The Girl in Acid Park (7 page)

"Ability," Jamie supplied. "So he doesn't know about the brick?"

"No."

"And you're just sort of...waiting out the storm?"

I twisted the cup in my hands. "Also no."

His mouth flattened. "I'm almost afraid to ask."

My half-empty cup had lost most of its warmth. I set it down, fingers still playing with the handle. "I've been trying to figure out how to see ghosts again. Preferably without giving myself another concussion."

"Oh!" A tone of pleasant surprise.

I cocked my head at him. That had been a chipper 'oh' for someone as dispassionate as the Bishop. Next moment, though, he was reaching for the laptop purring at the end of his bed. "I--actually--did some research on that last month. You know," he waved a hand toward Aaron's side of the room. I nodded and stood up.

"And you found something?"

"Well," he bobbed his head to the side to waylay my expectations. "If you don't mind at least one of them being slightly illegal."

CHAPTER SIX

A Joint Effort

"This was a stupid idea," I said, staring at the plume of smoke Jamie blew into the wet darkness in front of us. I'd tried pot once before and it hadn't done anything for me besides encourage an extended trip to find fro-yo. Now, all I could feel was a slight tingling in my fingers, but that could have been caused by proximity to Jamie. Still, as we leaned back against the tailgate of his truck, staring up the gravel-strewn ruts of Acid Park, I found I didn't really care whether this worked.

I'd texted, even called Hiroki, convinced some good, old-fashioned rule-breaking would get us over the tift, but he'd never answered. By the time Jamie and I had rolled off the main road, past the crashed VW, I was ready to do something reckless.

The driveway back to the artist's farmhouse was long, with bends enough of its own to easily conceal a dark gray truck from both the road and the house at its end. Neither of us actually knew whether Bill's bro lived in the farmhouse now that the artist was gone, but that's not the sort of thing you care too much about when you're getting high at 2 a.m.

Jamie handed me the rolled cigarette and I took it from him, pulled the smoke into my lungs. Pulled maybe too much in, because suddenly, my esophagus burned.

"Maybe it won't help us see ghosts," he said. "But at least you've relaxed."

"S-hort of," I coughed, waving a hand to clear away my graceless puffs. "This shit smells like sage. I'm craving Italian food."

He chuckled, then tilted his head back and let the smoke curl from barely-parted lips. I think he might have been more relaxed than I was.

It had been my idea to go to Acid Park, even though most of the whirligigs were gone. I guess I'd read enough about the place to be curious, whether the reflective splendor of its original design was gone or not. Part of me was also convinced by the claims of haunting, which made it the perfect testing ground for our experiment. And any opportunity to get out of school was attractive to me right now, especially if it involved Jamie.

"How do we know if it works," he said, using his middle finger to push his glasses back up his nose. Back toward the road, a soft rumble heralded the approach of a car. "I still think we should have stayed where we know for sure there's a ghost."

Headlighs filtered through the trees, then swung sharply away again as the car arrived at that fateful bend in the road. For just a second, they flashed off the rusted VW van's bumper.

"You didn't see Amy Barnes," I said. "If you had, you wouldn't be asking. I'd rather watch Fox News than look at her."

"Gross." He smiled as he said it, following the passage of the car with his eyes.

"You begin to see my point."

He breathed out through his nose, sending two streams of fog into the chill air. "Yes. I don't know how Satou does it."

I winced. That had been exactly Hiroki's point--he couldn't choose which ghosts he saw and when. I couldn't imagine getting used to something like Amy Barnes. That heavy, swinging form. The tap of her blood pooling below. The outstretched hand.

I shuddered, glancing around the trees for any hint of hanging girls. Tall pines lining the highway between school and Acid Park extended down the quarter mile of driveway. Though some of the trees had been cut down to aid in removing the whirligigs, enough remained to preserve the place's isolation. They stretched overhead, branches extending across the driveway like fingers weaving a roof. It was peaceful. It was away. It felt good.

I took another drag off the joint and shifted my weight against the tailgate.

"Hey." I kicked Jamie's shoe in case he was too high to realize I was talking to him. He glanced at me. "Thanks," I said. He reached for the joint. It was down to a twist of paper, but his fingers grazed mine, and he took it. Dropped it into the gravel.

The silence stretched out, but I must have been a little high myself because I didn't worry that he didn't respond. His leaned his head back and stared through the branches.

I wasn't one hundred percent certain why he was helping me. Part of my reason for thanking him was in the hope that he might tip his hand. Was it just to pay me back for helping Aaron move on? Was he being nice to me because everyone else wasn't?

He exhaled again, as if blowing out another stream of smoke. I thought he would say something, but he rocked forward, swinging himself around to the back tire, and climbed into the truck bed. I followed, but I must've been more high than I thought, because I couldn't tell how hard I was holding onto the truck. My fingers slipped free and only a majestic flail kept me upright.

When I finally joined Jamie in the truck bed, he'd stretched his arms out over the cab like a cat, long fingers tapping. I crossed my arms and leaned next to him, my chest pressing into the cold back window.

"Doth my gratitude offend?"

He shrugged. "No, I just don't feel like it's something you should thank me for, so saying you're welcome would be...weird."

"You're really high right now, aren't you?"

"I am really high right now. But I don't want you to thank me for--I don't know--not being an asshole. I mean. I usually
am
an asshole. It doesn't make one worthy of praise. That should be, like, baseline. The low bar."

I know what I would have said to Hiroki in response, but I wasn't sure what to say to Jamie. I didn't know if he would appreciate a joke right then, to point out that we'd possibly just slipped to the serious side of being high--the part where everything seemed deep and meaningful and finger snapping was an acceptable method of agreement. Instead, I lifted my chin and looked at him, stretched forward across the gunmetal gray cab.

"My gratitude isn't up to you," I said. "You got me away from school. Whether this shit works or not," I waved my fingers to indicate the overgrown and rusting Acid Park around us, "it means something that you were willing to try. Thank you."

I lifted my eyebrows at him, leaning forward to indicate that, this time, I expected a fucking "you're welcome."

He noticed me looking and his mouth twitched toward a smile. He turned his head away like he was embarrassed to let me see it and goosebumps drew up on my skin. He shifted toward me, bumped my shoulder with his own. When he straightened back up again, he was little bit closer than he'd been before. That was good enough.

Cool night air bit at my arms, and I considered climbing down to get my jacket from the passenger's seat, but my head was starting to feel slightly balloonish. The low, oceanic rush of an oncoming car was a nice counterpart to the silence between Jamie and me, and as the breeze stirred up the bits of metal suspended from the air, the atonal ring of not-quite-wind-chimes made it all feel like a dream. I basked in the absence of anxiety and the presence of a contentment I hadn't known since before Aaron Nguyen's death.

Jamie stopped tapping his fingers. The oncoming car grew louder, followed by a squeak that might have been from the whirligig beside us. Jamie drew his hands back toward him and pushed himself to his full height, and the look on his face many my stomach drop--and not in a good way.

"What?"

"Do you... hear wind-chimes?" he asked.

"Yeah?" I said, and pointed at the neighboring tower. "There are..." I trailed off, because suddenly, I noticed the same thing he had. The rusting structures still standing among the trees were silent, unmoving sentinels, and though my arms were cold, no air moved across them.

No headlights broke through the trees. My throat went dry as I realized what I'd taken for the rush of an oncoming car was closer to the sound made by a large, metal fan spinning in the wind. My ears popped. On his next exhale, Jamie's glasses fogged.

And then Acid Park came to life around us.

Dozens of whirligigs faded into existence. Phantom headlights broke off ghostly trees long since cut down, and the tide of wind set the place off in a chorus of clangs. I heard the spinning rattle of a bicycle wheel, and what sounded like the slush of change in a tin can.

Jamie grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the side of the truck before I'd even had the chance to blink away the dazzling light.

Note to self: being high might make seeing ghosts easier, but it makes running an Olympic-level impossibility.

My feet hit the gravel, but I was numb and ungainly and I swung my arm for balance. I slapped Jamie across the chest with it. He pinned my forearm there, trying to keep me from falling over. I turned toward the back of the truck just as Jamie lunged for the driver's side door. We collided, rebounded, and grabbed each other for balance. There may have been some unintentional groping on his part. There was some intentional groping on mine.

I pushed Jamie toward the driver's side just as my knee gave an almighty twinge, reminding me that I'd sliced it open with glass. I staggered, and the second I did, the air thickened in front of me. I hit a solid wall of cold.

"Hide
!" the voice was a shout, at whisper volume. Still, it was clear over the clang and squeaks of metal, the chuckle of wheels, and the crunch of very real tires turning off the highway.

Jamie and I turned together, and she stood before us, impaled by the headlights breaking through the underbrush. She was thin as a rail with long, limp hair that made a smeared nest in the crushed side of her forehead. I had a brief glimpse of the most hideous dress on the planet before she flickered away, appearing several feet down the drive.

One of the last remaining real whirligigs loomed behind us, reflecting a stripe of light across Jamie's truck. The girl flickered away again, then appeared, thin as a stain of light on my retinas, beside the VW van.

"Hide!"
Her voice sounded next to my ear. ...But she was standing at the end of the road. How could she talk right in my ear? I grabbed Jamie's wrist and hauled him into a run. The ivy almost defeated us, snagging Jamie's shoe and sending him staggering. He caught himself on a pine, and when we scrambled behind a whirligig, I could smell the resiny tinge of sap over the lingering marijuana.

We dropped into the cold ivy at the base of a whirligig's legs. The metal shaft gave a hollow ring as I leaned against it, bumpy wrought iron jabbing my palms. I felt the peeling layers of paint; the oxidized metal beneath was crumbly-rough against my fingertips.

As the vehicle drew to a halt, we hunkered down behind the bushes. I had to lay on the ivy and peer beneath some hanging bunches of wisteria to get a decent view of the driveway. Jamie's breath echoed loud at my side.

The new vehicle had stopped near the turn off into the driveway, roughly parallel to the overgrown VW. Judging by the height and separation of the headlights, it was a big vehicle--maybe a van or another truck. Those high beams splintered through the trees and bushes, but didn't reach our hiding spot. Shadows passed across the headlights, then vanished toward the farmhouse.

"Do you see any-"

"Shh!" I hit his arm for silence, just as a pair of silhouettes came into focus on their way to Jamie's truck. They spoke too quietly to hear, but I could tell they were talking about the unexpected vehicle.

"Shit," Jamie whispered, and I didn't shush him because it needed to be said. A man called out in Spanish.

"What did he say?" I asked, hoping this was one of those random things that Jamie just sort of knew.

"Shh!" he said, and tapped my arm slightly lighter than I'd hit his. I leaned closer to him, trying to see from his better vantage.

A conversation was taking place behind Jamie's vehicle, a lot of gesturing toward the trees and miming of circles. I couldn't understand the words, but I had a terrible feeling I knew what they were about to do. We were screwed.

The three men broke off their conversation as another call rang out from the farmhouse. They split up--one man toward the group on the farmhouse porch, the other two splitting toward the trees along the drive. I had just made out what looked to be a rug rolled up over the farmhouse group's shoulders when Jamie sucked in a breath.

One of the others was headed right for us. He stepped onto the crackling carpet of needles, then dodged around a bushy sapling pine. My pulse pounded in my throat. Jamie shifted next to me, needles crinkling loud and clear to my ears. The silhouette stopped, his hand going to his jacket pocket.

Oh God. Had he heard us?

Jamie put a hand on my back and I realized I'd been trembling. The soft shiver and crackle of foliage beneath us was due in part to my own involuntary movement. I could smell Jamie's sweat.

The silhouette stepped closer, one arm bracing on a tree trunk as he went by. The same tree Jamie had fallen against. He stepped up onto the root, slowly drawing his hand from his jacket, but, backlit by the headlights as he was, I couldn't see what he had pulled out. Some cheap, powerful cologne coated my sinuses like oil.

The thing in the stalker's hand clicked. Jamie tensed. I felt him breathe faster, heard the slight crackle as his chest moved on the leaves. I risked a glance and caught the barest edge of a light moving in the branches next to his face. It twitched, illuminated the tip of his nose for just a second. A flashlight. Not a gun. Not much better, all things considered.