Page 34 of The Witching Hours

I got the message.

No Ouija.

That didn’t stop me from hearing about it though. One time Margaret’s older sister went to this slumber party at Dorothy Rhodes’s house, and they had one. I heard the girls got it out in the middle of the night when the grownups were asleep and then got so scared they tossed it out the window.

I felt my eyes get big when Margaret was telling about it. “They tossed it out the window? Why? What happened that scared them that bad?”

“I don’t really know for sure,” Margaret said. “They don’t want to talk about it.”

Those of us who were listening to Margaret’s tale over lunch looked at each other in horror. Anything that could shut those older girls up had to be really be something.

I wanted to keep quiet. I really did, but my mouth just started talking on its own. “So, would you ever want to find out?” I asked and looked around the table.

Everybody was shaking their heads except for Penny. She didn’t say anything at first, but I just kept looking at her. After a while, she said, “I don’t know. Maybe. Depends on stuff, I guess.”

If I had to say I had a best friend, I guess I’d say it was Penny. For one thing, she wasn’t afraid to be different when the situation called for it.

“My Auntie Nan promised me a spanking like I’ve never had if I ever go around one of those things,” I said. “

“’Cause it’s the devil,” Susan said. “Everybody knows it.” If anybody had a question about the devil, all they had to do was ask Susan. She knew everything there was to know about the devil on account of her daddy being head deacon over at the First Baptist Church. He preached sometimes if the pastor was away and talked about church stuff at home all the time. I knew because I’d spent the night at her house a couple of times.

“Maybe they never heard about the devil,” Penny said.

Everybody laughed because, if there was one thing we knew, it was that everybody’d heard of the devil.

“Mydaddy says there ain’t no devil,” Cherry Anderson said.

Cherry was a little on the plump side. I didn’t know why, but I knew that the only thing they ever had to eat over at her house was potato salad. Sometimes they had it with eggs. Sometimes they made potato salad sandwiches. That’s what sheusually brought to school for lunch. I didn’t bring lunch. My smeller was better than most and lunchboxes always had a funny smell that made me not want to eat.

Nan gave me three dimes every morning to pay for hot lunch on a tray. It was okay except when they served liver and onions. On those days, the whole school smelled like a cow carcass in the summer sun.

Everybody got real quiet when Cherry talked about her daddy ‘cause we all knew he was mean as a snake. Nobody’d ever even heard her mama talk. Her daddy worked at night. So, if you went over there during the day, you had to be real quiet and not make a sound. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking to myself that her daddy tells people there’s no devil ‘cause it’s him and he doesn’t want folks to know where he’s hiding out. That would explain why he works at night. Working at night doesn’t make sense. Nobody worked at night except Cherry’s daddy.

“Well, that’s just dumb.” Susan made her pronouncement on Cherry’s daddy saying there ain’t no devil and nobody cared to disagree.

“But why do they have one of those things at Dorothy Rhodes’s house?” I asked. “They go to church.”

“They go to church. And Sunday School, too,” Susan said. “But they don’t go to Training Union, or Sunday night service, or Wednesday night prayer meeting, or Thursday night visitation.” Susan could speak with the authority of the official scorekeeper because her folks kept watch over who did what, and she listened from the backseat of the car.

“Don’t know why they had one,” Margaret said. “But I bet now they’re sorry they did. My sister says she’s never going over there again.”

Ms. Bean, the art teacher, walked past our lunch table, she said, “You better hurry up and finish, girls, or you won’t have time for jump rope before the bell rings.”

Everybody at my table shared that look that meant we were all thinking the same thing. We shoved the rest of our lunch down, laughing at our bad table manners and how our mamas would say we were bad as boys.

Summer weather didn’t break until the middle of October. One day I looked out and saw leaves falling and shadows looking different. It was cooler, too.

Instead of, “Good morning,” Nan said, “You’re gonna need a sweater today.” I sat down in front of a bowl of oatmeal.

“Okay.”

“If it’s raining when school’s out, I’ll pick you up,” she offered.

“Okay.” That was good with me. I hated riding my bike home in the rain. I mean it was okay if it was still hot out, but it was no fun being cold and wet.

When Ms. Grayson left the room to go do some teacher thing, R.W. told me he was maybe going to have a birthday party.

“You are? When is it?” I asked.