“I wanted you to know because you were Taylor’s friend,” she mumbled. “And because Lily and Rhea were going to get you kicked out. Rhea’s been on the phone with Lily for the past couple of days, since you texted Lily. Haley, Haley, Haley. That’s all she talks about, and thinks just because I’m fucked up, I can’t hear.”
Chloe took a breath. Since I felt like I was constricting her chest, I gripped one of her wrists and pulled my arms from around her waist.
“Yeah?” I whispered. “Thank you for telling me, Chloe. Thank you.”
“They even got Ms. Holland-Stone to help, even though you’re not ever supposed to contact old ghosts. But they were desperate.”
“She wrote on my paper?” In my disbelief, my grip loosened for a second.
Chloe pulled away from me. She flew at the window, both hands out, and nudged the screen up halfway.
I snatched her arm and pulled her from the window again.
“You’re hurting me,” she cried.
“I need you to stay away from the window.” I was trying to use a calming tone, but I could hear the tremble in my own voice.
Chloe reached out and scratched my face. Hard.
I screamed, and in my shock, let go of her again. She leapt for the window. Her feet were already off the ground. I lunged after her again.
She cried out as I pulled her down to the floor.
“This isn’t who you are,” I said. “You’re not a ghost.”
“I don’t feel anything, really,” Chloe sobbed. “I don’t see myself in the mirror.”
“I know. But you will again someday. You’re not a ghost. It wasn’t your fault. You were just caught up in something, you were like the messenger. But this isn’t you. Not forever.”
I wiped my cheek. It was wet—not just with the one tear that had slid from my eye, but a little blood from where she had scratched me.
“Girls! What is going on? What is going on?”
I looked up. Anna was standing in the doorway, her purple robe hanging off one arm, her mouth open. I exhaled.
She was not my mother or my friend or the lawyer lady with the beautiful shoes. She was not the most effectual of grown-ups, but I was so glad to see her.
“She was going to try and jump!” I cried, thrusting Chloe’s frail, shuddering body into Anna’s arms. “I think she’ll tell you. But someone needs to check on Rhea and Alex.”
“Wait!” Anna yelled.
As I ran, I heard Anna asking Chloe:
“What happened? Did she do something to you?”
I didn’t hear Chloe’s answer. I was already through the stairwell doors. Down the stairs. I was about to tear through the dining hall doors when Alex came out of them, staggering toward me.
“Alex!” I yelled.
“Chloe,” she gasped. “Have you seen Chloe?”
“She’s with Anna. Upstairs. Our floor. She’s pretty messed up.” I grabbed Alex by the arm. “We need to go see if Rhea’s all right. Chloe gave you both sleeping pills.”
“I thought so…,” Alex panted. “I thought so.”
“Is Rhea sleeping?”
“Yeah. I tried to wake her, but she was too sleepy to move.”
“So she’s not dead?” I whispered.
“What?” Alex looked stunned. “No. What happened to your face?”
“Chloe scratched me. It doesn’t matter. She told me everything, Alex,” I said. “She gave me the list. She told me about all of you ghosts. About Caroline Bromley and Norma Fleming and—”
Alex put her hand on the wall and slid to the floor.
“Good…great…good. I’m glad. I wanted to, too, but the others…”
She was afraid to look at me. Either the scratch on my face was worse than I thought, or it was sinking in for her how much I knew now.
“Is it true you were drugging Chloe?” I demanded.
Alex pushed her tangled hair out of her face and rested her head against the wall.
“She just needed some sleep,” she said. “She was acting crazy, sneaking off to Taylor’s room in the middle of the night, opening the window, carving more hearts, carving those words….We didn’t realize how bad it was till about a couple of weeks ago. She really thought she was a ghost. I was trying to get her some help, but it was complicated. We needed someone outside the school. We just needed to buy some time. And we needed to get the list from her, but she wouldn’t tell us where it was. I wanted to shut it all down. I wrote to Norma Fleming, and she wasn’t writing back. Lily and I were fighting about what to do, and she was worried about losing her money or even worse, getting arrested. We just needed a little more time.”
“Time for what?” I was trying—but failing—to keep my voice down. “What was going to happen that would have fixed things?”
“I don’t know.” Alex closed her eyes for a moment. “You don’t understand. We tried so hard to help her, to tell her it wasn’t her fault. Ghosts don’t usually room together, but Rhea and I both thought it would be a good idea to arrange it, last year, so she could keep a close eye on Chloe, make sure she was okay. And she seemed okay for a while. But the onset of the winter maybe just made something snap in her, brought the guilt back. She started acting weird, saying she was really a ghost, talking about February 10th, disappearing on Rhea in the middle of the night. We were trying to help her, but she was holding us hostage, not telling us where she’d put the list.”
Alex exhaled and gazed at me, exhausted but clearly waiting for a reply.
“Meanwhile, Chloe was losing her mind night by night,” I said softly.
Alex blushed bright red, her eyes flashing.
“I was doing the best I could with a really messed-up situation, Haley! Do you think you could do better?”
“I’m just trying to figure out—”
“You don’t know how lucky you are. Why didn’t the ghosts pick you? They almost did.”
I put my hand to my face, feeling the stinging part of my cheek. When I pulled it away, there was a little blood on two of my fingertips.
“What?” I said absently.
Alex was staring at me. “They had their eye on you at first. They watched you for a while. Scholarship student, quiet kid, afraid of the place, afraid of everything. The kind of girl nobody sees. Perfect. But then they saw you were starting to hang out with Taylor Blakey. And that’s not ghost material, a friend of a girl like that. They had to keep looking. They looked and they looked and then finally they saw her. The roommate of their first choice. Quiet and invisible, she almost slipped under their nose. But good thing she didn’t. Because when they really looked, she kinda looked like Sarah Black, even. Skylar—my senior ghost—was smitten. It was time for a good old-fashioned haunting, a sighting, the real deal. Not just the knocks on the doors or the projection camera tricks or the walkie-talkies or cell phones taped under beds. They told me on the night before Halloween when they initiated me—that’s when they do it—they had big plans for Bronwyn.”
“Could you have said no?” I whispered.
“In October of first year? With barely any friends? When it came with a practically full college scholarship from Ms. Fleming? Would you have?”
I hesitated. “Probably not. Do they always pick a fin aid kid?”
Alex shook her head. “No. Usually they do, but not always. It’s usually about power, not money. Above all, above even being an invisible sort of girl, the ghost has to be smart. Not just to know how to pull off a haunting, but to know when to pull back. When things are going too far. When circumstances aren’t good for a haunting, or it’s likely to be exposed. Lily wasn’t smart, turns out. She wanted everything. The exact date, the recorded cell phone ringtone taped under her bed, the door knocks, the Bible quote, scaring Taylor nearly to death in the days before. She even had this ridiculous plastic pole thing she’
d stick out her window and scratch Taylor’s window with. She thought it was all pretty awesome. She said it was the most fun she’d had at Windham. I mean, she said that before the accident.”
The accident.
What happened to Taylor had been an accident. Sort of.
I stood there silent, stunned. A moment later, someone came crashing through the dining room doors.
It was a bald-headed campus security officer.
“Is one of you Haley?” he demanded.
“I am,” I said, turning away from Alex.
“Your residential director called us. You need to come with me.”
“She didn’t do anything,” Alex offered weakly, pulling herself up.
“I won’t get in trouble,” I said to her. “If you help explain.”
Alex nodded.
The officer led me back to Dearborn and parked me on the couch in the sitting room. He stood right over me, calling his boss and then Anna, telling them he’d “intercepted her,” like I was a football.
I had a feeling that Chloe was going to be their priority for the next little while. I closed my eyes, going over Thatcher’s video in my head. Every scary moment had been produced by the “ghosts.” Taylor lived right next door to the senior ghost last year: Lily. That made it easy to make scratches on her window. And they’d gotten ahold of one of her keys somehow—probably from the backpack Rhea had taken from Star. A whispered prerecorded ringtone playing from a phone duct-taped under her bed, perfectly timed on multiple nights. Taylor was already haunted—terrified—by the time she recorded that video; she wanted to prove to herself it was real. But hadn’t had anyone to show it to.
And it was real. The “ghost” was embodied by real girls, year in and year out, for more than a hundred years.
Exhaling, I unzipped my fleece pocket and pulled out the notebook Chloe had given me just before she’d run. I opened it and looked at the first scrawled page:
Thirteen Nights Left
The window is open now, but I don’t feel the winter wind. I don’t shiver. I don’t chatter. Rather, I feel only a sensation of it blowing through the space that used to be me.
58
STAR NORDQUIST
Senior Thesis
Caroline Bromley: From Ghost to Legend
APPENDIX E
We, Caroline Bromley and Leonora Black, declare on this day of June 8, 1892, that Minnie Gardner, Vera Langstrom, and Hattie Brighton are “sisters in spirit” of our Sarah. Please remember Sarah’s favorite biblical quote, that “God sees the heart,” and perform this tradition in her gentle memory. The primary endeavor of this secret society is not intended to sow terror, but humility. Minnie will designate a younger ghost next year as we have done. In that way, Sarah, and girls like her, will never be forgotten, never be silenced.
Signed,
Caroline Bromley
Dear Ms. Noceno,
As promised, I’ve attached my full senior project. I had to do a great deal of rewriting, as more than half of it now deals with Caroline’s involvement in the creation of the Sarah ghost tradition.
I am honored that you want to include it in the archives. Please credit Haley Peppler and Alexandra Stegall in the file. Haley for obvious reasons, and Alex for being such a willing interview subject on some of the oral tradition passed down among the “ghosts,” and giving context to some of the new documents that were turned over to the archives after February 10.
I don’t find it as horrifying as some do that Caroline Bromley started the tradition with her bereaved friend Leonora. Caroline spent her life speaking up for the underdog, the voiceless, the penniless, the powerless. Is it so shocking that in this hoaxing she was performing a more adolescent, rebellious version of the same thing? A darkly awkward practice ground for “Our silence, forever broken”?
As you’ll read in my paper, it is my theory that Leonora and Caroline disagreed about how to carry on the tradition, to whom they should pass the torch, and perhaps whether it should be continued at all. I have a gut feeling—but can’t prove it, so didn’t stress it in the paper—that Leonora perhaps started to have second thoughts, as she matured and neared graduation, about spiritualist hoaxing being her sweet, devout sister’s legacy. Maybe that was what caused the rift to which Abigail referred in her letter? Or why Leonora didn’t sign the May 1892 document? One wonders why Caroline, in that case, was so determined to keep the tradition alive—without the support of the blood sister of the very person it was supposed to honor?
Maybe being a “ghost” was cathartic, and allowed her to leave her bitterness behind—allowed her to become the more positive, progressive, inclusive leader she became? Could she have possibly known that her bitterness would live on here, in a sense, for well over a century? Would she have wanted that? Writing this question gives me the shivers. I confess I am too much of a Caroline fangirl to consider that possibility too deeply. She could not have known she would become so revered and famous—which would lead to what I consider a misplaced reverence for a tradition that I think would have died long ago had not her illustrious name been attached to it.
I’ll shut up now. Here I am going on and on again, as usual. Please don’t put this note in the archives with my paper.
Thanks. I will miss you. Hope to see you at graduation!
Fondly,
Star
Hi Thatcher,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write back. It took me a while to figure out what that video was you sent me. I’m sure the school will be contacting your parents about it. But I would like to talk to you about it, too. And about Taylor.
Thanks,
Haley
59
Graduation was on the sunniest kind of day.
My mother was wearing her favorite springy dress with the splashy red flowers. She looked almost girlish in it, smiling so broadly, her hair swirling around her face in the early June breeze as she handed me a small bouquet of miniature peach and yellow roses—with a triangle snipped out of the cellophane where she’d removed the price.
My brother hung back, yanking uncomfortably at the striped tie my mother made him wear. I texted my father a selfie of me in my cap and gown, and he wrote back seconds later, saying he was proud. I wrote back that I was excited to see him in Illinois in two weeks. It had been his idea to buy plane tickets there for my brother and me instead of a ticket here for graduation. There were a lot of reasons why this was a better idea, and I was grateful no one seemed to need to say them out loud—at least, in this moment.
Star and Maylin and I posed for a couple of shots blowing bubbles in our gowns. My mother mentioned she wished she could take a bookend picture of Alex and me—for me to have along with the one from our first timid day as roommates.
“She’s getting her diploma in absentia,” I explained, feeling like a jerk as soon as I said the phrase. So prep school–y to say it that way. “I mean, they’re mailing it to her.”
I knew this because Maylin had been giving me updates on Alex all spring. Alex had left in February when everything went down, and it had taken Maylin a couple of weeks to get over the shock of it all.
If there’s any way she could have told someone, it would have been you, I’d insisted, over and over, until Maylin had given in and called Alex. My words might not have been true, but Maylin and I both allowed ourselves to believe them. And I wished Alex well despite the heaviness between us that would probably keep us from being friends again.
Given how hard Alex had worked, given her desperate emails to the Fleming Foundation—and Chloe’s persistent claim that Alex was trying to find a solution and end the ghost tradition—the school had allowed Alex to finish her work from home and receive a Windham-Farnswood diploma. This was only possible because I didn’t mention the sleeping pills. And apparently Chloe hadn’t, eithe
r.
A couple of weeks ago, Chloe had gotten out of the residential treatment she’d been in since February 10. She’d sent me an email saying she was doing okay; that her parents were deciding where she’d go to school next. Probably it wouldn’t be a boarding school, she said. Sounded like a good call to me.
“Will they have food at this reception thingy?” my brother wanted to know.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Little sandwiches, probably.”
The reception was designed to be a final goodbye for students and teachers; absent would be Ms. Holland-Stone, who was fired in February.
“Sweet,” he growled.
“I’ll meet you two there,” I assured my mother. “I just want to do one more thing in the dorm. Something I forgot.”
* * *
When my brother and my mother had helped me move the last of my things out of the dorm this morning, it had been crazed and stressful, full of nervous parents and sentimental girls. I hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye to the place.
And I definitely wanted to. I didn’t picture myself ever being the type of alum who came back here to nostalgically walk these halls.
There is something about seeing a place for what you know will be the last time; it feels different. The fourth floor was mostly empty when I arrived; everyone was busy getting free finger sandwiches. One lone dad was trying to wrestle an IKEA chair out of a narrow dorm room doorway, clearly trying to get a jump on the final moving wave that would occur in the afternoon. By three p.m., you had to hand in the keys to your empty room to get your diploma.
I gave Star’s and my room one last glance and then closed its door resolutely. Strangely, even with the flood of confessions that had followed Chloe’s revelations, no one had admitted to pounding on my door the night before the 10th. Chloe claimed not to have done it.
Down the hall, Taylor’s old door was, of course, locked. I wouldn’t get to see her room one last time. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It was enough just to stand by her door, and to remember what it was like to be inside of it. Like that time she was inconsolable about her calico.
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 33