Sara Shepard - Heartless

“ You’re going to a seance?” Aria squeaked incredulously.

Noel nodded, examining a set of tarot cards with a half-naked sorceress on the front. “Seances rock. Have you listened to any Led Zeppelin? They were obsessed with the dead. I heard they got their song lyrics from Satan worshippers.”

Aria stared at him. Led Zeppelin was Noel and Mike’s latest craze. The other day, Mike had asked Byron if he had an old copy of Led Zeppelin IV on vinyl—he wanted to play “Stairway to Heaven” backward and listen for secret messages.

“Anyway, now that you’re here, it’s getting me closer to a hot girl, isn’t it?” Noel snickered lasciviously. “And hey, maybe if this works, you’ll come to my hot tub party Thursday night.”

Aria’s skin felt like it was crawling with leeches. The various skull talismans lined up on a nearby shelf were leering at her. Behind the counter, the shopkeeper smiled mysteriously, like he was keeping a secret. What was Noel really doing here? Had someone from the Rosewood press put him up to this, asking him to follow Aria around and report her every move? Or maybe this was a prank thought up by some of the lacrosse boys. In sixth grade, before Ali had welcomed Aria into her exclusive clique, kooky Aria had been relentlessly teased by girls and guys alike.

Noel picked up a phallic purple candle, then put it down again. “So I guess you’re here because of Ali?”

The patchouli incense was beginning to clog Aria’s sinuses. She gave a noncommittal shrug.

Noel looked at Aria carefully. “So did you see her in the woods?”

“It’s none of your business,” Aria snapped, looking around for hidden cameras or recorders nestled among the boxes of clove cigarettes. That seemed like just the kind of question a Rosewood reporter would encourage him to ask.

“Okay, okay,” Noel said defensively. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

The shopkeeper slammed his book shut with a whump. “The medium says you can go in now,” he proclaimed, parting a bead curtain at the back of the store.

Aria looked at the curtain, then at Noel. What if a bunch of Typical Rosewood Boys were waiting to jump out from behind the boxes in the back room, take pictures of her, and post them online? But the shopkeeper was glaring at her, so Aria gritted her teeth, pushed through the curtain, and slumped down on one of the folding chairs that had been set up in the center of the room. Although she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to, Noel sat next to her and shrugged off his coat. Aria peeked at him. It was obvious why so many girls wanted to date Noel—he had dark, wavy hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and a tall, athletic body. His breath smelled like Altoids. But whatever. Even if he was here for legitimate reasons, he was so not her type. His perfectly broken-in dark denim jeans clearly came from a high-end boutique, and he was too groomed for Aria’s taste; he didn’t have a millimeter of stubble on his face.

Aria looked around the back of the occult shop, frowning. The only lights in here were a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and a foul-smelling candle in the corner. Unidentified boxes were piled high on shelves, and toward the emergency exit was an enormous, oblong wooden thing that looked suspiciously like a coffin. Noel followed her gaze. “Yep, that’s a coffin,” he said. “People buy those for, like, personal use. They get off on pretending they’re dead.”

“How do you know that?” she whispered, flabbergasted.

“I know more than you think.”

Noel’s ultra-white teeth gleamed in the darkness and Aria shivered.

The beads parted again, and two more people shuffled in and found seats. One was an old man with a handlebar moustache, and the other was a woman who looked like she was in her thirties, but it was hard to tell. She had a kerchief over her hair and wore big sunglasses. A young man came in last. He wore a velvet cloak and had a scarf wrapped around his head. pendants and strings of beads dripped from around his neck, and he carried a dry ice contraption that spilled smoke around the already hazy room.

“Greetings,” he boomed. “My name is Equinox.”

Aria stifled a laugh. Equinox? Come on. But next to her, Noel tipped his chair forward in rapt attention.

Equinox spread his palms toward the ceiling. “To conjure up the spirits you’re looking for, I need everyone to close their eyes and concentrate as one.” He began to om.

A few people—including Noel—joined in. The cold metal of the chair penetrated Aria’s wool skirt. She cracked one eye open and peeked around. Everyone was leaning forward expectantly and a few people had joined hands. Suddenly Equinox teetered backward, as if an invisible force had just shoved him. A shiver ran through Aria’s body and the air felt heavy around her. Taking a leap of faith, she omed too.

There was a long silence. The heating ducts rattled. There were soft patterns from the floor above. Incense wafted in from the front room, sweet and pungent. Something soft and featherlike brushed very faintly across Aria’s cheek, and she jumped. When she opened her eyes, there was nothing there.

“Goooood,” Equinox said. “Okay, we can open our eyes now. I’m feeling someone with us. Someone very close to one of you. Has anyone lost a friend?”

Aria stiffened. Ali couldn’t be here, just like that . . . could she?

Horrifyingly, the medium walked right to Aria and crouched down. His goatee ended in a sharp point, and he smelled faintly of pot. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “It’s you,” he said in a low voice, his lips close to her ear.

“Um,” Aria whispered, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end.

“You’ve lost a special friend, haven’t you?” he asked hauntingly.

The room was still. Aria’s heart started to pound. “Is she . . . here?” She looked around the room, expecting to see the girl she’d rescued from the fire, dressed in a sweatshirt, her face tinged with soot.

“She’s close,” the medium assured her. He tented his fingers and clenched his jaw, as if deep in concentration. A few more seconds ticked by. The room seemed to darken. The only lights were the glow-in-the-dark digits on Noel’s IWC Aquatimer diving watch. Aria’s pulse swished in her ears. Her fingers began to tremble, almost like they were picking up a vibration. Ali’s vibration.

“She’s telling me she knew everything about you,” Equinox said, almost teasingly.

Aria prickled with fear—and hope. That certainly sounded like Ali. “We were best friends.”

“But you hated that she knew everything about you,” Equinox corrected. “She knew this, too.”

Aria gasped. Now her legs trembled in sync with her fingers. Noel shifted in his seat. “She . . . did?”

“She knew a lot of things,” Equinox whispered. “She knew you wanted her gone. It made her very sad. Many things made her very sad.”

Aria fluttered her hand to her mouth. All the other audience members were staring at her. She could see the whites of their wide eyes. “I didn’t want her gone,” she squeaked.

Equinox tilted his head to the ceiling, as if it gave him a better view of Ali. “She forgives you, though. She knows she wasn’t fair to you either.”

“Really?” Aria stammered. She pressed her palms against her knees to settle them. It was true, of course. Sometimes Ali wasn’t fair to her. Lots of times, actually.

Equinox nodded. “She knows it wasn’t nice to steal your boyfriend. Especially since you two had been a couple for such a long time.”

Aria cocked her head, wondering if she’d heard him wrong. A chair squeaked and an audience member coughed. “My . . . boyfriend?” she repeated. A gnawing feeling roiled in her stomach. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in seventh grade.