The Spirit House (8 page)

“You angry at me, Julie?” Bia said.

But
he
was the one who had been avoiding
me
all weekend! “What makes you think I'm angry?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.

“You don't wear Buddha pendant I give you.”

That's why he had been staring at me during supper. A shiver worked its way from my stomach up along my spine. “I … I just took it off.”

“Put where? In bag? In pocket?”

It was all I could do not to turn and look directly at the spirit house. And because I was scared, Bia's cross-examination made me angry. “What difference does it make where I put it? It's mine. You gave it to me. I can do anything I want with it.”

“Only want you to understand, Julie,” he said, his serious voice coming out of the darkness, the burning end of the cigarette closing in on his fingertips, the only part of him I could see. “Very holy thing. Must be careful. Good luck if wear. But if put in low place, then not good for you, Julie. Better if you wear. You understand?” He flicked away the cigarette, a bright streak arching toward the spirit house, without turning his face from me.

Was he really worried I would bring bad luck on myself by not treating the pendant carefully enough? Or was it simply that his feelings were hurt because I had taken off this very special gift from him? “I would never be careless with it, believe me. It's very special to me.”

“Then where you put?” His face flickered in the flame of his gold lighter, though his eyes remained shadowed. “In bag? In pocket? Or some other place?” He turned, drawing deeply on his new cigarette, and gazed directly at the spirit house for a long moment. He looked slowly back at me. “Where, Julie?”

I couldn't answer, panicking. He watched me. Leaves rustled, a many-voiced whisper that swelled and gradually subsided.

“What you ask spirit for, Julie?” he said, moving suddenly toward me. He squeezed his right hand around my arm. I jerked away from him, my heart racing. He tightened his hold. His grip was very strong.

He
must
have seen me standing by the spirit house. And now that the pendant was missing, it was only natural that he'd suspect what I had done. “What you ask spirit for?” he repeated, his voice tense but strangely hushed.

How could I have forgotten to ask the spirit to protect me? “Let go of me!” I struggled to pull my arm away. “You're hurting me!”

“You not tell me?” He squeezed harder.

“Not telling you
what?
” My voice cracked; in another second I'd be crying.

“Mai pen rai!
” he said, the foreign words quick and biting. He flung my arm away so suddenly that I staggered backward and almost fell. “
Mai pen rai
. Do not care
what
you do!” He spoke with contempt, breathing hard. “You hear me, Julie? You not my friend. You my enemy. You hear?”

“W-What?” I said, rubbing my arm, my throat tightening. It was so unlike Bia to speak in this direct, harsh way that his words had a kind of nightmarish unreality.

“Listen. I am not care about you.” He looked directly at the spirit house, raising his voice. “Am not care about you, Julie Kamen. Care about Gloria, care about Lynette, care about other girl. But not you. You are liar.”

“Liar?
You're
calling
me
a liar?” I was so angry that I didn't care how loud my voice was. “
You're
the one who lies to everybody. You don't think I noticed that? You don't think I know what you—” I gulped the words back. Furious as I was, I was also too afraid of him now to let him know what I suspected. I started to turn away.

“Julie.”

The way he said it made me look back. He was facing the light from the deck now, I could see the fragile line of his mouth, the same lost, vulnerable expression I had noticed at school this morning. But he said nothing more.

“You're
crazy!
” I blurted out. But now there was an edge of guilt to my anger. Whatever his motivation for giving me the pendant, it had been a very great sacrifice for him. And I had discarded his gift—in an effort to trap him.

But maybe it hadn't really been mine to give, and the spirit knew that. Then it wouldn't matter if I took it away from her. If I gave it to Bia, then I could stop worrying about what I had wished. Suddenly I wanted no part of any bargain with the spirit.

I hurried to the spirit house. “Here, Bia. Take it. It really belongs to you.” I thrust my hand inside the dark little doorway, groping for the pendant.

The spirit house was empty.

10

The hairs on the back of my neck lifted. But I did not remove my hand from the spirit house. My fingers raked across the bare boards. “It's not here!” I peered frantically through the doorway. Inside there was no glint of chain or pendant, only darkness.

“You give. Spirit take,” Bia's quiet voice came from behind me. “Too late change.”

“No! It's not
possible!
” I dropped to my knees, pawing at the grass underneath the spirit house. The pendant wasn't there. “
You
took it out!” I accused him.

“Don't be stupid. If I take, I not say anything.”

That made sense. If he had taken it he would have kept quiet about the pendant, instead of calling attention to it. And when could he have taken it? I had been pretty distracted, but it seemed to me that he had been up in Dominic's room from the time I had put it in the spirit house until Mom called them to supper. I jumped to my feet. “I don't want to talk about it, think about it anymore, ever!”

He shrugged, tall and elegant, and glanced at the spirit house. “Just remember—I not your friend now, Julie.”

I turned and ran; I reached the deck just as Dominic was stepping out through the glass doors. “Telephone, Julie,” he said, and then stopped, staring at me. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Dominic!” Bia called from the yard. “What you want to tell me before?”

“Oh, that's right.” Dominic stepped to the edge of the deck. “Guess what I found out today? About the computers at my school, and at the high—”

“Dom, wait, don't!”

But it was too late. “Computer?” Bia was saying, walking toward him across the lawn. “Computer at your school and high school? What about computer?”

“Oh, Dominic,” I groaned. He didn't even hear me. He was already hurrying to tell Bia his discovery.

But I was more worried about the pendant than the computers now. I trudged inside, wondering if I was going crazy. Had I only
imagined
putting the pendant inside the spirit house? But that wasn't possible—I knew I had done it. Maybe one of the neighbor kids had stolen it. That had to be it. Or else a bird or squirrel had taken it. They liked bright shiny things, didn't they? “It was a bird,” I whispered, trying to convince myself.

Because if it wasn't a bird, or a neighbor kid—then the spirit was real. I was trapped in a bargain with her.

And on top of everything else, Bia was my enemy. He had told me in so many words. And what would he do—implacable and hostile now—if he ever found out what I suspected about him? I looked behind me before I picked up the phone.

“Julie? It's … me,” Mark said, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I just wanted to say, could we … go somewhere and talk?”

“Talk?” I said stupidly.

“Yes. I … well, I made a mistake. I was hoping you'd let me explain.”

“Explain? Why don't you explain to Lynette?” I asked him, ready to slam down the receiver.

“Please, Julie. I'm sorry. If only you'd give me a chance. I'd really like things to be—”

“What's the matter? Did Lynette stand you up or something?”

“No, she didn't. I just … came to my senses, I guess. I don't know what was the matter with me. I don't blame you for being mad. I deserve it. It's just that I'd really like to see you.”

“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You're not interested in Lynette anymore? You want to go out with me now?”

“Yes. Can I please see you tonight?”

It was a little hard to believe this was actually happening; it wasn't like Mark to be so
inhumanly
humble and apologetic. Why his sudden change in attitude toward me?

But I might as well see where this was leading. Maybe my life wasn't falling apart after all. Maybe I had a chance of being popular again.

I wasn't going to make it
too
easy for him, though, after the way he had treated me today. “I'm kind of busy right now,” I said slowly. “But
maybe
I could think about meeting you.”

“Just for a few minutes, Julie. Please?”

I held the receiver away and stared at it quizzically. This was Mark? I was very curious now. “Well, I guess I could find the time,” I said, trying to sound offhand. “You might as well pick me up now.”

“
Thank
you, Julie.” His voice was flooded with relief. “I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I brushed my teeth and fixed my hair and makeup. The pimples seemed to have been a false alarm; they had shrunk down to almost nothing, hardly visible anymore. My hair looked better than it had all day.

Another surprise—Mom made no objections about it being a school night when I told her I was going out with Mark. “Have a good time,” she said, smiling at me. “You look nice, Julie.”

I walked slowly down the stairs. Mom
never
told me I looked nice. What was the matter with everybody tonight?

Last year I would have run outside when Mark's red Thunderbird pulled up. Tonight I was thinking about things. I waited for him to park and walk to the house and ring the bell. “You look great, Julie,” he said, smiling bashfully when I opened the door. “This is really nice of you.”

In the car, he said he just wanted to drive around and talk, and I shrugged, as though it didn't matter to me. I hoped Mom and Dad didn't notice the squeal of his tires as he shot down the street.

“I'm sorry I didn't call you sooner,” he began. “But Lynette was at the airport to meet me, and you weren't, and she said you—”

“You didn't call Lynette?”

He looked puzzled. “No. Lynette met me at the airport.”

It hurt me to think of Lynette deliberately trying to take him away from me, and Gloria being so eager to tell me he was with Lynette. These were my best friends? “Go on,” I said.

“Then, tonight, Lynette was getting on my nerves. And I just kept thinking about you. It was a dumb mistake, going out with her. It won't happen again, Julie. Now I really know how much I want to be with you.”

I smiled at him, beginning to feel elated. Mark was ordinary—but he was also open and honest. Everyone liked him. And now not only did he want to go out with me again; he was telling me he liked me better than ever. After the bleakness of the last few days, life was starting to look pretty good.

And when I got home that night, Lynette phoned to apologize.

The next night after supper there was a light knock on the door of my room. “Come in,” I said.

Bia pushed open the door. “Can explain English essay for me, please? Take only minute.” He spoke in a monotone, his manner dignified and reserved.

My first impulse was to tell him to go ask Lynette to help him—he had spent the afternoon with her. But as I was about to speak I noticed again that shadow of vulnerability in the set of his mouth. I couldn't say no. “Sure. Bring it here.”

It didn't take a minute, it took hours. I practically had to write his essay for him. And after that, there were other subjects. Bia understood almost nothing of what the teachers had said in class. It began to dawn on me, with a trapped, hopeless feeling, that his survival at school depended on me spending every spare minute helping him.

We worked grimly until ten o'clock, when Bia said, “Take break. Call Lynette, before too late. Back in five minute.”

I felt an angry tightening in my stomach. “Sure,” I said, keeping my voice under control. As soon as he was out of the room I furiously snapped a pencil in half and hurled it to the floor.

Mark drove me to school the next day. Several times he told me how nice I looked. He carried my books when we walked into the building together in front of the other kids. It was a very different entrance from yesterday.

Gloria and Lynette were both desperate to talk to me. I was polite and distant to them at first. But they were both so earnestly apologetic, and so anxious to be forgiven, that I couldn't go on holding a grudge against them. Several senior boys who had never noticed me before made a point of coming over and talking with me. Gloria and Lynette were very impressed.

I felt so exhilarated by how well everything went for me at school that I didn't even mind helping Bia with his homework that night. I was also aware that the better he did in school, the less likely he would be to try to use Dominic's computer knowledge to fix his grades—helping him was a way of protecting Dominic. I spent one or two hours working with him the next night, and the next, and it soon became a pattern. He never forgot to thank me, but he was more remote and formal with me than ever.

And when we weren't studying, Bia spent time with Gloria, and Lynette, and then Gloria, and then Lynette, and sometimes Lynda or Gayle, and then Gloria again, and then again Lynette.

Yet he didn't seem at all self-satisfied by his conquests. He betrayed no emotions to me, but I sensed that he was unhappy. He wasn't eating much. After a week or so, I began to notice stains on the knees of his pants. He seemed tired all the time, slumping. There were dark circles under his eyes. Despite my help, he wasn't doing well in school.

At night, I could hear him coughing in his room; he was smoking more than ever. And I saw that he was lighting his cigarettes with ordinary matches now. What had happened to the gold lighter he had been so proud of? I was curious, but I didn't dare ask him. Partly it was because he was so chilly and unapproachable. But I was also afraid that if I mentioned the lighter, it might bring up the subject of the other valuable possession he no longer had. I didn't want him to ask me again what I had done with the pendant, or what I had asked the spirit. I was afraid of what he might do if he thought I had any suspicions about him.