Holly and Her Naughty eReader (4 page)

“Tell me about it,” I said,
thinking of my own monthly bit of servitude to the bank.

“But here’s the thing. I
followed the path to a tee and I’ve made it to the end only to find that it’s a
lonely, miserable place. Our mothers were wrong. Without even realizing it, I
traded my mom’s burden for my dad’s. Instead of being trapped in a marriage,
I’m trapped in a career. It sucks, Holly! I hate my job!”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I
said. “Couldn’t you work someplace else?”

“Nothing close to the salary I’m
making now,” Vivian said. “And I need that salary to pay down my debt and then
rebuild my life. That’s my new goal. Complete financial independence by the
time I’m forty-five. I’m gonna be ruthless about it. Max and I will stay in
this house, have our kids here, be debt-free, and build a monstrous savings
account. Before the kids get to high school I’m retiring. Max can keep working
for as long as he wants, but I think that with some hard work and prudence I
can spring free by the time I’m forty.”

“Wow, so you’ve already got a whole
life with Max all planned out,” I said. The same feelings of being lost and
left out that plagued me at the reunion were starting to return. While I had
been off in Dallas with the sort of selfish, evil man that Vivian seemed to
think was a myth, my friends in Albuquerque were getting married, having
children, getting divorced, and getting back together in new combinations. The
idea that Vivian and Max were a couple now, the envy and sadness it made me
feel—it was so…high school.

“It sounds like a great plan,” I
said.

“Max needs to get a better job,
of course,” Vivian said. “Right now he’s a telemarketer. I’m helping him find
something better.”

I imagined Max on the phone,
trying to sell credit cards or insurance or whatever. It didn’t seem like him at
all.

“You know, I used to…”

I was about to come clean about
the big crush I had on Max in high school, but there was no need. Max could
tell his own side of the story to Vivian if he wanted to. It wasn’t my business
anymore.

“Used to what?” Vivian said.

“I used to be really nasty to
telemarketers,” I said. “Now I try to be pleasant because I feel so bad for
them.”

“Max told me the most courteous
thing you can do to a telemarketer is hang up,” said Vivian. “That way he
doesn’t spend any extra time on the phone with someone who isn’t going to make
him any money.”

“Interesting,” I said, suddenly
feeling a wave of pity for Max. The Max I remembered from high school wasn’t
meant to be in sales. He was a quiet, unassuming guy who was too nice to push
products on people who didn’t need them.

With pity for Max came a wave of
other emotions. I remembered how crazy I was about him, especially in that
final semester of senior year. I thought about a fun night out under the stars
with the astronomy class, when I just knew that something was about to happen.
Then I pictured us slow-dancing together at Clarissa’s graduation party. I
remembered exchanging phone numbers with him.

Now it was all getting churned
together with wine and vodka sours and gin and tonics and pancakes and I was
losing control of my emotions. I remembered the daydream I had when I was
eighteen, the letter I wrote to my future self…

Here I was. My future self had
arrived. 28-year-old Holly was now. Was she everything eighteen-year-old Holly
had dreamed her to be?

Hardly. There was no way teenage
Holly would be proud of what happened tonight. I had wallowed in self-pity at
the reunion, gotten drunk as a skunk, made a fool of myself, and somehow ended
up in Vivian Halloway’s house, stuffing pancakes down my gullet at three in the
morning while the man who dissed me ten years ago slept down the hall,
apparently headed into a marriage with Moongirl.

And my Kindle was broken!

Unable to control it, I sensed a
storm surge of sadness roaring in. Irrational, disproportional, batshit crazy
sadness was going to be the next iteration of my drunkenness. Tears welled up
in my eyes, and for some ridiculous reason (or lack thereof), I grabbed my
purse and started rifling through it until I found my broken Kindle, which I
pulled out and put on the table.

“What’s that, one of those
Kindle Fire things?” Vivian said.

“Yes,” I said. “I dropped it at
the airport. And now it’s….it’s..”

“W’oh, Sweetie, are you crying?”
Vivian said.

“I can’t help it,” I moaned, the
tears now flowing down my cheeks. “All my old friends have their lives in order
and you’re this high-powered attorney with a plan to retire and I’m on the path
to old maid and my Kindle is broken!”

“Oh, come here,” Vivian said,
leaving her chair and coming to hug me. Feeling drunk and pathetic, or maybe I
should say, knowing full well that I was drunk and pathetic, I buried my face
in Vivian’s chest, let her hold me tight, and started to sob.

“You know that everybody at the
reunion tonight is as miserable as we are, right?” Vivian said.

“Yes, I know,” I said, pulling
myself up straight. I wiped my cheeks with my hands and took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry. This is stupid. I came here to have fun.”

“Yes you did,” Vivian said. “But
more than that, you came here to find yourself.”

“I don’t know,” I said with a
laugh. “Did I?”

“Of course you did,” Vivian said
with confidence. “Come with me.”

With one hand, she helped me up
from my chair. With the other, she grabbed my broken Kindle. “I know something
that will make you feel better.”

Vivian led me out of the
kitchen, down the hall, and to a stairwell behind the laundry room.

“I love the basement in this
house,” she said. “There’s a special kind of energy down there.”

She led me down the stairs,
hitting light switches along the way. We arrived in a large room that reminded
me of the Moongirl I used to know. This was the abode of the Wiccan goth girl
from high school, not the lawyer who showed up at the reunion.

There was a medieval-looking
iron lattice that hung on one wall. On the other wall hung a huge oil painting
of a woman fighting a dragon. There was a tall bookcase holding titles about
herbal medicine, the history of witchcraft, and the entire
Outlander
series by Diana Gabaldon. There were low shelves all
around that held candles of all sizes and colors, and glass art, and crystals,
and vials with herbs and powders.

And in the center of it all
stood a short table made out of a petrified tree stump.

“What a fabulous room,” I said.

“It’s my special space,” Vivian
said. “I’m a very spiritual person, but I keep that part of my life confined to
this room. My associates at the law firm are the type of people who wouldn’t
have much patience for witchcraft.”

I stepped further inside, going
to the tree stump and running my fingers along its smooth, shiny surface.

“I bought that stump from a
shaman in Taos,” Vivian said. “In life, it was a majestic cottonwood tree that
lived on the burial ground of his ancestors. I knew right away there was a
strong spiritual power to that stump. Can you feel it?”

I shook my head.

Vivian went to a shelf in the
corner of the room and grabbed an armful of candles. She took the candles to
the stump and set them on top.

“Sit right here,” she said,
pointing to a spot on the floor next to the stump.

“We’re not going to summon a
ghost or something, are we?” I said.

She smiled at me. “Relax,” she
said. “We’re just going to do a little ceremony to help you feel better.”

I sat cross-legged on the floor
next to the stump. Vivian grabbed a box of matches off the shelf and proceeded
to light the candles.

“I’ve arranged these candles to
align with the five points of the Raji-Shanna,” she said.

“The Raji-Shanna?”

“The Raji-Shanna’s all around
us,” Vivian said. “It’s the spirit of all living things.”

“You sound like Yoda,” I said.

Vivian smiled and shook her head
at me. “Open your mind, Holly. You have lost your connection with the spirit.
That’s why you’re sad. We’re going to help you reconnect. Plus we’re going to
feel silky smooth once I get my goods out.”

“Your goods?”

Vivan made another trip to the
shelf. This time she grabbed a glass ashtray full of what looked like lumps of
brown clay. She put it in the middle of the table and lit one of the lumps with
a match.It smoldered and smoked, and ignited the other lumps, making the ash
tray into a little cauldron of embers and smoke.

“Holy stink, Batman,” I said, as
the first wave of smoke hit my nostrils. “That’s so…”

“Sweet, I know. It’s a very
sweet smell,” Vivian said. “Might be the sweetest smell on the earth. And it’s
good for you. Lean a bit closer and take a big whiff. Very good for your
lungs.”

I did as Vivian asked, but the
pungent smoke made my nose tickle and I turned away in a fit of coughing.

Vivian laughed at me. “Your
body’s not used to it yet,” she said. “The same thing happened to me the first
time.”

“What is this stuff, Viv?” I
said between coughs.

“Medicine,” Vivian said.
“Medicine for your soul. Take another breath of it.”

I inhaled more slowly this time,
breathing in the smoke through my nose. As it filled my lungs, I felt a calm
come over me, and when I exhaled, I could practically see the tension of my
body float away in the mist.

“Oh wow,” I said. “Oh….oh…wow.”

Even as my butt stayed in place
on the floor, I felt as if my body was taking flight, like I was lighter than
air and might soar up to the ceiling.

Vivian handed me my broken
Kindle.

“Hold onto this during the
ceremony,” she said. “It represents the broken part of your spirit. You’ve
attached yourself to the material world, so you feel lost when one of your
objects doesn’t work. We’re going to break the bond between you and your
possessions, so you can remake that bond with your own soul instead. When the
time comes, I will ask you to set the Kindle aside.”

Her words danced and played in
my ears like music. I was too entranced with the sound of them to respond, but
I took the Kindle from Vivian and held it in my lap.

Vivian sat on the floor next to
me and lifted her hands like a priest at the altar.

“Water of life, river of
healing,” Vivian said. “To you we give our spirit nay.”

“Our spirit nay?” I said.

“Hush now,” Vivian said.

“Ok, sorry.”

“Strip us of our societal
garments,” Vivian continued. “And dress us anew in a gown of glory.”

I felt like I was swimming
through the air in Vivian’s basement. Whatever those smoking brown lumps were
in the ash tray, they were more than ‘medicine for my soul.’

I saw splashes of beautiful
bright color all around me.

“Like flowers,” I whispered.
“I’m a child in a field of tulips.”

I can’t say for sure—my memories
of the ceremony are suspect--but I think at this point I stood up and started
dancing around the living room with my Kindle, as if I were Ginger Rogers and
it was Fred Astaire. What follows is my best recollection of what happened, but
I don’t doubt that I’m leaving a few embarrassing details out.

“Giver of dreams, we call on
you,” Vivian said. “We open our hearts to your guidance. Make our souls one
with our loving mother earth, our caring father time.”

I might have whinnied like a
horse at this point.

“Our spirit
Neeeiiigghhhh!”

I couldn’t help it. What the
hell does
Our spirit nay
mean?

“We reject the shackles of a
false world, freeing ourselves to follow the course of the moon and sun,”
Vivian said.

“We follow the course, of
course, of course,” I sang, following it up with another horse-like,
“Naaaayyyyy….”

“Spirit of dreams, infect our
souls!” Vivian shouted.

“But no one can talk to a horse, of course.”

“And make us one with fire,
water, earth, and air.”

“That is of course unless the horse.”

“We pray for your guidance, and
invite you to visit us.”

“Is the famous Mr. Ed!”

“Make us whole, Dream Spirit!”

“Wiiiilllllburrrrr…..”
I shouted, doing my best Mr. Ed impression.

“Now, Holly, toss your Kindle
aside to symbolize your freedom from material possessions,” Vivian commanded.

Thinking,
what the hell it’s already broken
, I threw my poor Kindle like a
Frisbee, and laughed when it crashed into the wall.

“She is free!” Vivian cried. “We
are free from the shackles of our materialist prison. Come, Dream Spirit! We
invite you into our hearts!”

“Yes, come into our hearts,
spirit Naaaayyyy,” I said. “My barn door is open!”

The last thing I remember is
galloping around the stump like a horse before falling to the floor in a fit of
laughter.

Chapter 5

I woke up on Vivian’s couch at
10:30 in the morning. A splitting headache, an upset stomach, confusion about
what happened and where I was…nothing I didn’t deserve. I felt lucky that I
never ended up in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god.

Speaking of Max, he was
meandering around the house that morning. Vivian was gone. She had left me a
note saying she had to do some work at the office, but to make myself at home.
With Max roaming around in sweat pants and flip flops, I decided my better
option was to get out.

Max saw me putting my shoes on
and said, “You’ll have to call a cab if you want to drive anywhere. That, or
brave your way on the bus. Vivian took my car into work. You and I are stranded
here.”

Oh yeah. We were too drunk to
drive last night. I left my rental car at the reunion, and Vivian left hers
downtown.