Revived Spirits (3 page)

These are the same words Mom always said when a pet died—that I’d always carry Scamper the bunny or
Graymalkin
the cat in my heart. And I do. But it’s a poor substitute for really having them with me.

Adam is not a morning person. Whenever he meets me to walk to school, he never looks ready, like a cake that’s not finished baking. His hair’s sticking up in random places, his shirt’s buttoned wrong and his shoes are untied. He pulls something small, white and powdery from his pocket. “You want one?”

“You’re carrying doughnuts in your pocket?” His olive green cargo
pans
are dusted with powdered sugar.

He shrugs. “Since when did you know me to wake up in time for breakfast?”

“Since never,” I say, falling into step beside him.

“Mom says when I start high school I can drink coffee in the mornings. She says it’ll change my life.”

“Nobody drinks coffee at my house,” I say.
“Just tea.”

“Let me guess.” Adam dusts some doughnut crumbs off his skull-and flame-patterned shirt. “Your granny doesn’t believe in coffee.”

“That’s right,” I say. Adam never stops being amused by all the everyday things Granny doesn’t believe in: telephones, air conditioning,
computers
.

“I’ll add it to my list,” he says, grinning.

Starting back to school takes some getting used to for everybody, but for me it’s extra hard because after a peaceful summer of just being in my own thoughts and the thoughts of the few people I’m close to, I have to adjust to hearing the thoughts of hundreds of kids. As soon as I walk into the building it’s like three hundred people are talking as loud and hard and fast as they can, all at the same time and all inside my head. Over the course of the morning, though, I start remembering how to concentrate on myself and my schoolwork, and by lunchtime the thoughts of the other students have softened into distant whispers.

In the cafeteria, I join Adam at the table we usually occupy by ourselves. Nobody wants to sit with the Witch Girl. Well, nobody except the school’s one Asian kid. I take an egg salad sandwich and apple from my lunch sack. As I open my carton of milk, I glance around. The popular kids are at the popular table, the country kids are at the country table, and the Mexican kids whose parents work over at the meat packing plant are at the Mexican table. “Well, here we are again,” I say.

“Yup.”
He arranges his lunch before him: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bag of
Cheetos
, a bunch of grapes and a packet holding two chocolate cupcakes.

“Planning on feeding a small country today?” I ask, nibbling my sandwich.

“Just the country of
Me
.” He tears into the
Cheetos
. “I have a huge appetite lately. Mom says it’s because I’m about to have a growth spurt. I hope she’s right because I’m getting pretty sick of you being taller than me.”

“Come on, admit it,” I say. “You love it when I pat you on the head.”

Before I can reach across the table to pat him, I feel a surge of fear. It’s not coming from me, but it’s so sharp it feels like it is.

I turn to see a girl I’ve never seen before standing near our table, her cafeteria tray in her hands. Her light brown hair is pulled back into a long ponytail, and she’s wearing a white polo-style shirt, a denim skirt that almost reaches her ankles, and white canvas tennis shoes. Over at the country table, there are
similar-looking girls whose religion won’t let them cut their hair or wear pants. But this girl must be new because her thoughts are
Where
do I sit? Where do I sit? I don’t know any of these people.

I give her a little wave and gesture toward the place beside me.

She flashes a tiny smile and sets down her tray. “Whew, that thing was getting heavy,” she says.

“The grease on that pizza slice alone must weigh a good five pounds,” Adam says, looking at the rectangle of alleged pizza in a compartment beside a half ear of corn and a portion of canned fruit cocktail. “I’m Adam.”

“I’m
Caylie
,” she says, sitting down.

“And I’m Miranda.”

“Oh!” she says, like I just sneaked up behind her and said “Boo.” “You’re the one they call the Witch Girl,
ain’t
you?”

I try not to roll my eyes. “I’m glad my reputation precedes me. I’m not a witch.”

“She is a girl, though, so the rumor’s half right,” Adam says,
unwrapping
his second sandwich.

“I didn’t think you
was
,”
Caylie
says, “a witch, I mean. But my
mamaw
and papaw told me about you and your mama and your granny. They said I ought to stay away from you.”

“Won’t they be happy to find out you ended up having lunch with me?”

“I just won’t tell ’
em
,”
Caylie
says with a shy smile. “Believe
me,
since I moved in with them, I’ve got pretty good at not telling them things. Like sometimes when they’re not around I switch the radio to a country station instead of a gospel one. And once in a while, when they’re asleep, I’ll sneak in the living room and turn the TV on real low and watch whatever’s on. They don’t get any good channels, so there
ain’t
much.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything too awful,” Adam says.

“Well, that’s your opinion, not theirs. But Mom says as long as they’re taking care of me, I have to respect their rules even if I don’t agree with all of them.”

As soon as
Caylie
says
Mom
, I’m in her head. I see a patch of yard with a trailer on it and a tired, scared-looking woman with spiky bleached blond hair, being handcuffed and led by two police officers into a cruiser with flashing blue lights. Tears stream down the woman’s face and streak her mascara as she yells, “
Caylie
June! Be a good girl and mind your
mamaw
and papaw!” But then one of the officers slams the car door, and the woman’s yells are silenced.

Just like that, I’m out of her head. Adam looks like he’s about to ask her something, and I’m afraid it’s going to be a question about where her mom is, so before he can say anything, I blurt out, “So what do you think of Wilder Middle so far?” It’s a lame question, but at least it cut Adam off before he could say anything unintentionally hurtful.

She shrugs. “It’s tiny. I went to Morgan County Middle before, and
it’s
lots bigger. More kids and more activities like art club and marching band and chorus. I was in the chorus, and I miss it.
Mamaw
and Papaw thought they could make it up to me by putting me in the children’s choir at church, but it
ain’t
the same. I’m the oldest kid in the choir, so I look like Dorothy singing with the Munchkins.” Adam and I laugh, and she grins, a little less shyly this time. “Have
you’uns
always gone to school here?”

“I have,” I say. “But Adam moved here in sixth grade.”

“From Louisville,” Adam says, “so I know all about having to get used to a smaller place.”

“I guess so.”
Caylie
pushes away her lunch tray. “Listen, I don’t want
you’uns
to think I’m badmouthing my grandparents. I love them. They just live real different than I did with Mom, and I’m still not used to wearing this kind of getup instead of jeans and a T-shirt.”

“You don’t have to tell me about having old-fashioned grandparents,” I say. “My granny wears a long black dress all the time and never cuts her hair.”

“And she doesn’t believe in telephones,” Adam adds.

“Is it true that she can see what people think and predict the
future like people say
?”

“She can see people’s thoughts and sense lots of things other people can’t,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean she can always predict the future. People don’t always do what they think they’re going to.”

“You can see people’s thoughts too, can’t you?” she asks.

“Yeah, but not as well as Granny can. My powers aren’t as strong yet. Mom’s powers are stronger than mine, but they’re still not as strong as Granny’s.”

Caylie
nods. “
Mamaw
says
you’uns
do
black magic and that your granny and your mama killed their husbands.”

These rumors are as familiar to me as blue sky and green grass. “Nope,” I say, “no murder and no magic. Mom says if she could do magic, the only thing she’d use it for is to get the laundry done.”

Caylie
smiles.
“Well, I think both of y’all are cool.
Which my
mamaw
and papaw, bless their hearts, are not.”

On the way home from school Adam says, “Do you want to come over for a little while? Mom’s gonna drive me to Morgan for my guitar lesson after she gets home from work, but that won’t be for another hour or so.” Adam’s mom has been working part-time at the tiny public library, which, Adam says, makes her much happier than when she’d been staying home all the time.

“Sure.”

“We could play a game or something.” At my house “a game” means a board game or a card game.
At Adam’s, it’s always a video game.

“You know I stink,” I say.

“Of course I do.” Adam grins. “That’s why I love to play with you. You’re easy to beat.”

Adam lives in a Victorian house which, much to his
humiliation,
is painted pink. There’s nothing girly about his room, though, which is overflowing with all his obsessions: horror movies, video games, a desktop and a laptop computer and horror paperbacks and comic books. Posters from the old Universal horror movies decorate his walls: Frankenstein, the
Wolfman
,
the
Mummy. There’s no doubt this room belongs to a boy. A geeky boy, but a boy still.

“Why don’t you play, and I’ll just watch?” I say, sitting on the foot of his bed.

Adam smiles at me.
“Coward.”
He puts in some game that involves shooting lots of zombies. The screen says “loading.” “You know,” Adam says, “that girl
Caylie
seemed okay.”

“I thought so too.”

“I’ve
gotta
tell you, though, when she first sat down I thought, uh-oh, this is gonna be bad. Because of the way she looked. But once she started talking I realized I’d done the same thing people do to me. Make stupid assumptions because of the way somebody looks. I could’ve kicked myself, honestly.”

“It’s hard to judge people by appearance when you can see their thoughts. Like with
Caylie
, the first thing I noticed was how lost and alone she was.”

Adam is blasting zombies right and left. “I wonder why she has to live with her grandparents.”

“I saw that too,” I say, flinching when a zombie’s head explodes. “I’m pretty sure her mom was arrested. I saw her being shoved into a police car.”

Adam shakes his head. “You never have to wonder anything, do you? You just know.”

“That’s not true. Sometimes what I see in people’s heads just makes me wonder more. Like on Saturday night”—the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them— “I heard you thinking, today’s definitely not the right time to tell her. I was dying to ask you what it was, but I didn’t because I knew I shouldn’t have been snooping around in your thoughts in the first place.”

Adam has set down his video game controller and is looking down at his hands. “I shouldn’t have thought that around you. But thoughts are hard to control.”

I wait for what seems like forever, then I say, “So are you going to tell me what it is?”

Adam takes a deep breath. “Okay. So my dad signed a three-year contract to work at Wilder Memorial as part of a deal that paid for his medical school. His three years will be up in July, and he’s been offered a job at Jewish Hospital in Louisville starting in mid-August.”

It takes a minute for this to sink in. “So you’re going to move back to Louisville?”

Adam nods. “But not until July. We’ll have all the school year and most of the summer together.” He looks at me with alarm. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”