The Spirit Keeper (4 page)

It wasn’t until we started walking again that I remembered I’d been meaning to tell her something all day. I smacked the heel of my palm against my forehead.

“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you,” I said. “I saw your mom on TV last night.”

Priscilla’s brow arched, and she puckered her lips as though she’d sucked a sour lemon. “Let’s see, would this be the commercial for the yogurt that makes your poop regular, or the ad for the feminine hygiene products? Her career has simply skyrocketed, and I can hardly keep up with her rise to fame.”

The sarcastic bitterness in her voice made me hesitate to go on. “Uh, neither, actually. It was a commercial for . . .” I stopped mid-sentence, feeling pretty certain I should have kept my mouth shut, after all. “Just forget about it.”  

She grabbed my arm. “Oh, no. You can’t do that. You can’t tell someone to forget something and then expect them to do it. Tell me now, or I’ll have to force it out of you.”

I snorted. “I’d like to see you try.”

Priscilla squeezed my arm. “Then you’re not as smart as I thought you were, Miss Braniac. Prepare to die on three, two—”

I squirmed, not because I believed Priscilla would do me actual bodily harm, but because I realized I wasn’t going to win this argument. “Okay, fine. It was a commercial for, um, a certain major theme park in Florida.”

Priscilla froze on the sidewalk, her body gone rigid. She was breathing heavily through her nose. “And does this
certain major theme
park
happen to have a mouse as its mascot?”

“Perhaps,” I said a little warily, tugging my arm free and deliberately taking a step back in case her head exploded.

She closed her eyes, and I saw her lips moving as she silently counted to five before trusting herself to speak again. “And?”

“And that’s it.”

Judging by her obvious restraint, I thought it best to leave out the bit about Priscilla’s mom being cast in the role of happy wife and mother to two adorable children. But I’m sure she was already imagining that part, even without my help.

Priscilla opened her eyes and began walking again, her back straight and shoulders square. Nevertheless, her voice wavered when she spoke. “That was
my
dream vacation.”

I regretted saying anything and wished I had a nail handy to hammer into my eyeball. I decided that if Priscilla wanted to talk about her mother—the mother who’d run off to Los Angeles eight years ago to become a movie star—I’d wait for her to bring it up. It turned out I didn’t have to wait long.

“She still hasn’t called to wish me a happy birthday, you know.” 

“But that was over a month ago!”

Priscilla shrugged. “I was bummed when she stopped sending presents a few years back, but at least she still sent cards. This year she didn’t even bother. She didn’t even pick up the phone to call me. I mean, what kind of a mother forgets her kid’s birthday?”

“Maybe it just got lost in the mail,” I said.

My mother would never have forgotten my birthday; of that, I was positive. When she was still alive, she made my birthday seem like the most important day of the year. I had this awful lump in my throat remembering parties past, and I swallowed hard to force it down. There were some days I didn’t even think of my mom, and there were others when I really missed her.

“Why didn’t you tell me she forgot?” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“What’s the use of complaining?” Priscilla said. “It doesn’t change anything. It’s who she is. You know, sometimes I think she ran off to LA just to get away from me. It’s like she was tired of being a mom and didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I said. Priscilla shrugged her shoulders in response, like she didn’t really believe me. “At least you have a cool dad to make up for it, right?” I added helpfully.

She gave me one of her patented you’ve-got-to-be-kidding looks. “I wouldn’t know. He’s never around.”

My insides felt twisted in knots and like they were slowly dissolving in acid. It was Friday; the start of the weekend. We were supposed to be making plans and having fun, not moping around about stuff we couldn’t change.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said.

“Good idea.”  

Of all the best friends I could have ended up with, I was lucky to end up with Priscilla. She understood exactly what growing up without a mom and dad was like. Priscilla’s mom was out of the picture, and her dad was almost always away on business. She’d practically raised herself, minus supervision from one or another in the long line of live-in nannies. Laura Beth had stuck around the longest, if only because she didn’t put up with any of Priscilla’s crap.

I felt sort of bad for Priscilla, in some ways. Even though I didn’t have parents, I had Meg and David. My aunt and uncle had done a pretty decent job of stepping in to fill the parental roles, and I was happy living with them. I mean, they were a little neurotic at times, but that was totally understandable, considering the accident and—

Priscilla elbowed me in the side, jarring me back to the present. “Hey, look at that.”

I followed Priscilla’s gaze to the U-Haul parked at the curb a few houses down, directly across the street from my house. “Oh yeah,” I said. “They showed up last night.”

“Who’s
they
?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t seen them yet. Only the U-Haul.”

We stopped walking as soon as we got to my house and stood staring at the Colonial across the street. Someone was obviously home now. Aside from the U-Haul at the curb, there was a black Toyota, rusted out around the edges, and a vintage powder-blue VW Beetle, parked in the driveway.

“Now
that
is a cool car,” Priscilla said.

“Do you see anyone?” I asked, letting my eyes wander over the house and open garage.

Priscilla craned her neck as if that would help her get a better view. “Nope. Let’s be neighborly and go ring the bell.”

I gave her an incredulous look. “Are you insane? I’d rather just wave from a distance and never learn their names.”

Priscilla rolled her eyes. “But the
Bug
. It’s awesome! Whoever drives it has
got
to be cool. I bet you anything you’ve just hit the neighbor jackpot.”

She gasped then and thwacked me in the chest with her arm. “Omigod! I bet it’s that new kid, Adrian. It has to be, right? You have a new neighbor. There’s a new kid at school. It’s too much of a coincidence not to be him.”

I shook my head but secretly wondered at the possibility. Having Adrian as a neighbor wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. “Whatever,” I said. “Come on. I’m starving.” 

 I unlatched the gate and swung it inward on the front lawn, which had been painstakingly turned into a quarter-acre garden space. To say that Meg had a green thumb was a major understatement.   

Our house sat far back on a large lot, with the garden our primary view from the front window. Acres of preserved field and forest ran the perimeter behind. The house itself was cordoned off from surrounding homes by a tall privacy fence—not that we ever had much privacy. The property had been zoned so that Meg and David could run a modest, but thriving, greenhouse business on site out back. Meg also made and sold herbal tinctures and other voodoo stuff the neighbors couldn’t seem to get enough of.

As if my thoughts had summoned her, Meg rounded the corner of the house holding a wicker basket in one hand and a pair of pruning shears in the other. Her dark hair swirled around her head, and the sun glinted off her bronze-colored skin. She looked like she should be in a shampoo commercial or one of those Neutrogena ads for clear, perfect skin.  

“So detention, huh?” she said when she noticed us. She took the straw hat tucked under her arm and plonked it on her head, meeting us halfway along the pebble path.

“I got my homework done at least. Do you need any help out back?” I added quickly, to discourage her from any thoughts of a lecture. She narrowed her eyes, obviously on to me, but didn’t say anything more about the detention.

“David’s got it under control,” she said. “Business is winding down for the day, anyway, so don’t worry about it.” She lifted her head slightly, looking up at Priscilla from under the wide brim of her hat. “And how are you?”  

“I hear I’ve been abandoned on your doorstep for the night like an orphaned infant,” Priscilla said.

Meg laughed and reached out to rub Priscilla’s arm in a consoling gesture. “Laura Beth dropped off your things earlier today. Apparently there was an emergency at the lab, and she got called in. She didn’t think she would be home until late.”

The underlying message was that Laura Beth didn’t trust Priscilla to stay home alone for too long. Priscilla with too much unsupervised time on her hands usually resulted in one disaster or another.

“So can you two keep yourselves occupied until dinner?” Meg said. “I’ve got a few things to take care of before I call it a day.”

“I’m sure we can handle that,” I said.

We left Meg and took off for the house, ditching our bags just inside the doorway. Then we made a bee-line for the kitchen to grab a quick snack before zooming out again through the back door. David was busy with a few lingering customers, but he waved to us as we hurried past. Priscilla mumbled something about him being “so freaking hot,” which earned her a punch in the arm from me.

“That’s my uncle you’re talking about, in case you forgot.” 

“
Pshaw
. He’s what, twenty-five? He’s more like the big brother you never had,” Priscilla said. “I’m allowed to crush.”

I shuddered at the thought of my best friend having more than platonic feelings for my uncle. Quite frankly, I didn’t understand the appeal. He was annoying, even on his good days.

“Race you!” Priscilla said.

She shot ahead down the narrow footpath, out into the open field and to the boundary of the woods beyond, her flaming hair billowing behind her like the mane of a wild horse. I reached up to unfurl the knot at the nape of my neck, letting my long hair trail down my back as I took off after her. The wind picked up just then, whipping my hair into frenzy, and I was certain that if I could run any faster, I might as well be flying.

The air hung heavy with moisture and the sweet scent of honeysuckle, and the sun bore down hard on us as it half-heartedly contemplated its descent into early evening. I gained the lead in our frenzied race and led us to the creek that cut the forest into northern and southern hemispheres. I often went there just to think and to be alone, but it had been Priscilla’s and my “secret” getaway for as long as we’d been friends.

We stripped to our underwear and hurled ourselves into the cold, shallow waters of the stream. Tiny minnows and crayfish fled our splashing feet to seek shelter in calmer waters, only to be disrupted again by our vain attempts to catch them in our cupped hands. We soon grew bored with that activity, though, and took to floating on our backs, holding fast to the bedrock while letting the current buoy our legs in front of us.

“I so can’t wait until school is out for the summer,” Priscilla said, her voice slow and dreamy-sounding.

“You said it.” I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sky. The skin on my exposed body parts was covered in goosebumps, and the sun felt pleasantly warm against it.

For a while we floated without saying much of anything at all. The wind rustling through the trees, along with the near-constant birdsong, was the only sound to break the comfortable silence between us. My attention drifted along with the current, until at last it came to rest on the tree tops overhead. The sunshine filtering down from above seemed to set their leaves on fire.

And thinking of fire, I found myself all at once lost in a memory.