Vesper (6 page)

'Don't be a freak! You don't say things like that, Emily. Something is really wrong with you right now that you apparently can't see, so I'm taking you home so you can go to bed and wake up and be yourself again.” I opened my mouth to protest. Without even looking at me, Megan held up a finger in my face and said, "Don't argue.” Suddenly the car felt horribly cramped. It was a cage of rusted steel surrounding me, hemming me in and stinking of cracked pleather and exhaust and ancient nacho cheese crusted into the backseat carpet. It didn't help that the warden of this little prison was Megan at her snippiest. I glared at the side of her pasty, long, giant-nosed face, and I hated her. I wanted to lunge at her and throw her to the ground, tower above her and make her realize that I wasn't some mousy little girl she could boss around.

Instead, glaring out the window, I got an idea.

"That's cool," I said. "You're right. This isn't me." I wrapped my fingers around the ancient window7 crank and forced the old gears to turn, lowering the window. Cool air rushed through the widening crack, catching my hair.

"Whatever," Megan said. "Terrance is a jerk, but we'll get him back some other way. Once you're no longer tripping on glue fumes or whatever is going on here.”

"Oh, totally.” By now the window was completely open. I stuck my head out and parted my lips to suck in a breath of fresh air. I opened my mouth and let my tongue loll out.

And then, while Megan ignored me to glower out at the dark street, I swiftly unlatched my seat belt, reached out of the window, and grabbed onto the ancient bike rack bolted to the top of Little Rusty. I hefted myself outside so that my heels straddled the door, then slanted back as far as my arms would let me.

I clung to the bike rack as the car raced down the dark suburban street at thirty-five miles per hour. Parked cars and trees whizzed by me, and the wind felt like it was trying to toss me to the hard asphalt that zipped past beneath, but I had no fear. I was in control here. The night, the wind, the car—I was their master.

I tilted my head back and let out a loud, howling laugh.

Megan's panicked voice screeched out of the car. "Emily! What are you doing?"

She never sounded panicked. She was scared out of her mind, and I loved it.

The car swerved as Megan momentarily lost control. I rode it like a surfer riding a wave and whooped in excitement. We were rushing by the forested park not far from my house. The car started to slow, so I tensed my legs, waited for the right moment—and leaped.

The car came to a sudden stop, brakes squealing like the poor little pig whose house wasn't strong enough to keep the big bad wolf from blowing it down. The driver's-side door creaked open and Megan jumped out, running back down the street, her terrified expression painted red by the car's taillights. She screamed my name, "Emily! EMILY!"

Hanging from a tree branch fifteen feet off the ground, I laughed down at her.

"Scared you, didn't I?"

Megan slowly came back to stand beneath me on the dark, empty road.

Her car grunted and grumbled behind her like an addled old man. She gawked up at me, trying to say something.

Gazing down at her from the branch like it was nothing, I started to say something—about how much of a bitch she was for lying to me, and that she got what she deserved—when a sensation washed over me. A feeling that something I couldn't see was hovering right in front of me, looking at me with eyes I couldn't see. Just like in the darkened backyard I'd used as a shortcut.

And then, something inside me shifted. I very suddenly realized that I was freezing, that everything had gone blurry, and that I was hanging what felt like a million miles above the road after jumping out of a moving car.

And with that realization came fear, a dread that coated me, because absolutely nothing made sense.

"Oh... what?" I whispered.

My body was much too heavy to hold anymore and my fingers gave, the bark of the thick branch rubbing my palms raw as I screeched and fell. I landed half against Megan and half against the asphalt, the heel on my left boot snapping and sending me sprawling. Correction: the heel on
Dawns
boot snapping. That wasn't good.

No, nothing was good. Everything I'd just done, everything I'd said and every action I'd made, came back to me in an overwhelming rush. Shivering, I pushed myself to my feet and peered over at Megan. Even in the bloodred light from the brake lights and with my vision as blurry as it always is without glasses, I could the see the mixture of anger and confusion and hurt on her face.

"I—I don't know what—" Wrapping my arms around my chest, I whispered, "I need to go home”

"Yeah," she said, putting her arm around me to support me as we hobbled back to her car. "Yeah, you really do”

The rest of the night was more or less a blur-literally, because I didn't have my glasses. Megan drove me home and made a point of walking me to my front door. I managed to get past my dad at his computer—he only noticed me out of the corner of his eye and greeted me as "Dawn"—before crawling up the stairs, going into my room, and hiding under my covers.

The entire time, my skin prickled as though every hair on my body had stood on end and was trying to leap free, and my fingernails and my toenails throbbed with the echoing pain you get the day after slamming your finger in a door. A massive headache beat at my temples. Add all that sudden and reasonless pain to my stinging palms and it's a wonder I ever managed to fall asleep, but I did, like

I´d just spent the day running a marathon and even the aching joints that came with that couldn't keep my exhausted body from unconsciousness.

I woke up the next morning before my alarm went off. For a few bleary, amazing moments, I lay there and thought,
What a weird dream.

That was when my palms began to itch. I held them up and saw little bits of skin hanging free, and spots of dried blood scabbing over.

I kicked the covers off—I was still wearing the clothes I´d taken from Dawn's closet, sans boots. Fumbling for my glasses, I slipped them on my face—which felt sticky and cold with day-old makeup. Groaning, I flipped myself onto my stomach and pushed myself up. My pillow looked as wretched as I felt, streaked red and purple and black from the makeup I´d neglected to wash off the night before.

"Crap," I muttered.

Toppling out of bed, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The gold shirt was wrinkled and lopsided, my hair was tangled and ratted, my face clownish.

I caught sight of my boobs just sort of hanging there like a desperate D-list celebrity's version of cleavage. Immediately I hugged my chest to hide it.

Memories of sidling up to Lucas and Jared the night before seeped into my sleep-addled brain. I had never let anyone see me so exposed, not since puberty brought the changes that made me lumpy and curvy, something to hide under baggy clothes. But all that work to go unnoticed went away last night—I'd gone out half-naked and flaunted all my flaws.

What did the fair-haired duo that were Bubonic Teutonics think? I remembered Jared's cocky smile. What if that smile wasn't him liking what he saw—what if he was laughing at me? And the way I'd talked to him! Good girls didn't act like that!
I
didn't act like that.

I turned away from the mirror, my stomach roiling. Was I sick? I once saw an episode of one of those hospital dramas where a girl got some spore in her brain and started coming on to one of the doctors, driven into insane lust by what amounted to a trivial bit of dust caught in her neurons. Had something like that happened?

Except—what about leaping out of my bedroom window? Bounding down a street after a car, jumping over fences? Climbing onto a frickin'
moving
car?
How was it even possible for me, Emily Webb of all people, to do things like that without ending up a bloody splat on the concrete? I am the least graceful person I know. When I was seven and in dance class, I always played a tree or a bush or something in the recitals—stationary objects. And even then, half the time I managed to trip over my own feet while the parents in the audience tried not to laugh and the other little dancers glared at me for ruining their big night.

But that wasn't the worst thing. Even while I stood there, shaking and feeling like I was about to vomit all over my bedspread, part of me still liked the way I'd felt the night before.

Some guy on the street had been a jerk, and I'd gotten back at him. I saw a cute guy I wanted to talk to, and I talked to him (even though it was in a kind of shitty way), and the world didn't end. I leaped around like a video game character, like some sort of superhero, bounding over fences and racing down streets without breaking a sweat.

And all of it had felt so, so good. I'd felt confident for the first time in my life. Felt like I could do anything I wanted.

It was like, the older I got and the more I saw the other kids around me grow up, the more I harbored the fantasy of one day being a secret, perfect version of me. I'd always wished that I could be self-assured and pretty and superathletic like the heroines I'd grown up idolizing: a Buffy, a Sydney Bristow, an Ellen Ripley.

But that wasn't supposed to become reality. It just didn't happen. None of this was possible. None of it.

It had all started the night Emily Cooke died. The same night she left her house and died was the same night all this began happening to me.

And then an idea popped into my head. A strange, totally crazy idea: What if the way I was behaving was how Emily Cooke
always
behaved? I didn't know much about her, other than that she was pretty and popular and had seemed confident in herself. Could it be that maybe Emily Cooke was ... in me, somehow? Like maybe her angry spirit was planning to use me to avenge her murder?

I had felt, after all, like some new Emily had possessed me. And there had been those two times the night before when I'd quite clearly felt as though some unseen presence was hovering right in front of me, observing me.

Maybe it was a bit of a leap. But she did die only a few streets away. We did share the same name. And, come on, I was flipping around like I'd become the newest member of Cirque du Soleil—maybe spirits weren't so far outside the realm of possibility.

And if the presence I felt
wasn't
Emily C.'s spirit, then I didn't know what that meant. Only that the thought chilled me even more than thinking a ghost was controlling me like a puppeteer.

I sat on the edge of my bed, cradling little stuffed Ein in my lap, my eyes aimed at the floor for what felt like hours, all these conflicting emotions and thoughts swirling inside my head as I tried to understand what was going on and what I should do about it.

My clock's glowing numbers told me that it was 6:14. I was up an hour before usual. I couldn't stay here, trapped in my room, thinking about the weirdness of last night. I had to get out, do something normal.

I showered and got dressed in jeans and my baggiest hoodie before anyone else in the house was up. I shoved Dawn's wrinkled clothes and her broken boots into my closet—they were her clubbing clothes, so I hoped she wouldn't miss them right away—then tore the makeup-stained case off my pillow and tossed it into the laundry bin in the hallway. Just as my dad and stepmom's alarm went off and I heard Dawn rousing in her bedroom, I flung my backpack over my shoulder, left the house, and began the long walk to school.

"Where were you this morning?"

I hunched over my tray of steaming, overcooked sirloin steak-like substance, pushing around serrated carrots with my little plastic spork.

Megan slammed her books on the lunch table beside me and sat down.

"Hey," I muttered, then shoved a bite of carrots into my mouth. I couldn't meet Megan's eyes, not after the way I'd acted, especially without knowing what had caused my massive mood swing so I could at least explain.

All around me the lunchroom hummed with noise. I looked up from my tray, away from Megan. Girls and guys sat at their tables, eating and laughing and chatting. Well, some of them, anyway. There were still tables of kids who seemed like they'd never smile again. A little memorial to Emily Cooke had been hastily put together on a corkboard near the cafeteria entrance, a picture of her stapled in the center and surrounded by poems and letters her friends had written. The cafeteria seemed emptier than usual. I guess some people had decided to stay home.

Fingers snapped in front of my face, and grudgingly I gave Megan my attention. Her brow was furrowed, her lips tight. I could hold her eyes for only a second before slumping back over.

"Seriously, Emily," she whispered. "You act all crazy last night, then you can barely speak and I have to take you home, and then you're not even there this morning when I come to pick you up. I didn't see you in Ms. Nguyen's class, and I thought something had happened, but I saw you in the hall...."

I´d skipped homeroom. I didn't want to have to sit next to Megan, face what had happened. Lot of good that had done me.

I dropped my spork in the mush of food, swallowing the lump that had risen into my throat. "Sorry, I'm really sorry," I said. "I really don't know what happened. I had, like ... a mood swing or something, I guess."

Megan let out a sharp laugh. "Mood swing? I've had mood swings, Em, but nothing like that. It's like your mood swung so hard it tossed you around the bar or something. I mean, you just about mounted the deputy in my garage last night."

I shoved my tray away. How I must have appeared last night to that stoner guy, let alone to Lucas and to Jared and to Megan ...

I suddenly wasn't hungry.

"I think I might be ... sick or something? I don't know. I didn't tell you, but... it happened before, sort of. The mood swing. Two nights ago. The night Emily Cooke died."

"The other Emily? You think ..."

I shrugged and hunched down, "I don't know. I mean, they say that she acted strange and then just left her house all of a sudden, dressed in pajamas, right? The same night I dressed all differently and almost did the same thing. Maybe ..." I hesitated, not sure if I should share my "possessed by Emily Cooke's angry ghost" theory. I decided against it and went with the more rational explanation. "I thought maybe there is something going around, like what happened to me is maybe what happened to Emily Cooke and that's why she died."