Possessions (13 page)

I crawled into bed. I was trembling. Black eyes. What did that mean? Drugs. Had to be. These girls could hire scientist geniuses to design drugs for them. Mandy had had a bad trip. That must have been it.

I shifted to Troy.
God
, how could he be Mandy’s boyfriend? Was there a chip in his brain? Was she that good in bed?

Could I steal him?

Don’t even think that
, I admonished myself. Jane Taylor had stolen my crush, and it had pretty much pushed me over the edge. I could never do that to another girl, not even Mandy Winters.

After a while, I began to drift, going in and out of a heavy doze. My body weighed a thousand pounds; my chest barely rose and fell. The little finger on my left hand twitched.

Drifted, dozed, sank.

Goosebumps rose along my body. I was cold. Had I kicked off my blanket and sheets? I tried to move my hand to gather them up, but I couldn’t move.

And I knew, without a doubt, that someone else was in the room.

I fought to open my eyes. A cold breath brushed the crown of my head. I tried to move again . . . and drifted . . .

“
You
,” someone whispered in my ear. No, not in my ear; inside my head. And it wasn’t a whisper, but an echo, a wisp of a word braiding and unbraiding deep in my dreaming mind.

“
You
.”

I fought hard to wake up; there was a stone on top of my chest and my eyelids were glued shut. The weight on my chest pressed me against the mattress, and I couldn’t breathe. I floated, sank; my sheets enfolded me like splashing waves. The bed was a sinking anchor; I was going to drown.

“
You
.”

“
Must
.”

When Julie woke me up at midnight, she said I was sobbing uncontrollably.

“
Stop
.”

fourteen

November 2

“Yes, stress,” Julie said, as she and I sat on our beds, facing each other. She had just awakened me from another nightmare. It was my fourth, or fifth. Or maybe sixth.

“You just left home. You’re up here in the mountains with a bunch of girls you don’t know. And it’s getting to you. So, nightmares,” she finished.

“So are you,” I replied. “New to all this. And those girls . . . Mandy . . . are stress-maniacs.” I took a chance. “And Mandy is insane.”

Julie pulled her wrapped ankle onto the bed and scooted backwards. “Don’t try to change the subject. I don’t have to defend them. Or myself.” I could see the hurt in her eyes, and the uncertainty—a small victory. She was confused about Mandy. That was a start. I pressed on.

“Okay, not insane. But they were high on Halloween,” I insisted. “Their pupils were so dilated I couldn’t even see any color.”

“
I
didn’t see that.”

“It only lasted a couple of seconds.”

She snorted.

“I’m not trying to BS you, Julie.”

Silence filled the chasm. Then she took a breath and cleared her throat.

“You told me they have séances,” I said, trying another angle. “Kiyoko’s got a bookmark from an occult store in San Francisco.”

“Oh, what a horrible thing,” Julie mocked, covering her cheeks. “Kiyoko has a bookmark. They do séances. So that makes them crazy.”

“I’m not saying I believe that they do anything superweird, but being interested in the occult
is
weird, when you’re our age. C’mon, do you know anybody back home who still does stuff like that?”

She ran her fingers along Caspi’s eyelashes. “I don’t know that many people,” she said. “When you’re a stable brat, you kind of have a different focus.”

She’d had to sell her horse. So did that mean she didn’t have any friends, either? Like me? That we were each other’s best and only friends?

“You know, if this were a horror movie, it would turn out that I’m right and you’re wrong.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but I heard the hurt in my voice. “They would be possessed by Satan, and you would die a hideous death.”

“This is definitely the location for it,” she volleyed back, with a weak smile. “No cell phones, adults who let us do whatever we want.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, Mandy bluffs,” she said. “She would never really do anything to anyone.”

I let the sentence hang there. After all,
she
was the one who’d gotten hurt. And Kiyoko had probably been about a minute away from hypothermia last week at the lake.

“Just . . . be careful. Be careful, because you’re my friend.” I took a deep breath. “My best friend.”

“Oh.” She was a rosy little cherub. “Same here.”

We hugged. Caspian kissed my cheek. I was a bit embarrassed but I made a little kissy noise in his general direction.

“Okay. Next item on the agenda is, I have to pee,” I told her.

I trundled down the hall past the bad art and the portrait with the eyes that followed you and . . .

Come to me . . .

I flicked on the bathroom light and did my thing, then walked past our five huge bathtubs and turned on the sink. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. I had always thought that fluorescent lights made people look ugly.

That’s why I’m not looking
, I told myself.

I adjusted the hot water. And I forgot I was avoiding the mirror and looked up at myself, and I saw . . .

—Oh God—

“Nothing,” I insisted, shuddering as I stared back down at the water. “Nothing is there.”

There was no pale reflection staring back at me, with darkened eyes. I hadn’t seen that.

The distortion in the mirror was due to the overhead fluorescent lights. Those stupid lights would make anyone look . . .

. . . Dead
.

I ran-walked out of there as fast as I could. I wasn’t even sure that I had turned off the water.

I went back into our room. Julie smiled at me.

Maybe I
had
imagined the whole thing.

No. No, no, no.

“We’ll never fight again,” she said, but I knew she was asking me, not telling me.

“Agreed.” I made myself smile, but my mouth was quivering. “Never.”

I padded back to my bed. As I bent over, a coldness pressed against the back of my neck, and I straightened and turned around.

The porcelain head was staring directly at me. It was positioned at an angle, not straight ahead, as Julie kept it. Which meant . . .

That she moved it when she dusted
, I told myself, turning off the light.

Except we didn’t dust.

The first
streaks of sunlight saved me from more nightmares. I woke up panting, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

It was Saturday, which meant free time after roll call and late breakfast at nine. The school put on all kinds of events on weekends to keep us occupied. Some were special electives that parents paid for at the beginning of the semester—extra art and music lessons, for example. There were lots of clubs, too— French, German, yoga, fencing. I had signed up for yoga, but I had yet to actually go.

And none of the clubs started at five in the morning.

But I was awake, and restless, so I decided to get dressed and take a walk. I wasn’t alone enough at Marlwood, I decided. I was constantly surrounded by other people. Most of the girls on campus had single rooms, except for Rose, who also shared with someone. And Alis and Sangeeta, when they moved into Grose so late in the term. Money bought privacy. Money bought so much. I thought about Julie’s pony, and I decided then and there that if Mandy had been lying about Julie’s chance to reunite with Pippin, or didn’t follow through, I would kill her.

Then I took it back, and creaked open the front door. Theoretically, five o’clock still dwelled inside the boundaries of our official curfew, but no one had been busted for curfew violation yet, and I doubted anyone ever would. These were kids who drank wine at home and could wake up the chauffeur to take them clubbing at three in the morning. The rules didn’t apply, and probably never would for their entire lives. It would take more trouble than I was worth to treat me differently, even though I was “different.”

I put on my new army jacket because suddenly, with the turn of the calendar page, it was bitterly, bitingly cold. I could smell winter in the air, even though, in San Diego, I had never seen snow on the ground except in Julian, high in the mountains.

I walked past the quad as the sky turned from gray to pink, hands in my pockets, wondering if I’d been right in the first place. I didn’t belong here, and I never would. But I didn’t want to go home, where I had completely messed up my life. This was my chance to start over.

Soon I was on the blacktop road that led to the lake. I remembered that Troy said there was a little inlet where they tied up their stolen rowboats, and I decided to look for it. The boat of Mandy’s Troy.

People were not possessions. They didn’t just
belong
to another person.

Birds were chirping by then, and fog coated the lake like whipped cream. I replayed my brief, sweet moments with Troy, and I wondered again why on earth he was with Mandy Winters. And if he ever thought about
not
being with her.

As I walked off the path and onto the granular dirt, I heard a voice. At first, I couldn’t register whose voice it was, although I was disappointed that I wasn’t alone. But then I realized it was Mandy.

Oh my God, is she saying goodbye to him? Did Troy spend the night?

I moved quietly to my right, where a straggly line of large boulders would give me some cover. I was spying on her again. I didn’t care. I minced behind the first boulder, then the second, careful not to disturb the little pebbles beneath my high-tops. I poked my head out just as a large black bird shot out of the fog with a squawk. I jumped, startled, and whipped my gaze toward Mandy, to see if she had heard me.

Surrounded by rushes, the shoreline curved into a small cul-de-sac—an inlet. Mandy stood beside a white metal sign on a gray pole, which said NO TRESPASSING in chipped black letters. Dressed in a black sweater and black jeans, she had on a black parka, and over that, the beaded shawl Ms. Meyerson had worn in her role as the Gypsy fortune-teller at the Jessel haunted house. She looked old-fashioned, like her house.

There was no rowboat, at least that I could see. Mandy was alone. She was leaning forward with her face tipped down as if she were looking for something among the rushes, or in the water. Her white-blonde hair hung over her shoulders in ripples, very pretty, and nothing I could ever aspire to.

I crept behind the third boulder, which brought me closer to Mandy. I was nervous. I ran through some potential reasons to explain why I was hiding behind a rock at five-thirty in the morning, but really, what was the point? Mandy and I would both know the score.

I craned my neck slightly forward, all the better to eavesdrop. Despite my fluttery anxiety, I had no shame. Mandy was the enemy, and if I could get something on her, that’d be nothing but good.

“Well, I am disappointed, sweet bee,” she said, in a slight Southern accent. “You promised me. I thought last night would go better. Here we’re already into November, and you don’t have enough. Only four.”

I frowned. Who was she talking to? Did she have cell phone reception? Was Troy in the lake?

“She’s gonna come out sooner or later, and when she does, we need to be ready,” she went on, in the same singsong voice.

There was a long pause. I had a crick in my neck and I was cold. Wind blew across the lake, shifting the fog, wrapping around her like fingers. I heard a plop, followed by another one. One or two more. Mandy was dropping something into the lake.

“I’m sorry,” Mandy said, in her normal tone of voice. “I’m trying.”

“If y’all don’t keep up
your
end of the bargain, honey, I’m not sure I can give you what you want,” she said, going Southern again.

“Oh, no, you have to. You promised,” Mandy pleaded—with herself, it seemed. Whoa. “You promised to get him out of there. It’s hell for him. They’re the crazy ones. You . . . well, you know what it’s like. It’s like it was here.”

“Not by half,” she said in her Southern voice, her tone stony, angry. “You haven’t got the first notion what it was like.”

“That place is not helping him. It’s killing him. If anything ever happened to him . . . I’d die without Miles. I would.”

“No man is worth dyin’ over, honey,” she answered herself. “Not even him.”

“You don’t know him. Miles is, he’s . . . Oh God . . . he looks out for me. Makes sure no one . . . ”

Was she
crying
? Over her brother? I was seriously weirded out. If this was a mental breakdown . . .
Talk about stress . . .
I couldn’t wait to tell Julie. Who would probably not believe me, because at the moment, I was having trouble believing it myself.

Maybe she was practicing for a prank.

Practicing crying. Hard. In the freezing-ass cold, beside Searle Lake, with me spying on her. The whole thing was so bizarre that I began to wonder if I was dreaming again. I half-expected Julie to shake me gently to wake me up.