Chapter 34

It follows me inside. Thewondering. Mila looks so bewildered as she slowly makes her way up the path, into the summery warmth of the lake house, glancing behind her toward the water, opening her mouth as if to form a question. I am convinced that her fall was not an accident. I'm just not sure if the person who pushed her was living or dead. And even if I wanted to tell her what happened to her, I can't. We're trained to believe certain things almost from birth. What goes up must come down. What goes around comes around. Life and death are fundamentally incompatible. They simply cannot coexist.

Consider this, though.

We all see stars after they die.

Billions of ghosts, haunting the endless infinite night. Chelsea used to say stars made her sad, because we could never see them while they lived. As if they have stories to tell or anything to do except burn. But that's not precisely true. They create and they destroy. They collapse and absorb everything within their reach. They make life possible. I'm not a religious person. I was raised in the church of Einstein and Hawking. I believe that what we know of the universe is just a fifteen-billion–light-year snapshot, as likely as not to be a relative speck in relation to the whole. As likely as not to be one in an infinite number, each moment of our lives existing simultaneously and endlessly, somewhere. As likely as not to be heading toward a bounce. An endless cycle of birth and growth and collapse and death and rebirth.

Of course we know almost nothing about the universe we live in.

And since that's true, isn't it arrogant to refuse to admit that anything is impossible?

Even ghosts?

I can't bring myself to call them that. They don't fit into my concept of the world. But I'm convinced they were living once, and I am certain they're dead. They're gone, but they're still here. They don't feel like ghosts, but maybe it's all semantics. They are possible, and they exist. I don't believe in them, I know them. We share history and a home.

They play and fight and sometimes they do bad things. Of course, that's probably not the way they look at it. To them, it probably goes something like this:

The living are possible. They exist. They play and fight and sometimes they do bad things.

And then we punish them.

I try to banish the thought in the wake of the incident on the dock. We all need to relax. That's all. After we get Mila dried off and calmed down, Chelsea and Emily run upstairs to the attic with cold drinks and tarot cards, leaving Mila alone in the loft, attempting to apply makeup to her bruised, swollen nose using a tiny compact mirror.

I watch her for a moment, feeling torn. A dark circle is forming under one eye, and the left side of her face looks like something from Night of the Living Dead. She needs more than a simple sweep of powder and a tiny mirror. But Emily would never forgive me for helping her. I sigh and clear my throat, and Mila raises her long-lashed eyes. She has old Hollywood eyes, dark and round, with lashes like butterfly wings. There's something comforting and familiar about it. "Come with me." I lead her into my room and sit her on the corner of the bed before the fairy-tale mirror, the magic mirror, as Chelsea and I used to call it, and pull out my makeup case.

"I can do it," she insists.

"Can you, though?" I lift her hand doubtfully. Her knuckles are swollen; she slammed them into the dock as we pulled her out of the water.

"Fine." She leans in toward me and closes her eyes nervously. "Don't make me look like a freak."

A smile bubbles to my lips. "Don't move, then." A sudden cool sensation startles me just as I'm about to touch the brush to her face, but it's only a breeze sweeping in through the open balcony doors. I steady myself and concentrate on smoothing the cuts and bruises, masking the swelling. "I'm sorry about my friends. We're all perfectly nice people, I promise."

She smirks, keeping the upper half of her face still. "Nice isn't the same as good."

I grin. She has a little bit of spark under the timid exterior. "No, it's definitely not. But none of us are monsters, either."

"I know. Rejection is unbecoming of us all." She rolls her eyes.

I pause. "What do you mean?"

She raises an eyebrow. "Ryan tried to pick me up before Chase did. But… I mean, who would you go with?"

"Chelsea."

She smiles one of those I get it smiles. "But never Ryan."

She does get it. Never Ryan. He's not unattractive. It's hard to describe why never Ryan. I do understand what Chelsea sees in him. They're both nerdy and quirky. Funny. We got along when we were younger. But he's gotten somehow darker as we've grown. There's a bitterness to his humor now, a brooding quality that hangs on him like dissatisfaction is woven into him. I have mentioned it to Chelsea, and she says I'm reading him wrong. But I can't shake the sense that he resents me, and has from the first time Chelsea and I kissed. And it got much, much worse after they secretly dated when Chels and I were broken up and then she left him to get back together with me. That didn't make him the kind of person who would turn on Chase for dating a girl who turned him down. It just makes him consistent. That's why never Ryan.

The magic mirror frames us like a picture as I work, and I try to be quick, to finish before Chelsea and Emily tire of tarot and come looking for me, but the mirror always has a little bit of a spellbinding effect on me, and I find my arms slowing. My eyes fall on a row of dolls sitting on the bed, and my mind begins to wander back to another time, when the room was new to me. The room that used to belong to my dead aunt. The dead are especially drawn to this place.

It was in this room that I saw the second quiet person I can remember meeting. The blue lady. I was four, my aunt's age when she died. It was an arrival day, and my parents were busy unpacking and settling the house. I was arranging my toys on my bed in the order I wanted to play with them—book, puzzle, doll, book, puzzle, doll—when I heard a pair of footsteps descending from the attic. For a second, I didn't think anything of it, because half of arrival day is footsteps up and down the attic ladder, suitcases up, empty arms down.

But I could hear my father outside through the open windows and my mother in the kitchen, along with the smells of buttery popcorn and simmering crab cakes. The footsteps continued, and I froze in place, kneeling at the bedside, Where the Wild Things Are in one hand and a custom doll in the other, one my mother had ordered to be made to look just like me.

Some strange impulse hit, a weird protective thing, and I shoved the doll under my pillow. Like, if there was a robber, they could take everything but my Kennedy doll. She only had me to protect her, after all. I guess my protective instincts did not extend to the rest of my dolls.

But it wasn't a robber.

I was never able to look the dripping man in the face, so the blue lady was the first one I really got to look at, and it stole the voice out of my throat. There was no question about it; she was dead. She didn't look horrible or anything, at least not as horrible as you could imagine. I knew what a zombie looked like. She wasn't a zombie. She was just dead. Pale, bluish skin. Purplish lips. Not alive. Just not alive.

She sat down on the edge of my bed and lifted the pillow, and I felt my eyes fill with tears as she picked up my Kennedy doll. It's weird how when you're little, these things matter that wouldn't now. You would think the dead lady in my room would be the primary trauma, but for me, the twist of the knife was the Kennedy doll. She knew where it was, first of all, which made it like a living nightmare, and she just picked it up like she could take anything away from me. That made her all-powerful, and me totally powerless. And the thing she chose to take, out of everything I had, was the one thing I chose to protect.

I peed my pants.

Then the lady started to cry. She jumped up and fluttered through my drawers until she found a clean set of clothes for me, laid them neatly on my bed, and fled back up to the attic. She left my doll behind.

I didn't see her again for a while. But before I did, she started leaving me presents. She would find lost toys and bring them back to me or do my chores sometimes. She lined up my dolls neatly and brought me old things from the attic, toys that used to belong to my mother and grandmother. A dollhouse, a tea set, a series of books. I let her know when I was ready to play. I set the Kennedy doll by the attic with a teacup.

The next evening we had a moonlight tea party after my parents went to bed.

She still looked dead, but she had a kind smile.

I always thought I was her favorite until the day of the sacrifice. I'm pretty sure she's the one who drew first blood.

"Kennedy?"

I whirl around to discover Ryan standing in the doorway, staring at us. My heart jumps into my throat as I wonder how long he's been standing there, how much of our conversation he heard, but he doesn't let on. An innocent expression is plastered on his face, but he gazes up to the attic with a sparkle in his eyes that infuriates me, one that dances as I hear footsteps thunder across the floor above. He disappears and I hear him running downstairs, the back door slamming behind him, as Chelsea and then Emily descend the ladder and tumble onto my bed, both staring at me and Mila with accusing eyes.

"What are you doing?" Emily asks bluntly.

Chelsea looks more uncertain. She has no reason to. She's the one who went behind my back. For months. It doesn't matter that we weren't together. We both knew the other still cared. At least, I thought I did. Now she looks at me like she caught me with my dress around my ankles instead of a makeup brush in my hand. I wish my friends weren't so dramatic. Everything is life and death, heartbreak and betrayal.

"Makeup," Mila says, a little more assertively than earlier. I'm glad she's feeling more comfortable, honestly. It makes me feel uneasy to gang up, not just because it riles up our silent housemates. But because it isn't us. It's a mask of loyalty. But it isn't really loyalty. It's a performance. It's a role. It makes me feel like I deserve the way Ryan looks at me, like I don't get it, like everything about us is fake and hard and posed for display.

Emily glares at me for a moment, and I feel anger beginning to swirl up like a summer storm. I have done nothing wrong. Mila is my guest too. But the guilt hits then. Emily does take precedence. Her feelings come first.

I zip the makeup back into its case and put it away. "All done."

Emily studies Mila. "You can barely tell which side is all smashed up."

Mila darts a glance into the mirror. "It looks great." She shoots me a quick smile, then turns it on Emily. "Chase wouldn't care if my skin were on inside out, anyway. I couldn't lose him if I tried." She winks and leaves the room, and Emily turns to me, her face white as a sheet.

"What did you say to her?" Emily bites her nails nervously.

"Nothing." I stare after Mila. Another wave of guilt washes over me. "I'm sorry. I just… felt bad." I take her hand. "Come on, we can all do makeovers. It's been a million years."

Chelsea looks at me in disbelief. "It's not the makeup. That is not the girl who walked in here this afternoon."

I consider. "Maybe she's not afraid of us anymore."

"Great." Emily stalks after her.

Chelsea wraps her arms around me and gives me a comforting kiss. "You did bad."

"We can't just be horrible to a total stranger." I glance upward instinctively. To the attic. Where they like to play. We really can't be monsters. They wouldn't like it.