Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  My father was thrilled to offer up the services of his former colleagues. He told me he would e-mail me the names and contact information of psychiatrists he recommended.

  “One more thing, Dad. When you were growing up, did you know of any families in Willow named Simmons?”

  He paused and actually thought about my question for a minute. “Give me a moment here, McKenna. You’re asking me about ancient history. Simmons . . . Simmons. I can’t recall having any friends or classmates named Simmons. But I’m pretty sure there was a really well-to-do family in Willow back then by that name. They had something to do with construction. When the library expanded, the new wing was named after them.”

  Owning a construction company certainly seemed like a possible way for Violet’s grandparents to have amassed enough wealth to afford that big house out in the woods. At least it was something for me to go on. If Dad was right about the library, I could start my research around the building’s expansion.

  That night, wrapped in Trey’s arms, I shared with him my plan to use Candace as my guinea pig. If I could convince her to visit the psychiatrist and have removed whatever hypnotic spell she might have been under, I could determine if it improved her overall state of mind. And if it worked for her, then I would have good reason to believe that it would work for me.

  “And if it doesn’t help Candace, then you’ll believe this is real and not in your head?” Trey asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe we’re all still under some spell. If we are, then I’m probably just perceiving every little thing that’s happening as part of this.”

  Trey pushed my hair back from my face and said carefully, “What about the thing in this room? I wasn’t hypnotized, and I believe that was real.”

  I knew what he was saying was true, and it somewhat disproved my theory, or maybe my hope, that everything that had been happening was a trick of the mind. Trey had just had a severely traumatic experience, and even though he’d been present during the last haunting in my bedroom, I needed to be absolutely sure that I wasn’t going nuts. Messages from Jennie on a long-lost toy in the garage? Things were getting too serious for my brain to handle. “I know, Trey. But it’s been over two weeks. We jumped so quickly to the conclusion that ghosts and evil spirits were responsible that maybe we just . . . should have taken a moment to be rational.”

  Trey leaned in and kissed me on the lips. “Rational,” he whispered. “If you’re ready to be rational, and stop believing in ghosts, then I might say—rationally, of course—since I’ve been a little in love with you since around the seventh grade, and we’ve been sharing a bed for the last few days, that it might be a rational next step for us to do more than cuddle.”

  His warm palm slid beneath my T-shirt and traveled upward as his eyes remained fixed on mine, seeking confirmation that his touch was welcome. “It’s okay,” I assured him in a whisper. I buried my fingers in the dark mop of hair on his head and pulled his face closer. His mouth connected with mine, igniting a sense of certainty in my heart that no other person in the world would ever understand me better than he did. We kissed as if we had been separated, desperately missing each other, for a very long time—which was kind of the case, even though I’d always known exactly where I could find him. In the haze of our attraction, I forgot about the hailstorm, about Olivia’s death, and just desired—

  In unison, we both became aware at the same time that the breathing sensation in the room was back. “Just kidding,” Trey muttered. He jumped off me in a fraction of a second.

  I clutched my comforter tightly, pulling it up closer beneath my chin. We both sat upright, looking around the room for some kind of evidence of the disturbance that we both felt. Across the room, on the doorknob to my closet, my attention was caught by my student ID, which I kept on a lanyard and often hung there at night. It was moving, ever so slowly, around the doorknob. As if a hand I couldn’t see was revolving it around the knob in a jerky, unsteady circle.

  “Trey, do you see that?” I whispered, surprised to see my breath trail through the cold air in my bedroom as white steam.

  “Yeah,” he said faintly. “I see it.”

  The steel frame of my bed began rattling ever so slightly, and what began as a barely noticeable vibration rapidly grew stronger. I could see the movement of the footboard, and hear the frame’s joints making metallic clinking noises.

  In, out.

  “Holy . . . ,” Trey murmured, inching closer to me, watching the footboard at the other end of my bed move. I didn’t dare turn to look, but I could sense the headboard behind my pillow moving too. The clanging was growing more violent. The footboard was pulling away from the rest of the bed, then snapping forward, its left side rocking up and down at a different pace than its right side. I began to seriously wonder if the screws holding my bed frame together might become loose enough from so much motion that the whole frame might fall apart, letting my box springs and mattress fall to the floor.

  “Is it trying to throw us off the bed?” I asked Trey, terrified. “I think so. Maybe if we jump off, it’ll stop.”

  My mind immediately went to the dark, scary gap between the floor and the bottom of the bed. One of my greatest childhood fears was that there might be a monster lurking down there, patiently waiting to grab my ankles with cold, wrinkled hands the moment my feet graced the ground. Jumping off the bed seemed to me as terrifying as staying on the bed. But the entire bed was beginning to rock and shake, and it was making so much noise that my mother simply had to hear it.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “On the count of three . . . three, two, one.”

  Trey threw back the comforter and we both hopped off the mattress and onto the carpeting. Before we even landed on the ground, the bed frame stopped vibrating, and the clammy, sickly feeling that washed over me whenever the spirit was in my room had vanished. Immediately, I felt like a complete idiot, standing in my bedroom in the dark, out of breath from fear, having sweated a damp pool into the back of my T-shirt purely from terror. Trey and I stared at each other from opposite sides of the bed, shaking our heads, trying to recover from the shock of the experience. It was by far the spirit’s most aggressive episode, and I could only assume that it had not taken kindly to our make-out session.

  “Whatever that thing is, it didn’t seem to appreciate us fooling around,” I said in a very quiet voice.

  “Yeah, not a romance fan. Point taken,” Trey said.

  Suddenly, I heard the door to my mom’s room open farther down the hall. “McKenna? What’s going on in there?”

  My eyes shot wide open in panic. Hide! I mouthed at Trey, who looked around wildly. There would be absolutely no logical excuse I could give her for his presence in my bedroom at nearly three in the morning, especially not when he was barefoot, wearing nothing but sweatpants. Instinctively, he dodged toward the window, and I shook my head and hands wildly.

  “Don’t! It’ll be too loud,” I insisted. I had closed the window after he’d climbed through, and the frame always squeaked when it was raised. I pointed under the bed. “There!”

  He looked at me with pleading eyes for a moment, surely imagining the same scary possibilities in those few inches of darkness that I had just considered before leaping off the bed. But after a brief hesitation, he got down on his knees and wiggled beneath the bed on his stomach. My mom knocked on my door firmly before jiggling the locked doorknob, and said, “McKenna, open this door. What on earth are you doing in there?”

  Thinking fast but not necessarily coherently, I grabbed my earbuds off my desk and stuck them in my ears. With my phone in one hand, I opened the door to my room, instantly feeling guilty when I saw my mom standing in the hallway with her robe wrapped tightly around her. “Hi,” I said foolishly.

  “Do you want to tell me what all that racket was about just now?” she asked, sounding cross. I could hear the puppy down the hall stirring and whimpering in her crate.

  “What racket?” I bluffed, blinking my eye
s innocently.

  My mother peered into my room suspiciously, reached in through my doorway, and flipped on the light. “The clanging and knocking around I just heard in here. It sounded like you were jumping on your bed.” I tried very hard not to think about Trey under my bed, and hoped he was holding his breath, curled into as tiny a form as possible so that my mom wouldn’t discover him in my room. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I should be more afraid of my mom’s wrath—if she were to find out that Trey had been sneaking in through my window every night—than of the evil spirit occasionally paying me a visit.

  “Oh, sorry,” I ad-libbed, taking my earbuds out of my ears. “I was listening to music because I couldn’t sleep. I guess I was dancing a little more than I realized.”

  My mother looked at me with a very dubious expression. “Get some sleep,” she told me sternly, “and don’t lock your door. I shouldn’t have to tell you how dangerous that is in a house fire.”

  I sighed loudly as she walked back down the hall to her own room, and although I closed my door, I stood behind it, listening with the light on, before even addressing Trey again. As I suspected, I heard my mom return down the hall, her bare feet padding on the hardwood floor, moments later. Maude scampered behind her on their way to the kitchen.

  “What’s happening?” Trey whispered from beneath the bed. “She’s letting the puppy outside,” I whispered back, hearing the sliding door in the kitchen open, and the puppy’s claws scratching across the deck as she scurried over it on her way to the grass to relieve herself. I waited until I heard my mom reenter her room with Maude and settle in for the rest of the night before I turned off my light. Trey rolled out from under the bed and we both looked at my pile of blankets, confused.

  “Do you think if we both get back into bed, it’ll come back?” Trey asked.

  I shrugged. My honest suspicion was that it would. “Maybe I should go,” Trey said, looking at my empty bed and scratching his head.

  “No!” I insisted, really not wanting to be left alone in the room. We ended up stacking my pillows on my bed to look like my body, and piling blankets on top of them. The two of us lay down on my floor on the far side of my bed, where my mother wouldn’t automatically notice us if she were to open the door, and kept a safe distance of a few inches in between our bodies, not wanting to take any chances again. For safe measure, I set the alarm clock on my phone to wake me up far in advance of when my mom would normally check on me to make sure I was getting ready for school. “You realize that we are sleeping on the floor,” Trey told me before I nodded off. “This is officially completely insane.”

  It was undoubtedly insane. But even still, there was a part of me that was hopeful that the shaking of the bed could be explained by some logical, natural phenomenon. There were two things I was certain I had to do in order to move my investigation forward in both directions: explicable and inexplicable. First, I would find a way to get Candace to agree to a psychiatric appointment in Sheboygan. And second, Trey and I would attempt to make contact with the spirit directly, if that was really what was disrupting our lives so forcefully, on our own.

  * * *

  Hank’s Hobbies and Crafts was the only toy store within the town limits, and it was as unlikely to keep a Ouija board in stock as the fertilizer and feed store. The only toy store for miles that might carry an item such as a Ouija board was the big store at the mall in Green Bay. I couldn’t ask Trey to drive there with me, knowing that the last time he was there, in that parking lot, was the day he’d offered Olivia a ride home with him. Obtaining the Ouija board was going to be my solo mission, and I hated the thought of it. My hope was that my mother would let me borrow the car, but I had, of course, not considered the impracticality of my request. Since earning my license I had never yet driven the car alone, and Mom had never taken out an auto insurance policy for me. I had been covered on her policy while I was a student driver, but now that I had my own license tucked away in my wallet, I no longer had coverage. “If you can wait until Saturday, I’ll give you a ride,” Mom offered cheerfully at the breakfast table.

  I was totally failing in my request to borrow the car under the guise of needing to buy more things for the rescheduled dance. “Homecoming is Friday, Mom. Going to the mall on Saturday does me no good.”

  “Then I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll go tonight,” she said, taking a sip of her tea.

  “No, that’s okay,” I quickly refused, not wanting for her to witness my strange purchase. My mom could never find out that I was buying weird occult toys.

  She studied me across the breakfast table with one eyebrow raised. “You and Trey have been spending a lot of time together recently. Is there anything going on that I should know about?”

  I rolled my eyes. How typical of her to think that my need to go to the mall was somehow related to teen sex. For just a moment, I felt a little guilty that Trey had been spending every night in my room, but then I reminded myself that there was really nothing at all romantic about clinging to each other in fear until dawn, startling awake at every single chime of the clock in the living room and unexpected creak in the floorboards anywhere in the house. It was almost humorous how little fooling around we were doing. “Mom, there is nothing going on between me and Trey that you need to know about. I promise, okay? It’s just that I’ve had my license since August and eventually I would like to be able to run errands by myself.”

  “Well, then maybe it’s time for us to talk about you finding a part-time job,” my mom countered. “Car insurance for a teenager can be a couple hundred bucks every few months. I highly doubt your dad is going to increase his child support payment to cover that. In fact, I’m sure he’d be willing to send you a bike helmet if you would agree to ride your bike to school.”

  I sighed and cleared my empty cereal bowl from the table. Finding a part-time job just to drive to the mall to buy a Ouija board was not a solution I could consider just two days before homecoming, mere hours after a presumably evil spirit had rattled my bed frame. I was going to have to find another way to get myself to Green Bay, which was not going to be a simple feat considering there was no public transportation in our area of Wisconsin that would transport me farther than Ortonville.

  “Not gonna happen,” I informed Trey on the sidewalk ten minutes later as we walked to school.

  “She won’t let you borrow the car?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder back at our house.

  “I’m not covered on her auto insurance,” I said. “I’m going to have to ask Mischa or Amanda to drive me.”

  Trey twisted his mouth a little and then said, “Or we could borrow my mom’s car after school and say I’m driving.”

  All day long at school, my stomach tied itself in knots as I imagined having to drive alone to Green Bay. I wasn’t even sure I knew the way entirely from memory; when someone else was driving, I knew where to turn, but it might be different when I was the one behind the wheel. I didn’t know if Trey’s mom’s car had a reliable GPS, or if I’d have to keep a map open and handy in the front passenger seat just in case I flubbed the directions.

  “So, do you think that would be okay?” I was pulled out of my daydream abruptly back into real time in the cafeteria by Violet, who was looking at me expectantly for a response. Tracy, across the table from us, sucked diet soda through a straw, her cheeks hollow, as she, too, waited for my reply.

  “I’m sorry, that what would be okay?” I asked.

  “That I’d go stag to homecoming,” Violet said, clearly repeating something she had just explained in detail when I wasn’t listening. “Mark can’t come with me to the dance this Friday. St. Patrick’s has an away game that night, and he’d never make it to Ortonville in time.”

  It seemed very much like Violet was telling me all of this more for my information than because she was seeking any validation. Without either of us saying a word to this effect, I already knew the tables had been turned on popularity at Willow High School.
Violet was junior class president; she could go to homecoming alone, naked, and screaming “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of her lungs, and no one would dare to say a negative thing about her. I was no longer teetering on the edge of popularity, one foot in and one foot out, as I had been the night of Olivia’s party, either. I had my own Student Government office, a real (if maybe still a little secret) boyfriend, and secret ties to Mischa and Candace, who were still admired by freshman and sophomore girls even though they were fading into the background of the junior class.

  I swirled my kale salad around on my cafeteria tray. “Oh, I mean, of course. Why would that be a problem? You’re class president. You have to go, and at this point, I don’t know which guys in our school would even be, you know . . .”

  I trailed off, not wanting to complete the sentence in my head, which went a little something like, crazy enough to date you. But she and Tracy both looked up at me quizzically, urging me to finish. “Popular enough to go out with you,” I said, covering my own hide. My response seemed to meet with approval from Violet and Tracy.

  “It’s true,” Tracy agreed, stabbing at macaroni and cheese with her white plastic fork. “I mean, the hot senior guys are taken, and it’s slim pickings among the juniors.”

  For a second, I thought I saw Violet catch Pete’s eye across the cafeteria. He looked away immediately, and I wondered if I had seen anything at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  THAT DAY AFTER SCHOOL, TREY’S mother gave him the keys to her gray Civic. She looked reluctant to trust him, but pleased that he was volunteering to get back behind the wheel. I buckled into the passenger seat as he fired up the engine, kind of hoping that he’d miraculously overcome his fear of driving and get us all the way to Green Bay. But instead, he drove around the block and then pulled over. He took a deep breath as the engine idled, and wiped sweat from his brow.