Her bladder clenched. She turned away from the living room one story below. But when she reached for the knob of the bathroom door, her fingers tingled with tiny needle pricks. She snatched her hand away. Don’t go in there, the sensation warned. There’s something wrong with that place.
Shooting a glance down the hall, she considered sneaking into her dad’s room and using the bathroom there. But he was a light sleeper. She was bound to wake him. And what will you tell him when he asks why you’re using his bathroom instead of your own? How will you explain it away when he sees that you’re scared? If her dad saw the fear in her eyes, he’d demand to know what was up. She’d have to tell him about the girl, and while that would possibly win her a one-way ticket back to Queens as soon as her mom returned from her business trip, she wasn’t sure she was ready to leave just yet. If she sucked up her fear, she’d have something no other girl could touch. A damn good story about how she’d spent the summer in a haunted house was bound to win Tim’s heart.
She turned away from the blue bathroom and slunk down the stairs, nearly tumbling down the top few risers when her foot skidded across the carpeted edge. Catching herself on the banister, she shot a wide-eyed glance up to her father’s door. She waited for him to come rushing into the hall. What the hell is going on? Why are you up? What are you doing? When he didn’t appear in the doorway, she exhaled a quiet laugh. Of course he wasn’t coming.
She continued to descend the steps, more carefully this time. Her head felt fuzzy, as though soft tufts of grass had sprouted along the inner curve of her skull. She imagined blood pooling along the wrinkles of her brain, coating it like a bucket of red paint. Because while she felt silly being so scared, perhaps what she’d seen in the bathroom was a symptom of something bigger. Maybe there really had been no girl.
“No, she was there,” Vee whispered to herself. She was there, just as clear as the boy in the orchard, as unmistakable as the scream Vee had heard in the trees.
The third bathroom was across the living room from her dad’s writing den, and while she was positive he was upstairs in bed, she poked her head inside the room anyway. The mess of it took her by surprise. He had spent the whole day in there, but it looked like he had yet to organize a thing. It was the most crowded room in the house, the entire far wall crammed with boxes filled with books. His giant desk sat in the middle of the room, glowing in the moonlight.
Pivoting where she stood, she crossed the length of the living room toward the half bath. Her right arm pistoned out and slapped the wall just inside the door. The overhead light flickered on, revealing a sunshine-yellow toilet and sink. At least there was no tub in here, no place for someone to hide behind a shower curtain. As long as she avoided looking in the mirror, everything would be okay.
Vee had never tried evoking the spirit of Bloody Mary herself, but she knew the story: stare into the mirror, chant Mary’s name three times, and she’d appear right behind you, ready to slash your throat. Both Heidi and Laurie had tried it a few summers ago—at least that’s what they had told her—and they both swore they saw a woman standing against Heidi’s bathroom wall. But Vee hadn’t believed them. If that had really happened, they wouldn’t have been giggling at the story. If they had really seen her, they would have been pale as sheets. Possibly having gone crazy with the experience, locked up in rubber rooms. And that’s exactly why she wasn’t going to tell her dad a damn thing.
Squaring her shoulders, she stepped inside but left the door open behind her. She tugged down her pj pants, sat, and didn’t dare look away from the door. That was when a strange seed of an idea turned over inside her head, fed by the imaginary brain bleed that throbbed red and angry beneath her skull. What if some stupid kid who had lived here before had called out the girl Vee had seen? Like, if Heidi and Laurie really did call on Bloody Mary the way they said they had, they’d done it without any precaution. What would they have done if Bloody Mary had actually shown up? What would any kid do if one of their harebrained incantations worked? Vee had an entire box of ghost books upstairs, waiting to be unpacked. She’d spent countless hours reading paranormal websites, spent even more time watching grainy video footage of ghosts on YouTube. And while she’d never tried opening a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, she was sure it was possible. It seemed that people who didn’t know what they were doing did it all the time. But closing the doorway afterward? Far more difficult. If a door was opened, it would remain that way for a long, long time.
Her heart flipped at the revelation. If that’s what happened to the girl in the bathroom, if she was stuck, what if Vee could help the girl cross back to the other side? Imagine the story that would make. And if Vee could help the dead find peace, maybe it meant that, if she tried hard enough, she had a shot at figuring out how to bring peace to her family, too.
She finished in the bathroom and slapped the light switch. As she crossed into the living room, her excitement momentarily blurred her fear of the dark. But the sudden barrage of thoughts tumbled to a stuttering stop when she noticed something off. The carpet felt weird beneath her feet. She didn’t remember it being this fluffy before. Peering at it through the faint glow of moonlight, she couldn’t quite make out what was different. And while she wanted to ignore it and get back to her room, she squatted midstep to draw her fingers across the ground.
It felt as though thousands of inch-long strands of yarn made up the rug. It reminded her of the vintage Rainbow Brite doll her dad had gotten her for one of her birthdays years earlier. Spurred on by her father’s love for all things eighties, she had been on a retro cartoon kick. Thick yellow string had made up Rainbow’s head of hair, but the carpet beneath her feet was supposed to be a low-pile beige.
She tried to remember where she and her dad had dropped the few rugs they had brought from home, tried to remember if they even had a rug that felt the way the carpet felt now. Maybe it was one of the things her dad had scored on sale? But before she could figure it out, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. There, in the faint iridescence of night, their overstuffed leather couch was gone. So was the old armchair her mother had surrendered to “the cause,” and the glass-top coffee table her dad had bought off of a neighbor was missing too. Even the entertainment center and their flat-screen TV—the one thing her dad had refused to budge on when it came to material possessions. All of it was replaced by stuff she’d never seen before.
An ugly couch with a blanket thrown over the back of it stood where the leather sofa should have been, its orange-and-brown plaid pattern marking it as not their own. A worse-for-wear beanbag chair sat next to it, and a kind of TV she’d never seen before stood against the wall. It looked like it was stuck in some sort of stubby-legged wooden cabinet with dials on the side. A woven tapestry hung on the wall above it. It, like the carpet, looked as though it was made of yarn. The knotted strings displayed a meticulously constructed bouquet of flowers. Little wooden beads hung from the ends of the weird artwork, tapping against the wall, pushed by a fan that didn’t exist.
Vee blinked a few times, but the weird furniture refused to go away. She shot a look across the living room toward the kitchen. She couldn’t see it from where she was standing, but she was almost positive that it would be just as foreign to her as the stuff that had taken over the living room.
Shaking her head, she decided that this had to be one of those strange waking dreams her dad had a book about—something about feeling completely awake despite being in a totally different state of mind. Vee hadn’t understood a word of what she had read, but she now realized that this must have been what “lucid” meant. A sense of parallel reality, where you know where you are, but aren’t where you should be. It’s just a dream, she thought. Just your imagination. Just the headache twisting up your thoughts. But the steady tap-tap-tapping of wooden beads promised that she was awake.