Ever Near (Secret Affinity Book 1)

by Melissa MacVicar

  “I think I’ll just go home.” Even though it’s early, I’ve had my fill of this night. I don’t want to go and sit around at Long Pond and watch everyone drinking and talking and trying to be cool all over again. They probably won’t even have a bonfire because the pallets will have been left behind in the rush to escape the police.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” I fiddle with the radio, stopping on a station playing “Rhythm of Love,” by the Plain White T’s. Great. I gulp and think about changing it again. Why does my brain make everything that happens around Charlie romantic and sexy? He’d probably laugh if he knew what I was thinking. We finally reach Milestone Road, and Charlie turns toward town.

  “Text Ally. Maybe she’s going too,” he says.

  “No. I’m good.”

  I’m not alone with Charlie very often, but I guess I will be more and more now that we’re living together. I remember when we were forced to be alone last winter on a ski vacation. The trip was Mom and Mike’s first big move to bring us all together as a family, and I got stuck skiing with Charlie. We ended up pushed together on one side of a quad chairlift. Thankfully, our bodies were buffered by layers of down and fleece.

  “So what do you think? About them?” Charlie asked. He adjusted his poles, annoying the other people because his big body was rocking the chair.

  He’d never brought up our parents before, and I glanced over to be sure he meant what I thought he meant. From the look on his face, I saw that he did. “It’s okay. My mom hasn’t dated much since the divorce, so it’s a little weird.”

  “Yeah. They seem kinda serious.”

  “Yeah.”

  Going on vacation together was monumentally serious. I knew that, but hearing Charlie say the words made the truth a trillion times worse.

  “My dad seems happy, though.”

  “Yeah… my mom too.” I shifted my skis, trying to balance yet keep my distance from him at the same time.

  “What songs can you play on the bass?” Charlie asked.

  “Just a few. ‘With or Without You.’ ‘Smoke on the Water.’ ‘Louie Louie.’”

  “What kind of music is your favorite?”

  “I like different stuff. Depends on my mood. A few indie bands and some pop and regular rock. No metal or punk, though.”

  “Which indies?”

  “I really love The Features right now. And a band called Sons and Daughters.”

  A frigid wind sliced through us. I adjusted my neck warmer, which was pulled up over my face so only my goggled eyes showed, like a bandit in the wild west.

  “Can I hear them when we get back? I know nothing about indie rock.”

  “Sure. What do you usually like?” Indie rock is kind of an acquired taste, and I wasn’t sure Charlie was going to take to it.

  “Hip hop. Pop. Rock. That kinda stuff.”

  The lift approached the top, and a surge of nerves pulsed through me. Wiping out in front of Charlie would be more than a little embarrassing, and I knew he was a great skier from his conversations with Brendan about the Black Diamond trails, which were for experts only.

  “So, double Black Diamond?” Charlie asked through his neck warmer. I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “I swear to God, Charlie, I’ll hurt you if you try it.”

  “Kidding. Kidding. Only blue. I promise.” Blues were the easier one. More my speed.

  Charlie was so good to me on that trip, giving me advice on skiing and asking a million questions about music. But all this fun only enhanced my fourteen-year-old-girl feelings for him, and that was definitely not supposed to happen. I know that’s not what our parents had in mind when they planned the trip.

  I smile at the memory as we approach the rotary. Charlie takes Orange Street, and we begin the winding process of getting to Fair Street. Fair is a one-way into town so we have to navigate various narrow side streets with encroaching historic homes on either side to get there. The houses almost all have gray shingles with painted trim and cutesy, pretentious names just like Fair-Ever. Some have wooden plaques telling you which whaling captain or cooper or basket maker lived there back in the day. This time of year, they are adorned with perky flowers in window boxes and American flags flapping beside the doors.

  Whenever I drive past them, I don’t really see any of those things. All I see are the potential ghosts lurking inside—men, women, and children who didn’t, for whatever reason, leave the realm of the living when they died. And now, I start to stress about Lacey. The closer we get, the more I’m filled with dread about another possible encounter.

  Charlie stops the car several houses down from Fair-Ever, in front of FairWind.

  “Thanks for the ride.” The jeep door squeaks when I push it open.

  “Sure. Bye.” He doesn’t drive away though. He waits—and probably watches—while I walk up the brick sidewalk and make the turn through the white picket gate into our yard. I assume he’s making sure I get home safely, which is sort of overkill but also kind of cute of him.

  As island homes go, Fair-Ever is unique in that it’s not just a colonial but part Victorian too. The house has yellow clapboards instead of shingles, a tower-type thing in the middle, and some decorative gingerbread woodwork on the windows and trim.

  I’m still jiggling my new house key in the lock, trying to get it to work, when the jeep rumbles off down the road. The more I try to get the lock to turn, the more anxiety I feel about returning to this place. How ironic that I’m struggling to get inside a house I don’t even want to be in.

  “Hi,” Mom says when I finally reach the family room. “You’re early.”

  She and Mike are curled up on the sofa, watching a movie. Their arms and legs are all entangled, and they don’t even bother separating. Not even a little bit. Ew. There’s nothing worse than having your mother act like a teenager when you’re a teenager yourself. Parents should only cuddle behind closed doors.

  “Yeah. Just hung out with Ally. Night.” I head for the stairs before she can start with her twenty-questions routine.

  And I make it. That’s a miraculous feat, considering my mother’s penchant for curfew questioning, and I guess I have Mike to thank. Mom’s too busy thinking about him to grill me, and I feel like maybe I’ve avoided some drama for a change. Jogging up the stairs, I smile, but my victory is short-lived, because when I get to my room, Lacey’s there.

  Chapter 5

  Lacey hangs from an invisible rope, suspended from the ceiling with her head twisted off to the side at an unnatural angle. Bent and wrong. Her long gray dress sways with her body, ever so slightly from side to side. Dainty ankle boots dangle beneath her skirt. A reddish-brown line of blood mars her neck, and a mournful rendition of “Rock-a-Bye Baby” plays, high pitched, like a music box.

  Rock-a-bye baby,

  On the treetop

  When the wind blows,

  The cradle will rock

  I close my eyes, pressing my hands over my ears. Go away. Go away. Go away.

  Maybe she’ll listen. Maybe she’ll disappear.

  Something slams to the floor. Opening my eyes, I see a book from my shelf lying beside the desk. A second and then a third one goes. Next, the lamp clatters off the desk and hits the carpeting with a thud.

  “Stop!” I yell.

  In an instant, she’s right in front of my face, her eyes black, empty holes. “You will not deny me!” she howls.

  The flight impulse courses through me, but I’m stuck. Frozen. My fingers tingle. My head spins. Images of her flash in my mind like a slide show, each new shot of her demented face more horrifying than the last. Red and raw. Black and charred. Screaming.

  Please go. Please go. Please go. My knees buckle, and I fall. I’m not sure how long I’m kneeling in my room, praying for her to
go, before I gradually sense that she has left. I listen for any movement—here from Lacey or downstairs from my parents. Did they hear the books thumping? Me yelling? Hopefully, the movie drowned out the mayhem.

  When I hear nothing, I open my eyes and look around the room. The damage is minimal. I pick up the lamp and slide the books—ironically, my Mindy Bates series—back into their places before dropping on my bed. Mindy is one of my favorite book characters because she sees ghosts too, except people in her world know what she can do. She has a lot of friends, and they help with her ghost problem. I wish I could be more like Mindy, who always attacks her problems head on and solves them. The only thing I do is write about my issues in my journal.

  After a ghost encounter, especially one with a very demented spirit, I’m always sapped. Drained. But I know I should get out my journal and write down what happened before the memory fades. The old black and white composition notebook is hidden in my closet, wrapped in an old sweatshirt and stuffed inside the pink velvet sleepover bag I got when I was ten. With a sigh, I roll off the bed and retrieve my journal.

  I can’t put any of this on the iPad. I suppose I could if I was sure I wasn’t going to forget and leave it on the couch someday and have my mother do one of her infamous electronic recon missions. I’m not careful enough to defend against one of those, so I don’t take the chance. But since my mom thinks everything evil happens on the internet now, I’m safe writing my latest ghostly tales, along with my other ghost stories, on the lined paper of the frayed notebook I’ve had since I was eleven. All the details. The field, the drowning, the hanging. The scent of perfume and rotten apples. What she said and how she changed.

  Flipping back, I skim the other ghost stories and once again wonder why the ghost sightings happen to me. Why me and no one else? I ask myself that question often. I stop on the first page and run my fingers over the cursive letters. I call the first ghost Crypt Man.

  He was at the old cemetery on New Lane. During summer break, Ally and I went to investigate one of the graves that had a door leading into a mounded-dirt house thingy. We thought this tomb was a zombie crypt and imagined the door might be unlocked and zombie people might just be lying around inside. The scent of the fresh-cut grass surrounded us, and the heat of the midday sun beat down as we walked there from her rental house. The hum of bees and the chirping of birds filled our ears. The anticipation built as we approached the zombie door.

  “You do it,” Ally said, pointing at the tarnished knob.

  I shook my head. “No way.”

  “I’m sure it’s locked.”

  “You try, then.”

  Standing at the door to a crypt counts as pretty damn freaky when you’re ten. Ally was reaching for the knob when movement at the back tree line caught my eye. I turned to see a man limping toward us. He was dressed in brown pants and a rough, tweedy vest, he had a gray, wiry beard and carried some sort of club, like a policeman’s nightstick.

  “Ally, who’s that?”

  “Where?”

  I pointed. “Right there. That man.”

  “Stop it, Jade. I’m not scared.”

  “No, I’m serious. He’s right—”

  “You there! Get away from here!” he shouted.

  I didn’t wait around to hear more. I ran for the path back to Ally’s house with her following close behind.

  “What the heck, Jade?” she said when I finally stopped on her steps.

  I panted for air. “Didn’t you see him?”

  “See who? Stop trying to be funny. It’s not funny.”

  That was the first time I realized I saw things other people didn’t. Namely, dead people.

  The second ghost, Strobe, appeared during my fifth-grade field trip. We were supposed to be learning about the various historic sites on the island, and one of them was the Old Gallows. And let me tell you, the ghost residing there must have been a really bad dude because he’s a really bad ghost. I nicknamed him Strobe because he flashed like a strobe light, swirling up in the corner of one of the cells like a slow-moving tornado. I watched, helpless to do anything, as his horrid face flashed in front of me: sunken eyes, stretched greenish skin, greasy strings of hair. His body distorted and bent in the wrong places, covered in tattered rags.

  He blinked on and off over and over again while a high-pitched whine emanated from his open mouth. “Help me. Help me. Help me.”

  I screamed and ran from the building, shoving my classmates out of the way as I went.

  A chaperone—Timmy Fontane’s mother—followed me out. “Jade! What in the world is wrong?”

  I ignored her and stared at the door, watching for Strobe. Ally came out and sat with me under a tree away from the building. Our teacher, Mrs. Dearborn, eventually emerged and asked if I was okay.

  “I have claustrophobia,” I told her. I was already a decent liar, even then. Lying is kind of a necessary skill for me.

  “Your mother’s never mentioned that,” Mrs. Dearborn said.

  “Well, she should have.”

  Mrs. Dearborn placed her chubby hand on her hip. “Maybe you shouldn’t go in the Old Mill then, either.”

  “Maybe not. If the space is too small.” I didn’t care if I never went in another historic Nantucket building ever again.

  But of course I have. They’re kind of hard to avoid.

  I’m zoning out, thinking about the details of the first ghosts and wondering if they’re still there, when the Skype noise bubbles on my iPad—an incoming call from Gram and Papa. Shoot! Right now? I momentarily think about ignoring them. I’m not in a very good mood, but I also can’t resist a chance to see and talk to them.

  I smooth down my hair and rub my hands over my face, hoping I can make myself look normal and calm before I hit Accept Video Call. I hit the button, and Papa appears on the screen. As soon as he sees me, he starts grinning like a madman but with just the right side of his face. He had a stroke that affects his left side. Gray stubble covers his brown head, but his jaw is clean-shaven. Gram always keeps him neat and tidy.

  “Hi, Papa.” I wave with one hand, my other still fluttering around my hair.

  He waves back.

  “Does Gram know you’re calling?”

  He shakes his head, putting his finger to his lips.

  I giggle at his sneakiness. “Where is she?” I’m sure she’s nearby because Papa can’t be left alone. He’s not supposed to call me without her, but he’s done it a couple of times.

  “Er-ow.”

  In his mind, these words make sense, but he can’t get them to come out right since the stroke. I have to talk a lot when this happens because Papa gets frustrated easily. Plus, I hardly ever get to see him, and he likes having me tell him all about what’s going on in my life. Gram does too. They would spend hours chatting with me if they could.

  “Everything’s great here. I have a really nice new room with my own bathroom. School’s out, and I’m working at the coffee shop. I might visit Dad after the wedding. Maybe we can come to Baltimore to see you and Gram.”

  Papa nods and smiles, his tired eyes sort of dancing now.

  “Stanley? Who’s that talking?”

  “It’s me, Gram,” I say. “Papa called me.”

  Gram’s face appears over his shoulder. Her shock of bright white hair and her wrinkled brown face make me smile. “Jade? Stanley, you can’t be calling her at this time of night!”

  “It’s okay, Gram. I was up. It’s summer, remember?”

  “Yes, yes, but Papa knows better.” Gram swats him on the shoulder, a teasing little tap, before pulling up a chair. “Well, let me have a look at you.”

  Oh, geesh, now I’m going to hear about it.

  “Lord, you look grown up. And look at your hair! How’d you get it so straight?”

  “A
flatiron.”

  “I hope those are your pajamas. Your bra is showing. Why’s your bra showing?”

  “Gram—”

  “Do you have a boyfriend? You make sure you behave yourself, now. I know you’re sixteen, but you still have to behave.”

  “I know.”

  “A nice black boy who goes to your church would be perfect. Are you going to church?”

  Gram tries to help me understand about being black and white. When I was little, she told me I was lucky to be both but that I also needed to learn what my heritage meant for me. “Really,” she said, “people are just people, but you need to understand that there are some in the world who will see you and only see a black person. And they will hate you for it. It’s just the way the world is, and you need to be ready if that happens to you.” And she was right. Some people do only see me as black, when inside, I truly feel I am part of both my mother and my father.

  “So, erm, ew.”

  Gram looks over at Pa. “What’s he trying to say?”

  “I told him Dad and I might come visit in August. But I haven’t talked to Dad about it yet.”

  Papa nods and smiles.

  “August would be wonderful,” Gram says. “We’d love that. Any time would be fine. I could bring you around to some of my friends. Some of them have nice grandsons. Handsome young men. Young men who wear their pants the right way. Not all dangling down around their bottoms.”

  “Do ret sam.”

  Gram pats Papa’s shoulder. “I know, I know. I’m just saying I want to see her. That’s all. How’s it going there with your mother? And your stepdaddy?”

  “Fine. I have a nice room and my own bathroom, and we’re right downtown so I can walk everywhere. Mike’s great.” Sometimes, I can’t believe how nice he is to me. I used to think stepdads were supposed to be selfish and weird, but that’s not Mike. He helped me do a big project for school on the Constitution. Being a lawyer, he was very knowledgeable on the subject. And he never tries to tell me what to do. He stays out of my business, even when Mom and I are fighting.