Kindred Spirits (2 page)

When
Abigail was alive, this house was her family’s house, and her room was my room.
But there were a lot more serious illnesses in the 1800s than there are now,
and when Abigail caught scarlet fever at the age of twelve, she ended up
passing on to the other side. Her parents, who caught the illness from her,
joined her there soon after.

For some reason she’s not
sure of, though, Abigail can slip between worlds. So while she lives with her
parents on the other side, she comes to visit me a few times a week. Partly she
does it because she likes being in her old room, but she also does it because
she likes me.

Mom can’t see Abigail
anymore, and Granny has never seen her, but they both know she hangs out in my
room pretty often. My room was Mom’s room when she was a little girl, and
Abigail used to visit her, too. Mom stopped seeing Abigail when she was
fourteen years old.

Granny says that when she
was a kid, she also had a friend from the other side, a little Indian boy who
taught her a lot about using plants and herbs as medicines. But Granny stopped
seeing him when she turned fifteen. “Once you start coming into your womanhood,
you won’t be able to see Abigail no more,” Granny told me once. “When you get
old enough to give life, you can’t see past the world of the living.”

It’s sad. Abigail is the
only friend I’ve ever had, and it won’t be long until I lose her forever.

“Would you like to have a
tea party?” Abigail has picked up the teapot from my little china tea set.

I keep the tea set just
for decoration, but Abigail is really into pretend tea parties. I guess it’s
what girls in her time did for fun. “Yeah, okay.” I sit down across from her,
pick up a tiny tea cup, and let her “pour.”

“Did
you ask your mother and granny about getting a television for your birthday?”
Abigail asks.

“I asked, but they said
no. Mom thinks TV kills your imagination and rots your brain. And
Granny...well, she’s so old-fashioned she won’t even cook on an electric
stove.”

“I wish you could get a
TV for your room,” Abigail sighs. “I’d love to see it. You tell me about all
these marvelous things in the modern world, but I never get to see any of them
because your family still lives as though it’s the eighteen hundreds.”

“Tell me about it.”
Abigail’s right. The only modern convenience we have in our house is a toaster.
Other kids have cell phones, but we don’t even have a regular telephone. Granny
doesn’t believe in them. Mom does have a car, a beat-up Toyota she bought the
year she graduated from college. It’s an awful-looking thing, but Abigail will
look at it through the window and ooh and aah at it like it’s a brand-new
Mercedes.

“I wish Mom could take us
on a car ride,” I tell Abigail. “We could go to Morgan to the movie theater.
And maybe we’d go to Wal-Mart, just so you could see all the kinds of stuff you
could buy now.”

“I wish we could do that,
too.” Abigail’s voice is soft and dreamy. She knows as well as I do that our
little car-trip fantasy will never come true because when Abigail visits, she
can’t go beyond the walls of my room. She’s tried to walk out the door of my
room more than once, and every time, it’s like there’s an invisible wall in my
doorway that she can’t get past.

“And I wish you could
take me to see where you live,” I say. I’m always awfully curious about the
other world, but Abigail says it’s impossible to explain it in a way I would
understand.

“I
know,” Abigail says. “But there are no visitors there. Only permanent
residents.” She sets down her cup of pretend tea. “Can we listen to the radio?”

Abigail loves it when we
can tune in the Top 40 radio station out of Lexington and dance to pop songs.
Lexington’s pretty far away, though, so we can’t always get the signal. The
local stations are all country or gospel.

“We’d better not.” I
glance at the clock. 11:06. “It’s a school night.  I should at least try to
sleep.”

“Can I stay with you?
Just until you fall asleep?”

“Okay.”

Abigail crawls into bed beside me, and I roll myself up
in a quilt so she won’t make me too cold. It’s nice to have a friend nearby,
even a long-dead one, and soon my eyes are closing. When I open them again, the
early morning sky is gray, and Abigail is gone.

I drag into home room
with a familiar feeling of dread. Caitlin and Britney are in the front row, and
Caitlin nudges Britney as I walk past. “Where do you think she gets those
clothes?” Caitlin whispers. Britney giggles.

Britney and Caitlin must
get their clothes at the same store because they always wear the same thing:
name-brand jeans, name-brand tennis shoes, and t-shirts with brand-name slogans
on them.

Since Mom and Granny sew
my clothes, I don’t have a name-brand to my name. Instead I wear long, flowing
skirts made out of fabric with pretty patterns’wildflowers, paisley, moons and
stars’and simple, solid-colored cotton blouses. I wear sandals in the summer
and boots and tights in the winter. I don’t own a pair of jeans, and the only
time I wear tennis shoes is in gym class.

I
ignore Britney and Caitlin and take my seat in the back of the room, wishing I
had the power to make myself invisible. Mr. Wilkins, who coaches the middle
school football team and kinda, sorta teaches sixth grade science, is our home
room teacher. I say “kinda, sorta teaches sixtth grade science” because all he
ever does in class is tell us to read the chapter and answer the questions at
the end.

I’ve seen into his mind a
few times. Football is all he thinks about.

“Listen up, team,” Mr.
Wilkins says, tugging on his gray coach’s shorts. “We’ve got a new student in
here. You in the back,” he yells like he’s shouting across a football field,
“stand up and tell us your name.”

Every head turns to face
the new kid,who’s hidden himself in the back left corner, but is now standing
up because Mr. Wilkins has given him no choice.

The first thing I notice
about him is probably the first thing everybody else notices: he’s Asian. In
most places, this would be no big deal. But there are no other Asian kids at
Wilder Middle.   No black kids or Hispanic kids either.

Southeastern Kentucky is
a pretty white part of the world, anyway, but Wilder’s especially bad. The
whole town is as white as the inside of a mayonnaise jar.

The new kid looks down at
his desk to keep from looking up at the rest of the class. He has longer hair
than the other boys in the class do, and he’s wearing baggy olive green pants
and a loose-fitting black shirt decorated with orange flames. Everything about
him says city kid. I look at his hands, which he’s nervously drumming on the
desk, and see that he bites his nails.

And just like
that’whoosh! I’m in his head, racing through his thoughts, feelings, memories.
I see a tall red brick apartment building in a city. There’s a basketball
court, and he’s playing ball with a couple of boys around his age.

Another
picture fills the screen: a petite Asian woman, around my mother’s age, cooking
a food I don’t recognize in a tiny kitchen, while an Asian man, whom this kid
looks a lot like, sits at the table, reading a huge book and jotting down
notes.

Another picture: a moving
van driving away from the red brick apartment building, the friends from the
basketball court waving goodbye.

Another picture: a mummy,
with a wrinkled face peeking out from tattered bandages, slowly moving forward,
arms outstretched.

But that’s impossible! I
think, and as soon as I do, I’m out of the new kid’s head and back into my own.
My little trip must have only taken a couple of seconds because the kid is
still standing there, trying to get up the courage to introduce himself.

“Uh’” he finally says,
“I’m Adam So.”

“So?” Cody Taylor, the
star of the middle school football team, laughs. “So what?”

Everybody laughs, even
Mr. Wilkins.

Adam So sits back down. I
don’t have to see into his mind to know how embarrassed he is.

I fall into the routine
of the day: science, math, language arts. I eat my sack lunch at a table by
myself.

“What do you reckon she’s
eating?” one of the girls in the cafeteria line says about me, so low she
thinks I can’t hear her.

“I don’t know,” the other
girl whispers back. “What do witches eat, anyway?  Frog eyeballs? Bat brains?”

I
wad up my bread crusts in my napkin and get up from the table. “Sorry to
disappoint you girls,” I say. “But it was just egg salad.”

Out on the playground
Cody Taylor and a couple of his dimwit friends have Adam So backed up against
the side of the school building. Cody’s doing his best to look menacing, and
he’s doing a pretty good job of it. But I can see the truth inside his tiny
brain: he’s scared.

“Where you from anyway,
So What?” Cody sneers. “I think my granddaddy might’ve killed some of your
people in the war.”

Adam sighs like he’s
bored instead of afraid. “What war did your granddaddy fight in?”

“Vietnam,” Cody says.

“Well, then, he didn’t
kill any of my people,” Adam says, looking down at his bitten fingernails. I
was born in America, but my mom and dad are from Korea. But hey, cheer up.  If
your great-grandad fought in Korea, he might have killed somebody who was
related to me.”

I bite my cheek so I
won’t laugh out loud, which would just make Cody madder.

“Are you makin fun of
me?” Cody hisses, and his friends start closing in on Adam.

Adam looks at the five
big, tall guys surrounding him. “Well, no, I—”

“‘Cause I don’t like it
when people make fun of me!”

I look around to see if
any of the teachers are keeping an eye on what’s going on, but there’s not a
grownup in sight. I walk right up to Cody and his sidekicks, stretch my arms
toward the sky, close my eyes and try to chant something that sounds like a
spell. Too bad that all that pops into my head is a nursery rhyme, so I chant,
“Inky pinky ponky, Daddy had a donkey’”

“Hey!”
Cody yelps. “What are you doing?”

I look Cody straight in
his beady eyes. “I’m calling a curse down on you and your entire family, to be
effective immediately, if you don’t stop picking on Adam here.”

Cody’s beady eyes narrow.
“Are you faking?”

I look at him with my
most serious face. “Do you want to find out for sure?”

Cody looks at his
friends, who are paralyzed with fear. “Okay, come on, guys.”

“Whoa,” Adam says. “That
was cool. Or at least I think it was. What happened there?”

“They think I’m a witch.”

Adam raises his eyebrows.
“No kidding? Well, are you?”

It’s almost a trick question. I’m not a witch, but I’m
not a regular girl either. But if I can’t even explain this to myself, how do I
explain it to somebody I just met. “Not really,” I finally say. “But sometimes
it comes in handy for them to think I am.”

When’s school’s out and I
start walking toward home I hear a voice calling, “Hey! Hey, wait up!” But
since nobody ever asks me to wait up I just keep right on walking.

Suddenly, though, Adam is
next to me, out of breath from running. “Say, don’ t you people know what’wait
up’ means here in the middle of nowhere? I had to run a mile to catch up with
you.”

I smile. “Sorry.  I
didn’t know you were talking to me.”

“Of course I was talking
to you. You’re the only person I met today who didn’t treat me like I had a
contagious disease. And I couldn’t very well call your name because you never
told me what your name was.”

I guess I didn’t.
“Miranda,” I say.

Adam
grins. “That beats Witch Girl, which seems to be what most people call you.”

“Yep,” I laugh. “They
call Mom and Granny the witch women, so I guess I can look forward to be
calling Witch Woman, too, when I grow up.” I keep waiting for Adam to leave my
side, but he’s not showing any signs of it. “Say... you don’t have to keep
walking with me. Don’t you need to go back and get on the bus or something?”

“Nope. I just live up the
street. My mom and dad were all excited for us to live somewhere I could walk
to school. I have no clue why.”

It pops into my head
where Adam must live. All the houses up the street are owned by old people who
have lived there forever. All except for a two-story house which is about as
old as ours and has been sitting empty for as long as I can remember. “Hey,” I
say, “did your parents buy the old Jameson place?” But then I remember that
Adam won’t know that everybody in town calls it the old Jameson place, so I
add, “I mean, the house on the corner of Laurel and Oak?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.
Mom says she’s been living in little apartments too long and wants a place with
some space. Problem is, the house is practically falling apart. But Mom and Dad
have watched so many shows on that Do It Yourself channel that they think they
can fix the place up in half an hour.”

We walk past the Family
Drug Store, Louise’s House of Hair, and a couple of the empty storefronts that
have been popping up downtown ever since they built the Wal-Mart over in
Morgan. “So tell me,” Adam says, “does your school always give new kids such an
un-warm welcome, or is it just me?”

“It’s hard to say. To be
honest, I can’t remember the last time we had a new kid in school. People don’t
really move to Wilder because...well, there’s not any reason to.”

“We
have a reason,” Adam says. “Dad got one of those special deals in medical
school where your tuition will be free if you’ll agree to come work in a rural
area for three years after you’ve finished your degree. And this is the rural
area.  Lucky me.”

When we get to the old
Jameson place, men on ladders are covering the faded, used-to-be white paint of
the house with a fresh coat of candy pink. “Mom wanted the house to be pink,”
Adam says. “Like my life here isn’t going to be hard enough. Say...you want to
come in and hang out for a while? We could play Nintendo or something.”