Famous Last Words

I waited for her to get to the part where they dated.

“But as the year went on, I started to feel awkward about it. Like maybe he was a little more into the whole thing than I was. He started getting a

I held my breath.

“So finally, it sort of … imploded. He was supposed to come over and watch a movie, and I had a really busy day, and I tried to cancel but it was too late, and he showed up and he had brought a bunch of balloons. And he came in and was like, ‘Happy a

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Right? It was so weird. I guess I … went along with it, in a way? I mean, I tried to downplay it and laugh, like it was a joke. We watched the movie and hung out, and then he left, and I was relieved that he was gone. After that, I decided to spend less time around him. But he had this way of … showing up, you know? It was kind of odd.”

I nodded. “Kind of odd” was a fair way to describe Wyatt. Maybe even a little generous.

“So whatever, fine. I’m like, I can be nice to this guy, we’re friends, our parents are friends, yada yada. But then the next week, he comes over totally raging. Going on about how selfish I am and how I only think of myself …”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously. I was pretty freaked out. And at the end of it all, he broke up with me.” She let out a helpless laugh. “I mean, we’d never even been of a status where we could break up. But he dumped me. And I was like, okay, at least now he’ll leave me alone. But then …” She plucked at the pillowcase and shook her head. “He started texting me, and calling me, and stopping by my locker. There was this blog thing with pictures of me, with, like, our names…. And then I realized he had my email password.”

My heart had begun to thud like a drum. I felt sweat beading around my hairline, but this time I knew it wasn’t because of any ghost.

“I thought about it and realized that every time he’d shown up someplace unexpectedly, it was a meeting I’d talked about in an email. Went to lunch with my aunt at Spago? He was there. Went to a secret sale at Nordstrom? He was there. It started to feel like he was … everywhere.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

Her huge owl eyes blinked at me. “I told him straight out that he was a stalker and I was going to call the police if he didn’t stop.”

“And he stopped?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I stopped noticing it as much, anyway. And then he found his murder mystery to obsess over and I got out of jail free … so far.”

I didn’t know what to say. Yes, Wyatt could be argumentative and inconsistent. But something about Marnie’s story didn’t totally jibe with the guy I’d been spending time with. Almost like there are two Wyatts, I thought.

I certainly wasn’t going to tell Marnie that Wyatt and I had been hanging out, visiting local psychics, or that we regularly held perfectly pleasant conversations during chemistry class. So I said, “Wow. I’m sorry you went through all that.”

“Oh, it’s no big deal. I mean, I wasn’t a trembling victim in a corner. I started to get weirded out, that’s all. My instincts told me it was time to put a stop to it. And I have excellent instincts.” She smiled at me. “I picked you out of the crowd, didn’t I?”

The next night, I was home, asleep in my own bed, when a sudden noise woke me up.

I lay there, adrenaline zapping through me like lightning bolts, unsure if the sound had been real or if I’d dreamed it.

Then I heard it again….

Knock. Knock. Knock.

My whole body tensed.

In a moment of desperate, naive hope, I thought, Who would be knocking at the front door in the middle of the night?

Reed? With some urgent middle-of-the-night news?

But it wasn’t the sound of a person knocking on a door. Not a normal person, anyway. It was more like someone was sending a coded message, each knock separate and deliberate.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

It was coming from my bedroom door.

When I heard the next knock, I forced myself to sit up straight and called, “Hello?”

Maybe it was Jonathan. A lot of what he did was kind of formal and stilted. In theory, he could knock like that. It almost suited him.

But Jonathan didn’t answer me.

No one did.

The three knocks finished, but the sound seemed to hang in the air.

I went down the short, terrible list of suspects: an intruder — a robber, maybe, or a serial killer. Or a ghost.

Only … the alarm was on, so that ruled out a human.

It’s not a ghost, I told myself, because I am done with ghosts.

But even as I thought the words, I felt my so-called “normal” life slipping out of existence. I’d been fooling myself. Ignorance may be bliss, but at the end of the day it’s still ignorance.

And my ghost had decided it didn’t want to be ignored any longer.

I made myself step one foot out of bed. Then the other foot. And I forced my legs, one in front of the other, to walk to the door just as the sound came again:

Knock. Knock. Knock.

As quietly as I could, I dropped to the floor, pressed my cheek against the polished wood, and peered through the narrow opening.

I was fully prepared to see a pair of ghastly, rotted feet. Maybe even shriveled undead fingers worming their way under the door toward me …

But what I saw was red. Not blood — it was solid; it had form. But I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a red carpet? I thought of walking the red carpet the night before with Marnie. Maybe this was a dream.

I sat back and stared at the door until almost a minute had passed since the last set of knocks.

Okay, Willa. Listen up.

You are a reasonably intelligent human. You have some emotional issues to work through, sure, but you’ll probably be okay eventually. You’ll finish high school, go to a decent college, get a degree in something, and then enter the world as an adult. You have many choices and opportunities ahead of you. You can do anything you want to do with your life.

Except for one thing …

You are NOT opening that door.

Go back to bed. Go back to bed this instant.

In slow motion, I rose to my feet and turned away from the door, away from the foolish temptation to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy. Everything I’d done so far to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy just ended up making me feel even crazier.

I began to walk back to the bed, taking care not to make the merest hint of a sound as I went.

Behind me, the door opened by itself.

Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

How exactly, I wondered, does a corpse stand? Would she be leaning on the wall? Would she be held up, dangling in midair, by some supernatural energy? Maybe she lacked the strength to stand, and had dragged herself down the hall … so when I turned to look at her, she’d be lying on the floor, reaching her arms toward me hungrily.

Maybe she was already following me into the room.

Maybe she was right behind me.

At last, the horror of not knowing became greater than the horror of knowing, and I turned around.

But the room was empty.

The door was open.