Welcome back to Weeping Willow! This is an alternate ending about what might have happened at the end of Book #1 if something very evil had escaped from Violet's locket when Trey pried it open on the fateful drive toward White Ridge Lake. I wrote it as part of a campaign in support of Fox TV's The Exorcist, a new TV show starring Geena Davis, Alan Ruck, Brianne Howey, and Hannah Kasulka. The entire book on which The Exorcist was based is available on the @TheExorcistFOX profile - read it if you can't get enough horror!
I hope you enjoy this alternate ending!
It was pretty odd, returning to town as a convicted criminal at Christmastime.
There was no way that Judge Roberts could have known when he issued my sentence that my actions were perfectly justified on that chilly day back in November when my boyfriend and I assaulted a fellow student at Weeping Willow High and were chased across Shawano County by police. Using "but we were breaking an evil curse" as your defense in a court of law doesn't go over so well. If I'd dared to explain my actions with the truth, the judge would have requested that I have my head examined. So I hadn't even bothered being honest with Mr. Whaley, the pot-bellied lawyer that my mother had hired to defend me. My parents were worried enough about my mental health as it was.
Trey—my boyfriend and partner in crime—and I had agreed to allow everyone in town to think of us as juvenile delinquents. There was simply no way we were ever going to convince a courtroom full of stodgy grown-ups that we had been taking drastic actions to save the life of our friend Mischa. Even though two girls from our high school had already died earlier that fall exactly as Violet Simmons—the new girl at our high school from Chicago—had predicted they would, no one was going to believe us. If there was a surefire way to make adults suspect that you were under the influence of drugs or totally losing it, blabbing on and on about ghosts and evil spirits was it.
Now, five weeks later, I had been granted a vacation pass from the Dearborn School for Girls to visit my mom back at home in Wisconsin for the holiday. Behind the wheel of her car, Mom was uncharacteristically quiet. Still mad at me, I assumed, which was fair enough. The trouble I'd gotten myself into trying to undo the curse that Violet had cast upon me and my friends at Olivia Richmond's Sweet Sixteen party in September had cost my mom a ton of money in legal fees. Not to mention the fact that I'd probably destroyed my chance of ever getting into a good college.
"What do you think about a pizza from Federico's for lunch?" Mom asked when we reached the border between Michigan and Wisconsin.
My stomach rumbled at the mere mention of real food. I'd been subsisting on whole wheat toast and iceberg lettuce for the last five weeks because everything else in the Dearborn cafeteria was inedible. "Are you serious?" I asked.
"Sure," Mom said. "We can order it now and pick it up on the way home." Pizza was a peace offering. It was her way of assuring me that she didn't intend to spend the next ten days making me feel guilty. This simple gesture made me feel even guiltier; my mom was the best, and in no way did she deserve the hell I'd put her through over the course of the last few months.
Trey and I had been sent to separate boarding schools as punishment, where we weren't allowed to exchange letters or emails. Not being allowed to communicate freely with Trey was the worst part of being sent away from home—even worse than the lack of privacy, being called "crazy girl" by my classmates (word gets around fast in boarding school about why you ended up there), and missing my friends in Weeping Willow. We were permitted ten-minute phone calls on pay phones every Sunday night, during which we couldn't discuss any of the unbelievable things we'd witnessed earlier that fall since both of us were usually receiving nasty side-eyes from our classmates urging us to hurry up.
Sometimes it was enough just to hear the sound of Trey breathing on the other end of the phone.
Sometimes it wasn't, and I'd return to the room I shared with my hostile roommate and cry.
And although I was grateful to my mom for driving all the way to Michigan to pick me up that morning and had missed her tremendously, that day my heart was beating for one reason alone: to be reunited with Trey. He'd told me he'd be arriving back in town the same day as me, but nothing was certain for either of us now that we were under our parents' constant watch. There was a fair chance that Trey's parents might have decided it would be safer for everyone to keep us apart for the holiday by driving up to his aunt's house in Osh Kosh. Neither of us were allowed to keep cell phones with us at school, so I had no idea if plans had changed since our last conversation on Sunday night.
I didn't really want to show my face in town, and thankfully Mom didn't ask me if I wanted to come inside when we arrived at the pizza place. After everything that had happened in the fall, I was a bit of a local celebrity. The prospect of running into someone like Tracy Hartford, the biggest gossip in the junior class, was not exactly desirable.
And the prospect of running into Violet Simmons—the girl whose arrival in town had resulted in all of the events that had led up to my banishing—was downright nauseating.
Even though there had been plenty of times throughout my childhood when I longed to escape from Weeping Willow, driving its familiar streets back to my own made my heart ache. When we reached the corner of Martha Road and passed the empty overgrown lot where our old house had stood before it burned down, relief washed over me. The last five weeks hadn't been anything like spending the summer with my dad and his girlfriend in Florida. Every single night that I'd spent in Michigan, I'd wondered if I'd ever find myself at home again.
I was practically shocked to see that Mom had strung Christmas lights in the windows and had even taped cut-outs of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer in the window when we pulled into our driveway. As far back as I could remember, she'd never been big on decorating. Definitely not since the fire that had claimed the life of my twin sister. Mom usually let holidays drift by without making a huge fuss, and I indulged her in that because I knew it was painful for her to celebrate even though eight years had passed since Jennie's funeral.
The sight of our little house looking so cheerful made me wonder if perhaps my being sent away was good for Mom, in a way. "The house looks really cute," I complimented her, meaning it.
"Glenn insisted," Mom said, and I would have sworn that she was blushing a little. She'd mentioned during our weekly phone calls that she'd started hanging out with the local veterinarian, who just happened to be around 6'2 and have a blonde mustache like country singer Alan Jackson's. As much as I hated living far away from home in what was basically a prison with a high school curriculum, I doubted Mom ever would have started dating again with me around. Her blushing suggested that she and Glenn were probably doing more than "spending time together," which was how she had described their relationship to me over the phone.
Hours after the pizza had been consumed and I'd run myself ragged in the yard with Mom's puppy, Maude, I became impatient for Trey to arrive home. The Emory's house next door was uncharacteristically quiet, although the kitchen light was on (as always). There were plenty of things I could have been doing to distract myself from Trey's absence, like dealing with the book report on Pride and Prejudice that I had to complete before my return to school. However, I couldn't concentrate on anything—not even with unlimited access to television, which I was only allowed to watch for an hour each day in the roach-infested group lounge at Dearborn. Newscasters interrupted shows on every channel with stories about an impending snowstorm expected to shut down all of central Wisconsin until Christmas Eve.
By nightfall, when I still hadn't heard the sound of Mrs. Emory's Civic turning in to the driveway next door, I was panicking. I sulked through dinner, much to my mother's annoyance. "You know, Mary Jo and I spoke earlier this week, and we agreed that it would be the best thing for you and Trey to take it easy this week," my mother said. It was as if from across the dinner table she could smell my fear that he wasn't coming home.
She didn't outright say that she and Trey's mom intended to prevent us from spending time together, nor did she say that the Emory's had decided to spend Christmas out of town to keep us apart. But I got the sense that she was baiting me for a more in-depth conversation about my romance with Trey, and I refused to indulge her. There were a lot of details about the game that I'd played at Olivia's birthday party in which Violet predicted all of my friends' deaths that I hadn't shared with my mom. When Olivia died a few weeks after the party exactly as Violet described she would, my mom had tried to convince me that it was just an unfortunate coincidence. Then, when Candace Cotton died in Hawaii not long after, I knew my mother wouldn't understand that I had an obligation to make sure that Mischa didn't die next because I'd foolishly played the game, too. If I couldn't trust my mom to understand that we'd set something deeply evil in motion when we'd agreed to play "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" with Violet, I definitely wasn't about to have a heart-to-heart with her about my feelings for Trey.
The sharp smell of oncoming snow seared the air when I took Maude into the backyard for one last round of fetch before bed. It was almost midnight, I could barely keep my eyes open, and the Emory's still hadn't come home. A lump of impending tears formed in my throat as I re-entered the house. There was no denying it any longer: the five long weeks I'd spent looking forward to seeing Trey's beautiful face had been for nothing. Our mothers had obviously conspired to keep us apart so that we couldn't get in any more legal trouble over the break. I wished I could explain to my mother that we weren't in danger anymore; we'd stolen the locket that Violet had received from her grandmother, which was the object that we thought had tied her to the underworld and provided her with the ability to nudge Olivia and Candace toward their premature deaths.
That locket was at the bottom of White Ridge Lake. I'd personally hurled it over the side of the bridge right before the police who had chased us all the way to the lake district cuffed me. Since that day in early November, I hadn't received any more strange visits from ghosts or premonitions of danger, so I was pretty sure that we'd successfully broken the curse and prevented Mischa from dying as Violet had predicted. There wasn't any more trouble for me and Trey to get into; but naturally there was no way we could communicate this to our well-intentioned mothers.
I changed into my pajamas, my muscles sore from the long drive as well as five unrelenting weeks of uncomfortable posture and constant anxiety. Through the slats in the blinds on my window, I stared across the space between our house and the Emory's, and into Trey's dark window. This was the moment I'd been yearning for while I'd been far from home; peering across our yards and seeing his familiar silhouette waving back at me from his bedroom. The only thing that had kept me going during my miserable time at the Dearborn School for Girls was anticipating Trey wrapping his arms around me when we returned home for the holidays. Now it would be weeks—months—before there was any chance of seeing him again.
I shivered, wondering if Mom had closed the heat vents in my room while I was away to save money on the heating bill.
My reflection in the mirror over my bureau hardly looked like me. I would have expected that my hair would look longer than it had the last time I'd stood in this place in early November, and darker, since I hadn't been out in the sun. In Michigan I'd watched my summer tan fade and circles form beneath my eyes from lack of sleep. But the girl in the mirror looked like a healthier version of myself. Her skin was clear, her eyes twinkled, and she had such an ethereal glow about her that for a second I took pride in my appearance before I realized that the girl I was looking at in the mirror was not me.
In terror, I reached out toward the mirror with outstretched fingers and gasped when my reflection did not mimic my actions. The girl in the mirror, who I now realized was my twin, Jennie—only sixteen like me instead of eight years old as she'd been the last time I saw her alive—was shaking her head at me as if to warn me about something. She had eyes the same hue of brown as mine, only hers had always been wiser. No wonder the temperature in my bedroom had plummeted so sharply; it had always gotten cold in my bedroom in the fall whenever the ghost of Olivia had made contact with me. "Jennie?" I whispered, wondering if I were hallucinating from exhaustion.
From the other side of my mirror, my twin pressed her fingertip to the glass and slowly dragged it downward, leaving a smear in the shape of a vertical line at least five inches long.
There was no reason for Jennie to be paying me a visit, I thought frantically. It felt as if my blood were freezing in my veins. If we'd broken the curse, then why was my dead twin contacting me?
She then drew another line horizontally across the first, creating a perfectly formed cross smack dab in the middle of my mirror. The smudge on the glass distorted her face in the reflection, and just as I was about to ask her why she'd chosen to draw a cross (we weren't particularly religious in my family), I heard an eerie trickle of music from behind me. I whirled around to see that my mother had put my music boxes back on the shelf over my bed. Because Olivia's ghost had constantly tinkered with them throughout the fall, I'd stowed them away in my closet. But now they were back; the ballerina was spinning, arms raised, to her familiar tune of "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" as Minnie Mouse grinned along to "It's a Small World After All."
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
Three light raps on my window took me by such total surprise that a scream caught in my throat. Through the window I saw Trey standing outside, smiling at me with a devilish grin. My heart joyously skipped a beat. This had been our custom throughout the fall when ghosts had tormented me every night; Trey would slip out of his own bedroom and in through my window to keep me company. The rush of adrenaline that coursed through my veins heated into a flush of affection as I raised the window to greet him.
"Hi!" I whispered with a smile, fearful about waking my mother whose room was down the hall. "I was starting to think you weren't coming home!"
His face was thinner, his cheekbones more chiseled than they'd been five weeks earlier. His crystalline blue eyes looked even lighter than usual, as if they were illuminated from behind. His head had also been shaved, making him look a little older. Although I was overjoyed to see him just inches in front of me, immediately something seemed just... wrong.
"Yeah, well, there were some problems," Trey said in a dour tone. "They almost didn't release me today."
His voice sounded strange; deeper than normal. Behind him, I could see all of the lights on at the Emory's house, suggesting that at some point while I'd been communicating with Jennie in my mirror they'd arrived home and I'd been too distracted to hear it. Before I replied to Trey, I paused for a second, feeling a little hurt that he didn't seem happier to see me. In fact, he seemed a little pissed off about whatever had happened earlier in the day. His eyes were scanning the interior of my bedroom as if he were eager to climb in through the window. "What kind of problems?" I asked.
"I'll tell you once I come inside," he said, placing his hands on my window sill as if he were about to hoist himself up to climb through.
"Wait!" I whispered. "I don't think that's a good idea." We'd already discussed in heavily coded language over the phone that it was unlikely he'd ever be able to keep me company in my bedroom again overnight. There wasn't any need for him to stay over at my house anymore, anyway, since Olivia's ghost hadn't disturbed my sleep even once while I'd been away in Michigan. I hadn't had a reason to doubt that we'd broken the curse that Violet had put on me and Mischa—
—At least not until a moment earlier, when Jennie had appeared in my mirror.
"There are many things we need to discuss," Trey replied, sounding like someone else—almost as if he were doing an impression of Principal Nylander.
Everything about Trey's appearance and behavior was making me uneasy. He appeared to be perspiring even though it wasn't even twenty degrees outside. He was acting strangely, not at all like his sweet, sarcastic self. Trey could be moody; any one of the teachers at Weeping Willow High could tell you that. But he'd never been short-tempered or cruel around me before. I fought the impulse to inform him that I'd just received a visit from Jennie because the way she'd shaken her head at me had been so strange. It was as if she'd been warning me about...him.
I winced, not wanting to upset him after waiting such an unbearably long time to see him, but also strongly sensing that allowing him into my room was a bad idea. "That's crazy," I hissed. "If my mom catches you in here, or your parents notice that you're not in your room, they'll split us up forever. I'm serious, Trey. My mom told me that she and your mom have been talking about making us take it easy." I pressed my hands against the window, preparing to close and lock it.
Trey's brow angrily furrowed in a way that I'd never seen before. "I have a plan. Don't you trust me?"
"I don't want to get in trouble," I whispered, hearing my voice tremble with fear. "I'll come over in the morning." Without waiting for him to reply, I closed the window and fastened the locks. Then I closed the blinds and backed away from the window, half-expecting him to hurl himself through the glass. I had known Trey my whole life and never before had I been afraid of him. I could sense him fuming outside my window for a few minutes before he finally retreated.
Even after he left I was afraid to turn off the lights and climb into bed. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that the person who had just appeared outside my window demanding to be let inside wasn't Trey. Trey was the one who had pried open Violet's golden locket and had found a lock of her grandmother's hair inside. Perhaps he had released something else when he'd unhinged the golden charm. A year ago I would have thought myself crazy to consider such nonsense, but by now I knew better than to doubt the persistence of evil.
I didn't sleep that night. Was it a cross that Jennie had drawn on my mirror to protect me?
Or was it a "T" to warn me?