bad kind of implying that Candace is lying, but she needs to get a grip! She can’t just go around claiming that Violet had something to do with Olivia’s death. She’s going to make us all seem nuts.”
“Have you heard from Violet at all?” I asked. “I’ve left her two voice mails, but she hasn’t called me back.”
A car entered the parking lot of the funeral home and both of our heads turned. It was the Emorys’ car, and when it parked, Trey emerged with his parents, looking almost unrecognizable. It wasn’t so much the black eye he had or the bright blue sling around his left arm that made him look so much like a different person, but the dark navy suit he wore with a silk tie. My immediate assumption was that he’d been in some kind of fight, and I wondered if he’d been out causing trouble on Friday night. I knew he sometimes hung out at Tallmadge Park with the heavy-metal guys from school, and every once in a while troublemakers from Ortonville would show up there looking to throw some punches. Our eyes met across the parking lot, and he looked away quickly as he approached the entrance with his parents.
“I cannot believe he’s here,” Mischa commented as the Emorys approached where we were lingering.
“Why? Because he wasn’t friends with Olivia?” I asked.
Mischa looked at me as if I was crazy. “No, McKenna. Trey Emory was driving the night of the accident.”
Time came to a standstill. My heart paused for a prolonged second as I tried to make sense of what Mischa had told me, working backward from the present to the beginning of Trey’s involvement with Olivia’s death. Trey had been with Olivia at the moment she died.
“We’ve talked on the phone, like, fifty times since Saturday morning and you never mentioned that,” I said, sounding hoarse.
“I thought I told you this morning. He ran into Olivia in the parking lot at the mall and offered her a jump-start, and when that didn’t work, he said he’d give her a ride back to Willow. Then the hail started.”
The Emorys reached the entrance to the funeral parlor, and Trey strode inside without even acknowledging Mischa and me. Mrs. Emory recognized me and paused to greet me, and Mr. Emory stood loyally behind her, his hand on the small of her back as she leaned forward to peck me on the cheek. Mrs. Emory smelled like powdery perfume, one that was expensive and worn only on special occasions.
“Hello, McKenna,” she said, sounding tired. “Is your mother here with you?”
“She already left,” I said. “She had stuff to do at home.”
“I’ll stop by the house to say hi later,” Mrs. Emory said wistfully, as if she and my mother were confidantes. Mrs. Emory was a little younger than my mom, and to the best of my knowledge they rarely spoke other than trading niceties in the driveway. She and Mr. Emory entered the funeral parlor, and Mischa raised an eyebrow at me.
“Who did you hear that from, about Trey?” I asked, my voice sounding a little strangled.
“Do you, like, know them?” Mischa asked suspiciously, distracted by my interaction with Trey’s parents. Her eyes darted toward the doors of the funeral parlor, specifying that it was the Emorys to whom she was referring.
“Sort of. They live on our street.”
That explanation seemed sufficient for Mischa to believe that I hadn’t been holding out on her about us having some kind of secret friendship. “There’s this girl, Megan, on my gymnastics team whose mom works in the emergency room at St. Matthew’s Hospital in Suamico. She told me that Trey was brought in by an ambulance on Friday, and he was in shock. He couldn’t even tell the doctors what had happened. He saw everything,” Mischa told me, her eyes enormous. “They had to sedate him and take his ID out of his wallet to even figure out who to call. My stupid parents made us go to gymnastics practice last night even though we’re, like, in mourning. So I only found out last night when Megan told me.”
Mischa continued grumbling about her parents’ insistence that she continue her training in preparation for the state sectionals in February despite the shock of Olivia’s death. Her voice grew distant as my knees weakened with nausea. My heart ached for Trey and my feelings were even more hurt that he hadn’t said hello to me as he had passed us on his way into the funeral home. Cheryl had told me that Olivia’s injuries had been as terrible as those described by Violet in her prediction, and I couldn’t imagine being inches away from that kind of gore. I thought of Trey’s beloved Corolla and made the connection that it was the scrap heap I’d seen in the photo that ran in the town newspaper. That car, the one he’d spent so many weekend afternoons fixing, was completely wrecked.
But despite sympathy for him, I couldn’t help but wonder—what had Trey been doing in Green Bay at the mall on Friday evening after I’d run into him in the parking lot at school?
I was so caught up in thinking about Trey that I forgot if Mischa had said she’d heard a word from Violet. The sun began to set just after six o’clock, and Mischa’s parents insisted on driving me home. On my way out of Gundarsson’s, I finally submitted to Tracy Hartford’s request for me to sign the guest book. Nearly every single page was covered in the neat penmanship of parents and drawings of kitties, butterflies, hearts, and unicorns. Michael Walton had been enough of a freak to write junior class vice president beneath his name. As I slowly signed my name in my best handwriting, I felt like I was making
a promise to Olivia that I would find out why this happened. I remembered her trying to bribe me with tacos. If I had been a better friend, if I’d wanted her to like me more, if I hadn’t been so adamant about running for office and trying to carve out a little independence for myself, I might have saved Olivia’s life.
Or I might have died alongside her.
* * *
Mom had actually cooked a real dinner: a turkey meat loaf and baked sweet potatoes, a menu that consisted of foods from Rhonda’s recommended list for me, showing that my mom cared more about the impact of Olivia’s death on me than she had let on earlier in the day. We ate in silence, and she told me that Dad had called before I’d gotten home.
“Your dad’s worried about you,” Mom told me. “If you want to talk to a professional, he can make arrangements for you to see one of his old colleagues in Sheboygan.”
I didn’t look up. I continued stabbing at my turkey meat loaf with my fork. My feelings about Olivia’s death were too complicated to share with a psychiatrist. I was upset about her loss, of course. But I was also being honest enough with myself to admit that after only three weeks of close friendship, I didn’t really have the right to be completely devastated by her death. I didn’t know Olivia all that well, not at all, and now I never would. My predominant feelings were of surprise, and of overwhelming indirect responsibility. My throat and chest felt raw from crying because of this sense of guilt, not because I couldn’t bear the thought of going on with my life without Olivia in it. A professional psychiatrist couldn’t possibly have understood how I felt, convinced that my participation in a stupid party game had led to my friend’s death.
And worse: We’d all played the game. Violet had predicted all of our deaths.
Well, except mine.
For the first chilling time I wondered in terror . . . would Candace or Mischa be next?
“I’m fine,” I told my mom before clearing my plate.
After I had changed into pajamas, Moxie scratched at my closed bedroom door to let me know that she wanted to run around the backyard one more time. I put on my slippers and my denim jacket and followed her to the kitchen. When I slid open the door to our small deck, I was startled to see Trey sitting on the steps, his back to me. He had changed out of his suit and was wearing his army coat and jeans again. He only budged when Moxie rushed toward him and attacked him with dog kisses, her tail wagging. His right hand moved up to her thick fur coat to pet her, and he turned to permit her to lick his face. He kept his left arm, still in its blue brace, pinned to his side.
Moxie’s attention was caught by fluttering leaves at the far corner of the yard, and she trotted off as quickly as she could on her sore limbs to investigate. I hesitated for a moment before walking across the deck and sitting down on the steps next to Trey, leaving as many inches between us as the width of the steps would allow. The moon was a waning sliver of a crescent. Clouds slowly moved past it in what looked like nomadic caravans. There was simply nothing to say, I knew, despite the fact that my brain kept testing out greetings in my head, all of which I deemed unworthy. Even just simply saying, Are you okay? felt like it would come out wrong. Of course he wasn’t okay; that much was obvious. I didn’t dare look at him, not even out of the corner of my eye, because I knew if I got the slightest glimpse of his face I would be unable to stop staring at his swollen black eye. Mischa had said that Trey hadn’t been able to speak at the hospital on Friday night. It was entirely possible that he wasn’t speaking yet at all.
After a few minutes of silence, without saying a word, I reached for his hand and held it in mine. We sat there quietly in the cool night air, our hands locked between us on the wooden step. I could feel my heart beating against my own rib cage, and I struggled to think of anything I could say that might comfort him after what he’d experienced. I wondered if he felt responsible for the accident since the newspaper had said he was the one who had accidentally swerved into oncoming traffic. My heart ached with the desire to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. There was nothing he could have done to prevent what had happened, but I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that. If I hadn’t been acting like such a selfish brat in wanting to rush off to the game on Friday, maybe I could have spared him from all this pain.
A lump rose in my throat. Seeing him like this, hurting so badly, made me desperately wish for a chance to do things differently. When I finally opened my mouth to speak, I said in a shaky voice, “Trey, I’m sorry.”
He waited a long time before finally replying, “I’m sorry you missed the dance.” Of all the things for him to have said in that moment, the last thing I was expecting was an apology from him about the cancellation of the dance. The dance, and all my romantic expectations for it, seemed like part of a different life, one I could barely remember.
“I don’t care about the dance,” I said truthfully. There were suddenly so many more things on the horizon that were more urgent than slow dancing with a guy I barely knew. Like trying to figure out if Violet had actually murdered Olivia in some roundabout way. “Right now, I care about you.”
“Yeah, but you did care. Before Friday night, you cared,” Trey said slowly, stating what he assumed to be a fact rather than phrasing his statement as an accusation.
I felt an obligation rising. I felt like I had no choice but to confess to him what we’d done at Olivia’s birthday party, how we had summoned these events, how Mischa and I were trying to make sense of them, and how they were driving Candace mad. Now he was a part of it all, and I had to wonder if Violet had seen Trey in her vision of Olivia’s death. But I couldn’t be sure of Trey’s state of mind, whether he’d be open to hearing my paranormal mumbo jumbo so soon after the horror of the accident.
“Nothing before Friday night matters,” I said finally, deciding not to tell him anything about Violet’s game just yet.
He turned toward me, and only when I felt his gaze on me did I dare turn to the left to examine him. His right eye was swollen nearly shut, and the bruising around it was an angry shade of purple. I hadn’t noticed at Gundarsson’s, but he also had stitches sewn in black thread, a single-file line of Xs, along his right cheekbone, and swelling along his lower lip. His eyes were blue, a dazzling aquamarine, I made note, recalling how I had neglected to check during our last late-night encounter.
“That’s not true. A lot of things happened before Friday night that matter.”
I was so taken aback by how seriously he had been hurt in the car crash, I couldn’t say a word. It was a miracle he hadn’t also been killed instantly. He never could have known when he’d offered Olivia a ride what awaited him on the highway, but I’d known. I squeezed his hand, remembering how he had touched my hair the previous weekend. “You’re right,” I agreed. On an impulse, I leaned over and kissed him gently on his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “That you got mixed up in all of this.”
His lips parted in question for a second, but I was already standing, my hand sliding out of his. “Moxie, come on, girl,” I called, and the dog looked up at me from across the yard and began her lopsided hobble back to the deck. Even as I stood there, awkwardly waiting for my dog, I wondered if I had just blown a shot at having him kiss me, my first real kiss with a boy I really liked. But Trey wasn’t supposed to be the boy who kissed me my junior year. It was supposed to be Henry at the Fall Fling, Henry about whom I would daydream.
None of this was supposed to be happening.
* * *
“Where have you been?”
In the locker room the next morning, Mischa and I found Violet in the farthest corner, changing into her uniform. Her complexion was pale, and her eyes looked sunken, as if she had suffered through the flu all weekend. When she saw us approaching her, her expression remained unchanged, and she looked away immediately, securing her combination lock on her locker. She sat down on a nearby bench to lace up her running shoes.
“Did you hear me? I’ve been texting you all weekend, Violet. What
is going on?” Mischa put her hands on her hips and stood over Violet, fuming. For someone of such small stature, Mischa exuded a terrifying amount of power.
Other girls around us, also changing for gym class, looked over their shoulders at us. The entire high school was on edge that day. It was like the weekend of unexpected tragedy had pushed us all hard from behind—like a shove off a plane to force someone to reluctantly begin skydiving—right into a Tuesday schedule. Olivia’s death had been mentioned in the announcements during homeroom, inspiring half the student body to spontaneously burst into tears before the day had even really begun. We’d all received text messages on Saturday morning letting us know that the Fall Fling had been canceled, and there were rumors going around about homecoming being rescheduled, too, or it being canceled completely.
When Violet looked up at us, both laces tied, her eyes were glassy with tears and she was grimacing, kind of like the unfulfilled urge to sob was causing her physical pain.
“I’m sorry, but what did you want me to do? I knew as soon as I heard about Olivia that you guys were going to be mad at me,” Violet said.
“We’re not mad at you!” Mischa yelled, certainly sounding mad. Now other girls were staring as they changed. We were creating a locker-room spectacle. “But you have some explaining to do, Violet, and I think you know why.”
I stood behind Mischa with my arms crossed over my chest. Confrontation really wasn’t my style, and I was a little terrified to accuse Violet of anything without having a better sense of exactly how much she had manipulated events leading up to the accident. I felt the tiniest little seed of an idea, of acting as sort of a spy to get closer to Violet, begin to grow in my head. If I could get to know Violet better and convince her that I was on her side, maybe she’d admit the truth to me. After Olivia’s party, she’d confessed to me that she had visions of how people would die. Based on that alone, I reasoned that I had a better chance than anyone else at school at getting answers from her.