The Last Girl

Soon I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, and as my thoughts quieted, my senses took over. There was the sound of his breathing; sharp as he inhaled through his nose and then soft as he sighed. I took in the scent of his shampoo, something woodsy. Pine and lime. And then even those senses fell away and I was left with only two. There was just the feel of his lips, and the taste of them.

When we both pulled away, breathless, I finally got a look at who I’d been kissing.

At the sight of him, my mind – serenely blank just a moment before – blared loud with a big resigned fuck.

‘Rachel?’ Saundra called as she came down the stoop.

I couldn’t tell if Bram Wilding was horrified or repulsed by what I’d just done, but he gave me the courtesy of staying stone-faced. So that was good to know. Bram, Lux’s-boyfriend-who-I’d-just-basically-assaulted-because-I-was-a-criminally-inappropriate-freak-like-Lux-said-I-was, was courteous. He turned and walked away before Saundra could see him.

‘Who was that?’ Saundra asked when she reached me.

‘Nobody.’

She quirked an eyebrow. ‘I just saw you talking to somebody.’

‘It was no one. A ghost.’

‘It’s funny you should say that,’ Saundra said, the tips of her fingers twiddling together. ‘’Cause there’s gonna be a séance!’

2

Saundra led me back through the house, her arm linked tightly through mine to prevent any attempt at escape. ‘Why are we doing this?’ I asked.

‘It’s a séance,’ Saundra and I both said at the same time, though our tones were polar opposites.

‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Saundra asked.

‘You’ve obviously never watched Night of the Demons.’

Saundra stopped walking and turned to face me. She gently put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me very seriously. ‘Rachel? No one gets your references.’

I sighed. That was fair.

‘It’ll be fun,’ Saundra said. ‘And anyway, this is how you make your mark at Manchester. This is how you get to know the heavy hitters.’ She dropped her hands and squeezed my elbow. ‘This is how you find your people.’

Who knew that all I needed to do to find my people was conjure up some dead spirits? There was already a group forming a circle on the living room floor. By now the party had quieted down, leaving about fifteen of us still there. Unfortunately, one of them was Lux. My stomach knotted up as she glared at me. I was already on her bad side – I prayed she would never find out I’d just kissed her boyfriend.

Someone had shut off the construction lights, so the only light came from the center of the circle, where some kid was lighting thick block candles set on the floor. When the room was sufficiently eerie with flickering candlelight and everyone was sitting in place, the guy stood up. ‘My father owns this place, so this séance better not mess anything up.’

‘Your father bought this place so he could demolish it and build luxury condos,’ someone reminded him. ‘Let’s raise hell!’

There was a smattering of laughter, but I must’ve missed the joke. One girl raised her hand. She looked different out of her school uniform, but I recognized her instantly because she was always assertively raising her hand in Earth Science. Just like she was now. ‘What kind of séance will this be?’

‘A past-life séance,’ Thayer Turner suggested. His father was the state’s attorney general and as Saundra had informed me, the Turners were practically the next Obamas.

‘What’s a past-life séance?’ Raisey-hand asked.

‘It’s when you look in a mirror and you see what your past life was,’ I said.

Thayer turned to look at me. In fact, everyone turned to look at me. It was probably the most words any of them had heard me say since I’d infiltrated their school. I’d been joking when I mentioned the séance in Night of the Demons, but as I looked back at their ghoulishly lit faces, it was starting to feel more like a prediction.

‘Yeah,’ Thayer said slowly, taking an extra beat longer to examine me. ‘New Girl’s right. Lucky for us I saw a mirror in the hall closet!’

‘What were you doing back in the closet?’ someone said. I shot the guy a dirty look. There was a sniveling jeeriness to his tone, which Thayer hadn’t missed. His shoulders squared as he headed for the hallway.

‘Ha ha, funny, Devon,’ he called back.

When Thayer came back into the room, he was holding a full-length mirror. He leaned it against the fireplace. The glass was murky with age and decay, and everyone scooted around it to get a better look at themselves.

‘It might take a minute,’ Thayer said. ‘You have to concentrate.’

If this were anything like the movie, a bony demon would appear any minute now. But there was only a group of bored teenagers tilting their faces to show off their best angles.

Of course I knew that there wasn’t going to be a demon popping out at us, or even that we’d see our past lives, but still, I was starting to feel the familiar prickling sensation at the back of my neck. I didn’t believe in past lives, but I had a past. What if I looked in this mirror and they were all able to see who I really was?

‘Nothing’s happening,’ Raisey complained.

‘Well, I guess you don’t have a past life,’ Thayer said.

‘To go along with your nonexistent love life,’ snickered Devon, the asshole. People laughed again, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t in fact seeing a bunch of demons in the mirror after all.

‘Settle down, children,’ Thayer said. ‘Why don’t we forget the past-life thing and try to communicate with actual spirits?’

‘Like our great-grandparents?’ someone said.

‘Like the people who lived in this house,’ Thayer said.

‘I thought it was abandoned,’ Devon said.

‘Well, someone had to live here first to abandon it, smartass.’ Thayer leaned forward. It was a subtle move, but it quieted everyone down and made them lean forward, too. ‘There was a couple who lived here, Frank and Greta. Typical hipsters – I’m talking vegan cashew cheese and terrible style. All’s well in Hipsterville until one day Greta starts to hear a buzzing.’

‘Buzzing?’ somebody asked.

‘Like when a fly whizzes by your ear,’ Thayer said. ‘At first it was just once in a while, like maybe a bug got in through the kitchen window and couldn’t get out. But then it was more constant. Insistent. Greta realized the noise was loudest whenever Frank was home. Anytime they’d be together, she’d hear it. The buzzing. She asked if he was making the noise on purpose. Frank said he couldn’t hear anything. But Greta kept hearing the buzzing and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore. Greta broke down and begged him to please stop buzzing and Frank looked her straight in the eye and said he didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘But Greta didn’t trust him. The buzzing was too loud. She didn’t believe he couldn’t hear it. And as Greta began to spiral, she no longer just thought he was lying about the buzzing. She thought he was the buzzing. Greta became convinced that Frank was wearing a skin suit – that underneath it, he was just a million flies, buzzing and swarming and out to get her.’

Some people (Devon) snorted, but they still listened, waiting for Thayer to continue the story. I leaned in. I wanted him to continue, too.

‘Frank tried to reason with Greta, of course, but Greta couldn’t stand to be near him, what with all that buzzing. Some mornings, as he ate his cereal, she’d see a fly crawl over his ear lobe and he wouldn’t even be bothered. At night she couldn’t sleep because Frank slept with his mouth open and anytime she closed her eyes, she imagined the flies pouring out.’

Thayer opened his mouth, letting his jaw drop low, stretching it as far as it would go. No flies came swarming out, of course, but he held on to the pose, staring us down. I could feel Saundra squirm next to me. When he clamped his mouth shut with a click, a few of us startled.

‘Greta couldn’t stand it anymore,’ he continued. ‘One day she took a meat cleaver and swung it right into Frank’s neck.’

Saundra gasped dramatically.

‘She was trying to free the flies. But she just ended up killing Frank. And when Greta saw that there weren’t any flies, she offed herself next. And the scariest part of the whole thing is that Frank and Greta were’ – Thayer made his eyes go wide and lowered his voice to a whisper – ‘registered Republicans.’

I snorted, but nobody else seemed to find it funny.

‘Okay, that was a joke, but the rest is totally true!’ Thayer went on. ‘It was a week before anyone even discovered their bodies. Neighbors heard buzzing at all hours of the day and it just kept getting louder and louder. Someone finally called the police, and when they broke down the door guess what they found?’ The pause was dramatic. ‘Flies. Hundreds of thousands of them, crawling all over the house – and the bodies.’

‘You’re full of it,’ said one girl, but beside her, a guy swatted his neck and shivered.

‘So what, are we gonna, like, try to talk to the people that died here?’ Lux asked. ‘Don’t we need a Ouija board or something?’

Another girl, Sienna Something, cleared her throat. ‘I’ve been part of séances before. I know what to do.’ She made a show of sitting ramrod straight and locking hands with the people on either side of her.

I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be impressed or disturbed, because séances, plural? But I didn’t have time to dwell as the girl next to me grabbed my hand.

‘Go on, then,’ Thayer coaxed, amused. ‘What do we do next?’

‘We have to concentrate on nothing but also open our minds and souls to all the possibilities that the universe presents to us,’ Sienna said, sounding like a YouTube wellness guru. She raised her chin toward the broken chandelier in the center of the ceiling and took a deep breath. ‘Greta, we come to you with love and concern in our hearts. Your death was untimely and, like, totally brutal and stuff, and that sucks. And we’re aware that you had that small issue of killing Frank or whatever, but I also believe in giving women the benefit of the doubt and I know he was probably buzzing all day under his breath to tick you off. We’re here for you and we love you. If you can hear us, send us a sign.’

My mind and soul were open and all that, but a deep crease formed between my eyebrows. The only thing I knew about Greta was that she was one hundred percent a made-up person in a made-up story. But I seemed to be the only one to take issue with this.

Around me, everyone closed their eyes, the only sounds in the room the quiet strains of people trying to stay still or hold their breath. Definitely no signs from Greta. And yet we waited for what felt like way too long a time. I thought about sneaking out, but I didn’t want to be the one to break the spell. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Saundra had meant by finding my people. But thankfully, I didn’t have to do anything because someone spoke up for all of us. ‘Okay, this is obviously – ’

A thud in the ceiling interrupted him, and more than a few heads snapped up at the noise. It was loud and strong enough to make the chandelier crystals chime like this was a breezy day on a North Carolina wraparound porch and not an abandoned house in Williamsburg.

‘Is there someone upstairs?’ somebody hissed.

‘It’s Gretaaaaa,’ Thayer said, his voice vibrating spookily.

‘Greta, is that you?’ Sienna asked. ‘Tap once for yes and twice for no.’

Everyone waited again, listening closely for more sounds. After a moment, another thud. ‘Greta,’ Sienna said. ‘Are you okay?’

Another moment, another thud. And then, just in time to make Sienna’s smile flicker off, a final thud. Two taps.

‘She’s not okay,’ Saundra whispered.

There was a moment of restless silence as we all snuck glances at each other, looking to see who was scared and who believed.

‘Greta, how can we help you?’ Sienna asked.

‘That isn’t a “yes” or “no” question, how’s she supposed to answer us?’ Lux said, rolling her eyes.

Then a new noise came from above. Not another thud, but more of a rumbling, like a bowling ball being hurled across the floor. Dust fell from the popcorn ceiling. Then all at once other things started to happen. It wasn’t just the ceiling now, it was the walls too, knocking, pounding, as if the house were coming alive. The candles went out and I heard a piercing crash. The mirror had fallen, spraying us with glass.

Screams broke out, loud enough to match the growing cacophony of the crumbling house. Saundra’s scream was shriller than everyone else’s and she yanked my hand suddenly, pulling me up so fast that my feet slipped as I scrambled to stand. The sounds of people rushing around in the dark mixed with the thunderous roar still coming from the ceiling and walls. And then the noise morphed into something else.

Something much closer.

A swarm.

A buzzing.

As though a hundred thousand flies were crawling all over us.

The screaming started in earnest then, particularly from one person. ‘Get them off me!’ she screeched. ‘Get them off me!’

The bright fluorescence of the construction lights flickered back to life and illuminated a totally transformed room. There were people bottlenecking at the doorway, yelling and frantic to get out. But mainly we all stared at Lux, who was in a full-blown panic. She was wildly pulling at her beautiful blond strands, crying hysterically for someone to help get the flies out of her hair.

But there weren’t any flies. The light ushered in a stillness, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the only other person who wasn’t freaking out. Not one strand of his loose, curly hair was out of place. His thick-framed glasses were not askew. I watched as he clicked a portable speaker and slipped it into his pants pocket. And just like that the buzzing came to a halt.

I clamped my lips shut. I tried not to let it out. The rest of the people in the room swore and caught their breaths, but something else was bubbling up inside me. Finally, I had to let it go.

I laughed. Hard. I laughed so loudly that soon, people turned to look at me like I was the weirdest thing in the supposedly haunted abandoned house.

Lux’s eyes locked onto mine. She was breathing hard, her fists full of blond clumps, like sad bouquets. I thought for a moment she’d pulled out her own hair,but then I noticed the clips at the edges. Hair extensions.

‘You did this to me!’ Lux pointed at me as if I had been the one to snatch her bald.

I shook my head, and though I was trying to be serious, little laughs continued to slip out.

‘This was your stupid prank!’

I looked around, trying to spot the guy with the portable speaker, but he hadn’t stuck around to see Lux chew me out. Everyone else was riveted, though.

An angry, guttural sound came from Lux’s throat and she threw her extensions on the floor. ‘Laugh it up now because you’re done at this school.’ And with that she stomped out of the house.

I had stopped laughing by now. When I turned to Saundra, her face was frozen in a grimace. I waited for her to say something. Like all the encouraging things she’d told me when she said this party would be ‘totally fun’ and that I’d ‘find my people.’ But all she said was, ‘This is not good.’

3

I could feel how not good my situation was the minute I walked into school the next morning.

Manchester Prep was a private high school, and you could tell how exclusive it was by its location alone. Manhattan. Upper East Side. Basically on Museum Mile. It was four stories high, with the kind of intricate gothic details carved into its façade that attracted tourists and their cameras. It was pretty on the outside, but cramped within.

We wore uniforms. Oxford shirts and gray blazers with the school crest. The boys wore slacks and the girls wore pleated gray skirts that were meant to chastely kiss the knees but more often than not grazed the thighs. I’d made the mistake of ordering my uniform online instead of having it fitted like everybody else, so my hemline scraped along my shins. The uniform was starchy and chafed and bit into the soft parts of my waist, and the whole thing was a big metaphor for how much I did not fit in here.

A part of it was the money thing. As in they had it, I didn’t. You’d think it wouldn’t make that big a difference when we all wore the same clothes, studied the same things, but as soon as they opened their mouths you could tell we belonged to two different worlds. They loved to talk about their things: how expensive they were and how many of them they had. They had unlimited credit cards and wore Cartier jewelry, and for some reason that I will never understand, they all had the exact same Celine Nano designer bag. I once saw one of my classmates try to buy a Twix bar at a deli on Second Avenue using a hundred-dollar bill.

So yeah. There was me and there was them and the chasm between us was the size of Manhattan.

But now, as I took the same route I always did to get to my locker, I felt like I didn’t fit in for a completely different reason. People were looking at me. Like, really stopping to look. Some sneered; others leaned into their friends to whisper, their eyes never leaving me.

I didn’t have to hear them to know what they were saying. That’s the girl who crossed Lux.

I’d worked so hard to not call attention to myself at this school, to blend in, that when all eyes were on me, I felt it as acutely as a sudden change in temperature. Everything went cold. Even the people in the alumni portraits that trimmed the high-ceilinged walls seemed to be watching me. They were mostly angry-looking dudes from back when Manchester was exclusively angry-looking dudes. The school became co-ed in the 80s, and my locker was directly beneath the Technicolor portraits of two female alums with fanned hair. One had become an astronaut and the other a B-list sitcom actress. Both seemed way too interested in my being a newly anointed social pariah.

I didn’t see Lux, but I felt her presence all around, like a ghost haunting me. I felt it most strongely in my Women in Literature class when I saw Bram at his seat. Our gazes locked for an infinite moment in which I was yanked back to the kiss. I felt my face redden and I wondered if he’d told Lux about it and if I should expect my already-ruined life at Manchester to get exponentially worse. But then he looked away and so did I, and we both went back to pretending that I didn’t exist.

I tried my best to stop thinking about Bram, but unfortunately, he was Saundra’s favorite conversation topic.

‘Were there any guys in your old high school who were as gorgeous as Bram Wilding?’ Saundra asked as we sat down in the cafeteria.

I put down my sandwich. My stomach suddenly hurt but Saundra didn’t notice my loss of appetite. She ate distractedly, her gaze locked on the center of the room. It was the prime real estate of the school’s upper echelon. Saundra watched Bram and his friends like they were doing something truly remarkable instead of the same eating and chatting as the rest of us plebes.

Thanks to Saundra, I learned everything I never wanted to know about Bram. He was the product of Andrew and Delilah Wilding, a publishing magnate of Scottish descent, and a former model from Cairo, respectively. But I knew something about Bram that Saundra couldn’t know. Like what his lips felt like.

‘All the guys in my old high school were ogres,’ I said. Saundra was doing me a solid by not talking about the elephant in the room (my sudden notoriety and social ostracism), but I desperately needed to change the subject. ‘Could we talk about literally anything else?’

‘Okay, we can talk about the party, which I am legit still not over. We got to find out that Lux’s legendary locks are actually extensions?’ Saundra looked up and sighed. ‘You pray to the scandal gods, but you just never think you’ll get a response, you know?’

‘You didn’t think it was a mean prank?’ I asked.

‘Oh, don’t tell me you believe those rumors.’

‘What rumors?’

Saundra’s eyes lit up. If there was one thing she liked to talk about more than Bram Wilding, it was rumors. ‘I forgot you’re new and you don’t know all of Manchester’s dirty secrets.’ She swept her plate to the side, as though she needed to make space for the enormity of what she was about to say.

‘People think there’s some big prankster in school pulling the strings behind everybody’s biggest humiliations. Like one time, Erica Belcott got locked in the basement pool at the Y and when they found her, she was curled up in the fetal position on the diving board. She said someone had been flicking the lights on and off. Another time Jonathan Calden woke up in a dumpster behind a Red Lobster without knowing how he got there. And there was that one time when Julia Mahoney swore somebody was leaving her creepy notes written in red lipstick all over the place, and when she found a tube of lipstick in her backpack in AP Chem, she freaked out and knocked over the Bunsen and nearly set the class on fire.

‘Hence, the prankster theory. People think it’s all connected, that one person is behind it all. They’ll say, “That asshole got me.” But it’s like, uh, no, Jonathan, how about some personal responsibility? Waking up in a dumpster is your own fault for going to the Red Lobster in Times Square.’

Usually when Saundra dropped a bunch of names on me I zoned out like it was white noise. But a mysterious menace on the loose, screwing with people’s lives? ‘Tell me more.’

‘It’s been going on forever,’ Saundra said. ‘I heard about the “prankster” before I even started high school. But it’s just one of those urban legends.’

My mind went to the boy I’d seen when the lights came back up at the abandoned house. The one who’d discreetly shut off his portable speaker while everyone was distracted. I’d found out his name – Freddie Martinez. A look around the cafeteria and I spotted him, the sight of the loose curls cresting over his forehead unmistakable. He sat surrounded by a group of friends.

‘Who are those guys?’ I asked Saundra.

‘Ugh. The Tisch Boys. They’re in the Film Club together. They’re all going to the Tisch School at NYU to study movies – sorry, film,’ said Saundra. ‘And one of them is actually a Tisch. Careful – they might try to recruit you on account of their club not having a single girl in its membership. It’s a huge optics issue. Once, Pruit Pusivic was trying to flirt with me and for a minute I was into it but then it hit me, like, Wait, do you really like me or are you just trying to get me to join Film Club? It really gave me trust issues.’

‘Oh.’

‘Exactly,’ Saundra said. ‘They think they’re cool, but they’re just pretentious nerds.’

I didn’t think Freddie looked all that nerdy, though. Yeah, there was the thick glasses frame, but I kind of liked them. Plus, he had the relaxed posture and easy smile of someone with a healthy amount of confidence. And there was that jawline. Sharp enough to light a match on. His clothes were kind of messy – the uniform oxford shirt wasn’t ironed like the other boys’, and his shoes were scuffed and in need of polishing – but I got the feeling all of that was on purpose. A look he cultivated.

‘And what about that guy?’ I said, jutting my chin in Freddie’s direction.

‘Freddie Martinez?’ Saundra asked. ‘Why?’

‘Just curious.’

The look on her face said there were much more interesting people to gossip about at this school, but Saundra was always happy to show off her encyclopedic knowledge of the student body, even if it was only Freddie Martinez. She took a deep breath and launched into a list of Freddie facts.

I learned that he and I had something in common: in a school of one-percenters, we fell somewhere in the ninety-nine. He was a scholarship kid. His mom was a caterer who he helped out on the weekends, but he also sold cheat sheets and term papers. And apparently, for the right price he’d even take your standardized tests for you. Around here that was a lucrative side gig.