Chapter One
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
The sun was shining through the trees, the end-of-summer breeze was light on the back of my neck, and I was deeply, unbelievably over these ghost hunters.
“Hey!” I clapped my hands together as I stepped out my front door onto the postage-stamp lawn that my little brother, Liam, had mowed half of before abandoning the project in favor of Animal Crossing. “Can I help you?”
The group, five or six guys strong (in case you were wondering, the proper term for a group of paranormal enthusiasts was “an annoyance”) looked up as one from the faded white picket fence that surrounded our cottage. The absolute synchronization would have been creepy, if it wasn’t the third time I’d had to deal with this in the last week.
“Are you a student?” The guy who broke free from the hive mind to speak to me might have been tall once, but he had the posture of someone who spent all his time hunched over his computer, reading paranormal encounter reports on Reddit. That wasn’t just conjecture, either—the T-shirt he was wearing literally read r/Paranormal Investigator on the front.
“I am, which means I know you’re not supposed to be here.” The Northanger crest on my blazer was probably already visible, but I tossed my hair back out of the way anyway, just in case. I’d been having a particularly good hair day this morning, turned my usual curly chaos into soft, cooperating waves, and I wanted desperately to get to school while they still had some semblance of their shape, which meant I needed to get moving. The problem was that you could never leave these ghostbusters alone—they’d start with the fence, and then they’d decide that the latch on the gate was just a formality, and then the next thing you knew, I’d be sitting at my desk doing homework and spot one of them crouched in the tree outside my window. I’d scream, and he’d scream, and then he’d fall and break three bones in his wrist and my mother would make me write a get-well note to send to the hospital.
Unfortunately, I was speaking from actual experience.
“I don’t care what tour group you wandered away from.” I pointed away from the house, back toward the winding path that would lead them to the school. “This is a private residence. If you don’t leave, I’ll call security, and they’ll throw you out of here faster than you can say boo.”
“We were just looking for signs of activity,” the guy said, glancing back and forth among his friends for reassurance. “There are reports of sightings outside the official school grounds. Chatter online about the twins.”
The worst part of all of it was the shiver that went down my spine. You would think, three years into my time at Northanger, I’d be numb to it. And for the most part, I was, the mention of your average ghost no more concerning to me than a new rotation to the lunch menu. But every time someone talked about the twins, I felt sick to my stomach, like whatever I’d eaten for breakfast had turned on me.
So. Obviously I wasn’t going to stand for that.
“I did warn you.” I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my uniform skirt, then acted like I was dialing. “Hello? Neil? I’ve got a disturbance…”
“Sorry!” The guy backed up right away, all semblance of color drained from his face. Clearly, he was remembering the part of the tour that the school guides were supposed to emphasize—anyone caught outside the official tour route will be banned from Northanger Abbey. It was a death sentence for the paranormal enthusiast. The severity of the punishment was further emphasized as the guy and his buddies took off at a run, away from the house, back toward the school. There was practically a ghost hunter–shaped dust cloud left in their wake.
I should have felt satisfied. But as I leaned against the white, weathered doorframe and watched them disappear into the distance, I just felt tired. Everyone who came through on these tours thought they owned the place, had the right to creep on our private property just because they had the bad sense to believe in ghost stories. It was all so overblown, these grown adults jumping every time the floor creaked. Like the one possible explanation was that the floor was possessed by a demon and not that it was just, you know, old. If I started screaming about supernatural forces every time the pipes in our house made a weird noise, I’d be hauled off for questioning. But instead, these guys just took their shaky-cam footage of my backyard and put it on their YouTube channels with titles like Spotted: Ghost of Actual Schuyler Sister Haunts Headmistress???
Such was the burden of living on the campus of Northanger Abbey, America’s most notoriously haunted high school.
Well, there’d be no shaky-cam footage today, not unless they called the video something like Irate Teenager Berates Ghost Hunters for Making Her Late to Her First Day of Senior Year!
And why, I wondered as I pushed myself off the doorframe to follow them toward the school at a safe distance, did they have to bring up the twins, anyway? They weren’t even Northanger’s most famous (alleged) haunting. Most people were interested in the Howling Milkmaid, or War-Torn Wilfred. (I didn’t choose the names.)
“They keep calling to each other, can you imagine?” My dad pointed toward a faded paragraph in the back of the brochure, well creased from the dozen times he’d read through it. “Just wandering the school. Looking for each other.”
Some of us had the good sense not to keep looking.
“Tour group?”
I definitely didn’t believe in ghosts, but the sudden voice from behind me still made me jump about a mile into the air.
“Mom. Hi.” I whipped around to see my mother in the doorway I’d just vacated, watching me with one eyebrow raised as she sipped coffee from a travel mug. Not her first, judging by the mugs that had been in the sink when I’d come downstairs for breakfast. Unsurprising. It wasn’t like she ever slept. “Yeah. But they’re gone now.”
“Good.” Already tall and standing even taller in four-inch heels that anyone of lesser poise would find impossible on the uneven terrain of Northanger’s campus, my mom cut an impressive figure in a sharp blazer that made my school-issued one look positively casual. My mom—or Dr. Tilney, headmistress of Northanger Abbey, as she was known to the world at large—didn’t do soft. “I need to talk to Dr. Wallace about guide training. They should keep better track of their groups.”
“Mmm.” I straightened my shoulders next to her, tried to emulate her posture. Dr. Wallace, the school’s head of outreach, was locked in a perpetual battle with my mother over how much of the school should be open for touring. I don’t care how many servants died of influenza in that wing, Bob! she’d shout on the phone when she thought she was out of earshot, tucked away in her office at home. Students sleep there!
“Well,” Mom said, looking off toward the now-abandoned gate. “Don’t let me keep you. I need to gather my things.”
“Right.” It didn’t matter that Mom and I were going to the same place, walking along the same narrow path that would lead us to the main area of campus. She never walked with me or with Liam. It was part of the agreement we’d all made when she’d first taken this job three years ago. If students see me as your mother, they won’t respect me as their headmistress, she’d said. I need their respect.
I mean, everyone knew. We had the same last name and everything. But we all liked to think it helped to pretend. Besides, she was right to keep us separate. To keep the role of mother from weakening her role as headmistress.
“See you tonight,” I said, but Mom was already back inside the house. Moving slowly, she always said, was a privilege she didn’t have.
It would have been weird to have her walk with me on my last first day of school, I reminded myself. A real break from tradition. And anyway, I could use the time to gather my thoughts, to make sure my plan for the year was solid and well formed.
I did this every year—attacked the new season of my life with a plan. If you had plans, you could be prepared for anything. And when you were prepared for anything, nothing could hurt you. If I was prepared enough, I could relax.
Or not. Relaxing had never been my strong suit.
This was my senior year, and it was going to be perfect. Just the right mix of academic achievement and social standing, the sort of thing that would make any parent sit up and take notice. I’d spent three years working toward this, toward tying up my future with a neat little bow and saying to everyone, See? I did exactly what I set out to do, and it was easy for me. It all came completely naturally.
As far as they knew, anyway.
And if I’d managed to keep the worst parts of me hidden away for the last three years, I could sure as hell keep them there for one more.
Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Quain