Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

Epilogue

I set my bags down on my bed in my bedroom, suddenly very aware of how exhausted I was. My back ached, my neck felt sore, and the anxiety of the last few weeks of being dropped into a loud, noisy dorm full of girls who had ended up there because they had either gotten pregnant, become addicted to drugs, beaten up their foster brothers and sisters, or run away from home repeatedly, evanesced from my muscles. I had never felt threatened or in danger at Dearborn, mostly because Trey had been coaching me through the experience. "Don't try to make friends," he had advised me during our first brief phone call. "Keep your head down. Act dumb if other kids try to befriend you. Don't do anything to stand out."

The effort that went into remembering not to smile, suppressing my arm from rising in class when I knew answers, and generally trying to remain invisible—even right down to avoiding second servings of food items that appeared to be popular in the residence cafeteria—was extraordinarily tiring. But finally I was home, in my own safe bedroom, sitting down on my familiar bedspread and laying back. I spread out, stretching my arms wide like an eagle, remembering with a hot pang of desire the last time Trey had crept through my window to spend the night in my bed. It had been the night before we'd toppled Violet, the night before that locket sank to the bottom of White Ridge Lake. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to picture it there, that dull gold trinket, dark and cold, wedged into the slick silt bottom of the lake, far beneath the silvery white bellies of musky resting in the deeper depths of the lake for the winter. It comforted me to think of it there, wherever it had landed, far from Violet's reach.

I may have nodded off only for a few seconds, but was brought back to reality in a heartbeat when I suddenly heard unexpected music. It was a mechanical, slightly off-tune version of "It's a Small World After All," one that was so chillingly familiar, I could hardly believe I was hearing it. I sat straight up and looked at the shelf above my bed, where the ceramic music box I'd been given as a child was inexplicably back in its place. I had boxed up all of my music boxes in the fall to prevent Olivia's spirit from tinkering with them, and the box had been on the top shelf of my closet. My jaw fell open, watching the music box slowly spin and crank out its little tune, sounding more broken and melancholy than ever.

"Mom?" I called out, sounding very alarmed. "Did you put all of my music boxes back up on the shelf?"

My mom appeared in my doorway within seconds, as if she had been waiting down the hall for me to call her name. "Yes," she admitted. "Your room looked so empty and desolate while you were gone.  I put some of your childhood things back out to make it seem a little more like you weren't so far away. I hope you don't mind."

I shook my head, not wanting her to sense the danger in my room that I already sensed. "Not at all," I assured her. "Hey, what if we ordered a pizza from Federico's for delivery?"

"Great idea," she agreed. "Spinach and mushrooms?"

Once she was down the hall again, I crawled over the top of my bed to silence the music box, my heart beating as if it were a brick being thrown against the front of my rib cage repeatedly. I had to contact Trey, but there was no way to reach him until the morning when he got home to Willow. The tiny brown hairs on my forearms stood on edge, and I could feel a prickling along the back of my neck. There was no denying it. We had messed up, big-time. Olivia was back to make sure we knew it.

The locket wasn't the object tying the spirit to Violet. It had been a decoy, and I saw it so plainly sitting back down on my bed that I wanted to punch my hand through my window in rage. In my head, I recalled the day in November when we had taken the locket away from Violet, how she had allowed concerned parents to attend to her in the parking lot as Trey and I sped off in his mom's car. If the locket had been the real object, she would have followed us. She would have chased us all the way to White Ridge Lake. She would have tried to run us right off the road. I inhaled deeply, trying to calm down and collect my thoughts. Trey and I had been so relieved to dispose of the locket and be free from the curse of the game, it had never occurred to us that we had failed. But of course we had failed; the locket was, looking back now, so obvious. And now we were both in situations where it would be infinitely more difficult for us to continue investigating Violet.

All these weeks, Mischa had still been at risk and hadn't known it. Who knew how much time she had left? Who knew how much more power Violet had amassed in the month she'd been free from my interruptions? Who knew if she'd played the game again, predicting the deaths of Tracy, Melissa, and the new crop of popular girls who had taken over at the high school?

But if it hadn't been the locket, what could it have been? What other object could have tied Violet to her grandmother's dark spirit? I rose and walked to my window, hearing the whistle and squeal of heat coming from the steam radiator beneath the sill. Across the way, I could see lights on at Trey's house, and his younger brother setting the table for dinner. I wondered how the kittens that Trey had left behind in his brother's care were doing. I wondered if Olivia's resurfacing meant that I'd never again in my life enjoy a peaceful night under the stars, caring for kittens and hoping for a kiss from Trey.

And then my eyes refocused as my warm breath left a smudge of steam on my window. In that puff of steam, I saw a line drawn with perhaps a fingertip. I stood back, and for a few minutes watched as wet heat from the radiator filled the lower half of my window with more steam. There was an unmistakable image drawn on the window, possibly intended for me to see in a moment exactly like this one, when steam on the glass revealed it to me.

The image drawn was that of a crude outline of a house, with a simple box shape, sloppily drawn door and chimney jutting out of its slanted roof. I sank to my knees in the terrible realization of just how wrong Trey and I had been.

It had never been the locket connecting Violet to her grandmother's spirit. It was the house, that magnificent house on the outskirts of town.

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If you loved this book and can't get enough, read the sequel, Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble here on Wattpad. And be sure to check out the Light as a Feather TV show on Hulu this fall!

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