The Haunted (26 page)

Just a trick of the light.

At the theater that night I had to admit that I actually was having fun, and the movie was pretty good too. Beth and Lewis were so cute together, and every time Beth and I took a quick
bathroom break to talk about everything, she couldn’t stop gushing over how sweet he was.

Ben kept cracking jokes the entire evening and making us all laugh. Afterward we went for some pizza, and I didn’t think about Caspian the whole time. It wasn’t until I was standing in line to buy a bottle of iced tea to take home with me that my thoughts turned to him.

Glancing outside at Ben, Lewis, and Beth standing on the sidewalk, I thought about how much fun he would have had. If he could have been here. If he was as real to everyone else as he was to me…

The clerk snapped his fingers to get my attention, and I jerked out of my daydream. “Sorry,” I said with an embarrassed smile.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“That’ll be a buck twenty-five.”

I handed him two ones and waited for my change, glancing outside again. Ben was doing a crazy version of the robot, and Beth was almost in tears from laughing so hard.

“Here you go. Want a bag?”

“Um, no. I’ll just carry it. Thanks.”

He nodded, then handed me my receipt and something else.
“This is your friend’s. He dropped it when he was paying for the pizza.”

Ben had been the one to pay, so I said thanks and took the plastic card, then shoved it along with the receipt into my back pocket. Leaving the pizza place, I joined my friends outside, and we headed for my house, laughing the whole way.

Ten minutes after they dropped me off, the phone rang.

“Hey girl, it’s Beth. I just got in.”

“Oh, hey.”

“So?!” she squealed. “What do you think? Is Lewis worth it? I mean, he’s the total package, right?”

I sat down on my bed and pulled off my shoes. “Definitely. Brains
and
muscles.” I didn’t even know if that made any sense, but it sounded good.

“Oh, he’s got muscles all right. Big, and well built in every way. And I do mean
every
way.”

This was turning wayyy too personal for my tastes. “Go for it.”

She squealed again, and I held the phone away from my ear. There was some shouting in the background, and I heard Beth yell, “Just a minute!” Then she said to me, “Okay. I have to go. Thanks for coming with us tonight, Abbey.”

“No problem.” I yawned. “Night.”

Crawling under the covers, I kissed the cool glass of the four-leaf clover necklace I still had on. “Good night, Caspian,” I whispered. “Wish you could have been with me.” I fell asleep to dreams of starry skies and green eyes.

But sometime during the night my dreams changed.

It was a party, with decorations and streamers and fairy lights strung everywhere. The floor was covered in a sea of pink and red balloons, and I had to kick them out of the way. Kristen was there, sitting next to a giant three-tiered cake, her back turned to me. Her red hair was longer than it had been in real life, and hanging loose.

“Kristen!” I yelled to her. “Happy birthday!” She tilted her head and laughed, but she didn’t turn around.

A tugging at my ankles distracted me, and I looked down. The balloons had crowded around me again. A band started playing, and couples suddenly appeared out of nowhere, dressed in old-fashioned clothing. They swept between the balloons, gliding back and forth, all of them executing perfect dance steps.

Every time I tried to move, closer at first, then farther away, they’d stop in unison and turn to stare at me. Every single face was hidden behind a mask.

The balloons swelled again, climbing higher and higher. Burying
me deeper and deeper. I tried to dig my way out, flinging them to the sides, but the balloons grew heavy. Suddenly, one of them burst, and water came slowly leaking out.

It was like a special effect. As soon as the trickling stream touched another balloon, it burst in slow motion, and then another and another would go off.

The crowd kept dancing. Moving along a balloon remnant–littered floor. None of them seemed to notice the puddles under their feet.

Finally I broke free. Enough balloons had popped that I was no longer weighed down, and I rushed to Kristen’s side. “Did you see that?” I asked her. “Is this a masquerade?”

She turned to face me, eyes downcast, with a pout on her lips. “Where’s your mask, Abbey?”

“I don’t have one,” I said.

She stroked one hand along the black dress she was wearing. “Do you like this? I wore it to my funeral.”

I drew back, horrified. “Why would you say that, Kristen?”

She leaned down and put one finger to her lips, making a
shhh
sound. “I’m waiting for someone. Now put on your mask, Abbey.”

I was getting frustrated now, and angry. “I don’t have a damn mask, Kristen.”

“Sure you do. Everyone does. I’m wearing
mine.”
Her face
turned tight, pinched, like she was schooling her features. Then a single trumpet blared, announcing the arrival of someone, and Kristen clapped her hands together. “He’s here! My brother is here. And he’s wearing his mask.”

Turning, I saw the outline of a dark figure in the doorway with the sun behind him, casting a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his features.

“But Kristen, Thomas is dead.…”

And then the balloons were back, clustering around me, sweeping me away. They brought me closer to the door, and I cried out, “Thomas, help me!”

Kristen was there by his side. Wearing a black mask now. “He can’t save you,” she said. “He couldn’t even save himself.”

I woke from my dream shaking and covered in sweat. After changing into a pair of jeans, I paced around my room. Why had I dreamt about Kristen like that? What did it mean? And why was Thomas there?

Weak morning light filtered across my floor, and I kept pacing back and forth. Lost in my own head. Every way seemed wrong and I just couldn’t figure it out.

Then I realized something. I padded over to my desk and scanned a calendar that was sitting there; then I checked my phone to be sure.

It was July twelfth. Thomas’s birthday.

I went back to pacing around the room, feeling all out of sorts. Last year I hadn’t gotten the chance to spend the day with Kristen because she’d been missing. But this year it would be different.

I threw on some shoes and a sweatshirt and went to my closet to grab a blanket. I was going to the cemetery, and the grass there might be damp.

Caspian found me an hour later.

“How did you know where I was?” I asked him, not looking up from Kristen’s grave.

“I don’t know. I just sensed it. When you weren’t at the bridge, I came to check here. I guess you make my Spidey senses tingle.”

I knew he wanted me to laugh or smile, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“Hey,” he asked. “What’s wrong? Did something happen last night?”

I looked up then. “At the movies? No. It’s not that. I just had a bad dream last night about Kristen and…” A car drove slowly up the path next to us, and I stopped talking, trying to look like I was just a normal teenager sitting alone by a tombstone.

Like there was anything
normal
about that.

“Do you want to go sit under the bridge?” Caspian asked quietly. “I don’t think we’ll be bothered there.”

I nodded and stood, folding the blanket as I went. Resolutely, we walked past the church.

“Wait just a minute,” I told Caspian, when we reached the bridge. “Let me check on something.” Dropping the blanket, I walked over to the section where Kristen and I used to sit. Then I grabbed on to the support pillar, used several chunks of exposed concrete as footholds, and climbed up under the bottom of the bridge. “Come on,” I called softly down to Caspian. “We can sit up here.”

He climbed up as I settled myself on the support beams. An extra beam had been added near the front, so it wasn’t as open and as much of a drop down into the water below as it used to be when Kristen and I would sit there, but it was still a long way to fall.

Caspian wedged himself in next to me, and for a moment his knee disappeared into mine. “Sorry,” he said, readjusting. I shrugged and looked out over the water, falling back into my dark mood. “So, what about this dream?” he asked.

“It was a weird birthday dream about Kristen. But this time her brother, Thomas, was in it.”

He waited for me to continue. Never once prodding me to
speak faster. I liked that. “Today is Thomas’s birthday,” I confessed. “I think that’s why he was in the dream.”

“Okay.”

Just one word. One simple sound, and it completely undid me. Suddenly, the words were spilling out of me. “Ever since he died, Kristen and I used to spend his birthday together every year. But last year we didn’t get to because she was… gone. And I missed
her
birthday this year because I was at Aunt Marjorie’s. It was Mayfifth.”

Caspian just watched me with wide eyes, patiently listening.

“I feel terrible,” I said. “I mean, I thought about her, and I wrote her a note. I even sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her before I went to bed that night. But I wasn’t here.
With
her.”

“I’m sure she knew you were with her in spirit,” Caspian said.

“Maybe.” I dug one finger into the fabric of my jeans and traced a random pattern on my leg. “But maybe she doesn’t. Maybe that’s why I had the dream. Because she’s mad at me, or something.”

Caspian shook his head. “No. I know that’s not true.”

“But
how
can you know?” I said. “Last time I checked, she wasn’t exactly hanging around here to give us her opinion.”

“I know because of the type of friendship you had. I saw it firsthand.”

“You did?”

He looked sheepish. “I told you before that I saw you here at the cemetery, and… sometimes I would follow you guys.”

I watched him closely. Fascinated by his admission.

“I mean,” he said, “I didn’t like peek over your shoulder or anything. But sometimes when you would sit by Irving’s grave, I sort of stuck around. It was like I was a part of it too.” His face suddenly changed. “Your expression said it all. Your laugh spoke volumes.” Caspian looked down at his hands. “I could tell how close you two were. She loved you.”

My eyes grew moist, and a tear leaked out before I had the chance to wipe it away. “You think so?”

He nodded, and a quiet laugh escaped me as a memory surfaced. “You know, this one time, on Easter, Kristen thought it would be neat to hide some eggs for the people that ‘lived’ here. We were like ten, by the way.” I laughed again. “So we took three dozen painted eggs and hid them all around. But when we were done, all the hiding places looked the same, and we couldn’t remember where we’d put them.”

“It took weeks for poor John, the caretaker, to find them. A couple of them must have been eaten by animals, because we never did find them all. But every time the wind blew, you knew you were close to one. The stench of rotten eggs was horrendous.”

He laughed, and I joined him. “Of course, now I feel bad for all the people that just wanted to come visit their loved ones, but it was pretty funny at the time.”

Caspian grew silent and studied me with a serious look on his face. “Your love for Kristen shines through when you speak about her.”

I nodded and spread my hands wide. “She was the best.”

“Tell me about her brother.”

Leaning back, I looked up at the underbelly of the bridge overhead, feeling the vibrations of a passing car rumble through me. “He was her devoted big brother and she was his baby sister. Even with an eight-year age difference between them, they were super close. They had their moments, of course. But they were few and far between.”

He leaned back too, and I glanced over at him. “It’s weird, right? I can’t imagine having a brother or sister. I mean, Kristen and I were close, but to have someone who shares your
blood
?” I shook my head.

“I always wanted a brother,” Caspian said.

“Me too,” I admitted. “Someone to take care of the bullies and stand up for me at school. When I was younger, Mom and Dad talked once about adopting a baby. But then they just sort of dropped it. I don’t know what happened.”

He caught my eye. “What happened to him? To Thomas?”

Sadness filled me. Even though it had happened years ago, it was still hard to talk about. “He died of a drug overdose. Everyone thought it was accidental, but I think Kristen’s family… they knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That it might not have been accidental.” I waited a moment for that to sink in, for the heaviness of it to reverberate. “See, Kristen’s brother had an addiction to pain pills. When she was three, Thomas was holding her, and he sat her down for a minute on this table. She started to fall off, and he caught her and put her on the ground, but then he tripped over a chair leg and fell out the window.”

Caspian cringed, and an ache went through me. It was an awful story to tell.

“They were living in a third-floor apartment at the time, and he fell all the way to the ground. He only needed twelve stitches for the cuts on his face and hands, but he broke his back.”

Caspian nodded once. “So that was why he had the pain pills.”

“Yeah. He had two surgeries, but he needed more, and they couldn’t afford it at the time. So he took pills when it got to be too much to handle.

“Poor Kristen. She always thought it was her fault. No
matter how many times I tried to tell her it wasn’t, she never believed me. And whenever Thomas needed anything—a heating pad, or a new pillow—she was the first to get it for him.

“When he died, she cried for months. Luckily, she was in the hospital for bronchitis when it happened, and she didn’t find him or anything. That would have been awful.” I shuddered. “I just tried my best to be there for her. She always went with her mom and dad to go visit his gravestone on the anniversary of his death every year, but I was never far away.”

“I know how that is,” he whispered.