The Gifting (2 page)

While most parents wouldn’t let their fifteen- and seventeen-year-old children go to a party on a school night, my mom practically shoves us out the door.

How are you going to make friends if you never go anywhere, sweetheart?

I want to tell her that particular ship has long since sailed. We’ve lived in the small town of Jude, Florida for two years now. Since my dad is some bigwig for one of the nation’s wealthiest security companies—a thriving industry thanks to the escalating crime rate—we move a lot. Part of his job requires planting new branches across the United States. He gets them going, helps them grow, and starts all over again somewhere else.

Mom never complains about the moving, so long as Dad finds a house that is at least fifteen minutes away from the city. According to her, any place with a population over fifteen thousand is too dangerous for children. Plus, she thinks if Pete and I to go to smaller schools, we’ll have an easier time fitting in. What she doesn’t realize is that smaller schools also make it easier to stand out. Especially if you’re me.

Anyway, I don’t want to be here, in the balmy heat outside Sydney Lauren’s home. In fact, I’d rather be anywhere but here. Before I express any of this to Pete, he rings the bell. Two seconds later, Sydney swings the door open. She wears neon purple lipstick and a mesh tank top that is completely perfunctory. As she squeals and flings her arms around my brother, I’m distracted by her lime green bra. I would never, in a million years, have the guts to wear that outfit.

“You’re right on time!” She grabs Pete’s hand and pulls him inside. “We just got out the Ouija board.”

Pete laughs. “Ouija board? I didn’t know those still existed.”

“You have to know where to look.” She wags her eyebrows. “I told Rose that this house was built on an Indian burial ground and she doesn’t believe me.”

Sydney lives in a peach-colored stucco home straight out of the twentieth century. Hardly haunted house material. Still, my stomach squirms. The law prohibits the selling of items that perpetuate belief in the supernatural. The thing is, forbidding teenagers to dabble in anything supernatural only guarantees that they will.

She leads Pete over to the small crowd lounging around a coffee table. There are five juniors. Two seniors. A bowl of candy, a bag of pretzels, and a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff. Pete squeezes in on the couch and Sydney sits on his knee like the two are a couple. Elliana—a girl with an eyebrow ring and fluorescent colored bracelets covering both of her wrists—shoots daggers at Sydney.

I feel sick.

Despite taking two Excedrin Migraine pills, a headache pierces my left temple. Clasping my hands in front of my waist, I watch Missy set up the Ouija board while everyone else laughs and clowns around. Nobody has noticed me yet. Which means it’s not too late to turn around and leave. As soon as the thought occurs, Missy spots me in the doorway. “Hey everybody, look who’s here. It’s
Teresa
.” She raises a plastic red cup in my direction. I’m pretty sure she’s not drinking water. “Aren’t you going to come in? We’re about to have a séance.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna talk to some dead Indians.”

“The politically correct term is Native Americans, Syd.” Dustin pops a handful of M&M’s into his mouth.

I peek around the doorway. “Are your parents home?”

Everybody laughs.

Right. The vodka.

“Aw, is
Tewesa
scared the ghosties will get us without any gwown ups around?”

“Give it a rest, Missy.” Sydney tosses the Ouija board box aside. “Will you hit the lights, Tess? I’m pretty sure this works better in the dark.”

I swallow, but my throat sticks together. Everybody waits for me—Tess the Freak—to unglue my feet from the doorway when what I want to do is crawl under the doormat and disappear. No, scratch that. What I really want is to throw off my headache and my painful shyness and join in the laughter and fun. What I really want, more than anything, is to be a part of this group. So I ignore the erratic galloping of my heart and flip off the lights.

Sydney hops off Pete’s knee and pulls the drapes across the large picture window. The swinging vertical blinds chop apart the waning daylight.

Dustin wiggles his fingers at Missy. “Oo-oooo-ooo!”

She punches his bicep. “Cut it out, jerk.”

I follow Sydney, eager to be closer to the group. Despite being seventeen, darkness still creeps me out. The clamminess spreading across my skin doesn’t help. I take a deep breath and tell myself that fear is irrational. Ghosts are not real. And even if they were, the Ouija board is made by Parker Brothers. Not exactly black market paraphernalia.

Elliana snuggles closer to Pete’s shoulder and wraps her arm around his elbow. “Are you going to save me from the big bad evil spirits?”

Even through the semi-darkness, I can see Pete’s crooked, half smile—the one girls go gaga over—and a surge of jealousy stabs my gut. How can he sit there so at ease? How can two people born from the same gene pool end up so incredibly different? For crying out loud, we don’t even look the same.

Sydney kneels next to Pete’s legs. “Okay, so I think we all have to put our hands on this pointer-thing.”

“It’s called a planchette.”

Everybody looks at Elliana.

“Don’t ask me how I know that.”

“Don’t we need candles or something?” Missy asks.

Rose—a senior with beautiful ebony skin and a killer volleyball spike—wraps her long leg over the arm rest of the love seat. “You can light all the candles you want, the only thing this board can do is teach J.R. the alphabet.”

J.R. tosses an M&M at Rose. She catches it and pops it in her mouth.

“Hey, you better watch it or you’re going to piss off the Indians,” Dustin says.

The banter is lighthearted, but the hair on the back of my arms prickles. I can’t bring myself to laugh with the rest of them. All I can think is that I really, really want to leave.

Physical, physical, physical. Dad says the world is purely physical
 …

Missy sets her cup on the coffee table. “I think we should hold hands.”

“Jeez, Miss, if you wanted to hold my hand so badly, you should have just said so from the beginning.” Dustin gives her a lighthearted thwack with a pillow. “We don’t need a séance for that.”

Missy flicks her hair. “You wish.”

Sydney puts her fingers on the pointer, the planchette. Whatever it’s called. And I have the same feeling I had in Mr. Greeley’s Current Events class, when that monster stared up at me from my folder—a coldness that won’t go away. A coldness so deep I can feel it in my bones. I fist my hands in my lap.

Dustin and Missy put their fingers on the planchette too.

“I cannot believe we’re doing this,” Rose mutters.

“Shhh!” Sydney sits up straighter and closes her eyes. The room fills with laughter and … something else. A presence that makes my breath come so quick and so shallow, I worry I might be having a panic attack. I glance at Pete and Elliana flirting, at Rose sticking her tongue out at J.R., and I can’t figure out how they don’t feel it.

Sydney wears the kind of expression that says she’s trying hard to act serious, but a smile makes the corners of her lips twitch. She clears her throat and waits for the giggling and whispering to cease. “Who is with us in this house?” she asks in a low, spooky voice. Dustin and Missy giggle. “We’d like to speak with you.”

I tell my heart to calm down. I tell myself I’m being a spaz. I tell myself I will never, ever fit in if I can’t do a stupid séance with a group of teenagers on a Parker Brothers Ouija board. But then something moves in the corner of the room, near the hallway, and I squeeze my eyelids shut.

It was just my imagination. It was just my imagination
 …

“We invite you in.” Sydney’s voice has turned into an exaggerated moan. I peek at her through squinted eyes. “Tell us who you are.”

The planchette moves across the board. Missy takes her fingers away.

Elliana nudges Dustin with her foot. “Very funny, O’Malley.”

He holds up his hands. “It wasn’t me.”

The room plunges into ice. I wrap my fingers around my throat and squeeze my eyes tight. This isn’t real. None of this is real. But then the whispers come. Ghost-like voices that turn my blood cold. Visions slam through me—horrible, awful, terrible images—worse than any nightmare I’ve ever had. Visions of death and decay and gnashing teeth and man-made pits filled with cold, lifeless bodies. Visions of skinny, pale people wrapped in straitjackets, black mouths splitting their faces with silent, anguished screams.

Something brushes against my leg. I slap my shin. Something tickles my cheek. I slap at my face. But I do not—cannot—open my eyes. I refuse to face whatever is on the other side of my eyelids. The whispers turn into screams. Blood-curdling, heart-stopping screams. Like whatever is out there wants me to look. Demands me to look. As hard as I try, I can’t make them stop. I can’t make me stop.

The screams are coming from me.

Tess the Freak

I
wake up to the hushed voices of Mom and Dad and another I don’t recognize. My head pounds as I open my eyes to a blinding white box—white walls, white floors, white sheets, white bed. The brightness is so sterile and shocking, I throw my arm over my face.

Where am I? What happened?

“Her tests came back clean,” the unfamiliar voice says. “We didn’t find any traces of drugs or alcohol in her system.”

“None?” My mom sounds deflated, like the no drugs or alcohol is bad news.

“No, I’m sorry.”

He’s sorry?

My temples throb around the response. Why would he be sorry? I slide my arm away and this time, I understand why the whiteness is so bright. Sunlight filters inside an open window. I turn my head on the pillow and spy my parents and a man in a white coat huddled together in the corner, near the door. My mom presses her fingers against her lips and shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

“We’ll know more when your daughter wakes up. We can hear what she has to say about …” the doctor frowns, “the episode.”

“My daughter is not crazy.” Mom’s words come out sharp and vehement. And with them, comes clarity. It floods back into place with a vengeance. The party at Sydney’s. The Ouija board and the voices and the screams. My stomach churns. I should be afraid, maybe even terrified. But all I can feel is humiliation. Abject humiliation. Because what must I have done to end up in a hospital? The churning turns my stomach to rot.

“I’m merely following protocol, Mrs. Ekhart.”

The doctor leaves and I close my eyes, feigning sleep. I cannot face my parents or their worry. I cannot face anybody ever again. I want to hide behind my closed eyelids forever. I want to avoid whatever repercussions lay beyond this bed. The seconds tick into minutes. The silence in the room crackles with tension.

“What are you thinking?” It’s my father’s voice.

“You know exactly what I’m thinking.”

“I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation for what happened.” These are classic my dad-isms. According to him, logic explains everything. And if it can’t, he dismisses it altogether. His world makes no room for the unexplainable. “Tess is sensitive. We’ve always known that. She probably got spooked and the other kids exaggerated.”

“You think Pete is exaggerating?” Mom’s voice wobbles. “James, our son said she was hitting and scratching herself. He said she was screaming for something to get off her.”

I sink further into the bed, fear expanding inside my lungs. Never mind the humiliation I will face upon returning to school, I could be committed for this. I could be locked up in a cell and never let out again.

“What do you want me to say?” Dad asks.

“I want you to promise me she’ll be okay. I want you to promise that we won’t lose her. I want you to promise that our daughter won’t end up like your mom.”

My heart pounds into the silence, joined with the erratic breaths escaping my lips. My grandmother is dead. She died of a heart attack years ago, when I was too young to remember. So what is my mother talking about? Why is she afraid I’ll end up dead?

“Tess is not my mother,” Dad says in a voice so low I have to strain to hear it.

“But we’ve always suspected—”

“That’s enough, Miranda.” The sharpness of his words slice through the air. “We can’t talk about this. Not here.”

I open one of my eyes. Dad has ahold of Mom’s arm, their panicked expressions mirrored on each other’s faces.

“It’s not safe.”

A chill ripples through my bones.

“She’s going to have to speak with a government-mandated psychiatrist,” Mom whispers. “Nothing about this is safe.”

*

News about my freak-out spreads like pink eye. Another disadvantage of these small towns my mom is so fond of. At school, Pete is guilty by association. No matter how cute the girls think he is, there’s only so much high school students will tolerate. Apparently, having a whacked-out older sister isn’t one of them.

So everyone except Elliana ignores Pete. She must have it bad to risk being ostracized by the entire student body. The two of them stick to each other like double sided tape.