Page 17 of Waysider
A girl stood in the doorway. Cass guessed she was eighteen, at most. She had frizzy, ash-brown hair and round cheeks covered in freckles. Round-rimmed glasses were perched on the end of her nose. As Cass watched, she pushed them back up. The girl’s curvy shape was hidden in baggy overalls and a thick, orange sweater.
Crane gestured between them. “Finch Pritchett, meet your new housemate, Cassandra Ryan. Cassandra is joining us from New York.”
Finch beamed. She thrust out her hand, and there was a thick drawl in her voice as she said, “It’s nice to meet you, Cassandra.”
“Just call me Cass,” Cass said. She shook the girl’s hand briefly, then grasped the strap of her backpack tightly.
“I will leave you in Miss Pritchett’s capable hands,” the headmistress said. She nodded at Cass. “I look forward to see what we can accomplish together, Miss Ryan. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything you need.”
Cass just nodded back, her face inscrutable. “Thanks.”
Crane turned away and clipped back down the path. Barely a second had gone by when Finch said, “Well, come on in. Do you need help with your bags?”
“No, I got it.” Cass mustered a tight smile. She could hear Teresa in her head, urging Cass to be friendly, even when her instincts urged her to remain apart. To avoid connections, or feeling.
Apparently it was all the encouragement Finch needed, because her chatter filled Cass’s ear while she moved inside. “Your room is upstairs,” she said. “I picked it out. I thought you’d like it because of the windows, and the big closet. It’s pretty far from the downstairs bathroom, but since we share it with the boys, I figured that wasn’t a bad thing. We’re still waiting for someone to fix the one upstairs.”
Finch closed the door, and the girls entered a high-ceilinged room. In front of them stood a wide, gleaming staircase made of dark wood. Through a doorway to their right, Cass saw a dining room table. A chandelier hung overhead, its yellow glow bouncing off the dangling crystals. It seemed to shine a spotlight directly onto the lone girl sitting there. She had short hair, cut around her ears, and her small frame was drowning in an oversized black sweater. There was a textbook splayed before her, and she wrote in a notebook. Finch paused just outside the doorway, inclining her head toward the girl at the table.
“Cass, this is one of our roommates, Tammy Price. Tammy, meet Cass Ryan.”
Dark eyes went to Cass. “I’m not going to remember that.”
Tammy went back to writing, and Finch gave Cass a reassuring smile. “Don’t mind her. She just always says the first thing that comes to her head.”
They went up the staircase and continued down another hallway, this one with a much lower ceiling. A railing divided the hallway from the entryway they’d just come from, and some of the rails had been carved to look like vines and flowers. To their left, there were so many more doors than Cass had expected. Were all of these rooms occupied?
“How many people live here?” she asked Finch.
“With you here, that makes six. But most of the other houses have over fifty. Well, except House Shadowripper, because they’re so rare—there’s only five of them. There’s only eighteen in the entire world, I think. Isn’t that crazy? Oh, I should’ve asked. Are you hungry, or do you want to go straight to bed?”
After such a long day of traveling, going straight to bed sounded better than Cass wanted to admit. “I’m pretty tired,” she said.
“Bed it is.” Finch flashed another smile. Cass couldn’t quite bring herself to return it, but she found herself thinking Finch was more tolerable than most people she met.
The next room they passed was obviously occupied—light poured out from the crack beneath the door. Finch’s voice lowered. “That’s Candice’s room. You won’t see her very often. She doesn’t like to come out, except for classes and mealtimes.”
Music floated through the door, faint and muffled. “Is she listening to an opera?” Cass said.
A shadow flitted across Finch’s face, like a cloud passing over the sun. They kept walking. “Yes,” Finch said. “She never turns it off. She used to be a singer, you know. But then, last year, Candice got in a car accident. She hit her throat on the steering wheel, and it caused vocal cord paralysis. Now Candice mostly communicates with a chalkboard she wears around her neck.”
The accident must’ve been Candice’s NDE, Cass thought, feeling another pang of resentment toward them. The ghosts. Logically, she knew it wasn’t their fault. But she still blamed them.
The girls kept going. Floorboards creaked underfoot, the sound long and loud, despite the thick rug softening their footsteps. Gold-framed paintings hung on the paneled walls, all of them portraits of solemn-faced strangers. Every lamp and table they passed had faded edges or outdated designs.
It made Cass nervous, seeing how old the house was. She’d learned to avoid places like this. Dead people were everywhere, but especially in spots with lots of history behind them. Once, she’d made the mistake of going into a gas station. A very old gas station, as it turned out. Every corner had been full of pain and terror. Cass had practically run back outside, pale and shaking.
“Have you ever seen a ghost—” Cass started.
“Oh, gracious, never refer to them as ‘ghosts’. We call them revenants, apparitions, elementals, echoes, or traces.” Finch ticked them off on her fingers. “If Headmistress Crane heard you, she would’ve docked points from you. She hates that word. ‘Spirits’, too. Oh, and we’re not mediums or psychics—we refer to ourselves as voyants or percipients.”
“Have you ever seen a revenant on campus?” Cass amended, hiding a flash of annoyance.
“Sometimes,” Finch admitted. “It’s rare, but when it does happen, it’s usually at the start of a new semester. New students come in, and sometimes they have a revenant attached to them. Once in a while, a revenant just wanders in from off campus. They can be drawn by noise and a lot of activity.”
“Attached to them?” Cass felt like a parrot, but she couldn’t help it. For the first time in months, she was actually curious about something.
Finch led them up another staircase, this one narrower and tucked against the side of the house. They arrived at the end of another hallway. How big was this place? Cass wondered.
