Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“Have you ever tried?” Jenny said. “Come on.”

I took my seat beside her. She guided my hands to their place on the pointer next to hers.

“We have to be quiet,” she said. “And we have to be patient. She will come to us when she’s ready. Focus.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I watched the candlelight flicker on her face. The pointer moved a bit under my fingers. Startled, I looked down.

“Is there a spirit here?” Jenny said. She opened her eyes and addressed the empty room.

The pointer moved again. I wasn’t pushing it; Jenny seemed as surprised as I was. The pointer hovered over the letter Y. Then moved to E. Then S.

“YES,” Jenny hissed. “There’s someone here. Tell us your name,” she said. And I swear the wind howled.

The pointer moved to I. Then to S.

“Stop!” I said, and jerked my hands away from the board.

“She wasn’t done spelling,” Jenny said. “You scared her off.” She looked around as if trying to locate the presence. “You wrote ‘IS,’” she said softly to the invisible ghost. “‘IS’ what? Can you give us the next word?”

“Isabel,” I said. “It’s Isabel. You moved the pointer. You’re spelling her name.”

“I did not,” Jenny said. “I am not a faker.”

“She’s my sister,” I said. “You don’t know anything about her.”

I blew out the candles in a huff. We sat fuming in the dark. I wanted to go home, but it was too late to leave the house without upsetting her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Jones always turned on the burglar alarm at ten o’clock, so there was no way to escape without deactivating the system. I knew the code, but the beeping keypad would disturb them. From their bedroom across the hall, I could hear the faint laughter of the studio audience on Saturday Night Live.

Finally Jenny said, “I was just trying to help. I didn’t mean to upset you.” She stood up and switched on her desk lamp. She was wearing a lavender nightgown trimmed with white ribbon. “Want to sleep in my bed tonight?”

This was not the first time she’d let me squeeze into her bottom bunk. It was something I never asked for, but she seemed to know when I needed an extra degree of closeness. We had already brushed our teeth, so we scooted into bed. I took the inside, near the wall.

“Isn’t it funny that married people share the same bed every night?” she said.

“Until they get divorced,” I said.

“I’ll never get divorced,” she said.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get married,” I said.

“You’re so weird,” she said. Then, after a few minutes, she said, “Do you think your parents had sex before they were married?”

“I don’t know. Did yours?”

“Probably not,” she said. “But one time I heard them having sex.”

“Ew,” I said.

“My mom kept saying ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh’ really fast, like she was breathing really hard. My dad wasn’t saying anything, but the bed was squeaking.”

“Why were you listening?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I had a bad dream and woke up. I went to their room, but then I heard all the noise before I knocked.”

“You’re sure they were having sex?”

“I didn’t see them, but they must have been doing it.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. After Jenny fell asleep, I lay beside her and wondered if my mother missed having sex. Did she make those noises in bed with my dad? When my father had an affair, did his mistress make those noises in a hotel room? Would Jenny make the same noises someday? I listened to her breathing: mouth open, every exhalation throaty and extreme, as if she were entitled to more air than the average human. There was no one I felt closer to in the world, but someday I knew that we would be in bed with other people, that nights like this would take on the foggy quality of dreams.

WHAT ELSE DO I REMEMBER? Jenny and I on our backs in her yard on a summer night, our heads touching, our hair intertwined, pinpricks of light from the fireflies, and the day’s swelter draining from the air as the sky blackened and the stars came out. The whole neighborhood smoky with barbecue. Our skin itchy with chlorine, our fingers sticky with watermelon, bits of corn lodged in our teeth, and her mother’s voice, like a wind chime from the patio, telling us it was time for bed.

ALL THE ARTICLES about Jenny described her the same way. She was “precocious” and “charming” and even “brilliant.” Everyone wanted a piece of her. I once made a list of things you wouldn’t know about Jenny even if you read every single published word about her:

She was fussy about the texture of her food. She wouldn’t eat anything mushy (no avocados, no oatmeal).

When we played Clue, she insisted on being Miss Scarlet.

When we played Monopoly, she was always the shoe.

At night while she brushed her teeth, she would pretend she was in a toothpaste ad. She slicked her tongue across her enamel and said, “Now, that’s what I call clean!” I said her mother was like a mom in a commercial because she smelled the laundry while she folded it. Jenny thought that was funny.

She may have been precocious, but she wasn’t the genius the press made her out to be. Every night she called me so I could walk her through our math homework. And she also needed my help with grammar. The subjunctive confused her.

She wanted to have three children when she grew up. She intended to name them Amy, Lucy, and Troy. Troy because of the Trojan Horse, which was her favorite story in our studies of ancient Greece. “What if you don’t have any girls?” I said. But she refused to indulge this line of questioning. Jenny was always certain that things would work out.

She planned to live in a “mansion”—so many dreams in the eighties involved mansions. We played that game called MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House) in which possibilities for the future were limited to four categories scratched on a pad. Four names of boys we might marry, four careers we might have, four places we might live.

Jenny talked in her sleep, although she never said anything coherent. I didn’t! she said, or NO! Sometimes she’d start laughing so hysterically that I was sure she was awake. I’d lean my head over from the top bunk and shine the flashlight in her face to verify that she was really asleep.

She had a birthmark on the front of her left thigh. It was a small caramel-colored stain, so high on her leg that it wasn’t visible when she was dressed.

IT ALL STARTED WHEN I DECIDED to write a letter to Yuri Andropov.

I was at Jenny’s house on a Saturday afternoon in November of 1982. We were in private school by then. In the fourth grade, we had both started at the nearby girls’ school, so now our morning walk took us in the opposite direction on Lowell Street. We had been in our new school for a year and were still adjusting to the absence of boys. A boycott, we called it. The school started in the fourth grade, but most of our classmates had been together at the same private, coed elementary school, so Jenny and I felt like foreigners among them. We were trying to decipher their references and translate the inside jokes. Mrs. Jones had begun dressing like the other mothers—with cashmere sweaters draped over her shoulders—and was looking for sponsorship to join the exclusive Sulgrave Club. She asked my mom if she knew any women who were members, and my mother laughed. “I used to be,” she said, “but I gave it up.”

It had been raining all day. We’d spent the past few hours restlessly searching for ways to fill the time. We played three games of Connect Four. We played five games of Spit—I can still hear the impatient snap of the cards as Jenny shuffled. We made chocolate-chip cookies and licked most of the dough out of the mixing bowl instead of baking it. We took turns dialing Q107’s request line—we wanted to hear our voices on the radio—but it was always busy.