When All the Girls Are Sleeping

by Emily Arsenault

  “It wasn’t Ms. Engels,” Anna went on. “I’ve spoken to her multiple times, and she’s as baffled as I am. Now, I don’t think I need to explain why this is a problem, aside from the fact that it made the fourth floor extremely cold the first morning. If you’re not clear about that, feel free to ask me privately. I will say this: if someone is doing this intentionally, I’m going to ask you to stop.”

  I was looking down at my hands now, still avoiding the other girls’ eyes.

  I made her jump.

  Those words kept coming back to me—along with the question I’d been turning around in my head last night—about Taylor screaming or not screaming. About the girls who lived in the rooms next to her. Alex kind of knew the one named Lily. The other girl’s name I still couldn’t remember.

  Anna went on: “Ignoring this request will result in consequences—loss of off-campus privileges, to start. And a report to the dean of students. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said. I hope so. Because if this is someone’s idea of a funny prank, they are seriously mistaken. If anyone knows who might be responsible for this, and has information they’d like to share with me, I’m available in my room. I don’t want to belabor this, so that’s it….”

  Anna sighed deeply and looked quickly around the room, seeming to avoid eye contact with any particular girl. “Unless anyone has comments or questions they’d like to voice right now?”

  No one said anything. The floor creaked with the collective shifting of weight in the room.

  Ursula Gruber raised her hand. “Umm…besides that closet, does someone else have keys to the different rooms? Besides you?”

  “Aside from the student keys to each room, I have a copy and the main residential office has one as well. Ms. Engels has a key to the supply room, but she doesn’t have keys to any other student rooms. None of the custodial staff have direct access to student room keys, if that’s what you’re asking. Is that your concern?”

  “Uh…I guess,” Ursula said.

  “Anyone else?” asked Anna.

  No one spoke or raised a hand. I felt my heartbeat begin to feel heavy and fast again. This question of keys—and who had them—made me uneasy. Taylor was always losing things—phones, jewelry, and even her key. I knew this about her. And I wondered if anyone else in this room knew it, too. Always I’d wondered if it was part of being a rich kid—constantly losing expensive things and not much caring.

  “Okay, then,” Anna chirped. “I’ll let you all get to your studies.”

  Maylin met me as I came out of the room.

  “Want to hang out with me and Alex for a little while?” she whispered.

  The advantage of being a senior and living in Dearborn was that the “mandatory study hall” hours were that in name only. We could “study” wherever we wanted in the building, not just the study areas or our own rooms. Which meant we could hang out in each other’s rooms.

  I was happy to leave the meeting behind and not be alone. When we got upstairs, Alex was already in Maylin’s room—cross-legged on the rug, laptop open.

  “You know,” Alex said, “I just don’t know if Anna should’ve made a big thing of this. Maybe that old door lock is broken, or maybe Ms. Engels has been absentminded the past couple of days. But now everyone knows, and everyone’s going to be all worked up, and everyone’s going to think they have to come up with a theory about it.”

  Maylin shook her head and sat on her bed, pushing aside a pile of laundry that had been dumped there.

  “I mean, I really appreciate Ms. Engels and everything she does,” Alex continued. “But I think this whole ‘supply room’ thing is kind of insulting to all of us. It’s obvious Ms. Engels actually doesn’t need that room for anything. The real supply closet downstairs is enough, and that’s what she’s used to using. She probably left the bogus upstairs one unlocked for a few days by mistake.”

  This theory would’ve been perfectly plausible to someone who had not seen those grim words scribbled on Taylor’s old window.

  “But—” I began.

  Alex and Maylin both looked at me expectantly.

  “Never mind.” I shook my head. I wanted to share what I had seen—but not now. Not yet. Not until I could find a way without sounding crazy. And I wasn’t ready to tell them about the video from Thatcher, either.

  I saw Maylin glance at Alex before picking up a pair of pajama bottoms and folding them slowly.

  “Maybe it is the Winter Girl,” Maylin murmured. “I mean, I’m not really into that stuff. But Kate Goldberg’s older sister was in Dearborn just two or three years ago, and she was good friends with someone who swore she saw the ghost. It really freaked her out. She almost had, like, a nervous breakdown.”

  Alex looked unimpressed. “That’s a thirdhand story. All Dearborn stories seem to be like that. Isn’t that convenient?”

  Maylin folded a pair of pink-and-black polka-dotted underwear until it formed a tiny little square.

  “Kate Goldberg’s sister’s friend is a real person,” she pointed out.

  Alex stared into her laptop screen. “I’d be interested in hearing it straight from her, then.”

  Maylin rolled her eyes. “Hey. I mean, I’m not saying I believe in the ghost, really. But maybe there’s some weird energy in the building, opening and closing doors and windows and stuff.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Alex spoke as she typed on her computer. “Like maybe everybody is getting their period at the same time and it’s making the lights flicker.”

  “What?” Maylin said.

  “Well, you know…” Alex was clearly shifting into informational mode, looking up from her laptop. “I’ve read and seen stuff on TV about how sometimes poltergeists happen in places where there’s like a stressed-out tween or teenager. There’s some theory that all the nervous, messed-up psychic energy of a pubescent kid—usually a girl, gotta blame it on a girl—is what’s causing the weird shit to happen. Not a ghost.”

  “But this is a senior dorm,” I reminded her. “We’re all way past pubescent.”

  “Can we stop saying pubescent?” Maylin said.

  “Way Past Pubescent,” Alex repeated. “Can that be our band name?”

  “Stop!” Maylin squealed.

  “Maylin hates words that have pube in them,” Alex told me.

  “Shouldn’t everyone?” Maylin lay back into her pile of laundry. “I’m officially declaring this a no-pube zone.”

  “But do you think it’s possible that the ghost has always been that kind of energy?” I asked. I kind of liked this idea. It was weird, but at least it didn’t involve dead people.

  “Like all of our nervous little adolescent girl-brains are doing it?” Alex said. “No. No, I don’t believe that.”

  “But there are people who think this is a real thing? A young person’s brain causing a poltergeist?”

  “Yeah. Look it up. You’ve never heard that before? There are a lot of famous cases. Of people suddenly thinking there’s a ghost in their house. Dishes flying off the shelves. Furniture falling over. But really, it’s usually in a house where someone is going through puberty.”

  “Hear that?” Maylin exclaimed. “Puberty. Alex didn’t last two minutes.”

  “But what happens when the kid gets older?” I asked. “Does the poltergeist go away?”

  “Usually everyone gets scared and moves out of the house before that, I guess. I don’t remember. I read a few stories like that when I was a kid, that’s all. I’m not an expert. You should look it up.”

  “Like, do they outgrow the poltergeist? Or does it stay with them?”

  Alex shrugged.

  “There are still a lot of things I’m waiting to outgrow,” Maylin said, a little dreamily. Probably she was thinking about Wes again.

  “Is one of them Taylor Swift?” Alex asked. “Because my vote wo
uld be for that.”

  Maylin pulled a big-eyed, fluffy white stuffed seal off her bed. She tossed it and expertly hit Alex on the ear with it.

  “Well, we all know you emerged from the birth canal singing dark indie ballads,” Maylin said.

  Alex was laughing as she tossed the seal back.

  “Did you have to say ‘birth canal’?” she demanded.

  “Yes.” Maylin grabbed a metal water bottle off the floor and gulped from it. “Absolutely. I was tailoring my message to my audience, like Mr. Packer always tells us to do.”

  Alex rolled her eyes and put her earbuds in. Then she pulled one out and said, “And we all know how you feel about Mr. Packer.”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Maylin said.

  “I’m not sure if dignity has anything to do with it,” Alex replied.

  There’s no stopping Alex and Maylin when they start in like this. Sitting silently on their rug, listening to them go back and forth, I decided Anthony might be a better bet for showing the Thatcher video. I felt closer to him lately. He’d known Taylor better than Alex and Maylin had. And he might have more of a neutral response, in a way, since he wasn’t a Dearborn resident himself.

  Someone knocked on Maylin’s door.

  “Come in!” Alex yelled.

  It was the sophomore Alex tutored in chem, a laptop case slung over her shoulder.

  “Hey…guys,” she said softly, apparently embarrassed to be addressing a roomful of seniors. She was petite and urchin-eyed like Alex, but without any of the disarming confidence. I couldn’t remember her name.

  But it was time for me to get going anyway.

  “I’d better go get to work,” I said, standing up and gesturing for the sophomore to take my place on the rug. “But Alex…there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That girl Lily Bruno, who graduated last year…do you keep in touch with her? You were kind of friends, right?”

  Again, Alex and Maylin exchanged meaningful glances. No one wanted to address the obvious—that I was talking about one of the two girls who’d essentially witnessed Taylor’s death—who’d first seen her lying on the pavement in the moment afterward.

  “Not really friends.” Alex hesitated. “Just lab partners.”

  “But do you have a way of getting in touch with her?”

  “I might still have her old number to text her with. I’ll have to check.”

  I paused. “Maybe you could send it to me.”

  I felt like all eyes in the room were on me—except the sophomore’s. She was unpacking her laptop—probably trying to look busy.

  “When you get a chance,” I added.

  “Sure,” Alex said.

  I mumbled that I needed to get to my homework, then said a quiet goodbye before closing the door.

  * * *

  I didn’t go back to my room right away. Instead, I headed downstairs and sat for a while in the empty dining hall.

  I texted Anthony:

  I have something I want to show you.

  It took him only a minute to reply:

  Want to talk?

  I did want to talk. And to show him Taylor’s video, which I no longer felt I could keep to myself. But I knew he had a paper due tomorrow. Anthony was a last-minute guy. I imagined him banging away furiously on his laptop, pushing his hair from his face, tucked away in his spare, mostly undecorated dorm room.

  Not now, I typed. But any chance you remember the names of the girls from last year who found/heard Taylor the night she jumped? One was Lily Bruno. I’m trying to remember the other.

  Jayla Martin, he wrote back. She was in orchestra.

  Did you know her?

  Not really. Leo knew her from Afro-Latino Alliance. Said she was funny.

  Know anyone who might know her number?

  No. Why?

  Long story, I typed. Will tell you in person.

  Dinner together tomorrow?

  Sure.

  I was grateful Anthony and I had warmed up to each other this year. Warmed-over leftovers.

  I switched over from our chat and opened Facebook. There was a Jayla Martin who had a few friends in common with me. I went to message her, but then my fingers froze over the keys.

  What to say? Best not to mention murderous words written in window fog, I decided. Keep it straightforward. But not too straightforward.

  Hi Jayla. I hope you’re doing well at college. As you might know, I was a friend of Taylor Blakey’s. I was wondering if you would be willing to talk to me about the night she died. There are some things I’d just like to settle for my own peace of mind, if that makes sense? Thanks, Haley

  Did it sound reasonable? I wasn’t sure, but added my number. I hit Send, then sat and worried about my homework for a few minutes. The calculus problems this week looked especially hard. And the thought of those made my body feel way too heavy to move itself upstairs to tend to them.

  After a minute more, the less ambitious act of staring at my phone paid off:

  Hi Haley—Yes, I remember you hanging out with Taylor last year. I hope you’re doing okay and we can talk if you want. I know you’ve got classes till 3, and I have a late class tomorrow until 4. After that, maybe?

  Thank you, I replied. Let’s try then.

  I added her contact to my phone and saved the number she’d tacked on at the end, finally feeling satisfied enough to get back to schoolwork for the time being. In our room, Star was busy on her laptop. She looked up, gave me a stressed-out sort of smile, and went back to work. We didn’t Twizzle.

  9

  Breathe in. Maybe.

  Breathe out. It was me.

  In. Poltergeist.

  Out. Mine.

  Opened that door.

  Scribbled the words.

  Crazy.

  Stop. Being. Crazy.

  But maybe.

  Maybe. Maybe my brain created the words on the window. Maybe they weren’t really there. Maybe I looked fast and just thought I saw them?

  Lying still, listening to Star breathe in the dark. It’s a peaceful noise, at least. As an insomniac, you also learn not to resent your roommates for their sound sleep. Or at least you learn to try not to.

  And in the long hours in the dark like this, I forget how old I am sometimes.

  I could be nine again, worrying about what might happen if I go to sleep. Or fourteen, worrying about what might happen if I don’t.

  Nine: If I go to sleep, I might wet the bed again. Or sleepwalk to the edge of the stairs, and tumble down them, awakening with my head cracked open like a smashed pumpkin.

  Not that it had ever happened. But I was a worrywart as a kid. And I’d seen my mother slip and fall halfway down them once—on a night when she and my dad had had a little too much gin and tonic.

  And fourteen: The first night at Windham, lying in the bed my mother had made before she’d gotten in her rental car and driven back to the airport because she didn’t really have the money for a second night in the hotel. Me picturing my mother arriving home just before midnight, passing by my half-empty room. She wouldn’t say, “Night, Haley. Try to sleep,” because I wouldn’t be there. My eyes stung at the thought as I tried to make out the contours of my new room in the dark. That first tiny room with Alex, with the broken sliver of blinds where the light came in. Since Alex’s bed was closer to the window, that sliver illuminated her small fingers that lay across her thin elbow as she slept on her back.

  I’d worried about all the things I might screw up if I couldn’t manage to fall asleep. Failed cross-country tryouts. Failed attempts to make friends. Inability to focus in my new, super-challenging prep school classes. Being called on and looking sleepy and stupid if I couldn’t answer the questions.

 
When I fell asleep that night, I think it was in the comfort of knowing that even if I failed everything, it would be nice, in some ways, to go back home, to not have to think of that room being empty and my mother and little brother eating their chicken casserole dinner without me.

  To get to hear that “Night, Haley” for a few more years.

  But.

  But it wasn’t to be. Because I met Taylor a couple of days later. And from then on I didn’t ever consider going home.

  10

  Eleven Nights Left

  All of the girls are sleeping soundly.

  I used to be like these girls. Beaming and bright-eyed. Moving with light, tapping steps and not this ghostly shuffle. That was Before, of course.

  Before.

  I never understood what a beautiful and painful word that was.

  Before before befooooooore. Stretch and moan the end of that word, and it can go on forever.

  Soon enough, they will learn. I will teach them: what it feels like to be in the ugly After.

  11

  Wednesday, January 30

  After French class, I stayed on the Farnswood campus. Upperclass students were allowed to be here until the last shuttle at seven-thirty on weekdays—for library study, activities, meals, or “visiting,” which often actually meant making out in an empty student lounge or in the woods behind the athletic building.

  I had about forty-five minutes to kill before I’d meet Anthony for dinner, and I knew he was still at orchestra. My plan was to talk to Jayla Martin.

  It was really too cold to stand outside talking, but I didn’t want to be overheard. I found an empty women’s bathroom in the foreign language hall and dialed Jayla’s number. She answered and I felt a little unfocused as she asked me a few polite questions about how I was. I did the same. And then there was an awkward silence.

  “So you said you wanted to ask about Taylor?” she said.

  “Well…yeah. I was wondering if you would mind telling me exactly how it happened that night. Exactly what you heard and saw. I know it probably seems terrible, to want to know, but—”