Light as a Feather
Candace Hartsuyker
We will always live here. The mansion is faded white with four Corinthian columns, seventeen windows, thirteen bedrooms, a ballroom, a living room and a garden. After we died, our family mourned us for a month. They brought chrysanthemums, roses, hydrangeas and homemade cards cut from scissors with scalloped edges. They left tiaras and beauty pageant ribbons, all prizes we’d never had a chance to win. They did not bring the beauty pageant dresses we had smoothed carefully into plastic sleeves and laid in a pile on the top of our beds: dresses skillfully cut and paneled in shimmering teal and sherbet orange, cranberry red and deep purple, velvet and cream.
They left us tubes of mascara and lip gloss, bottles of nail polish and cases of eyeshadow. At first, we were flattered, but then we thought about how the makeup would dry and flake, and how now that we were dead, there was nothing we could truly call our own, and that made us feel sad.
Then, they stopped coming. The plastic tiaras grew warped from the sun; the ribbons grew tattered from the rain, the homemade cards became mushy and ink streaked. They forgot about us. If we had been able to speak to them, we would have asked them to bring us our dresses so we could try them on and we would have asked for a plate of our favorite food, even if it would have tasted like dust in our mouths. We would have given anything to taste the creaminess of a chocolate truffle or the crunch of a salty tortilla chip.
The summer we died, the mosquitoes came for us. They landed lightly on ankles and shoulders, sucking our blood like ravenous, malignant fairies. One of us looked like she’d lost a fistfight, tender eyelid swelling from the bite.
Maybe we should have seen it as a bad omen, all the dead things that came to die in the school swimming pool. The first week of that summer, there was a sun-fried worm, soft and bloated as a dirty shoelace, the sixth week there was a salamander, dark as a green ink gel pen, slimy and rigid and on the tenth week there was a baby bunny floating at the top steps, its paw curled against its chest.
Dusk threading the sky, a group of girls throws shoes into the massive branches of the oak tree in our front yard. The jelly sandals and kitten heels and ballet slippers hang suspended and glitter like jewels. This makes us feel like we are not dead girls but girls from a fairy tale, three dancing princesses. As if at night we could shake the branches and put on the shoes and dance, never mind the fact that we would have needed a ladder to reach those boughs.
We can’t remember how it started. Was it back in sixth grade when the neighbor boy wouldn’t let one of us go down the slide unless she flashed him her tits? Or was it later, all the grievances we’d ever known, piled up one after the other: our parent’s divorce, the kidnapping of a classmate, the suicide of a friend? We were The Furies and we were out for revenge. Our classmates began to whisper. If something needed to be done, we were the ones to ask. We accepted payment, but we weren’t in it just for the money. We liked knowing that we were three ordinary girls ready to make a difference.
Vigilantism became our purpose. When one girl came to school crying because her boyfriend gave her a black eye, we took care of him. When one girl wouldn’t leave her house, fearful of shadows that slinked even in daylight, we took care of that too. They were mostly girls but boys asked for help sometimes too. Anyone who had a grievance and had sufficient evidence to suggest that they were being bullied was granted retribution. We were detectives. We met our victims and listened objectively to their stories. If a story seemed false, we wouldn’t take on a job. Perpetrators who tried to pass themselves off as victims were treated the worst of all.
For a while, we were popular. Girls saved us seats at lunch, invited us to sleepovers and parties. Then something changed. In the hallways, girls who’d previously hung out with us avoided us. When we cornered them in hallways to ask what was wrong, they looked at us with eyes full of fear. Meanwhile, boys sniggered and made lewd gestures when they passed us. Their faces had never been so unfriendly, so sour. Everywhere we looked, we saw strangers.
No one asked us to help us. We stopped doing our homework, stopped going to school. The few times we went to school, our classmates continued to ignore us. Then came the hate. Mushy food was scooped from lunch trays and thrown at our backs. When we crossed the street to school, cars threatened to run us over. We linked arms wherever we went, pressed ourselves together. We formed a solid chain; one no one could pass through. We never looked behind us, afraid that if we did, that would give someone an excuse to throw rotten fruit or rocks at our retreating backs. Our town was splitting apart at the seams, like your favorite pair of jeans you keep in the back of your closet even though you’ve long outgrown them.
What had changed? We knew. It was after the accidental death of one of our victims, the most popular mean girl in school. Usually, victims wanted their revenge over and done with. This time, they wanted to watch.
Our town’s cursed landmark was an abandoned mansion, found on the south side of town. Adjacent to the mansion was a quarry. The quarry had dried up years ago and existed as a crumbling mouth of steps leading to a scraped, shallow bowl. Sometimes we or our classmates sat on the top step, chucking empty beer bottles, then hooting when they shattered and hit the bottom. Our friends’ older brothers and sisters liked to scare us by saying how when they were our age, some kids had fallen in and died. The story changed depending on who was telling the story. Some said two lovers were arguing and one had fatally slipped. The boyfriend or girlfriend had jumped in, trying to save the other, forgetting that there wasn’t a dark expanse of water but hard concrete below . In another version, the lovers had brought sleeping bags and had fallen asleep in each other’s arms, rolled off the top step and simply never woke up.
The one part of the story that was consistent was this: the quarry had never been evil. The mansion was. People said that after you’d gone in or even touched one of the doorknobs, it tainted you. While you were sleeping, the mansion whispered evil words into your ears, told you to hurt yourself or somebody else. Over the years, bulldozers had come to tear down the mansion, but each time, they’d never gone through with it. Workers said doors opened, echoes could be heard in the walls, lights were mysteriously switched on. Anyone who broke in and lived was in the mansion’s debt. The mansion always asked for something in return. Maybe it would happen when you were eighty, or maybe it would happen two weeks later. There’d be a pricking sensation, like a single, sharp fingernail scraping a line down the back of your neck and you’d just know.
A week before the mean girl’s birthday, we decided to host a party there and invited her as the guest of honor. As we approached the mansion, it loomed like a single, jagged tooth. The shadows in the quarry were long and deep. From a distance, the effect was of blood seeping. That night, we played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Our plan was a relatively harmless prank. Everyone knew that the mean girl had never outgrown the nightmares she’d had as a child, scenes where she’d float away with no gravity to hold her. During the game, she would levitate. This would frighten her so much that she’d faint or throw up. Even if she didn’t change her behavior completely, she’d be forced to have more empathy, knowing how her victims had felt after she’d hurt them. The humiliation would be enough.
But it didn’t work out the way we’d planned. It was one of those sultry summer nights that feel like summer, where the raindrops are plump and warm and make a shh-sizzle sound when they kiss your skin. During the party, the mean girl volunteered, just as we’d predicted. We’d been counting on her ego; we knew she’d be too proud to refuse. She lay on the floor and giggled; her arms pinned against her sides. Finally, she closed her eyes. We each put our fingertips on her, so we were almost touching her back, her leg, her shoulder. Our classmates watched, their eyes glassy, bodies tense with anticipation.
“Maybe she’s sick.” We chanted. “Maybe she’s dead.” Louder and louder, we cried, “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” until our voices rose to a crescendo. Nothing happened. For a moment, we thought that maybe our plan hadn’t worked. If so, our classmates would be disappointed. In that moment, we wanted something spooky to happen.
One of us laid a hand over her mouth. Someone’s shirt sleeve brushed against another person’s torso and there was zap of electricity. The mansion didn’t emit much light, and it had become a deep, soft, dark night, the kind of night that makes you feel like you’re sleepwalking or in a dream. Someone screamed, noticing before we did that she had stopped moving, that her eyes were open, but she wasn’t blinking.
No one wanted to be in a room with a dead girl. They scattered as soon as the police came. The police said they’d heard music and seen lights and were charging us for breaking into an abandoned mansion. They didn’t mention how people trespassed all the time and had never gotten in trouble before. The police arrived so quickly we knew someone must have tipped them off beforehand. When questioned by the police, all the victims we’d helped lied and said we were murderers, that we’d taken revenge. The other girls became outraged when the homicide detective said that she’d clearly died of a heart defect, unrelated to the game we’d been playing.
After hearing their testimonies, we weren’t angry, just sad. Sometimes we felt like seers, ageless entities trapped in the bodies of teenage girls. We knew there was hurt in the world, but it seemed like we never knew how to stop it in time. The whole town thought we were witches; maybe they were right. We were starting to realize that no one really understood us and worse still, maybe no one ever would.
This is what the girls didn’t have to tell their parents because everyone knew it to be true: even though she should have been old enough to grow out of it, we knew she was still afraid of the dark. Before she’d died, the inky blackness must have felt like a mouth swallowing her.
This is the story the other girls told their parents: we decided to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Her chest rose and fell. She breathed gently, her hair stirring against her face. Our hands pressed down, covered her mouth. There were three of us. Six hands, one on top of the other.
You can go now. We said.
We’re sorry. We said.
We didn’t mean to. We said.
She didn’t reply.
We were charged for our crime, put on trial and acquitted. There was not enough evidence to convict us. The words were repeated: the girl had a heart defect. We had been proven innocent, but we were still scared. We knew the town wouldn’t be satisfied; they had loved the girl and would want their revenge.
The stress of the trial made us three girls a skein of interlocking threads that had been stretched too far. During our trial, we’d had time to think. Some girls had sweaty jerseys and field hockey sticks they liked to scritch across the pavement, but what we had was better. We knew how to sashay in heels, how to wear flawless makeup, how to stare back without blinking.
Our crushes liked to tease us, to say we were just girls playing dress-up, but for us, it was more than just pretty dresses and photoshoots and late-night sleepovers: it was a lifestyle. We’d suffered to get to the top. We knew what it felt like to smile and not think about how you haven’t eaten in twelve hours because you need to look good during your photoshoot, but that’s the last thing you care about because all you want to do is eat all the food you’ve been craving like garlic parmesan fries and strawberry Nutella milkshakes. Then, once you’re home, you take off your sandals and massage your aching feet, unclip hair extensions that have been digging into your scalp. Finally, your mouth a foamy froth, you brush your teeth, get rid of the taste of Vaseline which you’ve smeared on your teeth so your smile will always stay bright.
We shared a secret wish that we didn’t dare to ever say out aloud because we feared if we did, it might come true: that we would never grow old, that somehow, we would always remain our best selves. The day after our trial, we decided to celebrate by going back to the place that had started all the accusations. We’d be leaving by bus to attend our last beauty competition the following day. We were both nervous and confident; we were sure we’d all win crowns.
When we broke in, time seemed suspended as if we’d never left. We’d come to the mansion to begin our revenge, to curse the town, to spell them into a sleep that would keep them alive but never waking. These were childish games we did to relieve our fears. We didn’t really believe in them. We snipped locks of our hair and threw them into a small fire we’d made. We pricked our fingers and wrote the dead girl’s name in blood on the walls. Our bodies felt loose, untethered from all the alcohol we’d consumed. We grew sleepy. We thought about how after we’d won our final beauty competition, we’d have money to leave town. We didn’t think about how maybe that would never happen, that girls who’d been on trial for murder probably weren’t allowed to participate in beauty contests.
Safe in the abandoned mansion, we didn’t turn on the lights. We hadn’t done this since we were little girls, but we did it now: we slept together, made sure that at least one body part was touching someone else’s. Hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, the sole of a foot brushing against someone’s toes. Like sisters, we curled up on the floor, using our sweaters for pillows. We pretended that we were lying on a king-sized bed, satin sheets twined around us.
This is the truth: we grew sleepier and died, not knowing the heater we’d turned on was leaching carbon dioxide and slowly poisoning us. If only we’d slept outside, burrowed in our sleeping bags, safe under the glow of the stars. We wouldn’t have minded the chirping insects, the fox creeping up a tree and spying on us, whiskers twitching. Why had the mansion decided to take us? The answer was this: there was something about the town that tied us to it, like an umbilical cord that wouldn’t let go.
From the window, we imagined that three girls who looked like us but weren’t us left the mansion. Maybe our simulacrums could fool our parents and everyone else in town, but we knew if a mirror was held up to their faces, there would be no reflection, just like we knew that in bright sunlight, their skin would reflect pinpricks of light and not flesh. If someone wrapped their arms around them, we were sure their arms would hold empty air.
When we realized the mansion had trapped us, we were angry. We argued with each other. One thought that maybe if we had entered the back door instead of the front, we would still be alive. Another said that we should have slipped through a window. It was only later that we realized we were lucky. Our best days had been when we were future beauty queens. We were used to forcing our feet into yet another pair of high heels, used to smiling until we thought our faces would split. We’d had two lives: girls playing dress up and girls as vigilantes. Now, we’d received the ending we’d always wanted. We were ageless and finally alone together.
We are cautious around mirrors. Some days, we like to admire our unblemished skin and lustrous hair. Other days, when we see our faces in a mirror we want to cry. We have a recurring dream: the simulacrums win second, third and fourth place in the national beauty competition. As soon as graduation is over, they leave town, wheels screeching, wind threading their hair.
The mansion has become a refuge for dead girls, an endless slumber party where no one is turned away. All the girls who come are girls who had things happen to them: girls who’d been accused, girls who’d been cursed, girls who’d run away. We take them all in. We’ll never be lonely now. As guardians of the mansion, we wait for the sound of a window to creak open, for a doorknob to turn, for a girl to slip in.
