Annalise closed her laptop. “I think, dear sister, that you may already know the answer to that.”
nine
Again, I was outside at night. The dark-haired girl was walking fast, away from the park and toward the dim streets, her pale dress fluttering around her ankles. She kept her head down as she passed a string of ruined buildings. Chunks of brick and stone had been pushed to the sides of the street, but debris still littered the road and Charlotte was careful to step over the sharp fragments left behind. She came to a side street and turned right, staying close to the broken shells of dark houses.
“Is it you?” someone whispered.
The girl stopped and peered into a gloomy alley. “Yes.”
A tall boy emerged from behind a shattered wall. “I could tell by your footsteps.”
The girl went to him and they embraced. He had black hair and dark eyes, and his voice was gentle as he put a hand to her belly.
“Are you well?” He spoke with a slight accent, I realized, but I couldn’t tell what kind. Spanish? Italian?
She kissed his cheek. “Yes. I am fine.”
He led her down the narrow street. “We will head north,” he said, helping her step over pieces of rubble. “I have a friend. We can be married tomorrow.”
They walked in silence for a while, their arms linked, until they came to a stable. He turned to her. “Are you ready?”
She ran her hand over the mane of one of the waiting horses. “Is one ever ready for such change?”
He cupped her chin in his hand. “It is the only way.”
“I know. I will miss them, though.”
“We can return one day, when we are established.”
The girl closed her eyes. “Promise me I will see them again.”
He pulled her into a hug. “I promise you we will come back one day,” he whispered into her hair.
“Charlotte?”
I awoke on the dining room sofa. Mom was standing over me.
“Time for school, honey.”
I shut my eyes against the sunlight and tried to remember my dream. Something about it felt familiar, yet at the same time so strange. It was like I had been watching a movie clip.
I dragged myself off the sofa, folded my blankets and trudged upstairs to get ready. When I came back downstairs, Mom and Annalise were sitting at the counter, sipping coffee.
“Avery’s mom called,” Annalise said. “The cheerleaders got a flat tire on the way home last night. Avery’s going to be late today, so I’ll take you to school.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
The scent of coffee usually helped me wake up, but not today. My eyes felt heavy, my head felt fuzzy, and part of me wanted to sit with Mom and Annalise and tell them every single detail of my dream with the hope that they would dissect it for me, discover its true meaning and insist that I stay home from school to sleep it off. I was about to pull out one of the counter stools when Mom stood up.
“Look at the time. I have a meeting with a woman across town. Possible paranormal activity in an old schoolhouse.” She kissed my forehead and left.
“We should get moving, too,” Annalise said.
It seemed like only hours earlier my sister had told me I knew how to find Charlotte Pickens, a task that seemed impossible to me.
“How am I supposed to find her when her own parents couldn’t?” I had asked, knowing that it wasn’t the girl I would actually be searching for, but her grave. She had to have died decades earlier, possibly a full century before I was even born.
Annalise had a theory. She said that the girl’s parents didn’t think I was their daughter, but for some reason they believed I could locate her resting place.
“You might not know how yet, but there’s something about you they connected to, something more than just your name. You’re the key, Charlotte. You can find her.”
I didn’t want to be the key to anything. The ghosts had chosen wrong. They heard their daughter’s name spoken aloud and zeroed in on me, and it was all one big supernatural mistake.
“Are you okay?” Annalise asked as we drove to school. “You seem out of it.”
I leaned my head back against the seat. “I had a weird dream. It seemed so real. I can’t shake it.”
“Hmm. Do you think it’s connected to what’s going on at home?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how.”
“What exactly do you remember? Don’t leave out any details.”
I described the girl in the pink dress meeting up with a guy at night and how I thought Charlotte Pickens had run away with him. Certain details played over and over in my head: the boy’s voice, thick with a foreign accent; the girl’s plea to one day return; the obvious tenderness between the two of them. As I talked, Annalise furrowed her brow.
“Sounds like a scene right after the Charleston earthquake,” she said. “We were talking about that yesterday. Maybe your mind was just putting pictures to new information.”
It was a logical explanation, but it didn’t feel right to me. And as I viewed the images over in my head, something stood out. I remembered Shane telling me that he was going to look over the footage from the Courtyard Café. He wanted to find a connection between the two visits.
Something that’s the same.
“The sweater!” I exclaimed. “I wore your pink sweater to the café both times. And the girl in my dreams was wearing pink!”
Annalise glanced at me. “So?”
“The last time her parents saw her, Charlotte Pickens was wearing pink. Your sweater was the trigger. If we just get rid of it, maybe all of this will stop.”
We pulled up to the front of the school. Annalise turned off the ignition and looked at me.
“I think we’re past the point of getting rid of anything,” she said. “Something has started and it’s not going to suddenly stop if we throw away a sweater. We have to find the girl.”
“No, we don’t. Dad says this is merely a stronger kind of energy than we’re used to. It’s not an intelligent being, Annalise. We don’t owe it anything.”
“Strong energy? If you really believed that, you wouldn’t refer to them as ghosts, which is all I’ve heard you call them.”
“I was only doing that to annoy Mom and Dad.”
Annalise raised an eyebrow at me. “Sure. Look, they might chalk all of this up to energy, but I know you. You think it’s something more, and I think you’re right. So let’s do something about it.”
I felt a helpless kind of anger build inside of me. Why was my sister pushing this so hard? Just a few months ago she had declared that she wanted nothing to do with paranormal research, yet now she was into it more than I’d ever seen her. What did she expect me to do? I wasn’t going to take off on some zany adventure just to locate an old gravestone. The ghosts may have chosen me, but I hadn’t chosen them. All I wanted was for things to go back to normal—or as close to normal as I could possibly get.
“Look, if you and Mom and Dad want to put a team together and go off on a ghost hunt, fine. But I’m tired of feeling watched and hearing whispers and dreaming about dead people. Do whatever you want, but leave me out of it.”
“We can’t leave you out of it.”
I glared at her. “Really? Because that’s what you’ve been doing for years.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice was calm and quiet. “We’re a team. We’ve always been a team.”
“I am so sick of everyone using that word! We are not a team. We are a family. A weird, abnormal family.”
“Charlotte, we have to—”
“No! Stop, okay? I don’t have to do anything except get to class.”
I got out of the car, slammed the door shut and marched into the front doors of the school without looking back. I told myself it wasn’t me the ghosts wanted. They weren’t even ghosts, I reminded myself. They were balls of energy triggered by the color pink and the sound of my name. It was not my job to do anything about it. My parents had started this, and they
could finish it. I was not a paranormal problem solver. I was just a girl trying to get through her senior year without too many complications.
I was twirling the combination on my locker when something sharp poked my shoulder.
“Ow.”
“Would you like to explain to me why you cut out my coverage of the Eco Club’s tree-planting ceremony?”
I turned to face Bliss Reynolds, who was wearing a pale pink blazer, khaki skirt and sour expression. “Did you just poke me?”
Bliss put her hands on her hips. “That ceremony was important and you had no right to cut it from the morning news. If you think you can sweep in here and sabotage my career—”
“I’m not sabotaging anything! Mr. Morley told me to cut four minutes from the program, which was exactly how long your tree thing was!”
“It wasn’t a ‘tree thing.’ It was an important environmental statement, one that was much more significant than the two-minute segment on Avery and the cheerleaders you chose to keep.”
“Bliss, it wasn’t my decision, okay? Morley has the final say. You know that.” I slammed my locker shut and tried to move past her, but she stepped in front of me.
“No, I don’t know that. What I do know is that you have consistently tried to ruin my best work out of some warped loyalty to your friends, and after I meet with the principal this afternoon, your little schemes will be exposed and you, Charlotte Silver, will be dropped from the class.”
Bliss flashed a victorious smile. There was something about her self-righteous smirk that set me off. She had made my bad morning even worse, and I was fed up.
“Are you always so paranoid?” I said loudly. People were looking at us, but I didn’t care.
“I’m not paranoid. I’m right. You’re the one who—”
“Shut up, Bliss! Just shut up! I don’t want to hear any more of your insane theories, okay? Just leave me alone!”
Bliss opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Her eyes widened and she put a hand to her throat. For a split second, I thought she was choking.
“Are you okay?” I was aware that a small crowd had formed around us. Everyone was murmuring and looking at Bliss, whose wild eyes and open mouth suggested that something was very wrong. I reached out for her, but she pulled back from me and ran down the hallway. Now everyone was looking at me, waiting for some kind of explanation.
“I don’t know what happened,” I stammered. “I mean, we were just talking and suddenly she—”
I didn’t know how to finish my sentence. Suddenly she what? Lost her ability to speak? Was silenced by my stalker spirits? I pushed past the crowd and raced for the nearest bathroom, where I locked myself inside a stall. I leaned against the wall and tried to pull myself together. What had I done?
The first bell rang, but I stayed where I was. After I was sure the hallways had emptied, I walked to the main office. I decided to fake a migraine and try to get a ride home. I simply couldn’t deal with school. Not today.
When I reached the office, I could see a flurry of activity behind the tall windows as two secretaries ushered Bliss into the nurse’s office. There was no way I was going in there, so instead I turned around and made my way to the library, where I knew I could find a quiet space between the bookshelves. Sure enough, it was nearly deserted, and the librarian didn’t even notice me as I crept into the reference section and slid to the floor.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I couldn’t hide between the stacks for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t go to the office yet and I couldn’t walk home. I would wait a while, I decided. I needed a little time to myself, some quiet to calm my rattled nerves. An hour later, I heard the bell ring for second period. I still wasn’t ready to leave my secluded spot, so I stayed put.
“You okay?”
Noah was standing at the end of the aisle. When I shook my head no, he walked closer and squatted down next to me.
“I heard you and Bliss had a little disagreement.”
“I’m sure everyone has heard that by now.” I sighed. “Only I wouldn’t call it little.”
“It’ll blow over. She’s harmless. Intense, but harmless.”
“Yeah, well, apparently I’m not.”
Noah gave me a funny look. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Is Bliss still in the nurse’s office? Is she okay?” What I really wanted to know was if she could talk, but I knew that question would seem totally insane.
“She’s fine. I just saw her in the hallway on her way to class.”
“Did she say anything?”
He chuckled. “She told me to do a better job at editing her footage.”
I felt an immediate sense of relief. I hadn’t permanently injured Bliss. I’d caused something to happen, but it had passed and maybe everything would be fine.
Noah switched from squatting to sitting. “Does your, uh, problem with Bliss have anything to do with that article she wrote last year?”
“What article? I wasn’t even here last year.”
“Yeah, I know, but I thought, since you’re friends with Avery, that maybe she told you about it.”
So many things seemed to come back to my friendship with Avery. It had somehow become one of my defining characteristics. Jared had mentioned it on the bus, Bliss had brought it up during our fight, and now Noah. It was weird being identified first and foremost as Avery’s friend. Nothing else seemed quite as important to other people.
“Avery told me that Bliss had written a negative article about the cheerleaders,” I told Noah. “But she didn’t elaborate.”
“The cheerleaders?” Noah looked confused. “I must have missed that one. No, I’m talking about the big article, the one about the accident.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. “Jared’s accident?”
“Well, yeah, but it was more than that.”
“How do you mean?”
Noah stared at me for a moment. “I think you need to read it. I’ll go through the archives and find you a copy.” He glanced around. “I need to get back to class. I’m supposed to be returning a book for my science teacher. Will you be in AV later?”
“I think I’m going to go home early today.”
Noah stood up. “Okay, then. I’ll see you tomorrow. Take it easy, Charlotte.”
After the next bell rang, I went to the office complaining of an imaginary migraine. I called home but no one answered, so I spent the next few class periods lying on a cot in the nurse’s room, where I fell asleep for a while. Thankfully, I didn’t have another weird dream.
When I woke up I forgot for a second where I was. I could hear a phone ringing and the tapping of a keyboard. The nurse came in.
“Oh, good. You’re awake. How are you feeling?”
“Better. What time is it?”
She looked at her watch. “Almost time for the final bell. Do you have a ride home?”
I hadn’t seen Avery or Callie or any of the other girls all day, but I was sure they had returned from their unexpectedly extended away game.
“Yeah, I’ve got a ride,” I said. “Thanks.”
I walked through the empty hallways to my locker. I knew I would have a ton of homework to catch up on and hoped Callie or one of the other cheerleaders would have the assignments, so I crammed nearly every book from my locker into my backpack and lugged it to the doors. The bell rang and people swarmed into the hallways. I stood against a wall, waiting to catch a glimpse of Avery. Minutes passed and I worried that I had missed her or worse, that she thought I hadn’t come to school at all. I headed for the parking lot and ran into Callie.
“You’re here!” she said. “We missed you at lunch.”
“I was in the nurse’s office with a headache. I heard you guys had a crazy night.”
We walked toward the senior lot together. “The bus got a flat,” Callie explained. “We made it home after three in the morning, so the principal gave us all a late pass, but we had to show up before noon.”
Callie laughed. “That’s what I said! But we had to be here to set an example or something. The school can’t let people think that we get special treatment or—”
She stopped, a strange expression on her face. I looked in the direction she was staring and saw Avery standing next to her car. A guy was in front of her, his back to us. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Avery looked visibly upset. As Callie and I got closer, Avery covered her face with both hands and sobbed.
“Get away from her!” Callie yelled, breaking into a sprint.
The guy turned around. It was Jared. “I just wanted to talk to her,” he said, taking a step back. I was aware of people pointing and staring. Callie opened the driver’s side door for Avery and practically pushed her inside. Jared just stood there, watching.
“I need to talk to her,” he said. “Five minutes. That’s all. I just need five minutes.”
“Get in,” Callie said to me. I nodded and slid into the passenger seat.
Callie turned to Jared. “You are not to come near her, do you understand?” She pointed a finger at his chest. “Do not even look at her. Ever.”
Callie tapped on my window and I rolled it down.
“Make sure she gets home okay,” she said to me. “Avery? I’m coming over to your house. I’ll be right behind you.” She jogged off toward her car.
Avery was crying softly. “Do you want me to drive?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbled. She took a deep breath. “Sorry I’m such a mess.”
“Don’t worry about it. Seriously. I just want you to be okay.” I found a clean tissue in my purse and handed it to her.
Avery took the tissue and wiped at her eyes. She looked up. Through the window we could see Jared as he limped back toward the school. People parted for him, backing away as if he were contaminated.
“What did he do?” I asked, remembering that I had meant to tell her about my conversation the day before with Jared.
I wasn’t sure that she even heard me. She just kept looking intently out the window like she was making sure he was really leaving. A few seconds later, she responded, her voice cold and hard.
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