Chapter 16

I was on a boat. The varnish on the wooden deck was hot from the sun; I could feel the heat through the soles of my feet. The air rushed by, smelling of salt and freshly washed cotton, but it was cold. I looked up. There was a green-and-white-striped sail pushing the boat forward as we cut a line through the white-tipped waves. I could see seagulls racing alongside, swooping up and down. There was a picnic set up on the deck of the boat. Deviled eggs, turkey sandwiches, a bunch of green grapes, and a pan of brownies cut into perfect squares. There was a single brownie resting on a napkin with a half-moon bite taken out of it.

It should have been an ideal scene. They put images like this on postcards. But instead of feeling relaxed, I felt panicked. My heart was racing and I couldn’t get a breath. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Then I placed it. There was no sound. Absolutely none. No snap of the sail in the wind or creak from the ropes in the metal cleats. The seagulls weren’t making their barking laugh. I opened my mouth and screamed until my throat burned.

Not a sound.

She didn’t say anything and she didn’t touch me. I knew she was there, because I sensed her. I turned around slowly. She was standing at the back of the boat. Her long hair was blowing in the wind. She held out her arms as if she expected me to run into her embrace. She was bundled up with thick socks and a jacket. We stood there staring at each other for what seemed like forever. I said her name, Evelyn, but the sound never left my mouth. I took a step closer to her and she fell back, stiff as a board, off the boat. I raced to the edge and looked over. She was slowly sinking, her arms and legs out. Her hair was mixing with the strings of seaweed. She looked straight into my eyes. It seemed to me that she didn’t look scared or panicked, but rather that she was somehow worried for me. She looked concerned and sad. I reached for her, but it was too far, and as the water soaked her clothes she began sinking faster. Then she was gone. Bubbles rose to the surface while I watched, helpless to do anything.

Suddenly her hands shot out of the water and grabbed me by the wrists. I tumbled into the ice-cold ocean. I opened my mouth and the water rushed in.

I woke up, barely able to choke off the scream that was about to rise from my throat. I sat straight up in bed. My T-shirt was stuck to me with sweat. I wanted to turn on the light, but I was terrified that if I pulled my hands out from under the covers, Evelyn’s clammy hand would grab me. Or I could turn on the light and she would be standing by the window again. I took quick, shallow breaths, trying to pull my shit together. I never used to have nightmares. Or if I did they were the typical being naked while taking an exam type. The kind of bad dream where as soon as you wake up you know you’re fine. Instead I was still shaking and couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was in trouble. What was I going to do, sit there terrified until morning?

Actually, staying awake wasn’t a half-bad idea. I shot a look at the clock and saw it was two a.m. Four hours until six. That wasn’t too bad, a measly four hours. Heck, once Anita and I waited outside a music store for nine hours for concert tickets. That was outside where there had been bums, and Anita was pretty sure she saw a rat by the Dumpster. It could have been rabid. If I could wait nine hours there, why wouldn’t I be able to make it a lousy four hours comfy in my own bed? I would just sit right here until it started to get light. It’s well known that things that go bump in the night can be under your bed, but they aren’t allowed in. It’s some sort of rule. As long as I stayed under the covers, nothing could touch me. Besides, now there were only three hours and fifty-eight minutes to go. The time was practically flying by. I tried to distract myself by doing the times tables in my head.

I made it until the threes before a new problem, in addition to my possible haunting, came up. I had to pee. Three hours fifty-two minutes. I tried crossing my legs and thinking dry desert thoughts. I wasn’t going to make it until six a.m. No way. That left me two choices:

 

1. Stay here and pee the bed. This option was fraught with a whole load of downsides, not the least being forced to sit in a puddle of my own urine for hours (three hours forty-seven minutes to be exact). Then there would be the morning humiliation to consider. Dick’s great-grandmother probably made this bed by collecting feathers off her pet goose. He would shit if I peed in it. He would make me sleep on rubber sheets as long as I lived here. Plus Nathaniel would know. I would be his spastic stepsister with an incontinence problem.

2. Leave the bed and make a run for the bathroom. This had the upside of not getting me a year’s subscription to Bedwetters Anonymous. The downside was obvious. I had to leave the safety of the covers and risk the dead girl grabbing ahold of me.

I made it another three minutes by crossing my legs in a complicated yoga position I didn’t know I could make. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I reached out as fast as I could and yanked the chain on my bedside lamp. The light clicked on, and no one touched me. I counted to three and opened my eyes. The room was empty. On the window seat Mr. Stripes the stuffed zebra was propped up where I’d left him.

“Stop staring at me.” I was glad he didn’t do what I said. He kept sitting there doing nothing the way a proper unanimated stuffed animal should. My breathing started to slow down. I was almost 100 percent certain I was alone. I jumped out of bed (on the off chance Evelyn’s hands would shoot out from under the bed and grab my ankles) and did the dance to the bathroom. Ah, sweet relief!

I drank some water from the bathroom sink and then rubbed my wet hands over my face. It was just a bad dream. A freaky, creepy, lay-off-the-Oreos-after-ten kind of dream, but that was it. Nightmares are common. In science class last year we’d learned that 50 percent of adults have occasional nightmares. Fifty percent. That’s like a majority. Or it would be a majority if some of the other 50 percent admitted that they did too. I was going to go back in there, crawl into bed, and drift back off to sleep. This time I would dream about something happy. I’d heard that if you were concentrating on something when you fell asleep, you could make yourself dream about that topic. I’d focus on happy thoughts. My thoughts were going to be Technicolor Disney-princess happy. Singing bluebirds, dancing chipmunks, fa la la la.

I was almost back to bed when I stepped on something sharp and felt it snap and crunch under my foot. I sucked a breath in through my teeth. I plopped down on the bed and pulled up my leg. There was a thin line of blood on the ball of my foot. I looked down at the floor, trying to figure out what I’d stepped on.

There, next to the bed, was a small pile of seashells. One of the larger shells, pink and brown, was broken into thirds.