The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (19 page)

“What about their protector?” I ask. I prefer the sound of a protector to a mentor, anyway. Some protection would come in handy right about now. “Does it say anything about when a protector shows up?”

“There's even less in here about protectors.” Nolan shoves the papers across the table. “And you'd think now would be the time the
protector
at least would show up,” he adds, echoing my thoughts. “You could use some protection, with your mom in danger.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Caught in a Web

The sound of keys rattling
in the front door makes both of us jump.

“Mom is never home this early.” I push my chair from the table and start stacking all of Nolan's papers on top of each other so quickly that it's a miracle I don't give myself a paper cut.

I'm feeling something that I've never, ever felt before: nervous that my mother is about to walk into the room.

“Hi Mom!” I say a bit too loudly. If Nolan notices my false cheer, he keeps it to himself. Maybe he's just curious to finally get a look at my mother in real life, this person he's heard so much about, this person he's watched hurt herself over and over again in the video on my phone, but has never actually met.

“Hi,” Mom answers absently, drifting through the kitchen, her eyes on a patient file in her hand. She doesn't look up at us. I don't think she even realizes that another person is in the room with us.

“Mom, this is my . . .” I hesitate, searching for the right thing to call Nolan. He's not my boyfriend, obviously. But he feels like more than just a regular friend too. My goodness, could I be more of a
girl
right now? Seriously, with everything that's going on, you'd think I wouldn't exactly have time to worry about semantics. “This is Nolan,” I say finally. “We're in the same art class.”

Nolan stands up, his chair squeaking against the tile. “Hello, Mrs. Griffith,” he says, sticking out his hand for her to shake. He's so adorably polite that I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning.

But Mom doesn't take his hand. Instead, she says, “It's Ms.”

“I'm sorry?” Nolan blinks.

“
Mizzzz
Griffith,” she replies, exaggerating the word. “Not Mrs.”

Mom has never asked any of my friends to call her Miss or Ms. or Mrs. anything. She's always just been Kat.

“Nolan and I were just studying—”

“For art class?” Mom interrupts, her voice thick with mockery. She drops her file onto the kitchen counter with a
smack.
“Have to study to make the best collage?”

I open my mouth to say
of course not,
but before I can get the words out, Nolan asks, “How did you know we were working on collages in class?”

Mom shrugs as though she couldn't care less. “Sunshine must have mentioned it.”

I turn to Nolan and shake my head from side to side. I haven't mentioned it. She hasn't even asked about school in weeks. In fact, this might be the most we've talked since the night she cut herself. I glance around the kitchen: at the counter where she
bled, at the butcher block that holds our knives, including the one she hurt herself with.

“So what
are
you studying?” Mom sighs finally, stepping toward the table.

“Nothing,” I say quickly. Too quickly. Mom raises her eyebrows, suddenly interested.

“I certainly hope you weren't studying nothing. I know what happens when you study
nothing
.”

I blush pinker than I've blushed in my entire life, horrified that Mom is implying that Nolan and I were . . . blah, I can't even think it! If only she knew how it felt when Nolan got too close.

“Nolan was just leaving—”

“No, I wasn't,” he says firmly. He shoots me a look that says,
I'm not leaving you alone like this.

I try to shoot one back that says,
Don't be ridiculous, she's my mother,
but I'm pretty sure it's unconvincing. How could I convince him when I can't even convince myself? I glance at the wound on my left hand, a reminder that my mother did kind of sort of stab me. I mean, we don't know for sure that it wasn't an accident. I didn't manage to record that part.

“Maybe you should leave, Nolan,” Mom says, a strange sort of brightness in her voice. “Sunshine and I never really get to spend any time together these days. I've been working such long hours, you see.”

“I understand, ma'am, but Sunshine and I have a lot more reading to get through,” he gestures to the stacks of papers on the kitchen table.

“I'm sure that can wait. Schoolwork isn't nearly as important as family time.” Mom crosses the room and brushes the papers
Nolan worked so hard to gather onto the floor. I crouch down immediately to retrieve them, crawling through her shadow to get to them. A shadow that's much, much bigger than it should be, as if she's twice as tall as she used to be.

“Mom?” I ask softly. “Are you okay?”

“Get up off the floor, Sunshine,” she says harshly.

“Let me just get these together for Nolan so he can take them home with him.” The pages are moist in my hands, as though they landed in a puddle on the ground instead of on our dry kitchen floor. Nolan crouches down beside me, grabbing as many of the pages as he can.

“Suit yourself,” Mom practically spits. She spins on her heel and leaves the room, her enormous shadow trailing behind her.

“She's not usually like that,” I say quickly.

“No need to explain,” Nolan answers.

A few of the papers landed clear across the kitchen and I crawl toward the kitchen sink to retrieve them.

And then I scream.

“What is it?” Nolan scrambles across the tile floor, but I'm frozen with fear, unable to answer him. I just point. On top of one of Nolan's pages—perhaps right on top of the word
luiseach
—is the biggest daddy longlegs spider I've ever seen.

Nolan carefully slides a paper underneath the spider and opens the window above the sink, releasing it back into the wild. I stay perfectly still all the while, staring at the place on the page where the enormous spider was seconds ago: now all that remains is a large rust-colored damp spot.

Nolan closes the window quickly and crouches on the floor beside me.

“Spiders, blood—you sure are a wimpy luiseach.” Nolan tries to grin, but I shake my head, too scared to argue about what I
might or might not be. I know he's trying to get me to laugh, but I'm not sure anything will ever be funny to me again.

But it's funny to someone. Because I swear I can hear the sound of my mother laughing in the other room.

You okay?
Nolan texts a few hours later. I'm in my room with the lights off and the door locked.

Fine,
I answer, though we both know it's a lie.

What happened after I left?

Nothing,
I reply.
Mom stayed in her room. Guess all that family-time stuff was just talk.

She was trying to get rid of me,
Nolan answers.

Why?

I don't know.

I tell him I'm going to sleep and put my phone down, but I doubt I'll get much sleep tonight. I close my eyes and listen for the sound of my mother moving around in the next room. I imagine her getting ready for bed, brushing her teeth, pulling her hair into a ponytail. But the thought of dozens of spiders crawling down from the ceiling quickly overtakes those images.

I open my eyes and turn on the light. No spiders in sight.

“Do you know why this is happening to her?” I say out loud, even though I can't believe I'm asking a ghost for help. “I'll play with you forever if you just tell me what's going on.” I gesture to the checkerboard beside my bed: last night she beat me, and this morning I woke up to a freshly arranged board, all set for another game. “I thought we were getting to be friends,” I say sadly.

Somehow, much to my surprise, I fall asleep. Instead of nightmares about spiders, I dream about the little girl in the tattered
dress, the one I dreamt of on our first night here. Tonight her dress is dripping with water, as though she just went for a swim. She's running down a long hallway, her tiny feet leaving wet footprints on the carpet beneath them, gesturing for me to follow her. I sprint after her, but no matter how hard I try, I can't catch up to her. She's always one step ahead.

But she always glances back to make sure I'm still there.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Rift

At school the next day
Nolan grabs me before first period. “I went back to my grandfather's last night. I'm coming over after school again.”

“I don't know if that's such a good idea—”

“If your mom freaks out on us again, we'll go someplace else,” Nolan cuts me off. “But I want to do this at your place.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see how your ghost reacts.” He raises his eyebrows.

By 3:45 we're back at my kitchen table, and Nolan is rifling through stacks of paper once more. “So I saw something when I was looking online the other night . . .” he begins, searching. “In one of these articles. I didn't get a chance to read it carefully—”

“What do you mean?” I ask, mock incredulous. “Did you actually
skim
something instead of poring over it carefully?”

Nolan grins. “It was three in the morning by the time I figured out the whole Google haunted house and guardian combination. I fell asleep before I could read everything I found.”

“Wow,” I say, genuinely touched. “You stayed up till three in the morning for me? I mean,” I add hastily, gesturing at the papers strewn across the table, “for all this?” Nolan doesn't answer right away, so I keep talking, rambling the way I did when we first met. I'd hoped I'd gotten over those Nolan-specific nerves, but apparently not. “But what were you saying? There was something else, right? In one of these articles? I could help you find it.” I reach for the papers on the table in front of Nolan and start flipping through them, like I'll be able to find what he's looking for without knowing what it is in the first place.

Nolan furrows his brow. “You okay?”

“I'm fine. I mean . . .” I take a deep breath. “This is all just a lot to take in.” And it is. I don't just mean the luiseach stuff. I slide the pages back across the table, careful not to brush my hands against his. “Maybe you should handle this part. I don't even know what you're looking for.”

Nolan nods, flipping through the papers. “I saw something about luiseach birth rates in here somewhere.”

The house seems to shudder, like we're caught in our own private wind tunnel.

“Golly,” I breathe, planting my hands firmly on the table like I think I can steady the whole house that way.

“Wow,” Nolan says, looking at the ceiling above us. He slides his glasses up over his forehead. A sudden breeze makes the overhead light swing back and forth like a pendulum.

I try to ignore the way I'm shivering. “Maybe the house
doesn't want me to come up with some kind of crack about luiseach birth rates.”

“Maybe luiseach just aren't getting it on often enough,” Nolan suggests. If Ashley were here, she'd make a naughty joke, but all I can do is blush. Anyway, like Mom, Ashley would be no help if she were actually here. She'd roll her eyes at this whole conversation, insisting that finding articles on the Internet hardly amounts to proof.
You can find almost anything on the Internet—photos of the Loch Ness monster, of mermaids, of unicorns,
she'd say.
That doesn't mean they're real.

I swallow a sigh. I know that when I text Ashley later, I won't mention any of this to her.

Maybe I won't text her later after all.

The house stills, and Lex leaps up on top of Nolan's papers.

“Scat,” I say to my cat, but he lies down and starts licking his paws. Nolan slides his stack out from under him.

“Here it is!” he shouts. He pats Lex. “Thanks for the help, buddy.” Lex jumps off the table, like it's his way of saying:
You're welcome. My work here is done.

“It says that luiseach live longer than the average human. But I couldn't find anything about how often they're born, their childhoods, that kind of thing. So last night I drove to my grandparents' again and searched through Gramps's desk.”

“You drove all the way to your grandmother's?” I ask.

Nolan shrugs. “It's just a couple of hours. And this was too important to wait for.” He produces an enormous file folder, yellowed with age. “Gramps had stacks and stacks of articles.” He picks up a paper and reads aloud: “
There are whispers that it's been decades, perhaps centuries since the last luiseach was born
.”

“Your grandfather knew about luiseach?” I ask incredulously.