Starcrossed

she knew, she would have to leave the dark bathroom and try to act normal.
    She got dressed and went downstairs to check on her dad, finding him just walking through the front door. He had run out to buy ice cream for dinner—and not just any ice cream, but the good stuff from the gelato place that Helen had banned him from when the doctor told him to watch his diet.
    “To bring down your core temperature,” he said innocently, shaking the rain out of his hair.
    “Is that your story?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
    “Yup. And I’m sticking to it.”
    She decided to let it go. There would be plenty of time to worry about his cholesterol in the morning. After so many days with so little food, rich gelato was probably not the best idea, but it did go down easily. They sat on the floor of the living room with their beloved Red Sox on television, passing the pint and spoon back and forth as they cussed out the Yankees. Neither of them answered the phone, which continued ringing periodically, and Jerry didn’t push Helen to explain what had happened. Claire’s mom would never have let her get off this easy. Sometimes there were advantages to being raised by a single dad.
    Helen had to change her sheets before she went to bed. The stains from the night before had not disappeared as she had hoped, but tonight she had bigger things to worry about than sleepwalking. For one thing, she could hear someone or something moving around on the widow’s walk. It was different from the sounds she had heard the night before. This time there were actual footsteps directly above her instead of just amorphous whispers coming from all sides. Helen didn’t know what would be worse—going up there and finding a gang of intruding monsters or finding nothing at all. For a moment Helen wondered if she was starting to crack up. She decided not to go up to check. She’d seen enough ghosts already that day.
    The next morning, Helen went to see Dr. Cunningham. After a few minutes of flashing a penlight in her eyes and thumping her on the chest, Dr. Cunningham told her father that there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage done. Then he yelled at Helen and told her she was far too fair to be walking around without a hat on. She didn’t know how it had happened, but after one trip to the doctor her meltdown had been brushed off as nothing more than the carelessness of not keeping her head covered. At least the checkup got her out of school for the day.
    When she got home, Helen opened her computer and spent a few frustrating hours online trying to find some information on the three women who were plaguing her. Every search she did overwhelmed her with so many possibilities that her task seemed hopeless, and she couldn’t narrow it down because she didn’t have any real context for what it was she had seen. Were they ghosts? Demons? Or just her own personal manifestations of crazy? It was entirely possible that she had hallucinated the whole thing, and now that she didn’t feel so enraged she was almost starting to think maybe she had had heatstroke. Almost.
    Claire came over in the afternoon to deliver some bad news. “The whole school thinks you’re on your way to an institution as we speak,” she said as soon as they sat down in the family room. “You should’ve come in today.”
    “Why?” Helen asked with a grimace. “It doesn’t matter when I come back, no one’s ever going to forget this.”
    “True. It was pretty bad,” Claire said. She paused for a moment before speaking in a rush. “You scared the crap out of me, you know.”
    “Sorry,” Helen apologized with a weak smile. “So, was he in school today?” For some reason she felt like she just had to know, but she couldn’t bring herself to say his name out loud.
    “Yeah. He asked me about you. Well, he didn’t actually talk to me, but Jason did. He’s a jackass, by the way.” Claire started talking with increasing heat. “Get this. So he comes up to me at lunch, right? And he starts asking me all these questions about you. Like, how long have I known you, where are you from, did I ever meet your mom before she skipped town . . .”
    “My mom? That’s weird,” Helen interrupted.
    “And I start answering him with my usual flair for clever repartee,” Claire said, a bit too innocently.
    “Translation: you insulted him.”
    “Whatever. Then that chump had the huevos to call me ‘little girl’! Can you believe it?”
    “Imagine. You,