I TELL HER about the footprints. The water pooling in the hall. The ghost. I tell her about Aubrey’s diary and the water stains around the bed and the few undamaged words that remained. The Drowning Girl. Don’t let it in. Grace.
“Grace,” Delphine says, her body giving a jolt.
“Does that mean something to you?” I ask.
She frowns. “I feel like it should. Who is she?”
“I’m not even sure it’s a name,” I say. I pause. “Mr. Campos said there was a girl who went missing in the eighties. She might have drowned in the Narrow.”
“Grace,” Delphine says.
“Maybe,” I allow. “You really believe me?”
She looks at me steadily. Those eyes could cut right through you. She’d see the secret heart of me even if I tried to hide it, I think. “I believe what you say you saw, but what actually happened?”
“You drowned. And you came back,” I say slowly. “And in between . . .”
“In between, something changed. Something that left me like this,” Delphine says.
“You don’t remember anything about that night?” I ask.
She looks away, arms wrapped tightly around her middle. “Maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a dream and what’s a memory.”
“You drowned. And the Drowning Girl keeps coming here,” I say.
She snorts. “Right. A ghost who wants to drag me back to the watery grave that was meant for me?”
“Or maybe that’s not it at all,” I say. We’re standing so close to each other it’s almost harder not to touch her. “Something saved you that night. Something lifted you out of the water. You couldn’t have gotten free yourself.”
“Are you saying a ghost saved my life, Eden?” Delphine asks softly. She looks up at me. I can see the golden flecks in her blue eyes.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I say. I want to touch her arm, to reassure her, but I curl my fingers against my palm instead. “But I want to find out. I want to know what it is she wants.”
“And then what?” Delphine asks wearily.
“Maybe we find a way to stop this,” I say. “Maybe we find a way to get you out of here.”
“Maybe,” she echoes. She turns away, stepping toward the door. There she pauses, her hand on the frame. “Or maybe you’ve got it wrong. Maybe I did drown in the Narrow. Maybe I died, and I’m the one who’s a ghost.”
On Saturday, it rains all day, and Delphine doesn’t summon me to her room. Veronica and Ruth both text me to meet up, but I give them excuses. I don’t want to risk venturing outside. I bury myself in schoolwork instead, opening the door only once, when a harried-looking staff member drops my long-lost luggage at my door. I leave my bags heaped inside, not able to summon up the energy to unpack them. My arm aches. It’s hard typing one-handed. Hard thinking at all.
If I don’t go out, the water can’t get in. I’ll be safe.
The throbbing of my arm makes my thoughts fray. The bruises are still there, purple and ugly.
As night falls, I give in at last. I’ve put the painkillers Delphine gave me in an empty ibuprofen bottle. I shake one out into my palm, then hold it up to the light. You’re supposed to take it so that it’s time-released, smothering your pain without getting you high, but of course the high was the point for Dylan. He acted like he was giving me a special present every time he offered me some. I shouldn’t have taken it, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice—and it helped. It left me euphoric and disconnected, drifting. It was like those days were a piece of paper I could fold in half and skip from edge to edge. And that was what I needed. After he found me in the kitchen, Dylan knew that he was screwed. Well, Luke was screwed. Whatever he threatened me with, all I had to do was make one phone call. Luke would go to jail, and Dylan would lose a steady paycheck. He needed leverage.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he told me. And together, we walked out to the pool house.
Luke was crashed out on the couch, playing some first-person shooter badly. He barely looked up when we came in. “What’s she doing here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dylan said.
The whole place looked like a TV set: Interior, Druggie Loser’s Living Room, Day. It would have been funny if I wasn’t terrified. “Have a drink. Settle your nerves,” Dylan suggested, but it wasn’t a suggestion. He made me a screwdriver, and then another. I looked over at Luke, some naive little part of me still hoping he’d act like my big brother and save me, but he seemed amused by the whole thing. Then Dylan gave me something—not one of these pills, something else, I didn’t know what, and I was drifting.
That’s when he started taking pictures. Photos of me, glassy-eyed, a bottle of vodka in my hand. Pills spilled over the table. Accepting the sloppily rolled joint Luke held out. Any one of those photos would get me kicked out of Atwood and tank my ability to get into college.
He finally let me stagger back to the house after dark. I puked for what felt like an hour and passed out fully dressed on my bed. In the morning, I took a forty-minute shower and I thought it was over, but just as I finished getting dressed, I looked up and there he was in the doorway. “Hey, Princess,” he said.
And so that’s what we did. Every day until the day before my parents got home, I went out to the pool house with Dylan and Luke.
That was my summer. Weeks spent trying to make myself empty. To do nothing but survive. All I had to do was get to the end, get back to Atwood, and I would be safe and I could forget it ever happened.
But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“Hey, Princess,” Dylan said, and I’m in Abigail House, but his grin is a pale slash in the darkness of my room, and it isn’t over at all. Maybe it never will be.
I put the pill on my tongue and wash it down with a swig of flat distilled water. I swallow it whole. I won’t let the tide take me under. I want clarity, not oblivion. And for that, I need the pain to recede.
My phone chimes. It’s a message from Delphine.
I believe you, it says. Now what?
I consider. We find the Drowning Girl, I write.
We find Grace, she replies.
And with that, the ghost has a name.
I wait for sleep, and I wait for her.
She doesn’t come. Only dreams of that bright room and the dark, destroyed world that lies outside it. No matter how far I walk, the room is always right there behind me when I finally give up and turn around.
I wake to a knock on the door. I comb my hair with my fingers as I stumble blearily toward it. My head is foggy. Cotton candy and stuffing pulled out of a teddy bear. I yank the door open and find myself looking at a stranger whose face I know intimately. I’ve seen it larger than life on the theater screen and shrunk down to nothing on my phone. Madelyn Fournier.
Madelyn Fournier is a woman of strong, striking angles: a broad jaw, a wide mouth, a nose that’s a touch larger than you’d expect and makes her stand out.
I’ve never been the kind to get tongue-tied or starstruck. I’m not even a fan—I’ve seen a few of her movies and think she’s obviously a talented actress, but she mostly stars in the kind of dramas that win Oscars and end up on “worst movies to bring a date to” lists.
In person, even before she speaks, she’s electric: immensely tall and dressed to elegant perfection in a silk shell and black pencil skirt, diamond studs winking at her ears. It isn’t that she’s beautiful—though she is—but that she seems to fill up every atom of space around her. Like not even air wants to get in her way.
“Eden, isn’t it?” she says, and the sound of my name on her lips makes me shrivel in place. I realize I’m standing there dumbstruck in front of a movie star, my hair a rat’s nest and dried drool at the corner of my mouth.
“I completely forgot you were coming,” I say, mortified. Madelyn Fournier hadn’t been terribly intimidating in the abstract, but that was when I’d only ever encountered her with the pause button near at hand. Her eyes flick around the apartment behind me, taking in the small signs of disarray.
“I suppose it is rather cruel of me to burst in on a high schooler at seven a.m. on a Sunday,” she acknowledges. I search for anger in her voice, but all I hear is the faint curl of amusement, perhaps even genuine apology. “I’m very sorry—I just got in, and with the jet lag and all, I didn’t quite think through the time difference. I’ll let you get cleaned up, and then why don’t you pop over to my side of the house?”
I agree—or I think I do, I honestly can’t tell if I’ve managed a coherent sentence before she waves a goodbye and shuts my door for me, leaving me gaping.
So that’s Madelyn Fournier. The woman who holds my future in the palm of her hand.
“Shit,” I say eloquently. If she’s been on a plane, does that mean she didn’t see the footage of me and her daughter? Oh, God, we were out of camera view when Delphine gave me the drugs, weren’t we?
The drugs that are still leaving slug trails through my brain.
I haven’t unpacked. I start to yank at the zipper on one of my bags, panicky, and then make myself stop. She said I could come over whenever I’m ready, and surely she didn’t want me smelling of—yuck. Sweat, mostly. She probably smelled me from across the doorway.
At least that’s something to worry about that isn’t ghosts.
I shower quickly, then get dressed.
It’s Sunday, which means I have the added pressure of deciding what to wear. Going around in your uniform on the weekend is a quick way to lose all social credibility. I decide on a black turtleneck and ankle-length tan skirt—what Veronica calls my “ambiguously anachronistic librarian” look. I settle her pentacle around my neck, a flash of silver against the black, but after a moment’s consideration flip it around so only the plain back shows. I don’t know what Madelyn Fournier would think of it.
I steel myself and walk across the hall, making myself hold my arm at something vaguely resembling a natural angle. The door has been left open a crack. I knock twice, tentatively, and Madelyn Fournier’s voice calls out for me to come in.
I enter. Unsurprisingly, this side of the house is far better furnished than mine. I recognize the couch from a high-end catalog my mom has been sighing over. It’s bright red, with clean mid-century modern angles that are shared by most of the other furniture.
“Coffee, Eden?” Madelyn Fournier calls to me. I can’t help but think of her with her full name. She’s in the kitchen—bigger than mine and sporting quartz countertops that gleam white with gray marbling shot through them. “Or I can whip up an espresso for you.”
“Coffee would be lovely, if it’s not too much trouble,” I say in my best impress-the-adults voice.
“It’s already made. I go through about a gallon a day,” she says in a confessional tone. She pours me a cup and sets it on the counter. I step close enough to curl one hand around it. She leans over, propping her elbows on the counter. I can see the pores on her nose. It doesn’t seem like Madelyn Fournier should have pores on her nose. “So. Tell me about yourself, Eden.”
My mind, of course, goes completely blank.
“I’m a senior,” I say haltingly. “I’ve been attending Atwood since sixth grade.”
“Ah, a lifer,” she says. She sounds enthralled. “Do you like it here?”
“Atwood? Yes, of course,” I say.
“It’s a hard thing, being away from your family for most of the year.”
“It’s definitely hard,” I lie. “But you get used to it. And it’s such a good school academically; plus, most of the private schools near us were religious, so they wouldn’t have worked for us.”
There’s no question of why I didn’t go to public school. For most Atwood families, it would be unthinkable.
“What do your parents do?” she asks me.
“My mother works for Denham and Brook, and my father works for Haley Imports, but I couldn’t tell you what they actually do. It’s all spreadsheets and mergers and meetings as far as I’m concerned,” I say with a false little laugh that’s reliable for charming people with.
“And they’re still working?”
There it is. I look at her earlobe so I don’t have to look her in the eye as I think. There’s no plausible lie I can come up with. Only the embarrassing, miserable truth. “You want to know why I need the tuition, right?”
“I don’t mean to pry, but there are students whose families are not nearly as well off who might benefit from the scholarship,” she says. “I want to make sure you actually need it.”
Meaning: She wants to make sure that I’m actually stuck here. That I have enough motivation not to just cut and run at the first sign of trouble—or the first sight of a dead girl at the foot of my bed.
“My parents are absolutely terrible with money,” I say. “They find ways to spend everything they make and then go into debt to buy more. They make enough that it isn’t usually a problem, but I guess something came up, and this time there wasn’t enough left over for tuition. So they just didn’t pay. I don’t know, I guess they thought it would work itself out somehow if they ignored it. They have a lot going on.” I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, try to keep it light, almost like it’s funny. But I have to look away.
“I imagine that if they sit down to find the money, they could,” Madelyn Fournier says. There’s no judgment in her voice.
“But I would have to ask,” I say.
“There’s quite a bit you would do to avoid having to ask your parents for help, isn’t there?” she says quietly.
“It would all be my fault somehow,” I say. “I know I’m wildly privileged, and it’s not like we’re actually broke, it’s just bad decision-making. But . . .” I sound whiny, pathetic. But she reaches out and puts a hand on my wrist.
“You don’t need to worry that I’m going to kick you out because your parents make too much,” she says. She straightens up. “The money was going to go to Aubrey this year. No one is going to be deprived because you’re here. So put that out of your mind. And it’s no trouble for me at all, of course.”
There’s rich and then there’s rich, and she’s the sort of rich for whom more than a combined hundred grand a year in tuition is hardly noticeable.
Besides, she wants me to be grateful. I see it the moment before she says it. The tightening of her shoulders and the not-quite-casual way she lifts her mug to her lips, watching me over the rim. “Eden, there’s something a little bit awkward I’ve got to ask you,” she says.
“What is it?” Eyes wide, guileless, meeting hers without faltering. As if I don’t already know.
“I’m away quite often, as I’m sure you know. And when I’m here, there are parts of my daughter’s life I’m not privy to. I would like you to keep an eye on her for me and let me know how she’s doing. I’m not asking you to spy on her”—she says this quickly, obviously not believing it herself—“just to keep me updated and answer a few questions. Delphine doesn’t like what a mother hen I am, so it would need to be just between the two of us. Oh, and I should mention—I always supplied Aubrey with a bit of a stipend. You’re welcome to the same.”
I could tell her I don’t need the money, but she’ll feel more secure in my loyalty if I take it, so I say, “That would be amazing. I don’t exactly want to have to call home for an allowance.”
“Wonderful,” she says. “Well! I’m sure you have plenty to do other than talk to an old lady like me. Don’t let me keep you from your weekend plans.”
I’ve been dismissed. I thank her for the coffee—she insists that I take it with me—and I flee back across the hall, feeling like I’ve just passed a pop quiz. And maybe I have. She likes me. For now. She thinks she has leverage. And as this summer has driven home, with the right leverage, you can get someone to do just about anything for you.