Kindred Spirits

Copyright© 2008 Julia Watts

Beanpole Books
P.O. Box 242
Midway, Florida 32343

All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from
the publisher.

First Edition

Editor: Katherine V. Forrest
Cover designer: Kiaro Creative Ltd.

ISBN 10: 0-9667359-9-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-9667359-9-4

For
Ian and Alec

My thanks go to all “the
usual suspects,” especially Carol and Don and my mom and dad. I am especially
grateful to the divine Katherine V. Forrest for her brilliant editing and to
Linda Hill and Sara Joyce for welcoming me into the Beanpole Books family.

Julia Watts is the author
of the Lambda Literary Award-winning young-adult novel
Finding H.F.
as
well as several novels for adult readers. She lives with her family in
Knoxville, Tennessee, in a house full of books and cats.

I don’t know why Mom bothers to buy candy at Halloween because
we never get any trick-or-treaters. Not even one.

Not that I’m complaining.
Right now I’m on my eighth miniature Hershey Bar. No point in letting good
chocolate go to waste.

“Miranda,” Mom says,
checking for the millionth time that the porch light is on, “don’t eat all the
candy. You’ll rot out your teeth, and besides, it’s early. Some kids could
still show up.”

“Mom, nobody’s coming,
and you know it.”

Mom looks out the window.
A half a dozen kids dressed as ghosts and witches and cartoon characters run
past our house like demons are chasing them. Even from inside the house we can
hear their screams. “You’re right,” Mom says. “Pass me some of that candy, will
you?”

Part
of the reason trick-or-treaters stay away is our house. We live in a big,
two-story house built in 1892. Like a lot of houses built back then, it’s
fancy, with gingerbread trim on the porch posts and a tower overlooking the
front yard. Of course, what I call fancy is what a lot of other people call
spooky, especially since the house is painted dark plum (my mom’s color choice)
and has a peach tree in the front yard which is bursting with white blossoms in
the spring, but is bare and gnarled and witchy-looking by the time Halloween
rolls around.

I’d like to say the house
and the tree are the only reasons people stay away on Halloween and on every
other night of the year, but that would be a lie. The main reason is us.

“Us” is Granny, Mom, and
me. Let’s just say that the three of us aren’t exactly the most popular gals in
Wilder, Kentucky.

Don’t get me wrong.
Granny and Mom are the best-hearted women you could hope to meet, and I’m a
pretty good girl most of the time. But folks here don’t trust us maybe because
Wilder is way back in the mountains and is populated by just over a thousand
people who are suspicious of anybody who’s the least bit different than they
are.

Granny and Mom and I are
different. Real different. Some of it’s the way we look. Granny is stooped and
wrinkled and has silver hair long enough to sit on, which she wears in a braid
down her back. The only color she ever wears is black. She even dyes her
nightgowns black. Mom, though, likes to wear bright colors and loud prints and
lots of big, jangly jewelry. She wouldn’t look out of place in a big city, but
here she sticks out like a peacock in a chicken coop.

And me, I dress in
clothes that Mom sews for me instead of the latest styles from the Young Miss
shop the next town over, and my hair is a big cloud of curls the color of a new
copper penny.

My
eyes are the same shade of green as a cat’s. Granny and Mom think my eyes are
beautiful, but the kids at school think they’re spooky.

But our looks aren’t
really why people are afraid of us. The reason goes back years and years.

When Granny was my age,
she thought little Wilder was the big city. She was raised in the backwoods by
her ma, who was a widow. They lived in a two-room shack and scraped by on the
money Granny’s ma made from picking herbs and cooking them up into potions she
sold that could cure anything from an upset stomach to a broken heart.

Granny’s ma was different
like Granny and Mom and me are. The women in my family have always had the same
kind of difference. Granny calls it the Sight.

Granny says she
discovered she had the Sight when she was just six years old. Her ma was
hanging clothes on the line when Granny said to her,“We’ve got to get the
chickens out of the chicken coop.” Granny didn’t know why they had to do it,
she says; she just knew they had to. Her ma rigged up a pen in the yard and put
the chickens in it, and that night the chicken coop burned to the ground.

Granny was scared that
her ma would think that she had set the fire herself, but her ma said, “I know
you didn’t set that fire, Irene. You just knowed that the chickens would be in
danger if we didn’t get them out of the coop. You’ve got the Sight, honey. Just
like me and my ma and her ma before her.  It’s a gift.”

Granny stayed at home
with her and learned how to boil down plants into healing teas and syrups and
tinctures. She learned how to tell people’s fortunes by looking at the leaves
in the bottom of their tea cup or by having them open up the Bible to a certain
verse. After Granny’s ma died, she took over her ma’s work, making potions,
telling fortunes, and curing boils and sties.

She
didn’t meet my grandfather until she was forty years old and he showed up on
her doorstep with a bullet stuck in his arm from a hunting accident. Once
Granny found out that he worked for the coal company and so didn’t need to hunt
in order to have enough to eat, she made him promise never to hunt again. Then
she took the bullet out of his arm and packed the wound with a salve she had
made.

He kept coming back to
see her, first for her doctoring, then for her company. When he married her and
moved her into the big house in Wilder where we still live, a lot of people
said she had cast a spell on him to make him love her. But Granny always says,
“If you take a bullet out of a man, you don’t need a potion to make him love
you.”

Even though he promised
Granny he wouldn’t hunt, Grandpa sneaked off on a hunting trip one weekend when
Granny was pregnant with my mom. A stray bullet from one of his buddies’ gun
hit him and killed him.

People in Wilder said
that Granny had put a death spell on him so she could inherit his money.

“That’s just
foolishness,” Granny always says. “But I did tell that man never to go huntin’
again. I seen what would happen to him if he did.”

So my mom was raised by
just her mother, like Granny had been before her. But Mom grew up in the big
house in town instead of a shack in the county, and while she learned about
herbs and potions and fortune telling from Granny, she also learned reading,
spelling, and math at the Wilder public schools. Mom grew up with one foot in
Granny’s world and one foot in the world of regular people, which is probably
why she spent so much time trying to figure out a logical reason why she can
see into other people’s minds and futures.

Mom
met Dad when she was going to Berea College. He had a ponytail and rode a
motorcycle, and they got married right after graduation and moved to Lexington
so Dad could go to graduate school. They had been married a little over a year
when Mom found out she was pregnant with me.

Now here’s the weird
part. When Mom was five months pregnant, Dad died in a motorcycle wreck. Mom
had begged him not to ride that day.

After Dad died, Mom says
she just fell apart. She quit her job in Lexington and moved back to the big
house in Wilder. Granny nursed her through her pregnancy and her grief. Granny
even delivered me into the world, in the big four-poster bed that’s still in
the master bedroom.

After some time passed
and I was big enough to walk, Mom took a job as a social worker in Morgan, the
next town up the road, and Granny took care of me during the day until I was
big enough to go to school.

You can imagine the
things people say about Granny and Mom. That they’re witches. That they killed
their husbands as soon as they were pregnant like black widow spiders kill
their mates. And since kids hear their parents talking that way about my
family, they’ve never been that anxious to buddy up to me at school.

I get called all kinds of
names. The witch girl. The creepy girl. The spooky girl. But they call me that
when they’re talking to each other. Or they think it, and I hear their
thoughts. They don’t call me anything to my face. They’re too scared of me.

Not that they have a
reason to be. I’m different, not dangerous. But to some people’s way of
thinking,“different” and “dangerous” mean the same thing.

I
never try to explain the Sight to kids at school because they’d never
understand it. And it is kind of hard to explain. The best I can do is to say
that sometimes when I look at a person, I can feel myself entering that
person’s mind.

The inside of a person’s
mind is like a movie theatre. It’s dark, but then there are these pictures you
can see on a big screen. I can hear the words that go along with these
pictures, too, just the same as I would if the person was saying them out loud
to me.

Like once,I heard
Brittany Silcox,who’s the most popular girl in the school, thinking about her
supposed best friend Caitlin: “The only reason I let her be my best friend is
because she’s so ugly she makes me look good.” Another time when a teacher was
handing me back some homework, I heard her think, “This isn’t as good as Miranda’s
work usually is, but as creepy as she and her family are, I’m afraid to give
her a bad grade.”

One time Mom said, “So
many people spend their lives worrying about what other people might be
thinking. If they only knew how much harder life is if you actually do know
what other people are thinking.”

Mom is right. Some days
when I’m at school, surrounded by people,my gift throws too much information at
me,filling my head with stuff I don’t even want to know. Sometimes when classes
change and the hall is full of kids, I’m almost deafened by the sound of all
their thoughts.

And so, to protect
myself, I’ve always tried to keep my distance from other kids. And other kids
have thought they were protecting themselves by keeping their distance from me.

Because of all this
distance-keeping, I’ve managed to make it all the way to middle school without
having made a regular friend my age. There’s Abigail, of course. But she’s not
what you’d call a regular friend. She’s been dead for over a hundred years.

I’m lying in my canopy
bed, wide awake and dreading school tomorrow. I jump when I hear the knock on
the inside of my closet door.

“Come in,” I call, barely
above a whisper, but the knocking doesn’t stop. “You’re going to wake up
Granny,” I hiss, kicking off my covers and jumping out of bed to open the
closet door.

“Trick or treat!” Abigail
yells, doubling over giggling. Like always she’s wearing a powder-blue,
drop-waisted dress and high-button shoes. Her blonde ringlets are tied back
with a ribbon that matches her dress. “I thought I would make sure you had one
trick-or-treater this year,” she says.

I grab her by the wrist.
She feels solid, but very cold, like somebody who’s been playing in the snow
for a long time. “Get in here,” I laugh, pulling her out of my closet and into
my room.

“Do you like my costume?”
Abigail twirls in front of me so that her skirt flares. “I’m a ghost this
year.” She flops down on the red bean bag chair in the corner, but her ringlets
and high-button shoes just don’t go with a bean bag chair somehow. “Of course,
I’ve been a ghost every year since eighteen ninety-eight, so it’s growing
rather predictable.”