Teen Spirit Page 8

  THERE WERE SO MANY things running around in my brain, little thoughts with feet and shoes. Some were on team Grant and some were on team Clark. They faced off like rabid tweens in their designated T-shirts at a Twilight premiere, making me sick.

  “Clark is kind and already your best friend,” said the practical girl self who wore a flowered cotton dress, denim jacket, and flat suede boots, who wouldn’t shut up about her college applications and the fact that she got straight A’s. “Take the best friend every time! You know what happy couples always say, ‘I married my best friend. That’s why it lasted.’”

  “Grant is hot and tortured,” said the similarly tortured romantic inner goth. “So what if he’s dead? When he takes over Clark’s body, he sure doesn’t feel dead.”

  If I was honest with myself, I wanted them both. I wanted a best friend and I wanted someone who wasn’t afraid of everything. Grant might have been dead (I was starting to believe that he was a spirit and not a psychosis), but he wasn’t afraid; he was the darkness that drew me toward it. Clark was still a boy who couldn’t face the dark.

  My mom wasn’t home when I got there—out with Luke, I figured. So I made myself a bowl of cornflakes and went to my room. I missed Clark’s cooking, the warm, savory grains and the surprise flavors of herbs and seasonings. Bowls of adzuki beans, brown rice, and arame seaweed to ground us. I needed something to ground me. I needed someone to help.

  My grandmother would have been able to listen and understand the situation. My mother, for all her supernatural storytelling, seemed too fragile to talk to, especially about something as strange as this. And she felt as gone as Grandma.

  I got out the Ouija board and held it on my lap. The plastic stuck to my bare skin. It seemed I had brought someone back with the board, even if it wasn’t my grandmother. I wondered if I could try again and get the right spirit this time.

  But when I set my fingers on the marker, there was no movement at all. I wondered if Grant could help me, Grant with his knowledge of that cold, cold meat-locker world.

  RIGHT BEFORE I FELL asleep, I put my grandmother’s photo under my bed and asked again for her to come visit me in a dream, if not through the Ouija board.

  As I slept, black-and-white images flickered behind my eyelids like a silent movie. I was searching for Grandma Miriam, walking through a series of rooms that looked like the backdrops in the ancestor photo album. The people in old-fashioned suits and dresses were seated on claw-foot chairs or wicker settees, or standing stiffly posed. They didn’t move when I passed, only shifted their strange, pale eyes to follow me. Then I was in a fancy room, a kind of parlor with large mirrors on the walls. There were two tall boys, one wearing a bowler hat and both sitting upright, side by side, their eyes large and farseeing crystals.

  “Whatever happens, leave the light on,” said Clark.

  “Turn off the lights,” argued Grant without moving his mouth.

  He stood up and the room fell away into a terrible darkness.

  I WENT TO SCHOOL the next day, eager to see Clark and apologize again, but he wasn’t there and he didn’t text me back when I tried him. At home my mom was sleeping in her bedroom and there were no groceries in the fridge. I thought again about Clark’s kicharee, how he always used to serve me a generous bowl, extolling the virtues of the kinds of seaweeds or spices he had used. What was wrong with me? Why had I even considered choosing his dead brother over him? There was no way I could have them both. I called but he didn’t answer.

  In the evening, my mom woke up and shuffled out of her bedroom in dingy slippers that resembled large dust bunnies.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. It messes with my intuition.”

  She sighed and sat at the table. There were crumbs on the gray kitchen linoleum and I thought of getting up to sweep them away, but didn’t.

  “What do you mean, messes with?”

  “I can tell you’re upset. I get these strong feelings and if you don’t validate them, it makes me not trust myself.”

  She tugged her hair back into a ragged ponytail and her face looked thinner than usual. “Luke hasn’t been calling. I think he’s avoiding me.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said.

  “What about you?” she asked. “How is Clark?”

  “Not so great. We had a fight.” I felt a bubble of tension expanding in my chest, ready to burst open with relief when I told her what was going on. But just then the phone rang.

  “Oh, sorry, honey, I have to get this,” she said, checking the caller ID. “It’s Luke.”

  CLARK WASN’T AT SCHOOL for the rest of the week and he still didn’t answer my calls or texts. I was planning on going over to his house if he didn’t show up before the weekend but then, on the last day, there he was.

  I ran up to him, tapped him on the shoulder. He turned slowly and looked at me with emo eyes.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?”

  He shrugged.

  “Can we talk?”

  We sat on our bench at lunch, and I noticed that he didn’t have his food with him again, only an apple and some raw kale chips.

  “Where’s your pot?”

  “I don’t smoke, you know that,” he said, straight-faced.

  “Very funny. Not your weed.”

  “I didn’t feel like cooking,” he said. “Want some?” he handed me the bag of dry, dark green leaves.

  “No thanks.”

  We regarded each other for a moment. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He was silent.

  “I miss you.”

  Clark nodded. After a while he said, “Me too.”

  Kids rushed all around us, eating and talking, and the sun was out, although the air was cool, and we had breath and heartbeats, we were alive, which was better than what Grant was. Grant, who would never have any of this ever again unless we let him. There was something intoxicating about knowing that Grant’s spirit, or the part of Clark that was behaving like Grant, if that’s what was going on, was so dependent on me to emerge. He had said I had helped him come back, that I had some sort of gift. This made me feel powerful and also made my stomach cower in my body, small and tight with fear. I didn’t want to be able to have that much power. And mostly, I realized, I didn’t want to lose my best friend.

  “I think we need to figure out what to do,” I said. “There’s somewhere I want to go.”

  AFTER SCHOOL THAT DAY, Clark came over and I showed him a website I’d found for an occult store in Hollywood that had a statue of a flute-playing man with goat legs as its logo.

  “No way,” he said. “I’m not messing with any devil shit.”

  “It’s not the devil, it’s Pan,” I said. “He’s a Greek god. It’s pagan.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Listen, Clark, I don’t know what else to do.”

  Clark turned away and looked out the window. It was the one below which Grant had stood, calling my name. The wires outside buzzed with electricity, and the air was charged with the threat of rain. Then the living brother turned back to me.

  Two sets of eyes in ironic black glasses confronted each other. I thought again of Grant using this body to kiss me. I had kissed Clark. And yet I hadn’t. I could feel sweat pooling between my breasts in the stuffy room.

  “Okay,” Clark said.

  THAT SATURDAY EVENING, AFTER I got off work at Treasure Hunt, we took a bus into Hollywood, although buses made Clark almost as nervous as cars (at least now I knew why), not to mention stores with “devil” logos and candles shaped like skulls, penises, and vaginas. The shop was a small, dark room stuffed with statues, amulets, herbs, and candles. I smiled cavalierly at the wax genitalia with wicks, but they made me feel uncomfortable, too. Not sure what they were for—to combat impotence, infertility, and disease, or cause them? The skull candles bothered me as much—they were so real they looked like t
hey’d been molded on actual human skulls.

  The woman behind the counter eyed us intently from under black bangs. “Possession?” she said.

  I took a step away from her and looked at Clark, who seemed like he was trying to burn holes through the walls with his superhero eyes, but the woman only yawned and stretched, extending her tattoo-sleeved arms into the light and turning them to display runes, dragons, roses, and sex-crazed fairies.

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  She picked up a few white votives and set them out on the counter. They smelled like the air before a rainstorm. Then she added a bundle of sage leaves tied with string, a packet of dried brown herbs, and a glass bottle with roses painted on the sides.

  “Start with this.”

  “That’s kind of a lot,” Clark said.

  The woman shrugged. “I hate to tell you this, but I see some intense shit around you. Proceed with caution, man.”

  “We’ll just get the candles,” he said.

  “Okay, but if you change your mind, check this out.” She handed me a small business card that I put into my purse without looking at it.

  “Whatever.” Clark took my arm, leading me out more forcefully than I would have expected.

  “Be careful,” she called after us. “He’s going to take you over again and pretty soon there won’t be anything left of who you were.”

  I tugged at my sleeves, feeling a chill so strong it made my back convulse. What secret winds cause those things?

  “Nice sales pitch,” Clark said. “Bad spirits. Take you over. Scare us into buying the whole f-ing store.” His touch made the skin on my arm prick with excitement and his tone was fiercer than usual; for a second, I thought Grant might be there, but he wasn’t. “What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

  “I want to use the Ouija board again. To contact my grandmother.”

  He turned away from me, shaking his head, and his voice was almost a whisper. “What if he comes instead?”

  An ambulance drove by, the sound ripping through the air outside like a knife across the soft flesh of my belly.

  “Clark. I need to reach her,” I said. “Please. I don’t know what else to do. And I need you.”

  “Why do you need me? You could do it by yourself, right?”

  “He came to us when we did it together. There’s something about us, together. Maybe it could work for her, too.”

  “Why can I never say no to you?”

  WE DIDN’T GO BACK to my house or his. We went, instead, to the house where I had once lived, the house where my grandmother died. Grant had said that she would come to us more readily there than anywhere else; maybe he was right. And asking her what to do about Grant, via the Ouija board, was the only thing I could think of.

  We took the bus to Beachwood and Franklin and headed up on foot into the hills. There was my house; I still thought of it as mine. But it didn’t quite feel real. I had the sensation I was watching it on a computer screen through Google Earth, a jerky satellite camera capturing every angle of the structure, the roses hacked brutally back for winter, the trees, looking shabbier now, guarding the front, the adobe roof peeking out from behind them.

  I paused and stood to look at it. The sun had set and darkness in a canyon felt different from the flatlands. It seemed to fall out of the trees.

  Clark moved closer. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Sort of. It’s weird. I feel like I should be able to just open the door and walk inside.”

  The FOR SALE/FORECLOSURE sign was still in front. No lights were on.

  “We can’t, though,” Clark said, as if afraid someone could hear him.

  “I know. Of course not.” I frowned, wishing he was bolder than I was, bold like his brother. “But we can go into the yard.”

  “I’m still not sure why we had to come here.”

  I didn’t tell him it was Grant’s idea. “I need to feel closer to her,” I said. “When we try again.”

  I walked easily toward the side gate, as if I still lived in the house, and Clark followed me. The sensor light went on, as I knew it would, casting our shadows across the grass, but we slipped through quickly and the light went off. A dog barked and Clark jumped and then froze.

  “It’s okay, that’s Marni, the neighbor’s mutt.” I was tempted to call to her but realized it wasn’t a good idea.

  “Isn’t she always close to you?” Clark asked. I realized after a second that he meant my grandmother and not the dog. His voice was trembly and I wished it wasn’t. I needed him to stay steady. “I mean, wherever you are.”

  “Apparently not. She’s not like your brother.”

  It wasn’t a cool thing to say, and he blinked as if I’d physically startled him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but I could tell I’d lost some of his trust. I hadn’t meant to hurt him; he was really all I had.

  He must have had similar thoughts, because he apologized, too. “Let’s just try it.” He looked around at the dark garden, the empty pool illuminated by light from the street; I showed him how to avoid the sensor lights by staying at the periphery.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I know, right?”

  “I can see you here. You should still live here.”

  We sat together on the grass under a small fig tree with hand-like leaves. My grandmother and I used to pick the purple seedy pouches in the late summer and early fall. The lawn was damp, moisture seeping through the seat of my jeans. I took the Ouija board and the candles out of my bag. We balanced the board on our knees, and Clark lit the white candles and placed them around us on the flagstones set into the lawn. Then our fingers met on the marker.

  “Grandma,” I said, “I need you.” I closed my eyes and thought of her wrapping her arms around me, kissing my face, braiding my hair with her small dexterous fingers. We had sat in that garden together, talking about everything. But there was so much more I wanted to tell her now and, more important, so much I wanted to ask.

  “Grandma,” I said again, inhaling the night, the air of the hills, which was different from the air in the lower regions of the city, because feral animals lurked nearer and wild plants grew unchecked. I could also smell the drop of her lavender oil I had applied to one of my wrists and the drop of Shalimar I had applied to the other, cherishing them like the essences of precious jewels because they had belonged to her, touched her skin.

  I didn’t open my eyes. My hands stayed steady on the marker. “Is this you?”

  Though my eyes were closed, I could see, through my lids, the candles flare around me.

  The marker slid haltingly across the board. I opened my eyes to look.

  Just then we heard a police siren in the distance and dogs barking. Clark blew out the candles and jumped up. “Let’s get out of here, Julie!” he said. “I don’t feel okay about this. It’s trespassing.”

  “Wait,” I snapped. There was no way I was stopping then. “Not yet.”

  “Do you want to get arrested?”

  Damn. “Okay, okay.” I got up, too, suddenly realizing Clark was probably right about coming here, flashing on a dream I’d had—had I dreamed this?—of being at this house, of red lights and sirens and danger. Grant’s idea could have gotten us in jail. Grant, I thought. What if he took over Clark entirely? Where would Clark be then? The police weren’t all I was afraid of.

  CLARK AND I DIDN’T mention the Ouija board or Grant or my grandmother again for a few days. I think we just needed a rest from the whole thing. Grant didn’t show up. I had the bizarre, and palpably chilly sensation that he, too, was resting, or just laying low, trying to make us miss him, like a girl playing hard to get when she was afraid of being dumped. If we missed him enough, we wouldn’t want to send him away.

  I did miss him, if I was honest, the urgent way he had looked at me as if I alone had the power to bring him back to life. The way I felt less—but also more—alive when I was with him, like I was escaping all the worries and fears and fl
oating in a dream. But he scared me, too. I tried not to think about any of it.

  My birthday was the next week, and my mom took Clark and me out for frozen yogurt, and we rented Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, our mutual favorite of the series. I got a cerise wool beret from Clark and a card from my mother.

  Birthdays at the old house, when my grandmother was alive, were big deals, with elaborate three-course meals on china and homemade cakes covered in fresh roses and sparkling lemonade in champagne glasses with gold rims and twinkle lights in the trees and lots of presents that my grandmother wrapped in rose-covered paper and tied with raffia and pink satin. I thanked my mother as graciously as I could for the card and the movie and dessert, but inside I felt a little anger demon jumping up and down on one foot and shaking his fist at her, reminding me, once again, how much everything had changed.

  SOMETHING ELSE HAD CHANGED. After Clark left that night, my mom told me that she and Luke would be going up north together for Thanksgiving in a few days and that I could come along.

  “What the hell?” I said. “You’re acting like you’re engaged. You just met him two months ago.”

  She ignored me. “I thought it would be a nice change. We need to get away. There’s a cute bed-and-breakfast Luke knows about.”

  “Where am I supposed to sleep? And what about Thanksgiving? We always cook!” I felt a shudder of anger so strong, I thought it might make something combust inside me.

  “You’ll have your own room, of course,” she said. “I thought it would be better to do something different. Now that Grandma’s gone.” She bit her lip and fanned her face as if she might start crying. “I’m sorry, honey. If you want, I won’t go.”

  I left her sitting at the kitchen table, slammed the door to my room, and called Clark.

  “What are you doing on Thanksgiving?” I asked. “Because basically if I have to spend it at a bed-and-breakfast with my mother and the boyfriend, I am basically going to hurl.”

  “You can have it with us,” he said.

  “Are you sure it’s okay? I know they don’t like company.”

  “They’ll deal,” he said. “This is important. It’ll be good for them. And you can’t be alone on a holiday.”