Kindred Spirits (3 page)

I have no idea what
Nintendo is, but I’m happy to have somebody being nice to me. “I’d better not.
Mom and Granny will worry if I come home late.”

“You could call them.”

Here’s where I have to
stop pretending I have a normal family. “Well, no, I couldn’t. We don’t have a
phone. Granny won’t have one in the house.’

To my shock,Adam grins
like it’s no big deal. “Old people are weird, aren’t they? When my grandparents
from Korea come to visit, they always make me bring them a bucket of water to
wash with even though we have a perfectly good shower. Well, maybe you can talk
to your mom and come hang out after school tomorrow.”

Mom will be so amazed
that I’ve made a real, live friend that she’ll have to say yes. “Okay.
Tomorrow.”

“You have to take off
your shoes before you come in,” Adam says as we step onto his front porch.
“It’s an Asian thing.”

I pull off my boots and
set them on the little shelf by the front door. “I never wear shoes in my house
either. I just didn’t know I was being Asian.”

When we walk into the
living room, all the furniture is draped in white sheets, and Adam’s mom, the
pretty, black-haired lady I recognize from seeing into his thoughts, is
standing barefoot on a stepladder, using a roller to paint the wall a cool mint
green.

“Hi, Mom. This is
Miranda,” Adam says.

She looks down at me from
her perch on the ladder and smiles. “Hi, Miranda. Sorry this place is such a
mess. Help yourself to snacks in the kitchen.”

“Thank you,” I manage to
stutter. I’m not used to people being friendly to me, so I tend to get shy.

“Come
on.” Adam leads me into the kitchen, which has been painted sunshine yellow,
and opens the fridge.

“Want a Coke?”

“Sure.” We never have
Cokes at our house just water or goat’s milk or apple juice or the weird, murky
herb teas that Granny makes. I’ve only drunk Coke a couple of times in my life.

Adam takes a flat paper
bag out of a cabinet and puts it inside an appliance that looks like a cross
between an oven and a tv set. Soon there is a buttery smell and the pop-poppop
of popcorn.

“Hey, is that a
microwave?” I ask.

Adam looks at me like I
just stepped off a space ship. “Uh...yeah.”

“Wow, that’s so cool!
I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one cook anything before.”

Adam takes out the bag of
popcorn and dumps it into a bowl. “Well, you’re sure easy to entertain.”

I feel my face flush.
“I’m sorry. I know I must seem weird. I guess Mom and Granny are old-fashioned.
We don’t have a microwave or a TV or anything like that.”

Adam grabs a handful of
popcorn. “Is it because of your religion? Are you Amish or something?”

“No. We’re
just...different.”

Adam shrugs. “Different’s
okay. You want to see my room?”

“Sure.”

The walls of Adam’s room
are covered with posters and cardboard cut-outs of Frankenstein,

Dracula, and the Wolf
Man. An inflatable Frankenstein almost as tall as I am is propped up in one
corner. An inflatable skeleton hangs by its wrists from chains on the ceiling.
“I like your Halloween decorations,” I say.

“They’re
not Halloween decorations,” Adam says. “This is always how my room looks.”

I suddenly feel like less
of a weirdo. Or maybe Adam just seems like more of one. “Well,
that’s...interesting.”

“I love scary movies,
scary books, anything scary.” He flops down on a pile of cushions in front of
his bookshelf. Looking behind him, I see that lots of the books have words like
“shivers” or”shudders” in the titles. “Mom and Dad will let me watch any horror
movie I want, as long as it was made before nineteen-seventy. They say the ones
made after that are too violent. That’s my movie collection over there.”

I look through the movie
titles. “Dracula,” “The Invisible Man,” “Frankenstein,” “Bride of
Frankenstein,” “The Mummy.” I pull “The Mummy” off the shelf and laugh when the
face on the cover is the face of the mummy I saw inside Adam’s head.  So that’s
where it came from!

“What’s funny?” Adam
asks.

“Oh, nothing.” I look
down at the case that holds the movie. “I was just thinking that I’ve never
held a mummy case before.” Of course, that wasn’t what I was thinking at all.

Adam laughs. “That’s
pretty good. Say, wanna play a game?”

At my house, whenever
somebody says, “Let’s play a game,” it usually means a card game like Hearts or
gin rummy. The kind of game Adam means is a video game with a little man who
sucks up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. I’m sure Abigail would disapprove.

“So,” Adam says, after he
pushes the game’s “start” button, “do you believe in ghosts?”

I figure he’ll think I’m
nuts if I say, “Sure, my best friend is a ghost,” so I just say, “Uh...do you?”

“Sure,”
he says, sucking up a ghost on the screen. “I don’t see any reason why they
can’t exist. My dad says there’s no scientific proof that ghosts exist, but I don’t
think there’s any scientific proof that they don’t exist either. Besides,
scientists don’t know everything.”

“I believe in them, too,”
I say. “There’s a lot of stuff in the world that people can’t explain.”

“Yeah,”Adam says.
“Ghosts,crop circles,alien abductions, ESP’”

I don’t even think before I say, “I have
it.”

Adam drops the video game
controller. “What did you say?”

“I have it. ESP, or
something like it. All the women in my family do.”

Adam’s mouth is open wide. “No way!”

It feels so good to be
able to talk about this that my words spill out on top of each other. “We’re
not witches like people say, but we have something my granny calls the Sight.
We can see into people’s minds. Like when you stood up in home room yesterday I
saw that you used to live in a big red brick apartment building in a city.
There was a basketball court and two kids’one white and one black’that you used
to play with.”

It’s a second or two
before Adam can say anything. Then he says, “But you can’t know that!”

“Sure I can. I can’t
explain why I know it, but I know it.”

“Can...can you see people’s futures,
too?”

“Not like Granny can. The
Sight gets stronger as you get older, so Mom and Granny have it more than I do.
Mostly I can just see people’s thoughts, and I can only do that some of the
time.

Sometimes I’ll get a feeling about
somebody’s future, unless it’s my own. Mom and Granny and I have the Sight when
it comes to other people, but we can’t see anything about ourselves.”

“Whoa,”
Adam says, looking at me like I’m an exotic animal at the zoo. “Just...whoa.”

“You don’t think I’m
crazy?  Or scary?”

“No way.” Adam’s face breaks into a big grin. “I think
you’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met. When can I meet your mom and granny?”

When I get home, Mom and
Granny are both in the front yard. Mom is raking leaves, and Granny is standing
over a huge iron pot that has a fire under it. Whatever she’s stirring stinks
to high heaven.

Granny claims she doesn’t
understand why everybody thinks she’s a witch, and then she does stuff like
stand out in the yard wearing a long black dress and stirring a giant pot of
what might as well be witch’s brew.

“Your granny took a
notion to make some lye soap today,” Mom says, pushing more leaves into a pile.
She’s still in her work clothes’a long, peacock-blue fringed skirt with a
matching fringed vest. Her bracelets jangle as she rakes.

The smell makes my eyes
water. “Ugh! I don’t see how you can stand to smell that stuff, Granny, let
alone use it on your skin.  I’ll take a bar of Ivory any day.”

“Store-bought soap don’t
get you clean like lye soap,” Granny says, pushing back a steel-gray braid to
keep it from falling in the pot.

“Yep, lye soap cleans the
skin right off your body,” Mom says, smiling. She looks at me. “So your visit
with your friend was good?”

She knows it was good by
looking at me. She’s just asking to be polite. “Yeah. He wants to come over
sometime. Is that okay?”

“Your
friends are always welcome here,” Mom says.

I laugh. “My friends? I
only have one friend. Well, one living friend.”

“Well, it’s better to
have one real friend than a hundred false ones, like some people have,” Mom
says. “Hold this bag for me, will you?”

I hold the leaf bag while
Mom fills it. “The thing is,” I say, “his parents want to meet y’all. They
don’t like Adam to go over to somebody’s house until they’ve met their family.”

“Well,” Mom says,
stuffing more leaves in the bag, “maybe we should have them over for dessert
and coffee or something.”

Granny looks up from her
stirring with a strange gleam in her eye. “I never met no people from the
Orient before. I’d like to ask them some questions about herbs and healing...
and ancient mysteries.”

This is exactly the kind
of thing I was afraid Granny would say. “Um, Granny,” I start, “you can ask
Adam about those kind of things when he’s here by himself, but when his parents
come to meet you, maybe it would be a good idea for you not to be so...spooky.”

Granny looks up from her
steaming cauldron. Her one-eyed cat rubs against the hem of her long black
dress. “How am I spooky?” she says.

Adam and his parents will
be here in an hour. Mom and Granny are washing up the supper dishes, and I’ve
been given the job of feeding the goats and chickens before our company gets
here. I’m grateful to have a job that gets me out of the house for a few
minutes because I’m a nervous wreck.

I can’t get the picture
out of my mind of Adam’s parents, horrified and dragging him out of the house,
probably while holding up a crucifix in front of us. I don’t know if this
picture is me seeing the future, or just me being nervous.

I have to hand it to Mom,
though. She’s really thrown herself into making a good impression. She made a
pie from the blackberries we picked and froze this summer, and she put on a
pretty purple batik dress and silver dangly earrings. Granny is in her same
black dress and black stockings and silver braids. but it’s not like I expected
her to put on a flowered dress and apron like a grandma in a picture book.

The
two goats see me coming and stand up on their hind legs with their front hooves
propped on the fence. “Hey, Naomi. Hey, Ruth,” I say. Granny names all of her
animals out of the Bible. Ruth and Naomi are Tennessee Fainting Goats. They’re beautiful
white goats with golden eyes, and true to their name, they will faint dead away
if they’re startled. When I was a little kid, I got into a lot of trouble for
banging on pots and pans to make the goats faint.

The goats don’t seem to
hold my pranks against me, though. When I enter their pen, they butt me
lovingly, and while I fill their feed buckets, they bleat in appreciation.

I go to the chicken coop
next. There are five hens (Mary Magdalene, Esther, Rachel, Sarah, and Delilah)
and one rooster named Samson. The hen’s job is to lay eggs, and Samson’s job is
to strut around and show off his good looks. I scatter feed on the ground, and
they peck happily.

I still have forty-five
minutes to go until Adam and his parents get here. I go back to the house,
climb the stairs to my room, and try to read a mystery. But I can’t
concentrate. When the doorbell finally does ring, I jump about a foot, just
like it wasn’t the sound I was expecting all along.

You can tell we don’t get
much company because when I go downstairs, Mom and Granny are standing in front
of the door, arguing about who should answer it.

“Maybe Miranda should
answer it,” Mom says. “Adam is her friend.”

“No,” Granny says. “It
ain’t proper to let a child answer the door. The door should be answered by the
lady of the house.”

“Well, then, who’s the
lady of the house? You or me?” Mom sounds exasperated.

“Well,” Granny ways,
“some folks would say it’s me on account of,’”

I
can tell Granny’s about to go into a lengthy speech while the Sos are waiting
outside and wondering if anybody’s home.  Proper or not, I open the door
myself.

Adam is standing in the
doorway between his mom and dad., who have dressed up for the occasion. Mrs. So
is wearing a simple blue dress in almost the same shade as her husband’s tie. I
look into Adam’s mind and see that he’s nervous, too, not nervous about our
house being spooky or my family being weird, but nervous that his family, even
though he loves them, will do something that will embarrass him. His thoughts
are the same as mine, and I instantly feel better.

“Hi,” I say. “Dr. and Mrs. So, this is
my mom, Sarah Jasper, and my granny, Irene Chandler.” “Oh!” my mom says,
startled out of her argument with Granny. “How nice to meet you.  Come in.” The
Sos come in, but first they leave their shoes in a neat little row on the front
porch. I keep waiting for Granny to say something, but she just stares at the
Sos without even blinking.

“I thought we’d have
dessert in the living room,” Mom says. “Why don’t you all sit down? Miranda,
come and help me in the kitchen for a minute.”

Dr. and Mrs. So settle on
the wine-colored camel back sofa. Adam sits in the green wing-backed chair. All
the furniture in the living room is heavy and dark and old and looks like it’s
been here ever since the house was built. Old photos of the women in my family
hang on the walls, women with high collars and their hair in buns staring with
eyes that look like they can see right into your soul. And if these women were
still alive, they could do just that.

Methuselah, Granny’s
African gray parrot, stirs in his cage and squawks, “a whistling gal and a
crowing hen always come to a bad end.”

“Oh!”
Mrs. So laughs, sounding startled. “The bird talks.”