The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (2 page)

BOOK: The Haunting of Sunshine Girl
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My Chuck Taylors crunch over the gravel driveway as I make my way to the front door. Mom and Oscar are already inside. It might be August, but that doesn't stop Ridgemont from being cold, colder than Austin is at Christmastime, and unfortunately I'm still wearing the ripped-up denim shorts I put on before we left our motel in Boise, Idaho, this morning. The brightly colored mustang on Mom's old high school T-shirt—my favorite shirt these days—looks out of place in the fog, the opposite of camouflage.

I hover in the doorway. “Mom!” I shout. No answer. Just the squeak of the screen door on its hinges while I hold it open, then the whistle of a gust of wind from behind me like it's trying to push me inside.

“Mom!” I repeat. Finally I shout her full name: “Katherine Marie Griffith!” She hates when I call her by her first name, though she claims it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm adopted. We've never made a big deal about it—never had some big talk where my mother, like, revealed the news to me. The truth is, I don't remember a time when I didn't know. There are moments when I wonder who my birth parents are and why they gave me up, but even Mom doesn't know those details. She was a pediatric nurse at the hospital in Austin where I was found—left swaddled in the emergency room: no parents, no paperwork, no nothing—and once she got her hands on me, she says, she knew she was never going to let me go. We were meant for each other, she'd say, simple as that.

Mom and I giggle when strangers comment on how much we look alike, because we don't. We just
act
alike—sometimes too much alike. But unlike me, Mom is a redhead with light skin, almost-gray eyes, pale skin, and freckles. I have long brown hair
that's usually trapped somewhere in between wavy and frizzy. And my eyes are green, not gray like Mom's. Ashley says they look like cat's eyes. You know how some people's eyes change color depending on the light or what they're wearing? Not mine. They're always the same milky, light kind of green. And even in the dark my pupils never get big. I've literally never seen anyone with eyes that look like mine. They're so unusual that I'm pretty sure anyone whose eyes matched mine would probably be related to me. Like for real related, by blood.

Anyway, adopted or not, I'm closer to my mom than any other sixteen-year-old I've ever met. Or, at least, I'm pretty sure we're closer than any of the mother-daughter combos I saw walking around the mall in Austin. If they weren't fighting, they were barely talking. Ashley used to pick her phone up and pretend to be deep in conversation every time her mother walked into the room rather than answer when her mom asked about her day. I mean, how many sixteen-year-olds do you know who could spend three days straight locked up in a car with their mother driving across the country? Though I've only been sixteen for a week now.

From somewhere inside the house comes the sound of a toilet flushing. “Where did you think I was, Sunshine?” Mom asks, returning to the front door.

“My name never sounded that ironic in Texas,” I mumble, shivering as I step over the threshold. The door slams shut behind me and I jump.

“It's just the wind, sweetie.” Mom's got a twinkle in her eye like she's trying not to laugh at me.

“I think it's actually colder inside the house than it is outside.” I don't think I've ever felt a cold like this before, not even when
I was nine years old and Mom took me skiing in Colorado, where the temperature was literally below freezing.
This
cold is something else entirely. It's snaking underneath my clothes and covering my skin in goose bumps. It feels kind of like when you have a fever and you're shivering despite the fact that your temperature is rising and you're bundled up under layers of covers in bed. The kind of cold that's damp, as though the whole house needs to be run through the dryer. It's . . . all right, fine, I'll admit it: it's
creepy.
I say it out loud and Mom laughs.

“Is that your new favorite word?” she asks.

“No,” I say softly. I can't remember ever having said it much before. But then I never felt like this before.

“No one has lived in the house in months. It's just been empty too long. Once we get all of our stuff in here, it'll feel more homey. It'll be
great
, I promise.”

But our stuff—the moving truck full of our furniture and my books and knickknacks and clothes—won't get here until tomorrow. I guess the movers who were driving it from Texas weren't in as much of a hurry to get here as we were. Mom and I ascend the creaky staircase and briefly explore the second floor—two bedrooms and one bathroom with a malfunctioning lock on the door (“I'll ask the landlord to fix it,” Mom promises)—but it's hard to imagine how our stuff will look in our rooms when most of our belongings are still a hundred miles away. I go into the room that will be mine and shudder at the bright pink wallpaper and carpet. I am not a pink kind of girl. I decide that I will put my bed in the corner to the right of the door and my desk beside the window across from it. I walk to the narrow window and look out, but the branches of a pine tree in our backyard almost entirely block my view of the street. Even if the sun were
shining, I doubt much light would get in. Mom's room faces the front yard, but branches mostly block her windows too.

We blow up our queen-size air mattress on the hardwood floor of the living room and spread blankets over it so the cat doesn't accidentally pop it with his claws when he climbs all over it, which of course he immediately does. We drive into town for pizza, the sound of pine needles hitting our roof in the car chorusing right along with the sound of raindrops. Main Street is mostly empty, nothing like the crowds in downtown Austin.

“It's quaint,” Mom says hopefully, pointing out the charming nonchain pharmacy and diner, and I nod, forcing myself to smile. On our way home, the pizza cooling in the backseat, we drive past the hospital, and Mom pulls into the parking lot. She hasn't been here since they flew her in for a job interview a couple of months ago. The hospital is at least half the size of the one where she worked back in Austin. She unclicks her seat belt but doesn't move to get out of the car, so neither do I.

“Guess they don't have as many sick people in Ridgemont as they did back home,” I say, gesturing at the nearly empty parking lot.

“It's a small town,” Mom shrugs, but she looks wary. She's going to have a lot more responsibility in her new job than she did in Texas, and even though she hasn't said so, I know she's nervous.

“Don't worry. You're going to knock their socks off.”

Mom looks at me and smiles. “That's my Sunshine.” She reaches across the car to squeeze my shoulder then puts her seat belt back on and restarts the engine. She's turning the car around when the sound of sirens fills the air. An ambulance
comes barreling into the parking lot, speeding toward the emergency entrance.

I guess there are sick people in Ridgemont after all.

We eat our pizza in our pajamas, sitting on the air mattress like we're having a slumber party.

“This pizza is better than anything they have in Austin,” Mom says as we argue over the last piece.

“Who knew?” I say, ripping the remaining crust from her hands and giggling. “Ridgemont, Washington, pizza capital of the USA.”

“See? I knew you'd like it here.”

“I like the
pizza.
That's not the same thing as liking the
place
.”

“Maybe loving the pizza is just a hop, skip, and jump away from loving the place,” Mom counters hopefully. I sigh. The truth is, we've barely been here three hours, and it's really too soon to have an opinion one way or the other.

“Smells funny in here,” I say, wrinkling my nose.

“It smells like pizza in here,” Mom says, gesturing to the crust-filled box between us.

I shake my head. It smells like something else, a musty, moldy sort of smell, like someone left the air conditioning on too long. Not that you need AC here.

“Anyway, once we have all our stuff moved in, this house is going to smell like us,” Mom promises, but I'm not so sure the damp mildew smell will go away so easily.

We read before bed. Mom's tackling the latest thriller to grace the best-seller list—she's a sucker for those kinds of books, even though I make fun of her for it—and I'm reading
Pride and Prejudice
for what has to be the fifteenth time. It's impossible to
feel homesick with the familiar weight of the book in my hands. I like all the words no one uses anymore:
flutter
and
perturbation
and
enquiries.
Sometimes I find myself talking like one of the Bennett sisters. Super dorky, I know.

“Do you think maybe I was Jane Austen in a former life?” I ask sleepily when we finally turn off the lights. It must be after midnight. Oscar has weaseled his way in between us on the bed, but I don't mind because even though he takes up half the square footage of the mattress, I'm a lot warmer with him curled up beside me.

“Of course not,” Mom says. She doesn't believe in things like past lives. She believes in logic and medicine, things that can be proven with organic chemistry.

“Okay, but I mean if you
did
believe in that kind of thing—”

“Which I don't—”

“Okay, but if you
did
—”

“If I did,
then
would I also believe that you'd been Jane Austen in a former life?”

“Exactly.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?” I scoff, feigning offense.

I can feel Mom shrug on her side of the bed like the answer is really obvious. “Statistics. Mathematically the chances are infinitesimal.”

“You're applying statistics to my hypothetical past life?”

“Numbers don't lie, Sunshine State.” Mom calls me that sometimes, even though we've never even been to Florida, the actual Sunshine State. I'm pretty sure Washington is as far as you can get from Florida without actually leaving the contiguous United States. But Mom's always said that as long as she's with me, she's in a state of perpetual sunshine. She says she felt that way from
the instant she picked me up when I was a just a newborn baby. That's why she named me Sunshine in the first place.

“Good night, sweetie,” she says into the darkness.

“Good night.”

The sound wakes me up. I'm not sure what time it is when I hear it. Hear
them.
Footsteps. Coming from the floor above us. I wasn't sleeping all that soundly anyway. Usually when I fall asleep after reading
Pride and Prejudice
I dream about Mr. Darcy, but tonight I was having really weird dreams. I saw a little girl crying in the corner of a bathroom, but no matter what I said or did, her tears kept flowing. I tried to put my arms around her, but she was always out of reach, even when I was right beside her.

“What the freak?” I whisper, rolling over and reaching for Oscar. Dogs' hearing is supposed to be really good, so if he doesn't hear anything, then this is definitely just my imagination, right? But Oscar isn't on the bed anymore, and it's pitch dark in here, so I can't see where he is. He can't be that far away, though, because I can smell the wet-dog-smell of his fur, which hasn't fully dried since we got here. Suddenly the footsteps stop.

“Mom,” I whisper, gently shaking her shoulder. “Mom, did you hear that?”

“Hmmm?” she answers, her voice thick with sleep. She was really tired after having driven so far. I should let her sleep. But then the footsteps start again.

Oh gosh, maybe this house doesn't feel creepy because it's been empty for months. Maybe it feels creepy because a crazed murderer has been squatting on the floor above us, waiting for
some unsuspecting family to move in so he could strangle them in their sleep. My heart is pounding and I take deep breaths, trying to slow it. But it just gets faster.

The footsteps don't actually sound like a crazed murderer's, though. They sound light, kind of playful—kind of like a child is skipping through the rooms above us.

“Mom,” I repeat, more urgently this time. Maybe there really is a kid up there. Maybe he or she got lost or ran away from home.

“What is it?” Mom asks sleepily.

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

“Hear what?”

“Those footsteps.”

“All I hear is your voice keeping me awake,” she says, but I can tell she's smiling. “It's probably just the cat,” she adds, rolling over and putting her arms around me. “Go back to sleep. I promise this place won't seem so creepy in the morning.” She emphasizes the word
creepy
like it's some kind of joke.

“It's not funny,” I protest, but Mom's breathing has resumed its steady rhythm—she's already fallen back to sleep. “It's not funny,” I repeat, whispering the words into the darkness.

The last thing I expect is an answer, but almost immediately after I speak, I hear it, clearly and softly as though someone is whispering in my ear. Not footsteps this time but a child's laugh: a giggle, light and clear as crystal, traveling through the darkness.

I squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself to think about anything else: Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane and Mr. Bingley, even Lydia and Mr. Wickham. I try to picture them dancing at the Netherfield ball (even though I know Mr.
Wickham wasn't actually there that night), but instead, all I can see is the little girl from my dream, her dark dress tattered with age, playing hopscotch on the floor above me. And again I hear laughter. A child's laugh has never sounded quite so scary.

BOOK: The Haunting of Sunshine Girl
10.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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