Spiritdell Book 1 Page 6

  Just then, the waiter appeared and said the escargots were one of their specialties. He held his fingers to his mouth and made the mwah kiss sign to punctuate.

  “Fine,” James said. “I'd love to try them.”

  Julie ordered a plain chicken breast with nothing but salt and pepper, and two sauces on the side. Her father said she was missing the point of dining out, so I took the opportunity to be adventurous and ordered coq au vin, which as it turns out is traditionally an old rooster, cooked in wine to soften him up. Delicious! I'd love to learn how to cook it myself, but of course, I'm getting away from the main point here, which is the escargots.

  When the food came, James got a round ceramic dish with twelve divots, and a dozen of the biggest snails you've ever seen in your life. They were like the snails you might visit at an aquarium, or a zoo. They were snails you might see inside a lion tamer's cage, trained to slime up onto chairs and jump through flaming hoops. Okay, maybe they weren't that big, but they were certainly larger than anyone expected.

  I think they were meant as an appetizer for a group, but the waiter put the whole dish in front of James, and trust me, nobody else was touching them. Julie sliced her chicken into tiny squares and dabbed at the sauces.

  James yanked the first one out of its shell with a tiny fork, then swallowed the gray-brown lump without chewing, nearly choking. He followed up with an entire glass of water and an entire glass of fizzy water with lemon. The rest of us pretended to be focusing on our meals and making small-talk about the decor, but we were all watching James.

  The second snail, he bit in half and swallowed in two separate pieces.

  “They taste exactly like mushrooms, right down to the texture,” he said. He offered to share, but nobody was having any. I started to reach over with my fork—to be a pal—but I changed my mind because I didn't want to ruin the flavor of my coq au vin. Have either of you had coq au vin? You really should try it.

  Anyway, James ate another and another. I got a whiff of them, all garlicky and weird, and combined with his expression, I nearly gagged. By the time he got to the twelfth one, his face looked exactly like it does now.

  * * *

  As I finish telling the story, the girls both turn to look at James.

  Flatly, he says, “Hilarious.”

  “I think he's haunted by their little snail souls,” I say.

  The fire lets out one whopping crack and everyone startles.

  “I'm not haunted by snail souls, I'm haunted by you,” James says. He turns to the girls and says, “He puts little snail stickers on my locker. He drew one on my forehead when I fell asleep in Chemistry class. And for birthdays and graduation, he gets me greeting cards with snails on them. You wouldn't think there'd be such a variety—that snails would be so popular in the greeting card world, but there's quite a variety, and every single one is different.”

  I hold my hands over my heart. “You keep all my cards? I'm so touched.”

  “You guys have been friends a long time,” the black-haired girl says.

  “Yeah, forever,” I say. “Hey, jamtart. I mean James. No hard feelings, right? You told them my secret, and I told them yours.”

  “Fair enough,” he says, and with that, I know we're good again. James and I bug each other all the time, but it's part of what we do, along with the wrestling. He's like a brother to me.

  We all turn to the fire and watch the firewood burn.

  “Fire is like caveman television,” I say.

  “Better than television,” James says. “I have no urge to channel-surf. Good riddance to technology, huh? It's so calming out here. Serene.” We all watch the flames in silence for a few moments. “Though I do miss email. And texting.”

  “Amen,” say the two girls in unison, and we all laugh. Just like that, we're having a moment—four souls, next to a beautiful lake and a crackling fire, the way life should be.

  “I have to pee,” the black-haired girl says, ruining the moment.

  “I'll walk you to your cabin,” James says, jumping eagerly to his feet.

  “Wait a minute,” I call out to James, recalling my vision of the black-haired girl punching a guy during an intimate moment.

  “Tell me later,” he says, jogging away.

  CHAPTER 9

  Missy and I stay and chat for a bit by the fire, occasionally looking off toward the woods as though we're expecting her friend and James to be back at any moment, but I'm sure Missy knows as well as I do that they've found something more fun to do.

  I tell Missy a bit about Austin, leaving out the fact I've only known her for one day. Missy says we sound like a nice couple, and she can appreciate the fact our names begin with A and Z. “That has to mean something,” she says.

  “Not everything means something. Actually, my power didn't work with her. I didn't see anything. But that doesn't have to mean anything, does it?”

  Missy licks at her lips, flashing her pierced tongue. “Maybe she didn't want you to see into her. You should try dating girls who are more open-minded.”

  “I don't know. Austin seemed pretty open-minded.”

  “What's her last name? Where does she go to school?”

  I pull my phone out to check the time and avoid questions I don't know the answers for. “It's late! I guess James went straight back to his cabin.”

  Missy smirks. “Sure he did.”

  She and I use the buckets provided by the lake caretakers to ensure the fire is completely extinguished, and after a bit more talking about life choices, we go our separate ways. On my way back, stumbling through the dark woods, I have a smile on my face. Missy said that thanks to me, she's going back to school, and she's going to try to live a life she can be proud of.

  * * *

  Back at the cabin, all is dark, except for the crack of light under the door to Julie's room. James isn't back yet, but I imagine he can find his way home safely, so I start brushing my teeth. Julie's left out all her toiletries, including an apricot soap that smells good enough to eat. My stomach growls, and I find myself wishing I'd eaten more marshmallows when they were available.

  James will have the other bedroom, which leaves me using the sleeping bag on the pull-out in the living room. I've barely settled down on the creaky old thing when Julie comes out, ostensibly to get some water from the fridge, but we both know it's to pointedly ignore me.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “You get that I love you like a sister and would never want to hurt you, right?”

  She bangs some pots and bowls around in the sink. “Where were you guys? Down by the lake? Without me?”

  “Oh. We didn't think you'd want to come,” I say.

  Angry silence hangs in the air as she drinks her glass of water, her gulps audible.

  “But I guess we didn't ask, did we,” I say, realization slowly dawning.

  She slams the glass down on the tiled counter. “Exactly. If I really am such a good friend, why don't you treat me the same as you do James? Why don't you put stupid in-joke things on my locker?”

  I make some noises that sound like words, but I really don't know what to say.

  “Like your snails gag that you have with James. What do you and I have? I mean, if we're such good pals.”

  “Jeez, I don't know, Julie. Do you want me going around telling people you were born with a little tail?” As soon as I say it, I know I've made a mistake. There's no way her secret little tail—that's since been surgically removed—was the right thing to bring up. No way.

  She pours another glass of water, muttering something under her breath.

  “You're right,” I say. “I don't wrestle with you, and I don't call you stupid nicknames. I don't treat you like I do your brother, because you're a girl. There's a lot about girls I honestly don't understand.”

  “Maybe that's why you get such scary, ookie psychic visions of us. Big scary girls with our weirdly different girl parts!”

  “Come on, it's not like that.”

  “Isn't it?” S
he turns on her heel and walks dramatically out of the kitchen. I have a good retort or two, but I squelch them. She can have the last word tonight, if it means getting closer to forgiving me for what I did, which was simply falling for a girl who isn't Julie.

  Alone again, I pull the musty-smelling sleeping bag up to my nose. My feet are cold, which means I won't be able to fall asleep for some time. I close my eyes and focus on sending warm blood down to my toes. Once, I tried to test if I could manually override my body's autonomic system by warming up just one foot, and I swear it was working, but I fell asleep too soon to tell. Now, whenever I'm tired but can't sleep, I focus on making my right foot warmer. Or is it my left foot?

  * * *

  I'm woken up by James coming in the door. He trips over something and then all is alarmingly quiet. I unzip out of my sleeping bag and turn on the light to make sure he hasn't impaled himself on the coat rack. If Julie's annoyed with me now, I can only imagine the treatment I'd get if I let her brother bleed out on the floor of the cabin.

  James, crumpled on the floor, moans as he blinks against the bright light. One of his eyes is red and swollen.

  Pointing to his face, he says, “It's dark out there between the cabins. I tripped and landed right smack-dab on a tree branch. Lucky I still have the old eyeball.”

  “Seems like a plausible explanation,” I say. “And far less embarrassing than admitting the girl you picked up by the lakeside was riding you like a horsie when things got kinky and she punched you in the face.”

  He rolls on his back and covers his face with both hands. “She asked if she could hit me, and I thought she was role-playing, but no. She up and wailed on me!”

  “You agreed to being hit?”

  “Wait, how'd you know I didn't fall on a tree? You saw the whole thing in your damn vision, didn't you? Dude! You could have warned me.”

  “Would you have listened?”

  “No.” He forms a megaphone with his hands and whispers, “I had sex. Wanna hear about it?”

  “Already kinda ... um ... saw it.”

  “That's sick, man. Your tummy-pokey-thing is an invasion of my personal privacy.” He sits down on the pull-out bed next to me. “I looked awesome in your vision, though, right? I've been doing a lot of situps.”

  “I wasn't looking at your abs. I wasn't looking at your anything!”

  “Your loss,” he says. “This is shaping up to be a strange summer so far.”

  “True. And apparently my power's still working,” I say.

  He gingerly touches his red eye, wincing. “Zan, did you ever wonder why or how you got this power?”

  My voice casual, I say, “All the time.” James doesn't know this, but the truth is I have a pretty good idea about how I got my power, and it has everything to do with my father. My insides quiver at the thought, so I push the memory away.

  “I'm sure you weren't given this gift just so you could be picky about girls,” James says. “Maybe you have some sort of purpose in life, like saving mankind and all that.”

  He pushes me over on the squeaky pull-out bed and steals a pillow.

  “Save mankind from what?” I ask as he commandeers the softest spot on the bed.

  “Save mankind from an asteroid,” he offers. “Or from ... ourselves?”

  “Trans-fats,” I counter.

  “Whaling.”

  “High-fructose corn syrup,” I say as I switch off the light.

  “Movie theater popcorn,” he says.

  “It's like a heart attack in a cute paper box,” I agree.

  “Movie sequels.”

  “And prequels.”

  “The diamond trade.”

  “Global warming,” I say.

  “Candies that look good but taste like soap.”

  “Sharting,” I say, laughing.

  “I think you get sharting from eating soap candies, so if you get rid of one, it solves the other.”

  “Good point,” I say. “What about gift cards? You get them for Christmas and it's mentally taxing trying to remember which ones you have and how much cash is on them. Gran gets me twenty different ones because she's a big believer in not spending it all in once place.”

  “Sounds like a nightmare,” he says. “Gift cards. Yup, pure evil. But what about poverty, or terrorism, or Mad Cow Disease. You never hear about Mad Cow Disease these days. Do you think it's been eradicated and nobody told us?”

  “Oh, yeah, I took care of that last week. I stuck a lady's finger in my belly button and got the recipe for a vaccine. I didn't tell you?” I chuckle for a moment, staring at the moon-lit shadows on the cabin's log ceiling.

  Is a spider climbing down from the ceiling toward my face, or is that moving dark spot a trick of my mind? If you stare too long in the dark, you can begin to hallucinate, albeit mildly. Your brain's trying to make sense of what little information it can get, and tries fitting meaning to the tiniest patterns.

  James, who I thought was asleep, suddenly asks, “Do you sometimes wish you never had your power? Or you lost it?”

  “I don't know. It's a part of me. Would I still be me? Can you ever recover from losing the only thing that makes you special and unique?”

  “Don't say that about my friend. You're plenty special.”

  “We should get some sleep,” I say. “If you're too tired to make it to your room, could you at least turn your face away from me? You've got that girl's ashtray smell all over you. You reek like a sun-dried tomato.”

  “Totally worth it,” he says.

  “How about your eye? Does it hurt?”

  “Yes. Still totally worth it.”

  “Guys do strange things to be with girls, don't they?”

  “You just summed up all of human history,” he says.

  James is a pretty smart guy sometimes.

  * * *

  We were planning to stay past dinner on the second day at the lake, but between the black eye on James and the bad mood on Julie, nobody's feeling like sticking around. The vegan hot dogs we have for breakfast aren't improving the overall atmosphere.

  I stir up the orange juice and think—again—about Austin. My next move should be to go to the coffee shop where she works. No, too intense. I'd love to phone, but that would mean trying to get her phone number through Julie, who's staring at me when she thinks I'm not looking, then quickly turning away to avoid eye contact. James has gone out to ask a neighbor for a painkiller, leaving the two of us alone.

  “Julie, wanna know the truth about how James got his black eye?” I ask her.

  She pauses in chewing her breakfast, which is mayonnaise and potato chips on a bun—no hot dog. With a hand over her mouth, she says around the gummy food, “He didn't fall and hit a tree branch?”

  “No. Can you keep a secret?”

  At the word secret, the corner of her mouth turns up. I knew it! No girl can resist a secret, not even Julie, who pretends to be above such girly things. I pour us both some orange juice, lean in conspiratorially, and tell her the real story.

  Julie cracks a smile. “That's why he wants to go home early,” she says. “He's afraid to run into her!”

  “No doubt. She might ask to go for round two, and he'll go for it—because he's James—and she'll punch out the other eye.”

  “Serves him right, going off with some girl he doesn't know.”

  “Now, now, we don't condone violence, do we?”

  Julie snickers into her hand. “Of course not.”

  James walks in the door and stamps the dust off his feet. Julie and I try our best to look innocent as he eyes us suspiciously.

  “You told her, didn't you, Zan?” James says. “You two can be such gossipy girls!”

  “Calling me a girl, are you? I'll take that as a compliment.” I initiate the secret handshake with Julie, who accepts readily. Outside the window, the sun comes out from behind a cloud, bathing the breakfast nook in golden light. Everything's better now that Julie and I are back on track as friends.

  S
o, if all is good, why do I feel like things are about to go terribly wrong?

  * * *

  We grab our bags and load up the Jeep. Julie's been driving James nuts with her need to analyze what happened to him last night.

  “I've heard about this phenomenon,” Julie says. “The gender politics are quite fascinating. It started because of some TV show, where a young girl punches an older guy during sex. Someone started a web site. Facepuncher, or something like that. Lots of women sign on and post their own stories.”

  “You're making this up,” I say.

  She rubs her arm, which is still red from the bee sting yesterday, but less so. “Like you guys made up the story about a bee sting being lucky?”

  “Damn,” James says. “Now I can't remember if I made it up or not. It's all in my head together, like those urban legends about kidnappers posing as birthday party clowns.”

  “Who'd trust a clown?” I say as I put the bag of leftover buns and potato chips in the back of the Jeep. “Besides, kidnapping can't be so difficult. Just go to one of those big grocery stores and help yourself to some screaming brats.”

  “It disturbs me that you two put so much thought into such things,” Julie says. “Now, about this odd trend of young women embracing violence as a means of expression ... did she explain to you why she punched you? Is it for a performance art project or something?”

  “There wasn't a lot of talking,” James says.

  “Shotgun,” Julie says coolly, just as I'm reaching for the passenger-side door.

  I start to protest that Julie had the front on the way out, but instead, I hold the door for her. “After you, m'lady.”

  “Don't play like you're being chivalrous,” Julie says. “I called shotgun fair and square, just like a guy would. I demand to be treated equally!”

  “Yes, Sir. Uh. Yes, person.”

  Once we're all inside the vehicle, James says, “I think the real kidnapping money's in getting the rich kids. For ransom.”

  “Phew, we're safe,” I say. “I have nothing of value.”