by Ania Ahlborn
“Well, can we try it anyway?” Maggie asked. “Since I spent my birthday money?”
“Not now.” Brynn dropped the box to her feet and casually toed it beneath her bed.
“Why not?” Maggie asked, looking to the bed skirt that was obscuring her birthday gift from view. “It’s my birthday. If it’s a party game, let’s have a party. And how come it’s going under your bed and not mine?”
“Because you can’t have a proper séance in the middle of the day, dummy,” Brynn said. “And because if Mom catches you with that thing, you’re gonna have a lot of explaining to do, and you totally suck at excuses. I’m surprised she didn’t see it when you bought it.”
That was because Maggie had a sneaking suspicion her mother would make her take it back, and now Brynn was confirming her wariness. She didn’t ask Brynn why getting caught in possession of the board would have been bad, but the thought of getting in trouble for playing that thing only made her want to try it out more.
“Can we do it tonight?” she asked.
Brynn shrugged, seemingly uninterested. That in itself was weird, because here it was, a chance to speak to spirits beyond the grave, and Brynn was acting like it was the most boring suggestion ever. Brynn, the girl who couldn’t stop telling ghost stories to save her life. Brynn, who once fashioned broken-down cardboard boxes she had painted black around her bed to make it look like a coffin. Brynn, the girl who couldn’t stop watching horror movies and claimed one of her favorite songs was a tune by the Smiths called “Pretty Girls Make Graves.”
“But Brynn, it’s my birthday!” Maggie couldn’t help it: she whined. Because it wasn’t fair. Birthdays only came once a year.
“Fine,” Brynn said, relenting. “Whatever. But don’t blame me if—” She cut herself off.
“If what?” Maggie asked.
“Nothing,” Brynn said, then gave her sister an impatient look. “I’ll see you later.” That was code for get out.
“Okay, see you later,” Maggie echoed, too excited by the prospect of an honest-to-goodness birthday séance to complain.
. . .
That night, Maggie wolfed down her birthday dinner—meat loaf and mashed potatoes, which her mom insisted was Maggie’s favorite but wasn’t (You love my meat loaf, Maggie)—and hurriedly cleared the table of plates and glasses. “Where’s the fire?” her dad asked, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Maggie flat-out lied.
“Brynn and I are gonna watch a movie in her room.”
“What movie?” Dad asked. “And what about the cake?”
“I don’t remember the title,” she told him, a pang of guilt twisting up her insides for half a breath, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from covering her tracks. She turned away from her father and continued loading the dishwasher. “Besides, I’m too full for cake. Can’t we wait a little?”
“Maybe because you devoured your food like a bear,” Dad said.
“We can wait,” Maggie’s mother chimed in. “But it’s ice cream cake. Brynn, you’re going to have to remember to pull it out of the freezer and let it sit for a while when Maggie is ready.”
Brynn didn’t respond. She was too busy messing with her flip phone, probably playing Snake or Tetris. Maggie wondered if she’d ever have a phone as cool as her sister’s. Maybe she’d ask for one next year, when she’d be thirteen. Then again, what she really wanted was her own computer. Now, she had to use AOL on her dad’s machine in his home office downstairs. She wasn’t even allowed to have her own screen name, unlike Brynn, who had spent a whole week thinking up the perfect username.
“I was looking forward to that cake,” Dad murmured. “I guess I’ll wait it out while watching a movie, too. Want to guess what it’s called?”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “Da-ad . . .”
“I’ll take what’s behind door number one, Monty,” Brynn said, not looking up. “Oh, that’s the only door? Such options. I do declare.”
“It’s a little something called Die Hard,” their dad announced, always triumphant at the mention of his most beloved film. “Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
“Yippee-ki-yay, mother—”
“Brynn!” Mom.
“I’m just a fly in the ointment,” Brynn quoted, then snapped closed her phone, got up from the table, and ducked out of the room.
Just a monkey in the wrench. Maggie couldn’t count how many times her dad had watched that film. Probably at least a hundred thousand, maybe even more. She was convinced her father wanted to be like that cop guy, John McClane. He probably had dreams of crawling through ventilation systems and dodging bullets and everything. Boys were such wackos.
But Die Hard would earn Maggie and Brynn a good two-hour window. Their dad would be absorbed, and their mom had that new novel to pore over. She was a sucker for romance. Her bookshelves were chock-full of the stuff.
When Maggie finally made it up to Brynn’s room, the place smelled of melted wax. She wasn’t sure where Brynn had gotten all those candles, but there were at least a dozen of them casting odd shadows across the walls. Brynn was playing another one of Simon’s borrowed CDs. Last time, it had been a band called Echo and the Bunnymen, which Maggie had thought was cute. This time, it was a soundtrack to a movie called The Lost Boys. A guy was singing about crying for his little sister. There was a choir of kids harmonizing something that sounded like the commandments behind him. It gave Maggie the creeps.
“It’s like a fire in here,” Maggie said, distracting herself from Brynn’s music selection.
“Hurry up, get in.” Brynn motioned her forward. “Shut the door, before Mom smells it.”
“She’s reading in Dad’s office.” Maggie paused, suddenly nervous at the sight of the unboxed board lying on her big sister’s bed. It almost looked as though it were glowing, beckoning her toward it, urging her to give in to its mystery, its potential for magic.
“This is your idea, you know,” Brynn said. “I don’t even want to do this . . .”
But Maggie wasn’t going to chicken out. There was nothing to fear anyway, right? Brynn had said it was fake. Nothing but a party game. A big fat hoax.
“Sit.” Brynn pointed to the rug on her floor, then turned down the music. “Cross your legs pretzel-style.” Maggie did as she was told, and Brynn placed the board between them so that it balanced upon their knees. “Now, if you want this to work, don’t screw around. No laughing.”
Maggie nodded again and dropped her fingers on the planchette.
“Lightly,” Brynn said. “Barely touching it. Like this.” She gingerly held her hands above the pointer, as though invisible wires were holding up her wrists.
Maggie lifted her fingers a little, trying to mimic her sister’s position. This was more complicated than she had thought.
“Who do you want to talk to?” Brynn asked, which was surprising; Brynn hardly ever asked Maggie her opinion on anything. Perhaps it was because it was Maggie’s board or her birthday—whatever the reason, Brynn’s graciousness left Maggie blank-brained.
“Umm . . .” She blinked, trying to think above the song slithering from the speakers. Brynn had set that creepy song to repeat. Finally, Maggie blurted out the first dead person she could think of. “Elvis.”
“Oh God.” Brynn’s head fell backward, as though the agony of having a kid sister was suddenly too much to bear.
“What? Gram loves Elvis,” Maggie insisted.
“Gram also loves Grape Nuts. If we’re going to talk to a dead guy, we may as well talk to someone cool, like Kurt Cobain.”
“Who’s that?” Maggie asked.
Brynn’s head rolled forward again. She looked serious, and a little disgusted. Maggie glanced down to the board, then back to her sister.
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Kirk Cobain.”
“Kurt.”
“Whatever. So, what do
we do?”
“You have to call him to the board,” Brynn said. “Say his name, and then say, I call upon thee.”
Maggie sucked her lips into her mouth and looked to the heart-shaped pointer between them, the flickering candlelight casting dancing shadows across the plastic.
“How come you don’t just do it?” Maggie asked. If Brynn knew how to play, why was she making Maggie run the game?
“Because it’s your birthday, remember?” Brynn flashed one of her fake smiles—the kind their dad referred to as the teenage sneer. Those smiles drove their mom up the wall. Why does she have to smile at me like that? Arlen never smiled at me like that!
“Um, Mr. Kirk Cobain . . .” Did Maggie really want to do this?
“Kurt,” Brynn corrected for the second time. “It’s Kurt.”
“Jeez, okay. Sorry! Kurt Cobain, I call . . . What was it again?”
Brynn groaned. “I call upon thee,” she said.
“Oh. Oh yeah.” Maggie squared her shoulders. “Mr. Kurt, I call upon thee!”
The planchette stayed where it was, unmoving. Maggie looked up at her sister. “Did I say it right? Are we supposed to move it or something?”
“Shhh!” Brynn hissed, then shut her eyes and breathed in deep. “I’m calling upon the spirit of Kurt Cobain.” A pause. “Of Nirvana.” Another pause as she peeked at her sister. “Which is a band, for those who are way too lame to know. Probably one of the best bands ever, in case you were wondering. Except for Depeche Mode, because Depeche Mode is the greatest band of all time.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. This was dumb.
“Hey.” Brynn narrowed her eyes. “I told you, be serious.”
“Sorry,” Maggie murmured. “I thought it was supposed to be fake, anyway.”
“Is there anyone here?” Brynn asked, apparently giving up on Kurt. “We call upon the spirits that live inside this house.”
“. . . Why would there be spirits living inside this house?” Maggie whispered. Nobody had died there, had they? “I thought Mom and Dad built this place from scratch.”
“I don’t know, Mags!” Brynn huffed. “Maybe if we actually waited for an answer . . .”
“Maybe the house is built on a graveyard,” Maggie suggested, gaping at her own suggestion. “Like that one movie we watched about the girl and the TV static. Remember? The one where they put real dead bodies in the swimming pool? That was so gross!”
“Ugh, you know what?” Brynn pushed the board off her knees. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
Maggie frowned. “Awh, come on, Bee. Let’s try again. I’ll be serious this time, I swear.”
“I don’t feel like it anymore. Besides, I still have homework. And I want to call Simon.” Brynn moved to the stereo, popped the CD out of the player, and grabbed her old standby: Violator. The greatest.
The mention of Simon sealed the deal. Maggie sighed, because Brynn was obsessed with Simon, and if she was thinking about a call, Maggie’s quality time with her older sister was officially up, birthday or not.
Maggie reluctantly rose to her feet, then pulled the board game box off the bed and opened it up. “You really think this never works?” Maggie asked, placing the board in its rightful spot. “Even if you’re super serious and don’t laugh or anything? What if you played it at a cemetery? Wouldn’t something have to happen then?”
Brynn grabbed the top of the box off her comforter. “See this?” she asked, tapping a chipped fingernail next to a name. “These guys make toys, Mags. Like Nerf and Sorry! It’s meant for entertainment purposes.”
“Then why’d you set all this up?” Maggie motioned to the candles, to the ambience of the place. Even the song had been spooky. It seemed like an awful lot of effort if Brynn didn’t believe the board could work.
Brynn hesitated for a second, then shrugged. “Because it’s your birthday.” Her answer rang hollow, not quite right. “I don’t know, whatever. Forget I even bothered, okay? Just go.”
Maggie frowned down at the board again. Leave it to her to screw it all up.
“But leave the board,” Brynn said.
“Huh?”
“Just leave it.” She paused, as if considering her own reasoning. “It’s safer in here.” Except that didn’t make sense. If it was just from the toy store, what danger was there? “In case Mom looks,” Brynn said, clarifying.
“I’ll just hide it,” Maggie said. “She won’t find it.”
That only seemed to irk Brynn even more. “Fine, whatever.” She was suddenly hostile. “Just get out, already.”
Maggie didn’t take offense to Brynn’s mood swing. They were standard procedure. Teen angst is what their dad liked to say. It paired well with her teenage sneer. But that didn’t mean Maggie was happy with being kicked out of Brynn’s room so fast. She stared down at the box in her hands, the smell of fire crawling up her nose. The fortune-teller’s fancy rings were still calling to her, still convincing her that, had Brynn only been more patient, something would have happened. If Maggie only had faith in the power of the oracle, it was sure to work. Because that was the thing about magic. You had to believe.
An hour before bedtime, Maggie was called down for birthday cake. Brynn didn’t come down, too busy yammering with her boyfriend.
“What happened to watching a movie with your sister?” her dad asked. He’d cut a massive piece of ice cream cake for himself and was happily eating it while watching the tail end of his film.
Maggie shrugged, half-heartedly stabbing at her own piece with the tines of her fork. Her mom had bought vanilla. Maggie didn’t even like vanilla, just like she’d never been nuts about meat loaf. Everyone knew her favorite was cookies and cream, but her mom never did make a big deal out of that kind of stuff.
“Simon,” Maggie murmured.
“Ah.” Dad nodded, as if that name explained everything. “Well, you can finish watching this with me, right?”
Another shrug. She didn’t much feel like Die Hard tonight. “I’m just gonna go upstairs and read,” she said.
“You sure, Crazy?” Dad asked.
“Yeah.” She’d take her cake with her. Maybe she really would read, or maybe she’d do something else.
Once upstairs, she shut her door behind her and, despite the rule of no locked doors, twisted the lock button to engage the bolt. She abandoned her cake plate atop her desk. It would melt there, nothing but a pool of cream and soggy cake until her mom found it in the morning. Maggie didn’t have any candles like Brynn, so she turned on the closet light instead, leaving the door open a crack while the rest of the room was left dark. It was there, in the glowing long rectangle of light, that Maggie took a seat upon her floor, placed the board upon her knees, and rested her fingers upon the planchette the way Brynn had shown her.
“I call upon thee,” she whispered. “Is there anybody here?”
She waited. Chewed her bottom lip. Her nerves roiled around her stomach. But nothing happened. She began to slide the pointer’s three felt-covered feet around to spell out random things. MAGS. BIRTHDAY. SIMON. DUMB. And then, just as she was about to give up and place the board back in its box, the planchette jerked toward the upper-left-hand side of the board.
YES.
Startled, Maggie pulled her hands away. A second later, she was shoving the board, the empty box, and the pointer beneath her bed before crawling onto her mattress, spooked. “Whatever,” she whispered, coiling her arms around her knees. “It’s just for parties,” she told herself. “It’s a hoax, like Bee said.”
Except that didn’t feel true.
And the soft rustling that came from her closet later that night only convinced her more.
NINE
* * *
THE LAST TIME Maggie had come home—three years ago—her bedroom had been untouched since she had left. Her mother, as though in unspoken apology, had left it j
ust as it had looked the day Maggie had left Savannah. But what Arlen had referred to as Maggie’s room was now unrecognizable; its only familiarity was its location—still at the end of the hall, on the right, across from the bathroom that Maggie and Brynn had fought over while growing up.
She hadn’t bothered taking a good look around before heading off to the mortuary, but now she was faced with the full impact of her room’s transformation. The walls, which had once been painted a vibrant ocean blue, were now a pedestrian beige. The gallery wall she had created with a mishmash of wildlife posters, framed photographs, and water-themed watercolors was gone. In its place was a mirror flanked by a trio of small canvases—black-and-white landscapes that Maggie had seen at a Wilmington Target while shopping for apartment essentials. Surprisingly, her furniture remained, albeit unrecognizable beneath a face-lift of white paint.
Maggie slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and spun around, her gaze falling onto the closed closet door. She’d left a lot of stuff in there when she’d taken off for college. Arlen hadn’t called to ask about whether Maggie wanted to keep any of the clothes she’d left behind, or asked if she wanted the novels she had alphabetically organized along her bookshelves, either. Those books, now missing, had been replaced by bric-a-brac that gave the room a staged Pottery Barn feel. “Probably tossed it all up into the attic,” she muttered, imagining a tower of disorganized boxes awaiting her return among both her mother’s and grandmother’s things. Poor Gram. She had passed away due to complications after yet another surgery. Gramps had followed her shortly after. Probably for the better, Maggie thought. It would have been hard for them to deal with their daughter’s passing, but the death of a grandchild? Impossible.
She took a tentative step toward the closet, a door that had been a constant source of anxiety, one that never seemed to want to stay closed, that emanated weird noises from within. Scratching, like there might have been a mouse in the walls. Stuff falling off hangers and shelves. Things that, when she complained about them to her parents, had been written off with perfectly logical explanations. It’s just your imagination, kiddo. Her father’s insistence failed to help her sleep at night. She had loathed that closet up until her very last day in that house. But now, with the room redone, it felt safer to approach.