I stared at the helmet she offered me. It was black with a ridge of neon-yellow spikes coming out from the top, like a Mohawk or the back of a dinosaur or something. I wasn’t sure how I’d never noticed Ruby in that thing before, but I took it and strapped it to my head, gingerly climbing onto the handlebars, the metal hot even though the bike had been parked in the shade.
“Ready?” Ruby asked, climbing onto the bike.
I held on tightly, reminding myself that if I could go to a possibly haunted house every day, riding a block on the handlebars of a bike should not be that scary.
“Ready,” I said.
CHAPTER 22
RUBY
I have to hand it to Olivia—she only shrieked once on the ride to my house, which felt like a real victory for both of us.
Of course, I tried to be as careful as I could, and didn’t even speed up coming over the bump at the top of my driveway, a major sacrifice since that’s my favorite part of the bike ride home. Maybe that meant Liv and I really were becoming friends.
We both hopped off the bike at the garage door, and I went over and punched in the code to open it, walking my bike inside as Olivia followed behind me, unstrapping her—well, my—helmet.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked, nodding at the older fridge we kept out there and leaning my bike against the wall.
“Sure,” she said as she handed me the helmet, and I grabbed a couple of really cold sodas before we made our way into the house. “I get that we can’t have Cokes at camp,” I told Olivia, walking into the kitchen, “because sugar and caffeine or whatever, but don’t you think that might actually help us work? I feel like I’d be so much more efficient all hopped up on Dr Pepper.”
Liv laughed, taking a sip of her own drink. “I don’t mind not having Cokes,” she said, “but I wish they’d give us something better than those juice boxes. They’re always warm and it’s not sweet enough.”
“Right? I hate that stuff. It’s like drinking sweat.”
“Oh, gross,” Olivia immediately replied, fake-gagging, but then she laughed, like, really laughed and I started laughing, too. I don’t think it was that my joke was that funny—definitely not my best work—but it felt good to giggle about something as stupid as bad lemonade after everything that had happened today. And I think maybe we were trying to avoid talking about Garrett and that bite and what it all might mean for as long as we could. But then eventually our giggles died down, and I cleared my throat, gesturing around.
“Do you want the tour? It takes like ten seconds.”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
I’d been to Olivia’s house a bunch because of Emma, so I knew my house was really, really different. To be honest, I liked our place a lot better even though it was smaller. Emma and Olivia’s house was pretty, all white cushions and blue curtains, lots of windows and plants, but it always looked like an advertisement for a furniture store or something. There was no flair, as Mom would’ve said.
Our house had plenty of flair. There was the one wall we’d sponge-painted with gold paint, the colorful pillows all over the couch, the furniture that didn’t really match but still managed to go together. It was a little crazy and a lot cluttered, but it was ours, and I could tell Liv liked it. She smiled as she glanced around, and that honestly made me like her more than I’d thought I could.
“C’mon,” I told her, “to my secret lair.”
She went to set her soda on the counter, and I gave her a look. “Oh, no,” I told her. “This is a total ‘food and drink allowed in bedrooms’ house. It’s anarchy.”
Giggling, Olivia toasted me with her can, then followed me through the den and the little hallway to my room.
It was messy in there, but I liked to think it was organized chaos. I swept a stack of books off the navy-blue beanbag chair I’d gotten at Target a few months back—saved up my own money, thank you very much—and gestured for her to sit on it while I perched on the edge of my futon. I used to have a much bigger, nicer bed, but I’d liked the idea of a bed that was also a couch. Sometimes I didn’t even bother folding it out. I remembered that Liv’s bed was this giant four-poster thing, all white and pink. Emma had made fun of it to me in secret, but I’d kind of liked it. It was pretty.
“Okay,” I said once Olivia was sitting down. “Are we ready to talk about the bite thing?”
She took a deep breath, her fingers fiddling with the pop top on her soda can. “It was probably an animal,” she offered, and I tucked my legs underneath me, giving her what I hoped was my best “girl, please” look.
“Olivia. Liv. Livtastic. Liv of my life.”
She waved a hand, her cheeks a little pink. “I know, I know, the room was empty, we didn’t see anything . . . I know all that stuff, Ruby, but . . . houses don’t bite.”
“This isn’t a normal house,” I reminded her. “Look, if my house took a chunk out of my palm—”
“It was barely a puncture.”
“And left me with only half a hand, then sure, I’d be like, ‘Animal, probs.’ Who knows, there could be a rabid squirrel in that pile of laundry right there.”
Olivia glanced over at the overflowing laundry basket I was pointing at, and scooted slightly away from it, pulling her legs closer.
“But this is Live Oak House,” I went on. “A house with a history. And a house with a tree in the middle of it.”
“But it’s a house,” Liv countered. “Made of wood and bricks and . . . I don’t know, whatever they build houses of. It doesn’t have teeth.”
A house with teeth.
That’s what I’d thought that first day when we’d driven up and I’d seen all those sharp angles and tall points. It had seemed stupid at the time, but it didn’t seem all that stupid anymore.
I sat back on the futon, my heels clanging against the metal frame. “Then what bit Garrett?”
Liv leaned back, too, mimicking my posture as best she could on the beanbag chair. “We’ll find out on Wednesday,” Liv reminded me. “I’m sure the hospital can find out what kind of bite it was, and it was probably a raccoon or something. That . . . just moved really fast.”
“We had a raccoon under our porch last year,” I told her. “It moved about as fast as you’d expect something made of blubber and tiny hands to move.”
“Raccoons don’t have blubber,” Olivia said, but I ignored that, pulling my satchel up onto my bed.
“And we don’t have to wait for Wednesday, anyway,” I told her. “I can text Garrett and ask him right now. He might already be back.”
I fished my phone out of the backpack, then looked up to see Olivia staring at me, green eyes wide. “You have his phone number?” she nearly squeaked. “His actual phone number?”
Stupid as it was, I felt my face go hot. “Okay, it is not like that,” I said, pulling up Garrett’s contact info. “Like, at all. We were talking on Xbox Live the other day, and he gave it to me in case I ever needed to text him for . . . stuff. Xbox stuff, or school stuff. Not . . . not, like . . . other stuff.”
Olivia didn’t look all that convinced, and I thought about Emma again. Had Olivia said anything to her? Could I even ask if she had?
I busied myself sending Garrett the most casual text I possibly could. Once it was done, I hit send and looked up at Olivia. “Okay, done. Let’s see what he says.”
But Olivia was getting up off the beanbag chair to sit next to me on the futon, craning her neck to see the phone. “‘Hey, Dude Man’?” she read, wrinkling her nose, and I pulled the phone back, tucking it under my leg.
“I was trying to be casual,” I told her. “Friendly.”
“You sound like an alien who just learned Earth-speak,” Olivia replied, and I actually gaped at her. Like, mouth falling open, eyes wide, the whole thing.
“That was super rude,” I informed her, “but also really funny? What is eve
n happening right now?”
Rolling her eyes at me, Liv sat back on the futon, but she was smiling, too, and I wondered how often anyone had ever called her funny. Probably never, and I couldn’t really blame them, since up until about six seconds ago, I certainly wouldn’t have said that—My phone vibrated under my leg, and I snatched it up, wanting to see what Garrett had said. Not because of liking a boy reasons, but extremely serious haunted house reasons.
“‘Weirdest thing,’” I read. “‘Not an animal. Freely asked if one of you guys bit me lol.’”
Olivia and I looked up, meeting each other’s eyes. “What?” she said softly, and I typed back my own version of that, an abbreviation that would’ve gotten me in trouble if Mom had seen it.
I waited for a while, holding my phone, occasionally glancing up at Liv to see her staring down at the phone screen, too. And then the answer flashed up, and both of us let out our breaths in a whoosh.
Because the bite was human.
CHAPTER 23
OLIVIA
“Well, I didn’t bite him,” Ruby said later as we sat in her room eating pizza. Her mom had come home earlier, and I’d gotten permission from my mom to stay for dinner. At my house, there is no way we would’ve been allowed to have dinner in my room, but Ruby’s mom had smiled, called it a “carpet picnic,” and left us alone. That was nice, since we really needed to talk in privacy.
“I obviously didn’t bite him, either,” I replied, picking a stray mushroom off my slice of pizza. “And there was no one in the room but the three of us.”
Wrinkling her nose, Ruby leaned back against her futon, a slice of supreme pizza dangling from her hand in a way that made me nervous for the carpet. “You know, I think I’m more offended that Freely thought we might have bitten Garrett than I am scared that some ghost obviously bit Garrett.”
“A ghost didn’t bite him,” I said automatically, because what else could I say? Nothing else really made sense, but when you had reached the point where “a ghost did it” seemed like the most logical explanation, things were pretty far gone in my opinion.
Ruby snorted, tugging at a string of cheese on her pizza. Her nails were painted dark blue with little sparkles, the polish chipped. “Then what did?” she asked, and since I didn’t have an answer for that—and Ruby knew it—she just kept going.
“And this is the third creepy thing that’s happened to us so far in there. It’s only been two weeks, and we’ve got the music box, the key, and the attic. Which could’ve been some old music box malfunctioning, sure, and a key that happened to be lying in it. And the door could’ve been some trick of the architecture, or an open window making drafts do weird things. We can explain those things away if we want to, but Garrett having a person bite on his hand? How do we explain that away, Liv?”
I didn’t bother telling her not to call me that—Ruby had clearly decided I needed a nickname whether I wanted one or not. I set my pizza on the paper plate, cleaning my hands off with a paper towel, and really tried to think. There was a poster of some video game over Ruby’s bed, a tall dude in a hooded cloak holding daggers out to either side of him, and I focused on Dagger Guy as I thought.
“Maybe it’s Garrett,” I finally said. “Maybe it’s some kind of elaborate prank. He seems like a little bit of a jerk—”
“Offense!” Ruby broke in, and I lowered my head, giving her a look.
“Ruby.”
Sighing, Ruby scratched the back of her neck. “He is a little bit of a jerk,” she agreed reluctantly. “But the funny kind. I’m the funny kind of jerk, Liv.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, quicker than I meant to.
And when Ruby just stared at me, I drummed my fingers on my leg, not meeting her gaze. “You’re funny, yes,” I said, “but you’re never mean. You’re just . . . you.”
There was a pause, and then Ruby said, “So you like my kind of jerkiness,” and I shook my head even as I smiled.
“We’re not talking about you, we’re talking about Garrett,” I said. “Is he the type of jerk who would somehow actually hurt himself to trick us into thinking he’d been bitten?”
We both pondered that for a second before, almost in unison, shaking our heads.
“That’s major psychopath behavior,” Ruby said, crossing her legs as she took another slice of pizza out of the box. “Garrett can be a jerk, but he’s not evil or anything.”
“Agreed,” I said, then chewed on my thumbnail, thinking some more.
“So if it is a ghost . . . ,” I started, and Ruby paused, her pizza halfway to her mouth, eyes wide.
“You’re going to admit that we’re dealing with the spooky?”
I waved her off and shoved my own plate away. “I’m just saying I’m open to the idea that something very weird is going on at Live Oak House, and it would be stupid not to explore all the options.”
“All the options,” Ruby echoed, nodding. “Especially now that people are getting hurt.” Then she dropped her pizza on her plate with a splat and got to her feet, going over to the messy desk by her window. I’d spotted the desk when I’d first come in even though it was almost completely covered in books, paper, little plastic figurines of monsters, what looked to be an abandoned terrarium, and more colored pencils than I’d ever seen in one place before. To my eyes, it was all chaos, but Ruby went straight for what she was looking for, a thick black notebook covered in silver Sharpie doodles.
“We need to make a list,” she said. “All the things that could possibly be going on at Live Oak House.”
It was actually a pretty smart idea, and I scooted closer to her as she opened the notebook, flipping past several pages of drawings before finding a blank page. Then, at the top of that page, she scrawled THE SPOOKY in big purple letters.
“So, number one, obviously ghosts,” she said, and I nodded, watching her write Ghosts, then draw a squiggly little figure next to it.
“Number two,” Ruby went on, “we are being dumb.”
I frowned at that, but then, after a moment, nodded. “Yeah, that’s definitely one of the options.”
Dumb went on the list, and Ruby made a quick sketch of two stick-figure-type girls, both holding their fingers up as big Ls on their foreheads.
“For losers,” she informed me, and I turned my frown on her.
“Yeah, I got that.”
The rest of the list went quickly, and was actually pretty short.
Ghosts.
Dumb.
Garrett. (His face drawn quickly, floppy hair over his brow, a smirk on his face.)
Invisible Monster. (No drawing for that one, of course.)
Mrs. Freely. (I didn’t want to add that one, but Ruby insisted that we at least consider it an option.)
The two of us looked at the list for a moment, Ruby tapping the pen against the paper, a sound that would have annoyed me once.
“Anything else?” she asked at last, and I shook my head.
“Nothing I can think of.”
Ruby added ?????? at the very bottom, then gave me a shrug. “Covering all our bases,” she told me.
So we had a handful of weird experiences and now we had a list of things that might be causing them, but I wasn’t sure what we should do next. I asked Ruby, and she leaned against her bed, thinking.
“It pains me to say this,” she said on a sigh, “but I think we might have to do, like, schoolwork. Research. The library. Stuff like that. And don’t get me wrong, that’s totally against everything I stand for in the summer, but if we want to get to the bottom of this, it seems like the only way.”
I gave a sort of giggling-snorting laugh, the kind that always embarrassed me but I was never able to help, and Ruby looked at me, her eyes crinkling in the corners.
“What was that?”
“That was me laughing,” I told her, “and I’m laughing because . . .
‘get to the bottom of this.’ It’s like we’re in a Scooby-Doo mystery or something.”
Ruby laughed, too, tilting her head back against the futon, and then she picked up her list and added Old Man Jenkins at the bottom.
We were still giggling when her mom came upstairs to tell us it was time for me to head home.
RubyToozday: Sooooo JACKPOT. I went to the library today, and they had the book about Live Oak House.
OliviaAnneWillingham: Anything good?
RubyToozday: YES. Check this out:
RubyToozday: “Live Oak House was built in 1903 by Felix Wrexhall, a man fleeing a tragic past.”
RubyToozday: I mean, BOOM, TRAGIC PAST RIGHT OFF THE BAT.
OliviaAnneWillingham: What kind of “tragic past”?
RubyToozday: I’ll get to that. Then there’s THIS: “However, from the very first day construction on his new dream home began, it seemed like the house was cursed.”
OliviaAnneWillingham: Ooooh!
RubyToozday: I KNOW RIGHT.
RubyToozday: Okay, now I’m going to summarize.
RubyToozday: Felix wanted the very first thing put in the house to be . . . wait for it . . . the live oak tree.
RubyToozday: You’re shocked, I know.
RubyToozday: He wanted to have it installed in the foundation of the house as this massive pillar right there when you walked in, rising up from the floor all the way to the third story.
RubyToozday: And that part worked out, we see it every day, it looks cool, etc.
RubyToozday: But the NOT-COOL PART?
RubyToozday: It killed someone.
OliviaAnneWillingham: Seriously?
RubyToozday: Like I’d joke about Murder Trees. YES.
RubyToozday: So the tree had to travel by rail, and three different men working for the railroad company had been injured loading it up for the journey. One had his leg crushed when the trunk unexpectedly rolled off the flatbed car it was riding on. Another was nearly killed when the machinery moving the tree misfired, sending it swinging right at the guy’s head. A third lost a hand getting the trunk off the train and onto the stretcher they’d set up to literally drag the tree out to where the house was being built.