Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

Chapter 4

After lunch, I walked back to my locker with Candace, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the past hour. Of our small group of friends, I was probably the least close to Candace, but our lockers were along the same wall in the same hallway, so from time to time I found myself walking alongside her, usually with little to say.

"I've been meaning to tell you something," she said in a low whisper as soon as the others had walked down the hall in the other direction toward their own lockers to exchange books for the afternoon session of classes, "about Friday. There was something weird with the story Violet told about me when we were playing that game."

I stopped walking for a second, so startled by the abrupt way in which Candace had gone from cheerfully making plans for Friday night in the cafeteria to instantaneously serious when she brought up Olivia's party, returning me to the state of discomfort I had experienced on Friday in Olivia's basement. Maybe I hadn't been the only one who'd felt a little too scared to have fun during the game.

"Yeah?" I asked, not wanting to volunteer my own unpleasant memory of the party.

"Violet said during all that stuff about being in the water that I went out into the waves far away from my brothers. I don't have any brothers. I have two half-brothers from my dad's second marriage, but I'm pretty sure I've never mentioned anything about Dylan and Jordan to Violet. I mean, they live in Green Bay. I barely ever see them."

I frowned. I had known Candace since kindergarten and I didn't even know that her dad had two sons with his new wife. Both of Candace's parents had remarried and I only knew about her younger half-sister, Julia, who was in eighth grade.

"That is weird," I agreed, wondering if I should confide in Candace about my own astonishment surrounding Violet's knowledge of the red Prius that had been parked in the Richmonds' driveway the night of the birthday party.

Just then, I looked up to see Trey approaching us. My involuntary reaction was to smile and raise my hand to wave, but a nanosecond after we made eye contact, he looked away and walked past me as if I didn't even exist. I blushed, humiliated. I had definitely overestimated whatever we had shared in his back yard, and I was ashamed at the force with which my heart was beating inside my ribcage. Fortunately Candace hadn't noticed my momentary distraction; her eyes followed Trey down the hall.

"Nice," she whispered to me conspiratorially with a wicked grin.

We reached my locker and Candace lingered while I twisted my combination open, her books pressed against her chest. Her focus returned to Violet and the events of Friday night. "Do you think Violet's been like, spying on us? I even went through my Facebook account to see if maybe she saw pictures of them, but I don't have any up there."

Just like that, I realized that Candace's concerns about Violet were rooted in regular everyday life, not in the realm of supernatural powers, as mine were. It was ridiculous of me to think that maybe Violet had ESP or some kind of special communication with ghosts.

"Maybe someone just told her," I suggested. "Like Olivia."

Candace frowned, unconvinced. I could understand why. Olivia didn't concern herself with the details of anyone else's life. She existed in her own little perfect world, blissfully ignorant of the trivialities of everyone else's plights. "I don't know. I just think it's weird."

Violet was in my first class after lunch, U.S. History, taught by Mr. Dean. Mr. Dean had been a teacher at Weeping Willow High School for so long that on the first day of junior year, he had squinted closely at my name and asked if I was any relation to Krista Brady, my cousin who had graduated ten years earlier.