The Haunting of Sunshine Girl (5 page)

Here. In
this
room. “Is there a darkroom someplace else in the school?” I ask, playing with my backpack's straps, knowing the film is in the front pocket, waiting to be developed. Surely the school has a darkroom
somewhere,
right?

“I'm sorry, dear,” she says again, shaking her head. She really does look sorry. “Ridgemont High doesn't have a darkroom.”

For a second I remain frozen in place. How am I going to develop my film? Was all that time I spent taking pictures just a waste? I ball my hands into fists and tuck them into my sleeves. It's almost as cold in here as it is at home.

Other students walk past me, and I realize I'm standing in the middle of the room. I force my feet to walk me toward the long table near the center of the room and sink onto one of the stools. There are kids scattered on the stools throughout the classroom; they're all chattering happily, catching up after a summer spent apart or just gossiping about which teacher they got for Algebra II and which jock got the best car for his birthday. Clearly none of them cares about the fact that their school
doesn't offer a photography class, and none of them have a clue that I'm sitting here feeling devastated about it. There's plenty of room at the table, so no one sits on either side of me. Finally the bell rings, signaling that third period has officially begun, and the woman with the sad eyes walks to the front of the classroom and announces, “I am your visual arts teacher, Victoria Wilde. Let's make some art, shall we?”

Everyone makes a run for the supply closet. Wait, that's it?
Let's make some art, shall we?
No further direction, no actual
assignment?
Just go to the supply closet, grab your medium of choice, and get started?

Ms. Wilde glances at me. She seems to be waiting to see what I'm going to do before she disappears back into the alcove where her desk sits. Her dark eyes have a sort of laser focus that makes me feel her gaze like actual fingerprints on my skin. I bet she's the kind of person who can see out the back of her head too.

I look around. At my old school visual arts was kind of serious business. I mean, we weren't, like budding Picassos and Ansel Adamses, but at least we took our work seriously. But the drawings on these walls are little more than rough sketches; the collages appear to have no rhyme or reason. The lights in the classroom are dim, not nearly bright enough to allow students to really focus on their paintings and sketches. At Ridgemont High visual arts is, apparently, a total blow-off class.

“Everything okay?” a deep voice asks. I spin around on my stool and discover a tall, slim boy standing over me.

“Am I in your way?” I ask, scooting my stool farther under the table and managing to bang my knee against the table in the process. “Ow!”

“You okay?”

“Just klutzy,” I nod, rubbing my knee. Later I'll discover a big purple bruise blossoming beneath my clothes. “I could trip over my own two feet,” I add. The boy cocks his head to the side almost exactly the same way Oscar does when he's trying to understand the gibberish that comes out of my mouth. “It's something my mom says.”

The boy smiles, then makes his way around the table and plops down on the stool across from mine. He adjusts his brown leather jacket. It doesn't really fit him, and it looks old, the leather cracked and faded, just the kind of thing I always hoped I'd come across at Goodwill back in Austin. But no one would ever give anything that nice away. He lays the supplies he's taken from the closet out in front of him: a glue stick, pipe cleaners, construction paper. Like this is a kindergarten class. I narrow my eyes to squint at the door to the supply closet, wishing it would morph into a darkroom.

“I know, right?” the boy acknowledges my look. “I could be in AP English right now, but my mom insisted I take this class. She thinks I need to ‘broaden my horizons,' you know?” He has straight dirty-blond hair parted in the middle, and I notice that his eyes are an amber sort of brown. He's cute in a nerdy way, like he popped out of an eighties movie or something. If Ashley were here, she'd be kicking me under the table, trying to get me to flirt with him. But flirting has never come as easily to me as it does to her.

“My old school had photography class,” I say, reaching into my backpack and bringing out the two rolls of film. What did I think would happen anyway? That I'd develop this film and see something that I wasn't able to see in real life? That I'd run home and hold the photos up for my mother to see and then
she'd turn from a cynic into a true believer? I wrap my hands around the film canisters and shiver. They're cold—like blocks of ice, not plain old pieces of plastic.

I pull my camera from my bag. I'd been planning on showing it to my new photography teacher so she'd know just how serious I was.

“Wow,” the boy says. “Is that a Nikon F5?”

I realize that I feel strangely, wonderfully warm. I look around: if I'm warm, then everyone else in this room must be sweltering. But my new classmates look completely normal: none of the boys are wiping sweat from their brows; none of the girls are pulling their hair back into ponytails. Whatever this is, no one else is feeling it. It's my own private heat wave. For the first time in two weeks I can literally feel the color rising to my cheeks. But I don't feel hot—I just feel
comfortable.

“Yeah,” I answer, smiling. “It was my birthday present.”

“Awesome.” He grins, revealing teeth that are just slightly crooked. He pulls a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses from his pocket and puts them on, though they quickly slide down his nose so it looks like he's wearing bifocals. “I'm Nolan, by the way,” he adds as he bends over his construction paper, running his glue stick up and down the length of the pipe cleaners, bending them into strange, squiggly shapes until it looks kind of like they're laughing. “Nolan Foster.”

Feeling ever warmer, I lift my hair off my shoulders and coil it into a messy knot. “I'm Sunshine.”

I unwrap my blue scarf and head for the supply closet, trying to ignore the way Ms. Wilde stares at me when I come back with an armful of pipe cleaners.

CHAPTER FOUR

Playtime

“Is he cute?”

I can hear Ashley's smile through the phone. I roll my eyes.

“Whether or not he's cute isn't the point.”

Ashley sighs. “I know, I know. The point is that being near him made you warm, just like being in that creepy house makes you cold, blah blah blah.” Ashley sounds even more tired of hearing me talk about creepiness than Mom does. I imagine her twirling her blond hair dismissively. I had sent her four text messages before she wrote back today. And she didn't call me until it was nearly midnight in Austin. While we're on the phone I change into my pajamas—puppy-printed, but no feet—and climb into bed. “Does it at least smell any better?” she asks.

I wrinkle my nose. “Nope. Still reeks of mildew.”

“Gross.”

“I know.”

“You'd think it would smell like you and Kat by now.”

“You'd think,” I agree.

“But back to the boy. Maybe you were warm being near him because he was, you know,
hot
.”

“What?”

“There's a reason they call it hot, Sunshine! Wait till I tell you how hot I felt sitting next to Cory Cooper in his car yesterday.”

Cory Cooper is the boy Ashley spent most of sophomore year crushing on, and I know she's waiting for me to squeal with delight—
Cory Cooper took you for a ride in his car yesterday?!
But I can't squeal because I just noticed that Dr. Hoo isn't on the shelf he was on when I left for school this morning. Instead, he's on the window sill, his face turned outward, as though he's surveying the yard below.

“Ashley . . .” I say softly, whispering as though I'm worried that whatever it was that moved Dr. Hoo might hear me.

“Sunshine . . .” she replies, trying to whisper back, but giggling instead.

I want to giggle with her. Really, I do. But I can't stop staring at my stuffed owl.

No one has been home today. Mom left for work before I left for school, and she hasn't come home yet. She texted me about an hour ago to tell me not to wait up.

Mom loves her new job. And anyway, these long hours are temporary. Just until she gets things up and running, just until her bosses see how valuable and amazing she is.

“Seriously,” Ashley says now, “Sunshine, what's going on?”

“I'm not sure,” I say, getting out of bed. I reach for Dr. Hoo and put him back on his shelf, and that's when I notice that beneath him, my unicorns have been moved; someone didn't like the way I arranged them by color and instead rearranged them by size, the way they used to be in Austin.

I pull my hand away as though I've touched something hot.

Okay: worst-case scenario, a ghost snuck into my room and moved my stuff around when I was at school. Best-case scenario . . . a robber came into the house, didn't steal anything, but just moved stuff around? Or the dog developed opposable thumbs and stood on his hind legs to move things around? Or I moved Dr. Hoo and the unicorns myself and don't remember doing it because I'm losing my mind?

Wait, which is the best-case scenario here?

I reach into my backpack and remove the two film canisters, place them side by side on my desk. “Hey Ash,” I say hopefully, “if I send you some film, can you take it to Max's to get developed?”

Max's is a camera store in downtown Austin. In the summertime, when I couldn't access the school's darkroom, the employees there let me use theirs.

“Why? There must be a studio in Ridgemont you can use.”

I shake my head. “No,” I say firmly, “it has to be Max's.” They're the only people I'd trust to develop the film. “It's important.”

“Why, are there ghosts on the film?”

When I don't answer, Ashley bursts out laughing. “Wait a minute, Sunshine. Do you actually think you have photographic evidence of the paranormal? Dude, we'll sell it to the highest bidder. We'll make a fortune!”

“This isn't a joke, Ashley,” I say.

“Listen, I know you must be homesick—”

“What?” I ask, spinning around defensively like maybe I think Ashley is behind me and I need to face her head on. Of course, because it's me and I'm a klutz, I lose my balance in the
process, but I manage to stay more or less upright. “Why do you think that?”

“Oh, I don't know, maybe because you're convinced your house is haunted and you can't even be bothered to notice whether the boy sitting next to you in art class is
cute?
If you're trying to convince Kat to move back to Austin, you'll probably have better luck with something a little more practical.” Ashley knows as well as I do that my mom prefers science to fairy tales.

“I'm not trying to get Mom to move back to Austin,” I say.

“Then what exactly are you trying to do, Sunshine?” Ashley has never sounded so impatient with me, not even when she tried to get me to buy a normal white T-shirt at the Gap and I bought a vintage blouse from a thrift shop instead, not when I dragged her to an antique store in search of a first edition of
Pride and Prejudice,
not even when I tricked her into coming with me to a screening of
Roman Holiday
by telling her I actually wanted to see the latest new release at the theater.

The temperature in my pink room drops about twenty degrees. I'm literally shivering, and when I exhale, I can see my breath. I turn around to face my desk again; the film canisters I'd set side by side are now stacked one on top of the other. My heart starts pounding so hard I can hear its beat in my ears.

Okay, that definitely isn't a robber, and it's not the pets, and I guess technically it could be me losing my mind, but I really, really,
really
don't think so.

“Just promise me you'll bring the film to Max's,” I beg Ashley finally.

“Fine,” she says, but I can tell she's pouting.

“And tell me all about Cory Cooper,” I say, exhaling. Living in Creep Central is no excuse to be a bad friend. Though maybe it is an excuse to at least get out of this room. I hop down
the stairs and greet Oscar and Lex in the kitchen, get some ice cream out of the freezer, set it on the kitchen counter, and concentrate on the sound of Ashley's voice telling me that Cory put his hand on her thigh when he drove her home from school today.

“He hasn't kissed me yet,” Ashley says. “But I know it's coming. You know how you can just tell sometimes?”

I lick ice cream off my spoon like a little kid with a lollipop. “No,” I say, sighing dramatically, “I really don't.”

“Aw, poor Sunshine,” Ashley giggles. “Wait, what are you eating?”

“Ice cream.”

“What flavor?”

“Vanilla.”

“Boring.”

“Classic,” I counter, grinning.

“Did you at least dress it up with some syrup and whipped cream?”