Manifest (13 page)

I am
in my room now after having left Franklin and Ricky at the library. The text I received freaked me out and I needed to be alone. Only something tells me that I’m not.

Ignoring that feeling when I pull the cell phone out again, I scroll down until I find the text message and read.

As if that’s not creepy enough, scrolling down a little further the picture reveals itself. The picture of a very alive, very naked Trina.

This whole situation just got a little more bizarre.

What kind of sick, perverted mess have I gotten myself involved in? Here I think I am helping out a spirit, doing something with the power I’ve been given, then another spirit comes along. A cute, street-wise, hot-to-trot spirit that I now know is into posing nude.

Yuck!

And whoever took this picture of her now wants to take pictures of me.

Double yuck!

There is no number so I don’t know who the sender is. I guess if I call our cell phone provider I can find out. But then I’d have to tell Janet and she’d most definitely tell Gerald and I have no idea what he would do. Would he blame me? Would he punish me?

Where Gerald is concerned I just don’t know.

So the obvious move would be to keep my mouth shut. I don’t have to answer this text and I don’t have to keep looking at it. But I don’t delete it either.

No, I am going to wait for Ms. Trina to make another appearance, acting like she knows me on a personal level, telling me what I should do for her boyfriend. And then I’m going to pull out my phone, show her this pic and see what she has to say. Bet she won’t act so high and mighty then.

The tapping wakes me up.

It sounds like a nail against the window but when I climb out of my bed to investigate, there is nothing there. I get back into bed, pull up the covers and burrow down to fall asleep again.

Screeeeeaaacccchhhhh!

Every nerve I have goes on end. My entire body stiffens as if keeping still will stop the god-awful sound. I cover my ears but it persists. Rolling over until I am flat on my back, I open my eyes wide to the darkness. Of course I see nothing, but it isn’t what I can see that frightens me. It is the unknown.

Somebody or something is in the room with me. I can feel it, as easily as I feel my heart about to beat right out of my chest.

“Ricky?” I whisper his name but even as it falls off my lips I know it’s not him. The feeling is not the same. My insides aren’t fluttering around. Instead I’m breathing heavy, my chest has a dull ache in the center and my
forehead is pounding. Whoever or whatever is here is not welcome.

But I don’t think that’s going to make them go away any sooner.

I sit up in the bed, despite the warning bells going off in my head and the little voice saying, “Don’t be like those kids in the movies, you know the ones who always die first!” I push the covers off me thinking that’s just fiction when my stuffed animal army comes barreling at me one by one, each smashing into my head, chest and arms with brutal force. As I raise my arms to ward them off, I can still hear that high-pitched screeching sound and wonder how long it’s going to take for Janet to barge in here asking what’s going on.

But after a few more seconds pass and, thankfully, all the stuffed animals have already been hurled at me, I figure that’s not going to happen. So, putting my arms down I climb out of bed slowly, not knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to do when I get there. All I know for sure is that this is my room and there’s no way I’m going to let some spiritual being or ghost or whatever keep me hostage in my bed. My feet touch the floor and I take the first step. It’s quiet now, maybe the ghost or whoever had the wrong house.

A gust of wind has my nightgown whipping up my legs. As I’m struggling to pull it down my legs are hit with freezing cold air. Now I’m getting pissed off. I’m cold and I’m shivering and I’m trying to move toward the window that I now see is open. I know it wasn’t open when I went to it just a few minutes ago. Then again, I also know that stuffed animals can’t throw themselves across the room, no matter how much I dislike them.

Reaching out a hand, I try to grab hold of the edge of my dresser because this wind is crazy and in a minute I’m going to go flying through the air like my name should be
Dorothy and there should be a little barking dog beside me. But before my hand can grab the edge I’m stunned by the lifting of a charcoal pencil—one of the ones that Janet bought me the other day that I’d thrown on my floor. It floats toward the mirror and begins writing.

Still shivering, I’m standing in the middle of my room reading as the pencil writes
Charlotte Ethersby.

The pencil falls to the dresser and rolls right off the end to the floor. By now I’ve crossed my arms. My teeth are chattering and my knees knocking.

“If you had something to say to me, Ricky, you could have just opened your mouth and said it. All this isn’t necessary.” I am so hoping it is him. Who else would come into my room in the middle of the night to leave me a cryptic message? It has to be Ricky, right?

Wrong.

The army of stuffed animals assault me again as they all circle around my feet until, as I’m busily trying to step over and around them, I fall to the floor with a loud thump. Then something falls on top of me. I can feel the weight but I can’t see anything or anyone. What I do feel is the sharp pinch on my right cheek, the pinch that I soon realize is something scratching me.

To hell with this. I open my mouth and scream like somebody is attacking me. Which, by the way, they are. It just so happens to be a dead and invisible someone.

My screaming goes on forever and the weight on me finally shifts. I roll real quick, coming up on my knees, still trying to see something in the dark. Behind me the window slams shut and the breeze abruptly stops. The stuffed animals stay on the floor as evidenced by the one I trip over when I finally stand up and make my way across the room to my lamp. Flicking it on, I turn slowly to look around me, hating what I know I’m going to see.

Nobody.

That hard wind has blown papers from my desk all over the room, the stuffed animals are on the floor and so are all of the charcoal pencils from my dresser. The note on the mirror is there, visible and with some sort of meaning.

And there is something else.

On the floor right next to the window seat is a picture. I walk over, crouch down and pick it up. It was here, the crying girl spirit I’d seen at the school.

Did
I ever mention that I hate Biology?

Well, I do.

It’s one of those subjects that if you miss a day or two of work you are totally lost, which equals totally busted when quiz day arrives.

The fact that today’s quiz is open book doesn’t even help me. So for the first ten minutes I just stare at the work sheet, my mind more focused on what I had heard on the news this morning. Other girls were receiving texts and IMs of a sexual nature. I’d immediately thought about the messages I’d been receiving from “number1.” I don’t think I can say the IMs were sexual. Creepy, yes. But not really sexual. Now as for the text message, well, the naked picture definitely said sex. Did that mean the sender was hinting at having sex with me? He’d only mentioned posing for pictures. Had the person had sex with Trina? Maybe that’s how she died.

I’m so full of questions it’s no wonder I can’t focus on schoolwork. But I don’t have a choice. I either need to get it together or fail.

That’s a no-brainer.

Finally, sighing wearily, I pick up my pen and open my
notebook. Flipping to the Biology section, I’m pleased to see that I do have the answers to the first ten questions in my notes. It’s the other twenty that I’m having problems with. I’m trying to think back, maybe I heard Mr. Lyle talk about some of this stuff but just didn’t write it down. I’m in deep concentration mode when the room gets a little darker. The sun must have shifted behind a cloud. I keep working.

The rain comes fast slapping against the window like a thousand tapping nails. I’m happy that when I look to the windows I’m not the only one. The entire class hears and sees the same thing. A sudden torrential rain doesn’t seem to bother them though; they go right back to work.

Screaaacchhhhh!

The sound moves through my body tortuously slowly and I drop my pen. Bending down, I pick it up and on the way back up I hear the sound again. My eyes shoot around the classroom; everybody’s still working. I look up front. Mr. Lyle is at his desk, looking down at something. Then I stifle a gasp. On the blackboard just behind Mr. Lyle the chalk is moving by itself.

It’s scribbling across the board just like that charcoal had on my mirror last night.

MONEY. PICTURES. LIES. KILL.

I can’t make myself stop looking. The room’s still kind of dim, rain—actually it sounds more like hail now—slaps against the window. Then comes the breeze whirling around the room ruffling the pages in my notebook. The words on the blackboard repeat in swirly handwriting. By this point my heart’s beating a frantic beat. I’ve gotta get out of here.

Slamming my notebook shut, I scoop it up in my arms and stand to leave. Nobody around me even looks up, like
I’m not even here. I’m moving fast heading to the door. I wonder if I need to get a hall pass. I look over at Mr. Lyle; he hasn’t even looked up. So I keep moving until I brush past Mr. Lyle’s desk, knocking over some papers. I hurry to pick them up and release a little yelp when I see writing on one of them.

MONEY. PICTURES. LIES. KILL.

Dropping them, I run straight to the door and out into the hall. I don’t stop until I’m in the bathroom leaning over the sink, trying to catch my breath. From the speaker above I hear the bell ring and I close my eyes.

Apparently spirits are not the only things I see.

By lunchtime Sasha is even more wound up then she was this morning. I’ve had two more class periods to get myself together after the last ghostly encounter. I have no idea what the words meant but know that all of this is connected somehow.

Sasha’s not eating her lunch and she keeps twirling strands of her hair around her finger. She looks like her mind is someplace else even though she’s sitting right at the table talking to me and Jake. I think about asking her what’s really wrong but then I stop. Sasha and I are too different to be friends. We’re just Mystyx.

“What happened to your face?” she asks while I’m opening up the sandwich Janet packed for me. I know it’s ham, cheese and mustard on whole wheat because that’s what she gives me every day. I usually don’t even bother to open it since I have no intention of eating it. Today, though, I’m hungry.

Dropping the sandwich, I immediately lift my hand to my right cheek. I’d seen the scratch this morning as I looked
in the mirror after my shower. It had come from my evening visitor.

I wonder if I should tell them about that and the text and the vision I had in class this morning, but then I decide against it. I don’t know how Trina’s involved or who Charlotte Ethersby is, so I don’t know what we need to do for Ricky. And he hasn’t reappeared so I can ask him.

“It’s nothing. I fell.”

“Did you talk to Franklin?” she follows up.

The mention of his name has me looking around the cafeteria to see if he’s there. I don’t see him. “Yeah, I did. He says his father has a system to track weather patterns and that he thinks there’s a big storm brewing.”

“Really?” Jake says. “That’s interesting.”

“Why’s it interesting? I could have turned on the television to get that very same report. Doesn’t really help us either way.”

Jeez. She was in a snippy mood today.

“But it might,” Jake begins, scooting up closer to the table and putting down the magazine he was only pretending to read. Inside the magazine was the diary of Eleanor Jean Kramer. “Listen to this. December 1946—”

“Wait, the diary started in 1932. There aren’t that many pages but it goes…” Sasha counts off to herself. “It goes fifteen years.”

“She doesn’t write consistently,” Jake says, sounding a little irritated at Sasha’s interruption.

“‘William’s doing things. Strange things. If he looks at something it moves. No matter what it is, all he has to do is look at it, focus on it and it moves. He’s confused. I want to help him but I am afraid. Afraid of the darkness.’”

Sasha perks up. “What darkness?”

Jake shrugs. “It stops right there.”

“Darkness,” I begin talking, picturing it clearly in my mind. “The dark fog. I saw it.”

“What?” they both ask in unison.

Then just Jake. “What did you see and when?”

“Yesterday when I fell, there was this black fog all around me. It kept moving and moving like it was going to choke me.”

“Did it say anything?” Sasha asks.

“No. It was a fog. Not a spirit. It didn’t speak or anything, just kept coming.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Jake says.

“No. It doesn’t.”

For a few minutes we’re all quiet, not really knowing what to say next.

“How did it go with Antoine?” Jake asks suddenly.

Sasha frowns. “He’s a jerk.”

And she says it with an attitude that makes both Jake and I look at each other in question then back at her.

“And?” he says.

“And he was an even bigger jerk when I asked about his brother. He was like, ‘Yo, that’s in the past. I’m tryna make a future wit me and you. What you tryna do?’”

I chuckle. Can’t help it, her imitation of the thug-lovin’ Antoine Watson is right on point. I know because I overheard him talking to his friends this morning by the gym.

Jake smiles, too. “So he tried to get with you instead of helping you? Is that what’s got you so ticked off?”

Sasha rolls her eyes at both of us. “I’m not ticked off.”

Jake nods and I go back to unwrapping my sandwich. She is lying and not doing a good job of it.

“So did you find out anything that could help us?”

Sasha huffs so hard her bangs flip up and fall back down in spiral ringlets on her forehead. “Just that Ricky was dating this girl Trina before she turned up missing. A few people said Ricky did something to her. Said they had a fight over money or something.”

“Money?” Jake whispers.

I am remaining quiet, waiting to hear what else she has to say, wondering how it will relate to the picture on my phone or the message on the blackboard.

“He said it was more like Ricky was hounding Trina about where she was getting all this money. Trina told him to mind his business, got mad and broke up with him.”

Jake looks like he is processing the information, too. “And what, she killed him?”

Sasha shakes her head. “Nope. Antoine said Trina went missing before Ricky died. Somebody saw them fighting and then Trina was gone.”

“Gone like dead?”

Sasha shrugs. “Gone like gone. I don’t know. That’s all I could get from him before he started getting too close.”

I take a bite of my sandwich and let the food move around in my mouth for a few seconds before attempting to swallow. I wonder if it’d threaten to get stuck like that pizza did. But as I continue to chew and breathe it doesn’t, it just slides down my throat like it is supposed to.

“Gone like dead,” I say when the food is finally down and I don’t feel like it’s going to come back up.

I can feel their stares on me and reluctantly look up. Accepting it, waiting for the onslaught of questions that will follow.

“How do you know?”

“Have you seen her, too?”

“Did Ricky kill her?”

I hate when they tag-team question me. “Yeah, I saw her. I don’t think he killed her.” Then again, I don’t know. I don’t know much about Ricky or his girlfriend.

What I do know is that I want to talk to Ricky again, to ask him some of these questions for myself.

“So what else happened that has you so ticked off with Twan?” I change the subject.

A neatly arched brow lifts. “Twan?”

I shrug. “That’s what Ricky calls him.”

Sasha rolls her eyes sideways, determined not to look at me. Or Jake either, for that matter. Instead she glances over to the table where Twan is sitting. Something is definitely going on there, something I am sure she isn’t going to be up front about. Which is probably okay considering all the little tidbits of info I’m keeping from them.

“They’re just a callous bunch of thugs. They don’t care who they hurt.”

“Did he hurt you?” I ask. Concern for Sasha is quick, natural and new to me.

She shakes her head. “No. Not me. Not him. I just mean I didn’t really feel comfortable being with him. I mean, with that group.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about. I guess I sort of get what she’s saying but she’s being rather cryptic. I open my mouth to say something else but Jake shakes his head as if warning me to let it go.

“Well, Ricky was definitely down with them. For how long and what role did he play with them?” Jake asks.

Sasha hunches her shoulders. “I don’t know. Like I said, he wasn’t really into giving me a lot of information about Ricky. More like trying to get in my pants. The creep!”

So that’s what has her all out of sorts. Twan was trying to get with her instead of giving information. I almost repeat what she told me yesterday about going along and playing like I want to get with Franklin the way he wants to get with me. But I stop and ask myself why a girl who looks like Sasha, with long pretty hair, pretty eyes, the stylish clothes and the curvy little figure, isn’t automatically pleased with the fact that yet another guy is trying to get with her. Then it hits me. A girl like Sasha—a Richie—and a boy like Twan, a hip-hopper who probably gets into more trouble than he gets good grades. Only I don’t think Sasha is into all that social status stuff.

“What I do know is that they’re not, like, a gang or anything. Just a group of guys who grew up together and stick together because nobody understands them. That’s what Antoine says. You’d just think they’d grow up and start doing something more useful with their time.” Then she turns, her eyes perking up just a bit. “I also know they have something deep to talk about tomorrow night.”

“Deep? Like what?” Jake asks.

“Tomorrow night he said they’re going to meet in the music room during basketball practice. I only got that info from him when he was trying to figure out what night I’d be available to spend with him. He quickly ruled that out.”

“Cool.” Jake is nodding his head. “I say we should definitely be there.”

Sasha and I both look at him quizzically.

“What?”

“We should be there. Find out what’s so important, what’s going on with them. The only way we’re going to get close to what may have happened to Ricky is to get close to those he was tight with.”

“Has he given you any details about his death?”

I shake my head no because in the two weeks that Ricky’s been asking for my help, he’s yet to actually tell me about his murder. And for the first time in those two weeks, I’m thinking how strange that is.

“We haven’t really talked about that.”

Tilting her head, Sasha glares at me. “What do you mean, you haven’t talked about that? You’ve been talking to a ghost, he asks you for your help but you haven’t talked about his death? What do you two talk about?”

Okay, first of all I really don’t think it’s any of her business what I talk about with anybody, living or dead, besides her and Jake. Still I get the idea of why she asked and I see where she’s going with the conversation. It’s not
making me very comfortable—then again, being around Sasha usually doesn’t.

“We just talk about stuff,” I say, knowing that’s not going to be enough. So I instantly take a deep follow-up breath and prepare to go into that “stuff” a little further.

“Okay, look, we’re all in this together so any information you’ve got about your little ghost friend, his club, his death, whatever, spill.”

Drumming my fingers on the table, I simply shake my head. Sometimes this girl really irks me. “After I first accepted that I was actually talking to a spirit, we just kind of talked about basic stuff. Who he is, what his problem is. You know, stuff like that.”

“And that’s all?” Skeptical should have been her middle name. “How many times have you and he talked about just basic stuff?”

“Just a couple.”

Then I think about my dream where I woke up in the cemetery right next to Ricky’s tombstone and I wonder if that has any importance on what we’re doing. “I know where he’s buried,” I blurt without thinking.

“Well, yeah, there’s only one cemetery in Lincoln,” Sasha informs me.