The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Page 16
They even called an ambulance, because Pinocchia couldn’t stop screaming that “the thing” had touched her (an arm around the shoulders, in a sort of hug that had made her feel more cold than warm), and that it had come for her because she was “the one who bothered them.”
Julita whispered into my ear, “It’s because she didn’t have anyone disappear.” I told her to shut her mouth—poor Pinocchia. I was really scared, too. If it wasn’t Leo, who was it? Because that person who’d come to get Pinocchia looked exactly like her brother, he was like an identical twin, and she hadn’t doubted for a second either. Who was it? I didn’t want to remember his eyes. And I didn’t want to play with the Ouija board ever again, let me tell you, or even go back to Pinocchia’s house at all.
Our little group never got together again. Pinocchia was hit really hard, and her parents blamed us—poor things, they had to blame someone. They said we’d played a mean prank on her, and it was our fault she went a little crazy after that. But we all knew they were wrong; we knew the spirits had come to get her because, as the dead guy Andrés told us, one of us bothered them, and it was her. And just like that, the time when we talked to the dead came to an end.
For Paul and for Chatwin, our kitten
BY MARIANA ENRIQUEZ
Things We Lost in the Fire
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mariana Enriquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires, where she contributes to a number of newspapers and literary journals, both fiction and nonfiction.
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