by Zoe Aarsen
“Enough?” I asked gently, seeing how hard it was for him to steer the car.
Without saying a word, he unbuckled his belt and threw it off of himself. He jerked the parking brake and climbed out of the driver’s-side door. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for a first in my own life: driving in a car all alone. I stepped out of the car, prepared to walk around its back to take my seat behind the wheel. Surprising me, Trey sat down again in the passenger seat and suggested, “Maybe you could just drop me at the Starbucks in Silver Springs and pick me up on your way back from the mall.”
Without him saying so, I inferred that he really did not want to be in the mall parking lot again so soon after finding Olivia there on the night she died. I agreed and ran through my checklist of tasks before pulling away from the curb. Engine on? Check. I peeked in my rearview mirror and my side mirror and then eased onto the gas pedal. Oddly, the car didn’t move.
“You might want to release the parking brake,” Trey gently reminded me.
It had been over two months since Dad had taken me for my license in Florida, and another three months before that since I’d driven regularly when I was practicing during my sophomore-year driver’s ed class. I was shamefully out of practice at driving, and feeling very unqualified to transport myself all the way to Green Bay and back in a car that was a lot fancier than any I’d ever driven before. But Trey and I had agreed: We needed that Ouija board. It was our best shot at contacting Jennie or any other spirit who might be cooperating with Violet. There was simply no other way we were going to obtain one. Buying one online would have required me not only to ask my mom for permission to use her credit card, but also to deal with her curiosity when the box arrived at the house. I was going to have to drive to Green Bay alone, whether I liked it or not, because making contact with a spirit had become imperative.
I abandoned Trey at the Starbucks as he had requested, and pulled out of the parking lot, back onto the rural highway. Fortunately, there was a lull in the slow, dreary rain that had fallen all day, but even that did little to ease my fears about the wet leaves everywhere on the flat stretch of highway ahead as I drove, other than relieve me of the need to locate the windshield wiper controls on the dashboard of Mrs. Emory’s car. The drive to Green Bay was a boring, unremarkable journey punctuated by few things more exciting than barns painted dreary colors, and out-of-date billboards marketing morning radio shows and local car dealerships. I was thankful that at least it was still light out, but knew that the drive back to Willow would be infinitely more difficult for me in the dark no matter how quickly I shopped. Nervously, I tinkered with the car’s satellite radio, and succeeded in filling the car’s interior with Mrs. Emory’s preferred honky-tonk country-western music. I was too anxious about keeping my eyes on the road to bother trying to find a more appealing station.
Parking was tricky, and to avoid a collision due to my sloppy turning, I parked farther away from the mall’s entrance than I probably needed to, in a space fairly far from other cars. Once I stepped outside Mrs. Emory’s car and clicked the doors locked with the automated key chain, I breathed a sigh of relief and then looked around. I was standing at the very place where Olivia must have realized that Violet’s prediction was coming true. For a minute, I stood in the lot, hugging my purse to my chest, wondering why in the world Olivia hadn’t just waited out the storm at the mall. She must have sensed when her car wouldn’t start that she was in danger.
Inside the mall, I entered the store walking briskly, on a mission. I walked down the board game aisle feeling like a total creep, trying to ignore the mothers shopping with young children for games like Connect Four and Chutes and Ladders. My eyes reviewed the stacked board games for sale on the shelves, and I started to wonder if I had just forced myself to drive all the way to Green Bay in vain, when I should have been at home catching up on homework. But then, on the top shelf, at the bottom of a stack of boxes of Stratego, I saw a white box with the word OUIJA printed across the top. It appeared to be the only one in stock.
“That’ll be twenty-three dollars and fifty-four cents,” the teenage girl behind the cash register told me, snapping her gum and smirking. I hated that girl immediately for her knowing smirk, and I fumbled around in my wallet to hand her exact change. It was annoying that she would dare to assume why I was buying such a silly toy. I was eager for her to just put the box into an opaque white plastic bag and let me be on my way as mothers with quarreling children were lining up behind me, impatiently waiting to pay for their Barbies and Tonka trucks.
“Here you go,” I said quickly, handing her cash and a handful of coins.
“We sell a lot of those this time of year,” she informed me, handing over my receipt.
Of course—Halloween! Buying a Ouija board in early October wasn’t so odd, after all. I rushed back to the parking lot with my purchase under one arm, and tossed it in the back seat before I strapped myself in with the seat belt. In the split second after I inserted the key into the car to start its engine, I became paranoid about driving home in the dark with an occult communication tool for talking with the dead in the car behind me.
Get it together, McKenna. There’s no other way to get home but to drive there.
I took my time switching music channels until I found a station playing pop music that I knew by heart, and carefully maneuvered my way out of the parking lot. I fumbled with the headlights, putting on the high beams even though it wasn’t completely dark yet, and turned them back down to low beams after someone angrily honked at me on the highway. All the way back to Silver Springs, I drove slowly, terrified of missing a turn or streetlight and getting lost in the woods, feeling the weight of Mrs. Emory’s car anchoring me to the road. As I pulled into the lot at Starbucks, Trey waved at me through the window, holding a large white paper cup, and met me in the lot so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through the ordeal of trying to park in a tightly jammed space.
“You got it,” he said, sounding relieved upon seeing the bag in the back seat.
“I got it,” I confirmed.
He reached into the back seat and pulled the bagged game into his lap to examine it. “So, where should we test this thing out?”
“Hey, could you put that away? It’s freaking me out,” I said, feeling a surge of relief pass through me as we drove past the familiar sign along the highway that read:
WILLOW POPULATION 4,218
In my head, I subtracted one from that number of residents. “Seriously, McKenna. Now that we have it, where should we see if it works? We can’t try it in your room. If by some incredible long shot, this piece of junk, manufactured by”—he examined the box again, reading the logo—“Winning Moves, is actually able to channel communication from paranormal spirits, and those spirits happen to be loud, we’d better not be under your mom’s roof.”
“Where, then? Your basement?” I asked, braking at a light.
There was a little more traffic now that we were within town boundaries.
“Possibly,” Trey considered the option. “Although getting you down there might be tricky unless you come over after dinner and we say we’re going to do homework.”
I eased onto the gas again as the light turned green, and we drove without talking until I turned left onto Carroll Road, the block before ours. It was already after six o’clock, and it would be close to eight by the time I finished dinner at home and helped to load the dishwasher. “Okay. Homework at your place it is. But can you do me a favor? Take the board inside with you. If my mom finds it, the questions will never end.” I pulled over to the curb so that we could switch seats to prevent Trey’s mom from suspecting that I had been the one driving all the way to Green Bay and back.
As he sat down in the driver’s seat, he said, “I remember why I went to Green Bay that night. It was to buy spark plugs for Coach Stirling’s Cadillac. I must have seen Olivia in the parking lot or something when I was driving by on my way to AutoZone.”
“But you don’t r
emember actually running into her?” I asked. I didn’t want to let on how relieved I was that he’d remembered why he’d been so far away from our town that night.
He shook his head. “I remember her telling me that her car wouldn’t start. But I don’t remember exactly how I ended up in the parking lot.”
Throughout dinner, Mom attacked me with questions about whether or not I had tried on my dress for homecoming recently to make sure it still fit, which earrings I’d be wearing, if Trey would be driving me to the dance on Friday, and what time I expected to be home. It was kind of baffling that she was putting so much more consideration into my attendance at the homecoming dance than I was; I didn’t have the right answer to any of her questions because Trey and I hadn’t really made an action plan for getting to the dance yet.
After I cleared my place, rinsed dishes, loaded the dishwasher, and set it to run, I threw my backpack over one shoulder without even peeking inside of it to see which books I’d carried home. At the front door of our house, I called over my shoulder, “I’m going over to Trey’s to do homework!”
The Emorys’ basement was nothing like the one at the Richmonds’ house. It was one giant unfinished construction project, with wiring peeking through drywall, and a non-functioning toilet standing in a corner on the cement floor that had been intended for a bathroom renovation that Mr. Emory had never completed. A bare light bulb hung from a wire that dangled from the ceiling, and a stained plaid couch had been pressed up against the wall near the stairs. Mildewing board games were stacked on a utility shelf. The entire basement smelled like decay, and the air was damp against my face. I suspected there were way more spiders down there than I wanted to know about.
Trey and I plunked ourselves down on an old rag rug with our legs outstretched, our backs pressed against the plaid couch. He opened the game board between us. The sight of it made me shudder. The word YES was printed in its upper left corner, and NO was printed in its upper right corner. The letters of the alphabet were printed in two orderly arcs, and numbers were assembled below them. Beneath the numbers, GOOD BYE was printed in capital letters.
Trey placed the plastic planchette on which we would rest our fingers in the center of the board over the word OUIJA, which appeared in between the YES and NO in opposite corners. “Kind of cheaply made, right?” he asked me shyly. “This thing might only be capable of contacting extremely tacky spirits.”
“Ha ha,” I replied dryly.
We could hear his parents watching television in the living room upstairs, but it seemed as if they were in another dimension. I couldn’t say why, but that Ouija board on the floor terrified me. I was afraid to place my fingertips on the plastic guide; a sense of doom was washing over me, as if we were about to throw open a gate to allow terrible things from another world into our neighborhood. “I don’t know about this,” I admitted quietly. “It seemed like a good idea yesterday, but what happens if we contact something and we don’t know how to control it?”
Trey leaned over and planted a soft kiss on my cheek. “The book says that this is our world, and we have more power than they do here. Truly evil spirits might resort to crazy tactics to try to scare us, but we have to remember that we belong here, and they don’t. James W. Listerman wrote that we have to be very authoritative when we’re communicating with them. Tell them who’s boss.”
Telling spirits capable of nearly tossing me out of my bed with sheer force that we were in charge seemed ridiculous. I wished there was a fireplace in the Emorys’ basement like the one at the Richmonds’ so that if things got out of control, we could toss the game into the flames, which seemed to be a viable method of disposal in horror movies. I followed Trey’s lead by placing my own freezing fingertip alongside his. “We should warm it up first,” he instructed, and used his own force to gently move the planchette around the board in circles. After a minute or so of this, I looked over to him to suggest that he should take the lead.
Trey nodded at me and cleared his throat nervously. “We are trying to reach the spirit that is visiting McKenna’s bedroom on Martha Road,” Trey said in a firm voice. “But only kind, well-meaning spirits are welcome here.”
I felt a very subtle vibrating sensation beneath my fingertip, and I couldn’t be certain if Trey was trying to scare me or not, but the planchette seemed to be channeling some kind of faint energy. It circled the board in a wide arc, coming to rest over the word OUIJA at the bottom. “We’re supposed to start with easy yes-and-no questions,” Trey informed me. “Is there someone here with us?” he asked the board.
The planchette, in a slow and wobbly trajectory, made its way toward the upper left corner and stopped with its pointer touching the Y in YES. I winced. Trey looked over at me for permission to continue, and I reluctantly nodded, sensing that the tip of my nose and my lips were freezing cold. The temperature in the basement seemed to have dropped at least twenty degrees during the last minute.
“Are you the spirit who has been trying to make contact with McKenna Brady?” Trey asked carefully.
My heart skipped a beat as the planchette trembled but didn’t move. “It’s already on YES,” I whispered. “Ask it something else.”
“What can you tell us about Violet Simmons?”
The planchette dragged our fingertips toward the center of the board, hesitated, and then moved up toward the NO in the upper right corner.
“What does that mean?” Trey asked me under his breath, not directing his question to the board. “ ‘No’?”
“Maybe it’s too complicated to answer this way,” I suggested, but then the planchette began moving again. First, it slowly dragged its way over to the F in the top arc of letters. Then it shifted a little more over to the E and came to a rest.
“E,” Trey said. “I think I might know where this is going.”
The planchette, as expected, then moved its way down to the second arc of letters, and hovered with its pointer touching the V.
“Evil. We’ve got it,” Trey assured the spirit. He looked at me and nudged me with his elbow. “Ask it something.”
There was one question on my mind, but it was too terrible to ask. If the answer was what I feared it would be, there could be no turning back time to a place when I believed Jennie was at peace, wherever she was. There would only be the knowledge that her existence persisted past the point at which her body died in the fire, and that she was still trailing me through my life, I feared, with jealousy. I really did not like the notion of leaving Trey’s basement and walking back to my house knowing that Jennie was around me, watching me, after me. After a moment’s hesitation I realized that Trey was studying me, waiting for me to speak, and surely he knew the question on the tip of my tongue.
“I’ll ask,” he assured me. “Are you Jennie?”
The planchette rocketed up to the right corner of the board, and landed on the NO.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief, and the air in my lungs rushed out of me with a giant whoosh. It was both an enormous relief and a heartbreaking tragedy that my twin, my other half, wasn’t the spirit trying so hard to reach me.
Which left really only one relevant question: Who was trying to reach me?
Reading my mind, Trey asked, “Okay . . . who are you?”
The planchette slowly, steadily, led our fingers across the board until it came to rest pointing at the letter O.
Trey’s fingers flew off the planchette, and he shook his head. “No way. No way,” he muttered.
To remove any possibility that we were misinterpreting the board, the planchette began moving with only my fingertip on it toward the board’s L.
“Let go of it,” Trey commanded.
I raised my fingertips, and as soon as I did, the planchette moved rapidly all on its own to the letters L-I-V-I-A. I gasped in horror. How was it moving on its own? I felt like I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing to be real.
Trey asked, “Are you the spirit visiting McKenna’s bedroom?” The planchette slid
over to the YES.
“The Lite-Brite,” I asked hoarsely, “was that you?” The planchette slid upward and landed on the NO.
We both watched the planchette where it had come to rest on the board for a moment, holding our breath for another sign of motion. “Maybe she’s gone,” I suggested. At the sound of my voice, the planchette slid over to the S. I clung to Trey’s left arm, barely breathing, as the planchette spelled out:
S-H-E-K-N-E-W-E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
“Jesus,” I murmured.
“Will more people die?” Trey asked. I could see steam escape through his lips in the frosty air that surrounded us.
The planchette delivered the response we both feared most.
YES. GOOD BYE.
* * *
That night, hours after I had said good night in a stiff voice to Trey’s parents and walked across our yards back to my house, and Trey had crept through the window, I rested my head on his chest and stared at the wall.
“What do we do about Violet?” I asked, knowing that Trey wouldn’t have an answer. “How do we stop her?”
“I don’t know,” Trey said, holding me protectively close, with a grip like an iron clamp.
“Why would Olivia reach out to me, and not Mischa? They were closer friends. Is she trying to protect us? Is she just out for revenge against Violet?”
The answers that Olivia had provided to us created even more questions. One thing was certain: Olivia wasn’t going to visit us in my room that night, but even knowing that we wouldn’t be troubled by her interruptions wasn’t enough to put either of us in a romantic mood. It seemed to be more and more the case that we were going to have to bring an end to Violet’s plans before another one of us died. And this time, because Trey and I knew it was coming, if we couldn’t prevent it from happening . . . we’d be partly responsible.
* * *
The staff at the Ortonville Lodge outdid themselves, lavishly decorating their grand ballroom, usually used for hosting sales conference banquets for Realtors and lawn equipment retail executives. Flowers had been donated by the same florist in Willow who had supplied most of the arrangements at Olivia’s wake, and they had placed clusters of orchids and carnations dyed blue throughout the ballroom, filling the entire space with fragrance. A disco ball dangled overhead, hung from a crystal chandelier, and streamers crisscrossed from one corner of the ceiling to the other. An enormous table had been set up for the DJ, with speakers tucked into all four corners of the room. A photographer had decorated a corner of the hallway leading to the ballroom with a gazebo and backdrop of clouds, and couples posed for pictures, choosing fun props from a box offering flower leis and grass skirts. The theme for the dance, chosen by the senior class, was Tropical Paradise. Given that we were dancing in a ballroom in central Wisconsin to Top 40 hits, hearing the chilly autumn wind whistle through the hotel windows, the theme was a bit ironic. But no one seemed to care how absurd it was that we were pretending to hold our school dance in Fiji. “How authentically Tahitian,” Trey quipped at a snack buffet offering popcorn balls dyed lavender with food coloring, and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, served on little toothpicks.