The Secret of Grim Hill

by Linda DeMeulemeester

  Every time I logged on to MSN, I’d get a ton of instant messages – people asking if it was a costume party, wondering if I wanted them to bring any music. Being on the soccer team made me the most popular girl in town, and after the match it wouldn’t matter what anyone thought because my friends and I would be having an amazing time at Grimoire School – as long as we won. Lately I simply assumed we would win and that life would only get better.

  The rest of the week dragged by, and on Saturday afternoon, the day of the party, I was digging out a box in the attic where Mom had stored our old Halloween costumes. Inside the box was just what I was looking for: a black mask and a witch’s hat. Those items, along with my soccer uniform of striped socks and black skort, would finish off the perfect costume.

  Mia, Amarjeet, and even Emily from the Ghosts would be coming over soon to help me decorate. Mom had spent the whole week baking ghost-and witch-shaped cookies. Together we’d made caramel apple slices and pumpkin cupcakes. We went all out and made pizza bagels and filled bowls with tortilla chips. Throughout the entire afternoon, my head spun with excitement. When the sun started sinking, I hung out in the kitchen waiting for my friends to arrive.

  Mom came downstairs and stood at the kitchen counter, hovering over a stack of file folders. For some reason, I got another one of my sinking feelings.

  “Work called,” Mom said. “I’ve got to get all the data from these files entered into the computer. And I have to do it tonight.” She smiled, but I could see there were shadows under her eyes. Mom had been bringing work home almost every night, so she looked forward to the weekend break. “They’re paying me double time. The money will be handy.”

  “But – ” I stammered, my heart diving, “but you were going to keep Sookie up with you in the attic tonight, playing games and keeping her from pestering me at the party.”

  “Sorry,” Mom said and shook her head. “There’s no way I can keep her happy and get my work done at the same time. I’ll still take my laptop up to the attic so that you don’t have to worry about keeping the noise down, but you’ll have to let your sister stay with you at the party.”

  This couldn’t be happening. Mom had been so excited about my party. She’d helped me with all the plans. Making me watch Sookie would ruin everything. “But – ” I repeated. There had to be some other solution.

  “Sookie has to stay with you, or you can’t have the party. Take it or leave it,” said Mom.

  At that moment, Mia and Emily showed up at the back door; I quickly nodded in agreement, but I burned with resentment. Nobody’s little sister hung out with them at a party. Maybe she would be satisfied staying in the study watching movies. I could hope.

  As far as costumes went, I quickly noticed that Mia and Emily had the same costume idea as me. Mia wore her Witches soccer uniform and had a spiked hat and tiny broom, and Emily wore her Ghosts uniform and had painted her face white with dark circles underneath her eyes. She actually looked really spooky. Before my friends even walked through the door, Sookie was hanging off of us, asking if she could play some of her little kid music, and didn’t we think we should make popcorn balls, and don’t we want to play “pin the broom on the witch” or a type of Halloween bingo she’d brought home from school?

  “Oh, and Cat, you have to help me with my costume for tonight,” Sookie said cheerfully. “I’m going to be a fairy princess.”

  So much for her keeping a low profile … Emily rolled her eyes and Mia tried not to laugh. We all knew that Sookie was going to wreck this party.

  “Here,” Emily said. She handed Sookie the gloppy cobweb stuff. “Decorate the entrance hall with this. Make sure it hangs low so everybody gets that really icky feeling brushing through it when they first come in.”

  Clearly Emily had managed little sisters before, so I left Sookie up to her while I got up to my elbows in crepe paper, decorating the walls and ceiling. Soon my cheeks throbbed from blowing up dozens of orange and black balloons, and my nose burned from their rubbery smell. But then my mouth watered as we put the cookies and cupcakes out on a paper tablecloth decorated with a haunted house.

  When I stood on a chair in the living room putting the finishing tack in all the streamers that gathered at the center of the ceiling, Emily handed up the finishing touch – a chandelier of balloons that she and Mia had wound together. Someone pounded on the back door, and I jumped down to answer it.

  Jasper stood at the kitchen door. “Cat, you’ve been avoiding me again.” He sounded irritated. “Whenever we agree to meet so that we can look into everything more, you don’t show up. When I knock on your door, your mom says you’re at practice. If I see you in the halls at school, you say you don’t have time to talk about the first soccer match long ago.”

  Jasper pushed his glasses up on his head. “I found out who won the game, by the way. But I’m really worried.”

  “But the mystery is over,” I said, smiling. “Just tell me, and then I can concentrate on the game and get back to my party.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “Remember I had rosters of both the Ghosts and Witches with all the girls’ names? Up until the match, there was lots of information, but after the game, there was nothing.” Jasper paced excitedly as if he was a detective cracking a big case. “So I thought, well, why not check the names of the girls on both teams and see who attended Darkmont the next year?”

  Tapping my foot, I tried to be patient, but I heard a loud bang in the kitchen and wondered what Sookie was up to. “Cut to the chase,” I said.

  “The Witches must have won because after the match, not a single girl on that team returned to Darkmont.” Jasper stopped dead and didn’t look as satisfied as he should have for succeeding in his investigation.

  When he didn’t say anything, I sighed and asked, “Well, what’s the problem?”

  “Cat,” he said. “I thought, why not cross-check the Witches’ names with the Grimoire records just to make sure those girls got the scholarship?”

  Only Jasper would think to dig through a bunch more files and double-check everything. Suddenly it occurred to me why he got straight As. “And?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said a bit apologetically, “I could only find one file from Grimoire in the library archives, and it only had student names up to the letter h. But every single girl on the Witches that should have been in that file wasn’t. Those girls never ended up at Grimoire School either!”

  “How many names did you actually match?” I was fidgety and wanted to get back to my party. Guests would be arriving soon.

  “Only five names,” said Jasper.

  “Well that’s it then, only five names. Those girls probably moved out of town or something.” I looked over my shoulder. Sookie was messing around with the pizza platters and I hoped she wouldn’t drop anything.

  “Considering those were the only names I discovered, the odds would be slim that –”

  “You do know,” I interrupted, “that was ages ago, right?” What happened way back then meant less and less to me, and besides, I was in a hurry.

  “Cat, we need your help in here!” shouted Mia.

  Jasper leaned past me and checked out the balloons that Emily and Mia had finally hoisted up.

  “Oh, by the way, I’m having a hard time getting my parents to agree to your Halloween party tonight.” He looked a bit embarrassed. “My parents don’t get Halloween.”

  “Huh?” In my defense, I was distracted at that moment, but his comment truly puzzled me.

  “They don’t celebrate Halloween.” Jasper glanced longingly at the kitchen table decked with food. Sighing, he said, “Swarms of people in weird clothes climbing our stairs and banging on the door all evening freaks them out.” Jasper shrugged his shoulders. “They might not want me to come, even though this is just a party about Halloween and not actually trick-or-treat night.”

  I’m sure my face looked blank. Suddenly his didn’t.

  “Oh. You don’t really care if my pare
nts let me come, do you? You never meant to invite me to your party in the first place.” Jasper turned and raced down the back porch steps.

  I was about to run after him – it wasn’t that I hadn’t planned on inviting Jasper. I hesitated on the porch. Try explaining to someone that you’d been so happy that all the popular kids wanted to come to your party that you’d forgotten all about him. That wouldn’t exactly make him feel any better. So I didn’t chase after Jasper.

  “C’mon, Cat. People will be coming soon, and we still have to set up the playlists,” called Emily.

  Jasper had left, and there was nothing I could undo, so I consoled myself by thinking that he probably wouldn’t have been allowed to come to the party anyway. I went back into the kitchen.

  But as soon as the doorbell started ringing, I wished I’d tried to convince Jasper to come. For one thing, how was I going to entertain Sookie and still have a good time myself?

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that not inviting Jasper could be a big mistake.

  CHAPTER 11 Day of the Dead

  SOON THE HOUSE was full of vampires, witches, ghosts and zombies, cats and wizards. My heart flip-flopped when the boys’ soccer team arrived, and I noticed that Zach was with them.

  First I was running back and forth from the kitchen like a crazed windup toy serving snacks, until Mia and Amarjeet helped me carry platters to the dining room table. After that, Zach, who looked totally cute in his hockey jersey, and his friends helped fill the bathtub with ice and we threw all the soda in there. When I finally had a minute to catch my breath, I took the opportunity to set up my MP3 player. Then Mitch offered to be the deejay. Pretty soon, the music was going and everyone was dancing. I did a double take when I noticed Zach coming my way.

  “Cat!” came Sookie’s disgruntled voice, echoing out from the study. “I’ve been waiting and waiting. You haven’t helped me with my costume yet!”

  “Not now,” I called cheerfully and kept smiling as Zach held out his hand, ready to get me out on the dance floor.

  “Then get Mom!” Sookie shouted.

  Zach rolled his eyes and said, “Your mom? Guess you’ll be back soon.”

  “Oh, I promise,” I said, waiting until I was in the hallway before muttering under my breath, “Yeah, sure, great idea – why not get Mom? Then I can have my mother and my little sister at my party.” Banging open the door to the study, I asked huffily, “What do you want me to do?”

  Sookie didn’t sound a bit intimidated. “I need you to clip on my fairy wings.”

  A good fifteen minutes passed as I searched for enough safety pins to fasten the wings. Sookie had made her fairy costume out of old angel wings from a Christmas play. She explained that she painted brown spots all over the white feathers because fairy wings and angel wings were different. She also had some weird antennae contraption stuck to a headband and pulled over her ears. She wore Mom’s sparkly purple top, which hung down to her knees and finished her costume off with her pink ballet slippers. She looked a bit ridiculous, and I felt embarrassed as she trounced out into the party and attracted smirking glimpses from the other guests.

  Sookie put on Ghostbusters and insisted that everyone get up and dance to it. I hid in the kitchen, fetching more cookies and bagels. Then Thriller came on and I had to dance – I love that song. But it wasn’t a couple’s dance, and after that, every time I looked out on the floor, another girl was with Zach. It was all Sookie’s fault!

  As the evening wore on, more and more people came until the house was absolutely brimming. Almost everyone wore masks or lots of makeup, so I didn’t recognize a bunch of people.

  “Fairies don’t really look like that,” I heard a girl say to Sookie. The girl was dressed in black and she wore a beautiful silver mask.

  “Then what do fairies look like?” Sookie demanded. After that, Sookie must have found an unsuspecting victim to play with because she’d stopped bugging me. Finally.

  We ate and danced some more. Mitch, who’d painted himself green and had stuck a fish bowl on his head as a space helmet, started a conga line. We all joined and got really silly. We danced around the living room, out past the front porch, and out into the thick fog. We did the conga around two entire blocks and then we danced back to my house and collapsed in the kitchen laughing.

  Although I could never quite maneuver my way back to Zach, the party was the most fun I’d ever had. Besides, I had a plan. For the last event of the night, we filled a big tub of water out on the back porch. Amarjeet and I dumped a huge bag of apples into the tub, standing back to avoid the splash. A dozen people lined up behind us ready to bob for apples. We were going to make two people dunk at the same time, a boy and a girl. Mia, Emily, and I had already planned who our partners would be. Just thinking about brushing my face up against Zach’s gave me butterflies.

  “Did you know that bobbing for apples – and other Halloween traditions – can be traced back to the ancient Celtic day of the dead?” came a voice out of nowhere.

  Spinning around, I noticed a tall girl dressed in a long, black dress with high, black ankle boots standing behind me. She was the one who wore the silvery mask studded with shining white feathers. The mask looked kind of old-fashioned, like what people wore at masquerades in picture books. It also gave her an eerie, almost ghostly appearance. An odd smell surrounded her too – it was like a mixture of roses and cinnamon.

  “What? What’s Celtic?” I asked.

  “Celts,” the girl said, “were people who lived in Ireland and Scotland a couple of thousand years ago. The end of October was their festival of Samhain, the night when Celts believed creatures from the netherworld walked the earth.”

  The girl outlined the mask on her face, her fingers brushing the feathers. “Celts believed if you wore a mask, you could hide from the spirits of the netherworld – because this was a favorite disguise of the dead.”

  Creepy, I thought. Kind of like her. Who exactly was she?

  But I didn’t have time to dwell on it because just then, Mitch and Mia bumped heads bobbing for apples, and Mitch accidentally fell up to his shoulders in the tub of water. Apples spilled out and everyone laughed as they bent over to start picking them up. I went into the kitchen to grab a mop and when I got back outside, the mysterious girl in the mask was gone.

  That was it for bobbing apples, so I never did get a chance to brush up against Zach. The party ended shortly after that, and Emily and Mia stayed an extra hour to help me clean up. After they left, I was exhausted – it was that good, achy tired feeling that you get when you’ve had so much fun, you’re about to drop. I climbed the stairs and walked past Mom’s room. It was empty. She was still working up in the attic, but because I couldn’t wait to jump into bed, I decided not to check in with her.

  Even though I was tired to the bone, the party kept replaying in my head. Just as I began to get that drifty sleepy sensation, I remembered that I’d been kind of harsh to Jasper when he had stopped by. And after he left, I had been worried about making a mistake by not inviting him. But it all worked out, didn’t it?

  CHAPTER 12 A Dreadful Jolt

  THE NEXT MORNING, I slept late, until weak light poked through my blinds. Rain pattered on my window, and the floor felt icy cold as I crawled out of bed, tiptoeing to my closet to find my slippers. Delicious smells drifted up from the kitchen, and I followed the scent.

  Downstairs Mom had made pancakes. Realizing I was starved, I sat down and slathered the pancakes with syrup. While I ate, we talked about the party. I told her how much fun everyone had, and she told me how pleased she was that the house was tidy when she came down in the morning.

  “I worked way past midnight,” Mom said. “And I just can’t understand – every time I got close to the bottom of my files, it was almost as if more files appeared on my desk.” Mom sipped her tea and yawned. “I’m going to bed early tonight, that’s for sure.”

  After I finished breakfast, I took our plates to the counter and began filling the sink
with soapy water, but Mom shooed me away. “You should head up to the field early for practice,” she said. “Remember, winning the scholarship is everything.” Mom grabbed a dishcloth and wiped a plate.

  Mom’s major enthusiasm was still puzzling. But that was okay, because I didn’t need any distractions.

  Gathering up my soccer gear, I rushed off and met up with Mia and Amarjeet at the bottom of Grim Hill. They seemed almost as tired as Mom had been. By the time we’d hiked to the top of the hill, the rain started coming down hard, and Mia and Amarjeet looked like drowned rats. I guessed that I did too.

  “Great party. I had an awesome time,” Mia said, and then she yawned.

  “Yeah, it was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to,” said Amarjeet. Then she sneezed. “I’m getting a chill.”

  My feet were wet and squishy after hitting a few puddles, but once we got on the soccer field, the rain didn’t matter. The castle school on top of the hill sang its song to me, and my body danced to the melody. Outrunning everyone, I could get the ball whenever I wanted and make it do whatever I wanted. My foot was the magnet and the ball acted as if it were made of steel – except when I aimed, kicked, and launched the ball past the other players and it landed exactly in the right spot.

  After practice every muscle in my body ached. How long had it been since I’d skipped soccer even for one day? How long since I’d had enough time to finish my chores or do all my homework? Stopping in my tracks, I realized it had been quite some time.

  For one thing, no teacher asked me to turn in my homework, which was helpful because I hadn’t finished a single assignment. And during these last weeks before the match, every girl on the Ghosts and the Witches was dismissed an hour early from school for practice. None of the other students seemed jealous of our extra privileges. In fact, everyone was cheering us on.