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“The spirits have come to claim you!” Madame Darkling screamed.
Celeste was huddled over, her hands covering her head, trembling. The chorus of voices overlapped and grew to a fever pitch, an insane babble. But just when Emma didn’t think she could take any more, the sounds stopped at once.
“Gotcha!” the other girls screamed on cue, all except Emma.
Light flooded the clearing. The girls whipped off their masks, clutching their sides with laughter. Madeline had tears pouring down her cheeks. Laurel could barely breathe, crouched over her knees in hysterics. Nisha sauntered out of the bushes smirking.
Celeste blinked into the bright lights, a dazed and blank expression on her face. She didn’t remove her mask but stayed crouched in the leaves and dirt.
Charlotte tossed her hair to fluff it after having it crushed under the mask. “How’s Sutton’s aura looking now?” she sneered.
“Did you get it on tape, Nisha?” Madeline asked. Nisha held up her iPhone.
“It’s uploading to YouTube as we speak.”
“On it!” the twins exclaimed, whipping out their phones to retweet the link.
Celeste stood up slowly. Dirt and leaves stuck to her cloak. One of her braids had flopped over the top of her head and jutted outward.
“We really got you, didn’t we?” Madeline asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you have seen it coming, in the stars or the tea leaves or whatever?”
“Hilarious,” Celeste snapped. Her voice was substantially less dreamy than usual. “You’re hilarious.”
“We know,” said the Twitter Twins in perfect unison. They were dancing around each other in a taunting do-si-do.
Celeste walked slowly to the side of the clearing and picked up her hemp knapsack. It was covered in patches and buttons that said things like FREE TIBET and VEGANS TASTE BETTER. Then she turned on her heel to face them.
“You shouldn’t play with forces you don’t understand,” she spat. She locked eyes with Emma. “It can be dangerous. You can accidentally call all kinds of problems down on yourself.”
“I think it’s time you stop with the lame aura warnings,” Charlotte said. “You’re the one who called down all kinds of problems on yourself when you messed with us. Remember that the next time you try to get in Sutton’s head.”
“You’ve been warned,” Celeste insisted, shaking her head slowly. “The spirits will not be mocked.” She tossed her bag on her shoulder and started up the path away from them. A moment later they heard a car start and drive away.
“That was brilliant,” Madeline told Madame Darkling. The medium had already lit a cigarette and stood to the side, examining their props. Charlotte handed the woman an envelope bulging with cash, and she opened it and began counting the bills.
“I’m going to have to remember some of this stuff,” she said. “Glow paint and balloons. Nice touch.”
Emma stood back, mask still on, not joining in the celebration of the rest of the group. She watched as the woman shoved the envelope somewhere inside her robes, then took off down the same path Celeste had, toward the parking lot. Laurel wheeled a cooler out of the underbrush while Gabby and Lili built a teetering pyramid of kindling. Nisha cued up a Black Eyed Peas album on the surround sound. Soon they had a fire crackling, marshmallows speared on sticks and browning in the heat. The clearing, which just minutes before had been spookier than a graveyard, became bright and cheerful.
“That could not have gone better,” Madeline said, reclining in a camp chair. The Twitter Twins were reading aloud tweets hashtagged “séance.” They had gotten the prank trending locally within the past few minutes.
Emma pulled Sutton’s wool jacket closer around her torso. “You guys, I feel a little bad,” she said.
If there had been a DJ playing in the bushes, his record would have scratched and gone silent. The girls turned to gawk at her. Sutton rarely felt bad about anything, and she wasn’t big on regret. But Emma couldn’t help but think of how desperately she’d wanted to believe that her sister could still speak, and how lonely she’d felt in the split second after she’d realized the medium was a fraud. It had felt almost as awful as those moments after she’d found the murderer’s first note—almost as if she’d lost Sutton all over again.
“I just mean, you know … her grandma recently died. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone there,” she said softly.
Surprisingly, it was Nisha who spoke first, her voice tense.
“If she was stupid enough to think her grandma would talk to her through some cheesy lamé-wearing hack, she deserved to be punked,” Nisha said. “The dead don’t come back. No matter how much you want them to.”
Emma bit her lip. Of course solid, sensible Nisha would have no patience for the desperate, delusional hopes of the grieving. Her voice was harsh with bitterness. She sounded as if she was mocking her own grief as much as anyone else’s.
The song ended on the stereo system. In the silence before the next started, they heard the distant bark of a dog down in Nisha’s subdivision. Then they heard a low, mournful cry.
“Did you leave the sound effects on?” Laurel asked Nisha. Nisha shook her head. Something crashed in the bushes nearby. Emma strained her ears.
“Seriously, guys?” Madeline said. “Who counter-pranked? I thought we agreed not to pull those anymore. That stopped being clever in middle school. I think whoever did it should have to sit out the next prank as punishment.”
