“That would be awesome,” I said, feeling relieved. I loved that she always had answers for me, sometimes even before I knew what my questions were. And I loved that she trusted my intuition so much. I felt so lucky to have my great-grandmother as part of my life. “Can we do it right now?” I asked hopefully.
“Perhaps tomorrow after school,” she said. “I am waiting for your father to take me to my hair appointment. And the rest of my day is booked. But we will deal with this soon.”
Chapter 9
I spent the rest of the afternoon tackling my homework. My social studies assignment took me a lot longer than I thought it would, and when I looked at the clock it was almost dinnertime. I hurried downstairs. Sunday nights were my night to cook dinner. My dad always offered to help, but I actually really liked cooking. It made me feel good to spend time preparing food for my family to eat.
I tried a vegetable bean soup recipe Lily’s mother had written out for me.
It was simple enough to make, but I spent a lot of time chopping vegetables. My shoulders ached from hunching over the big pot by the time the soup was finished. My dad and Lady Azura pronounced it delicious. It wasn’t as good as Mrs. Randazzo’s, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. We ate it with pieces of crusty bread my dad had gotten from the bakery, and all in all it was a pretty good meal. My dad offered to do the dishes, which I gladly took him up on. I raced upstairs to my room and closed the door. Then I pulled out the diary and began reading where I’d left off.
Monday, September 3
Labor Day today. School starts tomorrow!!!! Mom has been away for five days, and I miss her so much. I wish I had someone to talk to. Last night Lady Azura and I had shortbread cookies and tea for dinner. Mom definitely would not approve, but like Lady Azura said, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
I thought of the much healthier dinner I’d just had with my family and wondered if Lady Azura had been secretly wishing I’d serve cookies and tea one Sunday night.
Should I wear the blue button-down or the pink-striped shirt tomorrow? I was thinking the blue, but Julie said that pink plays up my tan better. I’ll call her and see what she thinks.
I sighed and turned the page.
And then everything went a little fuzzy. I knew what was happening just before it happened. I was having another vision.
I was standing in the hallway of a school. My school. Stellamar Middle School. Same walls, same windows. But the lockers were different. These were pale green and beat-up, with built-in combination locks. And the kids rushing past me did not look like the students in my school. They were dressed in crazy outfits. Girls with high-waisted jeans and shirts with humongous shoulders, almost like football uniforms. Boys with long hair, pleated pants. No one seemed to have backpacks. The girls carried their books clasped against their chests. The boys carried theirs balanced on one hip.
There was no sign of my mother. But I knew from the way everyone was dressed that the era was the eighties. My mom’s era for middle school.
The crowd thinned out—it must have been the rush between classes. And then I saw her. Alice. A spirit I had met last year, right after I had started at Stellamar Middle School. She had died decades before—even before this time I was in now. I had gotten to know Alice pretty well. She’d died very tragically, of a terrible illness. Polio. I had helped to clear her name, because the town had wrongly blamed her for bringing the illness to Stellamar.
I almost forgot I wasn’t really there, that this was just a vision. I almost called out to Alice. But then I saw my mother.
It was clear that she had also seen Alice. Her face was white. She was breathing fast, like she’d just finished a sprint.
This confirmed it. My mother could see and hear spirits.
She was just like me.
The last thought I had before the vision abruptly ended was that she’d decided to wear the pink-striped shirt for her first day.
I took a few deep breaths and looked around my room. I realized that my heart was pounding.
Eager to read on, I stared down at the page again. And immediately plunged into a second vision.
I was standing on a playground with an asphalt surface. It was a warm afternoon, but the leaves on the tree overhanging the playground fence were orange and yellow, so I saw that it was fall. Then I recognized my school. The playground where I was now standing had been demolished since my mother’s day to make way for the playing fields that were now in this area.
I spotted my mom. Same pink-striped shirt. It must be later that same day, I decided.
She and Julie were sitting side by side on the swing set, their heads bowed toward each other, having a conversation about something. I hurried over.
“Natalie,” said Julie, “what are you talking about? You are making no sense.”
“I don’t know how else to say it, Julie,” my mom said. She looked really upset, like she might start crying at any moment. My heart sank as I realized what they were talking about.
My mom had told Julie about seeing spirits.
“This can’t end well,” I said out loud, but of course they couldn’t hear me. I stood and listened and watched, feeling like I was watching an accident unfold before my eyes and I was powerless to stop it.
The look on Julie’s face said it all. She was looking at my mom like she was crazy. But my mom either couldn’t stop talking or didn’t want to.
“They’re people who aren’t really there. You know, like dead people.”
“DEAD people?” Julie repeated loudly, her eyebrows shooting up. My mother winced.
“Yeah, you know. Ghosts. I try to ignore them. But it seems to be happening more and more, and I just don’t know what I should do. I saw one here. At school!”
Julie’s eyes narrowed. “Do you hear them too? Like, are you hearing voices, Natalie?”
I think it was right then that my mom realized she shouldn’t have said anything to Julie. Her cheeks flamed bright red and she blinked several times. It looked like she was trying to keep from crying.
“You know what, let’s just forget about it,” my mom said finally.
“I think that’s the smartest thing you’ve said,” Julie said emphatically. “I mean, no offense or anything, but you really shouldn’t say stuff like that, Natalie. People will think you’re crazy.” Her voice dropped when she said the word “crazy.”
Intense dislike for Julie shot through my body.
My mom just nodded miserably.
“Bell’s going to ring. I need to go check my makeup,” said Julie, jumping off the swing. “See you in math!”
The vision ended.
Two visions back to back had made me feel queasy. Not the throw-up kind, just the carsick kind. I felt as though I’d just spun around and around in a circle and then sat down. And I think what I’d seen in the last vision wasn’t helping.
Why had my mom chosen to confide in someone like Julie? And why did she have such bad taste in friends? If only she had talked to Lady Azura first.
I stared back down at the diary, open to the page I’d left off. My mother’s usually neat, round handwriting went all slanted and got a little messier. The next entry was about how Julie was acting weird. Ignoring her. Blowing her off to hang out with some girl named Tabitha instead. This is how the entry ended:
Julie thinks I’m crazy, and it’s all my fault. Actually, it’s Lady Azura’s fault. All of this is probably happening because of her. I am going to grow up to be a big freak. I wish I had been born normal. This is all so unfair!
There was that word again. Freak.
Had I ever felt like a freak? I know I used to wish I was normal. Like everyone else. But that was before I learned about my powers. Learned they were a gift. I was proud to be like Lady Azura. Proud to be related to her. My mother was being really unfair.
I closed the diary and sighed heavily. I felt so let down by my mother. Why couldn’t she stand up for herself? Why would she want to even bother to rem
ain friends with someone like Julie? There must have been great girls at school that my mom could have been friends with. Girls like Lily. Girls who knew how to be good friends. Girls who deserved your trust.
Thinking of Lily made me remember the hurt look she’d given me today as I left her. She needed my help, and so far I wasn’t helping her. But the séance would change all that. I hadn’t told her about it yet, just in case it didn’t help. I didn’t want to get her hopes up. But deep down, I had a feeling it was going to help.
I looked at the clock. Close to ten. I was sound asleep within ten minutes.
Chapter 10
At school on Monday I barely had a chance to talk with Lily alone. I managed to find her just before lunch. I asked her if she wanted to go to the construction site after school, but she told me she had to get home to watch Cammie while her mother took her brothers to buy soccer cleats.
Just before last period, I slammed my locker door closed and found myself staring at the spirit of Barkus, the old gym teacher who haunted the school. Usually I made a point of avoiding him. But just recently I’d finally caved and listened to what he had been trying to ask me.
“Collins,” he said gruffly.
I sighed. Stopped. “Hi, Mr. Barkus,” I said. “I have to hustle to math class.”
“Thanks again for what you did. I owe ya one,” he said.
“It was nothing,” I said. All I’d done was go see an old lady who was in a nursing home. Decades ago, she and Barkus had been secretly in love with each other. He had asked me to tell her that he had always loved her, but that he’d died in a car accident before he’d gotten up the courage to tell her.
He shimmered away. And once again, I found myself staring at Jody Jenner.
She didn’t say anything. Just cocked one eyebrow in my direction, turned, and headed away.
I sighed to myself. Why did she always have to be there to witness me talking to spirits? I used to be so careful about it at school. I had let my guard down way too much. I had to work on that. It was almost as if because I knew that Mason and Lily knew, I didn’t care who else found out. But that wasn’t totally true . . . it would lead to all sorts of questions if all the kids at school found out what I could do. And some of it is really private. I mean, I shouldn’t have to explain it to everyone. Answer all the questions about it.
But that was different from being ashamed or embarrassed.
I smiled as I thought about it. I honestly didn’t care so much what the people thought anymore. It felt really good to know that.
When I got home from school, I could see that Lady Azura had a client. A strange car was in the driveway, and the purple curtain was pulled across the doorway to her séance room. I didn’t feel like reading more in the diary. Maybe I should start my own diary, I thought.
But the thought of doing all that writing didn’t really appeal to me. I’m a visual person. Maybe, I thought, I’d keep a visual diary. I raced upstairs to grab my camera, then headed back outside and wheeled my bike out of the shed.
I’d start by taking pictures of places around town that my mom might have gone to. When we’d first arrived here from California, my dad had shown me where she and her mom had once lived, although the house was no longer there. I wanted to see it again anyway. I pulled on my helmet and turned right out of the driveway, toward the road leading out of town.
What had once been rural farmland was now bustling development. The house where my mother and grandmother had lived for one year, before moving to Connecticut, was now a big warehouse store. I sighed and turned off the now-busy road, heading north, parallel to the boardwalk and the ocean. The busy strip almost immediately became a quiet residential street with modest houses. These had been built more recently than the older Victorians in our neighborhood. Another half mile, and the houses looked older. Farther apart. More like farmhouses. I stopped now and then to snap a picture of a pretty maple tree with colorful leaves, an old church, a weather-beaten clapboard house that looked like it had been built two hundred years ago.
I came to Culver Street and stopped for a moment before turning down it. This was the street where Lily’s father wanted to buy the vacant lot. Half a mile down on the right, I came upon the lot. I stopped again. Stared at the place thoughtfully.
It looked harmless enough. Beach Drive lay ahead, and I could see the ocean from here. The lot itself wasn’t as big as I had been expecting it to be. There wasn’t much there. Clumps of sea grass and sandy mounds. A faded sign that said PRIVATE PROPERTY. Toward the back of the lot, I saw a stack of old lumber, partly obscured by tall sea grass. Hadn’t Lady Azura said this was the site of an old train depot? There was nothing left of that now. I got off my bike and laid it down on the edge of the lot. I walked across it, toward the battered, three-rail wooden fence separating the lot from the one on the other side, which was the back side of the supermarket.
Now I could make out the remains of old rails, grown over by grass and hidden by sand. And looking to my left, heading away from the ocean, I could see them more distinctly. Abandoned old rails to nowhere. Signs of an age when trains, rather than cars, moved people and cargo. I snapped some pictures.
Then the air shimmered. A mist passed across my vision. When it cleared, I saw five young men sitting on the fence, just a few feet down from where I was standing. Like workers on lunch break or something. But these were definitely spirits.
I stared. Blinked a few times. They shimmered, grew transparent, and disappeared. “Wait,” I called. I wanted to tell them to come back and talk to me. But they were gone.
I’d only gotten a quick look, but I recognized the red-haired guy, the darker-skinned guy, and the one with the beret.
I got back onto my bike. These spirits were definitely connected to this land. This proved it.
When I arrived home, Lady Azura was still in with the client. I waited impatiently in the kitchen for a little while, eager for her to finish up so we could have our séance. But after a few more minutes I decided to go upstairs and read more of the diary.
Thursday, September 6
You’ll never believe what happened today. My mom came home. She’s furious with Lady Azura.
The page swam in front of me. I was having another vision. I swallowed hard, feeling rising nausea. So many visions. They were taking a lot out of me, I realized. I’d had visions before but never so many, so fast.
I was standing in a kitchen. An unfamiliar one. Smaller than Lady Azura’s. Painted a cheerful light blue, with a black-and-white tiled floor. My mom was sitting at the table, her chin in her hands, her long, straight hair cascading over her shoulders. Standing near her was—shocker—a younger version of Lady Azura. There was no mistaking her, though. Same dyed mahogany hair. Same exotic clothing. Same glamorously made-up face. But she looked twenty-five years younger. She was stunning.
Next to Lady Azura was another woman. It had to be my grandmother, Diana, whom I had never met. She was also startlingly pretty, though in a much simpler way than Lady Azura. She barely wore any makeup, and her hair was back in a twist. She had dark eyes like Lady Azura. My mom must have gotten her blue eyes from her father.
“Mom! What are you doing home so soon?” my mom asked. “I thought you weren’t due back until this weekend.”
“Julie’s mother called me,” replied Diana, her voice guarded. She looked from my mother to Lady Azura and then back at my mother.
My mom gulped, and her face got very pale.
My heart sank. So Julie had run home and told her mother what my mom had told her. And her mom had called Diana and told her everything, and Diana had come running home.
My mom looked scared. She tap-tap-tapped the eraser on the table. It was the loudest sound in the kitchen.
“Go upstairs now, Nat. I need to talk to your grandmother alone.”
Lady Azura’s lips were pressed together in what I knew was a defiant way. Her arms were crossed in front of her.
My mom slid from her chair and hea
ded out of the kitchen. But as I looked after her, the walls turned shimmery and transparent. I could see that she stopped just on the other side of the door and stayed to listen. She’d taken the pencil with her. The eraser end was now at her mouth, and I could see her tapping it against her front teeth.
“Mom,” said Diana, after she was sure that my mom was out of earshot, which of course, she wasn’t. “What is going on? Mary Kane called me. Julie’s mother. She told me that Julie had told her that Natalie is nattering on to Julie about paranormal phenomenon, how she can see ghosts. What kind of nonsense have you been feeding her?”
My mom took the pencil away from her mouth. I watched her snap it in half.
Lady Azura’s eyes flashed. “I’ve had no such talks with Natalie,” she said. “I would of course have been more than happy to discuss it if she had approached me, but she did not. I was not aware that Natalie possessed any powers. Were you aware of this before now?”
“She doesn’t have any powers,” snapped Diana. “I knew it was a mistake to leave for so long. Clearly this is a cry for help from Natalie.”
Lady Azura looked hurt, or at least I think she did. My heart ached for her. This wasn’t her fault. Diana was being harsh toward her. But I could only watch and listen.
“I think I should take that job in Connecticut,” said Diana. Her face softened a little as she noticed the hurt look on her mother’s face. “I really appreciate all you’ve done for us, Mom. Truly I do. It’s just that I think Natalie needs some stability. Some normalcy in her life. I’m going upstairs to talk with her.”
The bits of pencil flew out of my mom’s hands as she rushed across the room and tiptoed hurriedly up the stairs. I followed Diana out of the kitchen door and traipsed up the stairs behind her, into a bedroom at the top of the stairs.
Interested as I was in hearing the conversation unfold, I was also fascinated to be standing in my mother’s bedroom. It looked so different from mine. Just like the blue bedroom where my mom had been staying at Lady Azura’s, this room was a mess. Piles of stuff were strewn around. Shoes, draped clothing, open dresser drawers. The walls were white, and the furnishings pretty plain, but then, I realized, it was most likely a rented house. They wouldn’t have painted it for just a one-year stay. But there was artwork stuck up all over. Pastels, watercolors, charcoals, landscapes, figures, fantasy scenes.
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