“Don't forget the spit,” I say. “She rubbed her spit on my face with her dirty handkerchief. That's got to be assault.”
James catches my gaze in the rear-view mirror. “Zan, I think she was a witch. This power stuff just got real.”
“Witches are real,” Julie says.
“Would you call me a witch?” I ask. “I have a power, just like her. It might not even be so different. I've never actually tried reading palms.”
“I'm decent with a Ouija board,” Julie says. “A bunch of us girls went through this phase, when I was at summer camp, where we used our own home-made Ouija board every night. It's weird, you lose all sense of time.”
“Does time slow down?” I have to put the Jeep on cruise control, because I can't keep the speed up and people are aggressively passing us. Try as I might, every time I'm not entirely focused on road and the speedometer, my foot pulls back from the pedal, as though I'm afraid to get where I'm going. Maybe I am afraid. It's not too late to turn back and go to the lake, stay there the whole summer, eating hot dogs and marshmallows at the bonfire. I could have random girls stick their pierced tongues in my mouth every night.
Mibs pops into my head with a pitiful meow. He would miss me, of course. Thinking about him makes me homesick. Krystal will be taking good care of the big guy, but when I walk in the door, he'll tell me all sorts of stories about neglect, and demand extra treats. The little master of manipulation!
Julie's still talking about the Ouija board, saying time does seem to move at different speeds, like it did when we were in Heidi's cottage. “I'd swear we were only on the Ouija board for a few minutes,” Julie says, “but hours would pass, and we'd only get brought back to reality by the sun rising.”
“Julie, you know I don't like you messing with that evil stuff,” James says.
“Hey, whaddaya mean evil?” I say to James, who's resting comfortably in the back seat, his feet up between me and Julie. “Do you think my power is evil? Do you think I am?”
His feet twitch. “No.”
Julie says, “Anyways, boys, the next day after using the board, my neck and shoulders ached from being held so long in the same position. It was the strangest thing, like a paranormal workout.”
“Do you still use the board?” I ask.
“Gosh, no. The board started, um, asking for blood sacrifices, so we burned it on the stove. Set off the smoke alarm, too. We scattered the ashes.”
“Wait, you burned a piece of wood on top of a kitchen stove?”
“No, it was just cardboard. We made it ourselves, using felt pens for the alphabet letters and whatnot. They say spirit boards are more powerful when you make your own. That's the proper name for them, by the way. Ouija's a brand name, like Kleenex.”
“You made a spirit board out of cardboard?” James asks. “That doesn't sound very demonic.”
“I know,” Julie says. “One of the other girls played a mean trick and made another identical one and left it out on the table.”
“Which one?” James asks. “The girl you call Sadmachine? That's Claire, right? She'd do something like that. Just to bum everyone out.”
“I don't know,” Julie says. “Nobody would admit to it. Half of them thought it was me.”
My arms feel cold, and I'm suddenly terrified I might forget I'm driving a vehicle, accidentally veering into the oncoming lane. This thought sends a chill through me, and I break out in a cold sweat. I'm usually okay with driving, but sometimes I get scared, like now. Life can be so fragile, and one simple mistake can ruin everything.
“I'm tired of driving. Does one of you wanna take over?”
“I only have my learner's permit,” Julie says.
“I have two black eyes,” James says. “I can barely see.”
Julie and I say, “What?” in unison.
James explains that when he tried to run out the closed patio door, smacking into the glass, he punched himself in his good eye. I turn to check, and indeed, James has two bruised and swollen eyes.
Laughing at his predicament relaxes me enough that I feel confident about driving the last of the way home.
Julie stops giggling long enough to say, “Next time you see Facepuncher, if she wants a fresh bruise, she'll have to hit you on the mouth, or the nose.”
“Hey, what was Facepuncher's name?” I ask.
“I don't recall,” James says grumpily.
“Facepuncher it is,” Julie says.
* * *
When we get back to town, I drive us straight to James and Julie's house. I'm planning to pick up my camera equipment and walk straight home.
Julie gets out of the Jeep and grabs the bags from the back. “Zan, I think that old lady did just have a teaspoon after all. Our imagination must have been playing tricks on us. I've heard of people experiencing shared hallucinations. I think they call it mass hysteria. Hysteria. That word always seems a bit sexist to me.”
“So, you don't think anything witch-y was happening? Nothing ... supernatural?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” Julie says.
“The old lady was nice. I liked the cucumber sandwiches,” James says, his eyes focused on some faraway point. I consider telling him there were no cucumber sandwiches, and he's had some sort of forgetting spell put over him, but I realize I'd love to forget all the events of today, if I could.
“Thanks for the fun trip to the lake, guys,” I say, deciding to let the ordeal be forgotten by the twins.
“It's weird I was in such a rush to leave that nice lady's cottage,” James says, rubbing his newly-reddened eye.
“How did you manage to pop yourself?” I ask. “Patio glass is flat. How did a flat panel of glass get in your eye?”
“Had my hand up, like this.” He holds up his left fist and, in slow motion, recreates the incident, effectively punching himself in the eye.
I ask James, “Before I head back to my house, can I take your portrait? With the black eyes?”
“Are you kidding?” he asks, his voice charged with excitement. “Take lots. I look so bad-ass right now.” He growls. “I look like a bad lieutenant. The Harvey Keitel one, not Nicholas Cage.”
Julie rolls her eyes. “Boys,” she says.
I run up to his room and get my camera equipment, then get him to pose for pictures in front of the house. Julie poses for a few too, showing off the two bee stings on her arm.
“Weird, I don't remember getting stung twice,” she says.
We go inside, looking for food, and find pink cupcakes on the kitchen counter.
“You'd look so tough eating one of those,” I say to James, joking.
“Good idea. Contrast,” he says, not picking up on the joke. He poses for some photos with the glittery, pink cupcake near his mouth, and then with a big chunk in his mouth. “Ptooie,” he says, spitting the cupcake into the sink after the shot. “Meatcake.”
His mother comes in and says, “It's not meatcake. There's a little butter in the icing is all.”
“Grr,” he says.
“Are you biting and spitting? Stop wasting food,” she says.
After his mom leaves the kitchen, James gets serious and asks me what I'm going to do about Austin, even though I've asked him not to bring her up.
“I don't know,” I say. “What's to do? She's going to die soon. Maybe it's better to not get attached.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You should forget her and move on.”
I hear his words, but I don't think he means what he's advising.
“You're right, I'm going to forget all about her. I'll wipe her from my mind, right now.” I wave my hand in front of my face. If only it were that easy. I'd wipe her from my mind if I could. Anything to ease this aching sadness I feel all over when I think about Austin.
Chapter 12
One week. It's been one week since we got back from the lake. I've slept in my empty bed seven times, had microwaved pizza for breakfast seven times.
Sensing impending malnutrition, James and Juli
e have dragged me out to the mall today. They've also been trying to get me hooked up with a summer job, painting houses with them, but climbing up and down big ladders sounds like way more effort than I can muster.
“Arcade?” James asks.
“Food first,” I say, so we head to the food court, straight to the place where you choose your own meats and vegetables and they fry everything up for you.
As soon as I touch the broccoli and fresh little cherry tomatoes with the tongs, my mouth waters. “Guys, I think my stomach is asking for vegetables,” I say.
They exchange a look, the meaning of which I cannot fathom, but I imagine they're concerned about my depression. I've assured them I don't have clinical depression, but a perfectly natural response to ... grief, I guess. Can you have grief over losing someone you never had?
Julie fills her tray with cauliflower, sprouts, carrots, and thinly-shaved slices of lamb.
“That's Bambi,” James says to his sister.
“Excuse me, Mr. Pot, calling the kettle black. Cow-eater,” she says right back to him.
“What?” I ask.
James says he'll tell me when we're seated, so we load up our trays, pick our sauces, and give our food to the man at the grill. We all opt for pineapple chunks and heaps of seasame seeds.
I spot Raye-Anne Donovan, across the food court, talking to some shifty-looking kids. I excuse myself and run over to her as fast as I can, practically knocking slow-moving people out of the way.
“Oh, hey, it is you,” I say, catching my breath in a manner I hope appears casual.
The other kids skitter away like cockroaches.
“Zan! I never did get my palm read,” she says.
“Doesn't matter, it's all a joke. I don't have any special powers. I mean, look at me, do I look like a wizard?”
“Your clothes are really wrinkly. Is nobody looking after you at your house?”
“Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. Hey, did you want to come eat with us? James and Julie are over there.”
“Uh ... sure. Okay.”
We start walking together back to the table, where James and Julie now have three steaming piles of recently-stir-fried food. “Listen, Raye-Anne, this might be a bit presumptive, but would you like to be my friend? That means you can call me any time you want to talk, in a totally platonic way.”
“Are you joking?”
“No, I just want to be your friend. Guys and girls can be friends, like me and Julie.”
She hesitates, and I worry I've overstepped the boundaries of normal behavior, but she agrees to be my friend, and even shakes my hand.
We sit down at the table, and I say to James, “What's this about eating cow?”
“The vegan ate a cow?” Raye-Anne asks, her eyes wide. “This may be a sign of impending apocalypse.”
Julie laughs into her hand. I think we'll enjoy having Raye-Anne as a friend.
“My mother,” James says, as though that's an explanation. “She wanted to use some old farmer's almanac cure to help heal my two black eyes.”
“You had black eyes? But your eyes look totally normal,” Raye-Anne says. “How did you get two black eyes?”
“Never mind,” he says. “Not an interesting story at all. Very long, very boring. Anyways, my mother thawed out a steak and made me hold it over my swollen eyes. Totally stupid.”
“How did that do anything for your eyes?” I ask.
“It didn't do anything. But as I sat there at the kitchen table, holding the steak to my eyes, I started to feel these weird vibrations from the meat.”
“Vibrations?”
James looks both ways across the food court and leans in. “It told me to eat the steak.”
I stop shoveling stir-fried veggies into my mouth and put down my fork. “No.”
“Oh, yes.” Julie says.
“Let me tell the rest!” James says, stopping Julie with one hand on her shoulder. “So, I fired up the grill, salted and peppered that plump little steak, and I ate it right up. Then, two days later, my eyes were completely healed.”
“Two days? Sounds like normal healing time to me,” Raye-Anne says.
“The steak was magic,” James says. “It was exactly what I needed.”
The stir-fry in front of James contains no meat, so I say, “I don't understand. Are you off being vegan now?”
“I'm done with labels,” James says. “Done. From now on, I'm just James. I eat a mostly plant-based diet, because it's better for my health and the environment, but from time to time, once every few months, I may eat a steak. If I choose.”
“You sure seem happy about this,” I say. “Did you have bacon this morning?”
“No, but for the first time in years, I finally got that taste out of my mouth.”
“What taste?” I ask.
He whispers, “The snails. The taste of them. I've finally forgotten.”
* * *
After we've finished our lunch, Raye-Anne joins us at the arcade. Julie's delighted to have someone to play the dancing game with, and I'm relieved it's not me.
James and I do our best to save the human species by shooting aliens. I'm laughing and having fun, finally feeling better for the first time in a week, when I see, out of the corner of my eye, Austin's long hair. I turn, hopeful, but it's some other girl. A blade of despair pierces in, just under my breastbone.
I try to shake off the feeling, but you can't really shake off feelings. That's just an expression. You may have control over your reactions and the things you do or say, but you can't control your feelings. Feelings are like the weather; they come and go of their own volition.
Hiding the hollowness I have inside me, I try to put on an upbeat front so my friends won't worry. We play some more games and joke around, but I can't wait to finish our outing at the mall and go home.
* * *
Two weeks. It's been two weeks since we went to the lake, and two weeks plus one day since I met Austin, and I still can't stop thinking about her.
This morning, I took my weekly self-portrait and studied it on the computer, comparing it to the last year's worth of self-portraits. I'd like to put them all into a video some day, but for now I'm simply taking them as a way to record facial changes. My eyes in the recent picture are fascinating. Eyes can change quickly, because of the musculature around them. Psychological events may shift muscle tension, and so everything from love to loss is there in the eyes if you know how to look.
My eyes are definitely different today. It isn't the lighting, either, because I took a number of shots. In every single one of the new pictures, I look ... worse. I look like someone who's lost something, or is being haunted.
You know that trick they do in horror movies, where the person thinks he sees his dead wife, or the serial killer, but it's actually just a waiter? That happens for real. It happens to people in real life, and that's why they put it in movies. Of course you don't believe this phenomenon until it happens to you. Why would you? The whole thing seems crazy.
I've seen the old woman, Heidi, everywhere. Of course, it's not her—it's never her, but still my brain transmits a false image. It's the paper boy, or a neighbor, or the checkout lady at the supermarket, wondering why I'm hyperventilating in line.
And the birds. Have there always been a bunch of crows living around my house, watching me with their freakishly-intelligent eyes all day and night? Isn't a group of crows called a murder? Who the heck would give such scary creatures a suggestive name like that?
James doesn't understand my sudden fascination with crows. He and Julie think I'm paranoid, overreacting as a way to distract myself from the Austin situation.
The Austin situation.
I woke up this morning and did the same thing I've done every day for the last two weeks. I went to my computer and looked at the photos I took at the end-of-year party. I enlarge the images to maximum detail and look for a trace of illness on Austin's face. All I see is a beautiful girl, wondering why I never called.
I changed the sheets on my bed when Gran phoned to check in and remind me, but I left the pillowcase on the pillow Austin used on her one night here. I've been hugging the pillow and smelling it, and now it mostly smells like me—me, and Mibs, who's been sleeping on the pillow, as evidenced by little tufts of brown tabby fur.
Right now, as I'm stirring pasta on the stove, I fear I've made the wrong choice by trying to forget Austin. I pull out my phone to call James, knowing he'll talk me down.
By accident, I press the number for Julie. She answers, and sounds so happy to hear my voice, that I pretend she was the twin I meant to call.
“Julie, I keep thinking about Austin. Would you talk some sense into me?”
“Are you actually asking me for advice?” she asks. “Because I'm not going to say anything, unless you're ready to hear it.”
“Hit me with your best shot.”
“You're an idiot,” Julie says.
I pull the phone away from my ear and give it a dirty look, for all the good that does. “Thanks a lot, Julie,” I say into the receiver. “Much better than talking to James. I feel great now.”
“If your feelings are true, you have to go to her,” Julie says. “You know I want you to be happy. You might suffer if you see her, but you're suffering already. You mope around the house and you won't do anything fun whatsoever.”
“How am I supposed to have fun when ...”
“Exactly,” she says. “You have to go to her.”
I thank Julie, tell her I'll think about it, and end the call. I stare into the pasta water, bubbling on the stove. Julie's right. Forgetting Austin was not the right option. If Gran were here, she'd playfully slap me upside the head and call me a pickle-head.
I have to see Austin. Quick, what do I do? I turn off the stove, that's what. Okay, stove's off, now what. Call her. No. Not big enough. I have to go see her. It's early evening, and maybe she's still at work, at that coffee shop.
“Mibs,” I say, snapping my fingers to get his attention. “Does Austin work at The Grind or at The Bean? It's called The Bean, right?”
Mibs gives me his yeah, totally, dude look, which is similar to his feed me look, only a hair less desperate.
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