Cold Hands

Cards

"You're kidding," Chelsea took a slurp from her Dr. Pepper with a straw. She had joined me at my solitary table corner in the lunchroom, so we could silently judge the rest of the school together.

"Nope," I said, twirling my mushy gray alfredo with a plastic spork. Cafeteria food certainly looked a lot more palatable after helping my mom deep clean Miss Steeley's fridge from Hell the evening before.

"I've been trying to get into Cole Manor for years, and you just walk right through the door to live there." Chelsea shook her head incredulously. "You've gotta let me see! Is it freaky?"

I had actually kind of forgotten there were ghost stories about the mansion. Miss Steeley gave me the chills enough on her own without worrying about long-dead rich white people. I nodded.

"Yeah, there's lots of dusty old junk and spiderwebs."

Chelsea looked almost disappointed.

"What?" I said indignantly.

"Lame," she said. "I was hoping for something a little less predictable. Like, the whole Cole Family is buried in a private mausoleum in the basement. Dusty junk isn't freaky, it's textbook crazy old cat-lady."

I snorted, and rubbed my eyes wearily. "You're freaky."

"You look exhausted," she noted.

"I'm always dead inside," I quipped, but I probably really did look bad. I had hardly slept the night before.

My mom had gotten Chinese takeout for dinner. Miss Steeley didn't even sniff at the food, mumbling a grim goodnight and locking herself in her room. I went to bed early, but I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of creaking and shuffling from the ceiling above me.

At first, I dismissed it as just the sounds of a crumbly old house, but when the noises persisted, intermitted with thumps and scrapes and moving closer and further away throughout the night, I became convinced somebody was creeping around upstairs. My initial thought was there must a burglar, but then I remembered I was out in the middle of nowhere. It couldn't be anybody except my mom or Miss Steeley, and I knew my mom was sound asleep across the hall. I couldn't fall back asleep for more than a few minutes at a time after that, because the creaks would start up again and my mind would start racing through horrific images of Miss Steeley falling through the rotted floor above me and landing on my bed.

I had no idea what she could possibly have been doing up there all night, but I didn't want to think about it too much. The lady was a freak show. It was probably where she kept a memory box of the belongings of a deceased husband or the taxidermied corpses of all of her dead cats.

I didn't bring any of that up to Chelsea, because I knew she'd laugh at me.

"Are you doing anything after school?" she wanted to know.

"Yeah," I said, "'cause I have a life."

"So, that means yes, you'll do a bonfire with me?"

I wrinkled my nose. "What kind of bonfire?"

"I dunno, genius, maybe the kind where you burn stuff."

"Why?"

"Because it's fun."

I shook my head incredulously. "You guys really don't have anything to do around here."

"You're a brat," Chelsea observed.

"You noticed."

Something hard hit the side of my head. "Aargh!"

An empty chocolate milk carton dropped to the ground. There was watery brown stuff dripping down my bangs and all over my lap, darkening my pants like I had peed.