On Friday morning, I stowed my pink cashmere cardigan in my school bag in preparation for the Homecoming game in Kenosha later that night.
"I'm going to be home late tonight," I informed my mom in the kitchen, where she was correcting papers submitted by her students with a red pen between her fingers, ready to strike. I took a swig of orange juice straight out of the jug from the fridge.
"How late?" Mom asked, barely looking up from her grading task.
"Somewhat late," I replied smartly. Kenosha was a three-hour drive from Willow, and the game started at seven. Even if it ended promptly at nine, which I was sure it wouldn't since I knew from past experience that the half-time show would last at least twenty minutes, the earliest I could possibly expect to be home again was midnight. And that was if we didn't stop for fast food on the way back to town. Which, I strongly suspected, we would.
"Can you define somewhat?" Mom asked, finally putting her red pen down, adjusting her glasses and looking at me.
I rolled my eyes, knowing that she was going to make a big deal about my being out past midnight. "I'm going to the Homecoming game with Olivia and Candace. The game starts at seven, but Homecoming games always start late. And it'll be at least two hours long, and it's all the way in Kenosha, so the drive back is almost three hours."
My mother took a deep breath, not amused with me at all. "So, after midnight is what you're saying without saying it."
I crossed my arms over my chest to suggest my annoyance with her.
"I don't feel very good about that, McKenna," Mom told me. "You know I don't want to spoil your fun, but that's really late for a bunch of kids who just got their licenses to be out on the highway. Who's going to be driving?"
I hesitated, not really wanting to divulge that we'd be in Pete's car. Pete's expensive car.
"Olivia's boyfriend," I replied, not sure my mom would recognize the name if I had said Pete Nicholson.
"And how old is Olivia's boyfriend? Old enough to buy beer?"
It was becoming difficult to resist the urge to groan and tell my mom she was being ridiculous. "Mom. No one is going to be drinking beer. Do you realize Olivia is the Class President? She wouldn't go around driving drunk. And her boyfriend is not old enough to buy booze, okay? I don't see what the big deal is. You let me go to the Homecoming game last year with the band and you weren't a huge freak about it."
My mother sighed as if she couldn't stand to hear another word come out of my mouth. "McKenna, I liked you a lot more before you were fabulous. I want you home by midnight. End of story."
I exhaled loudly to let her know that she was ruining my social life. How was I going to tell an entire car full of my friends that I had to be a party pooper and get home before everyone else?
At lunchtime, our entire table buzzed with excitement. The football team, including Isaac, was loud and obnoxious, obviously getting psyched up for the game that night.
"Victory! Victory!" Isaac bellowed, manhandling his meatball submarine sandwich to make it look like the sandwich was leading the table in a rousing chant. The other players on the team were roaring with laughter and chiming in, pounding on the table and stomping their feet. The cafeteria supervisors were beaming. Any other day of the year, they'd be handing out detention slips for rowdy behavior left and right, but the day of the Homecoming game, everyone was encouraging the chaos.
"We should leave no later than three forty-five," Pete told us. "I have basketball practice for an hour after class, but after that, we should all meet in front of the library."
I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever orientation Mr. Dean had planned for those of us wishing to run for student office couldn't possibly take more than an hour. "You're going to the Student Government election meeting, right?" I asked Olivia, really wanting for us to attend the meeting together, kind of innocently hoping that she hadn't been kidding about us running together as a team.
"I'm not sure," she said, wrinkling her delicate button nose. "I have a small crisis on my hands. I still don't have a pair of shoes for the dance tomorrow that matches my dress. I mean, I have a pair of white heels from my uncle's wedding, but they totally clash. I was thinking about making a mad dash for the mall after school and then meeting you guys at the game."
My stomach began to feel queasy. If Olivia wasn't at Mr. Dean's meeting, then how serious was she about running for Class President again? What if Mr. Dean wouldn't let her run because she had so casually disregarded his required meeting? What if Michael Walton saw an opportunity to surge past her and snatched the coveted role of president from her, and I had to spend the rest of junior year listening to his sniveling narrative about the lack of adequate recycling bins in the cafeteria?
"Oh my god, Olivia, that's just like the story Violet told," Candace announced, her eyes enormous.
Violet, at the end of the table, smiled nervously. "The story was just silly," she murmured.
It was indeed strange that it was Friday, the day of the big game, just as Violet had started her story about Olivia's fictitious death, and Olivia was talking about going to the mall, just as she had done in Violet's story. I got a little chill when I remembered what Violet had told me on the track after Olivia's party, about how sometimes she saw things.
"What about the dance?" Olivia asked Violet suddenly, as if it had only just then, in that second, occurred to her that Violet had not yet confirmed a date. The topic of the similarities between the day's circumstances and those described in Violet's story was banished. "Who are you going with?"
Violet's face brightened and her eyes sparkled. "Didn't I tell you guys? I'm going with this guy from my church. He goes to St. Patrick's in Ortonville."
Mischa raised an eyebrow at me and I looked away, not wanting Violet to observe our doubt. She definitely had not mentioned this mysterious sudden Homecoming date; this was the first we were hearing of it. Olivia, never a skeptic until she had irrefutable reason to be one, looked genuinely surprised. "Really? That's awesome! What's his name?"
"Mark," Violet offered. "Regan. I think he went to public school in Willow until around fifth grade before his parents put him on the bus for private school."
"I remember him," Candace announced in a bored voice. "I remember him in first grade eating uncooked pasta when we were supposed to be stringing it together as necklaces for our mothers in art class. Blond hair, dimples?"
Violet nodded.
"Interesting. I can't picture what he must look like now," Mischa commented, peeling dimpled skin off of an orange.
I tried to remember any blond boys from elementary school in our own grade who had switched to private school at some point, but there were so many names and faces flooding my memories of kids who had moved out of Willow that Mark Regan didn't come to mind.
"Cool," Olivia said with a genuine smile, relieved of not having to chastise Violet for failing to spark an interest in a boy before the dance. "Is he coming to the game tonight?"
Violet shook her head. "No. He's on the St. Patrick's football team and they have their own game in Ortonville tonight. I might go to that instead of our game. I mean, if that's okay with you guys."
Consensus around the lunchroom table was that it was okay for Violet to attend the game in Ortonville instead of riding to Kenosha with the rest of us. Before we cleared our trays and gathered up our books, Olivia patiently reminded us to vote for Homecoming Court. She and Pete wove their fingers together across the table, smiling at each other in a way that only the most popular kids in school can smile when they're also in love. No one could ever be more perfect than Olivia and Pete, not even Candace and Isaac. I ventured up to the table where two sophomores were managing the ballot box with Candace trailing behind me.
"Check one box for Homecoming Queen, and one box for King," the acne-faced sophomore girl who handed me my ballot instructed me.
Because our high school was so small, the names of every student in the junior class had been printed on the ballot alongside a checkbox, as if anyone other than Olivia and Pete would be receiving votes. As I checked the box next to Olivia's name, I imagined the tiara that would be placed on her head the following night. Weeping Willow High School usually went all-out when it came to selecting tiaras for Prom and Homecoming Queens. Olivia would receive a tiered, bejeweled monstrosity to place upon her stiffly hairsprayed blond upsweep, and she'd undoubtedly receive an equally tacky crown the following year when she was named Senior Prom Queen. I felt a twinge of something distant as I folded up my ballot and handed it back to the sophomore at the table. Jealousy? Maybe. But it would be better to not even wonder what it might be like to get to wear that tacky crown and have confetti fall on me. That would not be my high school experience, not in this lifetime.
"Like it's going to be any surprise who wins," Candace smirked at me as she submitted her own ballot. There was just a hint of wistfulness in her smirk that made me take notice. For a brief second I wondered what it must have been like for Candace, living in Olivia's shadow. I'd already put fifteen years behind me of knowing the futility of wishing one day I'd be the prettiest girl at school. For Candace, the unacknowledged loss of a competition that never ended must have been painful, even if she knew she'd forfeited the right to jealousy when she and Olivia had become best friends.
After eighth period, I rushed to my locker, eager to get the Student Government meeting with Mr. Dean over and done with. I still felt pretty anxious about the possibility of a dark horse entering the race and stealing my chance at victory. There were an odd handful of people in the junior class who could do exactly that; any number of guys from the basketball or football teams, one of Tracy Hartford's friends from the softball team or French club. I didn't want to simply assume I'd win, not even for a second.
Olivia appeared next to my locker, already carrying her books in her canvas monogrammed bag over one shoulder. "I talked to Mr. Dean," she informed me. "He told me since I've already run for office before, I'm excused from today's meeting."
She was smiling like she had a wicked secret, waiting expectantly for something.
"Oh," I replied, unsure of why she remained standing there, next to my locker, as I stuffed my backpack with books I wouldn't touch again until Sunday afternoon.
"So," Olivia said, dragging the word across an entire octave of notes, "Will you come to the mall with me?"
I closed my locker and twisted the lock. "Olivia, you're excused from the meeting, but I'm not. I have to go if I want to run, even though it's just a dumb requirement." Under any other circumstances, I would have abandoned whatever plans I'd made for myself to partake in anything Olivia asked of me. But the strange note of sadness I'd observed in Candace's voice in the cafeteria earlier that afternoon had made me the slightest bit wary about giving up all of myself in support of Olivia. Olivia had practically already won the election for Class President before posters were hung, before ballots were cast, before votes were counted. The same could be said about her Homecoming Queen crown, it was hers before junior year had even started. Olivia already had everything; she didn't really need me to forfeit my shot at holding class office to go shoe shopping with her. Still, I felt like refusing to join her on her drive to Green Bay might jeopardize every element of my new life, including my plans to go to Homecoming with her brother in just over twenty-four hours.
"I know, I know. I really don't want to drive to Green Bay alone, though. Please? We can drive down to Kenosha together and I'll even buy you tacos on the way?" Olivia stared me down with those warm lagoon blue eyes of hers, quite clearly accustomed to getting her way. I felt my insistence on attending the meeting beginning to slip from my grasp. I couldn't give into her will, I wouldn't. If I folded on my intent to run for office, it would be a hasty decision that I'd regret all year.
I tried to suppress my rising annoyance with her for suggesting that her reluctance to shop alone had greater importance than my need to establish myself at school. "I would, Olivia, honestly, but I really want to run for Class Treasurer. It's just one meeting. It'll probably be over in twenty minutes, if you can wait."
Olivia sighed, cross with me but accepting that I wasn't going to cave. "Not even. Mr. Dean will blab for like, forty minutes, and make you all suffer through a lesson about the Electoral College and how our stupid Student Government elections at Willow High School compare to presidential elections in this country. I've endured it twice." She dug the keys to her new car out of her pink leather purse and dangled them from one of her fingers. "Last chance."
"Are you sure you want to go to Green Bay?" I asked suddenly, the strangeness of Violet's story at Olivia's birthday party returning to me. "It's just a little too weird, Olivia. Just like Violet's story."
"Oh my god," Olivia smiled, wrinkling her forehead. "You're not afraid to go shopping with me because of some stupid ghost story, are you?"
I wasn't, honestly. My real reason for not going to Green Bay was the meeting that was starting momentarily in Mr. Dean's classroom. "No, of course not! That would be dumb. But you have to admit, it is weird."
"McKenna, you are way too gullible. Violet's story was about a storm, and it's perfectly sunny outside. Candace has been checking the weather report all week to make sure the game won't be delayed. I will be fine," Olivia rolled her eyes and swatted me on the upper arm. "No tacos for you, then."
"I'll see you tonight," I said, hoping that I hadn't genuinely infuriated her. Olivia could be sneaky with her fury. She wasn't an outright mean or cruel popular girl, the stereotypical cheerleader-type portrayed in movies. On the surface she was good-natured and generous, but could turn in a second like an angry cat, whipping out claws without even giving any outward indication of her change in mood. If she was angry with me, she'd decide in her car on the way to Green Bay, and she'd strike at me later. As I watched her saunter down the long hallway toward the doors to the parking lot, her long pale blond hair hanging in a straight sheet to her waist, I realized there was a slim chance that Pete wouldn't even be waiting for me after school. That was how Olivia operated. Like a queen, moving all of her pawns to suit her whimsy.
"The voting period will be held Monday and Tuesday of the week after next. All ballots will be counted next Tuesday night, giving you a solid week to promote your campaigns. The ballots will be tallied by a team of faculty members to remove any potential for cheating."
Mr. Dean droned on and on, having documented and created a strict process for every single detail of our student elections. I seriously wondered if running for office at other high schools was such a rigorous affair, or if people literally just wrote down names on index cards and stuffed them into a shoebox in the cafeteria. At least I could relax a little now that I had seen the competition. No one was attempting to run against Olivia Richmond; that would have been sheer madness. Michael Walton was being challenged by Nicole Blumenthal, who was also his only real competition for valedictorian status. I didn't know Nicole well enough to be able to guess her reason for running; maybe now that we were juniors and college was a little bit more of a tangible reality, her parents were urging her to get more serious about putting experience on applications, too. Jason Arkadian smiled weakly at me across the aisle of chairs, and then proceeded to doodle in his spiral notebook throughout the entire meeting. I recalled sourly how Candace had told me the night we were in Olivia's pool that Jason had a crush on me, and figured it was safe to assume that he'd been cured of his crush.
Outside the classroom, a story below, I could hear the marching band loading its equipment onto the orange school bus that would deliver it to Kenosha. I remembered back to Homecoming of the previous year, and how itchy and hot my navy color guard uniform had been in the atypical September heat on the night of the game. That game had been in Fond du Lac, not nearly as far away as Kenosha. I wondered if Kelly and Erica, the girls with whom I had been closest friends on the color guard team, were boarding the bus for the long drive. The other girl on the team with whom I'd been friendly, Maggie, had quit the team the first week of school, just as I had. She'd undergone her own transformation over the summer, from knobby-kneed nerd to a girl who wore a lot of eyeliner, had her lip pierced, and hung out with the burn-out kids from the drama club.
I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. It was stultifying in the history classroom, and when I turned to see if the windows at the back of the room were even open, I was alarmed to see that storm clouds were rolling in. When I'd first sat down at the start of the meeting, the sky outside had been clear and blue. But now it looked unnaturally bright outside with a thick blanket of clouds covering the sun.
I immediately thought of Violet.
Without wanting to attract the attention of Mr. Dean, I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and discreetly texted Olivia. Are you at the mall? Are you okay?
She texted me back five minutes later, when Mr. Dean was wrapping up the meeting, distributing hand-outs listing rules regulating in-school campaign advertising. Just got here. Took forever to find parking.
Posters, buttons, and stickers were permitted. Stickers found stuck on school property, like lockers, would be scraped off by the janitors. Posters defaming any other candidates would not be allowed. Advertising materials making mention of any school faculty or staff, or using profanity, would not be allowed. Sabotaging any other candidates' advertising materials would not be allowed. It made my head spin to think that Mr. Dean had spent so much time imagining all the ways in which kids might underhandedly promote themselves just to win a school election.
Finally, the meeting came to an end. It was ten minutes to four, a full five minutes after Pete had said he wanted everyone to meet in the parking lot to depart for Kenosha. I was frantic with fear that the group had left without me, or that Olivia had instructed them to do so even though she had taken the time to answer my text. I rushed down the stairs to the ground floor of the school and pushed through the doors which led to the student parking lot.
Outside, I was stunned by the strange energy of the afternoon. The cloudy sky was bright with ultraviolet rays, and everything in the parking lot was at a standstill. There was an electric charge in the air as if something was about to happen, something static and coiled, waiting to be set into motion. I looked around wildly for Pete's black Infiniti, not wanting to appear as if I was looking around wildly, and not seeing it in the first three rows of cars, I fished my phone out of my bag to pretend to look busy. In my head, I was in full panic mode. Would they really have left without me? Are they on their way to Kenosha right now, laughing because they know I'm probably standing here, looking for Pete's car? Even without knowing where everyone was and whether or not Olivia had mandated that I be left behind, my heart was palpitating. I felt like I was breaking out into a light sweat. That might have been it, the end of my brief popularity, right there on that strange afternoon.
Suddenly the door behind me opened and I turned, expecting to see Candace or Jeff, but instead I was startled to see Trey Emory, wearing his usual scowl and army jacket. When our eyes met he looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and he straightened his posture. "Why aren't you on your way to Kenosha? Aren't you going to the big game?" Trey asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.
"I am," I said nervously, wishing he wasn't there right then, at that very moment. "But I think my friends might have left without me. I was in this meeting, and it ran kind of late."
Trey studied me and shifted his weight from one ratty black Chuck Taylor to the other. "Well, leaving without you doesn't sound like something real friends would do."
I picked at my fingernail polish. "Not like they just left me, it's more like, kind of a joke. Only I'm just not sure." As I struggled to put my reason for standing there on the sidewalk along the parking lot into words, I realized I was vocalizing probably exactly what Trey was thinking. If I had reason to fear that Olivia would command Pete and Candace to leave me behind, and that they would do so without questioning her authority, they weren't really my friends. I wasn't one of them; I was simply masquerading as one of them. My temper burned with shame because I had put myself in this situation. My life had been much less complicated before I'd been inducted into Olivia's world. I could have been in Cheryl's mom's car at that very moment, drinking milkshakes without worrying about calories, if things hadn't changed before junior year. "Why are you still at school?" I asked him, wanting desperately to change the topic.
Trey shrugged. "Detention. We were changing the spark plugs and wires in Coach Stirling's car in shop yesterday and... let's just say she wasn't happy with my work."
I could hardly believe my own ears. Coach Stirling drove a legendary piece of junk, a 1989 powder blue Cadillac Fleetwood that was too enormous to even fit in one parking space in the faculty parking lot. The auto body shop class was always working on it, giving Coach Stirling much-needed free tune-ups. "Geez, Trey! You can't just sabotage a teacher's car!"
Trey smiled innocently. "I wasn't intentionally trying to sabotage it. Maybe I just suck at fixing cars."
I thought of Trey's Toyota and how it was basically held together with a hope and a prayer. He was in the Emorys' driveway almost every Saturday, working on it. "Yeah, right. You probably could teach auto body shop at this point."
He looked at his shoes, quite possibly blushing, and then added, "Well, maybe I decided to use Coach Stirling's car as the subject of an experiment because she doesn't like my sense of humor."
I was about to inquire further when suddenly Pete's black Infiniti pulled into the parking lot, blaring music. Jeff sat in the front seat, with Candace and a girl I didn't know very well, Melissa, sitting in the back seat. In horror I watched as the car looped around the parking lot on its way toward me, not knowing if they would continue driving right past me, cackling, to make sure I knew I was being left behind, or if there was a reasonable explanation for why they had obviously gone somewhere without me and doubled back. Either way, I was mortified that Trey was next to me, because whatever humiliation awaited me, he would witness.
"Are you ready, McKenna?" Jeff asked through his rolled-down window.
"Where were you guys?" I dared to ask.
"We stopped by my house to get umbrellas," Candace said from the back seat. "It's going to pour."
I looked up at the sky. The clouds were darkening, looking much more like storm clouds than they had just five minutes earlier. "Do you think the game is going to be cancelled?"
"It's not raining in Kenosha. I'm checking my weather app," Jeff informed all of us.
Next to me, I saw Trey shrinking away toward his own car. I wanted to call after him, but hesitated for a moment, hoping he wouldn't be annoyed with me for calling attention to him in front of the car full of popular kids. "Hey, Trey," I called against my better judgment.
He slowed down just for a second and turned, but kept walking backwards, not wanting to slow his pace toward his car.
I didn't really have anything to say to him, I just hadn't wanted us to part ways without saying goodbye. "Are you going to the game?"
"Nah," he said, stating the obvious. "I've got some errands to run, and besides. You know. I already used up all my school spirit this year just by showing up on the first day."
"See ya," I said, weakly.
He waved quickly without saying a word, his hand low, lifted out of his pants pocket for just a flash.
I climbed into the back seat of Pete's car as Melissa moved into the middle to make room for me. "Hi," I said to Melissa. "Melissa's going to Homecoming with Jeff," Candace said, explaining the presence of the girl with bright red hair and freckles.
"Has anyone heard from Olivia in a while?" I asked, just as my cell phone and Candace's buzzed in unison.
"Speak of the devil!" Candace laughed. We both checked our phones to find that Olivia wanted our input on two different pairs of cream-colored pumps she had found at the mall. "Totally the first pair," Candace commented, showing the pictures on her phone's screen to Melissa for approval.
"No way," I countered. "The second pair." We both race-texted our opinions back.
An hour and about twenty heavy metal songs later, we were outside Osh Kosh when it began drizzling. The rain put me on edge. Everything was starting to feel too similar to the story that Violet had told. Frighteningly similar, like the entire afternoon was an extended moment of déjà vu. I wondered if Candace was thinking the same thing as me, but if she was, she didn't let on. I focused on trying to imagine what it was going to be like once we got to Kenosha: the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and Olivia waiting for us in the stands.
"You guys," Candace said, as if she was trying to motivate us to do something fun, "You know what would be so cool? If we stopped at the next rest station."
Pete and Jeff both groaned. I was secretly relieved because I had to visit a bathroom, too, only I didn't have enough of a friendship established with Pete to request a stop. With much complaining about girls and their weak bladders, Pete pulled off the highway at the next rest stop and parked. The rain was falling more steadily, dancing on the roof of Pete's car and running in tiny rivers down its windows. Using the umbrellas brought from Candace's house, we all made a dash across the parking lot, running in between parked trucks. Pete intentionally jumped in a puddle to douse Jeff as he ran by, and Jeff yelled a curse word at him, the legs of his jeans soaked. We burst through the doors of the rest station complex in giggles, our energy still off the charts in anticipation of the big game.
"It's totally raining," Candace said as we both washed our hands in the ladies' room of the rest station beneath glaring fluorescent lights. "They're going to cancel the game."
Melissa joined us a second later, stepping in between us to use the available sink.
"Who could we call to ask?" I wondered, not really wanting to drive all the way to Kenosha only to turn around and drive home again. Six hours in a car for no good reason was a little excessive. I honestly would have preferred to drive back to Willow and see a movie, or even keep my mom company since it was making me uneasy to have left the house on bad terms with her earlier that morning.
Candace dug through her purse to apply lipstick, rubbing her lips dramatically together in the mirror and then smacking them when she was satisfied with their appearance. "Let's text Mischa," she suggested. "The cheerleading team should already be down there."
The group of us reconvened in the small food court area of the rest station, where a handful of truck drivers sat, eating burgers and ignoring each other, as we waited for Mischa to text Candace back with the deal about whether or not the game had been postponed. Through the wide glass doors of the rest station, we watched the rain shift into a heavy downpour, and a blinding flash of lightning crackled in the sky moments before an earsplitting clap of thunder shook the building.
"Jesus," Pete muttered. "It's like the end of the world."
"There's no way the game is still happening," Melissa said, popping one of the cheese fries she had purchased into her mouth. Jeff helped himself to some of her fries, sliding into the hard plastic seat next to hers. The smell was making me crazy with hunger, and I turned my head to try to avoid it. The energy that we had carried into the rest station was steadily evaporating. Our clothes were damp, our hair was tousled, and the long drive ahead to Kenosha seemed more daunting the longer we sat still.
Candace's phone rang, and she answered it, stepping away from the rest of us for a few minutes to chat. When she returned, she was frowning. "Game's off. It's being rescheduled for Monday night."
A truck driver with a long scraggly gray beard wearing a Brewers' baseball cap walked past our table on his way to dump the paper liner and napkins on his food tray into a nearby trash can. "You kids might as well sit tight for a while. There's a flash flood warning in effect. You shouldn't be driving on these roads right now."
Pete rolled his eyes once the truck driver's back was to us, but not one of us moved a muscle to get up from our table and return to Pete's Infiniti. None of the truck drivers at the rest stop appeared to be in a hurry to leave, either. All of them patiently watched the lightning flash through the station's thick windows, drinking coffees and flipping through newspapers, content to wait the storm out.
"This is really freaky," I said to Candace quietly, no longer able to suppress my fascination and fear about how the afternoon was unfolding. We sat next to each other on a hard plastic bench one table away from Melissa and Jeff. I thought of Olivia's words in the hallway near my locker earlier that afternoon, when she had begged me to accompany her to the mall. Even she had been a little on edge about the memory of Violet's story at the party.
"Agreed," Candace said without elaboration. Without saying a word to Pete or Jeff, she called Olivia, who surprisingly answered. "Olivia? It's Candace. The game's postponed." She paused, pressing her hand to her free ear to block out the scratchy music playing in the rest station in order to hear Olivia better. "Where are you?" She paused again, still having difficulty hearing Olivia. "We're just outside Osh Kosh but we're turning around once the rain stops and driving home. Can you hear me?"
Candace pulled her phone away from her ear and looked at it angrily as if she intended to fling it across the rest station. "Her cell phone is dying," she told me, frustrated. "She says she's fine and she's still at the mall but..."
Candace didn't have to finish her sentence for me to already know what would follow.
"Her car won't start."
Our eyes locked, and a chill ran through me so violently that I actually shivered. Melissa noticed the serious expressions on both of our faces and stopped chewing her fries for a moment. "What's up with you two?" she asked.
"Nothing," Candace said sharply over her shoulder. Her mouth resumed the shape of a firm line and her eyes returned to mine.
"Do you think we should say something to Pete?" I asked her in a lowered voice. Pete and Jeff were playing a video game on their cell phones, oblivious to our panic.
"Hell no," Candace shook her head. "They'd think we're nuts. Quite honestly, I think we're nuts, too. But this is just freaky."
Candace looked like she was about to start crying, which rattled me even more. Candace Cotton—the girl who wasn't afraid of anything—was afraid. It made me feel a little better to be in her presence, because if Candace was willing to admit that the events of Violet's story were falling into place, I knew I wasn't being paranoid.
"What should we do? Should we call the police?" I asked, completely serious.
"Not the police," Candace said firmly, raising her cell phone again. She tapped the screen. "We're calling Violet."
She strummed her fingernails impatiently on the crumb-covered table where we sat as Violet's phone rang once, twice, three times and then transferred to voicemail. Candace frowned and held the phone up to my ear so that I could hear Violet's familiar outgoing message, "Hi! This is Violet's cell phone. I'm not able to answer right now, so..."
Candace ended the call and hit redial. "This chick is so going to get it. Why did you guys have to play all those stupid games last weekend? I don't feel good about this." She waited again for Violet's voicemail to begin, her head cocked in annoyance, and this time left a stern message. "Violet. This is Candace. It's pouring rain, and Olivia's stuck at the mall in Green Bay. I think you can figure out why I'm calling you. You'd better call me back as soon as you get this."
I felt sickened with anxiety. We sat at the rest station as the storm raged on for another fifteen minutes. Candace bought an icy diet soda, increasing the likelihood of another necessary bathroom break within the hour. Finally, there was a sudden pause in the rain, and we all looked up at each other, surprised by how abruptly the pouring had ended.
"Should we make a run for it?" Jeff asked us.
"Now or never," Candace mused. We cleared our snack trays and stepped outside the rest station, surprised at how crisp and clean-smelling the air outside was after such heavy rain. Something kept us from rushing for the car; we stood outside the doors of the rest station for a moment with our collapsed umbrellas tucked under our arms, looking around in wonderment at the soaked parking lot.
One of the truck drivers—not the one with the beard who had cautioned us about the flash floods earlier, but an older one with an enormous belly—opened one of the rest station doors and leaned out of it to address us. "You kids might want to wait it out another five minutes or so." He looked up at the sky skeptically. "Smells like hail."
Pete smiled politely and responded in the voice he reserved for teachers and parents, "Thanks for the warning, but we have to be on our way."
The truck driver shrugged at us like we were just a bunch of dumb kids, and we began walking toward Pete's car. But we had barely gotten halfway across the lot when the first ball of hail struck the ground. The first few balls that I saw were tiny, just thimble-sized clumps of ice barreling down at the blacktop of the parking lot at an incredible speed, smashing to bits when they made impact with the ground and the cabs of trucks. Behind me, I heard Candace shriek, and in front of me, Melissa pulled the hood on her sweatshirt over her head to protect herself. Within seconds, however, the hail grew much larger, incredibly large, like little rock-hard ping pong balls flinging down upon us from the sky. They hammered against the trucks in the lot and the hoods of parked cars, sounding like gun shots when they made contact. I felt hail hitting my back, my shoulders, and my head, and it hurt so much that I could barely think straight as I broke into a run toward Pete's car. It was difficult to even see where I was going as the hail accumulated on the pavement, slippery and crunching beneath my boots.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Pete opened all four doors of his car with the remote on his key chain, and we climbed inside in a mad jumble. For a moment, after we slammed the doors shut, we sat in clumsy silence, just trying to catch our breath and make sense of the weather around us. The hail continued to slam down on Pete's hood and the roof of the car, trapping us temporarily in the vehicle.
"This is just nuts," Pete muttered to himself.
"It's like, biblical," Jeff added.
The hail was coming down so steadily that from where the car was parked, we couldn't even see the rest station ahead. A particularly large ball of hail falling at a high velocity struck the very center of Pete's windshield and cracked it, sending ripples through it like a stone thrown into a pond. It left a dent that looked like an elaborate spider web at the point of impact. We all jumped a few inches in the air. Candace and Melissa shrieked, and Candace dug her fingernails into my forearm.
"Oh, crap, dude," Jeff said to Pete.
Pete whipped out his cell phone to call AAA for a tow. "Great. Now we can't even drive home. My dad is going to kill me."
Over an hour later, as we watched a tow truck drag Pete's car away through the small mountains of melting hail, we bickered over whose parents should be summoned to fetch us. Oddly, the storm clouds had passed over, revealing a peaceful blue sky that was quickly darkening as night approached. Despite the unexpected change in the weather, the game remained postponed, and the football team was bound for Willow again, displeased that they wouldn't have a victory to celebrate the following night at the dance. Our big night out had unraveled in the most unexpected way, undone by a freak storm, exactly as Violet had predicted a week earlier. We hadn't heard back from Olivia yet, but Candace was adamant that everything was probably fine.
"She kept saying her cell phone was about to die. That's the only reason why she hasn't called," she insisted.
I couldn't shake the feeling that something very, very bad had happened. Finally, I worked up the nerve to step back inside the rest station alone and call my mom. I couldn't explain why, but as soon as I heard her voice, I began crying.
"McKenna, where are you?" she asked. As I suspected, she was in her office at the university, absolutely clueless about the storm that had just pelted most of central Wisconsin with hail.
"Outside Osh Kosh," I said, trying to steady my voice. "We got caught in a really bad hail storm and Pete's windshield was destroyed."
Mom sounded baffled about why I was so emotionally distraught. "But you're okay, right? Why do you sound so upset?"
I couldn't tell her, obviously, that I had significant reason to believe that one of my closest friends was probably being violently killed just outside Green Bay at that very moment. And that my evidence to support this theory was entirely based on an uncanny paranormal story told by one of my weird friends, who may or may not have had psychic abilities. "I just really wanted to go to the game, and now it's postponed," I lied.
"Do you need me to come and pick you up? How are kids getting home?"
I swallowed, and was about to request that she come and get me when Candace stepped inside the rest station and mouthed, "My mom is on her way."
"I'm getting a ride home with Candace's mom," I said, kind of wishing my mom would come and pick me up anyway.
As it was just kind of the way things operated in high school, Pete's mom arrived almost an hour later to fetch him and Jeff, and she waited at the rest station until Melissa's mom arrived in a Mercedes. Then, both moms went inside and purchased coffees while waiting for Candace's mom to surface. Pete's mom drove a huge SUV in which we all probably would have fit, but we were still at an age when everyone's parents wanted to drive all the way out of town to pick up their own kid. Finally, Candace's mom arrived, her heavy turquoise and silver jewelry jangling and clanging. After she insisted on going inside the rest station to get a coffee to keep her awake on the drive home with Candace's half-sister Julia trudging along behind her, demanding that someone buy her some gum, all three of our parents' cars departed the rest station in a strange motorcade. We drove back to Willow intentionally slowly since the streets were treacherously slippery from all of the ice. By the time we were back within town borders, it wasn't even eight o'clock at night yet, but Candace and I were both yawning.
"Mom, can we drive past the Richmonds' house to see if Olivia is home yet?" Candace asked from the front seat as her mom's car rounded corners taking us closer to Martha Road. I sat in the back with Julia, who had Candace's height but her own biological father's thick, dark hair and squinty dark eyes.
Candace's mom had a throaty, gravelly voice just like her daughter's. "Oh, Candace, that's all the way on the other side of town, and the streets are so bad."
"It's really important, though," Candace insisted. "She hasn't texted me back in over two hours and the last time I heard from her, she was stuck at the Green Bay mall."
Candace's mom made a right turn onto Martha Road, and just past Julia's head I caught a glimpse of the empty lot, silent and still as it always was, as we rolled down my block toward my house. "You can call her house when we get home," Candace's mom was dissuading Candace.
"Mom, can we stop at Bobby's and get chicken sandwiches for dinner?" Julia piped up next to me as Candace's mom slowed down to a stop in front of my house.
Immediately I noticed two odd things: lights were on in my house, indicating that my mom was already home from campus, and the Emorys' house was completely dark. The Emorys' house was never dark on a Friday night. Trey's dad was always visible through the front window, watching television in the living room once he got home from work. Trey's brother, Eddie, was always using the game console attached to the television whenever Mr. Emory wasn't watching television. And the Emorys' kitchen light was basically on twenty-four hours a day. It was jarring to see the house so empty, so vacant.
"Thanks for the ride," I said, climbing out of Candace's mom's car.
"Call me if Olivia contacts you immediately," Candace ordered me.
Once inside my house, I couldn't resist the urge to text Olivia again to see if she'd arrived home safely and recharged her phone. I waited until after Mom and I had finished eating pizza before I made the very bold decision to call the Richmonds' house out of concern, despite knowing that it would be really awkward if Olivia's parents, or even Henry, answered the phone. I was prepared to apologize for interrupting their Friday night, and inquire politely about whether or not Olivia made it home from the mall. My irrational fears about Violet's crazy story aside, there was still a legitimate possibility that Olivia was stranded in the parking lot at the mall an hour away, unable to call anyone for a ride home. So it wasn't so unreasonable, I assured myself, that as a concerned friend I would call the house.
But no one answered.
I texted Candace one word: Anything?
And she texted back: Nothing. No answer. And no word from Violet.
I climbed into bed early, assuring myself that I'd be out late the following night. Fantasies about what it would be like to slow dance with Henry in just twenty-four hours filled my head, replacing thoughts of anxiety about Violet and Olivia. Around midnight, I heard a car pull into the driveway next door, and sat straight up in bed to watch Mr. and Mrs. Emory enter their house through the side door with Eddie following behind them, rubbing his eyes tiredly. They were having a serious discussion, but with my window closed their voices sounded muffled and indiscernible. It bothered me for some reason that Trey wasn't with them; where could he have been at that hour? For the first time it occurred to me that maybe Trey had a girlfriend I didn't know about.
About ten minutes after the Emorys' arrived home and I finally began to drift off to sleep, the door to my bedroom opened and the shape of my mother's body appeared there, illuminated from behind by the light in the hallway.
"McKenna, honey? Are you awake?"
I struggled to pull myself free from the grip of sleep to focus on my mom. Something was wrong, I knew immediately. My mother never came into my room unannounced, and never woke me up in the middle of the night.
"I'm afraid I have some really awful news, honey. There's been an accident."