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Now, in her defense, it hadn’t been an intentional theft. And honestly, ‘theft’ was way too strong a word for it…it wasn’t even what had happened! This had been a mix-up! A mistake! A real whoopsie-doodle of a switcheroo! …or at least she hoped it was, because if this hadn’t been something she’d accidentally done, then there was a very real, very significant chance that it had been one of Josh’s dead sisters who’d stuffed the hoodie into her bag, and like…
No. No, she wasn’t ready to deal with that possibility. Not when her stupid stitches had just started to dissolve.
Either way it left Ashley with a problem she wasn’t totally sure how to tackle; namely, she had to figure out what to do with the hoodie.
Chris’s hoodie.
Their retreat from Blackwood Pines had been a lot of things—quick, panicked, uncomfortable, steeped in an endlessly awkward silence—but ‘organized’ wasn’t on that list. Hell, ‘organized’ wasn’t even in the same zipcode! They’d all stumbled back down the mountain with their gear in tow, her and Josh both bleeding comically as they did so, and that had been that. No one had checked what they’d packed, they’d just freaking packed so they could get the heck out of there.
Y’know.
Away from the literal fucking ghosts.
True to form, she hadn’t been able to even look at her bags, much less think about unpacking them, for a solid week after that. Every time she so much as glanced at her backpack, that awful creeping sensation of fingers poking around her brain returned, the strange chill of a voice she only half-heard prickling the skin behind her ears, and like…Hannah and Beth might’ve been sweeties when they were alive, but Ashley wasn’t exactly champing at the bit for another round of letting them pull her around by the strings like some sort of demonic marionette. So long story short, she’d thrown her bag into her closet and shut the door tight.
Until about fifteen minutes ago.
That’s when she’d found the hoodie crammed in with all her other stuff. And to be fair—to be so fair!—she’d really, honestly, truly thought it was hers at first. It hadn’t been until she’d started sorting everything that needed to be washed into piles. That was a story in and of itself, because she was still a little nervous she was going to stumble upon some splortch of ectoplasm, truth be told…not that there had been any ectoplasm at the lodge…and not that ectoplasm stained things…to her knowledge…but she was getting off track again! She’d realized something was up when she was sorting her clothes, because as she held the wadded-up hoodie in her hands, it occurred to her that it was way too big to be hers.
‘Probably Josh’s,’ she’d thought to herself at first, because leave it to Josh to make her do his laundry. Had she fractured his tailbone? Sort of. But that hadn’t really been her fault, it had been Hannah’s, so it wasn’t entirely fair that he’d expect her to do his laundry to make up for that, and…and that was right about the moment she saw the name written in big, white block letters on the back of the pullover.
The name was not, in fact, ‘JOSH.’ It was, in fact, ‘CHRIS.’
She’d been staring at it ever since.
See, under normal circumstances, the answer was obvious: Return the freaking thing. Simple! Easy as pie! Problem was, um…hmm, how to phrase it…she had kinda…been avoiding Chris since they’d gotten back. Not like, intentionally! …well, okay, intentionally. Super intentionally. Not in a mean ‘I-don’t-want-to-see-you’ way, though, but in more of a mortified ‘I’m-afraid-I-will-literally-keel-over-and-die-if-I-make-eye-contact-with-you,’ way.
So. Okay, so…they hadn’t exactly bailed from the lodge immediately after the whole possession thing. They’d left the next morning, which meant she’d had plenty of time to make an absolute, utter, goddamn, hopeless fool of herself.
Again.
Cuz the whole being an unwitting conduit for the dead shtick had been incredibly cringeworthy, now that she had time to think about it in retrospect. Like, who did that? Who let themselves get possessed? She hadn’t even read out of a creepy old book written in Latin and made out of human skin or anything! She’d just been there! Ugh, it made her shudder to think about. Even still, that was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared to what had happened…after.
Her idea of making hot chocolate was solid, and she’d stand by that. It had been a damn good idea. Few things cured as many ills as a steaming mug of hot chocolate, marshmallows melting into foam on top, and she’d thought that it was precisely what the four of them had needed.
Had she intended on bawling her eyes out while making said cocoa? Yes, obviously. It wasn’t like they’d brought any K-Cups for the Keurig, so it was gonna take some time to heat up that soy milk (Sam’s doing), and in her book, heating up milk took up almost exactly the same amount of time as getting in one good existential weep. Fake psychic medium, real flesh puppet for the dead, professional crier—every little girl’s dream bona fides.
But she must not have been too slick about using cocoa time as crying time because Chris had joined her in the kitchen as she struggled to find which of the million or so cupboards the Washingtons kept their pots and pans in. That hadn’t even been enough time for her to get a single solitary tear worked up!
“So that was, uh…a thing. That happened. Out there.” Ah, always so eloquent, Chris. But he’d reached up into one of the higher cabinets to pull out exactly the kind of pot she’d been looking for, so she’d let it slide without comment. “You okay?” he’d asked, lowering his voice only slightly, something about the words suggesting he’d cut himself off, or maybe had meant to say something else entirely.
“Yeah,” she’d said, trying to push past the discomfort of having to accept (1) that ghosts were real, (2) that ghosts could very easily possess whosoever the fuck they wanted, and (3) that she’d been forced to learn both of those things the hard way only a few minutes ago. She’d wanted (still did, really) to move right into denial. Then repression. Then forgetting about the whole damn thing until she found herself in a therapist’s office at the age of fifty. But when she’d taken the pot from him she’d realized she wasn’t okay, because all at once her hand had felt like it had been crushed by a cartoon character’s ridiculously oversized mallet.
She couldn’t really remember, but she must’ve yelled or made some kind of noise, because hardly a second later the two of them were wrapping her hand in a makeshift ice pack made of a dishtowel and a few ice cubes from the freezer, neither having noticed the awful purple-black bruises that had been spreading from her fingers towards her wrist until then.
“Spoke too soon, huh?” he’d asked, sounding like he was only half-joking.
“Yeah,” she’d said, absently echoing herself, only acutely aware of the ache in her fingers, the sting in the very corner of her mouth where the spirit board’s planchette had caught and split her lip. And she could remember that much—she could remember feeling like a moron—because there she’d been, fingers sprained or maybe even broken, her mouth raw and a little bloody, her throat feeling as though it had been rubbed down with hot sandpaper from Hannah using her as a megaphone, every inch of her jostled and jangled and beat to high hell, and the only thing she’d been able to think about was how nice it felt to have him hold her hand in both of his like that.
The next part was fuzzy, in that she only partially remembered it. …which was to say, uh, she couldn’t really…put her finger on which one of them had moved first. She suspected it had been her. And really, even that was another gentle way of saying she was about ninety percent sure she’d been the one to do it, but her brain was doing its best to shield her from the added trauma of knowing she’d been the one to do it with any certainty.
So the jury was (mostly) out on that one, but the result had been the same either way. She and Chris had kissed.
In the kitchen.
A lot.
Like…a lot.
And it probably would’ve been a lot more, but one of them had moved just a little too suddenly, and then the cut on her lip had started to bleed worse, and okay, again, who was to say, but they had probably managed just fine for another few seconds anyway because she’d angled her face so he was only getting the side of her mouth that wasn’t gashed open, but then the pain had kicked in and…that had been the end of it.
Eventually they’d made the hot chocolate. Then everyone had slept in Josh’s bedroom, squeezed together like sardines or scared little kids at a sleepover (she’d wedged herself between Sam and the wall, removing all chance of having to talk to Chris about what had happened). Then they’d left.
So while returning the stupid hoodie was the obvious thing to do, it was also…uh, a lot to consider. If she returned it, she’d probably end up having to talk to Chris, and if she talked to him, there was going to be that big, weird thing hanging in the air between them, and…and…and…
Ashley shoved it into the laundry basket and carried it towards the laundry room with a grunt.
***
She stared at her phone. Picked it up. Unlocked it. Let her finger hover over her text messenger. Waited. Put her phone down again. Dropping her head into her hands, Ash did her very best to disappear into the air.
This was stupid. This was stupid and dumb and babyish and she was being such a moron. She and Chris were friends—best friends! They hardly ever went this long without talking, and like…they’d always had that playful, flirting-but-not-really thing going on…hadn’t they? And, and he’d kissed her back in the kitchen! …hadn’t he?
Her fingers (the ones not in splints) knotted in her hair. From behind her, the horrendous screech of the dryer told her that the last of her laundry was done. The only solace she could find in the situation was that she was home, meaning she could have this existential crisis in the privacy of her own personal space instead of the dorm’s communal laundry room. The last thing she needed was for someone to barge in on her frantically bouncing back and forth between pep talks and panic attacks, muttering under her breath about ghosts and kissing Chris. As long as she could get a handle on herself before her mom got home, no one would ever have to know how badly she was freaking out.
Again, the freaking out thing was stupid. So, so stupid. So stupid! They’d been friends forever! Even if…that…had been a mistake, even if he didn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about him, even if she was just deluding herself by thinking his awful jokes and stuff were attempts at flirting when really they were just affronts to the art of comedy in general, well…sometimes friends made mistakes! She couldn’t just avoid him for the rest of her life, that would be…ugh.
Embarrassed or not, the only thing on Earth worse than the thought of having to awkwardly find out her ridiculous crush on Chris was a one-sided deal was the thought of not having him in her life anymore. So…so one way or another, she was going to do…something.
Normally she didn’t text without punctuation, but like, what was she gonna do, send an exclamation point and look desperate? A question mark would’ve made her seem passive aggressive, an ellipsis would’ve been fucking ominous, and a period?! A period?! Absolutely not. No punctuation it was. She hit send and quickly dropped her phone onto the couch again, getting up to fold her laundry.
Chicken move? Definitely. But she knew she wouldn’t have been able to keep herself from sweating as she watched him type his response. Or…not type a response.
Ashley tried desperately to put it out of her head, folding her clothes and sliding hangers into her shirts for later. It didn’t take nearly as long as she would’ve hoped, and it was only about five minutes later that she found herself left with the final piece of laundry.
The hoodie.
Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she left the laundry room and picked up her phone, moving carefully all the while, as though afraid of setting off a motion alarm. She swallowed hard when she saw she had a new notification.
Ashley didn’t let herself sit. Nope, she squared her shoulders, made up her mind, and just went for it.
Instead of spelling it out, she popped back into the laundry room for a second, grabbing his hoodie. She laid it out on the arm of the couch and snapped a quick picture, sending it his way. The little ghost logo on the front came out slightly blurry in the low light, only adding to its general air of spookiness.
She bit her lip, then remembered her doctor’s warnings and quickly released it. Here they were…and here she was, about to do…something.
That time his response wasn’t so immediate. Ashley stared down at her phone’s screen, watching the little ‘…’ bubble appear and disappear over and over again before she finally let herself sit, warily eying the hoodie as she waited.
The temptation to put it on had been, in a word, strong. And that was dumb too! It was so, so, so, so, so dumb! It was just a crappy pullover with a stupid little ghost on it, literally nothing more than an identical—if not slightly larger—version of her own hoodie! The only difference was the name written on the back. The only difference was, well…it was Chris’s.
The thought of wearing it heated her face up until it almost hurt. That was a dating thing, a boyfriend thing…the sort of thing she regularly caught herself daydreaming about if she wasn’t careful.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
Well he’d sure taken his sweet time writing that sentence, hadn’t he?
Ashley frowned, rereading those last few messages a couple times.
That was when it began to dawn on her. Slowly at first, then it crushed her with all the weight of, well, a giant metal sculpture dropping from the ceiling. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—let herself get her hopes up, but there was a spike in her adrenaline that was impossible to ignore, forcing her to type a little slower to keep from misspelling everything.
She’d hit send before she’d meant to. Something else had just occurred to her. Chris’s odd, nervously veiled statements were one thing, but this? This?! Ash furrowed her brow in quiet disbelief before asking a question she was coming to suspect she knew the answer to.
She put her phone down just long enough to grab one of the couch’s pillows and scream into it like the star of some sappy teen movie, her feet kicking a little against the couch as the glee burst out of her.
She didn’t let him finish whatever else he’d been planning on saying. Before she could talk herself out of it, she sent two more quick messages:
His response dinged her phone just as she pulled the hoodie on over her head, and while she didn’t immediately turn to check what he’d said, she had a pretty good idea she already knew.