Page 32 of Paper Ghosts

It started when Tasha made the mistake of calling her father after seeing the photo of the Feathers in that old yearbook, and realizing that what her mother had been saying all along, to anyone who would listen, was true. Bailey’s grandmother and Tasha’s great-aunt Jani had been friends. She’d grabbed on to that faster than she should have.

She still thought a lot about Bailey, more than Bailey thought about her, for sure. And with all the mulling she’d done, Tasha considered herself something of an amateur Bailey-ologist. She was stylish in a way that seemed both absolutely intentional and completely effortless, much like her grandmother in her suits and shirts with dramatic collars. For Bailey, it was long Anthropologie skirts, short-sleeved sweaters, and her blond hair pulled back into a bun with tendrils around her face. Her favorite color seemed to be orange, because she wore it the most. Most boys at school were afraid of her—or more accurately, afraid of her grandmother—so she didn’t date. But she’d managed to attract the attention of the only hot guy in school, Clutch Vallow. He couldn’t get near her, though, not even between classes, because Bailey’s group was in a constant circle around her in a way that said Protect the golden goddess. She was aloof, some would say stuck-up. She usually had her earbuds in, but when someone managed to make her laugh, it was the best sound. But most of the time, she didn’t have an expression at all, and Tasha had heard some people call her “Hollow Girl.” Long gone was that hyper, imaginative child who had moved to town. She would disappear over summer and Christmas and stories would trickle down about camp and vacations, and everyone found this fascinating. What was Bailey like when she left? Was she less hollow? Did she go to parties? Did she kiss boys?

But one thing Tasha knew that no one else seemed to, because Bailey had become more guarded about it, was that she loved hearing stories of her grandmother. They weren’t as thick as thieves as everyone believed. So maybe Tasha could give her a story, just like she used to, something to feel connected to her again. As it was, the only thing besides memories Tasha had was a barrette with the name BAILEY engraved on it. She’d found it on the creek bank while she and her mother were cleaning up trash on their country property last summer, when her mother had gotten a wild hair about throwing Tasha a graduation bonfire there at the end of the year. Tasha had imagined the barrette falling from Bailey’s hair in the Westers’ backyard and into the creek, then winding its way all the way through town to her, like she was meant to find it.

She secretly got her father’s number off her mother’s phone and called him that evening. She hadn’t set eyes on him since he’d moved to Spartanburg when she was three, but she used to talk to him on her birthday every year. Those calls stopped after a while, because Pam would always interrupt their conversation to ask about child support. He’d remarried and had a wife and three more children that he actually lived with and therefore had to support, so he eventually made the easiest decision he could make—to lump Tasha with her mother in order to make cutting ties okay.

Tasha had only had her own phone for a year, so he answered, not recognizing the number. “Hello?”

“Hi, Dad.”

There was a long pause. “So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “We just haven’t talked in a while.”

“If your mother is putting you up to this, tell her that I don’t have any money to give her. And you must be eighteen by now, so I don’t have to.”

“She doesn’t know I’m calling.” Tasha paused. “I saw a photo in an old yearbook today. It showed Willamena Wester with your aunt Jani.”

“And?”

“I guess I wanted to know more about her.”

“She died years ago. There are genealogy sites you can look up, Tash.”

“They wouldn’t be able to tell me what she was like.”

“I can’t either,” he said. “My dad and his twin were nearly fifteen years younger than Jani. And she left town after high school. I never met her.”

“Your dad was a twin?” she asked, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“His brother died when they were two. He was hit when their father was pulling out of the driveway.”

“That’s awful. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I didn’t know any of them. My dad died when I was a teenager, so I barely knew him.”

“Did he ever talk about Jani and Willamena?”

He sighed. “None of it’s real. It’s all rumor.”

“What is?”

“That Jani had been the one driving the car that hit her brother. And her mother made her father say it was him to protect Jani, because she was always getting into accidents and had a record already. The story my dad told me was that, somehow, Willamena’s grandmother found out the secret. She didn’t do anything about it, she just held it over them, letting them know she knew. So Jani did something to get back at her, something to hurt Willamena. I don’t know what. And that was the end of their friendship. Like I said, all rumor. I’ve got to go, Tash.”

Before he disconnected the call, she heard a female voice in the background whisper, “You should change your number now.”

So she didn’t have a story to share with Bailey, after all. Yes, Jani and Willamena had been friends, but something mysteriously turned them sour. Similar to what happened to Tasha and Bailey, ironically. So Tasha decided with a sad finality that the best to hope for when it came to the Kellers and the Westers wasn’t friendship.

It was keeping them from becoming enemies.

In a twist that proved unfortunate for Tasha, one of the suggestions slipped into the suggestion box to name the new football team was the Hen Town Feathers.

When ballots were later handed out in homeroom for a final vote, a ripple of apprehension quivered through the hallways, because who in their right mind would suggest the Hen Town Feathers? The Feathers were what Bailey’s mean-girl clique had started calling themselves, which Vanna Delaney, their undisputed leader, resurrected that day in the library. But instead of feathering their hair, Vanna gave them all orange feather charms to clip to the zipper pulls of their backpacks, something Vanna made sure no one but their group was allowed to do. When a girl named Olivia Grace, who tried so hard to be cool but whose social status was barely a rung above Tasha’s, tried, her car ended up with Wannabe key-scratched into the door.

The votes were tallied and the winner was eventually announced. They were to be the Hen Town Flyers.

But if anyone thought that a bullet was missed, they were wrong. Because Vanna became nothing short of obsessed with finding out who had submitted their name, who had challenged their sole right to it. This caused some students such distress at the thought of blame landing on them that there was an unusual amount of absences due to sick stomachs. Eventually Vanna decided that because of that fateful day in the library when Tasha had spoken up about her great-aunt Jani being one of the original Feathers, the culprit must be her.