1
After a lifetime of being perfect, I was overdue for something extraordinarily stupid. Throwing a house party in a haunted house was next level.
This was life-or-death. My entire future was at stake.
My parents hadn’t spoken to each other without their lawyers for six months. Six months of screaming fights, court dates, U-Hauls, and shitty new houses that smelled like cheap paint.
And then, a week before graduation, they sat me down to dinner at the pupuseria where we used to go to celebrate every report card. Stupidly, I thought they wanted to put aside half a year of petty differences and congratulate me. Maybe there’d be a car with a huge bow or a new computer befitting a soon-to-be Windsor College freshman. Maybe they’d even admit that they’d come to their senses and decided to get back together.
There were no gifts or declarations of love. Just pupusas that turned to ash in my mouth when my parents told me that they’d spent my college fund.
On the Deinhart Manor.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know they’d bought the manor. Everyone knew. The auction for the place had made the local news. Local Realtors Buy Haunted House.
What I hadn’t known (what I could never have guessed) was that in order to win that auction, they had emptied their savings down to the penny. Including the money that Windsor was expecting for my freshman year.
“We’re going to make it all back,” Dad promised me. “But it’s taking longer than we thought.”
“Because you threatened to sue each other over the place?” I asked. “And neither of you can even change the locks on the manor until you get through arbitration?”
With her dark brown hands clasped loosely next to an untouched Diet Coke, Mom looked irritatingly calm on the other side of the table. She was wearing an amount of makeup she usually reserved for closing a business deal. Whether she was trying to intimidate me or Dad, I wasn’t sure.
“This doesn’t mean you’ll never go to college, Arden,” she said. “You’ll just need to defer your enrollment for a year. Or two. There’s still time for you to enroll at BCC for the fall. And you’re more than welcome to come work with me—”
“Or me,” Dad interrupted.
Mom gave a threatening lift of her eyebrows. She had taken the real estate business in the divorce. She had chopped Dad’s last name off the sign and photoshopped him out of the print ads. Dad was working for a company two towns over so they couldn’t compete over listings.
Besides, it was no secret that Mom had always dreamed of me joining the family business. Both of us in matching blue blazers on the sign, back to back, matching white-strip smiles. Like her favorite TV show, Mommy and Me Realty, where a mother-daughter team sold mansions to mysteriously wealthy couples. She’d even “jokingly” come up with a name for our reality realty show: The Fluffy Flippers. I told her that my ass wasn’t full of fluff. It was adipose tissue. She told me I was no fun. Which was probably true.
“You want me to go to community college?” I asked. The walls of the pupuseria started to spin. The sickly yellow paint reminded me of bile. I felt lightheaded. “I’m the valedictorian. I have a 4.3 GPA. I did everything right! I got scholarships, financial aid—”
“You didn’t get a full ride,” Mom said, somehow managing to make this my fault. “Even with student loans and your scholarship, we’re still on the hook for part of your tuition and your room and board. It’s not like you can commute from home. You didn’t want to go to a local school. You applied to a private, out-of-state university. It’s not cheap.”
“Because I got guaranteed admission to medical school after undergrad!” I protested. “I have a future! I have plans!”
Dad ran a hand over the shaved part in his glossy black hair. Ever since the divorce, he’d started going to some Instagram barber who loaded him up with pomade and manicured his goatee. He thought it made him look younger. (It really just made him look like a Puerto Rican supervillain.)
“Well, unless you have fifteen thousand dollars, nena, you need a plan B.”
He was right. I needed fifteen thousand dollars.
I told my friends the next day during lunch in the school library, where I could openly weep in peace. (Crying during finals week was normal enough that the librarian looked up only if she thought someone was blowing their nose in a book.)
“The key to fundraising is to have something everyone wants,” Remi said, stretched across multiple chairs with one foot up on the table. “Cookies, popcorn, candles—”
Maddy May gagged. “Ugh, that bubblegum candle I bought to support the volleyball team gave me such a headache. It smelled like root beer and gasoline.”
“Oh yeah, they were total trash,” Remi snorted. “But the uniforms we bought with the proceeds made us look so good. Especially when we won the championship.”
I laid my head on the table, letting the weak stream of tears reroute over the bridge of my nose. I’d cried so much since dinner the night before that it didn’t even feel cathartic anymore. Just a reflex at having to say it aloud again: My parents spent my college fund.
“I don’t think there are enough dollar-store candles in the world to make me fifteen thousand dollars in less than two months,” I said. I heaved a sigh. “I need something people would pay a lot of money for. And then I need people who have a lot of money.”
Remi laced her fingers behind her head and scrunched up her face in thought. “Every senior at Bucktown High is going to have money in a couple of days,” she said. “Graduation means graduation cards. Half the reason anyone sends out graduation announcements is to get a check from their long-lost great-aunt or whatever. People make bank graduation week. I assume I’ll get a Starbucks gift card and twenty bucks to spend at Sober Grad Night.”
“Sober Grad Night!” Maddy May shrieked, jumping out of her chair.
Shushes rained down on her from all over the room. Abashed, her shoulders came up to her ears and she bit her lip to contain her excitement as she half stood on the seat of her chair.
She continued in a frenzied whisper. “The last party of high school is a gym lock-in with teacher chaperones and rented bouncy castles from kids’ birthday parties. And it’s a hundred bucks to get in! What if we could offer them a real party?”
“A party?” I echoed, not convinced. “I’ve never even been to a party, much less thrown one worth paying to get into. Where would it even be?”
After my parents split, they had sold our family home (as quickly as they could and for fifty thousand dollars under the asking price). Mom moved into a tiny house with one bathroom and put my loft bed in one of the two bedrooms. Dad rented a condo. I couldn’t believe that a man who used to brag about selling one hundred houses before he turned forty was renting a one-bedroom condo with no backyard, no pool, and a homeowners association rule against pets. He lost custody of not only me but also Spaghetti and Meatball, our pugs. But he still had to chip in on the vet bill when Spaghetti ate a bee and swelled up like a tiny Thanksgiving parade balloon. (Spaghetti was fine but developed a minor fear of flowers since they were the turf of his enemies.)
“Arden, your parents have the keys to every empty house in town,” Remi said. “Pick any house for sale with a pool and neighbors who won’t call the cops and we’re golden.”
The idea came to me all at once, fully formed like it had been planted years ago, grown a network of roots, and suddenly blossomed. It was perfect. The thing that everyone in town wanted but only I could provide. The thing that had ruined my life could also be the thing that saved it.
I sat up and sloughed the residual tears from my cheeks. “No. Not just any house. The house. The Deinhart Manor. How much would you pay to get inside a real haunted house?”
Remi’s eyes bugged. “Literally any price.”
“And if there’s alcohol and a bong?” Maddy May grinned. “Double any price.”
Suddenly, we were throwing a party to save my life.
2
Climbing up to the Deinhart Manor was not for the faint of heart. First of all, the hill was so steep that it would have been easier to crawl to the top (even if you weren’t a fat girl with short legs, which I was). Secondly, the house was textbook creepy. Not because it was supposedly haunted. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I didn’t even really believe that the Deinharts had all axe-murdered one another a hundred years ago. The house looked like a Halloween decoration, even in early June with wildflowers blooming all around it. It had a sharp roof, two turrets, and an attic window that looked out over town like a Cyclopean eye. With its weathered bricks covered in green-blue moss, the house gave the impression of a zombie too hungry to care that its flesh had started to rot.
My entire life, I had listened to my parents argue about how they would save the Deinhart Manor. One of many annoying things about having two parents in real estate: They couldn’t pass a house without guessing its square footage and looking up its value online. And since we lived in a town with a huge abandoned mansion on a hill, they talked about the manor a lot. How many bedrooms did it have? How many fireplaces?
None of that mattered. Arguing about whether the Deinhart Manor was more Victorian or Jacobean revival was like fighting about whether the boards on the windows were walnut or oak. It wasn’t the point of the house. The point was that it was a mystery. All of Bucktown was fascinated by it. Whether it was because they loved the ancient true crime of it all and the family that locked themselves inside and allegedly never came out. Or because it was possibly haunted by the Deinharts’ ghosts.
Anyone who grew up in town had a friend of a friend who looked through the boarded-up windows and saw something. A bloody knife on a table (but how would they be able to see the blood in the dark?). An axe stuck in the wall (which wasn’t exactly proof that the axe was a murder weapon). Remi’s older brother (who also went by Remi) said he saw an entire ghost staring out from the single unboarded window in the attic.
But that’s exactly what people went to the house looking for. Ghosts. Proof. Murder scenes perfectly preserved for more than a century.
I knew exactly what was inside the Deinhart Manor. Old furniture, moths, antiques ruined by a leaking roof and a mouse infestation. My parents had done the walk-through of the house together six months ago. It had been the beginning of the end.
The manor’s key was surprisingly normal. I’d been picturing something heavy and ornate. Maybe with a skull and crossbones carved into the head. Or a key chain warning Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Instead, it was just a small gold key on a thin strip of crumbling leather. I vaguely remembered Mom saying that the key had been found in the safe-deposit box of the very last Deinhart relative who had died, allowing the house to finally be put up for auction. Allowing people to be inside for the first time since the Bucktown Deinharts had barricaded themselves inside.
Sweating and half-full of regret, I made it to the manor’s porch. It had been only a few hours since we’d walked the stage at graduation. Maddy May was probably being showered with gifts (jewelry or a purse that cost more than my entire wardrobe). Remi was enduring lunch with her family for long enough to convince one of her older brothers to buy our liquor.
My parents couldn’t decide who should get to take me out for a celebratory dinner, so after I got my diploma they had each given me twenty bucks and told me to go have fun with my friends.
“You’ll have more fun with them than you would with your old parents anyway,” my dad had said, slipping me cash in a handshake like we were making a secret deal.
He wasn’t wrong. Obviously my friends were more fun than my parents, especially since my parents had gone completely batshit after deciding they couldn’t be married or business partners anymore. But it was the principle of the thing. You’re supposed to spend time with your family after graduation. I should have been crammed into a table at Olive Garden with my parents and my grandparents, surrounded by my entire graduating class and their parents and grandparents. My mom should have been loudly saying the word “valedictorian” and making me keep my sash on to see if the waiter would give us a free cheesecake. Dad should have been quoting back parts of my speech and saying that I got my public speaking genes from him.
But they couldn’t celebrate my achievements because then they’d have to remember what they’d stolen from me.
My parents’ divorce proceedings and legal arbitration had halted the progress on the Deinhart Manor renovation. There was a sun-bleached COMING SOON Lozano Flack Realty sign nailed into the overgrown lawn, even though Lozano Flack Realty didn’t exist anymore. One more thing up on Founders Hill that was stuck in time.
The wooden porch was splintery and rotten. Spiderwebs blanketed the beams overhead. With a shiver of anticipation, I slipped the key into the front door’s lock and turned it. The hinges shrieked as the door swung inward. Stale air stinking of dust and carpet and something strangely sweet sighed onto the porch.
I stepped inside and turned on my phone flashlight, sweeping it ahead of me as I searched for a light switch. When I found one, it turned on a single chandelier overhead. Its many arms and crystals were caked in greige dust.
I was in a narrow foyer with a wooden floor, an umbrella stand, and a small cloudy mirror. The mirror was old and dark and about as reflective as a pot lid. Still, in my muddied reflection, I could see that the walk up the hill had taken a toll on my hair. My roots were starting to sweat out. I hoped Maddy May would remember to bring her flat iron.
The bottles in my backpack clinked against the floor as I set it down next to the coatrack. Walking deeper into the house, I found myself at the base of a double staircase covered in carpet. It twisted up the sides of the wall to the second-story landing high overhead. Beneath the second-floor landing, a yawning archway led the way to the rest of the house. It was the sort of endless dark that went on unfazed by the pinprick of light that my phone flashlight created.
“Hello!” I called out into the darkness, wondering whether I’d hear an echo or the squeaks of a dozen mice.
“Hello!” a voice called behind me.
Gasping, I clutched my phone to my chest, smothering the flashlight between my fingers. The front door crashed open. The dark mirror on the wall rattled.
Remi and Maddy May clattered out of the foyer. Both were loaded down with a variety of bags, backpacks, and accessories. Remi had her letterman jacket tied around her waist. Maddy May was wearing the same floaty blue dress she’d had on under her graduation gown. She had definitely been treated to a family trip to Olive Garden.
“Aw, Ardy, did you think we were ghosts?” she asked.
No one else had ever in my life tried to shorten my name from Arden to Ardy. Probably because it wasn’t actually shorter, just cutesy. From anyone else, I would have hated it. But Maddy May meant it with enough affection to make it okay. She didn’t have a patronizing bone in her body. She never even gave me shit for having a Spanish last name but not being fluent in the language, even though she and all of her cousins grew up bilingual. At her family Christmas party, she’d translated her little old abuelita for me but skipped over every time the word “gorda” was used.
“More like I thought that you were my mom coming to see why one of the lights turned on early,” I said. “She’s got every lamp set up to a timer so that the house lights up at exactly sunset every night.”
Right on cue, the whole house clicked on. Buzzing yellow light from the upstairs bedrooms cut through the stair banisters. The house wasn’t more welcoming with the lights on. The carpet on the stairs was bloodred. The walls were scarred, especially near the windows where the boards had been nailed in. In the distance, I could see the glint of something metal in the kitchen. Mom and Dad swore that they hadn’t found any corpses during their initial walk-through, but I couldn’t help but think of all the stories of how the Deinhart family locked themselves in here and never left. Murdered or not, they must have died here, right?
“Wow,” Remi said, her giant blue eyes taking in the whole house at once. She dropped a plastic bag, and a single toilet paper roll unraveled a trail toward the stairs. “You really did it. You got us in.”
Copyright © 2024 by Lily Anderson
