Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at her. The way in which she’d so easily shifted into Olivia’s life convinced me that she could very much control these predictions if she wanted to. “Didn’t you realize after he died that you’d made it happen?” Mischa asked, not buying any of Violet’s innocent act.

  “No! Not at all. Imagine if you were in my shoes. Would you really put two and two together? It’s like . . . What if the lady who works the cash register in the lunchroom died tomorrow? Would you ever think that her death was linked to a hamburger that you bought, or the five-dollar bill that you handed her? No!”

  “And then what about Rebecca? Did you figure it out when she died? Or did things not click into place until the third funeral, or the fourth?” Mischa snapped.

  Violet straightened her posture and threw her shoulders back, growing defensive. “Hey. Rebecca was my friend. I’m not a monster, you know.” Two enormous tears made their way over her lower eyelids and spilled down each cheek. She wiped them away with her fingers quickly, and blew her nose into a tissue she withdrew from her coat pocket. “I don’t even know who hit her, to this day. The police never caught the guy. . . .”

  “So, I have to know. Did your parents move you away from Lake Forest because of all the problems you caused there, or because of the estate here to settle in Willow?” I asked. For just a fraction of a second, Trey looked up from the bleachers and glanced at Violet. As soon as her eyes met his, Violet looked away out toward the fence circling the track.

  “The things that happened in Lake Forest were not my fault,” Violet insisted. “I haven’t committed any crimes!”

  Mischa snorted. “The way we see it is that you brought this on,” Mischa accused, taking a step forward and stabbing her fingertip into Violet’s chest. “You killed Olivia, you killed Candace, and now I’m probably next. The last time I checked, murder is a crime. You have to make it end.”

  I was a little afraid of Mischa. She was acting wild, but then again, if I had still believed my death was next in the lineup, I might have been acting with a greater sense of urgency too.

  “I don’t think you get it, Mischa,” Violet said, smiling nervously, digging her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I can’t change what they showed me. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t know how to make it all stop.”

  This brought Mischa no comfort. She folded her arms over her chest and stared Violet down. “I don’t want to choke to death now or ever. And if I’m going to die, I’m comfortable taking you with me. I want to be clear with you. If you don’t make this stop, I will kill you.”

  I was chilled to the bone by Mischa’s conviction and tried not to turn and stare at her. To my left, I could hear the huffing and puffing of her angry breathing. The truth was that she had considerable upper-body strength from gymnastics training for ten years. If she wanted to hurt someone, she could. If she wanted to kill someone, and wanted my help, I wasn’t sure how I’d respond. While I believed Violet in her claims that she didn’t know how to bring the game to an end, I didn’t believe her charade of innocence entirely. I believed she was being guided through this confrontation. She was being told what to say, how to throw us off.

  Violet’s eyes darted beyond us; surely she was wondering if we’d chase her if she made a run for it across the track back toward the parking lot, where the late bus would be arriving momentarily to pick up kids who’d stayed at school an extra hour for extracurricular activities. Maybe her spirits controlled her words, but they couldn’t control her thoughts, and she was probably thinking in that moment that if Mischa lunged at her, she would be a goner. “How do you propose I do that, Mischa?” she asked. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you guys, I can’t stop this.”

  “Then summon your spirits. Make them fix it,” Mischa demanded.

  Violet’s voice quivered. She was on the brink of crying. “It doesn’t work that way, I swear,” she insisted. “I can’t just summon them. They only come to me under specific circumstances, or randomly, when they feel like it.”

  Mischa and I exchanged determined looks. “You mean, like if we were to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” Mischa suggested. Violet shifted her weight from one leg to another. Beneath her, gravel that had drifted over from the track into the grass on which we stood crunched. She said finally, “Yes. Or if we held some kind of a séance. But even that’s not a guarantee. They don’t take requests. They just arrive, show me stuff, and leave.”

  Mischa’s plum-stained mouth was set into a firm, serious line. “Then we play the game again to bring them back, and you tell them that they made a mistake.”

  Violet looked at me as if to object, and then carefully said, “But the game won’t work again. They already showed me your death. If they arrive again they might just show a repeat, or they might get angry.”

  “We’ll play the game on Trey. They haven’t told his story yet,” Mischa suggested.

  I gasped in objection. There was no way I was going to risk Trey’s life.

  Trey looked at the gravel, and Violet shook her head slowly. “They don’t have a story for him.”

  “Then McKenna. They didn’t show her death,” Mischa reminded us both.

  Violet’s eyes flew wide open in terror, and she looked to me to save her. As much as I didn’t want to participate in the game again, it wasn’t an ideal time to inform Mischa that Trey and I had other ideas on how to topple Violet’s power. “Okay,” Violet agreed. “Tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow,” Mischa shook her head. “Tonight. Be at my house by eight o’clock. I want to deal with this as soon as possible. I could be dead by tomorrow, remember?”

  “I can’t tonight!” Violet objected. “It’s my mom’s birthday, and we have a bunch of people coming over. I can’t sneak out.”

  “Then fine. Tomorrow. My house.”

  Violet’s lower lip trembled a little bit before she agreed. “After the basketball game. It’s only the second game of the season. I have to be there.”

  Mischa’s arms flew out at her sides in exasperation. “You’re saying a basketball game is more important than my life!” She looked to me and Trey for help, but I couldn’t inform her that we had no intention of ever playing any games with Violet again while Violet was standing right there, listening. A buzz came from within Mischa’s bag, and she checked her phone to find a text message from Matt. After reading it, she said, “Okay. Tomorrow after the game, if that’s the best you can do. We’ll all be here tomorrow night in the stands, so don’t even think about disappearing with the pom squad to go to Bobby’s or something. We’ll be waiting for you.” Mischa turned and walked toward the gate leading back to the parking lot, through which we could see Matt pull up in his mom’s Honda to pick her up. “Do you think she’ll really kill me?” Violet asked me after Mischa passed through the gates and climbed into Matt’s mom’s car.

  “She might,” I mumbled. Things might have been different right after Olivia had died. But Candace’s death had changed everything. I felt it as sure as I felt the wind blowing: Mischa was doomed just like my other two friends had been. “Look, I’m not really thrilled about playing this damn game with you again, but I’m willing to try, because I actually care about Mischa when obviously you don’t, Violet.”

  Violet looked down at the ground again and startled me with a loud, uncontrolled sob. When her eyes met mine again, they were filled with tears, and her nose was pink. “I didn’t want to tell Mischa this, but her plan isn’t going to work.”

  I already knew that playing the game wouldn’t work to break the curse, as did Trey, but I put my hands on my hips. The cold November wind blew through my light jacket, making me wish I’d done as my mother had instructed and dug my winter coat out of the back of my closet that morning. “And why is that?”

  “Because,” Violet began, “I told you. They couldn’t show me your death. The door was already closed. If we try again, they’re going to be really mad.”

  “We’re done h
ere,” Trey announced to Violet. “You’re going to miss your bus.”

  Trey and I walked home without saying much. “That girl’s crazy,” he muttered as we reached the corner of Martha Road. “Don’t pay attention to her saying stuff about you being dead. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “I know I’m not dead. I’m right here,” I insisted. “But I’ve been thinking that maybe Jennie and I shared a soul, you know? One soul, split in half, and that’s what Violet’s seeing when she tries to read me.”

  Trey kept shaking his head. “Everyone has their own soul, and yours is perfect. We really can’t believe anything she says. I was watching her reactions on the track. They, or it—or whatever is behind this—is telling her what to say. She was waiting for direction from them every time she opened her mouth. It was like she was reading from a teleprompter.”

  “What about the object?” I asked, still considering the destruction of the object to be a safer course of action for us than resuming Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. But to avoid initiating the game again, we were going to have to figure out the object, and destroy it, before evening the next day. “Any ideas?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” Trey said. “My only guess would be something she keeps in her purse, because she kept it pretty close to her the whole time we were talking.”

  At dinnertime, Mom asked me a ton of questions about my day, quite obviously trying to be a more involved parent. I was distracted as I provided her with adequate answers about my classes, my thoughts lost in musings about objects and the afterlife. Maude was being a general nuisance throughout the meal, first begging for a sample of chicken potpie and then scratching endlessly at the sliding back door leading out to the deck. “All right, already!” Mom exclaimed finally, flipping the switch on our kitchen wall to flood our backyard with light and sliding open the door so that Maude could race across the yard.

  Almost an hour later, I put on my shoes and my jacket to try to lure Maude back into the house after she refused to return inside when Mom called her. “There must be a rabbit back there or something,” Mom theorized.

  In the yard, even despite the light shining over our deck, my eyes adjusted to the darkness before I could see Maude’s dark body in the far corner of the yard, digging away at something. It was freezing cold outside, with frost settling on the grass, and I cursed the puppy for dragging me out of the warm house. When she saw me approaching, she became very excited, running in circles around her digging spot, not far from where Trey and I had buried Moxie, happily yapping at me. “What are you doing back here, you bad girl?” I asked. As I grew closer, I noticed that the hole she had dug, which she was so anxious to show me, wasn’t very deep. It was about a foot in width, and oddly shaped. Standing right over it, I realized that the puppy had somehow scratched a hole in our grass that looked unmistakably like a heart. Maude barked at me enthusiastically, as if she was telling me, See?

  And then clarity hit me like an unexpected slap across the cheek. The sweaters.

  Since the weather had turned cold, Violet had been wearing new sweaters every day. All of them—thick wool and creamy cashmere—covered her neck. There had been loose cowl-necks and tight turtlenecks, ribbed crewnecks and an ivory funnel-neck that had shown off her figure, even before Candace’s death.

  They had been covering the gold locket that she had so plainly displayed during warmer weeks of the school year. Whether she had subconsciously been obscuring it with knitwear to put the locket out of our minds, or had been intentionally piling on sweaters in the hope that we’d forget that she had worn it every day at the beginning of the school year, I wasn’t sure. But I had forgotten about it entirely, until Maude had reminded me. I thought back to the bowl of heart-shaped soaps in the bathroom at the Richmonds’ house, and how I’d been compulsively inclined to use them. And then I realized whether I was “dead” as Violet claimed or not, I had just as much help on the other side as she did, if not more. It was possible that Jennie, Olivia, Candace, or even Moxie had guided Maude outside to trigger this visual cognition.

  It was that locket, that heart-shaped locket, connecting Violet to all of this trouble. I was absolutely sure of it.

  CHAPTER 17

  TREY AND I HAD A deadline now. We had to get our hands on that locket before we played the game again with Violet at Mischa’s insistence. In any scenario I could imagine, the most opportune time to snatch that locket would have been in the girls’ locker room before gym class. Since Mischa was no longer in my gym class, and since Violet would instantly know we were up to something if she were to see Mischa appear in the locker room with me before class, I would have to attack her alone if we couldn’t think of a better plan. For obvious reasons, the idea of attacking Violet on my own was daunting. What if I reached for it and the clasp didn’t break? Or if something even more horrific happened, and the gold chain sliced through the skin on Violet’s neck? I felt with certainty that we were on the brink of closure with Violet, but surely she must have felt it too.

  I heard my phone vibrate on my bedside table at five in the morning and instinctively sat up to answer it. It was Mischa, in an inconsolable state. Next to me, Trey sat up and rubbed his eyes. I patted him on the shoulder and told him to go back to sleep.

  “Do you ever think about what it’s like to die, McKenna?” Mischa asked me. Her voice was raw, and sounded like she had been crying for hours.

  “Sure,” I confessed. “All the time. I’ve wondered that for a long time. I think it’s peaceful. The whole bit with the white light full of grace, and drifting toward it, and then feeling total serenity and contentment. I believe in all of that.” I didn’t tell her that I believed all of that because I had to, because without that I couldn’t stand to wonder what pain and horrors Jennie had endured as she’d left behind the life we’d shared.

  “I don’t believe that,” Mischa countered. “When my grandmother died, my father told me that all life consists of is a series of neurons firing in our brains that make us perceive energy around us. When we die, and those neurons stop moving around, there’s nothing left. Just blackness. Nothingness. That’s what becomes of us when we die.”

  There was a long pause, and I tried not to let her words make too much of an impact on my thoughts. The notion that everyone I had known who had already passed away had just been hurtled into a void was too painful to consider.

  “We know that’s not true. Olivia reached out to me. She wasn’t in a state of nothingness,” I offered.

  “What’s going on?” Trey asked me groggily. I shooed him away, knowing that Mischa’s emotional state would only annoy him.

  “I don’t want to be an angry ghost. I want to stay with my parents and win a medal at the GK U.S. Classic, and I want to go to college in La Crosse and marry Matt and be a mom. How did all of this happen? Why did we play that stupid, stupid game? I want to take it all back! I don’t want to die, McKenna!”

  I could hear the sincerity in her plea, and I didn’t have a simple response for her. It wouldn’t be fair to assure her that she wouldn’t die. Olivia and Candace already had. “We’re trying, Mischa. We’re trying.”

  As I climbed back into bed, I wondered if she’d eaten any solid food at all yesterday. If we didn’t find a surefire way to prevent the death that Violet had foreseen for Mischa, she might just die of starvation anyway.

  Even with Trey’s arm wrapped around me, the now-familiar fall and rise of his chest against my back, both of us enveloped in the smells and textures of my childhood bedroom, I sensed that all the security I had known most of my life was about to be torn away. I tried to assure myself that it was just Violet’s spirits trying to scare me out of doing what I knew needed to be done. But deep down in my heart, I felt certain that I was on the edge of a precipice. Once I pushed back the blankets and climbed out of my bed in the morning, my life would never go back to normal again.

  * * *

  The parking lot of the high school was packed by six p.m.
, even an hour before the basketball game against Angelica High School was scheduled to begin. I hadn’t confronted Violet in the locker room that morning before gym class because Trey had thought it would be too risky to attempt during the school day, but he and I knew as we arrived at the game that we needed to get our hands on Violet’s locket that night. I pulled into the lot behind the wheel of Mrs. Emory’s Civic with Trey in the passenger seat beside me. Mischa sat in the back seat, defying Matt’s order to stay home and away from this situation. As far as she knew, we were at the game solely to prevent Violet from disappearing afterward without making good on her promise to play the game again. Trey and I had discussed the complication of Mischa joining us at the game and had decided it would be in her best interest, and ours, to refrain from telling her about the locket and our plan to steal it from Violet. She was behaving so erratically that there was no telling what she might do if things were to go wrong. We also knew that our plan was basically nonexistent, and that we were just going to have to be ready to spring into action at any point during the game when an opportunity presented itself, whatever the consequences.

  As soon as I pulled cautiously into a space at the less-crowded back of the lot, still not entirely trusting my driving skills, Trey said, “Look.”

  Violet’s white Audi was pulling into the lot. As it turned down one lane to navigate toward an empty spot closer to the west entrance of the school, we saw Violet, in profile, behind the wheel. She was wearing her black-and-red pom squad uniform, and after parking, she applied lip gloss. She checked her reflection in her rearview mirror and stepped out of the car, throwing her duffel bag over her right shoulder and casually locking the car behind her with the remote on her key chain. Her long dark hair, tied back in a ponytail, swung from left to right as she strode into the high school and disappeared behind the red doors.