“I’d assume you wouldn’t have to look too hard, being the mysterious new girl in town,” Trey teased. His voice sounded different, and I realized it was because I could hear an unfamiliar echo. “You’re probably way more of a source of intrigue than you realize.”
I asked, “Where are you? It sounds like there’s an echo.”
He hesitated before replying. “The infirmary. It’s a big room with a lot of tile.”
I was lying on my stomach across my bed, but at Trey’s mention of infirmary, I rolled over and sat upright in alarm. “Um, are you going to tell me why you’re there?” I asked, instantly worried.
He hummed, “Uhhhh,” for a prolonged moment as if he wasn’t sure whether or not it was safe to say. “Just not feeling well. They quarantine you here at the first sign of the sniffles—or any other kind of trouble.”
The melodious tone his voice had taken on insinuated that this wasn’t the whole truth. Trey was usually being sarcastic, and he normally spoke with a cool, detached delivery. But he shifted into a more vibrant, singsong voice when he was hinting there was something he couldn’t tell me. Something was going on at Northern, something he couldn’t describe over the phone, which made me even more worried. Automatically I wondered if he’d gotten into a fight or was more ill than he was telling me. Not being able to ask outright killed me. I just needed to know he was okay.
“Oh, really,” I replied flatly to suggest that I got the message that something else was happening. “I wonder where you might have picked up a case of the sniffles.”
“How about you? Have you been feeling blue?” he asked.
I waited a beat before responding. We often used “blue” and “purple” to refer to Violet, and I was tempted to reply that I had indeed been feeling a little blue. But knowing that Trey—one way or another—had landed himself in need of some kind of medical care made me a lot less eager to burden him with an update about evil happenings back in Willow. Nothing frustrated Trey more than being closely handled by authority figures, so if this infirmary business had anything to do with that, he was probably already in a volatile state of mind. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him something that might serve as a catalyst for him to mouth off to a guard or lash out at a fellow student.
For a second, I considered telling him about Dad and Rhonda’s big news, but even that seemed too personal to share on a monitored phone call. “All good,” I lied.
After we said our good-byes for the week, a lump formed in my throat. Something was wrong, I was sure of it, and there was no way for him to communicate what it was.
Even though I knew that tinkering around with my pendulum while I felt like Mischa and I were in danger wasn’t a great idea, I couldn’t resist the urge. By nothing short of a miracle, it had still been in my pillowcase atop my bed when Mom and I had driven up to Sheridan in February to collect the handful of belongings I’d left behind there.
I snuck downstairs to the kitchen carrying my last stick of palo santo, lit it with a safety match from the box that Dad kept over the sink, and carefully carried it back up to my room, cupping the glowing end of it with my hand to avoid setting off any smoke detectors. The small stick of soft wood burned for only a few seconds before the ember died off. But the scent of it in my room made me feel a little more secure about withdrawing my pendulum from my sock drawer, where I kept it hidden.
“Pendulum,” I asked. “Is Trey in trouble?”
Yes.
“Does the trouble he’s in have something to do with Violet?”
The pendulum rotated clockwise twice—yes—but then wobbled and dangled from my fingers without moving in any particular direction. “Does that mean… maybe?” I asked in confusion.
Yes.
Great. Frustrated, I sighed. I was going to have to insist that Mrs. Robinson teach me how to reach out to Jennie the next day. Maybe even explain to her why it was so urgent. Mischa and I couldn’t afford to be taking actions based on assumptions any longer, and if Trey was in serious jeopardy, then I needed detailed guidance. Getting real answers out of the pendulum took too long, and I could never be sure if yes or no was the complete answer to my question, or just a response to part of it.
As far as I could tell, since arriving in Florida I’d only been receiving messages from Jennie rather than being able to effectively transfer any information back. Our communication was completely one-sided. Although Olivia’s spirit seemed to have been able to master communicating with me by manipulating physical objects like my music boxes, Jennie’s spirit had an easier time with electrical devices. Early in March, when I’d set my earbuds in my ears as I began my walk to school, I’d heard a voice I knew was Jennie’s before I’d even tapped my phone to start playing music. She’d been repeating a three-syllable word over and over again. At first it had sounded like “tomato,” but it was quickly drowned out by a noise that sounded like high winds, the kind that knock the breath right out of your lungs and whip your hair around your face. Wisconsin storm season wind, the kind I’d never yet experienced in Florida—the kind that used to drive Moxie to hide under the bed and whimper. Almost a week ago, I’d left my laptop open to a blank page in Microsoft Word while doing homework late at night, and I’d come back from refilling my water bottle to find that she’d managed to type characters that formed a shape on the page like this:
—
\ /
At first I’d thought she was warning me about a “V.” Violet. Being certain that Jennie was trying to caution me about something but having to guess what it might be felt like scratching off a lottery ticket to find all winning numbers until reaching the last one and realizing I hadn’t won anything at all. Like being hit with a one-two punch of hope and defeat. Upon seeing the characters on my screen last Wednesday night, I asked the pendulum to confirm my shot-in-the-dark suspicion that Jennie was trying to warn me about a tornado, and the pendulum had said Yes. From there, the messages became muddled, and no matter how I phrased my question about who was in danger because of a tornado, the answer was always yes, yes, yes.
But it was early April. Tornado season didn’t truly begin in Wisconsin until summer.
I checked the local weather in Wisconsin every morning on my phone, and never once in the last six days since the weird typing incident had unseasonable storms been mentioned in the forecast.
By midnight, when I knew I had to at least try to sleep, Kirsten still hadn’t replied to my text. I was panicking. A thorough scouring of social media with what little information I knew about her turned up nothing. The only account that I came across that I suspected might be hers was on Instagram, and it was private. I tossed and turned, knowing that it wasn’t fair to be furious since Kirsten was basically a stranger who didn’t owe me anything. But still, I didn’t want to think about what might happen the next day if too many hours passed before one of us was able to perform the candle ritual again.
In the morning, I slept through my alarm but was relieved to see that Kirsten had texted me back at around four a.m. She promised to light the candles and chant the words of protection for Mischa and her family as soon as she arrived at the bookstore that morning, but urged me to buy more supplies as soon as possible. I can’t promise that my version will be as effective as yours, she texted me, reiterating her belief that somehow I had more control over witchcraft than she did.