by Juliet Vane
We continued down the hall. When we came to a closed door, I tried the handle, and it opened. Like the other rooms, this one looked like it used to be a classroom, only in this classroom, the desks were still inside, shoved toward the windows and collecting dust.
“Can you imagine going to school in a place like this?” James asked. “There couldn’t have been very many students in this tiny room. And they got to stare out at the courtyard when they got bored.”
I looked past him, out the old paned windows. The courtyard was just as beautiful from the inside as it was from the outside, with the weeping willow offering shade in the center.
The door slammed shut behind us, and I jumped.
“I’m not scared,” I said, before James could make fun of me.
He held his hands up in a no harm gesture. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Logan’s probably back by now, though. We should get going.” I went to turn the handle. At first it didn’t budge, and my heart clawed its way up my throat, but then it gave. Phew. I stepped into the hallway probably faster than I needed to.
Footsteps echoed from farther into the school, and I shivered. “Nobody’s here, right?”
James shrugged. “Maybe the grounds keeper is using the restroom.”
I pointed outside, to where Mr. Abbot was attacking one of the trees in the courtyard with a pair of large clippers. “Um.”
“Natalie could be back.”
“Not so quickly, I don’t think. Maybe it’s Logan.” I called down the hall, “Hey, Logan, we’re over here!”
No answer. The footsteps stopped.
“Wouldn’t he say something?” I whispered to James.
His eyes were wide. “You’d think so. Logan! Cut it out! We’ll meet you in the courtyard.”
The footsteps got louder, and it sounded like they were approaching. Frozen in place, I watched the end of the hall where the person should appear any second.
“James,” I whispered, “I don’t see anything.”
It sounded like the footsteps were only twenty feet away. We should have been seeing someone by now.
“I’m freaked out,” I said.
“Let’s go,” he hissed, grabbing my hand.
We ran back down the way we’d come, shoving open the rear exit and stepping into the sunlight.
The door creaked shut behind us.
We rushed back around the corner of the building, past Mr. Abbot with his clippers.
“You kids okay?” he called. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He chuckled.
I pretended to laugh. “Yeah, we’re fine.”
We walked at a more sedate pace to the parking lot. Logan and Natalie were just getting out of their cars.
“Whose footsteps did we hear?” I murmured to James. “Maybe there’s someone else in the building?”
He nodded, but his face was white. As Logan and Natalie approached, each one carrying take-out bags, James called, “Hey, uh, Natalie? Is anyone else here today? Besides us and Mr. Abbot?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s just us. Why?”
“We thought we heard footsteps,” I said. My face felt hot. “We must have just imagined it.”
“Sometimes the pipes get creaky,” Natalie said. “Sorry if it spooked you.”
“Not spooked at all,” I said.
“Liar,” Logan coughed.
Natalie gave us a quick smile and walked toward the school.
Logan held up the food. “So?”
“Let’s eat by the lake,” I said.
Three small picnic tables stood between the trees and the pebbly beach of the lake. The breeze coming off the water made me shiver, but it was a good kind of shiver. Logan had gotten us each sandwiches, an apple, and a bottle of water. At first we ate in silence, too hungry to talk. Once I had some food in my belly, I said to Logan, “So, how was the call with Helen?”
“Fine,” he said around a mouthful of sandwich.
“I don’t know much about her,” I said. Which was weird. The three of us had exchanged several group texts over the school year. He barely talked about her. “What’s she studying?”
“She’s undeclared.”
I couldn’t tell if it was just because Logan was eating, or because he really didn’t want to talk, but these were the shortest answers he’d ever given me on anything.
“Okay,” I said, “what do you like about her? Will we get to meet her this summer?”
Logan shrugged. “She’s really nice. Smart. Thinking of going into nursing. I don’t know if you’ll meet her or not. Depends on what she’s doing over summer, because she might take extra courses.”
“But you like her, though?” I asked.
He gave me a look that said, duh.
James frowned at him. “Is this the real deal, then?”
“I don’t know,” Logan said. “How do you know if anything is the real deal?”
James tossed his apple from hand to hand. “I think you just know.”
Yeah, that hadn’t worked out so well for me. I decided to keep quiet.
“Well, then I don’t know yet.” Without any kind of joke, Logan got up. He collected our trash and walked it back toward the dumpster and the basement.
“Guess it’s time to get back to work,” James said.
I eyed the building. Voluntarily going into Rosebud again sounded like the dumbest idea ever. And crap, I’d had all that water with my sandwich. I was going to have to pee soon. Maybe I could get one of the guys to stand outside the bathroom. At this point, I didn’t care about pride or the fact I’d look like a scaredy cat. This place freaked me the hell out.
“Those footsteps didn’t sound like pipes,” I said.
“No, they didn’t.” He frowned. “It reminds me of that legend—”
“Don’t say it,” I said, covering my face. “They had to be something else.”
“April, we both know what we heard.”
The legend he mentioned was the one that had given me nightmares, even as a teenager—a headmaster collecting vials of blood from the girls in the school. One for every student. They’d hear him coming down the hall. Logan used to tell it at parties, his tall, lean form tense as if he were waiting to pounce.
I pulled out my ponytail, smoothed my hair, and put it back into a straighter, neater ponytail. A ponytail that told all the creepy crawlies in the basement that I meant business and I wasn’t scared. To James, I said, “Maybe it was just pipes, like she said.”
He touched my friendship bracelet, before quickly pulling his hand away. “Sometimes when I’m really scared, I try to imagine that the scary thing is actually something funny instead.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like those footsteps were actually two ghosts trying to learn how to tango.”
I snorted.
He continued, “Or it was a teenage ghost boy, too nervous to ask you about going to prom.”
I laughed. “Now you’re being really crazy.”
James just smiled. “He wouldn’t be the first to choke up and not ask.”
Chapter Five
Feelings and Ghost Dreams
After dropping James off at his house, I drove Grizabella home. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was feeling. That thing James had said about prom had bothered me the rest of the time we’d worked in the basement, and I’d alternately worried about that and the freaky mirror.
What had he meant, that the hypothetical teenage ghost wouldn’t be the first to be too shy to ask me to prom? Did James mean me specifically, or had he meant in general, that lots of boys had been nervous over the years about asking people—in general—to prom?
I’d gone to senior prom with one of the guys from jazz choir. We’d simply gone as friends, and it had been fun. But if James had asked me? I’d have said yes in a heartbeat, and maybe we wouldn’t have just gone as friends.
Too much analyzing. It was times like now that I wished I’d had more friends that w
ere girls in high school—friends that I could confide in. But James, Logan, and I had been pretty insular. We hung out with other people, but I’d never made the effort to forge close friendships with other girls. Now in college, I was remedying that and I had some fantastic girlfriends, but they wouldn’t know all the history here.
My brain hurt, and I shoved open the front door to my house. I was greeted by silence. My parents had driven the fifty miles to Boulder for a performing arts benefit of some kind, and they’d be staying the night there.
The house to myself. It felt nice to be really alone and in an actual house, not just my car. I went upstairs to my room, put on the Hamilton soundtrack, and started working on my paper for 21st Century British Lit.
A few minutes later, while I was dissecting Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus,” my phone chimed with a text. It was Logan again, texting both me and James.
Logan: Party at Mackenzie’s house
James: No thanks
Me: Also passing. I have to write this paper
It wasn’t just the paper. It was fear—fear of confronting what might be, what I could have, what I could feel, if I were to take a chance.
Logan: You guys suck. April, write the paper later
Me: I can’t because SOMEONE made me work during my SPRING BREAK
Logan: Hahaha, okay. If you guys aren’t going, I’m not, either
Me: Poor Logan. His two best friends are introverts
Two hours and plate of leftover pizza later, my paper was outlined and I’d written the first three pages. Not bad for an evening’s work. I climbed into bed feeling productive and, surprisingly, refreshed. Maybe focusing on Plath’s poem had kept me from obsessing over my own internal angst.
Sleep took me quickly. At first I dreamed about driving Grizabella around campus, searching for a parking spot. Then James was with me in the car, and we were parked near the lake. He touched the side of my face, then my lips, and then we kissed like we were making up for lost time. Or maybe we kissed like the world was ending, because my dream took me inside of Rosebud next. It was full of students—I recognized some of my high school friends, and several people from my college classes. Becky from theater, Joshua from algebra 101, and Dana from British Lit. We were dressed in old clothes, outfits that looked like they came from the 1950s. James was there, too, in blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black leather jacket. I wore a flared skirt, a form-hugging sweater, and saddle shoes. Dana and Becky wore similar outfits, and her hair was curled at the bottom. We could have been doing a production of Grease. We walked down the hall, chattering excitedly.
Even as we walked, though, I could feel that something was coming. Desperate to change it, I tried to move the dream somewhere else, anywhere else.
The dream changed, but the setting remained the same. Now the school was empty, and James was gone. I stood alone in the hallway, but I could still hear the chattering of the students. “Hello?” I called.
Someone screamed, and all noise stopped.
“Hello?” I called again. I looked from door to door, hoping to find one of my friends, hoping to find anything at all and not be so alone.
My heart pounded in my chest, a soundtrack to my panic.
A girl’s voice kept saying, “Help, help.” She sounded young and scared. She appeared at the end of the hall, and she was older than she sounded, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Her dark, auburn hair was styled in a bob, and she wore a plaid flared skirt, a short-sleeved button-up blouse, and saddle shoes. Her heart-shaped face was pale and sad.
As soon as I saw her, she disappeared.
“Where did you go?” I called, but I was answered only by the sound of a closing door. Rushing forward, I opened one door after another. Finally I opened the door to one of the classrooms. Inside, I was faced with a pile of corpses. My friends’ faces stared back at me, their eyes wide and gaping and covered with a grayish film.
I woke up screaming, my heart pounding too fast. My room was empty and safe, but I didn’t feel safe. I wanted to pull the covers over my head like a little kid, but I was too hot already, drenched in sweat.
Taking deep breaths, I checked the alarm clock on my dresser. Five a.m. I didn’t want to go back to sleep, not with that image in my head. I remembered what James had said yesterday, about putting a humorous spin on something scary.
But how could I put a humorous spin on all my friends lying dead in a pile?
I couldn’t.
Chapter Six
Old Clothes and High School Romances
I never did go back to sleep. Instead, I turned on every light in the house, double-checked every lock on the doors and windows, and got out my laptop to work on the Plath paper.
I didn’t want this to be my life. Fear. Longing. I didn’t want to end up like Sylvia Plath, mentally unwell, alone, angry, feeling as if there was no one to turn to.
Shoving the self-pitying thoughts aside, I watched as the sky slowly grew lighter, then I got ready for the day. This time I was smarter and put on heavy work boots instead of my tennis shoes, which had to go through the wash after all the leaf sludge I’d walked through yesterday.
Besides, heavier boots meant I’d be better able to stomp on aggressive spiders.
Who was I kidding? I’d rather run from them. Maybe my tennis shoes would be better.
By the time I stepped out of the house and onto the front porch, James was already waiting for me in the driveway in his Jeep.
“You know I love Grizabella,” he said, “and that’s why we should take my car. I thought yesterday’s drive might be her last.”
“Good point,” I said, buckling in. Spying two drinks from Mocha Mel’s in the cup holders, I added, “Is that what I think it is?”
He laughed. “One of them is black coffee. The other is that crazy sugary stuff you call ‘your drink.’”
“Yes!” I said. “I love you, James!” My first stop when coming home should have been Mocha Mel’s, for their Duck, Duck, Goose—a mocha with a dash of hazelnut syrup, covered with brightly colored egg-shaped sprinkles.
James’s cheeks turned pink. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said, feeling stung that he’d dismiss the gesture. “It’s very sweet of you.”
It shouldn’t have bothered me, the thought of our exchanges becoming awkward like this, but it did. Since when did we have to dance around these things with each other?
When we got to Rosebud, Logan was uncharacteristically quiet, so we worked in the basement in silence. I finally worked up the nerve to open one of the trunks along the side of the wall. I worked far away from the mirror, which was shrouded in darkness. The old cloth lay next to it, forgotten.
When I opened the trunk, I was surprised to find clothes just like the 1950s garb from my dream, only these were covered in mold and mildew. The reminder of my dream sent goosebumps skittering up my arms.
“Old clothes,” I explained to Logan and James. “Will you help me carry it up to the dumpster?”
James came over and took one end. We awkwardly hauled it up the stairs, and James bumped his head again on the beam. I tried not to laugh.
“What do you think is up with Logan?” he murmured when we were out of Logan’s earshot.
“Dunno. Trouble with Helen, maybe?”
He nodded. “That’s my guess. Doesn’t seem like he really likes her.”
“But he has to—they’ve been together since December. If he doesn’t like her, why not break up?”
“Sometimes people get stuck in patterns. That’s another reason I’m glad I didn’t date anyone at school.”
“Oh?” I said. “You have other reasons to be glad?”
“One in particular.” He frowned, so I didn’t press for more info.
We hoisted the trunk into the dumpster and made our way back toward the basement.
“Do you think you’ll get back together with Ian?” he asked.
“Oh-hell-no,” I said, so fast the words blended together.
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you later. We should get back down there before Logan starts complaining.”
As if he heard me, Logan shouted, “Are you done with that big, heavy trunk, your royal highnesses? There’s still work to do, you know!”
James and I looked at each other and laughed.
*
Although I spent most of Tuesday ignoring the mirror while clearing most of the trunks surrounding it, I couldn’t ignore its presence. Eventually we’d have to bring it outside. It would go straight into the dumpster, I’d already decided. Nobody would want that thing—it was creepy as hell.
On Wednesday, James picked me up again, and again presented me with my Duck Duck Goose drink.
“I think I’ll keep you,” I said, reaching over and running my hand playfully over his spiked blond hair.
His cheeks turned pink again, and this time, my face felt hot, too, because I wanted nothing more than to touch his hair again.
I needed to get a grip. James was strictly in the friend zone. Not crush material. Too bad my heart and my libido were ignoring that message.
The boys were busy lugging up the last of the clothes-filled trunks from the basement. We’d already hauled up countless broken chairs, a rotting book case, and several trunks. The only thing left was the mirror.
I had to do something about it.
“It’s just a mirror,” I told myself. “Just keep it covered up, and pick it up, and everything will be fine.”
But I couldn’t forget the way it had spooked me that first time. The face that wasn’t quite my own.
Stepping gingerly over to it, I first made sure there weren’t any spiders on the fabric next to it. Then I gripped the material in my gloved hand, and pulled it over the mirror before leaning the mirror forward slightly. I turned on my flashlight app and shone the light behind it. No spiders there, either.
I heard the boys come back down into the basement.
“You need help?” James asked.
“Shush, she’s confronting her fears,” Logan replied.
“I’m…surprisingly okay,” I said. “Just gonna pick this up and bring it upstairs.”