When All the Girls Are Sleeping

by Emily Arsenault

  “Hold on a second,” I murmured. I slipped back into my room and studied Star’s motionless form in her bed. Her old photo of the girls gathered in front of Dearborn was still on her desk from the other night. I zoomed in on Sarah Chase, the sour, spooky-looking girl, and snapped a quick picture. Then I texted it to Bronwyn.

  “The girl in the picture I just texted you…Does that look like the girl you saw in your room?”

  Bronwyn paused for a second. “Umm…my girl was really frail. This girl looks like she’s of pretty hardy stock, actually. And darker hair.”

  “Oh,” I said, unsure if I was disappointed. If she’d said yes, I might have had an anxiety attack.

  “Are you…okay?”

  “I…um…haven’t been feeling so comfortable sleeping in Dearborn lately,” I admitted.

  “I don’t blame you. They couldn’t let you live in another dorm, considering everything that happened to your friend?”

  “I didn’t ask to.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. All seniors lived in Dearborn. No matter what. It was the tradition. And as a scholarship kid, I wasn’t in the habit of asking for exceptions.

  “There are people who…well, I don’t know if I should say this.”

  “What?”

  “There are people who…and I’m not going to say I’m one of these people…who think that there was probably more to your friend’s death than Windham wants to say.”

  “What people?” I demanded.

  “Well…look,” Bronwyn said. “I’m going to send you something. If anyone asks, it wasn’t me.”

  “Uhh…okay. What is it?”

  “You’ll see. I’m going to do it as a screenshot. There was a Facebook group I was part of for a little while. It’s mostly older women. Windham alums. They’ve all had bad experiences in Dearborn. They all believe there’s something wrong with the place. Some are more woo-woo about it than others. One of them thinks there must be some noxious mold growing in the building that makes some of the girls go crazy and see things. Anyway, they’re like a little club—they chat online about their theories. Not just about Dearborn, of course, but other supernatural stuff or whatever. That’s partly why I stepped away from it. It all started to weird me out after a while. Even though it was kind of hard to get into the group, once I was in, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there.”

  “Oh. Wow. Sure, I’d like to see anything you can send me.”

  “You can text me your email address after we talk, okay? And like I said, don’t tell anyone I sent it to you. I’m doing this because you’re a friend of that girl Taylor. I kind of don’t want to think about it anymore. But I get it that you do. Since you’re still there. Since you’re still close to it.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering if I’d made too much of Bronwyn’s expensive clothes and haughty smile when she was at Windham. Or, for that matter, the rumors about girls quitting the swim team because she was such an imperious team captain. She seemed perfectly nice. Exceedingly nice, even.

  “Then you can text me if you have any questions about it,” she said.

  “Okay,” I murmured. “Thanks.”

  “And Haley? Take care, okay?”

  After we’d hung up and I’d sent her my email, I dusted myself off, tiptoed back to my door as quietly as I could, and slipped back into the room. Star had flipped from her back to her side and now was scrunched up in a ball, her back to me.

  My history text was still open on my bed. I read a paragraph or two more of my assignment and then checked my email on my laptop.

  Bronwyn’s message had already come through with a screenshot of a Facebook discussion between several people. The discussion seemed to be moderated by a person named Suzie Price, whose profile picture was of a sunflower instead of a person:

  Suzie Price: Hi all. Please let me know if you do not want to be included in this, or you can remove yourself from the discussion. I know there has been very little discussion on this group recently—it isn’t my intention to frighten everyone or bring back bad memories. But I wanted to alert everyone to some tragic news from Windham. A student jumped (or fell) to her death from the fourth floor of Dearborn the night before last.

  Darla Heaney: Oh no.

  Jane Villette: I heard about this because I live in Northam—not too far from Windham. It was on the local NPR affiliate, that there had been a student death. Such a tragedy.

  Lynette Rakoff has left the discussion.

  Darla Heaney: The school’s PR is not saying directly, but it sounds like it was a suicide. Prayers for the family.

  Darla Heaney: Maybe this will light another fire under the administration’s behind about that building.

  Laurie Rowell: Never. They never will.

  Suzie Price: Let’s maybe wait until we hear more about the details before we speculate about that.

  Isabella Kaufman: They’re saying the girl had a drug problem.

  Laurie Rowell: How convenient.

  Karen Norcross has left the discussion.

  Suzie Price: Who’s saying that?

  Jane Villette: A friend of mine’s daughter is there as a day student.

  Laurie Rowell: Someone ought to call Ronald Darkins back for a visit.

  Suzie Price: He’s dead, sadly.

  Laurie Rowell: Oh. RIP. Or…probably not. Probably he’s haunting someplace or someone or other, just to prove himself right.

  Suzie Price: I know we all have our baggage about Windham and Dearborn, but I feel like this is kind of unseemly. Even in the context of this little group.

  Laurie Rowell: Windham admitting that a student had a drug problem? Hmm, I think they might be desperate not to have to admit to *another* problem…

  Jane Villette: Can we take a step back here, ladies? The poor girl. Her poor parents.

  Darla Heaney: Well, they definitely aren’t poor.

  It took me a couple of minutes to take all of this in. They all sounded like Windham girls, actually. But when I clicked on their profiles, several of them looked like they were pretty old. Laurie Rowell seemed to have kids. Suzie Price mentioned grandkids in her profile. Darla Heaney’s profile said she graduated from UNH five years ago, so she at least wasn’t as old as the others. But here they all were, gossiping about Taylor’s death.

  For a moment, I wondered if I should consider this discussion malicious. But then—at least they were angry about it on some level. At least they cared. And there was a general sense that Windham’s administration had something to hide.

  I had questions. I reopened my message with Bronwyn:

  Thank you for this. Have you ever met or talked to any of these ladies?

  Only Suzie. You have to talk to her to get in the group.

  Is she (I hesitated, searching for the right word) nice?

  Yeah. She’s nice, but not all of them are. A couple of them seem a little nuts, just go in knowing that. If you want to contact Suzie, friend her on FB or try to message her. Ask her to call you if you’re serious about joining the haunted group. She won’t just add you automatically. She’s very wary of interloper trolls.

  The haunted group. That wasn’t a club I was certain I wanted to join.

  Okay thanks, I wrote back, at a loss for a more specific response.

  Was I haunted? Had Taylor been?

  The wind whistled outside, and the sound of it pulled my attention away from my laptop. Star, seeming to hear the noise in her sleep, mushed her face into her pillow. I let my gaze creep upward to the framed poster above her bed—of a smiling beluga whale. I usually tried not to look at it, because the more I looked at it, the more I felt its innocently happy facial expression resembled Star’s.

  Stop that. I was so startled at the thought that I almost scolded myself aloud. Another mean thought about Star. A Taylor sort of though
t.

  I picked up my phone and texted again.

  How did you connect with this group exactly?

  Last year I met another Windy at a party. I was a little drunk and started talking about the ghost. She said her mom (also a Windy) knew someone who’d had a scare in Dearborn, and then she gave me that person’s contact info, and that person is in the Facebook group, so she helped me get signed in. I am glad I’m not the only one, but it’s all a little weird for me. I’m not suggesting you should join them but thought you’d want to know it’s an option.

  Thanks, I wrote simply. But then added Goodnight so Bronwyn would know I didn’t intend to hound her with questions all evening.

  How very legacy of Bronwyn to refer to herself as a Windy. Only girls whose mothers and grandmothers went here used that affectionate term. The rest of us riffraff all thought it sounded too much like a fart reference.

  I put my phone down and read over the Facebook discussion again.

  After a few minutes, I Googled Darla Heaney. She was likely the youngest of these women, and maybe I could gauge how crazy she was by seeing what kind of dirt I could find about her.

  Since she had a relatively uncommon name, it didn’t prove to be very difficult. She was an employee at an environmental firm near Philadelphia. And that had kind of a sane whiff to it for sure. Maybe I’d been expecting to find something a little weirder—like that she’d have an Instagram full of pictures of hairless cats, or an Etsy store of cocktail dresses for infants.

  I returned to the discussion to see who else in the group I might stalk, but my eyes settled on something else. A guy’s name.

  Someone ought to call Ronald Darkins back for a visit.

  Was he someone’s boyfriend? Was this an inside joke?

  I clicked back onto Google and typed in Ronald Darkins. The first thing that came up was a Wikipedia bio.

  Ronald Darkins (1936–1999) was an American parapsychologist, paranormal investigator, and author. He was associated with several well-known paranormal claim investigations, but is likely to have investigated hundreds of additional lesser-known cases. Early in his career, he avoided media attention and quietly investigated cases part-time while teaching general psychology at Weston Community College in Vermont. After the publication of his most well-known book, Resonances and Reflections, in 1992, he was in much higher demand for investigations and media appearances. The popularity of such shows as Unsolved Mysteries during the early and mid-1990s heightened his public profile, giving him minor celebrity status, with which he was never comfortable, according to close friends and family. From 1978 to 1994, he always conducted his investigations with the help of his wife, Kathleen, whom some claim was clairvoyant. Their marriage and working relationship ended with their divorce in 1994. Darkins continued to conduct paranormal investigations on his own and published Ghost of the Gallows: Paranormal Encounters in the American West in 1996. His last book, a work of horror fiction titled Dew Drop Dead, about a haunted restaurant inn, was published posthumously in 2001.

  The photograph beside the initial paragraph was of a smiling but slightly cross-eyed man in his forties, with a shock of dark hair, a trim beard, and large round glasses.

  I sucked in my breath as I scrolled down the page, scanning for any other relevant details about this guy’s career. At the end was a long bibliography that listed his books and media appearances. It seemed like he was big in the early ’90s. He’d occasionally been on shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Paranormal Detective.

  Ronald Darkins was a ghost hunter. But he’d been dead for more than twenty years. Still, my eyes focused on Someone ought to call Ronald Darkins back.

  Back? Meaning he’d come to Windham at some point? Or called one of these women at some point? Or maybe he went to Farnswood?

  I Googled his name along with Windham-Farnswood, and then with just Farnswood and Windham individually. Then I spent the next half hour scrolling and clicking on page after page where those names came up together. But I found no media reference to him ever visiting the school. It didn’t surprise me. Windham-Farnswood had a very stuffy, old-fashioned administration—moneyed academics who’d gone here or to similar schools themselves. There was no way they’d let some cheesy ghost-hunter show film an episode here.

  I sighed and minimized my search screen. It was already late, so I started again on my homework. I finished most of it in about an hour. Then, once I’d put on my T-shirt and flannel pants and shut out the light, I tried to ignore the occasional rattle-crack of the window glass shifting with the strong wind outside.

  14

  In the dark, my brain flirts with sleep but of course comes back to Taylor.

  I met Taylor in the first few days after cross-country practice. I felt her watching me in the locker room after the third day of tryouts. She came up and asked me where I’d come from.

  “Michigan,” I’d said dumbly.

  “What brings you all the way to Windham-Farnswood, then? Travel all that way, don’t you want to go somewhere a little fancier? Choate, maybe? Exeter?”

  I stared at her for a moment, trying to determine if she was making fun of me. The story of how I’d ended up here wasn’t one I’d been planning to share anytime soon.

  “I’ll bet you’ll be varsity. You’re really good. You’ve got amazing times, amazing stamina. I was varsity last year, too. I was the only firstie on varsity.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was trying not to stare—but trying, too, to decide if I thought she was pretty.

  “You’re a sophomore?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Yes, I decided. Pretty. Just not in a conventional way. She had what my mother called a “strong profile.” Bigger nose, but she carried it well. Fierce, dark eyes that appeared to be laughing at everything.

  Age gap aside, she invited me to have dinner with her and her friends in Barton. I agreed—and ate at a table full of sophomores and juniors who were all scheming how to get off-campus permission to sneak out to a day student’s party the following weekend. They were friendly with me even though I said next to nothing. Many of them seemed to defer to Taylor on things—and tolerating my presence was no different. Taylor and I lingered over dessert for a while after all of her friends had left.

  She asked me where I was from in Michigan. I told her there was no way she’d heard of my town. She asked me again why Windham “of all places.” I answered only that my mother had heard it was a nice school.

  Taylor seemed to accept that. Instead of replying directly, she paused and then asked, “Do you know you have a little bit of a sibilant s?”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She smiled. “It means you hiss some of your s’s. It means there’s some snake in your nature, probably.”

  I had to look up sibilant on my phone later.

  No one had ever mentioned it before—although I overheard my mother decline for me to be tested for speech services when I was in second grade. And whatever Taylor meant by comparing me to a snake, I decided to take it as a compliment. Taylor seemed like a good person to have as a friend, so I would take what I could get.

  And that night I didn’t have to toss and turn for quite so long to get to sleep. Because I was starting to feel like this whole Windham idea might work out.

  15

  Ten Nights Left

  Like all ghosts, I have a story to tell. The story of how I got this way. A story that doesn’t heal with telling. I’ve told the story to so many silent rooms, to mirrors in which I no longer see myself.

  The story does not belong to those girls.

  They whisper some fiction of a Sarah Suicide. They find it delicious.

  Winter after winter.

  Girls in. Girls out.

  Some see and feel a darkness of their own imagining.

  But I am the real thing.


  16

  Thursday, January 31

  When Star nudged me awake, her long wet hair touched my elbow.

  “If you hit snooze one more time,” she said, “you’ll be late to your first class.”

  I sat up. “You’ve showered already?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been up for a while.”

  “It wasn’t cold in the hall?”

  “Not this time,” Star said quietly.

  “Did you happen to look down the hall…at the…supply closet?”

  Star shook her head. “I didn’t think to…Do you want me to go look?”

  “Uh…no, that’s okay.”

  * * *

  Reluctant to spend any extra time in Dearborn, I’d decided I’d walk to the library after classes. My plan was to find a quiet, private place to write to the leader of the Facebook group Bronwyn had told me about.

  I made my way through the main reference area—with its stained glass windows and eager studiers at the long, shiny tables—and into the closed stacks. My favorite place to work was the fourth floor of the stacks, in the dusty cluster of carrels by the yellowed theology books that nobody checked out anymore. This was where the stacks were the most tightly packed and the oldest-smelling.

  Once I was settled in a carrel, I took out my laptop and tapped over to the screenshot Bronwyn had sent. Then I opened up Facebook and looked up Suzie Price, clicking on the option to send a message.

  Dear Ms. Price: I am a Windham-Farnswood senior, and someone gave me your name as a person to connect with about disturbing Dearborn experiences. I wonder if you would be willing to answer some questions about your own memories of the dorm and those of some of the other alums you know.

  I closed that window and started working on my English paper. If Suzie Price’s commitment to social media was anything like my mother’s—that is, spotty and unpredictable—I could possibly be waiting a month or two for a response.

  My attention to my work lasted about three minutes. I thought about how Taylor used to occasionally track me down here. Usually she wouldn’t stay long—she claimed the air wasn’t fresh enough and the packed shelves were too claustrophobic. But one time she’d lingered here with me long into a listless Saturday. She’d sat at the carrel opposite me, letting me catch up on homework while she listened to music with her phone and earbuds. I was fairly certain she’d just fought with her boyfriend and was hiding from him, but I didn’t make her say it. I never made Taylor do or say anything.