Teen Spirit Read online

  Both of us were exhausted, but we were afraid to sleep so we made ourselves stay up listening to music all afternoon. Clark also made me tie his wrists again although I didn’t want to.

  At around 4:00 the phone rang—PRIVATE CALLER—and I answered it.

  “Hi? Julie?”

  “Yes?” I said. No one except Grant and Mrs. Carol ever called me, and I searched my brain for who this girl could be.

  “It’s Ally,” she said.

  “Oh, hi.” And then I asked, “Are you okay?” Her voice sounded so soft and shaky.

  Clark cocked his head at me and I gestured for him to wait. My pulse was accelerating and my head hurt.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Ally said. “For warning me? About Jason. He and his friends came over the other night. They wanted to come in. They were drunk and I was by myself and I told them no. I wouldn’t have really thought about it except . . . you know, when you said that thing? So I put the alarm on and I called my parents. And those guys tried to break in. They were saying they were going to . . .” She stopped, and it sounded like she was crying.

  “But you’re okay?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. My parents got home in time. But if you hadn’t said that . . .”

  “Thank you for telling me, Ally,” I said. I looked over at Clark and all I wanted was to rest my head against his chest and close my eyes.

  IN THE EARLY EVENING, we both fell asleep—me on my bed, Clark in the armchair in my room—and woke at the same time a little before midnight. I checked to make sure it was Clark sitting there watching me in the darkened room, and not Grant.

  I untied him, we lit candles and sage, sprayed the rosewater, and scattered mugwort everywhere. We sat facing each other and held hands. I did Amrita’s breath work and it felt easier this time. No thoughts or visions interfered. Counting the breaths, thinking only of the breath. I imagined my cells rapidly vibrating, imagined the room flooding with rose-quartz-colored light. Then Clark and I put our fingers on the marker.

  “Grandma,” I said. “Please come now.”

  A stillness in the room, an intake of breath, a warmth in my throat and chest. I love you, I thought.

  And then, just then, the marker gently arced to YES. Simple as that. But not simple at all. It had taken us so much work just to be able to receive this one single, precious word.

  “Is this you?”

  YES.

  I blinked away the instant tears that seemed to have come back with me from the Pacific. Finding her this way was harder than I had thought. It made her feel both closer and more distant. There were so many things I wanted to share with her. But I had to stay focused on the task at hand.

  “Is there something you can tell us?”

  Clark and I sat upright and still, staring at the board. The marker stayed still, too, for what felt like a long time. Then, slowly, slowly, it began to move.

  The little plastic marker, the child’s toy, spelled out a simple and overused word, one that everyone knows and says all the time, one that we have forgotten to believe in as the magic that it is. It stood for what I felt for my grandmother and what she felt for me. It stood for what I felt for Clark and for what, by letting him go, Clark and I could now feel for his dead and despairing twin.

  Clark looked deep into my eyes, candlelight flaring in his dark irises. His face was solemn but calm. “What are we going to do?” he asked me.

  I could see my grandmother’s face, the way I saw it floating in front of me in the car. I had spent so much time looking for her that I hadn’t realized that she was with me all the time. In the dress at Treasure Hunt, the paper with the information about Ed Rainwater, the vision with the singing women, the roses that practically fell into my hands, the rainbow in the desert, the arrival of my best friend.

  Clark and I had gone seeking guidance and I had been told I had a gift inherited from my father, but maybe my grandmother was the real guide, the real shaman; maybe a shaman is just someone who understands that life is filled with loss and pain and that love, that simple, overused word, is really the most important thing, the only thing we have to fight with, the thing that always, ultimately wins.

  I knew what to do.

  “Do you have a picture of him?” I asked.

  Clark took out his wallet and opened it. Tucked in the back was a small snapshot of a boy who looked a lot like him but with a more muscular build, a more erect posture, innate confidence creating angles in his face that his twin didn’t have. Looking at the image, I saw that Grant was not really a voracious ghost, not a demonic spirit; he wasn’t just emptiness and devastation. He was only a beautiful boy who had died too soon leaving emptiness and devastation in his wake. Leaving things that needed to be slowly, slowly healed.

  And something else was different, besides the way I saw Grant.

  Clark and I, we were different. Clark had almost lost me and himself and was no longer afraid to let Grant go, and I no longer needed Grant because I had Clark—Clark who now had internalized his brother’s strength, without his despair and hunger. Clark, who was my best friend, even though I hadn’t always treated him that way. Clark, the one I loved. He was deep inside my heart. And so was my grandma.

  “Please release us from all the grief and fear that holds us back,” I said. “Please release the spirit who clings to us. We no longer need him and he no longer needs us. We are ready to let him go. Please let him go back to his dimension without harming anyone, without devastation or emptiness. Knowing he was loved and is still loved.”

  The candle flame leaped and spat, and the sage smoked so that the air billowed with it. My lungs burned as I inhaled sharply. I looked at my hand. It trembled and the ring was flickering back and forth. Green. Red. Green. Red. I looked up and saw the boy sitting in front of me. Not my best friend. The other boy. The boy in the photo. I forced myself to speak calmly, as if I wasn’t ready to run screaming from the room.

  “Good-bye, Grant,” I said to him, soft but firm, the way you speak to a child you must leave. “We love you but it’s time.”

  He reached out his hand as if he was trying to touch me, but I wouldn’t let him. I told myself not to look away: Breathe, Julie. Keep breathing.

  “Clark,” I said.

  He lowered his gaze.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Clark,” I said. I’m so sorry.”

  When he looked back up at me, my ring was green and so was the light around my best friend.

  He reached out and took my hand, folding my fingers up in his. This time he was Clark and I let him. I knew he had made his final choice to stay.

  “Good-bye, Grant.” There were tears thickening Clark’s voice, but his face was calm. “I’m sorry, brother. I won’t forget you.”

  It was 12:04. The room was suddenly quiet and I realized the refrigerator had been banging incessantly and now was not. The putrid smell evaporated, replaced by an intense aroma of roses mixed with the medicinal smoke of sage. I collapsed onto the floor. Clark put his arms around me. I could feel his heart beating hard through his shirt, the way you might feel your twin’s heart, if you were a twin being born.

  WE FELL ASLEEP LIKE this and later that night I dreamed about the red tattoo on my arm again. This time the letters, the very same letters, spelled something different in reverse.

  Not E-V-I-L.

  L-I-V-E

  THE NEXT DAY, I woke my mother from an afternoon nap in her room.

  “I need to talk to you.” She blinked at me as if she didn’t recognize me for a second, and I practiced my breath. Even. In and out. “I need to tell you some things.”

  “Okay.” She moved over so I could sit beside her on the bed. It smelled only of the pear-and-citrus soap she used.

  “I’ve been having the dreams again. Like when I was a kid.”

  “What type of dreams?”

  “Nightmares. Weird things. Since Grandma died.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Instead of answering I went on
. “I saw these colors around her, right before she died, and sometimes I see them around you and Clark. Around Luke before the accident. And I hear music. Or loud sounds.”

  “What do you mean? You see colors around people? And you hear sounds that aren’t there?”

  I nodded.

  My mother hugged me so quickly, I didn’t have time to pull away and I was secretly glad of that. “Why didn’t you tell me, Julie?”

  I just looked at her, literally holding my tongue between my teeth, trying not to say something harsh.

  “I’ve been so absent,” she said. “I know. I’m so sorry. We have to take you to a doctor. A psychiatrist.”

  “I will if you want, but I’m not worried about it. That’s not why I told you. I think I know how to handle it. I just wanted to let you know.”

  I avoided mentioning Grant, but I explained to my mom about Daiyu and Tatiana, Ed and Amrita.

  At this she stopped me. “He lives in Joshua Tree? And he’s Cherokee?”

  “Yes,” I said, a cool prickling in my spine.

  “And how did you find him?”

  I told her about the advertisement in my grandmother’s poetry book.

  She shook her head. “I knew she was up to something,” she said.

  I asked her what she meant. Breathe. In and out. Breathe.

  “Your grandmother started researching who your father was. I told her I didn’t want her to do it, it wasn’t even ethical, but she said she thought it was important for you to know. Especially when you started having the nightmares. I’m not sure, but I think this man might be him.”

  “Ed Rainwater.” Tall, Native American, a degree in psychology. He had said, I had a practice there, but I can help people better when I’m not constantly fighting my environment. I could see Amrita looking at me in a way I didn’t understand when I had told her about my sperm-donor father.

  A rose-colored wave of warmth rushed through my body, obliterating any chill, gathering all the broken pieces of me in its wake and joining them together into a cohesive whole. I could see my grandmother’s face, the smile she had given me before she died. Maybe she was going to tell me about my father. But there was something even more important she was going to say. I knew the words; she had said them to me a million times before. The three most important words in the world. And I knew it was her love that had led me to Clark and to my father, away from Grant, and then, finally, back to myself.

  EPILOGUE

  For the senior prom that spring I wore a vintage dress from Treasure Hunt. Mrs. Carol had insisted I accept it as a present when she found out who my prom date was. (“See, I told you he was special,” she’d scolded me.) The dress was made of cream and pink lace. I removed the sleeves and made it strapless, kept it long, almost to the ground, and wore it under a short pink faux fur jacket my mom had bought me with the money from her first paycheck at her new writing job. She promised she would start saving for a house again, right away, and not buy any more fake furs after this one. At first it had seemed too frivolous to wear, but it looked cute with the dress and my long, pink false eyelashes, my hair in a loose updo.

  When I reached inside my grandma’s black needlepoint purse with the wreaths of pink roses, I found an old lipstick that had belonged to her. Somehow I hadn’t discovered it before. It was cherry red in a gold dispenser and smelled like powder and wax.

  Beside it, in the purse, was a small sprig of sage from Ed Rainwater. I hadn’t contacted him since my mom told me that she thought he was my father. Someday, though, I knew I would go back there and speak to him.

  Clark arrived in his parents’ car. He had rented a tuxedo with tails and wore the top hat Grant had on at Ally Kellogg’s party. I kissed his cheek and he blushed, but instead of looking away he stared right into my eyes and hugged me so that I could feel the reassuring beat of his heart. He had a corsage of tea roses for me to wear. Pink, apricot, and gold roses like our magic ones.

  My mom took our picture, hugged Clark, winked at me. She was very into the idea of him as my boyfriend but, of course, she didn’t know our whole story. It might be different then. (Yeah, Mom, there was a dead version, too.)

  “Don’t stay out too late,” she said, but she didn’t sound forlorn, even though she’d be alone, without Luke or any other creepy man. She had been enjoying her solo nights of takeout and Netflix, she said. Clark and I had promised her we’d join her on Sunday evening.

  As we left I looked back at her standing in the window. Maybe it was from the rose-colored bulbs she’d put in the lamps in the house, but she glowed with a clear pink light.

  Instead of going straight to the prom, we stopped at the house, my house, as I still thought of it in the secret world inside me. I stood on the lawn, looking at the FOR SALE/FORECLOSURE sign, the empty windows, the trees dressed softly by the couturier of spring.

  I will come back here someday, I said to the fig and the avocado and the jacaranda, the banana and the birds-of-paradise, the grapes growing over the arbor, the mermaid-tiled pool. I’ll learn about psychology, but also meditation and herbs, all the ways to help people and I’ll come back and live here. I’ll buy you back. Someday. I promise, Grandma.

  Then I turned and ran with Clark down among the cypresses back to his car.

  WE DROVE UP TO the flamingo-pink, terracotta-roofed Beverly Hills Hotel, along the wide drive lined with palm trees. Clark held my arm as we walked to the entrance. People looked at us, pretending they weren’t. Ally Kellogg gave me a baby-powder-and-jasmine-scented hug and complimented my dress. I knew Clark and I looked good, working our nerdy, matching glasses. I felt bigger and warmer and for a moment didn’t know how to identify the feeling. Until I realized: I was happy.

  They took our photograph at the entrance, Clark’s whole body draped around me like a shawl, heating me through my lace dress.

  There was some dancing going on in the chandelier-lit ballroom with the skirted tables. I’d never seen Clark dance. He pulled me out onto the floor in spite of the crappy music, waving his arms around, surprisingly graceful, after all, despite his gangly limbs.

  “I didn’t know you danced,” I said.

  “Yeah. About as good as I play basketball. But you know, you only live once, or most of us do, so I said to myself, I said, ‘Clark, man, just go for it.’”

  We laughed and danced and danced. We ate the lousy food.

  “I wish I brought some kicharee,” Clark said.

  “Don’t tease me.” I put down my fork. Chicken in cream sauce, iceberg lettuce salad, and a few dwarfish vegetables just couldn’t compare.

  To add insult to injury “Call Me Maybe” was playing for the second time that night. “They should have had you cater and DJ,” I said.

  He speared a tiny piece of canned baby corn and tilted it back and forth, making it dance to the song. “Is this an actual vegetable or are they manufactured from plastic for important engagements such as this one?”

  We laughed so hard, the snaps on the side of my dress popped, and then he tried to fasten them for me, his fingers too big for the task, and we laughed some more.

  I wanted to laugh like that—doubled over, spasming for the rest of my life. Clark made me laugh like that. Sometimes you just want someone who can make you forget the person you wished you had never become, and make you remember who you were before.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Clark said suddenly. He had stopped laughing and I did, too, then. The chandelier lights were reflecting in his glasses.

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  He’d gotten into MIT, and I had a scholarship to Stanford. We had both been so excited by our acceptance letters that we hadn’t paid much attention to how far away the two schools were, and though I’d thought about it since then, we hadn’t discussed it.

  “I’ll visit you,” he said. “I mean, if that’s okay?”

  “Of course! You better.” I grabbed his hand. “Hey, I actually like this song! Finally.”

  We danced some more t
o Lady Gaga, “Born This Way.” Then he took my arm and danced me out through the doors into the garden.

  There was a little stream, the banks covered with moss and flowers. I couldn’t see them, but I smelled and felt them in the darkness. Gardenias and impatiens. Clark took off his glasses, pocketed them, and then, very gently, took off mine.

  “Remember what the Ouija board said that night?” he asked me.

  I did.

  “It’s a very good word,” Clark said.

  “Yes it is. A very good word.”

  And so, there in the garden, Clark and I used that very, very good word.

  I leaned in to kiss him with lips painted with Grandma Miriam’s lipstick. I didn’t levitate or fly into space. I was on earth in a sparkling garden kissing my beloved best, best friend and that is where I wanted to stay.

  As I opened my eyes, I saw there were reflections in his, like light on the stream water. Just as I had imagined him that morning, when I sat at my altar in front of my white candle for healing, my green one for luck, and my red one for knowledge (for danger can bring knowledge, my departed ghost), the picture of my grandmother, the picture of Grant, and a picture of my mother, me, and Clark, learning how to breathe.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Francesca Lia Block, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award, is the author of many acclaimed and bestselling books, including Weetzie Bat and its prequel Pink Smog: Becoming Weetzie Bat, the book collections Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books and Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales, and Secrets, the illustrated novella House of Dolls, the vampire romance novel Pretty Dead, and the gothic werewolf novel The Frenzy. Her work is published around the world. You can visit her online at www.francescaliablock.com.

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  BOOKS BY FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK:

  Weetzie Bat

  Missing Angel Juan

  Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories