"So, what's the deal with your car?" I asked Trey the next morning when we met outside my house to walk to school together. "Is insurance going to cover the cost of a new one?"

"Why, are you already in the market to upgrade to a boyfriend who can drive you to school?"

I swatted him. "No! I'm just curious. I know how much you loved that car."

"Don't know. I don't think I'm going to be ready to get behind the wheel again for a long time."

We were in the middle of a long stretch of bad weather, with rain soaking our small town every morning. Trey insisted on holding an umbrella over my head as we walked. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be strange for him to ever drive a car again after the accident. He seemed distant and uninterested in talking about cars, so I quickly changed the subject, not wanting to put him in a bad mood.

"So, did James W. Listerman have anything interesting to say about Violet?" I asked.

"Well, she told you she could hear voices, right? That spirits tell her things? That condition, if she's not lying and she is really able to hear things, is called clairaudience."

"Like clairvoyance, only hearing instead of seeing."

"Exactly," Trey confirmed. "Obviously, not everyone has that kind of ability, so Listerman's writings suggest one of two possibilities. Either Violet first discovered that she had the power to hear communications from spirits because one particular spirit who had known her during their own life reached out to her, or because she's close to someone that another spirit wants to reach, and can't."

A sweeping sensation of coldness filled my body. I wasn't ready to tell Trey that I thought there might be a possibility that Jennie was behind some of this. But what he had said certainly fit with my theory that perhaps Jennie had reached out to Violet in an attempt to get to me.

"So I guess the question is: has anyone very close to Violet died during her own lifetime? Like a parent or a grandparent?" Trey asked.

I had no clue how to go about trying to casually figure that out.

During gym, Coach Stirling did me the disservice of selecting both me and Mischa as volleyball team captains, forcing us to select our classmates one by one until two teams had been formed for a gym class scrimmage. It provided us with an opportunity to suggest our imaginary rivalry. We glared at each other as we made our selections, and I enjoyed the look of pleased surprise that crossed Violet's face when I chose her first for my team. In a surprising twist of events, my team actually won both of the two matches we managed to squeeze into our fifty-minute gym class, which would have probably felt more meaningful if I cared at all about volleyball. The nasty expression on Mischa's face as we all headed back into the locker room made me have to remind myself that we were only pretending to fight.

At lunch time, Violet, Tracy, and I worked on our speeches for the election. We were expected to give one-minute speeches over the high school audio system on Friday during Homeroom after announcements. I had never really given much thought to public speaking, but now that it was suddenly and unavoidably in my future, it was pointless to deny that I was terrified. Violet wrote an outline for herself in her spiral notebook that was so concise and well-crafted that I wondered if she had secretly worked on it all weekend and was only pretending to write down her first draft alongside me and Tracy. Tracy's speech was going to be based on her optimism about event planning. She wanted to promise future dances, a junior class Halloween party, a junior class holiday party, and she seemed insistent on offering the idle promise of a junior class sleep-away ski weekend in Michigan.

"How are we going to have two class trips in one year?" I challenged her.

"Well, your speech could be about extra fundraising activities," Tracy smiled back at me viciously.

Perfect. Way to calm my nerves about having to give a public speech in three days, I thought grimly, by requiring me to get the entire junior class psyched up to spend even more time this winter selling junk that no one in town wants to buy.

There didn't seem like there was any natural way to begin my investigation into Violet's personal history. Only once did I look longingly over my shoulder at the table where Isaac and Matt were horsing around at my old table. Pete was forlornly eating French fries. Mischa and her sister pretended not to see me watching. I had already been informed that Candace would be eating lunch for the foreseeable future in the nurse's office.

"And our last announcement of the day before I turn things over to our Student Government candidates for senior class office is that the administration has decided to reschedule the Homecoming dance for next Friday, October fourth. The Ortonville Lodge has graciously offered to host the event. Tickets purchased for the originally scheduled dance will be honored, and tickets for the rescheduled event will be available for juniors and seniors to purchase in the cafeteria next week. The Homecoming game against the Red Devils in Kenosha has been rescheduled for Thursday, October third, and buses will be leaving the north parking lot immediately after eighth period for any students who wish to attend the away game."

The freshman girl who had just shyly read the announcements stepped away from the microphone for the school's audio system in the administrative office to make room for Amanda Portnoy, who was ready to begin her one-minute speech. Amanda would be running for senior Class President against Craig Babson, as she did very year. Even after three consecutive losses, Craig must have figured that the chance of losing a fourth time was worth the vindication he'd feel if he were to actually win during senior year and be able to include the position on his college applications. Amanda stepped up calmly to the microphone with her notes for her speech prepared on index cards.

My brain was still focused too closely on the mention of the Homecoming dance being rescheduled for me to pay any attention to what Amanda was saying. How could Principal Nylander possibly think that was a good idea so soon after Olivia's death? Would a Homecoming King and Queen be named? I tried to imagine Principal Nylander standing at a podium at the banquet hall at the Ortonville Lodge, the only resort hotel for miles, announcing the name of the Homecoming Queen. Only Olivia could have received enough votes to win. I thought of her bare grave, not even marked yet with a headstone. It just felt wrong to me that life would be moving on so rapidly without her. 

"First of all, I'd like to thank Principal Nylander for rescheduling the Homecoming dance. Celebrating life and our time together as classmates is the best way for us to recover from the tragedy that our school suffered two weeks ago. We should never lose sight of the fact that life is short, and every moment counts," Violet was saying into the microphone. She was so cool, so collected, that her adlibbed commentary about the Homecoming announcement seemed rehearsed. All of the senior candidates had delivered their speeches already and I'd barely heard a word. I would have to step up to the microphone in fewer than five minutes, and I could barely concentrate. The thought of having to actually put on the lavender dress that I'd bought for the dance—back when I was still dreaming of dancing with Henry under the disco ball—made me feel dizzy. Would I go to the dance with Trey? Would Mischa and Candace boycott it? Would Pete dare to attend?

"McKenna," Violet whispered.

It was my turn. Tracy stood next to the microphone having just finished her speech, and was forcing a smile at me. I clutched between my fingers the index cards that I had written out for myself the night before and stepped toward the microphone, avoiding Jason Arkadian's stare. I hadn't heard a word of what Violet had said after she so eloquently made reference to Olivia's death as if she'd had nothing to do with it. Michael and Tracy's speeches had rushed past my ears without a single phrase standing out to me. All that was left was for me to read my notes off my cards, and then for Jason to step up to the microphone and quite possibly obliterate me.

"Ahem," I began, trying to focus, but still distracted by the thought of a dance, "I'm McKenna Brady and I'm running for junior Class Treasurer. As Tracy mentioned, we have a lot of exciting ideas for this year, but to keep them affordable for everyone to participate, it will involve the need to raise money. Rather than focusing on fundraisers that require us to sell candy or cheese or other things to our neighbors and family members as we usually do, as part of my campaign platform I'm proposing that we offer a series of services to our community that will involve a small time commitment from all of us instead of an obligation to meet an individual financial goal."

My voice was shaking and I struggled to read my own handwriting on my note cards. I imagined how the entire school was reacting to my delivery at that point, nearly twelve minutes into Student Government speeches; I was certain that spitballs were being thrown and notes were being passed in every single classroom. But I had to press on, if not just to win the election, to avoid sounding like a complete fool.

"Some ideas that I have been considering are a lawn clean-up service during the fall, snow shoveling service during the winter, and a booth at Winnebago Days where we can offer our own talents to Willow to make some money for our class trip as well as gain experience to put on our college applications," I hesitated, knowing that I was going to hate myself for what I was about to say next, but figuring if Violet had gone there, I had to, too. "Everyone can agree that volunteering time after school or on a weekend sucks. But we deserve for our junior year to be a great time in our lives. Our class has experienced a great loss this year already, and we owe it to each other to commit to making the rest of this year as fun and memorable as we can. If you vote for me, I will work tirelessly to make sure that this year is one that we all remember fondly."

As I stepped away from the microphone, my hands were shaking. I could hear one of the office secretaries blowing her nose, and when I turned, I saw her dabbing at tears in the corner of her eyes with a tissue. She gave me a thumbs-up. Michael Walton patted me on the back with a friendly smile. Violet mouthed, "Good job," to me silently. Tracy smiled impatiently and batted her eyelashes at me. She was really starting to bother me, especially because she had cozied up to Violet so quickly. She had no idea what she was getting herself into. Jason's speech focused on the need to start building up our class savings so that we could afford an impressive class gift when we were seniors. His voice was trembling and he stuttered twice, tripping over his own words. I felt a little bad for Jason, and wondered if it might have been a wiser move for me to have just flubbed my speech and handed him the election. Maybe my mom had been right; it was greedy to take something I didn't truly want.

After school, Violet cornered me at my locker with her backpack already fastened over both shoulders. "You should come over to my house. We could bake cupcakes to hand out at lunch time tomorrow. Like a campaign promotion."

I thought about the history chapter I had to read later that night about the Constitution, and the Spanish verb conjugation exercises I had neglected to finish during study hall, but forced myself to grin. An invitation into Violet's house was too lucrative to pass up. Who knew when another invitation would be extended? "Sure, that sounds great. I just have to text my mom and let her know I'm not going straight home."

Violet lived on the outskirts of town at the very end of the bus route along a road I didn't think I had ever been on before. It was set back from the street, nearly hidden completely by thick evergreens, with the sharp points of its Tudor roof poking out above the peaks of green.

"Wow, you live, like, in the middle of nowhere," I commented as we stepped off the bus and the driver sped off behind us. I was already wondering how on earth I would ever give my mom directions later that evening to pick me up.

"Don't worry, it's not too far," Violet assured me, leading the way down the long, shady drive connecting the main road to her house. As soon as we stepped into the shade of the trees, I felt like I was entering another world, and naturally, my defenses went up. The rain had temporarily subsided and sunlight making its way through pine needles left patterns across the pavement on which we walked. The heavy, wet scents of soil, pine, and decaying leaves closed in on us, and the chirping of birds overhead was dizzying.

After a bend in the wooded road, I could see the house emerge ahead of us. The road gave way to gravel, and turned in a circular drive wrapped around a grand fountain at the front of the house. White cement steps led to the home's front door, and the house appeared to be three stories high, with elaborate lattice-work over its windows. Fluffy red geraniums grew in huge ceramic flower pots at both sides of the front door. The Simmons' house was more like an English manor than any house I had ever seen before within town limits.

"How did your parents ever find this house?" I asked, not only for the purpose of information gathering, but also out of my own personal curiosity. Why would any family with enough money to purchase a lavish home like this one choose to live in Willow, Wisconsin?

"Well, it's not so much that they found the house. It was more like it found them," Violet sighed, pulling her keys out of the zippered pocket on her backpack. We climbed up the front steps. "It's the house my father grew up in. When my grandmother died two years ago, my uncle wanted to sell it, but my father really wanted to keep it in the family. I used to come here for summer breaks when I was a little kid and I thought it was like a castle."

The front door creaked open, and the coolness of the front hallway reached us before we even stepped inside. I felt as if I was entering a museum as I walked into Violet's front foyer. Everything was polished wood, and an enormous staircase led from the hallway up to a magnificent second-floor balcony that overlooked the living room. An enormous Persian rug in rich shades of turquoise, mint, and fuchsia covered the dark wood floor in the living room, and the furniture all appeared to be antique, expertly reupholstered. As we entered and Violet kicked off her shoes, to our right I saw an ornately framed oil painting hanging over the fireplace. It depicted what appeared to be a family of four: a husband smiling politely in a dark suit, a wife with her hair curled delicately, and two gangly teenage sons. The woman, who I assumed to be Violet's grandmother, had her hands placed gently on the shoulders of her seated sons. Unlike in other portraits I'd seen in museums of wealthy families, Violet's grandparents were dressed modestly. Violet's grandmother wore what looked like a simple teal green silk blouse, open at the neck to reveal a delicate gold pendant instead of a thick rope of pearls or elaborate diamonds. Violet didn't look much like her grandmother, whose complexion was peachy and hair a dark shade of blond in comparison to Violet's porcelain skin and raven hair. In the portrait, the grandmother smiled warmly, patiently, filling the room with a welcoming presence.

"This is amazing," I said, sounding more impressed than I intended. But it was. I had never in my whole life stepped into a house like that. I didn't even think that real, modern-day people lived in houses that enormous; it was like a house from a movie set in another time period. Oddly, there was nothing spooky or haunted about the house. The windows were enormous, filling it with cheerful sunlight despite the thick blanket of tall trees surrounding the house outdoors.

"Yeah, it's pretty great," Violet admitted. "Our house in Lake Forest was way smaller. This is fancy and all, but my parents spent a year remodeling it before we moved here. There was a ton of old stuff that needed to be replaced. Like, it didn't even have a dishwasher. My mom was so not willing to move to Wisconsin without at least one of those. The only option we had to moving here was to sell to developers who wanted to tear the house down and put up condominiums. My grandmother would have seriously rolled over in her grave if we'd let that happen. It's kind of a special place."

In the huge kitchen, Violet went on to tell me as she pulled a box of cake mix out of a cabinet, that her father had been an investment banker back in Chicago, but that he had taken time after Violet's grandmother died to establish his own fund and take on private clients so that he would be prepared to work for himself in Wisconsin.

"There are eggs in the fridge," Violet told me, suggesting that I should go get them. Violet's mother had a fancy automatic mixer, the kind that I imagined professional chefs had, and I wondered, as I opened the fridge and gawked at the abundance of food in there, what my mother would have made of the Simmons' house. She wasn't easily impressed by wealth, but the Simmons' were quite obviously very, very wealthy.

While we mixed the rich chocolate batter and poured it into cupcake pans, I learned that Violet was an only child. She told me that her parents tried to have another child after her, but were unsuccessful, and for a long time their infertility issues put such a strain on their marriage that she was positive they were going to get divorced. She shared with me that back at her old school, she had a boyfriend named Eric, and they had decided to break up before she moved to Willow rather than try to keep in touch. The drive between Willow and Lake Forest took over four hours. They knew their relationship wasn't mature enough to last. Violet had been so upset about it that she'd deleted all of her social media profiles because she simply didn't want to know any details when Eric began dating anyone new. Maybe that was her subtle way of answering one of the questions on Mischa's list; I wasn't sure. If Violet had any supernatural way of knowing what was on the list, she was making a very smooth matter of answering the questions one by one.

Violet seemed so relaxed and open with me that I began to forget a little about the circumstances under which I had been invited over to her home. In her sunny kitchen, as she heated the oven and moved from cabinet to cabinet, it was easy to forget that Olivia had just died. That my friends had tasked me with finding incriminating evidence supporting our theory that Violet had been responsible. That I was supposed to be digging for information.

"What about you?" Violet asked after the first batch of cupcakes had been gently placed on a rack in the oven. She was pouring glasses of diet soda for both of us. "Is that guy I've seen you walking to school with your boyfriend?"

My heart skipped a beat and my limbs went numb. I felt blood rush to my cheeks and I paused before replying, knowing that I had been caught off-guard and would likely stammer. So many things ran through my mind: had Violet really seen us walking to school together? Had she known Trey would be the driver of the car in the crash that would kill Olivia? I remembered Mischa and Candace teasing her on Olivia's birthday, suggesting that she and Trey would make a cute couple. Even though at the time, it had seemed like Violet genuinely had no idea who Trey was, the suggestion that they would be cute together filled me with jealousy now. In my head, I quickly scanned through what I knew to be factual about Violet and Trey's interactions; Violet knew who Trey was, but I had no proof that they had ever spoken.

"Trey's my next door neighbor," I confessed, giving her only information that she would easily be able to obtain on her own. "We're sort of... friends. He has a weird reputation at school, you know? Like weeks ago when Mischa and Candace were talking about him, I didn't say anything because they wouldn't understand. We've known each other since we were really little."

"What about before him? Did you ever date anyone at school?" she probed, her eyes huge and innocent. For no particular reason other than a very strange suspicion, I got the sense that she was up to something. Like a lion slowing down its pace and dancing a little bit as it moved in on its prey. My mind was racing, trying to outrun her. I wanted to stoke her curiosity about my past, but not give her any details that she could use to endanger me. Moxie's death was still too fresh in my mind, and I hadn't even mentioned it to Violet.

"No," I said with a chuckle, figuring that if I was just totally honest with her I would at least avoid being caught in any lies. "I lost a lot of weight over the summer. Up until then I was not very popular. Boys did not give me a second look. Ever."

Violet blinked once, evidently surprised by my admission. Surely she must have known that I'd been heavier before junior year; everyone at school knew that, anyone could have told her. "I never would have guessed that," she said, and I could tell she was lying. Maybe having a psychiatrist for a dad was an advantage I hadn't considered before. Dad could always tell immediately when someone was fibbing, and maybe I had gained that skill through my careful observation of him.

"So, what about the dance?" she asked, changing her course. "Are you going with Trey?"

I shrugged, not wanting her to know that I didn't have an answer. Instinctively, I wanted to go to the dance because that was what everyone in the junior and senior classes would do, and I wanted to be like everyone else. But truly, in my heart, if there was a chance the dance would make Trey uncomfortable, I didn't want to go. The more I thought about it, if we were to go together and step out onto a dance floor, there would definitely be pointing and staring. "I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure if my heart's really in it right now. Everything was different a few weeks ago."

"Oh my god, McKenna!" Violet exclaimed. "You have to go! I mean, look. It's terrible that Olivia died. But this is still our junior year. Life goes on, you know?"

The baking cupcakes filled the house with a delicious aroma, and the sun outside the windows of Violet's kitchen began to set. Wearing oven mitts, I withdrew the first three trays of cupcakes, and Violet set the next three in to bake.  When she leaned back from the heat of the oven, she winced in pain and her hand flew up to her chest.

"Ouch," she muttered. The locket around her neck had heated to a scalding temperature while she had been arranging the trays in the oven, and when she had leaned back, it had burned the skin on her chest, leaving a small red mark.

We stepped into the family room through a doorway in the kitchen to watch television for thirty minutes while the next batch baked, and then Violet flipped through pages in her mother's thick cookbook until she found the recipe for buttercream frosting. Into the mixer went a huge bag of powdered sugar, a dash of vanilla, and sticks of room-temperature butter. As the blades of the mixer whirled, I realized it was getting to be around dinner time. I hadn't eaten since I'd gulped down my salad at lunchtime, and my stomach was rumbling.

"Sample," Violet ordered me as if she could hear my belly growling. She handed me a chocolate cupcake, still warm from the oven, with a thick layer of vanilla frosting on top.

I waved the cupcake away with my hands, refusing. "No, no, I can't eat that." Somewhere nearby, I heard the buzz of an automatic garage door opening, and a car's engine shutting off.

"McKenna," Violet said sternly. "You can't just avoid eating forever. It's just one cupcake."

I shrugged, really wanting that cupcake. "I eat plenty. I just can't have cupcakes. Even if it's just one, it's hard for me to stop after one."

Elsewhere in the house, presumably a few rooms away, I heard a door open and close, and the clicking of high heels approaching on a hardwood floor.  Violet frowned at me, looking concerned. She set the cupcake back down on the plate with the others from the first batch. "It sounds to me like maybe you need help, McKenna. Maybe you're taking your weight loss a little too far."

I momentarily was filled with panic, wondering what Violet was getting at. I hadn't lost weight over the summer by any drastic means. But my concern about what she might have been plotting for me was quickly abandoned as soon as a well-dressed woman with smooth brown hair to her shoulders wearing a beige wool suit entered the kitchen carrying a briefcase. She was just as pretty as Violet, with the same bright blue eyes.

"Hi Mom," Violet said, barely turning around to look at her mother. "This is McKenna. She's running for Treasurer and we're making campaign cupcakes."

"Well, that's very sweet," Mrs. Simmons said, smiling at me. "Have you lived in Willow long, McKenna?"

"My whole life," I replied with a hint of pride.

Violet and her mother drove me home an hour later, and I couldn't help but cringe when their fancy white Audi pulled up in front of our plain one-story house. Over dinner I asked my mother if she knew of any influential families in town with the last name of Simmons, trying to get a better sense of who Violet's grandparents had been, and how they had come into their wealth. My mother, who had grown up outside St. Louis, had never heard of any Simmons' in town, and she encouraged me to call my dad, who had grown up in Ortonville. When I dialed his number, it went to voicemail, and even as I left a message I knew he wouldn't return my call that night. I should have felt proud of myself as I composed my email report to Mischa and Candace with all of my findings about Violet's life prior to her arrival at our high school. But instead, I thought of the sinister expression on her face as she had waved goodbye to me from the dark front seat of her mother's car. I had unknowingly given her something that she wanted. I was sure of it, and just wasn't sure exactly what it was.

Later that night, as I was getting ready for bed and growing uneasy about the moment when I would have to turn off the lights, I received a text message from Trey. His message was one word: Homecoming?

I texted back after a moment of deliberation: Up to you.

When there was no reply after almost ten minutes, I looked at my bed with my hand resting on my light switch. I flipped the switch off and stood perfectly still for about three seconds before I admitted I was far too afraid to be alone in my room to actually fall asleep. So I decided to try sleeping with the light on and climbed into bed. Even with my comforter pulled over me, I felt like a weirdo closing my eyes with the light fixture in my ceiling still flooding my room with light.

I heard a soft tapping at the window, which made me jolt in fear. When the tapping paused and then began again, I rationalized that an evil spirit would probably not have the manners to knock before entering. I moved quietly to my window, and raised the blinds. Trey was standing outside in a white t-shirt and sweat pants, shivering. Surprised to see him outdoors, I raised my window.

"What are you doing?" I whispered, not wanting my mom on the other side of the wall to hear us.

"Why is your light still on?" he asked.

"Because," I sputtered, "I'm afraid to be alone."

He motioned for me to lift the window, and I did, knowing that my mother would murder me if she knew that I was inviting a boy wearing pajamas into my bedroom at such a late hour. It took me multiple tries to lift the window screen, which was jammed because I couldn't remember ever before lifting it. Trey hoisted himself up and then climbed through silently. Once he was inside my bedroom and we'd lowered the screen and closed the window again, reality hit me: I had a boy in my room at bedtime. He looked around my small room in wonderment, as if trying to take it all in, even though he had been there recently without me the day he had retrieved Moxie for burial.

"Something weird happened last night. It felt like there was something in here with me," I hurried to explain. I realized as the words were departing my mouth how preposterous I sounded, but a lot of strange things had happened in a short amount of time, so I didn't feel any need to explain myself. "Remember how the night we were outside with the kittens, you said it felt like someone was watching us? It was like that, only... creepier."

"I'll stay if you want, at least until you fall asleep," he offered in a whisper, continuing to look around my room as if I had a trap set somewhere.

"No—if you stay, I need you to stay until dawn," I requested, positive that whatever had interrupted my sleep the night before would do the same, just after Trey left. I knew I was making a bit of a presumptuous request, asking a boy to spend the whole night in my room with me, but I was so terrified of falling asleep alone that I asked anyway.

"Okay," Trey shrugged.

I flipped the lock on my bedroom door just in case my mom tried to open it in the morning, even though she rarely did that.

"Lights off," Trey commanded, "just in case your mom is curious why they're on. I don't need any weird lectures from my parents about adult responsibilities right now. I've had enough family time in the last two weeks to last me the rest of my life."

We both crawled into my narrow double bed, and it occurred to me once we were both laying parallel beneath my comforter that Trey might have come over with intentions in mind other than protecting me from evil spirits. But without even trying to kiss me or touch me greedily, he set his head down on my pillow and put one arm protectively around me. Our eyes adjusted to the dark of the room, and I relaxed a little when I could actually see the whites of his eyes mere inches from mine.

"So, did you find out anything useful at Violet's today?" he asked. "Or did you guys just braid hair and eat Hot Pockets and do whatever girls do?"

"You mean, like tickle each other with big feathers, and call cute boys and then hang up?" I teased.

"Was that you who kept calling?"

I shared with him all of what I'd learned, which had seemed important while I was in Violet's kitchen, but seemed embarrassingly insignificant now that I was repeating it all back to Trey. My mention of Violet's grandmother's passing, and the inheritance of the magnificent house behind the trees, seemed to capture his attention.

"So, this grandmother... she recently died?" Trey asked in a low voice. "That could be something."

"It sounded like she died two years ago. Violet said her parents spent a whole year renovating the house."

Trey mulled that over. "So the timing is right. Was she especially close to her grandmother?"

I tried to remember Violet mentioning anything that hinted at noteworthy closeness between herself and her grandmother, but came up dry. "I don't remember."

"So, that book from the library says that oftentimes a spirit will use an object from their own life to connect to the medium," Trey mused aloud. "Is there anything that maybe Violet's grandmother gave to her that might be some kind of a channel for communication?"

I tried to clear my mind to form a picture of Violet. In my head, I envisioned her long hair, those long lashes... but then I became distinctly aware of the breathing sensation I had experienced the night before.

In, out.

I dug my fingernails into Trey's arm and whispered hoarsely, "Do you hear that?"

His eyes were huge, staring straight into my own. "I don't hear anything, but I feel it."

He pulled me closer to him. We both lay in silence for a moment before I asked, "What should we do?"

Trey shook his head very slowly, almost too slowly to notice. "Nothing. Let's see what happens."

The room, as it had the night before, became bone-chillingly cold. I felt the tip of my nose turn to ice, and could see steam escaping from Trey's nostrils in tiny puffs. The breathing sensation in the room was growing stronger, and I gripped Trey's arm more tightly. It felt as if the energy was being sucked out of my body as the presence pulled me toward the ceiling lightly, and then released, again with the steady rhythm of... inhale. Exhale. I was paralyzed with fear, thoroughly expecting to feel the same moist fingertip that had pressed against my arm making an indentation again that night. Why had I been so stupid as to think I'd be safer with Trey? He was as defenseless as I was against this thing, whatever it was, that presumably Violet had unleashed upon me. My stomach tied itself in knots and I knew the window of time during which I might have found the courage to make a dash for the light switch had already passed. There was nothing to do but wait for this terror to run its course.

I began to hear a low rattling. Trey dared to sit up slightly to look across my room, and a moment later, I did, too. The shelf over my desk was vibrating. It was barely noticeable at first, but in less than a minute it was shaking so much that I feared it would fall from the wall at any second, clatter down to my desk and wake up my mom. It was the shelf on which I kept my compact discs, most of which had been given to me by my dad when I was still in middle school. I rarely listened to any of them, since I downloaded all of the music that I kept on my iPod. Trey and I both watched the shelf thrashing against the wall; we could see the screws holding it in place against the drywall visibly being pulled out from the force. Suddenly one compact disc in a plastic jewel case fell from the shelf and landed on the top of my desk. The shelf ceased moving immediately, and the coldness that had just filled my room disappeared. If it weren't for that one, single misplaced compact disc, it would have been easy to think that perhaps we had just imagined the past few minutes of strange phenomena in my bedroom.

Trey and I sat, frozen in fear, for a long, gut-wrenching moment before either of us dared to move. I was sure that at any second my mother would come knocking on my door, demanding to know why such a racket was coming from my room at such an odd hour. But as my ears strained to hear what was happening in the house beyond the four walls of my bedroom, I was surprised to hear nothing at all but the clock ticking on the mantelpiece over the fireplace in the living room. The house was at peace.

"What the hell was that?" Trey asked me.

I released my grip on his arm and realized that my fingernails had broken the skin. Red semi-circles were left behind where my nails had dug in. "Sorry," I said. "I don't know what that is. But it's the reason why I was going to sleep with the lights on tonight."

"That's what happened in here last night?" Trey asked me, shaken by the event.

"Not exactly like that, but yeah."

Trey pushed back my comforter and walked over to my desk. He flipped on the small desk lamp and held up the compact disc that had been dislodged from its place on the shelf. "Death Cab for Cutie," he read off its cover, holding it up for me to see. "So, the ghost haunting you has crappy taste in music."

"Watch it, now," I warned.  I knew without budging from my bed exactly which CD it was: a single of "Soul Meets Body" that my dad had sent to me from Florida after I'd heard a snippet of the song playing at the mall while I was visiting him. I'd tasked him with the assignment of finding out the name of the song, armed only with the handful of lyrics that I could remember. I couldn't remember the last time I'd listened to the song, and was at a loss if whatever kept entering my room at night intended for me to find any significance in it. Trey lifted the CD as if to place it back on the shelf, and I immediately said, "No!" I feared that restoring it to its position might be ample reason for whatever spirit had just visited us to return. Trey set the CD back down on my desk.

"The lamp stays on," he stated before climbing back into my bed with me. This time, when he wrapped his arm around me, I felt sure that we wouldn't be visited again that night. I noticed that his feet were bare and freezing cold when mine tangled with his at the bottom of my bed. "So, whatever that just was, it's done this before?" he asked.

"Not exactly. Last night it didn't shake my furniture, but I think it touched me."

"Geez. I don't think that was anyone's grandmother. I mean, old people don't listen to Death Cab for Cutie, right?"

I hesitated before confessing what had been on my mind all day. "It might have been Jennie."

"Your sister? Why would your sister be haunting you? And why, after all these years?" he asked.

I wanted to tell him about the day after the fire in the hospital, about how my parents had believed that I'd died in the fire and Jennie had been saved, but couldn't find the words. 

"I think it might be whatever spirit Violet summoned when you guys were playing that game. We need to find out more about that grandmother. If it isn't her that came after Olivia and is now terrorizing you, then maybe it's some other spirit that used her to set up a channel with Violet."

We both fell quiet for a few minutes, and his breathing steadied. I wondered if perhaps he'd nodded off to sleep. "I'm glad you're here," I whispered. "I'm starting to think I'm going crazy."

"You're not going crazy," he murmured, sounding tired. "Whatever is going on here, it's very real. I think we need to figure out a way to communicate with that thing, whatever it is, and tell it to get lost."

He kissed me on the forehead. When I woke up in the morning, the sun was up, and the light bulb in my desk lamp had burned out at some point over night. Trey had already slipped across the lawn back to his own room, and cool morning wind was blowing in through the open window. I thought about the words he had uttered right before we both fell asleep. A shudder rippled my body. Just about the last thing I wanted to do was invite that thing to come back.