The snow continued falling all afternoon.

Around four o'clock the heavy flakes were dropping so steadily that it looked like a true blizzard through our front windows. By five, the streets were dark and the governor of Wisconsin had declared a state of emergency. Plows weren't out clearing the highways because it was a holiday and the union was having a hard time scaring up volunteers for the unexpected work, even despite the promise of overtime pay.

"Wow. Good thing I cleared out the garage last weekend," Mom commented, looking out our front window at the snowflakes illuminated by the light over our front door. During the rest of the year she left her car parked in the driveway because our garage filled so quickly with boxes of paperwork from the classes she taught, old clothes, old appliances, and projects neither of us were ever going to finish, like the antique buffet Mom had been staining for over two years. Cleaning the garage to make room for the car was a herculean task that she usually put off until the last possible moment. "The Waldbaums are going to be digging out for ages." Down the block, the elderly couple's Cadillac was engulfed in a snowbank, with only its shiny black roof visible.

I had texted Cheryl back agreeing to see a movie the next day in Ortonville, but hadn't determined the least offensive way to ask her if she'd unlock the high school for me. The request was something I already knew I'd put off until the following day, even though I was already queasy with anxiety about the enormity of the request. We needed to know if there was a medical reason why Violet had been bartering our friends' souls for her own, and if her own life was at risk. If there was, then at least we'd be equipped with the knowledge of Violet's motive for the unspeakably cruel game she'd invited us to play. If there was no evidence of Violet's health being compromised in any way, then we were back at the starting line.

Either way, our need to find out about Violet's medical issues was not exactly a high personal priority of Cheryl Guthries.' And since I'd been formally expelled from Weeping Willow High School, I had no choice but to believe that she would be risking expulsion, herself, if she were to provide me with access to school property. It was a lot to ask of a girl who was so serious about high school that she earned a perfect attendance award annually and was already planning to apply to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for early admission. I felt as if a dark cloud of guilt had positioned itself over my head, and no amount of my mother's Christmas cheer could make it go away.

Christmas Day had turned into a painfully long ordeal that felt a little hiding in a closet during Hide & Seek and not realizing that your playmate has given up the search for you. I passed the day in shifts of petting Maude on the couch and shoveling snow on our deck with a shovel from the garage to prevent us from being completely snowed in. I tried not to think about Violet, but kept reluctantly wondering about the long private road which led to her house. Surely no one would shovel that road; it was nearly a mile long. Perhaps the Simmons family owned a snow blower, but those ran on gasoline and probably wouldn't be powerful enough to clear the entire private drive. They'd probably need the town to send over a real snow plow to remove the nearly four feet of snow that had already fallen. There was no doubt in my mind: if Violet's father had driven home after I'd seen him at Hennessy's earlier in the day, the Simmons family was snowed in at their enormous mansion.

As I watched more holiday movies on television with my mom, I found myself thinking that it was a rotten shame that Trey, Mischa and I hadn't found a way to hide ourselves on the Simmons' property before the snow storm, because this would have been a perfect time to have forced Violet into another game like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Surrounded by snow, there would have been nowhere for her to run, and no way for police to help her. Imagining the terror that would have been in Violet's voice if she tried to call the police while we circled in on her, I suddenly became more self-aware in our cozy living room and realized that I was squinting my eyes and smirking evilly. Feeling helpless all day was starting to get to me.

"Well, rats," Mom said around ten o'clock, standing with her hands on her hips in front of the sliding glass doors leading to the deck. She looked out over the white blanket that covered our back yard with a frown.  "I had kind of wanted to drive down to Milwaukee tomorrow to go to the botanical gardens and have a fun day. But it doesn't look like we'll be going anywhere for a while."

I looked up, concerned, from the book I was trying to read without much success on the couch. If the plows didn't clear the streets overnight, there was little chance I'd ostensibly be going to see a movie with Cheryl in Ortonville the next day. Although my ears had been listening closely for approaching cars in the hope that the Emorys would successfully make it back from Osh Kosh that night so that Trey and I could finish our conversation about his discovery of his biological father, it had been hours since the last set of tires I'd heard making their way over the mounds of snow on Martha Road. Mischa had sent me pictures of all of her Christmas presents earlier in the day and had asked me what I'd gotten. She seemed most excited about a lilac leotard and matching dance slippers from her parents, which she was considering for her big gymnastics competition in February. Her girlish enthusiasm about her gifts made me feel all the more panicky about how endangered her life was. It was really urgent that we not lose a day of productivity because of snow blocking the streets.

That night, our house was uncommonly still after the lights went out. The snow continued to fall silently outside our window panes. I pulled up my blankets to my chin even though my room was warm. I only had seven more nights in my own bed to savor before heading back to Dearborn. Even just the thought of that filled my head with images of the faces of the girls in attendance at that school alongside me. I knew little more about them than their names and approximate ages since Trey had advised me, wisely, to keep to myself. There was my roommate, Alecia, whose petty thievery finally caught the attention of a judge when she'd ordered a number of expensive services at a manicure salon without having a single dollar bill in her wallet. There was the petite girl who'd constantly tried to get me to pass notes on her behalf in our shared classes; I didn't know her real name but everyone seemed to call her Hot Stuff. She was at Dearborn for routinely torturing her younger stepsiblings. A towering girl with shoulders like a linebacker named Winnie was at Dearborn for putting her foster mother in a chokehold; I did my best to avoid even making eye-contact with her.

My mental cataloguing of girls at Dearborn was interrupted when I realized that the tip of my nose had become very cold. There hadn't been any ghostly occurrences in my bedroom since I'd arrived home for the break, and I had perhaps taken a little too much comfort in my assumption that the hauntings were over for good. I inhaled cold air deeply and then exhaled to see if the temperature in my bedroom had truly dropped or if I was imagining things, and shuddered as I saw my breath release as steam.

I was not alone, and beneath my blankets, my skin puckered with goose pimples. Knowing a spirit was in my room with me and waiting for it to do something was the worst. I was too afraid to kick back my blankets and simply leave, even though it was a safe assumption that the only spirit in my room was Jennie and she meant me no harm. I held still. My eyes slowly wandered my room, looking for a sign, any indication of activity. I wanted to avoid being taken by surprise, however impossible that might have been.

There was a subtle motion near my window, the one over the radiator through which Trey and I usually climbed when visiting each other, and where I had noticed the house drawn in the condensation on my first night home. Through the window, I could see snow falling, only visible because the Emorys had left their kitchen light on before they'd driven to Osh Kosh. What I could actually see happening in that area with my eyes was subtle and I could only describe it as blurriness, but it seemed as if something was being drawn on the glass of the window. Without condensation on the glass, it was impossible to see the shape of the drawing. Gathering my courage, I pushed back my blanket and tiptoed to my window, thankful for the wall-to-wall carpeting beneath my bare feet to mask my footsteps, keeping my movement quiet.

In front of the window, I held my breath in wonderment as I saw the visibility through the window ever-so-slightly blur as if an invisible fingertip was writing on it. I couldn't recall the last time I had heard steam release from the radiator, so I had no idea when it would next come on to heat my room. But I was impatient to see what sign Jennie was leaving for me, as it seemed that writing on windows was the easiest way she'd found to communicate messages to me. I leaned in closer to the window and exhaled deeply, filling the window with the vapor of my breath. There were three illustrations of girls' bodies, shakily drawn stick figures with circular heads and dresses. A fourth illustration was in process, and I stared, too scared to make a sound, as I watched its legs form, inches from my face. Whether it was intentional or not, I noticed that a gap had been left in between the third and fourth illustrations approximately wide enough for another drawing of a girl to have fit.

Does that mean something? I voiced inside my head, and then realized that I was being silly; there was no reason to believe that Jennie could read my mind. My breath on the window disappeared quickly, taking the drawings away with it. I exhaled again to reveal them once more.

"Three and then a fourth. Does this gap mean something?" I whispered aloud, hoping that Jennie could hear me and of course feeling like a complete freak for whispering to ghosts in the dark of my bedroom.  Another circle appeared, the start of a fifth body. Three bodies suggested Olivia, Candace, and Mischa. The fourth suggested... me? Not Trey, as it was unmistakably another girl wearing a dress. Did this drawing suggest that Violethad taken a break after predicting Mischa's death, but that maybe she'd resumed playing the game since September? Perhaps the fourth body was Tracy Hartford, her new best friend. And a fifth? I had no idea.

"Does it mean Olivia, Candace, and Mischa?" I asked again in a whisper. I tapped the window underneath the first three bodies on the cold glass to better explain to Jennie what I was asking. One, two, three—

With my third light tap on the window, suddenly the glass cracked. From the point at which my fingertip had left a tiny imprint in the rapidly disappearing condensation from my breath, the crack spread outward in all directions like a shattered lake covered in ice.

"Oh, no. No, no, no," I murmured, and took a step back.

The glass burst inward with a loud noise, showering the floor with shards of glass. I took a step back, horrified, and winced when I felt glass penetrate the tender bottom of my right foot. I froze in position, not wanting to take another step away from the window for fear of lodging even more glass in my other foot. For a moment I assessed the damage; the windows in our house were double-paned for cold weather, and only the inner pane had broken. I heard my mother's heavy footsteps storming down the hallway from her room, and floorboards creaking beneath her on her approach. My door flew open and she flipped on my light switch only to find me standing in front of my window with my mouth hanging open.

"What is going on in here?" she asked, sounding angry.

My mouth moved to explain, but she was furious. I never saw my mom exhibit anger, and didn't know how to reply. "Is Trey outside that window? If he is, I swear, McKenna, I will murder that boy."

"Mom, don't come any closer," I warned her.

She stopped to realize that the interior panel of the window had broken and fallen into a mix of long shards and tiny pieces all over my floor.  I looked down to see that my foot was bleeding all over my carpet.

"Oh, my god," she gasped. "How did this happen?"

"I don't know. I heard it pop and just got out of bed," I said innocently.

"Well, don't move. I'll get the vacuum," she said, no longer angry. I blushed and shook my head in the moments she was away, fetching the vacuum from our linen closet. How much did she know about Trey sneaking in through my window? She'd never mentioned it before that night. I would have been mortified to learn that she'd known all along that he'd been keeping me company throughout the fall when the hauntings had been more violent, but I chose not to question her about that comment when she returned and vacuumed around my feet so that I could sit down on my bed and examine the bottom of my right foot.

"That looks pretty bad. I'll get tweezers."

I had managed to get four tiny chunks of glass out of my foot with my fingernails, but there were two slivers that were too far beneath the skin for me to retrieve. There was also a longer cut under my toes that was bleeding pretty badly. Mom returned from the bathroom with tweezers and knelt down to dig out the two tiny pieces of glass. I gasped with pain. 

"I don't know what we're going to do about that cut. You could probably use a few stitches but I don't think there's any way we're getting to a hospital tonight," she said. "We're going to just have to do our best to bandage it up here."

When Mom was done cleaning and taping up the cut on my foot, she rubbed a bit of carpet shampoo into the carpet near the radiator to try to remove the blood stain. "I'll have to steam clean that in the morning," she decided. She leaned forward to examine the window more closely. "That's so odd," she remarked, lightly tapping the remaining outer pane. "The heat from the radiator must have cracked it. It's pretty cold outside, I guess, but these windows are only five years old. I wonder if they're still covered by the warrantee."

Warrantees don't cover paranormal activity, I thought bitterly.

 I pulled on a pair of thick socks and said, "Is it okay if I sleep in the living room? That scared the crap out of me."

"Yeah, sure," she agreed, and helped me carry blankets out to the couch.

Hours later, after my heart had resumed its normal pace and I had started getting genuinely sleepy, I stared at our Christmas tree in the dark, trying to figure out the meaning of what had just happened. Had Jennie broken my window unintentionally? Was it possible that the window had cracked just from the application of her energy? Or had something else broken the window to interrupt her from telling me whatever she was trying to communicate? Three girls, then a pause, then a fourth and fifth. If the window hadn't broken, would Jennie have drawn a sixth? Was there any significance at all in five girls?

I longed to share what had just happened with either Mischa or Trey, but knew that mention of the first illustrations of three girls' bodies would just terrify Mischa since one of them might very well have been intended as her. Trey was probably across the state, fast asleep either on his aunt's couch or on a guest bed, far away from Weeping Willow and foolish girls who played occult games at slumber parties.

+++++++

In the morning, the snow had stopped, but temperatures had dropped even further. Rather than melting, the snow had just gotten harder, and the few streets that had been plowed overnight were icy and dangerous. News anchors were urging everyone in our area to just stay home for the day, stay off the streets. Some areas had lost power, and people were being urged to call the fire department if the needed to be evacuated from their home and taken to a temporary shelter. I didn't have any way of knowing when Trey would get home, and had no way of contacting him.

"It would be very nice of you to walk down the block to the Waldbaums' to check on them and see if they need anything if your foot feels alright," my mother suggested, basically ordering me in a gentle way to put on my boots and climb over the snow drifts to visit Dr. Waldbaum and his elderly wife at the end of our block.

"Okay," I agreed, already getting kind of stir-crazy after being shut into the house since the previous morning when I'd returned home from the pharmacy. My foot ached, but I knew I didn't have time to be babyish about the pain. "I should take something with me just in case they do need stuff because it could take me a while to get over there and back." I already felt deceptive, my plan for the morning taking shape nicely in my head.

We filled Tupperware containers with leftovers from our Christmas dinner: brussel sprouts, candied yams, turkey, colcannon (Irish mashed potatoes, my mother's favorite), and hulking slices of cherry pie. I stacked the containers in my backpack, and Mom placed two bottles of water from her huge stockpile of them in the garage on top. "It's cold enough that I would imagine pipes are bursting all over the neighborhood," Mom said, explaining her reason for sending me over with water. With my precious cargo strapped to my back, I set out through our back sliding doors.

The snow was so high that it reached the railing around our deck. Fortunately, the top of the snowbank had hardened enough overnight that I could take a few steps without my leg plunging through the snow. Walking in that mess was going to be a slow-going affair. It took me a few minutes to make my way around to the front of our house, squinting from the glare of bright UV rays bouncing off the white surface of the snow. Plows had come down Martha Road at some point during the dark early hours of the morning, and while our street was still impassible to cars with over a foot of snow on the asphalt, it was at least significantly easier to walk on the plowed area than over the banks of snow covering our lawns and sidewalks. Our street looked surreal; the jolly head of an inflatable Santa down the block was the only part of him visible above the snow. Mr. Blumenthal and his son, Jason, were up on their roof shoveling snow off of it.

At the Waldbaums,' I climbed atop the snow bank surrounding their house and made my way carefully toward their front door. Once reaching their house, I realized that the snow was so high, I had to brush some away to reach their doorbell. When Dr. Waldbaum opened the door a few inches, he chuckled at the sight of me.

"Why, hello there, McKenna," Dr. Waldbaum greeted me. "I'm afraid to open the door any wider or all the snow out there is going to come in here."

"That's okay, Dr. Waldbaum. My mom just wanted to make sure you guys were okay and she sent over some food," I said, opening my backpack.

"Who's here, Don?"

Mrs. Waldbaum entered the living room and smiled when she saw me passing the bottles of water through the door frame. "You tell your mother she's a doll," Mrs. Waldbaum instructed me, accepting the Tupperware from me. "We're just fine but this was absolutely lovely of her. Next year," Mrs. Waldbaum said with one finger in the air, "we're going to visit our daughter in California for Christmas. I've had enough of this snow nonsense."

Mrs. Waldbaum carried the Tupperware to the kitchen. "Is there anything else at all that you need?" I asked Dr. Waldbaum. He'd always been so generous with all the kids on Martha Road. The Waldbaums were known to give out king-sized candy bars on Halloween and were always big spenders when it came to school fundraisers and Girl Scout cookie sales.

Dr. Waldbaum hesitated for a moment and then looked over his shoulder nervously toward the kitchen area, into which Mrs. Waldbaum had just disappeared. "Well, I hate to trouble you, McKenna, but my wife's at the end of her blood pressure medication and needs the prescription refilled. I forgot to stop by Hennessy's yesterday when I was out running errands. It's probably alright for her to skip a day tomorrow, but..."

I interrupted him, eager to help. "It's not a problem, Dr. Waldbaum. But are you sure they'll be open?"

Dr. Waldbaum smiled, relieved. "I can call Chuck and see if he'll open up for you. Wait right there."

I sat atop the snow bank outside the Waldbaums' house while Dr. Waldbaum phoned Chuck Hennessy to see if there was any point in my traveling all the way over to Hennessy's to pick up the prescription. While I waited, I retrieved my mobile phone from my back pocket and texted Cheryl, choosing my words wisely.

I have to ask a huge favor. Can you meet me at the high school in an hour, and bring your keys to the East doors?

I was intentionally vague in my request, not wanting to actually put in writing that I planned to enter the high school just in case that text message was ever scrutinized by Judge Roberts in the future. When Dr. Waldbaum returned to the front door with a victorious smile, I was still waiting for her reply.

"Chuck says he can walk over to the store and meet you," Dr. Waldbaum said. "There are three prescriptions that need to be refilled. Remind him not to forget the water pills. She can't take the other two medications without those." 

Dr. Waldbaum urged me multiple times to be careful on my trek across town, and I told him not to worry. He was doing me more of a favor than I was doing him by giving me a plausible reason to walk toward the high school. I called my mom when I reached the street again and told her that I was going to try to walk all the way to the pharmacy, and she requested that I stop back at home to get five dollars from her so that I could pick up some toilet paper while I was at Hennessy's. Handing me five bucks and an extra scarf through the front door, Mom said, "Are you sure you're up to this? How's the foot?"

"It's okay," I lied. Even though the largest of the cuts really wasn't that bad, my whole foot ached. "I'll be fine."

"You're a great kid, you know that?" Mom told me.

Little did she know.

When I reached the corner of Martha Road, Cheryl texted me back.

CHERYL 10:19 AM

Why would you want to go in the high school?

I sighed. Cheryl only lived three blocks away from school, so she had significantly less further to travel than I did. The proximity of her house to the high school had been one of the main reasons I had been so angry and jealous when she'd been given a little white used car for her birthday; she could probably walk to school in a shorter amount of time than it took her most mornings to find a parking space in the student lot.

I'll explain when I see you. Can you meet me there?