Mr. McCormick winked at her and headed back to his car. He really was a nice man. A little silly — not at all like Maria imagined her own father would be — but nice. How he was the father of two such different children Maria would never understand. But then, she supposed she and Rafi didn’t exactly have that much in common, either.
Maria took the banana pudding to the fridge and found her mother at the kitchen table, staring off into space again.
“You okay?” Maria asked.
“What? Oh, yeah,” her mom replied. “Just thinking.”
“Mrs. McCormick sent over another banana pudding.”
“But we haven’t even touched the last one.”
Maria held up her hands as if to say, What did you want me to do? Send it back?
“So Rob is here?”
“Yeah, he went back to Rafi’s room.”
“Good,” Mom said. “I’m glad Rafi is able to do some laughing tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, nothing. I just worry about you kids sometimes. One death is a lot, but two? I don’t want you and your brother growing up thinking life is this big, sad thing.”
“I don’t think that,” Maria said. “I laugh all the time.”
“Do you?” Mom said, looking at Maria earnestly.
Maria laughed. “Yes, Mom. See?” She tugged at the edge of her shirt. “Derek makes me laugh,” she said quietly.
“That’s true. Derek is a good egg.”
“He seemed a little weird this morning.”
“At the funeral?”
Maria nodded.
“Well, he was very close to your grandmother, too, you know. Grief affects us all differently.”
“Yeah,” Maria said. She could hear the steady thwack thwack of two wooden swords from the direction of Rafi’s room.
Mom drifted back to thinking whatever she was thinking, and Maria left her to it.
She slipped back into her room and pulled down one of her favorite books, Agatha at Sea, about a royal kitchen maid who finds a sword in the castle moat and becomes a pirate. Rereading her favorite books always made her feel happy and safe, because she already knew what would happen in the end. She wished that real life could work that way — that she could see the future, and that the future she saw would be always happy.
Tonight, Maria was having a hard time focusing on reading. Her eyes kept drifting over to her nightstand, where the spider ring was hiding in its box. Finally, she set her book down in defeat, promising herself that she’d just look at the ring for a second and then put it away.
She took out the ring and slipped it on her finger. It was no longer warm, which was a small relief. Hopefully that meant it hadn’t tried to do any magic without her.
Maria made her breath as quiet as possible. She cupped her hands behind her ears, supposing that maybe she’d be able to hear the spiders the way she’d started to last night. But Maria heard nothing. Even the dueling sounds from her brother’s room had stopped.
Maria was shocked to discover that she knew why. Rafi and Rob were on their way to her room.
She followed the faint tremors of their footsteps as they tiptoed down the hallway and up to her door. It wasn’t that she could see them, exactly, or that she’d had a premonition of something that would happen soon — it was that she could feel the vibrations, actually, physically, as if the house were her web and Rob and Rafi had stumbled into it.
She stared at her door a full second before Rafi pushed it open. Instantly, her brother took a step backward and gasped.
“What are you doing?” he said, his voice cracking. Rob stood beside and a little behind him. Both boys looked terrified.
“What do you mean?” Maria asked, smoothing out the blanket on the bed next to her, mostly so she could hide her hand under her pillow and slip off the ring.
“You were staring at something, and your eyes …”
“My eyes what? What are you talking about, Rafi?”
“It looked like your eyes were totally black,” Rob said. Rafi seemed to have gone mute.
“Very funny,” Maria said. She didn’t think the boys were kidding, but she hoped if she could convince them she did, they would drop the subject.
After a long pause, Rob smiled, and Rafi said, “Don’t do that again, whatever it was. It was creepy.”
Maria laughed, doing her best impression of someone who wasn’t afraid. “Whatever you say.”
“Hey, look at that,” Rob said, pointing at something over Maria’s shoulder. She followed his finger and saw, in the far corner of her ceiling, the biggest spiderweb she had ever seen. She didn’t know how she’d missed it earlier.
“Man, Maria, Mom’s going to be mad when she sees you didn’t clean your room,” Rafi chided.
“I did too clean my room,” Maria said. “And if you tell her about this, I’ll tell her you snuck in my room and tried to scare me.”
Rafi stuck out his tongue at her.
“It’s a good thing my sister’s not here to see this,” Rob said. “She hates spiders. What’s that thing called when you’re afraid of them?”
“Arachnophobia?” Maria said.
“Yeah, that’s it. Claire is totally that.”
Maria felt something click in the back of her brain. An idea was forming there, and she was a little ashamed of it, but she told herself it was more of a dream than a plan. At least, for now.
“Are you going to her party tomorrow?” Maria asked Rob.
“Ew, no,” he said. “I heard Claire tell one of her friends that she was hoping they’d play truth or dare. I don’t want to be anywhere near that party.”
Maria started to ask something else, but Rafi seemed annoyed that his friend and his sister were having a conversation without him, so he grabbed Rob by the arm and said, “Come on, let’s go back to my room.” Just like that, they left Maria alone.
She jumped up and looked in her mirror. Her eyes weren’t black, except in the middle where they were always black. They were brown and normal. She’d really been scared for a second there.
She decided she wouldn’t grab the broom and take down the spiderweb on the ceiling. As strange as it was, she had to believe the spiders were her friends. And if she was going to pull off her idea, which was seeming less and less like a dream and more and more like a full-fledged plan, she was going to need her new friends’ help.
She brushed her teeth quickly and got ready for bed. She pulled out the ring from under her pillow and slipped it back on, climbing under her covers.
She turned out the light and closed her eyes. In the darkness, she began to imagine another beautiful dress. This one wasn’t for a funeral, though. The dress in her head was a party dress.
As Maria made her way to English class the next day, she was playing a little game in her head. The game was like one of those books where the story changes based on the choices you make — if you open the locked chest, turn to page fifty-three. On page fifty-three, a snake jumps out and bites you. The end.
The choices that were playing in Maria’s head had to do with whether or not Claire was nice to her today. If Claire was nice to her, Maria would forget her whole plan. But if Claire was mean …
Maria smoothed out the folds in her new dress. She’d decided that it was too pretty not to wear to school, even though that meant wearing a jacket to cover her arms, and getting the knee-length skirt a little wrinkled on the bus.
She reached her classroom. She walked through the door.