How the subsequent days were filled was unmemorable, as are most blocks of time lost to the past. The five girls moved through their paradoxically formative yet forgettable days with apathy, continuing their various crusades and confusions, completing perfunctory tasks and spending too much time on the telephone, the tapestry of dull colors occasionally catching a brief scintillation of interest. November and December pushed on, some bits transitioning into the hard drive of the brain, moments of awakening and regret, secret revelation coupled with the shame ingrained into so many like them: Joanna allowing a boy to put his hands up under her shirt, even though she didn't particularly like him but didn't know how to say no; Helen sneaking one of Danielle's mother's romance novels (with her friend's advice to start at page forty-two) and one evening sitting on her bed, guiltily allowing her fingers license, discovering the overwhelming gratification of which her body was capable; Danielle suffering distressing curiosity when her stepfather suggested she avail herself of his collection of porn, so long as she didn't tell her mother; and Anjulie, sitting on the lap of a seventeen-year-old, getting high for the first time when her sister threw a secret party during one of their parents' business trips. These and some other more potent definitive moments worked themselves into the fabric of the adolescents' recollections, so that many years later, looking back upon that turbulent time, they'd forever recall those certain moments that, in retrospect, would cause them to wonder, Why those?

But what most of all lingered forever in their consciousness was the night that the five were reduced to four.

It'd been cold, bitter cold. Sometime in mid-January. They'd been spending the night at one another's houses for years (except for Anjulie, who'd been initiated into a few sleepovers since arriving in October); there was nothing strange about any of it, not really. Perhaps tensions had been simmering in the hidden corridors of their muscle and bone. Perhaps most of them knew that somehow, some way, one of them seemed unlike the others, felt as if she were growing apart, was managing to progress gracefully, unscathed by resentment or self-loathing, unconcerned about fitting in or falling out, uninhibited by narcissism or timidness.

Where shame and iniquity thrive, like desires like. One wants no reminders of one's failings. The mere presence of Emily was to each, no matter how unsound, validation of their flaws.

They were in the dimly lit living room somewhere around midnight, Emily's parents and younger sister having long ago gone to bed. There'd been embellished games of M.A.S.H. and a forgettable movie, a relatively indecent game of self-made charades ("putting a condom on your boyfriend" and "giving a blowjob" mixed in with the likes of "walking your dog" and "baking a cake"), dirty French translations and lots and lots of whispery, giggly gossip. But now the hour was late, and the surroundings were subdued, and a tiredness all the girls were trying to ignore was seeping into each of them. The time for ghostly games had arrived.

"Who's got a good ghost story?" Danielle asked, lying on her back across the arms of a large leather chair in her oversized Nickelodeon T-shirt. "Something really scary."

"I've got the one about the babysitter—"

"No, Helen. We've all heard that one." Danielle sat up and looked at her peers. "Joanna! If you fall asleep first, you'll regret it."

Joanna bolted upright. She'd been drifting on the sofa. Why was she always the one to pass out before the others? She was tired of ending up with makeup all over her face or toothpaste in her hair. Danielle could be ruthless to killjoys.

With a huff, Danielle narrowed her eyes at Joanna. "Your stories never make any sense," she said, then shifted to Emily. "And you're the least scary person ever."

"Then why don't you tell one?" Emily laughed. "You never tell the story!"

"That's because I don't know any ghost stories! I'm so bad at all that creative shit. Anjulie, do you have a French story? You probably have something good."

Though the French thing had, for her, staled long ago, Anjulie continued to play along. Somehow, the others considered her a certain type of special for it, though the only thing she could do was speak bits and pieces of the language. It wasn't as if Anjulie herself were foreign. "All right," she said after a moment of thought during which inspiration had struck. "I think I maybe have something. But it's not really a story. It's one of those legend things, like Bloody Mary. You know?"

"A French one?" Joanna asked, attempting to shake some alertness back into her body.

No, idiot, Anjulie wanted to say. Something I just made up because I'm weird enough to do it. "Yeah. It's . . ." Her thoughts moved fiercely. "We have to turn off all the lights."

"All the lights?" Helen echoed. "How will we see?"

"Open the curtain," Anjulie explained, beginning to grow excited. "We'll use moonlight. And . . . we need a candle, but don't light it yet. Just bring it with a lighter. And we need a bowl of . . . something red. Traditionally," (there was no "traditionally" in Anjulie's extemporaneous production), "it's wine, but it'll work if you have Koolaid or juice or something. And the last thing is, we have to sit around this table and hold hands." Emily and Joanna and Danielle went into the kitchen to forage for Anjulie's requirements. Only Helen stayed behind, unmoving on the floor, her features betraying her nerves.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she whispered while the others were out of the room. "Occult stuff can bring in evil spirits."

Briefly considering mocking Helen, Anjulie instead chose to be kind. "I am totally making this up," she leaned in and replied. "None of it's real."

Helen's upper body relaxed a bit but not entirely as she methodically went about and turned off the floor lamp and table lamps, casting the room in obscurity.

Within a few minutes, the five of them sat in a circle in the dark, a plastic bowl of Hawaiian Punch and a 19 oz. buttercream Yankee Candle on the coffee table in their midst. As unbefitting as the trappings might have been, the late hour coupled with the gloom tipped the mood toward solemnity, and what was in actuality ridiculous took on a heavy sense of gravity. Helen and Joanna were quietly murmuring between thmselves; Emily and Danielle were stifling giggles while trying to spook one another. Anjulie, ready to take on her role, hushed them all and rose on her knees above them, the moonlight giving her the pale face, dark holes-of-eyes, and black hair of a reanimated cadaver. She took the lighter and lit the candle, and the uber-sweet smell of it, the warming glow, did something to sequin the atmosphere with mysticism.

Recalling the nursery rhyme she'd told the girls some while back, Anjulie began. "This is the legend of Kitty," she made up. "It goes back many generations in France, to the Middle Ages, probably, but no one really knows where it came from."

"It's a cat?" Joanna interrupted.

"Shh!" Anjulie and Danielle both ordered, and Joanna shrank into herself.

"No," Anjulie continued. "It's just called Kitty. No one really knows what it is. But the legend says that Kitty's always there, just waiting to be called. And if you call Kitty, it might help you do dark magic. That's why people would try to wake it up. But waking up Kitty is dangerous, because it's really unpredictable, and sometimes it likes to play tricks and jokes, but its sense of humor is really demented. And also . . ." Her mind ran through the nursery rhyme—five little mice. "Kitty requires a payment for being called." She felt the others' eyes on her, the anticipation of her words. "Five lives," she said. "Kitty claims five souls for itself when it wakes up, and if you're the person that calls Kitty, you never know if you might . . . be . . . one!"

"I don't want to do it!" Helen cried, suddenly. She scooted back but Danielle grabbed her arm and pulled her back to the table. "Stop being such a baby!" she snarled, somewhat ruining the mood.

"Okay, okay," Emily soothed, her features outlined in the candle's glow. "Everything's fine. It's just a game. Nothing's going to actually happen, all right, Helen? It's just for fun. But if you don't want to do it, you can go sit on the couch."

One glance at the icy Danielle convinced Helen to reluctantly stay put, and Anjulie, trying to reclaim the ambience, continued.

"You all ready? I'll say the words, and then you have to follow the things I say to do, ok?" She watched as the others nodded. "All right. Here we go. Everybody hold hands." The girls listened, and then Anjulie took a deep breath to add weight to what she was about to make up. Her mind had easily puzzled out the simple words she next slowly intoned: "Toc, toc, toc, un, deux, trois. Minou viens jouer avec moi." She paused, allowing the chant to take effect. The others sat dead still. Anjulie picked up the bowl of punch, lifted it to her lips, and took a sip. Then she passed it to her left, giving the instruction to take turns drinking. Her next spur-of-the-moment demand involved each of them plucking a hair and holding it over the candle's flame. Then Anjulie again said the French words, having the girls repeat them, and blew out the candle.

The immediate darkness fooled their eyes into seeing shadows that weren't there, dipped the room into an austere stillness which Danielle would have broken with a snort had not, at that moment, three definite resonant knocks sounded at the back door.

They were seated in the living room, which was adjacent to the eat-in kitchen. That was where the back door was. It led out onto a patio in a fenced backyard.

Five pairs of wide eyes stared at one another in the darkness. A deathly silence engulfed them; they were stone gargoyles in the wake of what they were uncertain they'd even heard. Only when another trio of crystal-clear knocks followed did the girls begin to move and make noise.

"Get your parents!" Helen hissed.

Emily shook her head of yellow hair. "No! They'll be so angry we were doing this kind of stuff. They—it's nothing. It's a tree or something."

Three more knocks, these a little more insistent.

Joanna squealed and buried herself into her sleeping bag.

"Oh my God, stop being such fucking losers!" Danielle said, getting to her feet and sounding far bolder than any of the others felt. "It's Tony and Mark and Joe! I told them we were all here tonight. You know they're just trying to prank us. Those assholes. I'll show them." In the darkness, Danielle stood and headed into the black-hole-of-a-kitchen.

None of the others spoke as they listened to Danielle's bare feet faintly pad across the tiles; they waited in breathless anxiety for the door to open, cringed when it did, then sat confused and trembling when no further noise came to them. There were no shouts to indicate the boys were there, but there were also no blood-curdling screams. So, gaining courage, Anjulie hopped up and hurried to the kitchen, where she saw Danielle standing, silhouetted against the bitter cold, moony night in the rectangle of the open door.

Pausing mid-way through the room, Anjulie was aware of an odd static energy crackling through her. Her breath clouded as the January air rushed in. "Danielle?" she tried once, twice . . . but it was only when she touched her friend's shoulder that Danielle spun about so quickly she drew a shriek from Anjulie.

"Oh my God!" Danielle gushed as the others ran into the kitchen. "I got you so bad!"

It took Anjulie a moment to realize that Danielle had tricked her, was laughing at her. But the relief she felt overruled her annoyance.

"Who was there?" Emily gasped, closing and re-locking the back door.

"No one!" Danielle managed through her teasing. "They must've run off. Ding dong ditching us in the middle of the night—we'll have to think of a way to get them back."

"Wh-what did we all say, Anjulie?" Helen asked, reminding them of the terror they'd felt mere moments earlier. "What were the words?"

Anjulie exhaled a huge, exasperated breath. "'Knock, knock, knock, one, two, three. Kitty come and play with me.' I totally made it up. I promise. It's harmless."

While that seemed to offer some reassurance as the five of them huddled back into the living room, snuggled into their blankets and pillows, and eventually tried to find sleep, there was no denying that what followed that night was far from harmless.

And Emily was gone by morning.

END OF PART II