A Perfect Storm (2 page)

I was the only other kid-aged person who knew about his powers, and I had promised him I wouldn't tell anyone.

Over the summer, he and I had been locked in a closet together by Henry, the ghost of a mischievous little boy who lives in my house and loves to cause problems. Mason has asthma and needed his inhaler really badly, so I had started talking to Henry to try and convince him to let us out. When that didn't work, Mason used his powers to open the door. It was the first time I had ever told someone who wasn't an adult about my powers, and the first time Mason had ever told
anyone
about his. It's not like we would have told each other if we hadn't been in that emergency situation together, but I was kind of glad it happened.
Glad he knew. We were friends now. I just wasn't sure if he thought of me as more than a friend.

We'd just finished collecting all the spoons, and Lily was pushing the container across the counter to Dawn Marie, when the bell on the door tinkled again.

Three girls walked in, girls I'd never seen before.

The tall one in the middle really stood out. She was really pretty. She was dressed like a model—well, that is to say, those pictures in fashion magazines showing models snapped without makeup, their hair casually caught up in a perfectly sloppy bun. I don't know much about fashion—that's Lily's area of expertise—but even I could tell that her outfit was amazing.

“Oh! Hey, Jody!” called Lily.

The tall girl flashed a million-dollar smile, as my dad would describe it. I guessed this was the Jody from dance class that Miranda had mentioned.

“Sorry we're late,” said Jody, looking directly at Mason. “Hope you haven't been too bored waiting for us.”

Mason glanced quickly at me, then shrugged. “Nah, it's cool,” he said.

Before I could decide how jealous I should be feeling, Jody took Mason by the sleeve of his sweatshirt
and Calvin by the sleeve of
his
sweatshirt, and pulled the two of them toward a booth in a far corner, away from ours. Her two friends followed in their wake.

“Good to see you again, Lila,” she said over her shoulder as the five of them smushed into a too-small-for-five-people booth.

“It's Lily,” Lily called back. Then she shrugged. “I should be getting home.”

“Me too,” we all agreed. We returned to our booth to collect our stuff.

We were barely out the door when Lily blurted out what she'd obviously been dying to know.

“So is Jody going out with Calvin?” she asked Miranda.

I was all ears. I wanted to know what the deal was between Jody and Mason.

As usual, Miranda seemed to be a fountain of information.

“Nope, she's not going out with either of those guys,” she said. “I heard from Ellie Kramer, who also goes to Harbor Isle, that Jody's dating a high school freshman.”

We all digested this information. Still. Mason and
Calvin had obviously planned to meet Jody and her friends. It wasn't an accidental encounter.

“And also I heard that her dad is a famous, like,
really
famous, television director. And her mom used to be a model. But nowadays she's a photographer, a
famous
one, and her photos have been in galleries and stuff.”

I thought about how cool it would be to have a mother who was a famous photographer. My own mother had been a really good photographer, and I had inherited her love for it too. But she'd died having me, so I never knew her. I wondered, if she'd lived, whether she'd be famous like Jody's mom. Her pictures were amazing. I bet she would have been.

When I got home, my dad was still at work, and Lady Azura was in a session with a client.
She'd been written about in the newspaper earlier this year, and the news services had picked up the story, so her business had really taken off. I was happy for her. I knew that all the extra money was a good thing, but more importantly, it made her feel good to have a lot of clients. To be helping so many people. But it meant that our afternoons together were less and less regular. She'd been
helping me with my powers, teaching me how to deal with different situations and passing on all the wisdom she had from eighty some odd years of dealing with being able to see spirits. I missed getting to spend a lot of time together.

My dad came home soon after I did. As a special treat, he brought home takeout from Thai Taste, my favorite Thai restaurant, and we had a delicious dinner together. I had to do a ton of homework, so I didn't get to bed until after eleven.

I fell asleep quickly and then had the strangest dream.

In my dream, I rose from bed, wearing the actual nightshirt I'd worn to bed in real life—an old T-shirt of my dad's. I walked out of my room, down the hall, and into a room I rarely went into during the daytime. It was the hexagonal-shaped room with pale blue walls. The room that was usually occupied by the spirit of the man in the sailor hat, the one I had seen outside Scoops.

In my dream, it was dark and shadowy, but still daytime, the way it might be in the late afternoon on a drizzly fall day. An old-fashioned clock under a glass dome sat on the mantelpiece, ticking loudly. At first I
thought I was alone in the room. And then I saw that there was someone sitting at the writing desk over near the window. A girl. A girl with long blond hair. She was bent over, writing. Not on a computer, though. She was writing with a pen, in a small book that looked like a journal. She didn't look up. I moved closer to her. She was writing so intently a strand of hair had fallen across one eye. Maybe she hadn't seen me.

I cleared my throat. Did it again.

She looked up, startled. As her hair fell away from her face, I saw that it was me. Me, except with longer hair. But I only looked at myself for a split second, because then I woke up with a start.

It was the middle of the night, and the room was freezing. That, too, was weird, because when I'd gone to bed it had been nice and warm in my room. Now, though, it felt icy cold.

I turned on the light next to my bed. The clock said 3:38. I'd kicked the coverlet off the bed entirely. It lay in a heap on the floor. I pulled it back up and around myself, turned out the light, and went back to sleep.

The next afternoon, Friday at last, Lily and I met after classes were over to walk home. We did this most afternoons. But today we were extra excited because Lily was sleeping over. I used to avoid having Lily over for sleepovers because of all the issues that came with living in a haunted house and trying to hide from your best friend that you could see spirits. But now that Lily knew about my powers—I had told her over the summer—I didn't have to try and hide anything from her.

It was three thirty in the afternoon, the sun still shining, the shadows lengthening. But there was something strange about the light. The sky was a weird, greenish color, and everything seemed sort of backlit, with an eerie glimmer. The day was still warm for the season, but since we'd walked to school that morning, a wind had sprung up. Dry leaves skittered and swirled
around us, whipping our hair around our faces.

As usual, Lily had more energy than a normal walking pace could accommodate. She bounced along next to me. Then danced a few steps ahead and spun around to talk to me while walking backward. Then broke into a skip.

Lily never just walked. She was high energy. High enthusiasm. Just fun-loving and extroverted. A good contrast to my shy, avoid-attention, introverted self. We were opposites in so many ways, but we were alike in all the important ways.

“So guess what I brought for the sleepover?” she asked me, her dark eyes shining.

“Stuff to make s'mores?” I guessed.

“Nope. Better.”

“A movie we can watch?”

“Nope. I better tell you, because you'll never guess.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

She spun around again and faced me, skipping backward without either of us having to lose a step.

“A spirit board!” she whispered.

I blinked at her. “A spirit board,” I repeated. I knew what one was, of course. One of those board games
where you ask a question and then move the pointer and hope a spirit answers yes or no. Or spells out a word to answer it. I'd never actually used one before. Given that Lily knew I had way more than my share of success in communicating with those from the Great Beyond, I felt perplexed by her. Why would she think I'd want to play with a game that supposedly conjured spirits, when I was already surrounded by them?

“Huh. Well, that's nice,” I said weakly, because she seemed to expect me to say something. “That explains why you brought such a lumpy overnight bag, I guess.”

Her face fell. “You don't like the idea?”

“Well, um, it's not that I don't like the idea,” I said. “It's just that, well, it's like suggesting to a mailman that he go for a nice, long walk on his day off.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Come on, Sara. It's time you started looking at your powers as something fun, rather than a burden. What if we conjure up Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? They could give us dancing lessons!”

Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “Come with me to Elber's. My dad gave me money for groceries. You have to help me think of what to make for dinner tonight.”

Shopping at Elber's helped distract Lily from the spirit
board idea. We found some baby artichokes and decided to make pasta with them, even though neither of us had ever cooked with fresh artichokes before.

As we stood in line to buy our stuff, Lily texted her mother and asked her how we should prepare them. Mrs. Randazzo can do anything when it comes to food. She's an amazing cook.

Mrs. Randazzo texted Lily back about thirty seconds later with detailed instructions, so Lily had time to run back for lemons and parsley before I'd even finished putting the other stuff on the belt.

When we got to my house, a car was parked out front. That meant Lady Azura had a client. We walked around to the side door leading into the kitchen, so we wouldn't disturb her session.

Soon we had the artichokes cleaned, cut into quarters, and simmering in a saucepan with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, and garlic. I chopped parsley while Lily demonstrated ballet moves for me.

“This is called a
fondu
combination with a
relevé
,” she said, standing with one arm extended to the counter edge and the other curled in an arch over her head.

I had no clue what she was talking about, but she
looked so graceful, even getting up on tippy-toes with her beat-up sneakers.

“Lovely, Lily!” said Lady Azura. She'd entered the kitchen behind us.

Lily twirled across the kitchen and gave her a hug. You'd think they hadn't seen each other in months. I loved that my best friend and my great-grandmother got along so well, though. Lily was Lady Azura's most devoted follower.

“It smells divine,” said Lady Azura, moving toward the stove. She lifted the lid on the artichokes, and a cloud of steam rose up, bathing the kitchen in more delicious aromas.

I grinned. “We've called Mrs. Randazzo four times for advice,” I said. “Otherwise we would never have thought to pull off the outer leaves and cut the pointy top part away.”

“Guess what I brought over, Lady Azura!” said Lily. “A spirit board!” She supplied the answer without waiting for Lady Azura to guess. “But Sara doesn't want to do it.” Lily shot me an exasperated look.

I moved to the sink to fill a large pot with water for the pasta. “It's not that,” I said. “It's just that I already have
a lot of spirits in my life. I don't need any more.”

The truth was, while I was relieved that Lily knew about my powers now, and that we could talk about them openly, I just wasn't all that comfortable conjuring up random spirits with my best friend. Spirits were like people, and sometimes they turned out to be really different than you expected. It wasn't something I liked to mess around with. “If you want to meet a spirit, I am more than happy to introduce you to Henry on the third floor. He is, after all, a distant relative of yours.”

Henry definitely liked to wreak havoc, as I mentioned before, but he was also pretty cute when he was sitting still and not causing problems. Last fall, when I was just getting to know Lily, she was up in my crafts room with me, and Henry had escaped from his closet. He'd seemed to be drawn to Lily and acted up more than usual when she was around. When I told Lady Azura, she mentioned that Henry was a distant relative of Lily's, and that explained why he'd been drawn to her. It seemed like a fun idea to have them meet. I'd told Lily about him, of course, since telling her about my powers and the spirits that lived in my house. But so far I had not tried to initiate an introduction. Most likely she wouldn't be
able to actually
see
him, but it was easy enough to see the chaos he was capable of causing. It might actually be fun.

Lily shook her head. “I want to meet an
exciting
spirit,” she said, “not a little kid who has to spend eternity in a supply closet. I want someone who was famous, or in show biz somehow!”

“Henry
is
exciting,” I persisted. “Remember how he almost knocked a bookcase over on Jayden at the Halloween party last year?”

I looked to Lady Azura for backup. I was positive she would react with the same lack of enthusiasm I felt. But instead I saw a smile spread across her face. “Delightful idea!” she said.

Lily shot me an
Aha!
look.

“Spirit boards can sometimes be useful conduits to tapping into the spirit realm, so long as they are used responsibly,” she said.

“See, Sara? I told you she'd be psyched about it!” taunted Lily. “Even though I am not completely sure what a conduit is,” she admitted.

“However—”

Oh, good,
I thought. Lady Azura had added a “however.”