THE NEXT MORNING, I OPEN my eyes to the sound of Cassandra humming in the distance. I am alone, she’s somewhere else in the apartment. I don’t recognize the tune, but it’s happy, silly—a making-breakfast tune.
There’s sunlight peeking through the curtains; I’ve never been here in daylight. It’s not a cave or a witches’ den. Just an ordinary, messy room.
My head hurts. My stomach feels like it has a heavy, greasy ball rolling around in it. Every once in a while, I think I might throw up.
Cassandra appears at the door. “Coffee? Cheerios? English muffin?”
“Coffee,” I croak. “Definitely.”
Coffee, as always, is the answer. Sitting at the breakfast table, I manage half an English muffin. Cassandra is wolfing down Cheerios; the bowl’s hardly emptied and she’s pouring more from the box. They make a happy little rattle as they clatter into the bowl, which has a bright daisy on the side.
“You seem … really good,” I say blearily.
“I am really good,” she says. “Way good, stupendous, and great. Casting a really intense spell is like … sorry … a spiritual laxative. Just takes all the crap inside you and sends it on its merry way.”
Heading right toward Chloe, I think. I sip my coffee. “When do you think it’ll hit?”
Cassandra pretends to look at her watch. “Um, at ten-forty-seven Eastern Standard Time.” She rolls her eyes. “Who knows?”
“But …”
Cassandra smiles. “Look, there probably won’t be any big boom. We’ve blocked her energy.”
Blocked? Is that it? Some of the things we said were pretty extreme. I try to remember the words, what we actually asked for. But it’s all a wine-queasy blur.
“She can’t hurt you anymore, that’s all that matters. Monday, when we’re back at school—you’ll see. I bet she’s scared to come near you.”
The thought of Chloe scared cheers me up. “Pass the butter,” I say. “And maybe some jam.”
It hits as I am walking home. I am walking from Columbus to Amsterdam when the moment comes. The autumn chill in the air eases. The day becomes fresh, rather than fierce and biting. My shoulders feel looser, like when you shrug off a heinously heavy backpack. I take a huge gulp of air, realize my chest doesn’t feel so tight. The last few weeks tumble out of reality and into the past.
It’s over, I think. I’m free. Chloe no longer has power over me.
I can do anything, go anywhere I want.
The world is mine again.
I bounce into the house and hand my mom a sunflower. I bought it on the way home. I was so happy, I wanted to give someone something.
Taking it, my mom smiles and says, “My, my—thank you.”
I flop down at the dining room table. From the kitchen, my mom asks, “How was the sleepover? Did you get any sleep?”
As I try to answer her question, the memory of last night hits, and with it, a feeling of … ugliness. Shame. Now that I’m home, talking to my mom, I don’t want to think about burning things and cutting myself. It’s like taking something you thought was beautiful in the store and holding it up to the light once you get home to find it’s all cheap and cracked. You feel stupid for buying it.
“Fine,” I say, tugging my sleeve over my hand. “What’d you guys do?”
“Oh …,” says my mom vaguely. As she puts a small vase with the flower in it at the center of the table, she catches me fiddling with my sleeve and says sharply, “What happened to your hand?”
“Gym dumbness,” I say, wishing I’d been smart enough to take the bandage off.
She’s about to say more when my phone rings, sharp and loud in the Sunday quiet. “Ah—teen crisis,” says my mom. “I’ll leave you to it.”
I dig in my bag for the phone. For a brief, silly moment, I wonder if it’s Chloe. Then feel happy when I realize I don’t care if it is or not. I’m beyond that.
But it’s not Chloe. It’s Ella.
“Hey, Ella,” I say, happy to hear from her.
“Hey.” She sounds out of breath, as usual.
Then she says, “So, I don’t know if you heard.”
Instantly, my entire body goes on alert. “No.”
“Um—oh, God, this is awful. I mean, really bad.”
“What, Ella? Just tell me!”
My mom draws close, a worried look on her face.
“It’s Chloe—”
My stomach wrenches. I am going to throw up, here and now, on my parents’ hall rug.
“What?” I demand.
“I know you didn’t like her, I know she was horrible to you—”
Walls, ice-cold iron walls, slam down on all four sides of me. There is no room. No air. I am trapped. I know you didn’t like her. It’s an accusation, a pointed finger. The world knows I hated Chloe.
And while I am struggling for air, Ella is saying things like last night and party and coming home and truck. And it all jumbles in my head and it kind of makes sense but I still don’t know what’s going on.
“… and this morning, she died. At the hospital. She—”
And Ella can’t say any more. She just starts crying.
What time? I want to ask her. What time did she die?
But I can’t. I don’t have to. I know what time Chloe died. I know exactly when. I know where I was, what I was doing.
I was walking from Columbus to Amsterdam. Feeling free.
Chloe was at Alison Maxwell’s birthday party. It was a twenties theme. To Alison’s parents, this meant flappers, jazz, copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the tables. To Alison and some of her friends, it meant sneaking in alcohol like they would have done during Prohibition. Which they would have done no matter what the theme was, but it gave them a fun excuse to hide mini bottles in their bags. Once Alison’s parents went out for the evening, they tumbled the booze out on the floor and everyone grabbed some, like kids at a piñata party.
Chloe had a lot of mini bottles, apparently. She may have had some other things too. She spent much of the night huddled in a corner with Isabelle. Most people avoided her; she was in a ranty mood and being a “downer.”
At around one in the morning, the party broke up. Chloe headed home. Both she and Alison live on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, so she decided to walk. People were a little worried because she was pretty out of it. But they let her go, thinking, Hey, it’s only a few blocks.
To get home, Chloe had to cross three streets. At Seventy-Second Street, she didn’t see that the light was red. She didn’t see the truck come barreling around the corner. She just wandered out into the middle of the street.
They got her to the hospital. So her parents were with her. When she died.
It’s been ten minutes since I hung up with Ella. I can’t get up off the floor. My mom keeps asking if there’s something she can do. My dad keeps asking questions. Things like “Did you know her well?” “Did she usually drink a lot?” “Did she have a fight with someone?” “How much do kids drink at these parties?” “Are they charging the driver?”
“Henry,” says my mom. “Stop.”
“What?”
“Stop looking for a rational reason this girl died. It’s just a”—she gropes for the word—“a tragedy. A senseless, awful tragedy. It’s nothing she did.”
She strokes my hair, says softly, “It’s nothing anybody did.”
One o’clock, I think for the nine thousandth time. Midnight to one. Last night was so crazy, I don’t remember time in a normal way.
That’s what I tell myself. But way back in the corner of my brain, a tiny echo of Cassandra’s voice saying, “ ’Tis the midnight hour.”
It means nothing, I think fiercely. You’re stupid, you’re insane. Stop this fantasy that because you got drunk and burned some hair you have some sacred magic power that pushes cars into people.
But Chloe was not a big drinker. She didn’t get stupid, never threw up. How could she not see a truck coming? How could she not hear it? You hear those things rumbling blocks away.
I want to talk to Cassandra so badly. Because there’s other stuff I don’t remember. The spell was to block her energy—not destroy it. Not … wipe it out. Right? We just wanted to stop her hurting me.
I send these thoughts out to the air. Hear back, Bullshit. My voice in my head or Cassandra’s?
Okay, even if it is bullshit. Even if I did want to hurt Chloe, I never said “death,” did I? There was nothing in that spell …
A street. No stones. Just a truck. A two-ton truck hurtling at a hundred-pound girl, throwing her in the air till she lands ten feet away, her body broken.…
Shall tear your bodies limb from limb.
Oh, God, I did not mean this. I did not mean for this to happen.
I stand up suddenly. “I have to be alone right now,” I say, and go to my room.
The second the door’s closed, I call Cassandra. I have trouble punching in the numbers; three tries to get it right. My fingers are not working at all. I’m a jangle of disconnected wires.
As the phone rings, I think, She has to answer. She has to. She’s the only one who can tell me what that spell could do. The only one who can say, “Chill. I just did it to make you feel stronger. It was a head game. There is no power to this stuff at all.”
It rings for a long time. Then goes to voice mail.
I hang up. Dial again. Again no answer.
My heart is banging in my chest. I don’t so much put the phone down as let it fall out of my hand.
Cassandra won’t talk to me. That means every awful thing I’m trying not to think is true. It means Cassandra knows what happened to Chloe and doesn’t want any contact between us.
Because we’re guilty. We sent something out into the world, and it killed Chloe.
I slide down the wall, pull myself in tight. I feel terrified of moving, aware that even the slightest motion could set off something that I never intended. I am hyperaware of my body, the ripples in the air caused by my breathing. The way my heat changes the atmosphere. If I move even a finger, it could change something. If I even think the wrong thing …
I see the truck, Chloe turning.
They say it sounds like a bomb going off, when a truck hits someone at high speed.
A little while later, there’s a knock at the door. My mother’s voice: “Honey?”
“No,” I say.
The door opens anyway. “Oh, baby—”
My mom makes me take a shower. “I promise,” she says firmly. “It helps.”
And it does help. The blast of the water drowns out the panic, leaves me stripped of emotion.
Chloe died because she was hit by a truck, I think tiredly as I wrap myself in a towel. You were not driving the truck. You did not kill her. You got no sleep last night and you are really not in your right mind.
“Take a nap,” says my mom when I come out of the bathroom.
“Mom, it’s lunchtime.” My voice is all croaky and raw.
My phone rings. I hesitate, because it’s probably someone wanting to do the grief freak about Chloe, and for a million reasons, I’m not up for that.
I look at the name. It’s Cassandra. I wave my mom away.
“How are you?” she says, her voice strong and cheerful. “Feel like a walk in the park?”
We meet by the reservoir in Central Park. It’s a gray, chilly afternoon. Diehards are jogging around and around the huge pool of water, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence—I guess so people don’t fall in.
Cassandra stands directly on the path, slurping a smoothie from Fruitopia. When joggers glare as they make their detour past her, she smiles around the straw.
But when she sees me, she comes over and gives me a one-armed hug. “Hey,” she says.
Tearing up, I put my head on her shoulder. “Oh, my God, Cassandra. Oh, my God.”
“Come on now,” she croons. “Keep it together.”
“What did we do?”
I look at her, because I really need her to answer that question.
She takes a slurp of her smoothie. “No one’s going to arrest us for chanting some half-assed poem.”
I stop, move away from her. “Half-assed poem or not, Cassandra, Chloe is dead. Okay? Seriously—”
“ ‘She’s really most sincerely dead,’ ” sings Cassandra in a Munchkin voice. “ ‘Tra, la, la, la.’ ”
“Cassandra!” I shout, trying to jolt her into understanding what’s happened here.
But then I think, Maybe Cassandra knows exactly what’s happened here.
She smiles.
“This is not what I asked for,” I insist. “I never wanted Chloe—”
Cassandra narrows her eyes. “Really? Because I seem to remember the D word coming up.”
“From you.”
“So, what exactly does ‘gone forever’ mean?”
Struggling to stay calm, I say, “You said you understood it was a metaphor.”
I search her eyes, looking for some sign of my friend. I can’t tell: Is she totally messing with me? Is this her way of dealing with what’s happened? I think, Cassandra, please tell me we did not use a killing spell. Just say the freaking words.
But she just nods. “Ah.” And starts walking again.
Running behind, I say, “Tell me that’s not what we asked for.”
She shrugs. “You never know how these things are going to play out. We wanted her energy stopped.”
“We said blocked.”
She rolls her eyes.
“There’s a difference.”
Cassandra puts her hands in her pockets. “Maybe that was the only way to keep her from harming you. Maybe her will was that strong.”
I feel like I’m falling. As if I’ve backed away from the cliff’s edge, only to tumble off the other side. “No,” I whisper. “No.”
Cassandra whirls around. “Why are you so hung up on this? How can you, of all people, feel guilty? Do you have total amnesia about what this chick did to you?”
My head hitting the rim of the toilet, the feeling that I was going to puke it hurt so bad. Shit floating in the water, past my face. Yes, I think, she deserved it, she deserved all of it.
“Okay?” Cassandra puts a hand on my arm. “Really, this is not someone to weep over.”
Everyone’s someone to weep over, I think, at least to someone.
“This is not happening,” I whisper. “It just can’t be.”
“I get why you’re anxious,” says Cassandra in a “Now, let’s be practical” voice. “Power is scary. In some ways, it’s easier to be the victim.”
I’m so tired it’s hard to put words together. But I manage to say, “There’s an in-between, isn’t there? The normal person who doesn’t hurt other people, just does her own thing?” Like, do we all have to be predators and prey? Are those the only choices?
“There are a lot of people who like to think that’s what they are. Personally, I think it’s better to know you have the power to hurt people—and use it well.” She hugs me, then looks deep into my eyes. “Which we did.”
Cassandra’s certainty is the only thing I have to hold on to right now. I close my eyes, try to stop thinking about it.
I hear Cassandra say, “Okay. Tomorrow?”
Oh, God—school. Everyone freaking out. Oliver. I say, “I’m calling in sick.”
“No, that’s what we don’t do. You have to go. And everyone’s going to be all Boo-hoo, Chloe was such a great girl. And you’re going to feel like crap. But when that happens? Remember what she did to you. Remember who she really was. And know you did the right thing.”
She walks away. Alone on the path, I watch her. And think, What did we do, Cassandra? What did you make me do?
And the answer comes.
Nothing you didn’t want.
That night, I check out people’s Facebook postings on Chloe. I can’t believe this! Her poor family! Rest in peace, sweet Chloe! You were the best, the most beautiful! At first, it hits me like a kick in the gut: all this hysterical love for my total enemy.
But then the pain twists into anger. What are these idiots talking about? Sweet? Best? Give me a break. We need a serious reality check here.
I put my fingers on the keyboard, think, Yeah, rest in peace, Chloe. Lord knows you were such an angry, spiteful bitch, you never gave anybody peace when you were alive.
My fingers are hovering over the keys, ready to type, when there’s a knock on the door. I jump, squeak, “Yeah?”
My dad puts his head in. “Hi there.”
Flustered, I say, “Oh, sorry, is it dinner or—”
“Nope,” he says calmly, coming in and closing the door. “Just wanted to see how you are.”
I grope for an acceptable answer. “I’m okay. I mean—”
My dad watches me. He knows he’s being lied to.
And it occurs to me, my dad knows what it feels like to hurt someone badly. Maybe he could get what I’m feeling right now.
“I didn’t like her very much,” I say tentatively. “Chloe. She was kind of mean to me, if you want to know the truth.”
My dad sits down on my green chair. “How so?”
I shake my head, a refusal to go there. “So I don’t feel so sad that she died, but I feel … bad that I don’t feel sad. Or—”
“That maybe it was your fault in some way,” says my dad.
I look up, frantic to hear that this could not be my fault. I stare at him. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “Something awful happens to someone we didn’t like, we become convinced we’re somehow responsible. It’s natural.”
“What if you actually wished them dead?” I ask. I look over at my little crystal creatures. “Like, you asked the universe to make it happen?”
“You only asked the universe?” jokes my dad. “Not an actual hit man?”
“Can’t really afford a hit man on my allowance,” I say.
“Then I think you’re in the clear.”
I smile, wish I actually felt relieved.
Then my dad says, “Want to tell me what was going on with this girl?”
I should have expected this question. But I’m caught off guard. I can’t tell my dad about Oliver. Cheating is just not something we can talk about. And also, if he knew, he might take back those magic words: “I think you’re in the clear.”
I wave my hand. “Just dumb who-likes-who stuff. Seemed like a big deal at the time.”
My dad looks at me, waiting to see if he’ll get any more. I keep the smile on my face. Thanks, Dad! All better now!
Finally, he stands up, says, “Okay, well, if you want to talk more, you know where to find me.”
“Yup.”
When he’s gone, I look back at the computer screen, the empty box where I started to write my hateful thoughts. I hit refresh. Instantly, more grief floods the screen. We heart you forever, Chloe! We’ll never forget you! I can’t stop crying!
There is no room for what I feel, no place I can say what I truly think.
I push away from my desk. I know for a fact I could post every single nasty thing Chloe did to me and people would go, “Why are you being so horrible? Why are you being so mean?”
I pace, buzzing with anger. I see my crystal animals on the sill. My dad’s sweet little presents to his sweet little girl. I can’t stand how ridiculous and childish they look.
My fingers reach, close on Phoebe the unicorn. With one monstrous swing, I hurl her across the room. She shatters against the wall; little chunks of glass land on my bureau, fall onto the rug. I knew she would break; I wanted to break her. But seeing her destroyed, I burst into tears.
Going to the bureau, I try to put her back together. Little Phoebe, my symbol of purity. With stupid, clumsy fingers, I push the shards into a pile, whimpering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Oh, God, will you forgive me? Please?” Bits of glass cut my fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” I say again to Phoebe’s broken body. “I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t fix it, but oh, God, I am so sorry.”