“Freaky Friday, huh?” Adrienne said through Couri’s mouth, laughing lightly, the voice on my phone speaker doubling with the voice coming out of my laptop. “The old switcheroo. Pretty cool trick, huh?”
I turned my phone off and tried to nod, to seem unbothered by what was happening.
“Yeah,” I said, “pretty cool trick. But…how do you do it?”
“Watch,” Adrienne said.
And then my mouth fell open.
My mouth fell open because in a period of maybe half a minute, as Couri’s body began to shake and then to convulse, as if she were sick and about to throw up, a shadow began to gather behind her. At first, it was a formless sort of thing, no more than a cloud of fine black mist. But slowly that mist began to take on the outline of a human figure, and then specifically a female figure, and then specifically it began to take on the features of Adrienne Long herself.
Short, spiky black hair, dark brown eyes, flawless skin—the one physical feature Adrienne shared with her little sister. She wore the same top I remembered her wearing the morning of the outbreak, where she’d stood not far from me and Noah out in the parking lot, watching as we fought. It was a black, lacy bodice that Adrienne had found in a vintage shop in New York City when she and Couri had gone with the school band for a music competition. She’d worn that top more than any other article of clothing in the past year, whenever the weather was appropriate, and sometimes even when it wasn’t. Seeing her in it now made me feel weirdly relieved. Like, at least she still had that, I thought. This small token of happiness from her former life.
“So?” Adrienne said, spreading her arms out wide behind her little sister, who began to slump forward in the desk chair, forehead coming closer to me on my side of the screen. “What do you think?”
At first, I could only sit there with wide eyes and open mouth, afraid and in awe. Mostly afraid, though, which is what kept me from forming a coherent response.
Adrienne started laughing, then shook her head like my reaction was the most hilarious thing in the world. “Well, look at that,” she said. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen Ellie Frame, journalist extraordinaire, without a strong opinion.”
“I can’t,” I said, nearly breathless. “I can’t believe you can do that.”
“It’s not easy,” Adrienne said, “but just like Mom and Dad always told me and Couri when it came to mastering our instruments, practice makes perfect.”
She put her hands in the position I’d seen her take to play her flute and pretended to pipe a few notes before dropping her arms at her sides and looking down at her sister. Couri’s eyelids were half closed, as if she were on some kind of sedative.
“Help,” Couri said, slurring that sad little word.
A shiver ran down my spine. I could feel it hit each and every vertebra as it passed through. Then another ran through me as I saw Adrienne’s face contort a little, as if she was holding back tears only seconds after she’d finished laughing, and the next thing she did was to lean down and put one cheek against Couri’s, stroking her sister’s hair gently. “Oh, Couri,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wish it could be some other way, too.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I began to get an inkling as I watched Adrienne’s form dissipate, returning to that fine black mist surrounding Couri, who began to choke and convulse again as Adrienne forced herself back inside her.
After it was over, Couri’s eyes opened and, from somewhere inside her, Adrienne’s voice said, “I really do wish there was some other way, but this is all I’ve been able to figure out so far.”
She flexed Couri’s fingers, cracking them like she might be prepping to play a difficult piece of music, then rubbed Couri’s wrists, one after the other, as if she were making sure gloves had been pulled tightly over her own hands.
“Adrienne,” I said, “where did you learn how to do that?”
“That’s kind of hard to answer,” Adrienne said, tilting Couri’s head a little, as if she were trying to find the right words. “It was kind of by accident, actually. A little bird showed me, after I got to this side of things.”
“What side of things?” I asked, even though I knew from Becca and Rose exactly what she meant. I wanted to draw her out. Whenever the Adrienne I had known got upset in the past, giving her the space to talk was the best way to get her to be reasonable.
“You know,” said Adrienne. “The other side. The shadow side. The land of the dead.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t have to do this sort of thing,” I said then, giving out just a little bit of bait that I hoped Adrienne would take, which she did.
“What sort of thing?” she asked immediately. Couri’s eyes narrowed, expressing Adrienne’s suspicion. “What would you know about it?”
“It’s all over the news,” I said.
“What is?”
“The hauntings,” I said. “So many of them. It’s like half of Newfoundland is haunted.”
“Oh, that,” Adrienne said, shrugging. “Well, some of us aren’t interested in haunting anyone. I’m just trying to keep myself alive.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning in a little, trying to show her that she didn’t have to treat me like the enemy. “Is there something trying to hurt you? Is there anything I can do?”
Adrienne huffed in frustration through Couri’s nose, then wrapped Couri’s arms around her chest, hugging herself defensively. “Really, Ellie,” she said, and right then the tears she’d previously held back started to well in Couri’s eyes. “There’s nothing the living can do for me now. Goddamn it. I didn’t want to cry.”
Couri’s body suddenly began to convulse again, her shoulders jerking as she struggled through a fit of coughing. “Help,” Couri said again, in her own voice.
Then her body returned to stillness, and Adrienne was back in the control booth.
“Please don’t fight me, Couri,” she said, wiping away her tears. “You know it just makes this harder.”
“What are you doing to her?” I asked, disturbed by what I was seeing.
“I’m taking what she always had,” Adrienne said. “I’m going to get what I always deserved but only she was given.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A life,” Adrienne said. “Attention. And respect. I was talented, too, you know.”
I could tell at that point that Becca and Rose had been right. Adrienne wasn’t the person I remembered. Sure, she’d always been a bit resentful of the attention her parents and everyone else showered on Couri, but she’d always been gracious about it. Used us, her friends, to vent about her problems so that she didn’t make any more issues than there already were between her and her family. But she’d never been like this. Never once while she was alive had I seen her become so unhinged, so vindictive.
“I know you were talented, Adrienne,” I said. “We all knew that.”
“Having friends who understood the situation made things better, Ellie,” she agreed, nodding a little, her voice cracking from the pressure of trying to hold back her tears. “But that’s all gone now. A month ago, I still had a future, where things could have gotten better, you know? Where it would have been enough for me to just be me. Now, though?” She shook Couri’s head, rubbed Couri’s red eyes, thumbing away the tears she wouldn’t let fall. “Now things are different. It’s all over. There are no second chances. There’s no wide-open future for me. I’m sorry if you don’t understand. But trust me. You’d feel the same way, if you were in my position.”
“What’s your position, Adrienne?” I said. “Help me understand.”
“My position?” Adrienne said, sighing, rolling her eyes. “Not a good one, really. I just want my life back, you know? But I can’t have that. And yet I can’t leave this godforsaken place, either. So this”—here she paused to hold Couri?
??s arms out in front of her, turning Couri’s palms upward, clenching and unclenching Couri’s fists before looking up at me again—“is the best I can do. I’m not going to hide or try to wait things out like Becca and Rose. I may be dead, but this—what I’m doing here with Couri—this is the one choice I’ve been able to make on this side of things. Screw that gray-area bullshit. If I can’t leave, I’m going to figure out how to live, somehow.”
“You don’t have to do this, though,” I said. “Not like this.”
Adrienne snorted. “Oh, really?” she said. “I’m sorry, Ellie, but what would you know about it? Last time I checked, you still had a heartbeat.”
“Becca’s been able to leave,” I said, ignoring her jab. “So has Timothy Barlow. You remember him, right? My next-door neighbor, the sophomore?”
Adrienne shook her head, squinting at me like I was the one who had come unhinged. “What the hell are you talking about, Ellie?”
“I did it,” I said, looking away from the screen for a second, still anxious over it all. “I know how to help you get out of here. I know how to help you leave. If you really want to, that is, like you said.”
“You’re lying,” Adrienne said immediately. “How could you possibly know how to do that?”
“I learned by accident,” I said, shrugging. “Just like you learned how to do…what you’re doing.”
Adrienne stared at me hard for a long moment, assessing whether or not she could trust me now, despite the years we’d spent trusting one another. She turned Couri’s head to look away from the laptop camera at some other place in the room, arms still folded against her chest defensively.
When she turned back, she said, “Okay. Tell me how you do it.”
I explained what I knew, telling her what happened when I recorded Timothy Barlow and Becca. And when I was done, Adrienne looked genuinely calm as she considered everything I’d just described.
After a while, she unfolded her arms, leaned toward me through the camera lens, and said, “Being like this isn’t really what I want. Not for me and not for Couri, either. So, okay. Let’s do it. I’ll try anything.”
That’s when I clicked the button on my laptop to start recording.
And Adrienne began to tell her story.
Help you understand? I’m not sure if I can do that, Ellie. There’s so much on this side I don’t get. At least not yet. But you know how I am. I’m always trying to learn, even if I’m not naturally good at the subject. Think about it. All those years of flute lessons just to become a slightly better than average player, while Couri here seemed able to pick up a bow, place it across the strings of a cello, and produce the music of angels.
Life isn’t fair. Not to you. Not to me. Not to anyone. And now? It’s not even fair to Couri.
I know what you’re thinking. I can see it on your face. How can you do that to her? But calm down, Ellie, really. I’m not doing anything that bad. She’s still here. It’s not like she’s dead. She’s in her body, here with me. She’s just, you know, been pushed to the back of the space to make room for me. And besides, she let me do this. She gave me the space initially.
And if you really want to understand why I’m doing this, here’s an answer. Even though I think the answer is obvious, maybe it isn’t for someone like you. For someone who hasn’t died.
I want to live, Ellie. That’s all, plain and simple. I want to be alive. Even if that means living inside someone else’s body. I don’t have one of those anymore. And as far as I can tell, if I don’t find some other way to stick around, who I am on this side of things will die and decay the same way my remains are doing six feet under, even as we speak.
I don’t know what you’ve seen. But here’s the thing: whatever happened in Newfoundland after the outbreak, it’s left some kind of…rift between life on earth and life in…whatever the next place is supposed to be. I don’t even know what to call it. I don’t even know how to describe it, because none of us can get there, even though we know that’s where we’re supposed to go to.
A gray area? How did it get that name? Well, that’s just what everybody started calling it, after we were able to escape the wreckage of the school and find each other. It seemed appropriate, you know, considering wherever we walked around the perimeter of Newfoundland and its outskirts, this misty wall of gray seemed to just be there, unpassable. So I guess if I’m trying to help you understand what I’ve learned on this side of things, maybe that’s where I should start.
* * *
The last thing I remember before I died is Rose and Becca and Noah and I working on the yearbook during free period. The principal’s voice came over the speakers all of a sudden, saying there was an emergency, that tornadoes had been spotted and we needed to follow emergency procedures immediately. By then we’d all already noticed the weird color the sky had turned, this green, sour-apple sort of color. And for about five minutes before the principal rang the alarm bells, we’d been seeing tiny pieces of hail tapping against the classroom windows, collecting on the ground, glittering like pieces of broken glass out in the parking lot.
After the principal finished her message, the drill alarm started up, and we left the room to go out into the hallway, where everyone else was already gathering. Anxious murmurs filled the hall, and the voices of teachers rose above the murmurs, giving orders, giving directions. Rose, Becca, Noah, and I didn’t have a teacher ordering us into any particular formation right then, since we were on our own during free period, but we’d been through enough tornado drills over the years that we automatically knew what to do. And besides, there were so many people in that hallway, we just fell in with them and listened to their teachers telling them to line up against the lockers, to kneel, to tuck our heads toward our knees and cover the tops of our heads with our hands.
I remember seeing grit on the floor, inches below my face. I remember the small dent at the bottom of the locker in front of me, and how I started to wonder who’d kicked it hard enough to make that dent and why they’d gotten so angry.
It’s funny, thinking back on that now. People probably always think about strange things in the moments before they’re about to die and don’t even know it.
Noah was kneeling on one side of me, and on the other side of me was Ingrid Mueller. At first, everything was fine, but as the winds picked up, we could hear them howling around the building like demons trying to get in, and above the winds I could hear Ingrid starting to whimper. Noah lifted his head a little, so he could look over and try to calm her, and he kept saying things like, “It’s okay, Ingrid, don’t worry. We’re going to be okay. Don’t worry.”
At first, I thought she was being overly dramatic, you know? I mean, how many tornado drills have we been through over the years? How many actual tornadoes have come and gone and never done anything to us at all? Usually, they just tear through some random track of farmland or woods and then disappear without hurting so much as a cow.
But things kept getting worse, and when dust started to sift down from the ceiling, I started to feel afraid, like Ingrid. Then there was this horrible sound of glass breaking in the classrooms behind us. I remember looking over my shoulder and, through an open doorway, saw the windows blow out, and the blinds batting and twisting in the air like they were alive. Then a sound came from above us, this awful screeching noise like metal twisting. And in the next instant, the roof came off and we were looking up at the open black sky swirling above us.
Ingrid started crying for real then, and I could feel Noah literally reach over my head to put his hand out to her, which she took hold of. All around us, people were screaming and crying. I started crying, too. Then I started praying. I started saying things I don’t think I’d ever thought to say before in my life. Not ever.
How sorry I was to my parents for being such a failure.
How sorry I was to Couri for being such a bitch to her ov
er the years, just because I was jealous.
I even went so far as to try to explain things to Couri in my head, as if she were there in the hallway right next to me. “I wasn’t jealous of you,” I whispered. “I was jealous of how they treated you. I’m sorry, Couri, I’m so sorry.”
Then there was an explosion. It rocked everything around us, the air itself seemed to quiver, and I saw a bright white-and-yellow flash, felt a sudden heat that seemed to come at us from all sides, so unbearably hot, so unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I remember that last feeling—the burning, I mean—and I remember screams, mine and the ones from others around me, before it all ended.
Then there was only darkness and silence.
For how long that darkness and silence lasted, I can’t really say. I have no sense of time during all of that. But eventually the darkness began to lift, and then light reached my eyelids, prying at them little by little, revealing a thick white fog when I finally managed to open them all the way.
Though I still couldn’t see anything but the fog, I heard Ingrid sniveling beside me. And I heard Noah telling her that everything was okay, that everything was going to be all right. “I’m here with you, Ingrid,” he kept saying.
And then I found the strength to open my own mouth, choking a little as I said, “So am I. I’m here, too.”
“Who’s that?” Ingrid asked frantically.
“It’s Adrienne,” I said. “Are you still next to me?”
Noah’s hand brushed across my neck as he fumbled in the fog, trying to find me. “There you are,” he said, and I sighed, thinking for a moment that I’d only been knocked out during the explosion, that I was still alive.