17
I walk ahead as Chaseand Mila linger behind to tie up the boat. By the time I reach the lake house, I can see faint candlelight flickering in the living room, Kennedy’s room, and the one tiny circular window in the attic. Someone’s definitely been up there. Inside, a thick blanket of silence hangs over the house, and a panicky feeling flutters through me, the feeling of déjà vu, of crushing loneliness, of being abandoned over and over and over again. Kennedy has lit a candle on the living room table next to where I was sleeping, alongside a glass of water with another note readingFor your pills. I stuff it into my pocket, annoyed.
I flick the light switch, but the light doesn’t come on. Every hair on my body stands on end. I’ve had a recurring nightmare since childhood where I wake up and reach for the light next to my bed, and it doesn’t turn on. I go to the door, and the light switch on the wall is broken. I feel my way down the hall to the bathroom, and those lights are out too. And just as it’s dawning on me that all the lights in the world are out, I wake up. It shouldn’t be that scary. Blackouts happen all the time, especially during heat waves. They happen frequently at the lake house. It’s not the content of the dream, it’s an unspoken implication, a subtext. It’s not thewhatof it all, it’s thewhy.
The dread that saturates that dream flows through me now. I try every light in the living room, then the kitchen, flinging open the refrigerator in desperation. There’s something creepy about a dark refrigerator that’s hard to explain. I slowly close the door on the gradually expiring milk and eggs, and a light wisp of condensation escapes like a gasp of breath. I turn back to the living room. There’s a circuit breaker in the cellar. I’ll find Ryan faster if I can get the lights back on.
I can make out the door by the candlelight, near the base of the staircase. As I draw near, I notice the cellar door is slightly ajar, and for a split second I reconsider my circuit-breaker plan. The cellar has always creeped me out. We found a dead rabbit down there once—not a mouse, a rabbit. I don’t know how it got down there. It was our first summer at the lake house all together, the summer after third grade. We’d had a class pet rabbit that year, Miss Palindrome. We all took care of her, we all loved her, and we all cried at the end of the year when we had to ceremonially hand her over to the next class.
We found the rabbit in the cellar just a week later. She had white fur with caramel-and-coffee-colored spots, just like our pet. She was about the same size, and I thought their faces looked similar. I don’t think she’d been dead for very long. It wasn’t like roadkill, with a stretched-out, gaunt, tortured, almost petrified look, but her throat had been torn. Chase stood staring, stuttering, while Ryan held Emily’s hand, forcing her up the stairs, shouting for Mr. Hartford. But I was stuck, my eyes locked on the rabbit I was convinced was Miss Palindrome, who must have somehow found us, and been punished by some divine force for running away. Of course, itcouldn’t have been Miss Palindrome, and she didn’t run away. But a child’s imagination can make impossible things feel very, very real.
I reach for the door, but before my fingertips touch the knob, it begins to move. Slowly, so slowly that in my head I feel time grinding to a halt and beginning to move in the wrong direction, like a record player going backward, twisting your favorite song into a dark and terrifying hymn. It moves. I watch helplessly as it drifts away from me with a long, sighing creak, like a little doll’s scream, and clicks shut. Every single hair on my body rises. The brass lock above the antique doorknob slowly turns, sealing the door shut. I stare at it for a moment, frozen, a strange numbness in my legs, my lips glued together. My brain begins to buzz like it’s swarming with flies, and I get another shutter flash of Miss Palindrome. I force my wooden legs to bend and hinge in their sockets, and I reach for the bolt and turn it. For a moment, I rest my hand on the doorknob. The metal is warm under my skin, like someone’s been holding it for a long time. I shake the thought out of my head. Absurd. People don’t stand around holding doorknobs.
I take a deep breath and try to yank the door open. It’s stuck. I flip the bolt back and forth a few times, but the door won’t move, even when I throw all of my weight behind it. It’s odd. It was ajar just moments ago, and it drifted shut softly. It shouldn’t be jammed like this. I knock on it, feeling silly. “Hello?” I call through the door. No one answers. I put my ear to the wood and rap again. “Hello?” One more tap, this time with my knee. “Kennedy?” I make a skittering noise on the door with my fingernails. “Miss Palindrome?” I whisper, just to be an asshole.
There’s an enormous bang against the door from the other side, like someone is throwing their entire body against it. I scream and fall away from it, slamming against the living room table and sending the Truth or Dare game sprawling onto the floor, and the candle on top of it.
I smack my palm down on it in a panic to stop the flare-up, but regret it the instant the room is cloaked in darkness. A watery rinse of moonlight filters in through the windows, but it doesn’t reach the stairs. The cellar has gone quiet again. I make a dash for the staircase and feel my way up, scrambling on all fours. The rest of the house is chillingly silent. Kennedy must have heard me scream, which means I won’t be alone for long. I pause at the top of the stairs and consider calling for her. I don’t want her following me up to the attic, though. I hear Chase and Mila stumble into the house, something glass shatters on the floor, and Mila curses. Perfect—that should buy me time to find Ryan first.
I tiptoe past the guest room and then stop short. The door to Kennedy’s room is wide open. It catches me off guard. It’s been closed all day. The balcony doors are flung open, and a slight breeze flutters the gauzy curtains, princess pink, just like the old ones. Exquisite care has been taken to carve the fairy-tale scenes in the walls anew. Sleeping Beauty with her spinning wheel, Rumpelstiltskin dancing around his fire, the Snow Queen with her shattered mirror. Kennedy has placed a candle here, too, on the dresser. I shut the door silently behind me. The entrance to the attic is through a trapdoor in Kennedy’s closet. I open it and climb up the ladder.
“Ryan?” I call softly. No one answers.
As always, the attic is about ten thousand degrees and smells like sawdust. I get a suffocating sense of claustrophobia just poking my head into it. Ryan isn’t up here, but someone was. At the center of the unfinished, cavernous space is another lit candle and an open book. I step lightly across the floor. When someone walks in the attic, it sounds like elephants stampeding below. I bend over the candle curiously and pick up the book. It’s an old library book, but all of the pages have been scribbled out in black ink. On the inside jacket is Emily’s name. Under it is a short series of notes in tiny handwriting, hers and mine. We must have passed it back and forth in class years ago. I hold the candle up and squint to make out the words.
No one will believe you.(Emily’s hand)
They might.(Mine)
She gets away with everything. They all do. Don’t bother.
You don’t know them like I do.
Yes I do. That’s your problem, Chelsea. You think you know everyone better than me. They’re my friends too. And they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
I stare down at the words, bile gathering in my mouth. I haven’t thought about the incident the notes are referring to in ages. It almost tore our group apart. It was just after Kennedy broke my heart for the first time, the summer after ninth grade. After, I guess, I inadvertently broke Ryan’s. Kennedy and I werebarely speaking, and Ryan was avoiding me. Emily was the one everyone trusted. And suddenly things got really ugly. According to Emily, Kennedy’s mother discovered a family heirloom missing at the lake house. Either she or Kennedy suggested that I “accidentally put it in my bag and took it home.” Obviously I didn’t do it.
But the words were spoken, and you can’t un-ring a bell. People already thought I was a freak. Now they also thought I was a criminal.
I stood my ground, showed up at Kennedy’s door, and politely but firmly told her mother that I was very sorry to hear about her stolen goods, but I didn’t have them. She had no idea what I was talking about. Either Kennedy lied, or Emily made it up to turn me against Kennedy and earn her spot as the leader of our group. Ryan took Emily’s side, Chase took Kennedy’s, and I was stuck in the middle, alone. It took six months for us to even start speaking again.
I tear the page out of the book, crumple it up, and stuff it into my pocket. If Mila is right and it was Ryan up here, why would he leave this? Is it a message to me to remind me whose side I’m supposed to be on?
I flip through until a flash of white catches my eye. I thumb back, looking for the page that hasn’t been inked out. It’s a stick-figure drawing. I skip a few pages ahead and find another, then a couple more. It slowly dawns on me that someone has created a flip-book—that if I flip the pages quickly, it will look like animation. I go back to the beginning and slowly fan the pages through my fingers. Before my eyes, five stick figures line up on a dock. A lightning bolt flashes above, and four noosesdrop. Four of the figures hang and one figure remains. Another lightning bolt, and then a sudden rush of air blows out both of my candles as the attic door is slammed shut, leaving me in total darkness.