“Why don’t you join in, Emma?” she asked. “Don’t you have, like, special sensitivity in your hands?”
“Uh, not really,” I said.
“Come try anyway,” Amanda said. “You guys didn’t have a turn last time.” Logan put her hand on my back, helped move me in toward the board. I felt backward with my left hand for Spark.
“Come on, Blythe. Put your hands on, too,” Amanda said.
“What about Deirdre?” Nicole asked.
“That’s okay. I’ll watch this time,” Deirdre said. She sounded upset.
“Okay, so it’s me, Blythe, Emma, and Logan,” Amanda said, and if I’d thought she had said it for my benefit, I would have considered it thoughtful, but it was clear she’d made the announcement for the sake of some ghost or other.
“Here we go,” Amanda said. We each put our fingers on the board, over a little wooden piece that felt, when I picked it up for a moment, like a guitar pick. Amanda took it and set it back on the board.
“We all just hover above it; no one needs to grab it or hold on to it or anything.”
“Okay,” I said. No one else responded.
“Ask the board a question,” Amanda said.
“Does it have to be someone who’s touching it?” Nicole asked.
“No, it can be anyone,” Amanda said.
“Okay,” Nicole said. “Are there any spirits here?”
We all sat there, and our fingers started pushing at each other’s. I don’t mean to be a giant killjoy, but I was pretty sure that Amanda was guiding the movement. Our hands moved together, even though I couldn’t feel the planchette anymore.
There was a squeal and everyone inhaled sharply. “Okay, so yes,” Amanda said. “It went to the ‘Yes’ on the board, for anyone who can’t see from where they’re—oh my god! I’m so sorry, Emma. Was that, like . . . was that—”
“Was it what?” I asked, wanting to punish her for being rude to Logan a minute ago but only succeeding in coming off as an uptight shrew myself.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Rude? I mean, I didn’t mean—I just meant anyone who can’t see the board.”
“Right. And that includes me. It’s fine, Amanda.”
“Oh good, okay. So anyway, the yes? That means there are spirits here.” She dropped her voice back into its creamy, ghost-ass-kissing register.
“Who are you, spirits?” she crooned. “Will you please tell us your names?”
It wasn’t lost on me that Amanda talked to both me and the Ouija board “spirits” in the same patronizing baby voice. I wondered if the ghosts found it as annoying as I did.
Our hands were moving again, and this time I let myself get lost in it, feel the group push of what I figured were our imaginations and desires, which Amanda and maybe everyone else believed were Claire’s thoughts. And who knows? Maybe that’s what a spirit is, right? The collective memories and thoughts of people who knew a dead girl and want to believe that her energy still exists in the universe.
“H,” Amanda said. “H what, spirit? Is that your name?”
“O,” they read.
“Ho?” Logan said, laughing. “The spirit is a ho?”
I laughed, too, but Amanda shushed us furiously. “Shut up!” she said. “Do you want to piss her off? Are you crazy?”
“I thought this was a game, Amanda,” Logan said. “Remember how you just told me to chill out? Maybe you should chill out.”
“God, Logan. You really need to back off. I’m just saying, why not be respectful about what you can’t be sure of?”
“What is it I can’t be sure of?” Logan asked.
“What exists in other dimensions,” said Amanda. “Do you think you know everything there is to know about science and the universe?”
“Obviously not,” Logan said. “Do you?”
“Shhh,” said Nicole. “Do you feel that?”
Our hands were moving again. “U,” everyone but me said. “S. E.”
“H-o-u-s-e,” Nicole said. “It spells house.”
“What house, spirit? Can you tell us your name? Or the name of the house?”
This time I worked to keep my hands still, to let them move only if I actually felt like some power beyond me was moving them. But I felt nothing but the pressure of the fingers of the group, making my hand move with theirs. And the whole operation was the opposite of piano, or even braille—anything that has color in it, depth, joy, or meaning. I was all blank.
“B,” Amanda said.
“L,” said Logan.
“X,” said Logan.
“This is bullshit,” Blythe said.
“Come on, Blythe!” Amanda said. “What if Claire is trying to tell us something? Don’t you want to hear what it is?”
“What if you’re trying to pull some of your regular bullshit, Amanda?” Blythe asked. “I don’t want to hear what that is.”
“Okay,” Amanda said. “Everyone, shake your hands out. Let’s start again.”
We all shook our hands at the wrist, and even as we were doing it, I was thinking, At least three of us don’t want to be doing this, so why are we?
“I only want to do this once more,” I said, “and then can we please do something else?”
“Me too,” Logan said. “Let’s have this be our last round.”
“Fine by me,” Blythe said.
“Whatever, you guys,” Amanda said. “Fine. Let’s start. Who wants to ask the question?”
“Why don’t we all ask together?” I said.
“Okay, if we can agree on a question,” Amanda said. “How about, ‘What are you trying to tell us, spirit friend?’”
If my eyes had worked in their old way, I would have rolled them endlessly. But they didn’t and I didn’t. I just synced my voice with everyone else’s: “What are you trying to tell us, spirit friend?” we all asked, and the room vibrated with our vocal cords. Then our hands moved quickly, and I got nothing—no texture, no truth, nothing. I didn’t care what they said; just wanted to have the stupidity over with, to be home in my own bed, a baby, safe in my mom’s orbit.
“L,” Amanda said.
“P.”
“Space.”
“L, P, space?”
“W,” Nicole read.
“Lap? Wow?” I said, as our hands went all over the place into a huge scramble of letters and I felt furious in a way I hadn’t since my days on the couch with my braille cube. Nothing meant anything, and we were making it worse, further confusing ourselves and each other. And for what?
“You know what, you guys? Fuck this,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” And I went back to the bathroom alone, called my mom, and asked if she’d come get me.
And she did, and I left, and Logan stayed.
-9-
Logan showed up at my house at one o’clock the next afternoon and forced me out of bed, where I was listening to Alice in Wonderland, still in my pajamas. I had my clay head on the nightstand next to me and Mr. Hawes’s pen and a valentine Zach Haze made for me in third grade under my pillow. Zach made one for everyone, of course, but I spent hours poring over mine, hoping to find a clue in it that mine was extra special in some way. And now it is, because I’ve kept it a million years and it’s definitely the only remaining one in the universe. Normally I kept these treasures in my desk drawer, but lately I’ve been putting them under my pillow. Maybe because things, including parts of me, can disappear without warning, and I want to keep them close. Maybe I’m going crazy.
“What happened last night?” Logan asked.
I didn’t say anything. She went and got me a hoodie and basically pulled me out of bed.
“Come on,” she said. “We have our second meeting and you can’t miss it. Everyone is counting on you.”
“Yeah. I’m such a pillar of strength.”
“No one said anything about you leaving, Em. That Ouija board thing sucked, and everyone blamed Amanda. But it got better after. We—”
“Yeah, Lo? I don’t really want to talk about last night. Maybe we should just—”
“Okay, fine.”
I got dressed in silence and then we breezed by the kitchen to the mudroom to put on boots and a parka. As we left the house, I called back to my mom, who was cleaning up lunch, that we were going on a walk.
“But you haven’t eaten, sweetie. And it’s freezing!”
“We need fresh air,” I said. “And I’m not hungry.”
It was so cold that I could feel the steam coming off me. I could almost see our breathing, but neither Logan nor I spoke until we were halfway to the Mayburg place, when she brought up Deirdre’s again. “So, Em, I know you don’t really want to talk about last night, but I just thought, in case it came up or whatever, that you might want to know that some of us snuck out for fun. It was no big deal, we just wanted to see if we could do it, so—”
“You guys snuck out of Deirdre’s? Who’s ‘some of us’?”
“Me and Blythe and Nicole.”
“Wow. Where were Amanda and Deirdre?”
“Asleep.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of rude to sneak out of Deirdre’s house and risk getting her in trouble?”
“I wanted you to come, Em,” she said, “but you had already left—”
I said, “I didn’t mean me, okay? Forget it.” And we walked the rest of the way without talking.
The Mayburg place was so cold it felt like a cave, and I imagined icicles coming both up from the floor and down from the ceiling. But in spite of that, and the fact that our first meeting had been a disaster, there were twenty-one of us by three o’clock, fifteen from Lake Main, four from Pendleton, and two friends of friends, Nicole and some guy visiting Carl Muscan.
“Is Blythe here?” I asked Logan.
“No.”
“What about her foxy Pendleton friend?” David Sarabande asked, meaning Dima. He had heard us? How close was he standing?
“Shut up, David,” Logan said.
Then Amanda Boughman shouted, because she apparently thinks I’m deaf, “Hey! Emma? I know you’re in charge or whatever, but is it okay if I say something?”
Obviously I said, “I’m not in charge. Go ahead.”
So Amanda said, “Well, this is really crazy, but last night some of us were at Deirdre’s and we think Claire was trying to talk to us,” and naturally that made everyone freak out for all sorts of reasons: first of all, it’s rude in human society to bring up a party that no one else was invited to, so Deirdre started apologizing all over the place and talking about how her parents only let her have a few people or whatever, and then a bunch of guys were criticizing Blythe for not showing up, saying how if we were going to make any progress figuring out why Claire “offed herself,” Blythe’s input would be necessary. Of course, that expression freaked out other people, including Monica Dancat, who was like, “Why do you guys have to be so rude and degrading?”
And David Sarabande made this whiny sound like he was imitating her, even though he sounded nothing like her at all. “Yeah, why can’t you be a big feminist about her overdose?”
The word feminist was like a gray, spitting snake, weaving through us like something toxic and awful. No one, not even Carl Muscan, laughed.
“I’m not a feminist,” Monica said. “It’s just, ‘offed herself’ is kind of, I don’t know, disrespectful.”
“What would you call drugging yourself to death and then drowning?”
“I don’t know,” Monica said. “Passed away? Died? Drowned? Why does there always have to be such an assholish value judgment in everything you say?”
“Whereas ‘assholish value judgment’ is respectful?” David said.
“Fine, you’re right, whatever,” Monica said.
But then Coltrane Winslow shocked everyone by asking, “Why aren’t you a feminist?”
I felt bad for Monica. I would have hated to be on the spot like that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just meant I don’t, like, hate guys or whatever.” At this point I heard clouds in her voice.
“But feminist just means you think men and women don’t get treated like equals,” Coltrane said. “And they don’t. Women make seventy cents for every dollar men make.”
Someone—one person—was clapping. It sounded like a death cough. Apparently someone wanted to join Coltrane in social suicide, and it was Elizabeth Tallentine, because she stopped clapping to say, “I totally agree with Coltrane. I mean, look at Congress—it’s eighty percent men? And Fortune 500 companies run by women? Ten of them. What the fuck?”
I agreed, obviously, and so did my mom and dad and Sarah and Leah, and everyone I’d ever met who had a brain, but there was no way I was going to be like, “Yeah, I totally agree! Hooray for women!” at the Mayburg place. It’s shameful, but I didn’t want everyone to think I was a guy-hater lighting my bra on fire.
“I totally agree,” Logan said, and my self-loathing was complete. “And I think it’s relevant, because if girls could feel better about ourselves, then maybe—”
“Yeah? It was because men earn more money than women in certain jobs that Claire OD’d? You can’t be serious,” David said. “Guys kill themselves more often than girls anyway, so it’s not society’s fault.”
“No, they don’t,” Coltrane said. “Girls attempt suicide more often. Guys succeed more often because they use guns.”
“Have you guys ever heard of the rule of three?” Amanda asked. When no one responded, she said, “It’s just that suicides happen in threes, so probably at least two more of us—”
Logan cut her off. “I’m just saying we’d be less suicidal if society was better for girls, David; not that we—”
“I think it’s pretty fucking good for girls,” David said. “How about you work and pay the bills and I get to stay home and play with the kids?”
“Play?” Logan shouted. “My mom works like a slave so she can feed us, while my dad . . . whatever.”
“Well, not every dude is a complete slacker, Logan,” David said. “You can’t really hold all males responsible for the bad choices of a few females. The many bad choices.” Then he laughed. “Like mother, like daughter.”
“Shut the fuck up, David,” someone said. It took me a minute to accept that it was Zach.
“Why don’t you take that shit up with her?” David said.
“What’s your problem?” Zach said, and I heard scuffling and then something hitting something else—hands, maybe, on something. I couldn’t tell what was happening, and I put my head in my hands, half to rock and half to protect it in case the sky fell. Something was happening on the floor—were they fighting on the floor? I kept trying to move back, but there was something behind me—boxes, or a shelf. I heard Logan shouting, “Stop it! Quit it!” And then the door opened and there was more shouting outside, but I held my hands over my ears for what seemed like a long time.
Logan came back in. “That was horrible,” she said. She put her hand on my back. “It’s okay. Emma. Emma, stop.” I stopped rocking. I heard movement around the room as people came back from whatever they’d all seen and I’d missed.
“Em? You didn’t miss anything. A bunch of guys rolled around in the grass punching each other like fucking idiots,” Logan said. “And then Josh broke it up and they all ran into the jungle. We should keep talking, instead of everyone just leaving now and proving Sauberg right that we’re too stupid to have a conversation at all.”
“Josh broke it up?” I asked her, because he’s shy and nerdy. She shushed me.
“So where should we start?” Josh asked. So he’d heard me. I vowed never to say anything about anyone ever again. People shuffled chairs and lit cigarettes and settled.
The sound and color of his words made me feel like everything could be understood eventually if we all just worked and talked and tried hard enough. Like meeting up had been worth it, the exact opposite of how I’d felt literally thirty seconds before.
But Carl Muscan asked, “Matter how? What difference does it make? Dead is dead, right? We’re not going to bring anyone back by talking about shit here.”
“But we never thought we were going to bring her back,” Logan pointed out. “We just thought if we could understand why she did it—whatever it is—we could prevent—”
“You’re not going to prevent anything by sitting around in here smoking and talking about whether Claire slipped or jumped into the lake, Logan,” Carl said.
“We might, actually,” Coltrane argued. “People don’t kill themselves unless they have an opportunity—like a gun or a cliff to jump off of or a lake to drown in.”
“So, what?” Carl said. “So the lake is cordoned off at that beach now; you think if it had been cordoned off before, Claire wouldn’t have found some other way to OD or die anyway?”
“He has a point.” One of the Pendleton kids—or someone I don’t know, anyway.
“Where was Claire getting the drugs?” Josh asked.
“Carl, I don’t get why you have to shoot down everything everyone says,” Logan said. “We’re just trying to imagine what Claire felt like, or what happened to her, so we can all do better in some way. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Carl said. “What’s wrong with me disagreeing with you? Why are you so insecure and bitter?”
“Um, excuse me,” I said quietly. “But what about Josh’s question?”
“Thank you, Emma,” he said.
“I’m sure she got the drugs from her pill-popping mom,” someone said. Again, I wasn’t sure who it was.
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