Free Spirits Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Julia Watts

  Beanpole Books

  P.O. Box 242

  Midway, Florida 32343

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover designer: Linda Callaghan

  ISBN-10: 0-9667359-2-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9667359-2-5

  Acknowledgments

  To the crew at Beanpole Books, especially the divine Katherine V. Forrest, and to the family and friends who put up with the fact that I’m often scatterbrained because my head’s full of stories…thank you.

  Chapter 1

  “How come it’s so green?” Granny asks after the waiter sets the bowl on our table.

  Mom, Granny and I are sitting in a red vinyl booth in El Mariachi, the first and only Mexican restaurant in our little town of Wilder, Kentucky. The restaurant’s just been open a month, but Mom and I already come here every chance we get.

  This is Granny’s first time here. Maybe because she gets tired of the children who scream “witch!” when they see her on the street, she doesn’t get out much.

  “It’s made of avocados,” Mom says. “They’re green.”

  “I’ve heard tell of them,” Granny says. “They used to call them alligator pears. Good for the complexion.” With a clawlike hand, she reaches her spoon toward the guacamole.

  “It’s a dip,” Mom says. “You eat it with chips, the same as the salsa.” Mom’s chunky silver bracelets jingle as she rakes a tortilla chip through the guacamole.

  For our dinner out, Mom and Granny and I fixed ourselves up in the way that’s normal for us. Mom and I are wearing our hippie-style skirts and peasant blouses with Mom’s black hair and my red hair flowing long and wild. Granny, as always, is wearing a long, plain black dress and black stockings even though it’s warm outside. Her steel gray hair is in a long, fat braid. In other words, what’s normal for us isn’t what’s normal in Wilder.

  But unlike in other places in town, here in the restaurant nobody stares at us, maybe because everybody else here is a recent immigrant from Mexico, so all Kentuckians look equally strange to them.

  Except for Mrs. McGillicuddy, the high school Spanish teacher, Wilder didn’t have any Spanish-speaking people until Masters’ Meats, the new meat processing plant, opened up just outside town. From what I can tell, Masters’ Meats takes hooves and snouts and guts and other unappetizing animal parts and squishes them and spices them until they turn into bologna and pickle loaf and all those other “lunch meats” I’m afraid to eat.

  When Masters’ Meats first came to town, they hired quite a few local folks. But since Wilder’s so small, they needed more workers. Soon Mexican families started moving in, and the little grocery store out by the plant started carrying Mexican sodas and churros next to the Pepsis and Moon Pies.

  The kids in these Mexican families all have to go to school in Wilder, and while I can’t speak for conditions at the elementary and high schools, I know that at Wilder Middle, the Mexican kids have it rough. The same kids who call me “the witch girl” and tease my friend Adam for being Asian absolutely hate the Mexican kids. It’s worse for them than it is for Adam and me, maybe because there are just two of us. There are twenty-two Mexican kids in the school now. Two weirdos like Adam and me just give the regular kids some cruel entertainment. But twenty-two brown-skinned kids speaking Spanish in the hallways is, to a lot of the regular kids’ narrow minds, a threat.

  “Hi, Miranda, I thought you might like some chips.” Isabella, whose dad owns El Mariachi, sets the basket on the table and smiles. Her cheeks are apple-round.

  “Well, look at you!” Granny says. “Your braid’s longer than mine is, and I’ve been growing mine my whole life. How old are you, honey? You don’t look old enough to be working.”

  “I’m in seventh grade with Miranda,” Isabella says. “I just help Papi here after school.” Isabella leans toward me. “Did you ask your abuela about that thing we talked about?”

  “She told me,” Granny says. “And I brung my things.”

  Isabella’s older (and very handsome) brother Javier arrives with our dinner. “Careful, señoritas,” he says. “The plates are muy caliente.”

  “Enjoy your meal,” Isabella says. “And Papi wanted me to tell you that because of your help, your dinner will be…” She pauses. “What is the American expression for when the owner of a place says you don’t have to pay for something?”

  “On the house?” Mom says.

  “That’s it,” Isabella says, and we all laugh because when you think about it, a lot of the sayings we have in English don’t make any real sense at all.

  Granny laughs some more after she takes her first bite of food. “Why, this ain’t nothing but pinto beans that’s been mashed up like taters. Here I was, all nervous about how different these things was gonna be, and they ain’t so different at all.”

  After we’re finished, Isabella comes to the table and asks, “Are you ready to do the uh…thing?”

  “I’m ready,” Granny says. “I reckon we ort to do it ’round back, though. We don’t want nobody bleeding where there’s food around.”

  “Okay,” Isabella says. “I’ll go get him, and we’ll meet you around back.”

  Granny and Mom and I stand behind the restaurant, near the dumpster, like we’re waiting to rob the place.

  Finally Isabella comes outside with a skinny young man in a white apron.“This is Paolo,” she says.“He doesn’t speak English.” She turns to Paolo and speaks to him in Spanish. I make out “abuela” and something that sounds like “brew ha.”

  The young man smiles shyly under his thin black mustache and holds out his hand to Granny. On the base of his thumb is a big, ugly wart.

  “Well, look at that,” Granny says, taking his hand and examining it. “It’s a bad one, ain’t it? But don’t you worry none. I’ll get you fixed right up.”

  Paolo smiles again and nods. He may not know what Granny is saying, but her tone is comforting.

  Granny reaches into her black bag and takes out a packet of needles and a box of matches. She chooses a needle, strikes a match, and runs the needle through the flame. She looks at Isabella. “Tell him to hold still,” she says.

  Isabella speaks to Paolo, and then Granny pokes the hot needle straight into the wart, drawing up a bright red bead of blood. Paolo winces, but he doesn’t move.

  “Now,” she says. She reaches into her bag again and pulls out a jelly jar. The jar looks empty at first, but as she opens it, I see it contains a single kernel of cracked corn. She takes out the corn and smears it with the blood, then drops the kernel back into the jar. “I’ll feed this corn to a red rooster, and in three days’ time that wart’ll be gone.” She looks at Isabella. “Tell him.”

  Isabella gives Paolo what seems like a really long explanation. The only word of it I recognize is “pollo.” Paolo smiles at Granny and says, “Gracias, señora.”

  Granny gives him a little pat on the shoulder. “The same to you, honey. And them beans you cooked was real good.”

  Once we said our goodbyes and got in the car, Granny says, “Lord, the pain that boy’s been through! When I touched his hand, the force of it just about knocked me backward. Some man—it could’ve been his daddy, I reckon—got shot dead right in front of him. And then the way he got to this country…he was hiding in a truckload of watermelons. He was black and blue from them banging against him. It’s queer, though, Sarah,” Granny says to my mom, “using the sight with somebody that don’t speak English. You can make out pictures of things they’ve seen or things that happened to them, but
you can’t understand what they’re thinking.”

  In any other family, Granny’s words would’ve been reason enough to take her to a psychiatrist. But what people are thinking, because we know it, not because we guess it, is a normal topic in our house. Like all the women in my family, Granny and Mom and I have the Sight, the ability to see into other people’s minds.

  The Sight grows stronger with age, so Granny’s the most powerful of the three of us. Mom’s powers are plenty strong, too, which is why in her job as a social worker people always praise her for being so understanding. These same people might be terrified if they knew how much Mom really understands.

  And while my powers are the weakest, they still feel like more than I can handle sometimes. I’ve never believed that saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Who hasn’t been hurt by words at one time or another? But the thing about me is that people don’t have to say something out loud to hurt me. I can see what they’re thinking, even when I don’t want to. This is also how I know a lot of kids at school hate the Mexicans. When I look inside their minds I see the hate, and even though it’s not aimed at me, I still feel it shoot through me like poison.

  Mom and Granny are always reminding me that the Sight is a gift, and that I should think of other people’s thoughts like a gift. I can look right through the attractive packaging and see what’s really there. But just like real gifts, some people’s thoughts are disappointing or ugly. Sometimes I don’t want to know what’s inside.

  Chapter 2

  I’m stretched out on my bed, finishing the last line of my homework when I hear the unmistakable scratching on my closet door.

  “Come in!” I call.

  The knob turns, and Abigail swings open the closet door. As always, her hair is in perfect blond ringlets, and she’s wearing a light blue drop-waisted dress: the dress she was buried in. “Is it time?” she asks.

  I look at the antique clock on the mantel. Ten till nine. “Almost,” I say.

  Abigail flounces out of the closet. “Oh, good,” she says, climbing up on my canopy bed to sit beside me. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day. Have you ever noticed that when you’re looking forward to something it seems like an eternity for time to pass? And I know all about eternity.”

  Abigail is one of my two best (really, my two only) friends. The only unusual thing about her is that she’s been dead for more than a hundred years.

  For women in my family, one of the symptoms of the Sight is the ability to see and talk with ghosts. When Granny was little, she was friends with a little Cherokee boy who taught her how to crush and mix plants into healing herbs and potions.

  When Mom was a girl, Abigail was her ghost companion, too. But unfortunately, once a girl in my family hits puberty she loses her ghost-seeing gift. I know one day I’ll lose Abigail, just like my mom lost her before me. I treasure Abigail the same way I treasure the short season of spring, knowing it’s too nice to last.

  In addition to being invisible to everybody except me, Abigail is unable to leave my room, which was her room back when she was a living girl. I try to bring as much of the world to her as I can. We’ve always liked listening to the radio, but what’s really been exciting is that Mom finally broke down and bought me a TV for my twelfth birthday. I know it’s weird we didn’t have one before, but Mom and Granny have a lot of ideas about how electronic gadgets have made it so people don’t really spend time with each other anymore. Abigail has no patience with Mom and Granny on this topic. “Just because they live in a Victorian house,” she says, “they don’t have to live as though it’s the Victorian era.”

  Abigail loves to watch TV with me. We’re both totally obsessed with this show called Who Wants to Be a Pop Star?

  “May I turn it on?” Abigail asks. She loves to play with the remote control.

  “Sure.”

  She picks up the remote control and aims it. To anyone but me, it would look like the remote was just floating in empty space.

  We watch a commercial for some kind of hair removal cream. Smiling young women strut around in bikinis and short shorts, showing off their smooth legs. Abigail giggles. “Look at all that bare flesh! When I was alive we weren’t even allowed to say leg, much less show one. I remember once I fell down and called to my mother, ‘I believe I have injured a limb.’ Even in pain, I knew not to say ‘leg.’”

  I laugh. “Limb? Like you were a tree?”

  Abigail fluffs a pillow on my bed and leans back. “I suppose people were more comfortable talking about trees than they were talking about flesh.” She shakes her head. “Which is a shame. Living flesh is nice. I miss having it.”

  Our conversation ends when Who Wants to Be a Pop Star? begins. The show has three judges: a mean British man, a nice but ditzy American woman, and an American man who, much to Abigail’s confusion, calls all the male contestants “dog.” Tonight on the show a skinny brown-haired woman is trying to sing a hard song with lots of high notes, but she’s not singing so much as bleating. She sounds exactly like one of Granny’s goats birthing a kid.

  Abigail hits the “mute” button. “How can a person be so unaware of such a simple fact about herself? This woman not knowing she can’t sing would be the equivalent of me not knowing I’m dead.”

  I laugh. “And the terrible singers always say the same thing: ‘My friends tell me I’m a great singer.’”

  Abigail laughs, too. “They do, don’t they? It makes you want to say are you sure these are your friends telling you this, or are they enemies who are plotting your public humiliation?”

  After the show’s off, I ask Abigail to hand over the remote. She’d stay all night and watch TV if I let her. Ghosts don’t have to sleep. But I do, especially since Granny expects me to do an hour’s worth of chores before breakfast and school. I switch off the TV and tell Abigail goodnight. She kisses my cheek, which feels like a soft puff of cold air, and is gone.

  I get up with the chickens. Or maybe it would be better to say I get up for the chickens. It’s my job to scatter the morning feed and refill the water and gather the eggs from all the laying hens. Granny names all the layers after women in the Bible— Delilah, Ruth, Naomi, Jezebel. The stuck-up little rooster who struts up for me to greet him every morning is Samson. The other chickens—the ones we’ll end up eating fried or stewed with dumplings—Granny names after the wives of Henry the Eighth since sooner or later, their heads will end up on the chopping block.

  After I feed the chickens, Granny feeds me fresh eggs and fresh goat’s milk and hot biscuits. I brush my teeth and wash my face and change out of my work clothes and into my school clothes. By the time I meet Adam on the sidewalk outside my house, I’ve been up for more than two hours.

  Adam’s eyes are still puffy from sleep. His Hawaiian print shirt is buttoned wrong, and one of his Converse high-tops is untied. “And how long have you been up?” I ask.

  “A while,” he says. “Like, fifteen minutes or so.” He takes a bite of the cereal bar that’s his last-minute attempt at breakfast.

  “I’ve been up two and a half hours,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t live on Old MacDonald’s farm, so I can sleep in,” Adam retorts as we fall into step on our way to school.

  Adam So and his family moved to Wilder from Louisville last year. It was quite an adjustment for Adam, moving from the biggest city in Kentucky, which was full of skate parks and movie theatres and stores where he could buy horror movies and comic books, to Wilder, which only has one drugstore, one grocery store and one dollar store. And now Wilder has one Asian kid: Adam.

  It didn’t help matters that the Victorian house the Sos bought not far from ours also happened to be haunted, but by creepy ghosts, not by a friendly one like Abigail.The Sos’ problem finally stopped after Adam and Abigail and I put our heads together and figured out what the ghost wanted: to clear the name of a young man who had been wrongly accused of murder over seventy years ago. Solving this a
ntique murder case got us quite a bit of attention. Adam and I were on the front page of The Wilder Herald and in a short article in the Lexington paper. One of the Lexington TV stations even came to Wilder and did a news story on us.

  None of the reporters got the full story, though. We didn’t tell them about the ghostly goings-on in Adam’s house or about how we talked to dead people. And we couldn’t give credit to the third member of our team, what with her being dead and all. That’s the part that really made me feel bad. It’s a shame that nobody but me can see Abigail. Of the three of us, she would’ve gotten the biggest thrill out of being on TV.

  What made Adam and me small-time heroes in the newspapers only made us bigger freaks in school. Now that we had attracted some positive attention, kids felt like they had to make up for it with the opposite kind. And so I’ve been called the Witch Girl even more than I used to be, and I don’t even want to repeat what Adam’s been called, but he has to hear a lot of idiotic jokes about fortune cookies and chow mein.

  “I’m Korean, not Chinese,” he always tells his tormentors. One time when he was particularly worn out, he said to obnoxious Cody Taylor, “Look, if you want to be a racist, be a racist. But at least know which group you’re being racist against.”

  Later Adam said to me, “Maybe the school should sponsor a special racial insensitivity class, so these morons will at least know what slurs to use against what group.”

  Adam and I have sat through social studies and science and have suffered through PE where we have to separate by gender. It used to be that without fail I’d be picked last for a team in the girls’ class, and Adam would be picked last in the boys’ class. Since the Mexican kids moved here, though, I sometimes get picked before the Mexican girls. Adam says he sometimes gets picked before the Mexican boys and sometimes not, depending on who’s doing the picking. When he does get picked before the Mexican kids, he says he figures the only reason is because English is his first language.