"Untitled"

BY RACHEL GUIDA

I passed the window of a candle store. A saccharine floral scent wafted out of it. Only slightly close to the one that Lynne used. Lynn and I have been friends for as long as I can remember. Our moms were childhood friends, and after Lynne’s father died, my mom brought me over to their house as often as she could. She thought that the two of us spending time together would help Lynne and would make things easier on her mom. Even back then, Lynne loved to explore. She would make up stories about the families who used to live in her house and would search the attic for secret passageways.
One hot summer day, we were up in the attic. Lynne eagerly searched through boxes while I fanned myself with a book that smelled strongly of old paper. I was doing my best to wait patiently until Lynne finally tired of the attic and we could go down to somewhere with proper air conditioning when Lynne let out an excited shriek. She held up a torn box with a Ouija board on the cover. Before I could say anything, she ran to the ladder and climbed down in a rush. By the time that I made it downstairs, she had already finished talking to her mom.
“It was my dad’s. Apparently, he used to be really into ghost hunting when he was younger.”
“Should we put it back upstairs?” While I was grateful for the return to the air-conditioned area of the house, the Ouija board scared me.
Lynne rolled her eyes. “Of course not. It’ll be fun. Who knows, we might get lucky and have a ghost respond.”
From then on, instead of exploring the house when I visited, we would use the Ouija board. We would bring scalding black tea and bitter dark chocolate up to her room, and she would close the blinds and turn off the lights. Her newly bought, floral scented candle would give off just enough light. The perfect scene for the Ouija board. As time went on, I was no longer scared of the Ouija board and instead viewed it as another one of Lynne’s silly adventures.
One day, I was late. When I arrived at her house, I was greeted by the sound of her mother yelling. There had been a fire in her room, leaving an almost perfect circle of singed carpet. It had been put out before it could spread. Her mother banned her from using the Ouija board anyway.
In our sophomore year of high school, she found a loophole in her mother’s rule and formed a club that met up at the library with a few other kids our age. The fluorescent light in the club room flickered, so we never had it on. Lynne would smuggle a Ouija board into the library every week, and we would all sit around it, crammed together in the stuffy room. Lynne would light her candle to cover up the musty smell. The candle would often be the only source of light. I always felt claustrophobic in the tiny room. I was barely able to breathe because of the cloying floral scent. It was around then that I became allergic to it, too. My throat would always itch in that room. I never bothered telling Lynne. She liked the candle too much.
One day, Lynne brought a ghost detector. She said that she found it at a yard sale. She was practically bouncing up and down with joy. Most of the kids did not really believe in ghosts, they just thought that it was fun to look for them. By then, I did not believe in ghosts one bit. But Lynne was convinced that there were ghosts out in the world, and it was her dream to find them. She never stopped to think about the danger. Armed with the ghost detector, we would troop around the library. There was one librarian who glared at us any time that we passed by and would shush us at the slightest noise. We only lasted a few months there. One day, after closing, a fire was spotted in the library. It started in the club room. Half of the kids' section was damaged before it was put out. The library kicked us out. We stopped hanging out with the other kids after that.
They blamed Lynne for the fire.
Lynne bought a few more ghost hunting gadgets after that, and through the next two years of high school, we ghost hunted. As time went on, it was all that she wanted to do, and bit by bit, I grew tired of it. It blew up into an argument towards the end of our senior year of high school. Lynne stormed off into the forest just outside school. I got a call from her parents later that night asking if she was with me. I went after her into the forest. I jumped at every sound, whether it was an owl hooting or a leaf rustling. I found her in a clearing. Looking back at that night, I’m not sure how I found her.
No. I know how I found her. It just seems far too illogical to believe.
After we were reunited and reached the outskirts of the forest, we smelled smoke coming from behind us. If it weren’t for the storm the next day, it might have spread well past the forest.
A year later, it was our first spring break from college. The tires of Lynne’s car crunched loudly against the gravel as she parked. After draining the last dregs of my tarlike black coffee, I stepped outside the car, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Lynne’s dark blue car almost looked green from the pollen. She slid out of the car, her arms full of all sorts of ghost hunting gadgets.
“I don’t want to get bored.” She replied, seeing my frown. “Knowing you, a ten-minute trip will turn into an hour.”
“Keep that up, and I’ll make it two hours.”
Lynne relented and put all but one back in the car.
The fireweed that filled the area took my breath away as the beam of the flashlight shone on them. It looked glaringly different than it had just one year ago. The charred pine trees were few and far between, and a few young saplings had sprouted up, threatening to change the scenery once again. I felt a prickle of annoyance as Lynne spun around with a ghost detector, not even sparing a glance for the fireweed. To her, everything else paled compared to ghosts. Though, despite her fervent efforts, she had never seen one. She started walking the way that we had come, her eyes still on the detector; she disappeared behind one of the wider trees.
“I’m not done yet,” I called out.
She looked up from the camera for the first time since we got there. “Sorry.”
She walked closer to me, putting the camera to her side. I must have failed at hiding my annoyance. We stood in silence for a few minutes, the cool breeze lightly sweeping over the petals.
“What were you doing out here that night?” I asked. That question had been on my mind ever since that day.
“What else?” she answered, waving the camera around. “It wasn’t as fun without you. After a bit, I tried leaving, but I couldn't find the way out. Everything looked different.”
Even she would think that I was insane if I told her how I found her. Memories of that night brought out another question that I had never dared to ask.
“Do you still have that old, floral scented candle? You used to light it when we were kids.”
Lynne shook her head. “I used up the last candle not long after the library club. The store I bought it from closed around that time. I haven’t found a scent that’s similar to it.”
I simply nodded. I figured that I must have hallucinated it. It seemed so real.
We walked out of the remains of the forest. Lynne chattered about some place nearby that was said to be haunted. She begged me to head over there with her right away. I sighed, realizing that she must have had it planned when she had agreed to this trip. Suddenly, my throat itched, and the overwhelming floral scent made me feel dizzy. I stopped in my tracks. Lynne turned towards me, confused.
The taste of smoke filled my mouth.