Sisterland (8 page)

Marisa shook her head. “Barely.” Twelve days later, she called to invite me to her birthday party.

As I discovered,
a hot tub was the least of the Mazarelli family’s treasures. A vast, lushly carpeted basement rec room also contained an enormous television set opposite a three-sided brown leather sectional sofa, ping-pong and pool tables, a player piano, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a gumball machine, and a dartboard whose bull’s-eye was the tomato icon of Mazarelli’s Pizza. Fourteen guests including me were in attendance, and the slumber party started with a pre-dinner staking out of sleeping bag locations (I hadn’t expected to land the prime real estate near Marisa herself and therefore wasn’t troubled that I didn’t) and proceeded with Mazarelli’s pizza for dinner, the boxes carried out with a kind of showy fake humility by Marisa’s father; a sundae bar set up along the Mazarellis’ dining room table; the ceremonial unwrapping of presents; a ten-
P.M
. dip in the hot tub, which entailed much shrieking and the revelation that Marisa wore a yellow string bikini; a post-hot-tub viewing of
The Exorcist
(I spent large chunks of it with my eyes closed, reconstructing in my mind the plot of the first
Back to the Future
); and finally the time at which some girls started falling asleep just as others caught their second wind. There was talk of prank-calling boys, but instead Marisa brought down from the living room the Ouija board she’d been given a few hours before by Abby Balmer.

I was on my way to my sleeping bag after using the bathroom adjacent to Marisa’s bedroom—of course Marisa had her own bathroom—when I paused by a handful of girls who’d clustered around the Ouija board. They sat on the floor next to the pool table, and soon I found myself sitting, too. Marisa was cross-legged on one side of the board and Abby was on the other, their fingertips not quite meeting on the planchette, which was made of plastic and shaped like an upside-down heart with a circular window near the top. I didn’t know what question they’d asked before my arrival, but I watched as the planchette slid over the letters O-N, followed by a chorus of squeals. Although I’d heard of Ouija boards, I’d never seen one. But I knew immediately that they were using it wrong—they were forcing the letters, picking them, instead of allowing the letters to be picked.

“Ask it Jason Davis or Jason Trachsel,” said a girl named Beth Wheatley, and Marisa gave her a withering look.

“Obviously, it’s Jason Trachsel,” she said.
Who likes me?
That must have been the question Marisa had asked the board. Jason Trachsel was the agreed-upon best-looking boy in our class—his mom was Korean and his dad was white, which meant he was the only Asian person in the eighth grade, and he was already expected to make the varsity soccer team the following year as a freshman at Kirkwood High School—while Jason Davis was a quiet boy with a center part. “Does he want to kiss me?” Marisa asked.

At the top of the board, flanked by a menacing sun and a gloomy moon, and separated from each other by a skeleton head with wings and devil horns, were the words
yes
and
no
. As we waited,
yes
appeared beneath the planchette’s window in Gothic script.

“Does he want to go all the way with me?” Marisa asked.

Yes
.

She glanced around at us and said merrily, “Not that I would.”

“Does he have wet dreams about Marisa?” cried out Debby Geegan. Neither of my parents had ever initiated a birds-and-bees conversation with Vi and me, and Debby was the person who in fourth grade had explained to us the meaning of the line “They keep their boyfriends warm at night” from the song “California Girls.”

Yes
, the board told us, and all the girls exclaimed with disgust and delight. But I wasn’t caught up in the excitement. I felt distracted by whatever it was—the energy—that had been summoned by the Ouija board; the girls had invited the energy in, and their invitation had been accepted.

“When will he try to kiss me?” Marisa asked.

V-E-D-R-Y, the board spelled out. As Marisa and Abby’s hands kept moving, Beth Wheatley said, “Does that mean Wednesday?”

“Shh!” Marisa said.

S-O-O-N.

“Oh,” Beth said. “It just misspelled it.”

“Beth.” Marisa had lifted her head to look at Beth directly. “Shut up.” Beside me, I felt Beth flinch.

“Ask if anyone likes me,” said Debby.

“Nobody cares if anyone likes you,” Marisa said. She smiled. “Who
here tonight will be the first person to die?” As the other girls gasped, I did it without deciding—my hand shot out, stilling the planchette.

“No,” I said. “Don’t.”

“Because you think it’s you?” Marisa said.

It wasn’t me. It was Brynn Zansmyer, who at that moment lay on the far side of the rec room in her sleeping bag. She wouldn’t die immediately, but it wouldn’t be in such a long time, either. The energy, the presence, told me this without using words.

“Because it’s sad,” I said. Marisa and Abby wouldn’t have come up with Brynn’s name except by coincidence. That was the irony, that they believed they wanted to know the answers to their questions, but they weren’t listening.

“Fine,” Marisa said. “Then how about this: Is it true that Violet Shramm gave Mike Dornheiss a blow job behind the cafeteria?”

Right away, and not because of the presence, I knew.
But a blow job?
I thought.
An actual blow job? And Mike Dornheiss?
Mike was pale and red-haired and freckly and on the seventh-grade field trip to the Daniel Boone Home in Defiance, Missouri, on the bus ride out, he had been sitting across the aisle from Vi and me and had lifted his backpack from the floor by his feet, unzipped it, vomited inside, then zipped it up. And besides all that, why hadn’t Vi told me? I was myself completely sexually inexperienced, which had the effect of causing me to withhold judgment—a blow job wasn’t much more foreign or hypothetical than a kiss.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“Me, too.” Beth stood as I did, and Marisa said, “You guys are lame.”

I had made a mistake in sitting down by the Ouija board, but my bigger mistake had been attending the slumber party in the first place. Marisa was, as Vi had warned me, a rich bitch, though mostly just a bitch. Standing in the rec room, at what had somehow become almost four in the morning, I wished I were at home and that I’d spent the evening lying on our living room floor with Vi, watching Rob Lowe bite into an apple. Gesturing toward the board, I said, “You should be careful with that.”

“You’re scared of it, aren’t you?” Marisa said.

“Ask if I should quit violin,” Debby said.

Marisa looked at me. “You are scared. Your sister is a penis licker and you’re a scaredy-cat.”

“Here’s a question,” I said. “Is Marisa’s dad having an affair?” As in the moment when I’d set my hand on the planchette, it didn’t feel like I’d decided to blurt this out before doing so.

Very quickly, Marisa overturned the entire board. “Fuck you, Daisy,” she said. She seemed to be biting back tears, which I had never seen her do and which made me feel panicked rather than triumphant. Then she said, “Fuck all of you.” She stood, whirled around, and stomped up the basement stairs, leaving us hostessless.

Beth, Abby, Debby,
and I hardly spoke after Marisa’s departure; we retreated to our sleeping bags, but none of us had shut off the rec room lights, and I could feel their brightness when I closed my eyes. I lay there for more than an hour, listening to the breathing of the girls around me, wanting to undo this last section of time—why had I stopped on my way back from the bathroom?—and then I climbed out of my sleeping bag and went upstairs. Marisa’s room was at the front of the second floor. Her bedroom door was closed, and I opened it quietly. She was asleep in a double bed, lying on her back with her mouth open, and I saw how even Marisa Mazarelli was vulnerable. This was what I knew but sometimes forgot: the vulnerability everyone shared.

I tapped her foot, and she startled.

“I’m sorry for the question I asked,” I said. It didn’t occur to me that she might apologize in return, and she didn’t. I had ruined her birthday party, whereas she had merely been her usual self. I added, “I really liked the sundaes.”

“I’m sleeping,” she said.

“I don’t think you guys were using the board right anyway,” I said. “That means the questions don’t count.” Not that the final question, my question, had even been answered.

“Get out, Daisy,” she said.

“Vi and I have ESP,” I said into the dark room, and it would be impossible
to overstate how desperate this disclosure was. Though our parents had never explicitly cautioned us against discussing our senses, they hadn’t needed to. But I was thirteen years old, it was getting light outside, I still hadn’t slept, and Marisa terrified me. The worst part was that my announcement worked. Right away, I could tell that Marisa became alert.

“If you want to know stuff, about Jason or whatever, I could help you,” I said. “Usually I just know things because I dream them, but I could try using the Ouija board. We could use it together.”

When Marisa finally spoke, she sounded neither mean nor excited but only curious. “Is the ESP because you’re twins?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“And that’s how you knew about my dad?”

“We don’t have to talk about it.” I had felt his affair when Mr. Mazarelli came downstairs carrying the pizza boxes while Mrs. Mazarelli hovered nearby with a camera and they didn’t interact. The skin on Mr. Mazarelli’s face was ruddy, and he had a smug, unself-conscious grin, and he wore a gold pinkie ring. The affair was inside his grin.

“
Does
Jason like me?” Marisa asked.

I tried to feel the answer, to let it float toward me like seaweed in a calm incoming tide. But the information wasn’t as close as it had been when we were sitting around the Ouija board; the presence wasn’t in Marisa’s room. Nevertheless, I heard myself say, “I’m sure he likes you. Doesn’t every guy in our class?”

It seemed I’d responded wisely. She shifted a little with pleasure. Then, in a darker tone, she said, “Are my parents getting a divorce?”

Foamily, the tide slid in and out. “That’s hard to say.”

She had started to doubt me, I could tell, and I wasn’t surprised when she asked, “What’s something about me that no one else knows?”

This was too easy. “You cheated on the math quiz last week,” I said. “You copied the answers off Dave Stutz.”

She laughed. Then she patted the mattress. “You can sleep up here if you want,” she said, and gratefully, I climbed over her, into the empty space.

For a brief
time, I became Marisa Mazarelli’s best friend. It was five weeks total, from the middle of April to the end of May. Before, I had walked home from school each day with Vi; now I would trot alongside Marisa as she rode a blue ten-speed with white handlebars to her house. Instead of eating melted cheese on Triscuits, we’d drink Diet Coke, which we carried to the rec room for our Ouija sessions. Usually but not always, the presence from before was there when we used the board, and it guided our hands. When the presence wasn’t there, I was just guessing, though sometimes Marisa was clearly pushing the planchette, and I never stopped her. At almost five each afternoon, I would depart from her house, which left me just enough time to make dinner with Vi before our father arrived home.

Marisa’s family wasn’t around in the afternoons. Her father was working, her mother played tennis, and her older brother, Todd, was away at the University of Kansas. Based on what I could discern from photos and passing remarks, Todd appeared to be merely normal, even a glasses wearer, and not a member of the superspecies to which Marisa belonged.

I had figured out on my own, by watching him during an assembly, that Jason Trachsel was not actively interested in Marisa. But he was persuadable, and Marisa and I spent many hours consulting the Ouija board about his preferences. Perfume, yes. Smoothly shaved legs, yes. Tank tops and big boobs, which meant Marisa had more going for her in the former category than the latter; she looked good in her string bikini, but she wasn’t spilling out of it. Another of Jason’s likes was when girls had sweat above their upper lips, which surprised us. He thought girls’ periods were disgusting and that girls who played video games were cool, and this was how Marisa eventually lured him and Brad Wennerle over one afternoon. We kept the Ouija board hidden, and the four of us played Super Mario Bros., and after an hour Marisa and Jason went up to her bedroom. She had shaved her legs that morning and was wearing perfume and a tank top. Brad and I switched from Super Mario Bros. to pool. I felt mildly hopeful and mostly fearful that he would try to kiss me, but he seemed more interested in poking the stucco ceiling with his pool cue and causing tiny particles of paint to rain down on us. The longer this activity went on, the less I experienced of either hope or fear. Putting a stop to the ceiling poking
felt like my responsibility, as if I were babysitting, but I wasn’t sure what to say to Brad. He went home before Marisa and Jason reappeared, and then it got to be five o’clock, six after five, ten after five, and I climbed the two staircases to the second floor and stood outside the closed door of Marisa’s bedroom. I was considering knocking when I heard Jason say, “What if I only use one finger?” I turned and fled.