Paper Valentine (5 page)

I swing my legs down from the planter and untangle myself from the rubber tree, trying to scoot away from it without getting my hair caught in the leaves.

When Connor sees me, he smiles and does a little salute. “Hey, Twinkie,” he says, thumping down next to me on the edge of the planter.

“You have got to make him stop calling you that,” Lillian whispers from right behind me. Her voice sounds bored, like she barely even knows him, but under that, there’s an empty note. I’m practically sure that if I glance over my shoulder at her, she’ll be watching him with wide, greedy eyes.

Connor leans back on his arms. “What were you doing back there in the bushes?”

I feel stupid, but I figure I might as well say it. Connor can sometimes be really obnoxious. He’s not always a very good boyfriend to Angelie, and for the first few months after Lillian died, he was pretty hard to be around. But most of the time he’s okay.

“I was hiding from Nick Andelman,” I tell him, sounding only a tiny bit less ridiculous than I feel.

“That guy? He’s a total loser. Why were you hiding from him?”

I sort of want to tell Connor everything, explain about the bracelet, but instead I just shrug.

When Angelie exits the bathroom, newly brushed and braided, she comes bounding down the steps to the fountain and kisses him on the cheek. She gives me a look and I scoot away from him, even though he’s the one who sat down next to me.

The two of them decide to go see one of those loud, summer action movies they’ve been advertising constantly, even at the gas station and Taco Bell, but the rest of us opt out. Carmen and I both hate movies about explosions. We say good-bye to Angelie and Connor and then head down the walkway to Bathing Beauty so that Jessica can get some more Harvest Peach body spray, which comes in a round orange bottle and smells exactly like peach schnapps.

As we pass the food court, I slip my arm through Carmen’s and try not to search the crowd for Finny. I know I shouldn’t be looking for him, but I can’t help it. I keep picturing him standing over me in the Quik-Mart every time I let my mind wander.

On my other side, Lillian’s mood has darkened abruptly. She’s glaring at the clusters of afternoon shoppers with their french fries and their floppy slices of pizza. “Don’t waste your time swooning over him, Hannah. He’s just a big dumb animal who hangs out with bracelet thieves.”

I don’t answer, but I have the stark, uneasy feeling I always get when she does this, like she’s just seen straight down into my soul. The magic of ghosts is that she always seems to know what I’m thinking, and even when she was alive, Lillian was a little bit of a mind reader.

“God, you’re such a weenie sometimes,” she says as we wander through the fragrance section at Bathing Beauty. “If you had any self-respect, you would have gone up to Nick and told him to give it back.”

I twist away and pretend to be very interested in an elaborate pyramid of pastel bath bombs, but she steps in front of me, making me look at her.

“Seriously, Hannah. When are you going to stop letting everyone in the whole entire world walk all over you?”

I turn my back on her. In the long mirror behind the counter, I look strange and secretive, like I’m trying to keep my face under control. Behind me, Lillian is watching, waiting for some kind of reaction.

“Fine,” she snaps, but the way she says it makes it clear that this isn’t over. It isn’t fine.

When she swings her fist at the table, it’s fast and ferocious. I don’t expect her to make contact, but as soon as she brings her arm down, there’s a sound like pond-ice cracking, and the whole display goes crashing to the floor.

Bottles hit the tile in an avalanche. Plastic cracks and lids fly off, splattering pink and blue bath products everywhere. I stand with my hands clasped tightly under my chin and cupcake-scented bath gel dripping down the front of my dress.

Sometimes Lillian tries to throw or break things, but even when she concentrates, she hardly ever actually moves them. When I turn to face her, she has the strangest look—not shocked, not sorry, but defiant.

Jessica comes hurrying over to me, picking her way around broken bottles, doing her best to avoid the spilled gel, which is all over the floor and splashed up the sides of the shelves. “God, Hannah, are you okay?”

I nod, glancing at the woman behind the counter, wondering if I’m going to get in trouble, but the table is in pieces on the floor with its legs splayed out like a flattened bug, and this is clearly not my fault.

“That’s it,” Lillian says, shaking her head and turning away. “Just keep telling yourself that.”

THE GHOST

CHAPTER FIVE

I
t’s almost seven by the time I get home. As soon as I let myself in, I’m hit by the smell of garlic and peppers, and my mom calls from the kitchen that dinner will be ready in twenty minutes and can I please set the table?

“Sure,” I yell back from the front hall. “Just let me change first.” The top of my head feels burned, and there’s bubble bath all over my dress.

Upstairs, Lillian is already waiting in my room, balancing precariously on the footboard of my bed. Outside, the sun is low. The air is starting to look blue.

I want to lie on my floor and listen to Imogen Heap or The Sundays, but I smell like a soapy, chemical cupcake, and I should really go help in the kitchen. Anyway, I know if I turn on the stereo, Lillian will get all excited and remind me that she’s the whole reason I even know about whatever band I’m playing. She’ll clap her hands and dance around like she owns it, because she was always doing that—acting like a song or story or poem was so important. Like she was the first person to ever know about it. Like it didn’t exist before the second she heard it for the first time.

She hops down from the footboard and begins to pace, striding back and forth across the room. “You need to get cleaned up,” she says in a distracted voice. “You’re a mess.”

The way she moves is frantic and jerky, like a nervous bird. Completely exhausting.

She’s wearing the powder-blue flannel pajamas she died in, and her hair is loose and straggly and unbrushed. Her feet make no sound as she crosses the floorboards and the little braided rug. Sometimes I catch myself wondering all these strange, perplexing things, like if she ever wishes for a change of clothes, and whether time and distance mean anything to ghosts. If she can even feel the ground under her.

I gesture to my soapy dress. “Yeah? Well, whose fault is that? I didn’t make the mess.”

She doesn’t answer, just gives me a tiny shrug, like she might be half sorry.

After watching her pace for a few seconds, I sit down and take off my shoes. The AC clicks off with a sharp mechanical sound and then there’s silence.

I can hear my mom and Decker downstairs in the kitchen, laughing about paella and for a minute, I just sit there in the dimness, listening to them sound happy.

Lillian folds her arms over her chest but doesn’t stop pacing. “God, could an afternoon with Angelie be any more gruesome? I don’t know why you even do this to yourself. When she talked Jessica into getting that feathered headband, I actually wanted to shoot myself.”

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t joke about things like that. Anyway, you used to hang out with Angelie all the time. We’ve always hung out with Angelie. She’s my friend.”

“Oh, I forgot. Hannah doesn’t like to live in real life. Hannah just wants to pretend that we all live in happy fairyland, where everyone is super–best friends and no one is a heinous bitch and nothing bad is ever going to happen. Yeah, well. Maybe you should ask Cecily about that.”

I’ve been waiting for this. Ever since the breaking-news story and Lillian’s little tangent about ghosts the other night, I’ve been wondering when we’d get into the topic of Cecily Miles—all the gory details.

Lillian sighs and flops down in my desk chair. “What do you think the police are doing right now? Do you think they’ll call in the FBI?”

“Come on,” I say. “It’s not exactly a freak occurrence or anything. I mean, do you know how many people die in Ludlow every year? This is just the kind of thing that happens in cities.”

That’s not really true, though. The only other time anything this bad has happened was almost a year and a half ago, to a girl named Monica Harris. She was in our civics class, and she died the winter of freshman year, the Saturday before Valentine’s Day. One of the city garbage collectors found her out in the parking lot behind the Bowl-A-Rama in her pink polyester jacket, beaten dead with a piece of two-by-four and her own ice skates.

It was one of those shocking nightmare things, and afterward, I wove floral wreaths for the makeshift memorial by the bowing alley and tried not to think about it too much. For the next few months, though, it was all anyone at school could talk about.

* * *

When Lillian first got the idea to contact Monica Harris from the dead, it was like just another part of this same bad running joke that people had started spreading around. That Monica would come back and haunt you. I said absolutely, positively not—no way. The whole thing was awful. It was stupid. It wouldn’t work.

Lillian kept after it, though, teasing me about ghosts whenever I slept over, waking me up in the middle of the night with the sheet over her head. And when that didn’t work, she threatened to do the séance with Carmen and Angelie instead.

I think she always knew I’d do it, though. And in the end, I did.

Neither of us had a Ouija board, but Lillian had read this article about how you could make one the way they did in the 1800s, with a card table and a drinking glass. My mom had a whole set of vintage barware from the seventies, up on the top shelf in the front closet where she kept extra merchandise for the store. The corners of the box were held together with Scotch tape, and I worried it would be full of spiders, or that my mom would be able to tell we’d been messing around with her inventory, but Lillian just picked through the box and found the smallest, fanciest glass and took it up to my room.

We did the séance on a Wednesday, because Lillian said Wednesday was the best day for contacting the dead. I made a board with a permanent marker and a square of leftover plywood and put a piece of clear shelf paper over it because Lillian said it had to be slippery. Then we sat on my floor with the plywood between us, and she lit her mom’s aromatherapy candles in a circle around us, just like the instructions said in an article she found online.

“Spirits,” she said in a whisper, with the fancy little glass turned upside down in the middle of the board. “We call on you to help us contact Monica Harris. Spirits, are you with us tonight?”

She’d barely finished talking when the glass jerked hard and skated along the edge of the board in a long arc. The way it moved so effortlessly made a cold shudder run right down my spine. The shelf paper wasn’t that slippery.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop doing that.”

Lillian shook her head. “I’m not moving it.” Her eyes were big and she didn’t look like she was lying, but by then she was so good at lying about everything that it made it hard to believe her.

She scooted closer, staring at the board. “Am I talking to Monica Harris?”

At first the glass just sat there. Then, in one long, lazy swoop, it drifted to the top corner of the plywood, where I’d printed the word
yes
.

“Okay,” Lillian whispered, almost like I was gone and she was saying it to herself. “Okay. Monica, can you tell us how you died?”

We sat perfectly still, and I watched without breathing as the glass slid down again and hit the
H
, then circled briefly before gliding across to the E and stopping.

“He?” whispered Lillian, staring hard at the board. “Who’s he?”

But then the glass moved again, sliding to the A and then just as quickly to R, and finally coming to rest on T.

Heart.

“What does that mean?” I said. My voice sounded thin and tiny.

The glass was already moving again and I took my hands away. I couldn’t help it. The feeling of it gliding around under my fingers was just too creepy.

Lillian gave me an outraged look but didn’t say anything. She sat with her hands over the glass, but it didn’t really look like she was touching it at all anymore. Maybe a little, but it didn’t seem that way. I could have sworn I saw the glow of candlelight in the gap between her fingertips and the bottom of the glass.

I sat perfectly still, watching the board with goose bumps coming out on my arms.

The glass looped across the rows of letters, spelling out P-A-P-E-R. Then, without pausing, it circled its way back to H-E-A-R-T.

After that, the glass wouldn’t spell anything else. We tried for another half hour, but it was no good. It just sat in the middle of the board, motionless. Silent.

As soon as Lillian went home, I put the cordial glass back in the closet and threw the board in the Dumpster behind my house.

* * *

After a minute, I shut myself in the closet and change into one of my old wrap dresses, then sit down at my dressing table, and switch on the lamp. The light makes everything look warm and ghostly, but it never seems to do that to Lillian. She’s always more solid at night.

I get out my hairbrush and wish for her—the real Lillian, and not the worst, most selfish parts of her. I wish for a warm, true best friend, one who didn’t die.

She stands behind me, reflected in the mirror. The shape of her shoulders when she cups her elbows is fragile, but real enough, almost like I could reach out my arms and hug her. Only, I know that if I do, she’ll feel like ice against my skin, too freezing to touch, and even when she was alive, all I’d be holding on to was her bones.

Sometimes girls online or at school called it Ana, like a real actual person, someone you could play Yahtzee with or talk to on the phone. But because Lillian never liked to do what everyone else was doing, she called it Trevor, after this Christian Bale character in a movie about a guy who never sleeps or eats. A guy who looks like the walking dead. Even then, I guess she knew what she was up against.

I toss my hair back over my shoulders and start brushing. It bothers me, remembering all these random little things, like they’re part of a book or a TV movie, or happened to someone else. Like it isn’t really real somehow. But I know better. My best friend gave up a life and a future for something else, and the indisputable proof is standing right behind me.

“I couldn’t help it,” she says close to my ear, always so good at knowing exactly what I’m thinking. “I didn’t have a choice.”

I yank the brush through my hair, feeling the bristles dig at my scalp. The string of paper lights tacked around the outside of the mirror makes my face look dreamy and all the wrong colors.

I hate that she says
choice
like it wasn’t one. Like it was something that just happened, some natural phenomenon or twist of fate, instead of something she actually did. And maybe, when everyone is always competing to have the most ironic thing to say and wear the most unique outfit and be the most special, maybe it starts to feel like you don’t have a choice. Because the truth is that if everyone’s special all the time, then really, no one’s special, so maybe all that’s left is just to be perfect, because at least that’s something you can measure.

Or anyway, these are the things that I think about. Because when you hang out with Angelie Baker, it’s like even just existing starts to be a contest all the time, every day, and I always thought that because Lillian was the brightest and the wildest, she was somehow exempt.

“It wasn’t Angelie’s fault,” she says behind me, leaning her elbows on the back of my chair. “Don’t give her that much credit.”

I glance at her reflection. Beside her, my own face looks pink-cheeked and kind of startled.

“It was more like this obsessive little part of me I couldn’t shut out,” she says. “I could hear it all the time, whenever I was alone, reminding me how I was worthless and stupid, that nothing would ever be okay if I couldn’t get myself under control, because who wants a person with no self-control? Who wants a fat, stupid pig? I wasn’t good enough to have what everybody else did.”

Her mouth is close to my ear, like she’s telling me a secret, but it’s ugly and self-satisfied, the kind of secret you throw around like a live grenade any chance you get, and I can feel the anger—the absolute fury—welling up in my chest. “Well, you didn’t have to listen!”

Lillian grabs me, fingers digging into my neck. “Yes,” she says in a deadly voice. Her face is terrible and gaunt. “I did.”

I spin around with the brush in my hand, and I would hit her if I thought it would make a difference or if I could justify beating at a ghost. The fact that she’s here telling me about some kind of relentless, judgmental voice she couldn’t ignore when she lurks around everywhere and says mean things to
me
all the time is just pretty much hilarious. “No, you didn’t. Get off me!”

Lillian skips back and clasps her arms over her chest to shield herself, but she’s smiling. “Aw, you’re so cute when you’re mad.”

The way she says it is warm and cozy, like I am not significant enough to be mad. Not significant enough to be anything but this scared little bunny hiding in the rubber tree just because Nick Andelman walked by.

Suddenly, I’m on my feet. “I said, leave me alone!”

We stand facing each other and I clench my hands into fists, squeezing the hairbrush. I want to throw it at her. The distance between us seems to hum, and my room is so quiet and still that for a second, I’m not even sure if I’m breathing.

“Hannah.” The voice is low, coming from just outside my window. “Hey, is everything okay?”

I turn around and almost scream.

Finny Boone is crouched in the cottonwood outside my window, blurry through the screen. The clearest, most visible part of him is his white undershirt, and the second is his Clorox-blond hair. Everything else is in shadows.

I move toward him cautiously, still holding the hairbrush in front of me. “Why are you here?”

He’s resting his palm against the screen, steadying himself. I have a sudden idea that if he overbalances and falls through the window into my room, Decker will kill him. The shape of his mangled hand is intriguing. The fingers that are left look weirdly delicate. It was clearly a nice hand, before whatever happened.

“You were shouting,” he says, and I have the same hot rush of panic I always feel when there’s a chance someone’s just caught me talking to Lillian. Like I’ve just made a huge, unforgivable mistake and someone is seeing straight into my head.

I move closer, still clutching the hairbrush. “Why are you here, though, at my house?”

He lets out his breath like he’s been holding it. “I, uh, I brought your bracelet back. It’s on the steps. You should bring it in, though. So no one takes it.”