Possessions (6 page)

“I haven’t even seen mine yet—I think my dorm mates killed her,” I shot back.

She snickered.

Our shoes crunched over the gravel as we walked down a slope, then onto another blacktop path lined with more horse heads. Mandy’s ice-blonde hair glowed in the darkness ahead. Fog swirled around my ankles. An owl hooted, and I smelled pines.

As wind caught at my crazy hair, I took my first sip of wine. It was very bitter, and I tried not to make a face. I was tightly wound, very nervous. These people weren’t my people. I thought about the scene at the hedge that morning. They’d called Kiyoko Number Three; my guess was that Lara was Number Two, and Mandy, of course, was
the
One. I knew I shouldn’t be there, and that I had succumbed, yet again, to peer pressure. I quickened my pace to catch up with Mandy, who was rounding a large boulder and a stand of trees with brittle leaves that seemed to collapse off the branches as she passed.

“So, what’s going on?” I asked loudly.

“It’s for fun,” Mandy said, obviously amused. “Just trust us.”

“Why should I?” I said. I thought I heard Kiyoko gasp.

I turned my head to look back at Jessel, and I felt a little shock because I couldn’t see it anymore. All I could see were enormous granite boulders and tall pines rising up around us, seeming to suck up the sound of my high-tops, my breathing, my heartbeat. We were cut off, alone.

I looked back at Mandy. “Just do,” she replied, raising her chin. She looked amused.

“God, it’s cold.” Lara wrapped her arms around herself, her very pale, exposed legs shook a little under her bulky jacket. I jerked; her voice seemed so loud in the empty woods.

“Wait until November,” Mandy said, also in a normal tone, as if she knew we were far enough away that we wouldn’t be heard. “I heard it snows up here.”

“I have great snow boots,” Lara crowed.

“I’m sure you bought them at some men’s store,” Mandy said, rolling her blue eyes. Blue, not black. Normal.

Just then, we stepped out of the trees onto a cliff over the lake. Far below us, black dots and points of light skittered beneath the moon, clumping at the water’s edge.

“Everyone finish your wine,” Mandy ordered. I had two choices: dump it out or chugalug it. I went with number two, and it hit me, hard. Then Lara gathered up our glasses, opened the backpack on Kiyoko’s back, and wrapped them in white linen napkins. She zipped the backpack and gave it a little pat.

Mandy walked along the lip of the cliff and grabbed onto a leafy bush. She found a foothold and grabbed an outcropping of rock. Lara followed after, and it was obvious to me they’d gone down here many times before.

“Here,” Kiyoko said, reaching into her pocket. “She told us to bring flashlights. I—I won’t be needing mine.”

“Why not?” I asked her.

She tried to smile, but she didn’t make it.

“Because it’s . . . my turn.”

A clatter of falling rock echoed through the blackness.

“Careful,” Mandy called back to us, “it’s slippery. Let’s not have any sacrificial offerings tonight.”

Kiyoko started down the cliff face, giving it her full attention. I followed after, the last of four, wondering why on earth I was doing this. We had a ten o’clock curfew, and before then we were allowed to go either to another dorm or the library. We sure weren’t allowed to go down to the lake.

But I kept going. After all, I didn’t know how to get back.

It took us a while
to climb down, but we finally stepped onto grainy earth. There was a ripple through a milling crowd of maybe ten girls as we approached, Mandy first, like the Homecoming Queen, then we three, like her royal court.

I saw Julie with two of my new dorm mates, Ida and Claire. Ida had great highlights, and at dinner she’d told me the movie star I’d seen in lit class was Chyna Loftis. Of course. Ida’s father had something to do with the San Francisco Opera but I wasn’t sure what. Ida wanted to go Harvard Law. Claire from Hawaii was bronzed all over, even her “area” and her “chi-chis,” Julie had informed me, rather scandalized.

Julie had stuffed her hands in the pockets of her peacoat, and she rocked back on her heels when she saw me, her eyes spinning with excitement. I had the feeling she hadn’t known about this little trip at dinner. But she was there now.

I smelled the lake water—mossy, with a slight undercurrent of rot. The moon glittered on the vast, black surface. Flashlights bobbed as the girls stood beneath starlight and moonlight, waiting, like me, to see what was going to happen next.

Then, at the very edge of the shoreline, Shayna from our lit class shifted her weight. She was dressed in gray sweats and a navy hoodie, holding a folded blanket in her arms.

Kiyoko saw her, stopped, and said, “I brought a towel, Shayna.”

“This is stupid,” Shayna hissed. “I can’t believe you’re doing it. That you didn’t tell me.”

“This is why, Shay,” Lara said. “You’re embarrassing her.”

Lara took hold of the backpack and slung it off Kiyoko’s back. She unzipped it and pulled out a coil of white nylon rope. She dropped it to the sand and showed the end to Kiyoko. Kiyoko took a deep breath and took off her jacket. Then she pushed her skinny pants down over her ankles and stepped out of them. She was wearing a red-and-black bikini bottom that was practically a thong. On her, it wasn’t very sexy—she was skin and bones.

I had a feeling I knew what was going to happen, and I didn’t like it. As Kiyoko snaked her sweater over her head, the top of her bikini stretched over her almost-flat chest confirmed it. She was going to swim in the freezing cold lake.

Lara handed the coil to Mandy as Kiyoko wrapped the other end around her waist. I could see Kiyoko’s breath as she looked out at the lake. Her shoulder blades looked sharp enough to cut steak.

“It’s good and strong,” Mandy confirmed, testing the rope between her hands. “But the ghost of the lake is very lonely. She will try to untie it, and keep Kiyoko with her.”

Nervous laughter greeted her announcement. I puffed air out of my cheeks and shifted my weight. I couldn’t believe Kiyoko was going to willingly jump in the lake. Correction: I could. I would have done it, if Jane had told me to.

“Just more one thing before you go in,” Mandy went on, giving Kiyoko a once-over. “No suit, sweetie.”

Kiyoko blanched; beside her, Shayna shook her head disapprovingly. “You didn’t say anything about that,” Kiyoko murmured.

Mandy tsk-tsked like some melodrama villain. “I said ‘no clothes.’ That means . . . no clothes.”

“It’s freezing in there, Mandy,” Shayna protested.

“Then it won’t matter if she’s wearing a bathing suit or not, Shayna,” Mandy said. She turned back to Kiyoko. “You don’t
have
to do it.”

I knew then that Kiyoko’s fate was sealed.

“All right,” Kiyoko half-shouted. She grabbed the blanket out of Shayna’s hands and wrapped it around herself. Then she snaked her left hand up and grabbed her suit strap, giving it a tug down her arm. Some of the girls closest to her began to hoot and applaud.

“Take it off, baby!”

“Go, Ki-yo-ko!”

She moved and shifted inside her blanket; about ten seconds later, her suit dropped to her ankles.

Mandy lifted a brow. “Check the rope. We want you to be safe. Lara?”

Lara pulled some plastic glow-in-the-dark necklaces out of the backpack. She broke the liquid inside and they started to glow green, pink, yellow. She looped a few over Kiyoko’s neck. They rattled on her collarbones.

“Her ankles and wrists, too,” Mandy said.

“This is stupid,” Shayna hissed, as Kiyoko stuck out her right arm and Mandy wrapped one of the glow-necklaces around it.

“No one is forcing her,” Mandy reminded her. She smiled at Kiyoko, whose blanket began to undrape; Kiyoko turned her back, holding the blanket between her teeth as she tried to maintain her modesty. Her rounded shoulders and back looked bluish-white beneath the alien green and pink of the glowing necklaces.

Then she walked to the edge of the lake, black and deep. I couldn’t imagine how cold it was. Despite the heavy leather jacket I was wearing, my teeth had begun to chatter.

“Drop it!” Lara called.

A few took up the chant. “Drop it! Drop it!”

And she did. She dropped the blanket, revealing her scrawny, naked backside to all of us, and placed one bare foot in the water. I saw her jerk to a stop, as if she were shocked by icy pain. Then she took another step, and another. Girls were laughing, cheering. They didn’t care how loud they were. They didn’t have to. We were a long way from our housemothers.

She kept going. I felt sorry for her and mad at her; I didn’t want to watch, but I had to. I was afraid for her. I knew I would go in after her if she got in trouble, but I didn’t want to.

Mandy’s got hold of the rope
, I reminded myself, checking to make sure. Mandy and Lara were standing together, shrieking with laughter.

But I didn’t know if Mandy would keep holding the rope. I didn’t know her at all. And I liked her less.

Kiyoko went in to her knees, and started to back out. She stopped herself and staggered forward, up to her thighs, then her bottom, and then she pushed off and started to swim. Flashlights trained on her like searchlights. I saw her glow-sticks above the waterline, and the occasional flash of neon green around her wrists. She started to splash the water with opened palms. Did she even know how to swim?

Mandy cupped her hands. “All the way under!” she yelled. “Get your hair wet!”

Kiyoko started coughing. Her leg kicks were random.

“No, get out now,” I said, but no one could hear me.

As her head went under, the applause was thunderous. Cheers bounced off the lake.

I watched, counting
one, two, three
. . .

four . . .

five
. . .

She didn’t come back up.

The applause ebbed; the cheers began to fade.

The lake was still.

And I began to think the unthinkable, because bad things really did happen. People really did die.

six

“Kiyoko?”
Shayna called. “
Kiyoko
?”

Shayna bolted into the water. I flew in after her. Mandy tried to grab my wrist as I darted past; I shook free and kept going—

—just as Kiyoko breached the surface, screaming.

“Something grabbed me!” she shrieked, shooting out of the lake and barreling past me, her tiny breasts bouncing. The rope was still around her waist, and her wrists and ankles glowed. As I turned around, she dashed onto the shore in a blur, hysterical, racing past Shayna and into the darkness.

Then there was a flash and I turned in its direction. Mandy had taken Kiyoko’s picture with her cell phone.

“And off to Lakewood,” she said gleefully.

“You bitch! You unbelievable bitch!” Shayna shouted, heading for her.

“It was the ghost!” Kiyoko cried.

Mandy’s cell phone flashed again.

Then, suddenly, a second figure shot out of the water, and everyone screamed and scattered.

As terrified shrieks bounced off the lake, I crossed my arms and watched a guy in a body-hugging wet suit and scuba gear rise from the water, his dark face shining wet in the moonlight. Floodlights erupted from a rowboat, and two guys started laughing their butts off. Scuba guy had obviously swum from the boat, tracking Kiyoko via her glowing necklaces and bracelets, all to scare the wits out of her.

Julie rushed over to me, grabbing my arm like a little girl, and I slowly shook my head at the intense meanness of it all. Shayna was shouting and Kiyoko was crying and almost everyone else who’d been watching now loitered on the outskirts by a cluster of tall pines, gossiping.

I narrowed my eyes at the scuba guy, who was pulling off his hood. Skin like mocha cappuccino, eyes like dark chocolate, and more ringlets than even I had. Mega-cute.

“Hey,” he said, looking through me, “this wasn’t the way you said, Mandy.”

Mandy swirled around me and walked toward him, stopping short at the water’s edge. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk.

“
Hey
,” he said again, unhooking the tether around his waist and tossing it behind himself as he sloshed through the water toward her. He was wearing swim fins. “This is not cool.”

She kept laughing, and a wild, crazed impulse came over me to push her in the lake. As if Julie sensed what I was thinking, she tightened her grip on my arm.

Shayna stomped over to Mandy and held out her hand. “Give me your cell phone. Give it to me or I’ll tell Dr. Ehrlenbach.”

“Hey,” Mandy said, wiping tears of laughter from her pale pink cheeks. “I didn’t really send it to Lakewood. How could I? I don’t have any reception.”

“You lied to Kiyoko,” Shayna said. “You said all she had to do was go under the water. You didn’t say anything about skinny-dipping or guys!”