Spirit Legacy (10 page)

Finally the game ended with huge cheers from the Patriots fans. Tia and Sam looked around, startled that it was over or perhaps that there had, in fact, been a game in progress at all.

“Is it over?” Tia asked.

“Yup,” I said, climbing to my feet. My ankles were numb from sitting cross-legged too long.

“I’ll walk you girls back,” Sam offered.

“I’ll get the coats,” I said, hobbling down the hall towards the bedroom.

I opened the door and stopped dead. Gabby and Anthony were on the bed. It was dark, but I could sense quite a bit of movement happening.

“Whoa, sorry,” I muttered. Mortified, I started backing out of the room. And then I heard something that utterly froze me in my tracks.

“Anthony, no! I said get off of me! I want to go home!” Gabby sobbed.

I flung the door open and slammed my hand down on the light switch. The room flooded with light.

“What the hell!” Anthony growled. “Find your own damn room! Can’t you see we’re busy here?” He was on top of Gabby, one hand grasped around her waist, the other pushing her dress up around her hips. He’d removed his shirt and belt.

“Party’s over, asshole,” I said. “Rise and shine, time to go home.”

Gabby, her face a map of mascara-stained tear tracks, struggled to sit up.

“No, stay there, babe. You’re confused. You don’t want to go anywhere. Jess was just leaving,” Anthony said, his voice somehow managing to sound reassuring and threatening at the same time.

“You’re right, Anthony. She is confused. And
we
are leaving. Right now.” I marched toward the bed and tried to grab Gabby’s hand, but Anthony jumped up and stood between us. He was surprisingly steady on his feet considering the amount of booze he was breathing on me. My heart started pounding but I stood my ground.

“She’s not going anywhere. She’s with me. I’ll make sure she gets home,” he snarled.

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said.

I tried to reach around him, but he grabbed my wrist. “Let go of me,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Listen, you bitch. You had your chance. Get your nosy ass out of this bedroom and keep your mouth shut or you’ll be sorry.” He tried to shove me aside, but lost his footing and stumbled. We fell into the wall and slid to the floor. I was pinned to the ground.

Anthony shook his head to clear it. Then he saw me under him and grinned lazily. “On second thought, I like you right where you are now. How ‘bout we stay put?”

I opened my mouth to shout, but Anthony clamped a huge paw over my face. Panicking, I bit him as hard as I could. He let out a roar and pulled his hand back to strike me. I turned my face aside; my eyes clenched shut, waiting for the pain.

It never came. I heard a grunt and Anthony rolled off me, moaning. A huge hardcover book lay on the ground beside us. My eyes flew to Gabby, but she wasn’t looking at us. She was crying and pointing into the corner of the room. I followed her terrified gaze.

Nothing. There was nothing there.

“Gabby, what….”

My question became a shriek as I felt hands grab the back of my sweater and drag me away from Anthony. My hands clawed around to free myself and closed around what I thought was a wrist, but it was shockingly cold. Gasping, I released it and spun around. There was no one there.

A second book lifted off the shelf under the window and hurled itself above my head across the room. This time it hit Anthony on the shoulder causing him to roll even further away from me.

I skittered across the floor like a crab. Covering my head as another book flew through the air, I ran at a crouch over to the bed. I grabbed both of Gabby’s hands and yanked. She slid off the bed and clung to me, crying into my neck.

“What the fuck? What the
fuck?”
she sobbed.

A fourth book soared across the room, whacking Anthony in the back. I stared frantically into the corner of the room, trying to force myself to see someone or something that would explain what was happening.

Anthony clambered to his feet, his expression livid. He was staring at Gabby, apparently convinced, as I had been, that she had thrown the books.

“I’m gonna kill you, you—”

Wham
.

This time a lacrosse stick flew across the room and nailed Anthony right above the eye. He staggered back into the wall again and slumped to the floor, motionless. I just stared at him wordlessly. And then, just above his head, I saw it. In the small square mirror hanging on the wall, a reflection had appeared.

My head snapped back to the corner. Nothing. No one.

I stared back into the mirror. A dark figure, shoulders heaving, fists clenched, stared not back at me, but down at Anthony. I watched him reach for another book, and then stop, hand oustretched, as he caught my gaze. His eyes were blazing and his handsome features were twisted in anger, but I recognized him right away.

Evan.

Anthony was coming to. Blood began to seep between his fingers as he clutched his face. His angry yells finally sent people running into the room.

“What the hell is going on in here?” someone yelled.

“Anthony? What happened to you?”

“Jess? Gabby? Are you okay?” I could hear Tia’s frightened voice from the doorway.

I glanced again in the mirror. Evan had vanished. Taking advantage of the sudden crowd, I dragged Gabby across the room and out the door, shoving past people. I felt as though my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest. Sam grabbed a blanket off the sofa and wrapped it around Gabby, who was on the brink of full-out hysteria.

I pulled her around to face me. Her teeth were chattering and her eyes were spherically wide. “Gabby, look at me.
Look at me
. Did he hurt you?”

With seeming difficulty, Gabby forced her erratic gaze to my face. Slowly she seemed to recognize me and then almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

A tiny nod.

Sam and Tia looked their questions silently at me.

“I’ll explain later,” I muttered. Let’s get her back to the dorm.”

“Can she walk?” Tia asked.

“Where are her shoes?” Sam added.

“Probably somewhere in there.” I hitched my thumb back over my shoulder at the bedroom. “And we’re not going back for them. She can barely stand up, let alone walk home in stilettos. Sam, can you carry her?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sam said, and without hesitation scooped her up and hefted her into his arms. “Let’s go.”

We hurried back to Donnelly Hall in the crystal night, the air painful and sharp in our lungs. Tiny sparkling snowflakes sliced through the air on needling gusts of wind. The silence was oppressive, and the echoes of our footsteps sounded oddly dead against the pavement. The only other sound was Gabby’s soft, fluttering sobs inside the blanket. Sam walked us to the door and promised he would meet us in our room after he had dropped Gabby off at the campus medical center to be checked out.

As soon as the door to our room was shut, I told Tia everything that had happened. Whatever Tia may have thought of Gabby, it didn’t reduce her outrage at Anthony’s actions. And when I reached the point of Evan’s arrival, her mouth just dropped open.

“Jess, you’re kidding me! Please tell me you’re kidding me,” she whispered.

“I wish I was,” I said, flopping into my chair after ten minutes of pacing. “But he was there! I saw him in the mirror. It was like he was coming to my rescue! Somehow he sensed that I was in danger and he just showed up and started throwing things! And thank God he did, because I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t.”

“Did Gabby see him? Did Anthony?”

“I don’t
think
so. He only seemed to appear in the mirror and Gabby had hidden her face by then, she was so freaked out. Does it really matter though? I mean, they both saw inanimate objects being hurled through the air! What the hell are they going to think?” I ground a fist into my temple. My head was pounding.

“And no one else saw anything? What about the people who came into the room first?”

I thought hard, trying to extract my objective memory from the web of terror that had entangled the experience. “No, definitely not,” I finally said. “The last thing to get thrown was the lacrosse stick and that was before the door opened. But it doesn’t matter, does it? There were two witnesses! How am I going to explain this? What the hell am I going to do?”

“Nothing.”

I stopped massaging my temples and stared at her like she was crazy. “How can I just do—”

“—You do nothing. It didn’t happen,” Tia repeated.

“Are you saying you don’t believe me?”

“Of course not!” she snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous! I believe you, because you are my best friend and you don’t lie. Not to mention the fact that you are completely sober and in total possession of your faculties. And that’s just it, Jess. You’re the only one in the room who was!”

“So what? Do you think they’re just going to forget what they saw?”

“Actually, yes, I do. Think about it, Jess. Gabby probably won’t have a very clear memory of any of this. You saw how drunk she was; she couldn’t even walk, and Anthony wasn’t much better. And even if either of them does remember something, do you really think they’ll trust their own memories?” Tia said in her most reasonable, Tia-like voice.

“No, probably not.”

“Exactly! You wouldn’t believe it yourself if it weren’t for everything that’s happened this year with Evan. If you’d never experienced any of that, would you be telling me this right now?”

“No,” I said, nodding my head in understanding, “I’d think I’d had some kind of freak out in my panic or that I’d been seeing things.”

“Okay, then. So here’s the story. Gabby threw the first book. That got Anthony off of you. You took care of the rest. If the other two remember anything different, it was the booze talking. Got it?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and blew it out. “And you think this will work?”

“Of course it will.”

At that moment there was a quiet knock on the door, followed by a muffled voice. “It’s Sam. Can I come in?”

Tia and I looked at each other in silent agreement.

“Here goes nothing,” she said, and got up to open the door.

Chapter 8—Enter Pierce

Chapter 8—Enter Pierce

T
ia, as usual, was right.
Sam believed our story at once, as did everyone else at the party who discovered us in the aftermath. But they weren’t really the ones I was concerned about. The real test came the next day when we saw Gabby, curled up in silky pink pajamas and fluffy slippers on the futon in her room, looking absolutely exhausted and slightly green from her hangover.

“It’s like, a total blur,” she said, nibbling on a saltine cracker. “I remember freaking out and I sort of remember you coming in and Anthony yelling, but the whole thing feels like it happened on one of those spinning rides at a carnival. How did we get back to the dorm?”

“We brought you back,” Tia cut in, before I could answer. I fought the smirk that was trying to pull my lips up. She obviously didn’t want Gabby to know she’d been whisked back to Donnelly in Sam’s arms. Not that I blamed her.

Gabby accepted the story I told her without question.

“Good, I hope I got him in the junk with one of those books!” she hissed. “What an absolute creep! It’s just so weird, because he seemed so nice at the party.”

“Right.” I’d known he was a creep from the first time I’d met him. In Gabby’s lexicon, “nice” and “hot” were synonymous.

“So, are you pressing charges or something?” Tia asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Gabby said, chewing on her lip. “But I am definitely going to say something to the Dean. He shouldn’t be allowed to live on campus, forget hosting parties.”

Anthony wouldn’t be hosting another party again for a long time. He was put on probation and lost housing. Gabby wouldn’t get the police involved, but she did get up the courage to go to the administration and they took care of the rest. I refused to go within ten feet of him, but Sam, who probably would have liked to kill him, agreed to talk to him for me.

“He’s got a wicked shiner and three stitches above his eye,” Sam reported. “You really clocked him good, Jess.”

So, one of two things had happened. Either Anthony didn’t remember what had happened and was taking our version of events as fact, or he did remember what happened and he was either too scared or too proud to admit what he’d actually seen. Either way was fine with me. I wasn’t about to try to dig any deeper as long as he was cooperating.

And then there was me. I didn’t know how to feel about what had transpired. Of course, I was glad that nothing worse had happened to me or to Gabby, and so I was grateful that Evan had shown up. But then again,
Evan had shown up!
The ghost I’d been trying to convince myself didn’t exist, or at least was not haunting me, had appeared again. He’d rescued me, like some paranormal knight in shining armor. My heart was calling for him to appear again so that I could thank him, but my head was telling my heart to shut up, before I became the campus nut job, walking around chatting up a dead boy and getting carted off to the nearest available psychiatric facility.

I started spending time in the places I’d seen him, haunting them as I thought he ought to, both wishing and not wishing to see him. It was a strange combination of anticipation and dread. When I confessed as much to Tia, she looked thoughtful.

“Maybe you should try to contact him.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He left you a message he thought was important, but he didn’t explain it. How can you help him without more information?”

“Yeah, I get that, but still ….”

“Look, I’m not saying we should break out the tarot cards or anything, but maybe you could try to … I don’t know, call him, or something.”

I laughed weakly. “This whole conversation sounds nuts.”

Tia laughed too. “I know. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I think it might be worth a shot.”

“But how do I do it? I never tried to see him any of the other times he showed up. I don’t think it’s something I can control.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve been doing a little research ….”

“Of course you have.”

Tia went on as though I hadn’t spoken, “I think maybe you should go to the spot where he died. People who study ghosts believe that spirits are tied to the places they died. I think you might have a better chance of seeing him there than anywhere else.”

I scraped the purple polish from my thumbnail, considering. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we can add it to the list of all the other stuff we’ve tried,” Tia said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I glared at her.

“Okay, I withdraw the question. But just think about it.”

I did think about it. For the next three days, every time I walked by the narrow alleyway between the quad and MacCleary Hall, my gaze lingered on the base of the rock wall where Evan had died. Finally I decided Tia was right. Evan had asked me for help. I had to find a way to give it to him, even if it scared the hell out of me.

The Thursday night following the party at 2AM, I pulled on five layers of warm clothes and stuffed a blanket, a flashlight, and my copy of Hamlet into my bag. Tia, already in bed, offered one last time to go with me, but I shook my head.

“He reached out to me for a reason. I think I need to go alone.”

“Well, take your phone. If you aren’t back in an hour, I’m coming to get you. I know you want to see him, but it isn’t worth freezing to ….” she stopped abruptly, horrified with herself.

“Death,” I finished quietly. I pocketed my phone and walked out the door.

The campus was icy and still under a steely mass of clouds that threatened snow at any moment. Here and there, a light glowed from a dorm window. A raucous laugh echoed faintly in the otherwise silent darkness. I kept my eyes on my feet as they crunched through the dirty snow.

The alley next to MacCleary Hall was darker than I’d hoped. The nearest lamppost’s bulb was out, and I wondered if it had been like that since Evan’s death, and that was why no one had found him that night. For a moment I pictured him, a huddled mass at the base of the wall, and then closed my eyes and forced the image to recede.

I ducked into the alley and pulled the blanket from my bag, bunching it into a makeshift cushion to sit on with my back to the wall. I clutched the flashlight in one hand and the book in the other. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep unsteady breath.

Evan?

At first I called to him quietly even in my head. A slight breeze rustled by me, but there was no other answer. I thought his name again, louder.

Evan?

Nothing. I called for him silently over and over again as the minutes ticked by and I shivered in the cold. This was stupid, this was so stupid. The only thing I was going to find out here was a raging case of pneumonia.

I pulled my glove off with my chattering teeth and rifled with stiff clumsy fingers to the page Evan had written on. I placed my numb fingertips to his message and tried again, this time out loud.

“Evan?” I called, my voice a hoarse whisper.

“Jess? What are you doing out here?”

My shriek should have woken half the campus, but the cold froze it in my throat. The voice came from the darkest corner of the alleyway. As I watched, the shadows materialized into a form strolling casually toward me, clarifying and congealing until I recognized him.

Evan’s face looked genuinely alarmed as he approached me. He was wearing the same sweatshirt and jeans he’d worn when I saw him in the library. He looked as real as anyone I’d ever seen, but no clouds of frozen breath wafted around him as he drew closer.

“You came!” I said.

“I was walking by and I saw you here! You shouldn’t be out here by yourself in the middle of the night. It’s freezing.” He crouched down next to me.

“I know,” I replied. His nearness drove the cold even deeper into my bones, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe I was looking into his face again.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked again.

“I was looking for you,” I answered. I felt fear fluttering through me, but it was a wild, detached thing. I was afraid of something, but it wasn’t him, it couldn’t be him.

He looked puzzled. “For me? Out here? Why?”

“I … thought you’d be here. I didn’t know where else to look.”

He was too bright in the darkness, illuminated from some unseen source. A disturbed shadow flitted across his features.

“Why didn’t you just try my room? I live right over ….” He pointed toward MacCleary Hall, but dropped his hand quickly, looking momentarily confused.

My heart, already beating frantically, sped up to a panicked flutter. A terrible thought crossed my mind. “Evan … don’t you know what’s happened?”

He scowled and opened his mouth to answer me, and flickered out of focus, like an image in an old movie. He blinked out of sight and appeared instantly ten paces away, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“You really shouldn’t be out here. It’s late and we’ve got class tomorrow,” he said.

“No, Evan, we don’t,” I said slowly. “
I
have class tomorrow.”

He gave me the strangest look, like I’d suddenly started speaking in tongues, and shimmered out of sight again. He reappeared on the other side of the alleyway, leaning against the wall.

“How did you do on your paper?” he asked, almost desperately. The outline of his form was wavering, like a guttering candle losing its battle with the darkness.

“I ….” I was completely unprepared for this possibility. He didn’t know. He didn’t know, and I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell him. I swallowed hard. “I got a B-plus.”

His expression relaxed into a smile. “Not bad for a procrastinator!”

“Um, yeah, I guess so.” I tried to smile back, but my face wasn’t cooperating. “How about you?”

“I got a B. Not my best work, but I’ll take it. I’d better start earlier on the next one though. I’d hate to have to explain less than a B average to my mom.”

“She’s pretty strict, huh?”

“Let’s just say it will not be a pretty winter break for me,” he said.

His form seemed stronger now, brighter. It was almost as though, by pretending he was still alive, he was more likely to stick around and talk to me. But how was I ever going to find out about Hannah if we had to carry on this conversation as though he weren’t a ghost? I decided to take a chance.

“Hey, I have a bone to pick with you.”

His eyes widened. “Am I in trouble?”

“Yes, you are.” I thrust a cold-stiffened hand into my bag and fished out my copy of Hamlet, which I flourished in his face. “You said you wrote your phone number in here, but I can’t find it. Didn’t you wonder why I never called?”

He started at the copy of Hamlet as though trying to remember where he’d seen it before. “I….”

“You said you wrote it on your favorite page, but I’ve searched it cover to cover, and all I’ve found is this.” I clumsily thumbed to the message he’d left me and held it up so he could read it.

He just stared at it, dumbstruck.

“Who’s Hannah?” I asked.

His outline began to shiver again, threatening to blink out of existence. I tried again.

“Who’s Hannah, Evan? Who is she and how can she help you?”

He started fading dimmer and dimmer in the darkness as he shook his head frantically. “I … I can’t … I don’t want to ….”

“Please Evan! How can I help you if I don’t know who she is?”

His expression darkened. “Stop it! Just stop it, Jess!”

“Evan, please? Don’t you know what’s happened to you?” Tears brimmed up into my eyes and clouded my waning view of him. I brushed them fiercely away.

He shimmered out of view and reappeared so close to me that I gasped. The cold emanating from him washed over me like waves.

“Why are you crying? Why are you sad?” he asked, and reached out a hand toward my face.

“Because you’re here,” I said. “Because you’re here and you shouldn’t be. Because you’re dead.”

His hand hovered just an inch from my face. For the briefest of moments he stared into my eyes, his expression twisted with unimaginable pain. Then he was gone.

I sat in the absence of him for what felt like a very long time, letting the hot tears cool and freeze as they rolled down my face. Finally, I willed myself to stand and trudge stiffly back to Donnelly Hall and to Tia so that I could tell her the terrible truth: Evan didn’t understand what had happened to him. He didn’t even know he was dead, or at least, he didn’t want to face it. Evan might have answers, but he wasn’t going to give them up easily. In fact, he might never talk to me again.

§

The cold snap continued over the next couple of weeks. We had reached a total dead end in our search for more information about the elusive Hannah, but with the end of the term staring us in the face I tried to concentrate on the crushing onslaught of exams and final papers.

“Course catalogue is out!” Tia called as she entered the room on the last full day of classes. It was miraculous that she could have opened the door at all; as usual, she looked like some sort of refugee forced to carry all of her worldly possessions with her wherever she went. One would think that someone so organized would realize that she didn’t
need
to bring six classes worth of books around with her when only two of those classes met that day.

“Ti, our room is the size of a closet. Why do you shout every time you come in?” I asked, half-exasperated, half-amused.

“Oh, I know, I’m sorry,” Tia shrugged, efficiently filing away her mountain of books and tossing the catalogue onto my bed before plopping down onto her own. “Force of habit, I guess. I always had to shout up the stairs when I got home- my mom’s office was on the third floor.”

“Why do we need a course catalogue?” I asked.

“To pick next semester’s courses, obviously. Did you think they were going to let you walk onto campus after break and just pull some out of a hat? They have to plan these things, you know.”

I pulled the catalogue towards me and was shocked at how heavy it was. “Whoa! How many courses are in here? I mean, how many classes can one person possibly take?”

Tia laughed as she pulled out her own catalogue. “At St. Matt’s? About a thousand.” She wasn’t exaggerating. “And see, they’ve got a detailed description of each one, so you know what you’re getting yourself into.” She had already pulled out a highlighter and was busily highlighting different course titles, adding little pink sticky notes beside possible options.

“So, do you have any idea what you’re going to take? How the hell are we supposed to pick?” I was already feeling daunted just looking at the choices; decision-making was not my strong suit. The little packet of course options they’d sent to incoming freshman over the summer had been bad enough.

“Well, there are restrictions. I mean, you can’t just take whatever you want. Lots of the courses have pre-recs and things like that. They’ll have an ‘O’ listed next to them if they’re open enrollment. That means anyone can take them without any prior required courses. And they list them in ascending order from there by department. The earlier they are on the list, the fewer pre-recs needed.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t think this narrowed things down much.

“Haven’t you thought any more about a major yet?” Tia asked, somewhat sternly, I thought.

“Well, I haven’t definitely decided or anything. I was thinking maybe Art History, but I’m trying to leave my options open.”

“Well, then just get your common requirements out of the way; everyone has to take those. And check these out, too,” she suggested, plunking herself down next to me and flipping forward a few pages. “There are a whole bunch of art courses.”

We sat quietly contemplating our choices for a half an hour or so. I took Tia’s lead and borrowed a highlighter to mark my options. Tia didn’t have much trouble selecting her courses, having already declared her major and met with her advisor. Sometimes she was so productive that she gave me a complex. She tried to be helpful, even going so far as to suggest that I enroll in microbiology with her.
“To fulfill your science requirement!” she trilled.