Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
For a handful of seconds after I dial Harper, she is still alive.
When I amble up the porch after work, I hear my aunt and sister’s chatter filtering through the screen door, but I linger on the steps. The wood is halfway to rot, and I struggle to find a sturdy spot to sit.
Harper’s name is still at the top of my favorites list. I press the call button.
“Hey, you’ve reached Harper!” The familiar, steady tone wrenches me back in time, to cafeteria benches and late nights over music sheets. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll totally get back to you. Or maybe I won’t, but you should probably have texted anyway!”
I’m surprised and relieved to find the mailbox isn’t full and that her parents haven’t shut the phone off yet. I picture them sitting at the dinner table, paying a phone bill for a dead girl.
The phone beeps at me, and I inhale.
“Hey, Harper. It’s been a while.” I lean back into the top step, tipping my head back.
It’s a clear night, and thousands upon thousands of stars wink down at me.
“God, you wouldn’t believe the view here.
Do you remember that summer you came with us?
We slept in tents out back and tried to find the constellations.
Which neither of us knew a thing about, so it was a lot of pointing out lines. ”
The memory shifts, darkens, as I imagine my or Harper’s face on one of the missing people posters. We were out here, basically unattended, ripe for the snatching.
Three years ago. The year Finn disappeared.
Ice rushes up my spine, and I jerk up straight.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, Harper.
There are all these missing kids, and three literal ghosts haunting my aunt’s house.
” I press my eyes shut until fireworks dance in the blackness.
“I know you’d be all over it. You’d probably already be knee-deep in some investigation with Sloane and Aisha. You’d have gotten answers.
“But you’re not here. It’s me. And me was never really enough to begin with, was it?”
Silence hangs heavy in the warm evening air.
An automated voice breaks the monotony.
“If you are satisfied with your message, press one. To erase, press two.”
With a sigh, I jab the number 2. The voicemail shrieks a beep, and before it can prompt me again, I hang up the phone and shove it back into my pocket.
If she were here, Harper wouldn’t let these kids—and not just the three in this house—fade into nothing.
She would have tried to find out what happened, why they ended up here, even if she knew it was pointless.
Even if a seventeen-year-old girl would never have the resources the town’s task force has already exhausted.
She would have tried. She wasn’t particularly amazing at one thing, but she was good at most things, because she fought to be.
When she didn’t make the soccer team, she practiced two hours a day all year and landed a spot the next season.
When our art teacher told Harper that painting may not be her thing, she spent all her babysitting money on canvases until her still lifes almost looked lifelike.
She had a drive I’ve never had. She was the hero, and I am still a sidekick.
The hairs prickle on the back of my neck. The sensation of being watched isn’t new in the house, but my understanding of it is. I crane my head to find a sheepish Sloane standing on the doormat.
“Hey. Sorry. I didn’t mean to…” Sloane palms the back of her neck. She clears her throat. “Sorry.”
“Eavesdropping is kind of part of the gig, yeah?” I ask.
Sloane snorts. She crosses the porch and settles on the step beside me. Her fingers wear at the hem of her T-shirt.
“Harper is the one who…” Sloane doesn’t say it, but I nod. She nods, too, more out of discomfort than agreement. “You never talk about her.”
“And you would know, because of the…”
“Eavesdropping, yeah.” Sloane grins. The sharp curve of her mouth is like a coat of armor she wears, but behind it there is a maturity beyond her years. Maybe she’s always seen everything before she literally could. “Why don’t you?”
“Talk about her?”
She nods.
I wrap my arms around my knees and lean forward. As the sun dips under the trees, some of the incessant heat of the day dissipates, and the cool breeze lifts my hair off the back of my neck.
Talking about Harper makes her death more real. She is in the past tense now, everywhere but inside my head.
“It hurts less not to,” I say.
“The denial club has its membership benefits,” Sloane says, and it’s clear I’m not the only member. “You’re in good company.”
A laugh slips past my teeth, less bitter than I expect.
“I know she’s never going to pick up,” I say, losing to the urge to justify myself. If anyone understands loss, it’s the three extra occupants of my home.
Sloane shakes her head. “I figured.” At my scrunched nose, she amends with a smirk, “I think it’s nice, though. I’d like to think someone’s still calling my number. Hoping I’ll pick up.”
There is no room here for placation. Telling her that she might one day would be a lie, one I can’t tell and one she’d never believe.
“Maybe they are,” I say.
“I only had that phone for a few months. Got it for my thirteenth birthday.”
We’ve veered way too deep into painful territory, and before it drags me under, I sit back and force my expression back into neutrality.
“What were you doing before eavesdropping?” I ask.
Sloane, apparently grateful for a topic change like I am, shrugs.
“Aisha, Finn, and I are out in the backyard. I saw you moping. Figured I’d invite you to join.”
“Join?”
Sloane waggles her brows. “Feel like doing a favor?”
—
By favor, Sloane means snagging three spoons from the kitchen; my mother’s incredulity as to where all the spoons were going is answered as soon as I join Sloane in the backyard, where Finn and Aisha are standing together off the back porch. A pile of metal glints at their feet.
There are four more metal spoons in the grass. All of them clearly from the kitchen drawer.
“My mom has been looking for those,” I say.
“We’ll put them back,” Finn says with a wave.
“We won’t, actually,” Sloane pipes in.
Finn ignores her, gesturing to the utensils in the grass. “You remember field day?”
“Like in elementary school?”
Finn nods. “Sack races and cornhole and capture the flag. A whole day without an ounce of learning. Best day of the year.”
“Speak for yourself, ” says Aisha.
“I remember field day,” I say. “But that doesn’t explain the hoarding of my utensils.”
“This is our field day,” Sloane says.
Aisha and Sloane crouch before the pile of spoons, intently focused on curling their fingers around them. Aisha grabs on within a few seconds, but Sloane’s fingers pass through the metal a few times before she gets a solid grip.
“Y’all ready?” Finn asks. Sloane and Aisha line up side by side. “You know the drill. First to the tree line and back with a spoon in hand wins this round.”
“Someone’s feeling cocky because he won last week and the week before,” Sloane says, meeting my eyes over her shoulders. “Considering he created the game, it’s a little fishy.”
“You call it an unfair advantage; I call it skill.”
Sloane lifts the middle finger on her free hand.
“Keep that up, and I’m giving Aisha a head start.”
Sloane rolls her eyes.
Finn counts them down. As Sloane and Aisha make their way toward the tree line, slow and steady with their spoons, he sidles up to me. He leans over as if to bump my shoulder. “You think this is silly,” he says.
“I don’t,” I say, and it’s the truth. “I was actually thinking I haven’t seen either of them smile this much before.”
A sad smile lifts Finn’s lips, but it fades as fast as it came. “They should have more than this. But all I can do is…make things feel as normal as possible. Or distract them from how not-normal this all is.”
“You’ve been doing this a while?”
He nods. “When I first showed up here, it wasn’t Sloane and Aisha.
Back then, it was this boy named Vincent and— He stops abruptly, and it takes everything in me to not push him.
But pushing when he’s already opening up feels too much like pressing on a sore.
“Every Friday, Vincent dragged us out here, and we’d tell stories.
Things we remembered. A good day or a bad one.
Something funny or scary or whatever. I thought it was ridiculous at first, but I get what he was doing. ”
“So field day.”
“So field day,” he says. “I would have kept story time, but I’m not that sentimental. And I figure it’s good practice. Like strengthening a muscle. The more they play these silly games, the more they can, like, interact with the world.”
“And by interact, you mean properly haunt my house.”
“Haunt sounds so…horror movie.”
“If the shoe fits.”
Finn smiles, but half his attention is on Sloane and Aisha.
“What happened to them?” I ask. “Vincent and whoever else was here? You weren’t the first to disappear, and neither was Vincent. But the rest aren’t here.”
His focus snaps back to me, but just as fast he looks away. Whatever spigot was pried open, it cinches back shut. Something about the ghosts who occupied the house before turns the ever-moving, always-talking Finn into a statue.
“They’re gone,” he says.