The Spirit House

by William Sleator

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “The man on the phone wanted to speak to Thamrongsak. And I said yes, Bia was outside, I’d get him. And the guy said no, not a person named Bia. Thamrongsak.”

  6

  When we went back inside Bia was off the phone; he must have gone up to his room. I started upstairs, hoping to have a few minutes alone with him. I was curious about the phone call, and his strange reaction to the spirit house. I wanted to ask him to be a little more enthusiastic about it, for Dominic’s sake.

  “Where are you going, Julie?” Mom barked at me. “You’re supposed to be making supper.”

  “I’m starving,” Dad said. “Aren’t we ready to eat yet?”

  We weren’t. I trudged back down the stairs. I was starting to pull the fish out from under the broiler and Mom was unloading the dishwasher when the phone rang again. “Yes, she’s here,” Mom said, thrusting the receiver at me as I pushed the fish back into the oven. “And don’t talk very long,” she whispered. “Supper’s already late.”

  “Hi, stranger,” Gloria said.

  “Oh, Gloria,” I said. “Sorry I never called you back. We’ve just been so busy, with the foreign student and everything.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gloria said. “Well, Julie, guess who’s home? Mark. And guess who he called? Lynette. She just called to tell me. He’s on his way to her house right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had thought I didn’t care about Mark anymore, but now I felt a jealous pang. I was the one he’d been going out with before he left for Europe. I was the one he’d been writing to—I knew he hadn’t sent Lynette or Gloria a single postcard. It was odd that he had instantly called Lynette, without even trying me first.

  “Uh-huh,” Gloria said knowingly. “I thought you’d be interested. Well, I guess you’ll just have to cry on what’s-his-name’s shoulder.”

  I was stung by her tone. I’d thought she was my friend. Why was she being so nasty? “I really have to go,” I said. “I’m late with supper.”

  I set the receiver down slowly, with a painful feeling of foreboding. I had worried about Mark’s return, wondering what it would mean in relation to me and Bia. But Mark didn’t know that. So why hadn’t he called me? I was hurt and mystified. Did this mean Mark had dropped me? But why? I couldn’t think of any reason for it.

  Apparently Lynette hadn’t hesitated an instant to agree to see him. And why had Gloria been so spiteful, rather than sympathetic about it? There were many times in the past when I hadn’t called either of them for a few days; they had never been angry about it before. And being occupied with the foreign student was a logical explanation. But now, suddenly, the girl friends it had taken me so long to make last year seemed to have turned against me. And without Mark to give me status, would I be treated like the out-of-it new girl all over again?

  But I had Bia, didn’t I? He might not be one of the class leaders, like Mark was. But he cared about me. I was wearing his pendant. No one would see me as pathetic as long as I was with Bia. The girls would be impressed by his looks, and everybody would think he was cool—he knew how to make people like him. My status would hardly be diminished at all. I brightened a little.

  When supper was ready I hurried up to get him. I knocked on his door, then stepped inside his room without waiting for an answer.

  He was getting hastily to his feet, brushing off his pants, as though he had been kneeling on the floor. “Oh. Did I interrupt you?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, not looking at me.

  I was taken aback; it wasn’t like him to be so rudely direct. “Well I just wanted to tell you it’s time for supper.” I smiled at him. “And also … thank you again for the pendant, Bia. I love wearing it. Nobody ever gave me anything as nice. It means—”

  “Hungry now,” he interrupted me, and walked toward the door.

  “Bia!” I said. “What …”

  He turned back from the doorway. “Supper,” he said coolly. “You boring me.” And he walked out of the room.

  It was just as though he had slapped me in the face.

  The meal began in silence. I’d been cooking pretty decently all week, but tonight the fish was burned, the mashed potatoes like glue. Dominic was more depressed than I’d ever seen him, moping over Bia’s reaction to his spirit house. Dad, who doted on Dominic, seemed a little down on Bia too—and he gave me a nasty look when he tasted the fish, which wasn’t like him. That hurt, and so did Gloria’s spitefulness, and the fact that Mark had ignored me and rushed immediately to Lynette.

  And what was the matter with Bia? Yes, he had always been somewhat distant. But yesterday he had given me the pendant and told me how special I was. And now he was worse than cool to me, he was insulting.

  It was very strange how the world had changed so abruptly. There was something unnatural about the suddenness of it, something that gnawed at the corner of my mind but didn’t surface.

  Mom couldn’t control her curiosity about Bia’s phone call. “I hope you had good news from home,” she started out, breaking the silence, not saying anything—at first—about the odd fact that the caller had not known Thamrongsak’s familiar name.

  “Everybody fine,” Bia said.

  “Was that your father who called?” Mom wanted to know.

  He didn’t confirm or deny it. “Family fine,” he said again. “Food good tonight.” He pushed mashed potatoes—which he hated—into his mouth.

  It was obvious that he considered the phone call his own private business, which it was, and didn’t want to talk about it. But Mom refused to drop the subject. And I wanted some answers too. If he would at least admit that he had had some bad news, that might explain his sudden change in attitude toward me. Maybe it was something he didn’t want Mom and Dad to know, and he would tell me about it later, when we were alone.

  “But if it was your father, then why didn’t he know your familiar name?” Mom persisted.

  “What you mean?” Bia asked.

  “He didn’t know the name Bia. Just Thamrongsak,” Mom said, watching him.

  He slowly chewed a mouthful of potato and swallowed it. “Neighbor make call to America, for father. Know English, little bit. Not know my nickname Bia.”

  Finally Mom gave up. But she was dissatisfied, irritable.

  “How long take letter, Thailand to America?” Bia asked her.

  “One or two weeks. Why?”

  Bia shrugged and looked down at his plate.

  “Well, Julie, you really outdid yourself tonight,” Mom snapped at me. Bia’s presence wasn’t stopping her now. “This is barely edible. Did you think about how much this fish cost when you so casually let it burn?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. It was because Gloria called me up.”

  “It’s never your fault, is it.”

  I managed to restrain myself from throwing down my fork and rushing upstairs. I wanted to be down there when supper was over so I could talk with Bia when he went out in the backyard to smoke.

  But Bia stayed away from the backyard. He went out to the front of the house to smoke, on the street. I followed him out there anyway. And he still refused to say anything about the phone call, to admit he had heard any bad news. He did ask me if I thought my parents would call Thailand. “Call who?” I asked him. “Your family? Anyway, what reason do they have to call?” But he wouldn’t say and did not seem reassured.

  After that, he spent most of the weekend with Dominic, upstairs, at Dominic’s computer. Not once did he go into the backyard, where we had had so many private talks.

  I couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t avoiding me; I couldn’t sleep on Friday or Saturday night, worrying about it. Was he angry because I had walked into his room without knocking on Friday evening, when he might have been praying? It seemed like an extreme reaction from someone who was usually so polite. But I didn’t understand Thai customs; maybe interrupting someone at prayer was a terrible offense. His mysterious nature made it very difficult to
guess what might be going on in his head. Dealing with an ordinary American boy would have been simple in comparison.

  Dominic didn’t stay quite as gloomy as he had been on Friday night. Bia had been upset by the spirit house, but he was certainly spending a lot of time with Dominic now, and that must have cheered him a little. Then, on Sunday night, Dominic asked me if Bia had said anything to me about the spirit house.

  “He hardly talks to me at all,” I told him. “Didn’t you notice?”

  But of course Dominic wasn’t concerned about Bia’s attitude toward me. “I wish he’d say something,” Dominic said, sighing. “I keep putting fresh flowers in it, but he never even goes near it. I didn’t mean to upset him. I wish I’d never built it.”

  “Then take it down, if you’re so worried about it,” I said, wishing my problems could be solved as easily.

  “Oh, no!” Dominic said, sounding horrified. “That might make it even worse!”

  “Well just forget about it then,” I told him. “At least Bia’s talking to you. What are you two working on upstairs, anyway?”

  “I’m just helping him learn to write on the computer,” Dominic said. “And playing math games with him. Funny how little math he knows.…”

  Unlike Dominic, Dad hadn’t forgiven Bia for his reaction to the spirit house. He was definitely colder to him. And though Mom could never be as obnoxious to anyone as she was to me, she was no longer on her best behavior with Bia.

  On Sunday evening at supper she had the gall to criticize his English. He had answered a question of Dominic’s by saying that in Thailand they rarely ate with “chopstick,” and Mom said, “Didn’t they teach you about plural nouns in your English classes?”

  “Plural?” Bia said blankly.

  “She means—” I started to say.

  “I was just looking over your school records again. They show you got all A’s in advanced conversational English,” Mom interrupted me. “You’d think advanced English would have included something as basic as the plural noun.”

  It was a logical question, though I still felt like kicking her for putting him on the spot. But now that he understood, Bia had an answer. “Advance English in Thailand, not same as advance English in America,” he said. “You hear other Thai student in advance English, you see.”

  “Hmph,” Mom said, unconvinced.

  After supper on Sunday, my last chance to talk with Bia before school started, he went right up to his room and stayed there. I lay awake all night. And then it was Monday morning, and I was more nervous than I had been on the first day of school last year, when I was new.

  I slouched into the bathroom, feeling exhausted. I stared at my sallow, bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror. The first thing I saw was a pimple in the middle of my chin. Then I couldn’t get my hair to fall right; my eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles around them. I had never looked worse in my life.

  Not that my appearance mattered anymore. Mark had already dropped me for Lynette. Gloria had suddenly become openly hostile to me. Bia wouldn’t look at me or talk to me.

  He hardly said a word on the walk to school. I wanted to know why he was angry, why he had stopped caring about me. But it was clear that asking him would be pointless. He behaved as though I weren’t there, not looking at me, keeping well away from me on the sidewalk. There was no way anyone would get the idea that he liked me, even though he had given me the pendant.

  I steeled myself as we neared the school. Hordes of kids were gathering on the front steps. I spotted Gloria and Lynette and Mark at the edge of the crowd. Mark had his arm around Lynette’s shoulder. They had seen us now. They didn’t wave or smile, they just watched us approaching. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. I had never felt so pathetic in my life.

  And all day it got worse.

  7

  Mark, Gloria, and Lynette greeted me with a kind of cool smugness, though Mark did seem a little embarrassed too. As soon as I introduced Bia they forgot about me. In less than a minute Gloria was actively flirting and Lynette was being as friendly as she could get away with in front of Mark. Occasionally Gloria and Lynette managed to drag their eyes away from Bia long enough to cast looks of approval and awed amazement at each other. No one was impressed by the pendant on my neck; no one even noticed it.

  And I had worried, before Bia arrived, that a nerdy foreign student would hurt my status! Already, on the first day of school, smooth, cool Bia was the focus of interest, and I was the outcast.

  “Come on, Bia, time to meet the principal.” My voice sounded as warped and fuzzy to my ears as an old record. I started edging him away, up the steps.

  “Bia, try to get into Rothschild’s English class,” Lynette called after him.

  “No, Rothschild’s a bore, take Becker’s class,” Gloria brayed.

  “No, no, Becker hates men. Take Rothschild,” Lynette insisted.

  “Ignore her! She’s lying. The name is Becker!” Gloria shouted.

  Bia kept turning back to smile at them as I urged him toward the doors. “You have nice friend, Julie. Really pretty girl. Like very much.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “I’m so happy to hear it. Now you better use some of your charm on the principal. This way.”

  The school secretary let Mrs. Keating know we were there and then told us to go right in. When we entered her office Mrs. Keating was already striding from behind her desk, her hand extended, smiling at Bia. And then Bia waied her.

  I glanced quickly through the open door, but no one in the outer office had noticed. Bia’s head was still bowed when I turned back. Mrs. Keating didn’t seem to know what to do.

  “It’s … a sign of respect,” I said, blushing.

  “A welcome change from what I get from most students,” Mrs. Keating said, her smile returning. She actually seemed interested as she asked the usual questions about his trip, and what he thought of it here, and Bia told her that America was very beautiful, and very strange. I could see that she liked him already.

  “Your teacher recommendations and test scores are extremely impressive, especially in math and English,” she said, speaking very fast, as always. “Otherwise, we couldn’t have accepted you, of course, since we have no facilities for ESL students here. But judging from your marks in English, and your writing sample, you shouldn’t be at even a minimal disadvantage due to low comprehension.”

  Bia nodded, wisely not saying anything. I knew he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Mrs. Keating’s smile faded a bit. “Your English is at an acceptable level of fluency, isn’t it?” she asked him.

  “Oh, his English is fine,” I said quickly, before she had a chance to catch on that it wasn’t. “Except, sometimes when people talk really fast he misses things. So it might make sense to put him in some of my classes.”

  It had struck me, watching Bia and Mrs. Keating, that he wouldn’t have a clue about what was going on in any of his classes. Without a lot of help he would be lost. I understood how important this year was to his future. He’d been unfriendly to me for a few days, but I really didn’t want him to fail in school and lose his chance for a better life. And if I helped him, his attitude might change back—he might forgive me for whatever it was I had done to offend him.

  “You want to be in some classes together?” Mrs. Keating said. “Well, you’ll have to check with Mr. Fowler about your schedules—he’s Bia’s homeroom teacher. Better hurry, you’ve only got a few minutes. It’s very nice to meet you, Bia, and I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful year with us.”

  “Thank you. I think I really like school here,” he told her. “Not like Thailand. School principal there always much older than student.” She was beaming at him as we left the office.

  “Do you want me in some of your classes?” I asked him, out in the hallway. “I might be able to help you a little.”

  “Thank you,” he said, eyeing a pair of senior girls.

  There were kids in Mr. Fowler’s room alrea
dy, some of whom I knew. I was aware of their eyes on us as we approached the desk. I realized, too late, that I had forgotten to tell Bia not to wai Mr. Fowler. And when he did wai him I glanced quickly over at the others. Most of them hadn’t noticed. Those who had seemed more curious than contemptuous.

  I did most of the talking, explaining that Mrs. Keating had said Mr. Fowler might be able to get Bia into some of my classes. Of course Fowler had to object that it was rather late to be rearranging Bia’s schedule and wanted to know why he hadn’t been told earlier, as though it were my fault. But I didn’t back down. It was very clear to me that Bia wouldn’t make it on his own; he’d flunk out of school in a matter of weeks without me there to help him. I also wanted to be in his classes so I could keep my eye on him for purely selfish reasons. I didn’t like the way Gloria and Lynette had already tried to appropriate him.

  There was no way to get him into my American history or math classes. Still, Bia was very clever about figuring out how to coordinate three of our other classes. Fowler noticed that. He also noticed how courteous Bia was about the whole thing, and how Bia made sure to express his gratitude to him for helping us out.

  “Of course, this is all just on paper,” Fowler told Bia. “You’re still going to have to confirm it with the individual teachers. Although, now that I’ve met you, I don’t think any teacher would object to having you as a student.”

  The bell rang.

  “See you second period, Bia,” I said.

  He met my eyes briefly. And on his face was a searching expression I had never seen before. I caught a flash of uncertainty in the way his lips were slightly parted. He was unsure about being here on his own, with all these strangers speaking a foreign language.

  He wasn’t cool to the core; he had a vulnerable side too—and he had just allowed me to see it. I couldn’t help being touched.

  And then Fowler, looking harried, was directing Bia to a desk. I hurried to homeroom.

  I didn’t hear a word Campbell said in first period; I stared into space, worrying about Bia. I kept trying to tell myself that he was used to being on his own, that he knew very well how to deal with people, and that his transcript from Thailand proved he was a much better student than I was. But I still worried.