Possessions (10 page)

I got it open; Troy guided Julie into the passenger side while Claire, Ida, and Rose climbed into the back. I squished in on top of Rose and she said, “Hey, baby.”

The seats smelled like leather. The engine purred as he turned the key. Then he drove us down a winding road.

“This is Route 6 Bypass,” he said, “but locals call it Fire Lane. There’s an urban legend about a ghost who races down the middle of the road in a white nightgown. She’s screaming, and she’s on fire.”

“Oh my God, that’s creepy,” Julie said. “This place freaks me out.”

“Me, too,” Ida said.

“Three,” Claire agreed.

“That makes me four,” Rose reported in.

The car was close and stuffy. I rolled down the window with the crank handle. Cool, silky air wafted against my forehead.

“Were you here tonight to help Mandy with her prank?” Ida asked him.

“No. I heard about the lake prank from Spider.” Troy sounded angry. “Way to nearly get someone killed. I thought I’d better come over and make sure tonight went smoothly.”

A fellow lifeguard
, I thought approvingly.

“You go to Lakewood,” Claire said.

“Ever since seventh grade,” he answered.

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” Rose asked.

“No.” His voice was clipped.

I suddenly had the strangest thought.
He’s lying.

The road seemed to disappear as he turned off his headlights when he reached the Marlwood admin building. He got out, tiptoed around to Julie’s side, and quietly popped her door. In silence, we scrambled out of the back, glancing in all directions to make sure no one was watching.

“We’ll take it from here,” Ida whispered. “If anyone saw us with you . . . ” She made a scratching sound and mimicked slicing off her head with her hand.

“Got it.” He steadied Julie while I took her arm. Rose popped open the trunk and pulled out the costume.

“Thank you,” Julie whispered. “You probably saved us from being expelled.”

He grinned at her. “You’re too cute to get expelled. Just like Spider told me. Night,” he murmured to all of us.

I didn’t know if I imagined it, but it seemed that he saved me for last. “Good night,” he mouthed, all dimples and that hunky five o’clock shadow.

“Yeah. Thanks again,” I managed. He didn’t answer, just smiled.

“What?” I asked.

He moved his shoulders. “Just lookin’,” he said in a twangy accent. Then he touched my hair. “Springy.”

“Wild. Untamed,” I replied.

“I like it.” His smile made my toes tingle. “So, what dorm—?”

“Guys, later,” Rose urged. Plink, our spell was broken.

“Later,” he echoed. Then he jumped back in his car, pulled out of the space, and drove away.

“Dang, he’s hot,” Ida breathed. “And
nice.
And did you check out what he said about Spider and Julie?” She fluttered her lashes at our wounded comrade.

Julie blushed.

“Yeah, but did you see the way he was looking at Lindsay?” Rose smacked her lips. “Yum-yum, freshman hottie.”

“Shut up,” I said happily.

“And you do not mean that in a trendy way,” Rose prompted.

I shook my wild, untamed hair and fluttered my long eyelashes. I felt positively radiant in my skuzzy jeans and tomboy sweatshirt.

It took forever to get to Grose. Ida crawled through the bathroom window we had cleverly left open, then tiptoed down the hall and let us in through the front door. She took the costume from Rose, who trotted off into the darkness.

Ida said, “There was a ghost in the bathtub. She was washing all her bodily cavities.”

“You’re evil,” Claire shot back. They both snickered.

I made Julie go to our room while I snagged the bag of ice from our freezer—practically the only thing in it—put there by Ms. Krige.

I carried the ice down the hall. Julie was sitting on the edge of her bed with Caspian in her lap. She had set the porcelain skull on the windowsill, and it gazed blankly at me as I crossed the threshold.

Our curtains were open; I thought we’d closed them. I saw nothing but the dark expanse of Jessel with its turrets and privet hedge. I wondered if Mandy and the others were back yet, and I marveled that we could do these things without getting busted.

At least so far. No more for you, Cinderella.

“Scoot back,” I told her. “I need to elevate your foot.”

I plucked my pillow off my bed and brought it to her as she obeyed. She sucked in her breath and clung to Caspian. I was seriously worried that her ankle was broken. I lifted up her calf and slid the pillow under it. Then I sat on the bed and carefully laid the ice over her ankle.

“Ow,” she said. “Ow, ow, ow.”

“Did you stash any painkillers?” I asked her. We were supposed to give all our medication to Ms. Krige, even our over-the-counter stuff. But who was going to go to all that trouble for cramps and headaches?

She nodded. “Ibuprofen. Little white bottle. In the top drawer of my dresser. My underwear drawer. Don’t look at my cup size.”

Smiling faintly, I got up and crossed to her dresser. Opened it. “I don’t care what your bra size is,” I assured her, as I came across a striped camisole and a matching bra beneath it. 32A.

Julie shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “My mom keeps saying I’ll fill out, but—”

“Oh, please, you have the adorable ballet dancer look going on.” I moved aside some cotton bikini underwear with little clouds and stars on them. Definitely angelic.

A light went on in the second story of Jessel. It was the turret room directly across from us, but no one went in.

I had a clear view; it was furnished similarly to Jessel’s downstairs—dark wood antiques, including a big desk and a four-poster bed. I marveled at the kind of wealth that allowed you to redecorate not just your dorm room, but your entire dorm. All I had brought was a picture of my parents.

I saw something on the turret room window and I squinted at it, blinking, making out the shape of a white oval. A face. There were two eyes and a half-opened mouth. It was the same face that I had seen in the window, the same girl whose reflection had appeared in the library.

“That is such a cool effect,” I said. I was actually a little creeped out. She—it—seemed to be staring right at me.

“What?” Julie half-turned. “Ow.” Stayed as she was.

“There’s a face in their window,” I said. “Like a reflection.”

“Of you?”

I squinted. Definitely a face, but blank. It didn’t move as I moved. Didn’t blink. The mouth stayed half-open.

“Nope. Just something Mandy whipped up. What was the rest of the house like?” Now I sounded like my dormies.

“Lots of gory fake body parts,” she said with a shudder. “They’re going to use them for their Halloween haunted house.”

The porcelain head sat silhouetted in the moonlight on our windowsill. White face, white brain marked into sections, with big black numbers. Where was the part of the brain that made you want to be with the cool girls even after they ditched your roommate?

Wait. Did it move?

I stared at the white head. It stared back at me. I gave myself a stern reminder about my conversation with Lara. I was not a gawker.

But the light glinted off it just then. . . .

“Hey,” Julie said, “are you okay?”

“Just really tired,” I said. Then I gave her what she needed to kill the pain.

eleven

October 31, Halloween!!!!!!!!!!!!

possessions: me

possessions: them in general

more stuff. it just keeps coming:
clothes
iPhones(no reception, but still...!)
jewelry—their parents send boatloads
more freakin’ furniture!
YET more stuff for the haunted house. can you say
ENTIRE anamatronic graveyard in their front yard?
Light-up witch on the roof? OMG, OMG.

possessions: Mandy specifically

Julie’s foot was sprained.
At the infirmary they iced it and wrapped it. They told her to stay off it, but she was determined to wear her Tinker Bell costume and make the rounds of Halloweentown. Much hopping would be involved. Crutches were out; they clashed with her wings.

And that, pretty much, took care of October 30
^th
. During the day, Marlwood was completely transformed. Eerie faces were sprayed on tree trunks with glow-in-the-dark paint. Motion detectors set off hysterical screaming all over campus, and fake bloody fingers writhed on branches and overhanging lamps. Dozens of the horse heads wore witch hats, and all of them disappeared under the obliging blanket of fog that swept over the campus at six-thirty, half an hour before the carnival was scheduled to start.

Grose had a totally lame cakewalk; they had already baked twenty cakes by the time I started school, and I helped frost a few. I made a spider cake and one that looked like a big eye with blood oozing out of it. Ida said I was sick. April offered to buy it then and there for a hundred dollars.

Marica decided we didn’t have enough cakes, and had a dozen overnighted from Charm City Cakes—scary Halloween villages, graveyards with little coffins that opened and closed, a big skull with eyes that we could set on fire.

Julie and I ran the cakewalk for the first shift. Since we had eight people in our dorm, and the carnival ran for four hours, we were gone in thirty minutes.

It followed that a girl who wore tattered jeans and sweatshirts would go minimalist for her Halloween costume, too. An old sheet, two eye holes, and I was a ghost. Ida, who had gone all out as a sexy vampire, told me I was “cunningly retro.”

But most of the girls had elaborate, professional-looking costumes that had been either ordered from Hollywood or Europe or custom-made. Mandy’s costume had been a favor from someone who used to costume Madonna. Lara’s vampire costume was vintage, from an old Vincent Price movie. Julie’s Tinker Bell costume was studded with hundreds of tiny peridots that she told me were hand-sewn. She wore a crown of intricate silver and gold leaves, and green and silver ribbons trailing down her back. Her wings were silvery, delicate, and heart-shaped.

The carnival swag was amazing. Stewart was giving away beautiful black enamel earrings as their prizes. Hill House was handing out a vast assortment of gift cards for high-end stores like Neiman Marcus. Back home, we made fun of people who wasted good money at Needless Markup. I could see why Marica felt the need to compete with some serious cakes. The carnival prizes were more extravagant than my Christmas presents.

I tried not to do more gawking, even though my mouth was hanging open. I found out that the parents donated the prizes and that Claire’s costume, which was an authentic recreation of Belle’s yellow gown from the Broadway production of
Beauty and the Beast
, cost sixteen thousand dollars.

And Jessel was the most extreme of all the extremeness. Of course, the haunted house was the biggest deal, and featured a graveyard, complete with graves that opened to reveal fake corpses. Leaves swirled and crunched as spooky laughter rolled around me on the gusts of autumn wind, rising and falling, growing louder . . . and stopping.

Strobe lights shattered the blackness of Mandy’s turret room; then Mandy herself appeared in the window dressed like a really sexy wicked witch—supershort black skirt, bustier, and a black hat with a trailing veil. She slowly raised her arms as she stared down at us. The lights flickered on, off, on-off-on-off, making her arms jerk-jerk-jerk as she raised them above her head. Ooh, she was holding a knife. The strobe glinted off of it. Good effect.

Julie giggled and waved at her.

My breath caught. The ghost-face was in Mandy’s window again. The one I’d seen before, through our window and in the haunted house, too. Dark holes for eyes, a wide slit for a mouth. The slit grew, as if someone—Mandy—had carved a jack-o’-lantern mouth into its dead-white skin.

“I have to ask them how they do that,” I said aloud, challenging the face to vanish.