Teen Spirit Read online

  “Clark!” I called. “Clark.”

  Then the boy above me reached for the flashlight I kept by the bed for emergencies and shone it in my face. Moons of hot light blinded me until my eyes adjusted and I saw him. Clark.

  In the kitchen, the refrigerator sounded like someone was pummeling it from inside. Something big and cold and mad.

  Clark looked down at me, moved away. “How did I get here? Fuck.”

  I pulled my shirt back over my chest. I couldn’t speak.

  “What happened?”

  “Clark . . .”

  He shone the flashlight around the room and saw the condom wrapper on the floor. Looked down at his own bare chest. “He tried to have sex with you?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you want to? Julie?”

  I couldn’t look at him. I thought of Grant trying to get me to look into his eyes the first time I went to Clark’s house and that was difficult, but for a different reason. Now I was guilty.

  He shook his head like a big, sad dog and ducked into his T-shirt.

  “I called for you,” I said, dreading the sound of the door closing behind my best friend, even though I knew I didn’t deserve to have him stay.

  “I think I should go. Will you be okay tonight?” He started for the door before I could answer.

  “Clark?” I said.

  He froze with his back to me. “What?”

  I wanted to say I was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come. And they felt inadequate anyway after what I’d done. Instead I said, “Never mind.”

  IT WAS NEW YEAR’S Eve. My mom, in her cast and a little black dress, and on crutches, was out with Luke, probably listening to some metal bands.

  The guilt she’d felt about the date was apparent; before she left, she’d barraged me with questions: “Are you going to see Clark? Why haven’t you seen him? Are you in a fight or something? Are any of your other friends having parties?”

  Other friends? Right. The truth was, I never felt like going to another party for the rest of my life even if I had any friends besides Clark. And that friendship was on tenterhooks.

  I didn’t answer my mother. I’d hardly spoken to her for a week although she kept begging me to forgive her and promising that Luke wasn’t going to drink when they went out, that he’d drive safely. Whatever.

  I drank some leftover wine in the fridge to wipe me out as much as possible and went to bed early.

  When I woke, I lay on my back, staring at the stucco ceiling, trying to catch my breath. The red digital numbers told me it was 11:45. My head ticked with pain like a demonic clock.

  I had dreamed of the red car again and I felt the now-familiar queasy bubbling in my stomach that followed it. I wrote the dream down so I would remember it, as Ed had suggested, but it felt insignificant, just another distraction.

  I still hadn’t dreamed of my grandma like I wanted, but everything that had happened in the last six months felt like a dream. My grandmother dying in my arms. A Ouija board. A dead twin. A possession. A searching. White candles, mugwort, roses, sage. An accident. A quaking appliance. A hellish stench. All I wanted was for my grandmother to help me understand what had happened. She was so far away. All that was left were ashes, some photos and jewelry and dresses and purses, poetry books, a bottle of perfume. Why had she left me without teaching me how to reach her? Why had she waited until the last second, when it was too late? She hadn’t known when she was going to die but she knew that eventually she would. Maybe, she was worried she’d upset me if she brought it up.

  I got out of bed and it almost felt as if I were watching my body move across the room. I dropped some of Daiyu’s tincture into my mouth and touched the lavender oil and Shalimar to my wrists.

  “Let’s try now,” I said to my grandma, Miriam.

  I pulled the photo album from under my bed and put it on the floor next to the urn and surrounded them both with a circle of white votives, which I lit, one by one. I sat down with my legs crossed, closed my eyes, and began to breathe with the Ouija board balanced on my knees, my fingers on the marker.

  “Grandma?”

  Trying not to think of anything in particular, I took a series of deep breaths through my nose, making the whispery sound at the base of my throat. Visions flitted across the dark space behind my eyes—my grandmother standing in front of me, holding the book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry open in her hands, my mother getting into Luke’s car, Clark in a hotel room, staring out the window at a city enshrouded in fog. I tried to acknowledge each image and then let it go.

  Grant’s face appeared in my mind then. This image would not be so easily breathed away. As if I needed it. As if I needed him to help me.

  “I can help you reach her,” a voice said.

  I opened my eyes with a bang in my chest. Grant was sitting there quietly, watching.

  “What the hell? How did you get in?”

  You called him, Julie.

  “I’m pretty agile,” he said calmly.

  “Get out,” I told him. “You scared the shit out of me. You can’t just come in like that. Get out!”

  “I’ve come to help you with your grandmother.”

  “Why would you do that?” He had mentioned Clark and my “little rituals.” Grant had started playing tricks with the refrigerator after Clark and I began to consider sending him away. The dead brother must have known that we were trying to reach Grandma Miriam in order to get rid of him, so why would he want to help me now?

  “Because she’ll understand. She’ll know how to help us all.”

  I could feel my eyes narrowing at him, my jaw tightening. “What do you know about her?”

  Grant moved closer. “You still have her ashes. You need to scatter them. Then you’ll reach her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m dead, remember? I know about it. My family just tried to move away and forget me, repress the whole thing. See what happens with that? I won’t take off.” He smiled but his mouth made a hard line. “Let’s scatter her ashes.”

  “My mom isn’t ready.”

  “She doesn’t have to be ready. She doesn’t have to know. You can scatter them and put in some fake ones. She’ll never know. She’s never going to touch them anyway. She’s scared.”

  In my head I heard what sounded like glass breaking. “Stop it. I’m not ready.”

  “Don’t you see? You want your grandmother to be close to you, but you are holding on too tight.”

  “I’m not,” I stammered. I wasn’t holding on to my grandmother’s life but lately, more and more, I was holding on to her death. I wanted to hover in a netherworld bathed in her ashes, I wanted to live inside that jade urn with her. The fact that I had allowed Grant to get so close to me was just more proof that I wanted to cling to death and not let go.

  “Come with me,” said he, my ghost of devastation and emptiness. “To scatter them.”

  WE DROVE ALONG PACIFIC Coast Highway with the windows down and the cool breeze tasting of gasoline and salt on my lips. I was holding the heavy, light-green urn on my lap.

  I didn’t want to let her go. It wasn’t the time. It hadn’t been a year yet, and my mother wasn’t with me. My grandma would have wanted to be scattered nearer to where Maury was.

  But maybe Grant was right and it didn’t seem as if I had time to waste. He knew something about the spirit world that I didn’t.

  We parked, took off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and went down to the water. The sand was cold and my feet sunk in; it was hard to move forward. The water was shining and black. Black jade, I thought. I wanted to go into that dark, wet, vast space with her, part of me did. My life was cramped into a little box with a mother who didn’t know she was as much in love with death as I was, an urn full of ashes to talk to, a friend who was so wounded that he no longer cared if he stayed, conscious, in the world. All I had now was Grant, a ghost. A ghost I wanted to go with, one I would follow anywhere, it seemed.

  We waded out onto the rocks, t
he urn balanced on my hip. You weren’t legally allowed to scatter ashes there, but he said no one would know and I let myself believe him. As we climbed up onto a large rock, the soles of my feet snagged on the jagged surface. I gripped his arm for balance. The waves sloshed at our feet, dragging at us, dragging us in if they could. I opened the top of the urn and reached inside, cringing. The ashes felt soft, with a few hard particles. Grant was beside me, facing the churning, wet darkness, his eyes closed and a small smile on his face, one I couldn’t read by moonlight, or perhaps at all.

  I wondered again, Why is Grant helping me? He knows why I want to reach her. Not just to reach her, not just to understand everything that’s happened, but to get rid of him.

  Why should I trust Grant?

  I was crying, and the sea spray on my face felt like the extra tears I would have shed if I could.

  “I want to go now,” I said, releasing his arm. “It’s not safe. It’s illegal. I’m not ready.” A wave splashed hard against the rock and I felt my feet slip on the algae-slick surface, but I didn’t want to touch Grant again, not even for balance. The full impact of where I was hit me with the slam of the water.

  “Oh, come on.” He grabbed my hand, and his fingers dug into my flesh. “Not safe. It’s illegal. You sound like Clark.”

  “Maybe I do sound like Clark,” I said. “Maybe I want to sound like Clark. And get your hand the hell off me. He and I won’t let you come back if you do this.”

  Grant’s grip softened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I was trying to help. I . . .”

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  WE SAT IN THE car for a few minutes. I was soaking wet, freezing, clutching the urn of ashes, staring straight ahead, waiting for Grant to start the engine, but I could see peripherally that he was looking at me. And that he was enveloped in a pulsing, dark, emergency red light that didn’t come from any discernable outside source. I thought of all the times I’d seen this color around Grant before—a reflection in a puddle, a flash of light from an ambulance on my wall, his eyes in my mind. How had I ignored such distinct warnings?

  He leaned over and spoke into my neck so I could feel his breath move strands of my hair against my skin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just trying to help. I don’t have much time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want you, before it’s too late.”

  I touched the sea spray that had dried in the wind on my face like tears. “Are you kidding? We came here to . . .” I pressed the urn of ashes to my chest. The ring on my finger was pulsing with the same red that I’d seen coming off Grant.

  Why hadn’t I checked the ring when I was with him before? Did he have me that deeply under his spell?

  “Please, Julie, please, I need you. Now. I only have until tomorrow night. That’s when the accident was. Then I’ll have to leave.”

  “What are you talking about? Take me home,” I said.

  Grant’s upper lip lifted slightly, showing his teeth. I rarely saw his teeth, only Clark’s. Clark, who was always smiling, or used to always smile. “Whatever,” Grant said. “Whatever. I don’t know why I bother.”

  “Take me home,” I said again.

  He started the car and threw it into DRIVE so abruptly that it lurched over the side of the curb separating the parking area from the highway. Eminem blasted on the stereo. “No Love.” “You need me, too,” Grant muttered, his jaw set. “Without me you’ll never feel good about yourself.”

  He hung a U-turn across the road. The canyon seemed to be collapsing around us. My body was shaking with the cold of my wet clothes in the night air and the colder sensation of fear. The red light coming off Grant was even stronger now, like flames reflected in glass. I could see colors around people, my dreams were full of messages. Ed Rainwater had said I had a gift, some kind of spiritual ability that could be developed. I had a friend who cared about me, though I had pushed him away. I had a grandmother who had loved me.

  “I don’t need you anymore,” I said to Grant.

  He turned to look at me as the car sped even faster into the dark ahead. “It doesn’t matter anyway, babe. I’ve got his body now, don’t I? And if he doesn’t get rid of me by tomorrow night”—he cocked his finger at me—“I’m here to stay forever.”

  Sick chills went through my body like the kind you get before you vomit, and my mouth tasted like iron.

  “What?” I shouted over the sounds blaring inside my head and out. “I thought you said . . .”

  “Never trust the dead. I said I have to leave by tomorrow, but it’s only if you figure out how to get rid of me at the right time. Otherwise I get to stay, friend.”

  “He’s stronger. He’s going to come back.”

  “Not if I scare the shit out of him.”

  The car was speeding now, racing along the highway. Grant turned off into Topanga.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Driving. I’m driving.” He reached down between the seats and took out an open bottle of wine. Held it up. “Want some?”

  “Put that away. What the hell are you doing?” I tried to grab it from him, but he moved his arm and some of the wine spattered red drops onto the seat. “What the fuck?” I said.

  “This is how the driver was doing it. Just wanted to take his girlfriend out for a little spin, thought the wine would be romantic, didn’t think he’d kill anybody! Anybody young and gifted with his whole fucking life ahead of him. Didn’t think that! They never do, they never do. Ask MADD, Mothers Against Drunk—”

  “Stop it, Grant, please.” I tried to speak softly, reaching out and touching his arm.

  The car took another curve, and I slammed against the side door. Here it was. I could die now. I could give up all the loneliness and stress and pain and loss that was life and just leave with him. But I didn’t want to.

  There were two boys. The brave one, the frightened one. The bold one, the timid. The tough one, the sweet one. The dead one and the one who was still alive, so far anyway, if his brother allowed it.

  “Clark!”

  “Stop it,” Grant said. “Stop crying for him every time you’re scared. He’s gone. You’re with me now. And the Clark man hates fast things.” He winked at me. “Maybe that’s why he likes you.”

  “He’s not gone.” I tried to focus on Clark, to use whatever gifts I might have to overcome Grant and bring Clark back to me.

  I thought of the day in Chinatown with Clark, the straw hat he bought, the purple parasol, the way he had noticed everything—red paper lanterns, metal dragons inlaid in the pavement, sour plum candies. The trip to the Arboretum, chasing each other from the willow hut, the red-and-white Queen Anne, small in the distance like a playhouse, his laughter, his touch. Yes, if I tried hard enough, I could see him, I could feel him. It was as if he was here with me.

  “Clark!” I shouted. “Clark, I need you. Come back!”

  “How are you ever going to live like that?” A snicker. “He’s more helpless than you are.”

  “You’re never going to live,” I said. “So stop, okay? Just stop.” I was screaming as Grant sped around another curve. Along the side of the canyon the dark rocks fell into nothingness below.

  I pressed the urn even closer to my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut, and this time I thought of her, my grandma, trying to conjure her up, if just for this moment. Her face was floating in front of me, and I could see her green eyes shining and shining with so much tenderness. I didn’t want to go to her; I wanted to stay on this earth and carry her around in my heart where she already was.

  “Clark,” I said again, softer now.

  The car lurched toward the side of the road, toward the abyss.

  There was a screech of brakes and I slammed forward toward the dash as the car spun sideways and skidded, and I thought we were dying and there was something I wanted to tell Clark, something I wanted to say.

  The car stopped.

  I opened my
eyes and looked at the boy next to me. A boy giving off the same glow of sun-through-leaf-green light that shone in my ring. He was panting and shaking. He reached across the seat and took my hand and held it flat against his chest where his heart was pounding, pounding, pounding.

  It was Clark.

  2. THE GOOD-BYE

  He took my face in his hands, cheekbones cupped by fingers, and looked into my eyes. “You’re okay, right? You’re okay? I came back in time? I didn’t let him hurt you?”

  I fell against him, crying, and we sat in the car on the edge of that cliff, as the sun of the new year crested the rocky landscape with streaks of red and gold, my grandmother’s urn beside us.

  “What did he mean about tomorrow night?” I kept repeating the words, unable to stop.

  “What are you talking about?” Clark asked, and I explained what Grant had said.

  “It’s the anniversary of his death,” Clark said.

  “He said we’d either have to make him leave or he’d take over your body,” I told him.

  Clark shook his head. “Like hell he will. You’ve got a learner’s permit, right?” He got out of the car and went around to the trunk, and I followed him. He pulled a length of rope out of the back. His gaze and his hands were steady.

  “What’s this?” I asked him.

  He sat in the passenger seat. “Tie my hands together, so I can’t grab the wheel.”

  “No way, Clark. I’m not tying you up. I’m not into S and M,” I tried to joke.

  But his eyes weren’t laughing and his face was so serious, he could have been Grant. He kept holding the rope out to me. “Do it, Julie,” he said. He wasn’t messing around.

  At one point on the way home, I saw him flinch and writhe on the seat, mumbling to himself, and a red siren light flashed a warning in my brain, but he shut his eyes, put his hands on his knees, and began to take long, even breaths.

  When we got to my apartment I untied him; he had rope burns on his wrists. I gave him a bottle of aloe, wanting to put it on him myself but afraid to touch him.

  We took our herbal tinctures from Daiyu, applied our gem essences from Tatiana, and ate a porridge Clark had in his backpack made of millet, goji berries, raw honey, and ghee.