“Don’t eww me! He was hot. But he was also bad news. He definitely had a girlfriend. He might’ve even been married, I don’t know. I knew that if my brother found out, he’d kill me. But, like, I still couldn’t stop, you know? We’d run into each other near the bike trailers, and I’d tell myself not to look at him, and the next thing I’d know, we’d be up against a chain-link fence, going at it. It was like a gravitational pull.”
Lillia nods her head vigorously. “That’s exactly how it feels.”
“You can’t go near Reeve, Lillia. Especially not when it’s just the two of you, alone. The force, it’s too strong. You’ve got to shut it down.”
“Shut it down,” Lillia repeats. “Yes.”
“Shut it the f**k down, because if you don’t, it’s only going to bring you trouble. Think about Mary, what she’d say if she knew.”
“It would kill her.” Lil shudders. “So you were able to stop seeing that guy?” she asks hopefully.
“Uh, well. I mean, yeah. After he moved to Italy to join this pro racing club.” I wonder what ever happened to that guy. Fuzz? Fez? I can’t remember. Lillia groans. “Lil, we only have, like, four months left of school. And then you’re gone, baby, gone. You can do this.”
“I have to do this,” she corrects. Staring up at my ceiling, she says, “I just hate that Paige thinks badly of me now.”
“Don’t take it personally. Paige loves to stir up shit, you know that. She’s a drama queen. That’s where Rennie got it from. She’s just pissed right now that Ren’s gone, and she wants to take it out on somebody.”
Lillia nods, but I can tell she’s still bummed out. I get it. I’d probably be bummed out too.
She hangs around for a while longer. I fill her in on what’s going on with Alex and play her a few of the songs that I’m putting on his mix. “Lindy must really trust you,” she says, putting her jacket back on. “He doesn’t play his songs for anyone else. I hope they’re good enough for him to get in.”
“Me too. He was so excited on the phone, like a kid on Christmas.”
Before Lil leaves, she says, “I almost forgot—I have something for you.” She unzips her purse and holds out a strip of black-and-white photos. They are of me and Rennie, as little girls, from the photo booth in the ice cream parlor. Rennie has her hair in two pigtails, and I’ve got mine long and straight, with bangs cut blunt across my forehead.
“Rennie’s old nose,” I say, laughing. “It wasn’t even bad.”
Lillia looks over my shoulder. “I told her that a hundred times, but she’d never listen.”
In the first shot we’re both smiling at the camera. In the second we’re smiling at each other. In the third we’re both back to looking at the camera, but this time Rennie’s giving me bunny ears. The fourth one is blurry, because there are tears in my eyes.
Chapter Ten
MARY
I OPEN MY EYES, AND everything slowly comes into focus. I’m lying on my bedroom floor, staring up at the wooden beam stretching across the ceiling. The one that I . . .
I push myself up onto my knees. How long has it been since I was sitting on top of the lighthouse? An hour? A day? A year?
I crawl on the floor over to the wall and sit with my back up against it.
This room was once full of my things. A closet packed with dresses and skirts, sweaters and shoes. A bookshelf lined with paperbacks. I had school notebooks and pencils and homework. A quilt on my bed. Pretty trinkets I arranged on my dresser just so when I moved back to Jar Island.
It looked like the bedroom of any teenage girl.
Except now I see the truth. The empty closet. The bare bookshelf. A stripped mattress without pillows or sheets.
I used to think that this was the room I lived in. But it’s not.
It’s the room I died in.
It kills me all over again, thinking back to how knowing the truth weighed on Aunt Bette. I basically drove her crazy. Her dead niece, haunting her house. Except I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I really, truly believed that I lived through my suicide attempt. I thought I was alive.
I look down at myself, at the clothes I’m wearing. I’m the Mary I should be, seventeen, in a navy-blue sweater and a pair of jeans. Thin. But how? How did I fill this room up, my life up, with things that don’t actually exist?
I close my eyes, concentrate hard, and try to put my things back in my room the way they were before New Year’s Eve. The quilt, the clothes in my closet, my pink terry-cloth robe. I envision everything in my mind. I need something back. One little thing. A stuffed animal. One of my old books. I can’t exist like this.
When I open my eyes, the room is still empty and dark.
And I swear I feel my heart break.
I get up and walk out of my room, down the hall, and linger in the doorway of Aunt Bette’s room. It’s total chaos from when my mom came and took her away. The floor is covered with her collection of those old occult books.
I remember the fight we had, after I found out she was doing those weird spells on me. Burning those herb bundles in teacups, making string webs on our shared wall, trying to trap me in my room. She was afraid of me, of what I might do. She knew I was the one who’d caused that fire at homecoming, even though I didn’t.
I take a step inside, then a second, then a third. I hold my hand over a red cloth book teetering at the top of the stack closest to me, and wiggle my fingers. It flips opens to a random page. I used to think I had special powers, that I could move things with my mind. I was kind of right about that, I guess.
Some spirits are prone to unrest. Often they stay close to this world to resolve things they left unfinished.
Yes. Yes! That’s it. Exactly.
I flip to another page.
Under no circumstances should one ever inform a spirit that they are, in fact, deceased. It is better for them to remain ignorant of their plight and ignorant regarding the extent of their capabilities, which they will almost certainly use maliciously.
I stare down at the word “maliciously.” It scares me. What I could be capable of. But these books are my only hope. And that’s so much better than feeling hopeless.
Chapter Eleven
LILLIA
ASH MEETS ME BY MY locker after school and says, “Derek and PJ were talking about going to the basketball game tonight.”
“We’re playing off island, right?” Ash nods. I don’t like basketball, and I don’t think our team is very good, but the idea of getting away from Jar Island for the night sounds like a plan to me. There’s just one thing keeping me from saying yes. “What are the other guys doing?”