Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  “I’m still a part of you,” my reflection told me. It reached for me, I felt its hand on my neck, and—

  I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart beating wildly, and realized it was only one o’clock in the morning. It was nowhere near time to wake up for school, but too late to get out of bed and poke around the kitchen for a glass of water without alarming my mom. I calmed myself in the darkness and silence of my bedroom, and I wondered about the meaning of my dream. My father was a big believer in the psychological significance of dreams; ever since Jennie and I were little, he would ask us about our dreams and request that we retell them to him in detail. It occurred to me that maybe my dream wasn’t about gaining weight and becoming the old McKenna again. Maybe it was about Jennie. If she hadn’t died when she was eight, would she have lost weight and become pretty in the same timeframe as I had? Would she have lost weight and become popular even before I had?

  As I wondered what it might have been like to have Jennie with me at Willow High School, I became keenly aware that I was not alone in my bedroom. A breeze blew in the light curtains that hung at the sides of the blinds over my window soundlessly. When it settled, the room felt suddenly unbearably cold, and it seemed as if I could almost feel something in my room inhaling and exhaling.

  In, out. In, out.

  I sat upright in my bed and remained perfectly still, wondering if whatever it was would leave me alone if it thought I had fallen asleep again. My eyes squeezed shut, and I convinced myself that there was definitely something there with me. It wasn’t so much that I could hear its breathing, but more that I could feel the air pressure in the room falling and rising in the same way that Moxie’s rib cage would expand and contract when she slept. The coldness of the room and the strangeness of the odd presence around me made the exposed bare skin on my arms, resting atop my comforter, prickle with goose bumps.

  I am going crazy, I thought. All this talk about evil spirits and predicting death is making me insane.

  Then, horrifyingly, over my bed, on the shelf where I arranged the music boxes I had accumulated as a little girl, I heard music begin to play. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see, but knew without even looking that the ceramic Minnie Mouse my father had bought for me at Disney World was slowly spinning in circles as it cranked out its mechanical tune of “It’s a Small World.” Next to it, a porcelain ballerina spun in circles on its platform to “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from The Nutcracker. And on the end, a wooden jewelry box with a silver star on its lid must have opened itself to begin chiming out its version of “My Heart Will Go On.” The medley of songs that I used to adore as a little girl all played together in a jumble without my having activated any of the statuettes. The eeriness of the music and spontaneous motion terrified me to the extent that I felt nauseous. I was too scared to even make a noise.

  I tried to convince myself that I should just jump out of my bed and turn on the lights. The space between the edge of my bed and the wall on which the light switch was located was just a matter of a few feet. I could have been there in a fraction of a second if I could have just summoned the courage to throw back my comforter and make a run for it. Just as I had told myself I’d do exactly that on the count of five . . .

  Five, four, three, two—

  I felt with certainty a cold, damp fingertip press against my forearm.

  Gasping in shock, I sprang from my bed, bolted across my room blindly and flipped the light switch. Before I even took the time to become too afraid to turn around I whirled, convinced I’d see something horrible hovering over my bed. But there was nothing. Absolutely nothing unusual, nothing out of place. My usual rainbow-striped sheets, a little faded from the washing machine. My stuffed bunny and stuffed dog next to my pillow, where they always were. The shelf over my bed displaying my music boxes was still in place. The music from the statuettes and jewelry box had ceased instantaneously. My bedroom was oddly, suspiciously, as boring as ever. Almost too calm, too normal.

  I couldn’t help but notice through my lowered blinds that the light in Trey’s bedroom next door was on. Although I couldn’t see the shadow of his body against his blinds, I assumed he was probably awake over there, and I hoped he hadn’t observed that I’d turned my light on. Perhaps he was reading the mysterious works of James W. Listerman. Whatever he was up to at that hour, I was suddenly very self-conscious about the possibility of him noticing that I was awake next door. Part of me wished he were in my room with me to comfort me and assure me there was nothing to fear, but my dream had rattled me, and I was relieved that he couldn’t see me so upset. I snatched my pillow off my bed and turned my light off, seeking a more restful night’s sleep in the living room.

  As I lay on the couch, comforted by the light from the lamp on the table beside me, filling the living room with warmth, my mind drifted into dangerous territory.

  What if Violet wasn’t the one delivering evil into our lives?

  What if it was Jennie, and she had decided she wanted to switch places?

  The more I thought about it, the more the theory seemed logical. If Violet was truly given visions of dead people by her spirits, what if the visions she had received for Olivia, Candace, and Mischa had been provided to her by Jennie? The mere thought that Jennie might have presented her own death as mine to Violet chilled me to the bone. But why would Jennie want to kill my friends? Had she lured Violet to Willow for this particular reason, or was Violet’s delivery to our town just serendipitous to Jennie’s purpose?

  Before I fell asleep, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a framed photo of Jennie and me positioned over the television in an arrangement. The arrangement had been there for so long that I rarely studied the photographs individually; they were all moments in time at photographers’ studios that I could kind of remember but had no reason to recall in detail. The one that caught my attention was of us both, taken right before our first day of kindergarten. It was a rare occasion when we were dressed identically, in pink smocked dresses with our hair in long brown pigtails. I remembered, after a moment, with clarity, how the photographer had positioned us in front of a tacky background that looked like autumn leaves changing color, had given us orange lollipops when were finished, and had led us in an overly enthusiastic chant of “Cheese!” But looking at the picture now, ten years later, I honestly couldn’t tell which smiling little girl was me, and which was my deceased twin.

  CHAPTER 9

  SO, WHAT’S UP WITH YOUR car?” I asked Trey the next morning when we met outside my house to walk to school together. “Is insurance going to cover the cost of a new one?”

  “Why, are you already in the market to upgrade to a guy who can drive you to school?”

  I swatted him. “No! I’m just curious. I know how much you loved that car.”

  “Don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to be ready to get behind the wheel again for a long time.”

  We were in the middle of a long stretch of bad weather, with rain soaking our small town every morning. Trey insisted on holding an umbrella over my head as we walked. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might be strange for him to ever drive a car again after the accident, which sucked because he loved fixing them so much. He seemed distant and uninterested in talking about cars, so I quickly changed the subject, not wanting to put him in a bad mood.

  “So, did James W. Listerman have anything interesting to say about Violet?” I asked.

  “Well, she told you she could hear voices, right? That spirits tell her things? That condition, if she’s not lying and she is really able to hear things, is called ‘clairaudience.’ ”

  “Like clairvoyance, only hearing instead of seeing.”

  “Exactly,” Trey confirmed. “Obviously, not everyone has that kind of ability, so Listerman’s writings suggest one of two possibilities. Either Violet first discovered that she had the power to hear communications from spirits because one particular spirit who had known her during their own life reached out to her, or because she
’s close to someone that another spirit wants to reach, and can’t.”

  A sweeping sensation of coldness filled my body. I wasn’t ready to tell Trey that I thought there might be a possibility that Jennie was behind some of this. But what he had said certainly fit with my theory that perhaps Jennie had reached out to Violet in an attempt to get to me. When I thought about the night of the fire, I had to admit, if Jennie’s spirit was behind all of this, I couldn’t be angry. I supposed if I were her, I’d hold a grudge about being left to die too.

  “So I guess the question is: Has anyone very close to Violet died during her own lifetime? Like a parent or a grandparent?” Trey asked. I had no clue how to go about trying to casually figure that out.

  During gym, Coach Stirling did me the favor of selecting both me and Mischa as volleyball team captains, forcing us to select our classmates one by one until two teams had been formed for a gym class scrimmage. It provided us with an opportunity to suggest our imaginary rivalry. We glared at each other as we made our selections, and I enjoyed the look of pleased surprise that crossed Violet’s face when I chose her first for my team. In a surprising twist of events, my team actually won both of the two matches we managed to squeeze into our fifty-minute gym class, which would probably have felt more meaningful if I’d cared at all about volleyball. The nasty expression on Mischa’s face as we all headed back into the locker room made me have to remind myself that we were only pretending to fight.

  At lunchtime, Violet, Tracy, and I worked on our speeches for the election. We were expected to give one-minute speeches over the high school audio system on Friday during homeroom after announcements. I had never really given much thought to public speaking, but now that it was suddenly and unavoidably in my future, it was pointless to deny that I was terrified. Violet wrote an outline for herself in her spiral notebook that was so concise and well crafted, I wondered if she had secretly worked on it all weekend and was only pretending to write down her first draft alongside Tracy and me. Tracy’s speech was going to be based on her optimism about event planning. She wanted to promise future dances, a junior class Halloween party, and a junior class holiday party, and she seemed insistent on offering the idle promise of a junior class sleepaway ski weekend in Michigan. “How are we going to have two class trips in one year?” I challenged her.

  “Well, your speech could be about extra fund-raising activities.” Tracy smiled back at me viciously.

  Perfect. Way to calm my nerves about having to give a public speech in three days, I thought grimly, by requiring me to get the entire junior class psyched up to spend even more time this winter selling junk that no one in town wants to buy.

  It didn’t seem like there was any natural way to begin my investigation into Violet’s personal history. Only once at lunchtime did I look longingly over my shoulder at my old table, where Isaac and Matt were horsing around. Pete was forlornly eating french fries. Mischa and her sister pretended not to see me watching. I had already been informed that Candace would be eating lunch for the foreseeable future in the nurse’s office.

  * * *

  By Friday, although I’d been rehearsing my speech all week, I still didn’t feel confident about reading it into the loudspeaker system from the principal’s office. I hadn’t slept well all week since the disturbance in my bedroom and was having difficulty keeping my eyes open in class even though nothing else had happened in my room since.

  “And our last announcement of the day before I turn things over to our Student Government candidates for senior class office is that the administration has decided to reschedule the homecoming dance for next Friday, October fourth. The Ortonville Lodge has graciously offered to host the event. Tickets purchased for the originally scheduled dance will be honored, and tickets for the rescheduled event will be available for juniors and seniors to purchase in the cafeteria next week.”

  The freshman girl who had just shyly read the announcements stepped away from the microphone for the school’s audio system in the administrative office to make room for Amanda Portnoy, who was ready to begin her one-minute speech. Amanda would be running for senior class president against Craig Babson, as she did every year. Even after three consecutive losses, Craig must have figured that the chance of losing a fourth time was worth the vindication he’d feel if he were to actually win during senior year and be able to include the position on his college applications. Amanda stepped up calmly to the microphone with her notes for her speech prepared on index cards.

  My brain was still focused too closely on the mention of the homecoming dance being rescheduled for me to pay any attention to what Amanda was saying. How could Principal Nylander possibly think that was a good idea so soon after Olivia’s death? Would a homecoming king and queen be named? I tried to imagine Principal Nylander standing at a podium at the banquet hall at the Ortonville Lodge, the only resort hotel for miles, announcing the winners. Who would people even vote for as queen now that Olivia was dead? I thought of her bare grave, not even marked yet with a headstone. It just felt wrong to me that life would be moving on so rapidly without her.

  “First of all, I’d like to thank Principal Nylander for rescheduling the homecoming dance. Celebrating life and our time together as classmates is the best way for us to recover from the tragedy that our school suffered two weeks ago. We should never lose sight of the fact that life is short, and every moment counts,” Violet was saying into the microphone. She was so cool, so collected, that her ad-libbed commentary about the homecoming announcement seemed rehearsed. All the senior candidates had delivered their speeches already, and I’d barely heard a word. I would have to step up to the microphone in fewer than five minutes, and I couldn’t concentrate. The thought of having to actually put on the lavender dress that I’d bought for the Fall Fling—back when I’d still been dreaming of dancing with Henry under the disco ball—made me feel dizzy. Would I go to homecoming with Trey? Would Mischa and Candace boycott it? Would Pete dare to attend?

  “McKenna,” Violet whispered.

  It was my turn. Tracy stood next to the microphone having just finished her speech, and was forcing a smile at me. I clutched between my fingers the index cards that I had written out for myself the night before and stepped toward the microphone, avoiding Jason Arkadian’s stare. I hadn’t heard a word of what Violet had said after she so eloquently made reference to Olivia’s death as if she’d had nothing to do with it. Michael and Tracy’s speeches had rushed past my ears without a single phrase standing out to me. All that was left was for me to read my notes off my cards, and then for Jason to step up to the microphone and quite possibly obliterate me.

  “Ahem,” I began, trying to focus. “I’m McKenna Brady and I’m running for junior class treasurer. As Tracy mentioned, we have a lot of exciting ideas for this year, but to keep them affordable for everyone to participate, it will involve the need to raise money. Rather than relying on fund-raisers that require us to sell candy or cheese or other things to our neighbors and family members as we usually do, as part of my campaign platform I’m proposing that we offer a series of services to our community that will involve a small time commitment from each of us instead of an obligation to meet an individual financial goal.”

  My voice was shaking, and I struggled to read my own handwriting on my note cards. I imagined how the entire school was reacting to my delivery at that point, nearly twelve minutes into Student Government speeches; I was certain that spitballs were being thrown and texts were being sent in every single classroom. But I had to press on, if not just to win the election, to avoid sounding like a complete fool.

  “Some ideas that I have been considering are a lawn clean-up service during the fall, snow-shoveling service during the winter, and a booth at Winnebago Days where we can offer our own talents to Willow to make some money for our class trip as well as gain experience to put on our college applications.” I hesitated, knowing that I was going to hate myself for what I was about to say next, but figuring if Viol
et had gone there, I had to too. “Everyone can agree that volunteering time after school or on a weekend sucks. But we deserve for our junior year to be a great time in our lives. Our class has experienced a great loss this year already, and we owe it to one another to commit to making the rest of this year as fun and memorable as we can. If you vote for me, I will work tirelessly to make sure that this year is one that we all remember fondly.”

  As I stepped away from the microphone, my hands were trembling. I could hear one of the office secretaries blowing her nose, and when I turned, I saw her dabbing at tears in the corners of her eyes with a tissue. She gave me a thumbs-up. Michael Walton patted me on the back with a friendly smile. Violet mouthed, Good job, to me silently. Tracy smiled impatiently and batted her eyelashes at me. She was really starting to bother me, especially because she had cozied up to Violet so quickly. She had no idea what she was getting herself into. Jason’s speech focused on the need to start building up our class savings so that we could afford an impressive class gift when we were seniors. I felt a little bad for Jason, and wondered if it might have been a wiser move for me to have just flubbed my speech and handed him the election.

  After school, Violet cornered me at my locker with her backpack already fastened over both shoulders. “You should come over to my house. We could bake cupcakes to hand out at lunchtime on Monday. Like a campaign promotion.”

  I thought about the history chapter I had to read later that night about the Constitution, and the Spanish verb conjugation exercises I had neglected to finish during study hall, but forced myself to grin. An opportunity to check out Violet’s house was too tempting to pass up. Who knew when or if I’d have another chance? “Sure, that sounds great. I just have to text my mom and let her know I’m not going straight home.”

  Violet lived on the outskirts of town. We drove to her house after school in the white Audi her parents had recently bought for her. Her family’s property was enclosed by a tall fence, and she punched a security code into an app on her phone to unlock the front gate. The house was set far back from the street down a long private road. It was nearly hidden completely by thick evergreens, with the sharp points of its Tudor roof poking out above the peaks of green in the distance.