He would show up with a freshly bruised Jordan, hug him and leave for several days until his father’s mood improved. When Nathan came to collect Jordan, he would sit down on one of the lawn chairs on the deck, and wait patiently until someone noticed him and sent Jordan out. I couldn’t remember Aunt Dee speaking to him one of those times.
That day though, she whispered to him, hugged him, and stuck something in his hand. He squeezed it and then dropped it into his pocket. Aunt Dee lifted his face and wiped under his eyes.
“It’s going to be okay, I promise,” Aunt Dee said, then kissed him on his forehead and released him.
I used to wonder so much what had happened between the two of them that summer afternoon on the porch, but I hadn’t thought about the moment in years. Now, it ran clear in my mind like a movie playing on the screen.
If I asked, would he tell me what she had said to him that day?
The song ended and Nathan stopped swaying. We stood still for a moment, our heads still resting on each other. He pulled away. Reluctantly, I did the same.
“Do you want to go smoke?” he asked, and I nodded.
He led me outside, but instead of going back to the smoking hut, we walked down the side of the building, neither of us speaking.
Ten feet from the door in the shadows, we stopped. He ran a hand through his hair, and looked up at the sky, letting out a shaky breath. I didn’t know what he was going to do for a moment, but then he pulled out his pack and offered me one. I accepted, and inside the bubbles popped and fizzed. What were we doing, hidden in the alley if he wasn’t going to kiss me? But I didn’t ask.
The door opened, and a group of five or six drunk guys trickled out, laughing and pushing each other around jokingly. I tilted my chin up to Nathan.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked in what I hoped was a sexy voice. He didn’t answer, didn’t move, and I thought maybe I had come on too strong. Too fast out of nowhere. “I mean, the music in there, it’s so loud. And kind of smelly.” More silence. Backtrack. “We could grab everyone and go somewhere else.”
He flicked the ash off of his cigarette and nodded. “Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
I wanted to be as far from him as possible. I felt thirteen years old again. Throwing myself at an older boy who couldn’t see past the pretty girls everywhere else. I dropped my cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. “I’ll go get the others.”
The group of cut off drunks play-fought by their vehicles, and didn’t notice me. One of them walked back towards the restaurant, stumbling.
“Megan, wait,” Nathan said, close behind me.
“Megan!” Bobby called out. He had been the drunk heading back into the restaurant. “Just like you, out in the alley getting busy. I guess you gotta make money somehow, huh?”
He laughed at his own joke as his friends turned and walked back to us. I saw it again, right in front of me like I had earlier when we were by the street. A truck squealing. A body hitting the hood. He was going to push me in front of a truck.
Bobby turned to his friends. “Hey, come meet my girl, Meg. She’s open for business, and I’ll give you the friends and family discount.”
The four of them laughed, and Nathan moved forward.
“Nathan,” I said, my voice tiny. I wasn’t scared of what Bobby would do to me, I’d seen enough of his threats to know when he was just running his mouth. It was more like what him and his three friends would do to Nathan. “Let’s go back inside. Please.”
“Hey, man.” Bobby put his hands up and laughed. “You might owe me a little cash for what you just finished doing back there. Meg tell you about how we used to make money in high school?”
My stomach clenched, threatening to spill out all the alcohol I had enjoyed that evening. I shook my head, unwilling to look at Nathan. There had been one horrible weekend Bobby needed extra money and tried to loan me out to some friends. He didn’t succeed, but the thought of what could have happened was always enough to make me sick. I felt dizzy and placed my hand against the brick wall to steady myself.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Nathan said, stepping up to Bobby.
A welcome whoop of a siren sounded at that moment, and a police car pulled into the parking lot. The window rolled down and the officer in the passenger seat leaned out. “Everything all right, Nate?”
“All right.” Nathan didn’t take his eyes off Bobby. The cruiser didn’t move.
“Your buddy got ya this time,” Bobby said, looking between me and Nathan. He spat on the ground, and a bit of snotty saliva hit my bare toes. “You can’t keep a cop in your pocket all the time.”
“Fuck you, Bobby,” I said, my bravery returning at the sight of Bobby and his friends walking away.
Several cars sped by, loud engines revving. Teens taking advantage of the police officers standing outside of their cars, instead of sitting in them.
As they approached the sidewalk, Bobby looked back. “I’ll stop by later and show you what you’ve been missing, Meg.”
Nathan’s arm stiffened against my hand. I backed up, like the threat had actually slapped me. That was the side I had loved and feared from Bobby. The vengeful side. In high school, if someone hurt my feelings, I’d only have to let him know and he’d go after them. He didn’t make some useless offer to hold my hand next time, or keep it from happening again. Bobby showed up on their doorstep and made sure it didn’t happen again.
Bobby tortured Jordan senior year, and it made me like him even more. He never stopped, coming back to town and continuing that torture. When he promised to stop by later, it wasn’t an empty promise. It was something he would complete.
I grabbed Nathan’s hand and dug my fingernails into his flesh, willing him to go back inside without another word. Not to do anything while the police watched. They knew too. They heard what Bobby said, and they walked towards us. Not towards Bobby, but me and Nathan. Bobby’s threat was for later that night or the next day. The look on Nathan’s face was for that minute. Ticking and ready to go off.
Doing or saying anything to Bobby would only put the Dieters back on his radar. Now that I had picked a side that wasn’t his, Bobby would tell Jordan about all of his secrets I spilled. My betrayal seemed worse than Jordan’s now. We were kids when he hid. I was a fresh adult when I told Bobby all of Jordan’s deepest secrets, smiling all the way through it.
What had Jordan done? He’d hid in the woods and cried, but I smiled. Bobby would tell him how we laughed at his pain. How I had helped him deface Jordan’s car senior year.
Bobby blew me a kiss, then leaned on a light post and grabbed his crotch. His version of seduction. Bright lights of a truck grew larger behind Bobby as it hopped on the curb and back onto the street. The driver drunk, or sending his girlfriend a text letting her know he’d be a little late. Either way, he popped back onto the curb again, and I was the only one who seemed to notice. No one else looked behind Bobby. Did that mean it was all in my head?
The police officer approached Nathan, oblivious to the scene about to unfold. The other officer looked down the street speaking into his walkie-talkie. Was he reporting the speeders who had driven by a minute earlier?
I raised my hand and pointed, taking the chance that I would look crazy when no one else saw the vehicle. Bobby moved to lean against the post of the smoking hut, but somehow missed it, tipping backwards over the bench and landing on his back on the street.
It was fast and forceful, a shove instead of a drunken fall. A sickening thud filled the air. The truck slowed for a second as Bobby disappeared, rolling over the top and out the back of the bed. Tires screeched as cruising high schoolers came upon the scene a millisecond after the truck vanished around the curve in the next block. Bobby lay still in the road.
The world grew dark and heavy, and spun around me as Aunt Dee’s voice flooded in around me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
West Virginia, 1977
Geraldine, 16 years old
&nbs
p; “Hand me that, will ya?” Dee asked. I blinked, working to remember for a second. She was much younger or was it older? I could never figure that right when I came out of one of my spells. “Are you out of order again?”
“I’m all right now,” I said, smiling at her. Nothing in my life ever went in the right order anymore, but I could wrap my head around how old I was by looking at Dee, then knowing where I was. Within a minute or two, all would be normal and right again.
We sat next to each other on the log beside the unlit firepit. Granny’s cottage stood behind us, the woods all around. The sun sparkled through the trees, casting fairy lights in the dirt. Our summer kissed feet were lined up, two by two, and I grabbed the little brown pouch she pointed at with her big toe. I dropped it in her lap and she began to dig through it, stones clacking as her fingers moved crystals out of the way.
“I’m trying to get your pages to stop flapping around; it’s hard when Granny don’t know who she is one day to the next.” She pulled out a rock and looked at it, one eye closed, shook her head and dropped it back into the bag.
Dee had been born with a natural sight when it came to the workings of the world around us. Living with Granny Darling, she received more training in magics than I had gotten from Mama in the years before her death.
Dee glared towards the cottage where Granny slept. “She shoulda never told you how to talk to that girl in your head when she can’t keep her own straight.”
“Granny didn’t know she was gonna get sick,” I said in Granny’s defense. Even when Dee was mad at Granny, she still loved her and didn’t count that stare she gave everyone against her. Forgiving her when she couldn’t tell us apart.
“Maybe she should have. Her gift should have told her. Warned us.” Dee didn’t forgive her all the time.
“It’s my own fault, Ruby ain’t having problems traveling out of her mind. It’s just me.”
“That ain’t the difference between you and Ruby. That’s the difference between them others you’re letting in your mind. And—” She made a face like she smelt something foul. “—I don’t even believe Ruby when she says she can travel like you can.”
“We’re sisters, it only makes sense we can do the same thing.” Besides, I’d seen her over there. I just didn’t want to tell Dee that.
“Geraldine, don’t nothing about magic make sense to me; and I been raised in it since I was in nappies.” Dee pulled a few rocks out of the bag and stuffed them into her apron pocket, replacing the ones that had been there all week. She handed me a new rock, jagged and deep brown, cool stone welcome in my sweaty hand. The stone glittered when I twisted under a sunbeam.
Dee sighed and leaned forward against her knees, her back shuddered. “Granny said she’s going back into the dirt this week.”
“Back?” It was the third time Granny had predicted her death since I’d known them. The last time she wanted to be burned and her ashes carried through the forest on the wind. The time before that, she wanted to be buried with a mulberry seed.
“You know her; she says we all come from the dirt, we all go back to the dirt.”
“I thought she said we was all pieces of stardust?” I asked. “Julian Berg said this scientist said we all came from the stars. When they die and explode, they gotta go somewhere. We gotta come from somewhere.”
“I don’t know ‘bout Julian Berg, but Mr. Penny at the smoke shop told Granny about the stars. She thinks he’s handsome.” Dee lifted her head. “Besides, you know her, it changes if it’s a harvest moon or strong winds out of the North, to where she say we come from.”
I fell into a memory that didn’t seem to belong to me. Looking up at a much older Dee, and her teaching me about the stars. It belonged to the other girl in my head. We touched dew on the leaves, and we drew in the dirt.
Dee looked at me, one corner of her mouth smiling, the other drooping. She crossed her eyes for a second, then uncrossed them. I hated when she looked at me like that, worrying too hard. I concentrated on the rock in my hand. She put her arm around my shoulder and said, “You looked funny for a second.”
“You always look funny,” I said, pushing her shoulder, and we both toppled off the log onto the dirt laughing. She shoulda been the one born my sister. Not Ruby. My heartbeat caught funny, and a lump formed in my throat. I looked away, blinking back tears. Rolling on my back, I looked at the clouds and pointed to one. “Looks like a bird.”
“You still two girls in one?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s like she’s here, she’s just real quiet. Not wanting to announce herself. I don’t mind her so much when she ain’t screaming and crying. You know the funny thing? She’s screaming for you sometimes.” I used to think the girl was calling for her Auntie. Then one day I realized, it was ‘Aunt Dee’ that she cried.
“Shut up.” She elbowed me.
We laid quiet, looking at the clouds for a few minutes. Listening to the rustle in the trees, the squawks of a random bird or two.
“Dee?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think you’ll miss school this fall?” We announced our final year at the end of tenth grade. No sense in going on when we could start working instead. She didn’t answer. “I don’t think I’ll miss the work, but I’ll be sad to not see Miss Heart again.”
“She sure was funny, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“August took me out the other night,” Dee said. My stomach twisted in a knot, and I told it to untwist. Dee would be moving on sooner than I would, with marriage and a family. I still hadn’t started dating. I’d been taking care of Daddy and Ruby after Mama passed on. “He said he had a cousin who heard voices too.”
My face felt hot, thinking about her telling August anything about me. “Yeah? He knows about me? About the things I hear?”
“I didn’t tell him, if that’s what you’re saying. Get your head on straight, Geraldine. People talk, and you had that day at the market.”
The market. I fainted, the first time it had come over me so strongly. I usually stood and my mind disappeared, and someone would shake me back to normal. Dee said I was only ever gone a few seconds, but that day in the market, I was gone almost five minutes. They called an ambulance and everything, and Ruby told them how I saw another girl in my head. Always talk going around after that. I thought they had all moved onto something else. Hoped anyway.
“Said you belong in the asylum. He said his cousin had more than one person in his head. They took him to the hospital to fix it. Left him there.”
“What’d you say to August?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer. Without warning, a fire came over me, anger at Granny Darling.
I never heard anything but my own dumb words in my head, till Granny Darling taught me to split myself. Dee used to be jealous that Granny taught me and Ruby, but Granny Darling said it was in my blood.
Dee didn’t understand it. She didn’t have the blood because she didn’t have ancestors. She came back all on her own, no help from a mom or a dad. A baby born to the dirt, waiting on some old crone or another to find her.
“I didn’t say nothing to him,” she said. “Those twins from the car place were there. I told them he was being mean to me. And using foul language.” She smiled. “They think I’m a lady.” We giggled.
“Then what?”
“One of them gave August a black eye.”
“You didn’t have to make them do that,” I said, not sure if that was one of those times Dee made someone do something, or if they did it because they were boys. She flipped over onto her stomach and drew symbols I didn’t recognize in the dirt.
Just because she didn’t have the blood magic in her, don’t mean she didn’t have strong magic in her.
Granny Darling said the earth there was made up of the bodies that fell on it, and before the world was filled with normal boring people, all the folks were made from magic. When they died, their body charged the earth with their power. As time moved on, the borings start
ed making these boxes to drop their dead in, and strict boxes for them to live their lives in. No longer appreciating the differences and the beauty of magic. Filling the earth with coffins and normal, unfulfilled minds, they killed off the strength of the land.
Lucky for us, not enough regular folk chose our little corner of West Virginia to decay on. The magic folks’ power in the earth was strong here. Strong mixing with magic of my blood and Dee’s never-ending rebirth.
“Dee.” I elbowed her since she still didn’t answer. Ruby’s style of magic was more of the manipulator, sliding into other people’s minds and taking over. Dee could do it too if she was heated enough. “Did you make them do it?”
“I didn’t make them.” Dee turned, her dark hair shadowing her face. “They like us.”
Always an us. I never imagined a time when it’ll be anyone or anything except us against the rest of them. Then Dee went and found us a pair of twins.
I rested my eyes against the sun, and within seconds felt my pages turning again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I slammed back into my own feet. The vision of Mama laying in the woods outside of a cabin, yanked away when someone screamed.
How long could tires squeal? The cars slammed to a halt one after another in the street, some narrowly shooting over to the far-left lane and continuing on. Patrons from the pizza place began to line up in the street like bowling pins around the lump that was Bobby.
Bobby moved, his arm up, like, I’m okay, but did you catch the trick I did on my board?
A teenager, still waiting for his big boy voice to come in, yelled, “Don’t move him!”
The parking lot filled with customers from inside, crushing into the space between us and Bobby.
A woman with a smoker’s growl shouted, “He should stay there until the ambulance comes.”
Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 16