Free Spirits (2 page)

“May I turn it on?” Abigail asks. She loves to play with the remote control.

“Sure.”

She picks up the remote control and aims it. To anyone but me, it would look like the remote was just floating in empty space.

We watch a commercial for some kind of hair removal cream. Smiling young women strut around in bikinis and short shorts, showing off their smooth legs. Abigail giggles. “Look at all that bare flesh! When I was alive we weren’t even allowed to say leg, much less show one. I remember once I fell down and called to my mother, ‘I believe I have injured a limb.’ Even in pain, I knew not to say ‘leg.’”

I laugh. “Limb? Like you were a tree?”

Abigail fluffs a pillow on my bed and leans back. “I suppose people were more comfortable talking about trees than they were talking about flesh.” She shakes her head. “Which is a shame. Living flesh is nice. I miss having it.”

Our conversation ends when
Who Wants to Be a Pop Star?
begins. The show has three judges: a mean British man, a nice but ditzy American woman, and an American man who, much to Abigail’s confusion, calls all the male contestants “dog.” Tonight on the show a skinny brown-haired woman is trying to sing a hard song with lots of high notes, but she’s not singing so much as bleating. She sounds exactly like one of Granny’s goats birthing a kid.

Abigail hits the “mute” button. “How can a person be so unaware of such a simple fact about herself? This woman not knowing she can’t sing would be the equivalent of me not knowing I’m dead.”

I laugh. “And the terrible singers always say the same thing: ‘My friends tell me I’m a great singer.’”

Abigail laughs, too. “They do, don’t they? It makes you want to say are you sure these are your friends telling you this, or are they enemies who are plotting your public humiliation?”

After the show’s off, I ask Abigail to hand over the remote. She’d stay all night and watch TV if I let her. Ghosts don’t have to sleep. But I do, especially since Granny expects me to do an hour’s worth of chores before breakfast and school. I switch off the TV and tell Abigail goodnight. She kisses my cheek, which feels like a soft puff of cold air, and is gone.

I get up with the chickens. Or maybe it would be better to say I get up for the chickens. It’s my job to scatter the morning feed and refill the water and gather the eggs from all the laying hens. Granny names all the layers after women in the Bible— Delilah, Ruth, Naomi, Jezebel. The stuck-up little rooster who struts up for me to greet him every morning is Samson. The other chickens—the ones we’ll end up eating fried or stewed with dumplings—Granny names after the wives of Henry the Eighth since sooner or later, their heads will end up on the chopping block.

After I feed the chickens, Granny feeds me fresh eggs and fresh goat’s milk and hot biscuits. I brush my teeth and wash my face and change out of my work clothes and into my school clothes. By the time I meet Adam on the sidewalk outside my house, I’ve been up for more than two hours.

Adam’s eyes are still puffy from sleep. His Hawaiian print shirt is buttoned wrong, and one of his Converse high-tops is untied. “And how long have you been up?” I ask.

“A while,” he says. “Like, fifteen minutes or so.” He takes a bite of the cereal bar that’s his last-minute attempt at breakfast.

“I’ve been up two and a half hours,” I say.

“Yeah, well, I don’t live on Old MacDonald’s farm, so I can sleep in,” Adam retorts as we fall into step on our way to school.

Adam So and his family moved to Wilder from Louisville last year. It was quite an adjustment for Adam, moving from the biggest city in Kentucky, which was full of skate parks and movie theatres and stores where he could buy horror movies and comic books, to Wilder, which only has one drugstore, one grocery store and one dollar store. And now Wilder has one Asian kid: Adam.

It didn’t help matters that the Victorian house the Sos bought not far from ours also happened to be haunted, but by creepy ghosts, not by a friendly one like Abigail.The Sos’ problem finally stopped after Adam and Abigail and I put our heads together and figured out what the ghost wanted: to clear the name of a young man who had been wrongly accused of murder over seventy years ago. Solving this antique murder case got us quite a bit of attention. Adam and I were on the front page of
The Wilder Herald
and in a short article in the Lexington paper. One of the Lexington TV stations even came to Wilder and did a news story on us.

None of the reporters got the full story, though. We didn’t tell them about the ghostly goings-on in Adam’s house or about how we talked to dead people. And we couldn’t give credit to the third member of our team, what with her being dead and all. That’s the part that really made me feel bad. It’s a shame that nobody but me can see Abigail. Of the three of us, she would’ve gotten the biggest thrill out of being on TV.

What made Adam and me small-time heroes in the newspapers only made us bigger freaks in school. Now that we had attracted some positive attention, kids felt like they had to make up for it with the opposite kind. And so I’ve been called the Witch Girl even more than I used to be, and I don’t even want to repeat what Adam’s been called, but he has to hear a lot of idiotic jokes about fortune cookies and chow mein.

“I’m Korean, not Chinese,” he always tells his tormentors. One time when he was particularly worn out, he said to obnoxious Cody Taylor, “Look, if you want to be a racist, be a racist. But at least know which group you’re being racist against.”

Later Adam said to me, “Maybe the school should sponsor a special racial insensitivity class, so these morons will at least know what slurs to use against what group.”

Adam and I have sat through social studies and science and have suffered through PE where we have to separate by gender. It used to be that without fail I’d be picked last for a team in the girls’ class, and Adam would be picked last in the boys’ class. Since the Mexican kids moved here, though, I sometimes get picked before the Mexican girls. Adam says he sometimes gets picked before the Mexican boys and sometimes not, depending on who’s doing the picking. When he does get picked before the Mexican kids, he says he figures the only reason is because English is his first language.

Now we’re standing in line to file into the cafeteria, and Adam is telling me about how he’s started watching all these horror movies made in England in the Sixties. He is totally obsessed with horror. “Mom and Dad don’t usually like me to watch movies with blood and gore, but the blood in the Hammer films is so obviously fake they don’t mind it. Mom says getting upset about me seeing that fake blood would be like getting upset about me seeing red nail polish.”

As usual when Adam is going on about one of his obsessions, I just listen and nod, but then I see something that makes me cry out in a little yelp.

“What is it?” Adam says.

“Look.” I point at the dry-erase board where the day’s lunch menu has been written. It says,

Tacos

Tater tots

Fruit cup

Milk

But next to the word tacos somebody has written, “This ain’t Mexico, spics go home.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Well, obviously this isn’t Mexico, or they wouldn’t be serving tater tots with the tacos.”

I can barely hear him because when I read the words on the board I’m inside the head of the person who wrote them, and while I don’t know exactly whose head I’m inside, I know it’s the last place I want to be. I feel fear and hate and spite, but there’s laughter, too, the terrible kind of laughter that comes from laughing at somebody else’s pain.

“Miranda!”A hand is squeezing my shoulder.It takes a couple of seconds for me to register that the hand and the voice belong to Adam.

“Sorry,” I say. “For a second there, I was someplace I really didn’t want to be.”

“You’re okay, right?” Adam has gotten used to my tendency to fall into other people’s thoughts and accepts it just like any other personality quirk, as if it’s something as simple as being left-handed or good with numbers.

“Yeah.” When we file past Mrs. Lawson, the bleached-blond cafeteria monitor, I say, “You might want to take a look at the menu board.”

When she does, she just mutters “Kids” and erases it like it’s no big deal.

The tables in the cafeteria have always been divided between the popular kids and the country kids. Now that there’s more than a table’s worth of Mexican kids, though, sometimes they run out of room, and a couple of them end up sitting at the table that’s usually empty except for Adam and me. Today Isabella and Jorge, a stout, pleasant-looking boy who doesn’t speak much English, sit at our table, looking suspiciously at their cafeteria trays.

For a second, I’m in Isabella’s mind, watching as an old lady pats out a tortilla by hand, sets it in a cast-iron skillet, flips it, and then takes it out and fills it with fragrant shredded meat. There’s no comparison between this remembered taco and the greasy, soggy mess on Isabella’s tray.

The smell of lunchroom food takes me out of Isabella’s mind and back into the moment. “From eating at your parents’ restaurant,” I say, “I know you’re used to better tacos than that.”

“Yes,” Isabella says, poking at the taco shell stained orange with grease. “And we’d have even better tacos if we’d ‘go back to Mexico.’”

I wince. I had hoped none of the Mexican kids saw the menu board.

“You know what’s really stupid?” Adam says. “We had tacos in the cafeteria at least every couple of weeks before there were any Mexican kids here. It’s not like you guys showed up and started demanding tacos until the cafeteria people caved.” Adam takes a bite of the peanut butter and banana sandwich he brought from home. Like me, he won’t touch the cafeteria food.

“If I was going to demand tacos, I’d ask for better ones than these,” Isabella sniffs.

Jorge takes a bite of his taco, makes a face, and lets loose a stream of Spanish.

Whatever he says makes Isabella laugh so hard she can’t catch her breath. When she finally gets control of herself, she says, “I would translate for you, but if anybody heard me say what Jorge just said in English, I would get thrown out of school.”

“Hmm,” I say, nibbling my egg salad sandwich. “That’s an advantage I’d never thought of to speaking a language the people around you don’t know. You can say pretty much whatever you want.”

“And we do,” Isabella says, smiling.

“My mom and dad do, too,” Adam says. “You should hear them talking in Korean in the Wal-Mart. They say some awful stuff.”

“Maybe that’s why so many people don’t like foreigners,” Isabella says. “They’re afraid of what we might say about them.”

“Well, whatever you say can’t be worse than what was written on the board out there,” I say.

Isabella shrugs. “But what do you do? There are stupid people everywhere.” She turns to Jorge, and they talk in Spanish for a minute. Isabella laughs. “Jorge says if we really want to force people to eat Mexican food in the cafeteria, we should make them serve menudo.”

“What’s menudo?” Adam asks.

“It’s a soup,” Isabella says, “very popular in Mexico. I won’t eat it, but my grandparents love it. It’s made of the foot and stomach of a cow.”

“I wouldn’t eat that either,” Adam says. “It sounds even worse than the kimchee my parents can’t get enough of.”

“I probably wouldn’t eat it either,” I say. “But I bet there are a lot of Americans who wouldn’t eat menudo but who are more than happy to scarf down those nasty lunch meats Masters’ meat processing plant makes. You know that stuff has got to have stomachs and hooves and worse in it.”

“Snouts and tails,” Adam says.

“Eyeballs,” Isabella adds, laughing.

And then Jorge says something that makes Isabella scream with laughter and play slap him. I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m pretty sure I know what body parts he was talking about.

If we’d been having a gross-out contest, Jorge had jumped right over the language barrier to win.

Adam and I take turns going over to each other’s houses most days after school. When I visit him, we have chips or popcorn and soda and play video games or watch a movie. When he visits me, it’s much more low-tech. We play with the goats or with Granny’s ancient African gray parrot Methuseleh, who knows all kinds of weird sayings and squawks them at random. One time when Adam was holding the bird, it squawked, “Don’t tell your grandmother how to milk mice!” and Adam said, “Well, I was going to tell her, but if you don’t want me to, I guess I won’t.” Or we play some game that’s been lying around the house since Mom was a girl, like checkers or dominoes or Scrabble.

If Adam can stay around till evening when Abigail can come out, he visits her, too, even though he can hear her but not see her. The only thing he can see is a cloud of gray mist where Abigail should be.

Even though I don’t have any high-tech gadgets, Adam loves visiting my house. How could a horror movie fan not love our old, dark house with its antique furniture, creepy pictures of intense-eyed Jasper ancestors, a parrot that squawks dire warnings and a real ghost?

The only thing Adam likes better about being in his own house is the snacks. He definitely prefers Cheetos to the rock-hard, molasses-sweetened oatmeal cookies Granny bakes. She uses molasses to sweeten them because she thinks it’s less bad for your teeth than white sugar. But I think biting into a cookie that’s as hard as granite is probably not so good for your teeth either.