The Screaming Season (9 page)

Just before he glanced up, the light disappeared. I tapped his helmet, indicating he should just move on, but he slowed, then stopped and put his foot down. I cringed.

“Sorry, it’s nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He looked at the library, then craned his neck around and looked at me. My face prickled. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Define your terms,” I answered. I couldn’t help looking back at the library. He followed my gaze, then studied the black mouth of the doorway.

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing. Forward motion.”

He gripped my arm, and a chill shot down my back. This was Miles Winters. No one knew we were here. What had I done?

He gave my forearm a squeeze. “C’mon, play fair. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“Let go of me or I’ll gouge your eyes out,” I said coldly.

His reply was a cross between a laugh and a grunt, but he did let go. Without realizing what I was doing, I rubbed my arm.

“What have I ever done to you?” he asked me.

“It’s not what you’ve done. It’s who you are.”

“You have no idea who I am,” he retorted. “And
what
I am is the closest thing you have to backup.” He patted the messenger bag. “I have information in here. And I want to go someplace and sit down and sort through it. With you.”

He looked at the library, obviously intrigued. “I wanted to get away from Marlwood when we do it. Just in case. But if this place is haunted, then wouldn’t it be perfect to do it here?”

“No.”

“But—”

“No.”

“Wow. Okay. Fine.”

I put my hands around him again and we took off, the Vespa buzzing like an angry hornet. Headlight beams hit the trees . . . and farther up, more light reflected against the leaves: The light from the library had turned back on.

He pointed to the left at a cluster of Victorian-style bungalows and bellowed, “That’s where I’m staying. Too many neighbors,” he added, as if explaining to me why we didn’t hold our pow-wow there.

Miles downshifted and I held on as the Vespa worked its way up the incline. Above us, on the hill, the Victorian-style mansion that was the admin building perched like a vampire on a rooftop, waiting to spring. We thrummed through the mostly empty parking lot, past the dark stained glass windows.

Then we forked left, down the bypass where Troy had seen the burning ghost, and I could feel my heartbeat picking up. Was she a manifestation of Celia? I was on a scooter, unprotected; what if we saw her? What if she was mad at me for getting rid of her and came after us?

“Ouch, you’re hurting me!” Miles shouted above the whine of the engine.

“Sorry.” I tried to unclench my hands. I couldn’t. I was too scared.

Then I recognized the landscape of my dreams of the screaming ghosts. It was all around us; I had been here with Celia—maybe in my mind, maybe out of my mind. And I had a terrible thought: I had always assumed that all I had to do to end the possession was free myself from Celia. But what if the possession worked two ways—what if
my
spirit or soul, or whatever it was, could be taken from my body and sent somewhere else?

“Ouch!” Miles bellowed. He batted at my hands. “Stop it!”

SEVEN

“I DON’T LIKE motor scooters,” I muttered as we were led to a dark table in the back. I was disappointed. “Roadhouse” was another word for dirty, grungy bar. I hadn’t ever been inside one of those—I was sixteen, and a fake ID could only take you so far—but I remembered the fancy spa Troy had taken me to for dinner and wished we could have gone there instead.

I sat gingerly on cracked brown pleather upholstery. A varnished wood table separated Miles and me. A red glass candle surrounded by white plastic netting flickered and spit. The silent waiter in jeans and a black corduroy shirt set down two small, greasy laminated menus. We were far away from the other patrons, who were playing pool, drinking beer, and watching a basketball game on ESPN. Miles ordered two Diet Cokes and some nachos without asking me what I wanted.

After the waiter ambled away, Miles opened the messenger bag and pulled out a stack of rumpled papers, a notebook with a jeweled cover, and a joint, which rolled onto the table. I gaped at it.

“Whoops,” he said, stuffing the joint back into the bag.

“You brought drugs on campus? Don’t you know we have zero tolerance?”

“Oh, sweetie.” He stuck out his lower lip, making a sad face. “You are adorable beyond the telling.” He patted the bag, where the joint now rested. “I guess there’s no sense in asking you if you want to light up after this.”

“No.” Drugs had always been out back home in San Diego. Jane decreed that they were off-limits. A point in her favor. There were some. No queen bee was without her positive qualities.

“So.” He didn’t really care what I thought about drugs. He unfolded a piece of paper and tapped his finger on it. It was a list, written in Mandy’s bad handwriting. No queen bee is without her failings, either.

“Part of dead person?”
I cried.

“Could you please yell louder?” He gave me a look.

“Where could she find . . . ?” I thought back to my nightmares. I had believed that the ashes of the girls who had died had been thrown into the lake. I had worried that some of those ashes had been left behind in the operating theater and that I had actually walked through them. But Celia had shown me a grave in a forest. Maybe this was why.

“I didn’t have any of that stuff,” I said. I looked at the list again. “Absolutely nothing. It was broad daylight, okay, except it was foggy. And I got . . . ” I lowered my voice as he crossed his eyes at me.
“Possessed,”
I hissed.

“This must have been to get the ball rolling,” he said, tapping the list. “Your girl—Celia—maybe she caught a ride on what Mandy had already started.” It was too weird that he was almost bragging on Mandy’s being first.

“Well, it was a total accident, at least on my part,” I said. “She told me she did it to hide from Belle and the other five.”

“Hide.” He set the paper aside and opened up the notebook. “They’re all dead. Why not, you know, let it go?”

“They’re angry. Terrible things were done to them. Celia . . . ” I stopped. It had become second nature to me to brace myself for repercussions when I started talking about Celia.

Miles leaned toward me, locking gazes with me. His eyes flared.

“Celia?” he whispered. “Celia, Celia . . . ”

Come to me.

Come to me.

They said if you said it five times . . .

“Don’t,” I said. “If she’s gone, I don’t want her back.”

Something flickered over his face. I was an idiot. He
wanted
Celia to show. He wanted to see how it worked, maybe even talk to her. Maybe he wasn’t even interested in helping Mandy either.

No. He loved
her
. Me? I was just convenient. Help me?

Only if it worked out that way.

I wanted to stomp off, show my outrage, but he had the transportation
and
Mandy’s notes. I had never fully trusted him, so it wasn’t like I was getting any big surprise here.

“Let me see everything,” I ordered him, grabbing the jeweled notebook before he could stop me. It really was beautiful, with purple and green stones set in embossed swirls decorated with gold. I had started a journal when I came to Marlwood. I’d fancied myself quite a writer. My killer personal essay was what had snagged me a place on the wait list, despite my precipitous drop in GPA. But I’d learned very quickly that some things were best not written down.

“I want to see your news clipping,” he said, “when you move back in.”

The waiter chose that exact time to return with our Diet Cokes and an oval red plastic container loaded with tortilla chips and pale orange cheese goo, a few sad little jalapeños scattered over the mound.

“Yum,” Miles said appreciatively as he scooped up a chip and carried it to his mouth. A purple flush crept up my neck. I recalled the last time he’d used that word: kissing me. He bobbed his head, inviting me to partake.

“Not big on ’em,” I said, mostly to make a point that he should have consulted me before ordering.

“Yeah-huh.” He pushed the container toward me. “I won’t, you know, dump you once we figure this stuff out. I said I’d help you, and I will.”

I didn’t believe him. “What if the only way Mandy can get free of Belle is by doing something to me?” I asked, and the purple flush continued its march across my face.

He froze with a chip halfway to this mouth. “You scamp. Celia’s already told you how to free yourself, hasn’t she?
You
are supposed to do something to
Mandy
.”

“No.” I turned the page, to another list.

There was a sketch of a floor plan labeled
B
. For “basement,” I supposed. I blinked as I visually traced the layout of Jessel’s basement. It had the L shape that reminded me of a hunchback when I looked down on it from Grose. Running along the back, where Mandy had written
DOOR
, were two lines that led into the basement from a ninety-degree angle, then appeared to rise up out of the L shape at an incline. She had written
TUNNEL!
And continued the angle, connecting it to a trapezoid, she had marked
ATTIC
.

So Mandy had known there was a tunnel in the attic, which I had stumbled upon—literally—when I lost my balance trying to escape from the haunted wheelchair. I fell through the thin wall into the tunnel . . . and the wheelchair had followed me.
Followed
me. How had I stayed sane after that?

Maybe the wheelchair wasn’t really haunted,
I thought.
Maybe she rigged it up to move when I was up there.
She had had access to all kinds of high-tech spook-house equipment, which her dorm, Jessel, had used to make the most elaborate haunted house that I’d ever been to outside of a theme park. She had also souped up the old library for one of her legendary pranks, terrifying two Marlwood girls, Sangheeta and Megan, as a hazing initiation to get into her superclique—those girls not realizing, of course, that Mandy was setting them up to be possessed.

Did Miles know about that? That Mandy provided girls for Belle’s ghost clique so they could possess them?

I looked at the tunnel again. The wheelchair had chased me down that tunnel, and I had eventually escaped through the door, right there. It was the first time I had seen Celia’s ghost hanging in the air. I had felt her slide right into my body. I shivered at the memory.

It’s over.
I crossed my fingers.

“Hello?” Miles said, tapping the map. “Am I boring you?”

At different places around the basement there were
X
s. Four. For the four items on her list, I was guessing. She hadn’t labeled them. I don’t suppose she needed to, since these were her personal notes.

“I saw a couple of these things in Jessel,” I said. “The group photos are on the mantel. And the portrait, if it’s the same one . . . ” I trailed off. The portrait of Belle (so I had assumed) was in Mandy’s room, and it was creepy. A large daguerreotype framed in worm-eaten wood; half of Belle’s face had been eaten away by mold.

I had seen the picture when I had snuck into Mandy’s room with Rose. And that was when we had seen the kinky photographs of Mandy with Miles. It made perfect sense that I would have been in Mandy’s room at some point in my life, but I was so uncomfortable about the photographs of her and Miles that I lost track of what I was saying.

“Look,” I said.

At the bottom of the page, there was a large bubble outline in brown, with an arrow pointing to the words:
body part!!!!

“You are such a liar. She
did
tell you how to get unpossessed,” he said. “Do you need one of Mandy’s body parts to break the spell? Will any Winters body part do?” He leered at me. “C’mon, baby, I’m happy to give it up.”

“Sorry, I’m not your type. I’m not related to you,” I snapped, still thinking of the pictures, flipping the page. A plane ticket was taped in the center of the page, surrounding by swirls and exclamation points in neon shades of puffy gel. And across the bottom of the page,
YES!

“You . . .
bitch
,” Miles ground out. I glanced up. He was staring at me as if I’d slapped him. As I blinked, he grabbed the notebook away from me.

“What? Why are you so angry?”

He clenched his teeth. “You know why. You know exactly why.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t.”

He rose out of his seat, pulled out his wallet, and dropped a twenty on the table. Then he gathered up all the papers and crammed them into his messenger bag.

“Don’t mess them up!” I yelled at him. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t look at me as he stomped toward the front door. He was furious. Following him, I replayed the conversation.
Oh. God.
I had made a crack about his supposed incestuous relationship with Mandy. But so had he. Crossing boundaries. He’d said that, right? No?

He hadn’t meant
that
?

“Miles,” I called after him. Two guys in ball caps playing pool looked at me and chuckled. Look at those crazy kids, having a lovers’ quarrel.
Hyuk.
“Hey, I’m sorry.”

He let the door slam in my face. I grabbed the knob and propelled myself toward him, discovering en route that it was raining. Hard. I hadn’t heard rain on the roadhouse roof, but within seconds I was drenched. I hadn’t brought an umbrella.

He was sitting on the Vespa with the messenger bag slung over his shoulder. The engine started humming, and he pushed up the kickstand and held out my helmet. As I took it, he sat staring straight ahead, as if he couldn’t stand the idea of riding with me but knowing that he had to take me home.