The longer she lay on her mattress in the darkness of her new room, the more convinced she was that it wasn’t her, it was her surroundings. There was popping coming from the insides of the walls, the kind of noise that comes with settling and temperature shifts. Normal noises, she thought. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old house sagging on its weary bones. Except the shadows that lurked in the corners of Vee’s room seemed darker than they should have been.
She tried to keep her eyes shut, to ignore the strange feeling and forget the girl who kept flitting in and out of her memory like a dying lightbulb. The stringy blond hair. The way her eyes had rolled into the back of her head. Her pale blue skin. Her gaping mouth and the blood that soaked into her sweater, so dark it looked more black than red. And then the disembodied baby’s cry just before the scream that had come from Vee’s throat.
The reflection’s eyes had rolled forward, snapped into their rightful position, and they had stared. The fact that their gazes had met was what scared Vee the most. She’d seen something in that girl’s face that almost seemed as though the stranger in the mirror knew who Vee was.
As though the leering boy in the orchard had announced Vee’s presence and the girl had now come around to say hello.
Hours passed. She tried to sleep. But the bumps and creaks that emanated from the surrounding walls kept her eyes wide open. That, and the glass of water she’d gulped down along with her final dose of Tylenol was coming back to haunt her.
She hated the fact that she was so scared; it made her feel like a fraud. All those times she’d talked herself up to Tim, how casually she had said oh, I’m totally in when he had suggested they explore abandoned buildings during the summer—before she knew she’d be spending that time thousands of miles away. The way she had laughed along with Tim and Heidi when they had watched the Paranormal Activity movies, as though the stuff that was happening on screen wouldn’t have fazed her at all. Back then, she was sure she had the guts to deal with shadows and unexplained noises. She had convinced herself that if she was ever lucky enough to see a ghost, the last thing she would do was run. But all that bravado had been a lie. Because talking about fear was a lot different than actually facing it. The unknown was exciting until it was time to step into the void.
She needed to pee. Her back teeth were starting to swim. With no choice but to take a deep breath and roll onto her side, she let her gaze dart across the night shadows that swallowed up her room. She searched the darkness for the mirror girl she was sure would be there somewhere, watching her sleep.
Her heart sputtered up her throat when her gaze fell on the closet door. She gaped at it, sure that it was slowly swinging inward.
The receding thump of her headache flared up with the hiccup of her pulse. A flash of pain lit up her head from the inside out, and she pinched her eyes shut against the discomfort. When she reopened them, the closet door was closed.
It was always closed, she thought. You’re acting like an idiot, totally freaking out.
Pressing her lips into a tight line, she hummed deep in her throat to keep her nerves in check while reluctantly rising to her feet. She wobbled toward her bedroom door—which she had left open but, it seemed, her father had shut. She slogged toward it, her mouth sour with remnants of acetaminophen and pain.
When she stepped into the hall, she found the house silent—nothing but the patter of rain against the roof. Glancing over the upstairs hallway banister, she could see the lights in her father’s study were off. There was no soft tapping of her dad’s laptop keys, no quiet music he’d play when the mood hit him just right.
Her bladder clenched. She turned away from the living room one story below. But when she reached for the knob of the bathroom door, her fingers tingled with tiny needle pricks. She snatched her hand away. Don’t go in there, the sensation warned. There’s something wrong with that place.
Shooting a glance down the hall, she considered sneaking into her dad’s room and using the bathroom there. But he was a light sleeper. She was bound to wake him. And what will you tell him when he asks why you’re using his bathroom instead of your own? How will you explain it away when he sees that you’re scared? If her dad saw the fear in her eyes, he’d demand to know what was up. She’d have to tell him about the girl, and while that would possibly win her a one-way ticket back to Queens as soon as her mom returned from her business trip, she wasn’t sure she was ready to leave just yet. If she sucked up her fear, she’d have something no other girl could touch. A damn good story about how she’d spent the summer in a haunted house was bound to win Tim’s heart.
She turned away from the blue bathroom and slunk down the stairs, nearly tumbling down the top few risers when her foot skidded across the carpeted edge. Catching herself on the banister, she shot a wide-eyed glance up to her father’s door. She waited for him to come rushing into the hall. What the hell is going on? Why are you up? What are you doing? When he didn’t appear in the doorway, she exhaled a quiet laugh. Of course he wasn’t coming.
She continued to descend the steps, more carefully this time. Her head felt fuzzy, as though soft tufts of grass had sprouted along the inner curve of her skull. She imagined blood pooling along the wrinkles of her brain, coating it like a bucket of red paint. Because while she felt silly being so scared, perhaps what she’d seen in the bathroom was a symptom of something bigger. Maybe there really had been no girl.
“No, she was there,” Vee whispered to herself. She was there, just as clear as the boy in the orchard, as unmistakable as the scream Vee had heard in the trees.