Not Just Like Us

Chapter Three

The Red Herring

Ever since Odette passed away, I kept having the same recurring dream.

It wasn't a nightmare, but it was a memory. It was a night in the late summer, when Odelia and Odette and I were sent away to a kind of adventure camp the summer before high school started. We were sitting around the embers of the fire with the other kids, trying to freak each other out.

We were all getting picked up the next morning, so the counselors were looser and more relaxed as their responsibilities were almost over. We were drinking beer someone had brought in under a blanket in the boot of their car. A guitar was gently twanging, and the guy I had spent the last six weeks kissing behind the Arts-N-Crafts cabin was telling another girl that old story about the man with a hook for a hand. He was leaning in close, arm around her, and she was giggling. My best friend at the time, Ava, was rebelling against a Christian upbringing by dangling crystals from her ears and reading tarot cards.

She laid out three cards face-down in ashen dirt around the fire, fireflies lighting up as the sun went down. "Can we play poker with those?" Odette had joked, but Ava bore her mystical responsibility solemnly, and shot Odette a chiding look.

She turned over the first card. "You're going to get an opportunity of a lifetime," she said, and started to smile. Odette's eyebrows furrowed together and I leaned in, skeptical but curious. Then Ava turned over the second card and frowned, "But whatever it is, turn it down."

I had laughed but Ava didn't. Odette huffed, "That's a lot of bullshit," she muttered at the tarot cards and walked away. At the time, I didn't think much of it. Now the more I thought about it, I thought about how Ava had warned her.

Ava eyes were big and luminous with worry behind her coke bottle glasses, turning them over one by one. You're going to get the opportunity of a lifetime, she said, and Odette had. She got a scholarship to the most exclusive boarding school in the world.

Whatever you do, turn it down. Ava had told her. But every time, Odette had said yes. And now she was dead.

-

After Lenore's visit, my dad returns to my dorm with Aunt Laura and the rest of my luggage. Aunt Laura's cheery disposition carries us through the session awkwardly as we unpack my boxes. My dad's movements are slow and deliberate as if it pains him to do this. I know this is hard for him, I do.

As he grabs one of the picture frames from my box, a photo of Odette and I smiling outside a country fair, he sighs.

"I'm going to see if they have any adapters," Aunt Laura says as she holds up all of my electronic devices, which have American plugs on them.

When she leaves, my dad says: "You know you can always turn your back now." His voice is grave. "I'm serious. I can book you a return flight on my credit card, I have enough miles."

"Dad-"

"I don't know why you're choosing this," he starts, and I gear up with a sigh. "I don't know why you're choosing to be here after —"

"Because we all know what happened to Odette wasn't normal," I say, "And we need to know what happened to her."

He sits down on the bed and puts his head in his hands for a moment. "What happened to her was a tragedy."

"Is it?" I contest, "We know Odette. Dad, we know her."

"Even if it is," he says in a small prickly voice, his shoulders hunched with tension. "That doesn't mean you have to be here. You don't have to play detective. This place isn't safe for you. How can you be here? Doesn't this place creep you out?"