Untethered (8 page)

“Ugh. Let’s go back up,” I say. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I spot Kevin in a room off of the main one. “Wait! There he is.”

We hurry past the TV (well, Cassie and I do — seems like Sam takes his time) and arrive in what must be Bryce Hensley’s bedroom. There are less people here. Kevin’s sitting in a corduroy bean bag chair throwing a baseball into the air and catching it. Bryce is on the bed, leaning over and rolling a joint on the nightstand. Ashley Green is next to him, drinking beer with a straw. A few other people are there: Ryan Witteck, Latisha Harper, Rhea Silverman and Tyrone Dickson (making out in the corner) and, of course, Tori Thompson. She must have made a beeline for Kevin after answering the door.

Bryce and Kevin are in the middle of a conversation, but they stop talking when they see us. Kevin smiles at Cassie. “Glad you came,” he says. Then he takes in me and Sam. “Uh ... all of you.”

Ashley and Tori exchange looks. Bryce arches his eyebrows and leaves the room. Two seconds later he’s back with beers for us. “A beer in the hand is worth two in the fridge,” he says.

Cassie’s gone to a couple parties. This summer, with the barrage of boys she’s suddenly been dating. But me and Sam, never. I feel ridiculous with this crowd, totally out of place, and Tori’s staring at me doesn’t help. Yet Kevin’s here. And being so close to him outside of school fills me with a sweet ache that drowns out any other feelings. He stands and clangs beer cans together with us.

“Cheers!” His gaze lingers on Cassie, but when his eyes finally meet mine over the foam oozing out of his can of Schlitz, he winks.

Oh, God.
Somebody get a defibrillator. I think my heart just stopped.

Bryce lights the joint he’s rolled. He takes a drag, then motions for us to sit on the floor. Kevin drops down next to Cassie.

“So we were talking about Kevin’s step-mom,” Bryce says, smoke escaping his mouth with every word. He passes the joint to Ashley. “That woman’s messed up. An effing head case.”

“Just wait. There’s more.” Kevin says to Bryce, then glances at Cassie. “It started with her having the baby.”

This is what I know about Kevin’s family: His parents are divorced, but he lives with his dad. I have no clue where his mom lives. Two years ago, he got one of the country-club ladies as a new mom. She wanted her own kid, and now, at sixteen, Kevin is big brother to a ten-week-old screamer.

The suffocating, sweet smell of marijuana creeps around the room. Next to me, Sam’s making little gurgling noises, trying not to cough.

Ashley offers the joint to Kevin, but he waves it away and keeps on about his step-mom. “So get this, this is all she’s been talking about the past few weeks: she’s convinced she, like, left her body while she was squeezing David out. Says she saw herself yelling while she floated around the ceiling in the hospital.”

My breath catches and my head starts spinning. I feel the can of beer slide out of my hand and drop to the carpet. Sam reaches over and sets it upright, giving me a dirty look as he does so. One phrase reverberates inside my head:
she left her body
.

“Okay, I don’t even understand what you mean, dude,” Bryce says while running a finger up along Ashley’s leg. She giggles.

Kevin bunches his eyebrows together. “She says she thinks her soul ... left her body.”

“She was on drugs,” Ashley sighs.

“Not even,” Kevin says. “No drugs.”

Ashley tries handing the joint to Cassie, but Cassie shakes her head and raises her beer, “Don’t like to mix my medicines.” So Ashley holds the joint up in the air and Tori takes it from her.

“If she wasn’t on drugs, then what?” Cassie looks at Kevin.

“She says she thinks the pain drove her out of her body. She wasn’t dead, but she could go through walls and everything, like a ghost. At least, that’s what she’s been saying.”

“Whoooooo.” Bryce lifts his hands in the air and pretends to be a ghost. Ashley, Latisha, and Tori all laugh like it’s hysterical. (It’s not even the beer — they always act that asinine.)

Kevin runs a hand through his copper hair. “Thing is, now she’s convinced she can do it again. She got books from the library. Googled it. Thinks she’s some guru. When she’s not stuffing a bottle into David’s mouth, she’s meditating, trying to send her soul out again. I don’t know why Dad married her – she’s psycho.”

I feel my face heat up at the word
psycho
, but butterfly wings bat like crazy inside my chest.
I’m not the only one. Oh, my God. I’m not the only one.

Maybe I’m not such a freak.

Maybe I’m just a normal girl with a paranormal problem, that’s all.

Maybe—

Tori comes over and waves the now miniscule joint in front of my face. “Not gonna ask
you
if you want a puff, Psycho. You’re too goody-goody. Besides, you’d probably pass out on us.”

All eyes are on me. I consider taking the joint and smoking it, just to get Tori off my back. But it won’t work. She’ll never be off my back. And I just don’t give a damn right now. Right now, I want to hear more about Kevin’s step-mom, so I ignore Tori.

Bryce nudges Kevin with his foot. “So what’s up now with your step-maniac?”

Kevin bites his bottom lip like he’s not sure if he should really be saying anything. When he finally talks, his voice is low. “Last night she said she did it. That it worked.”

Bryce holds up his hands and shakes his blond head. “Whoa, dude. What worked? You mean she, like, left her body?”

I shoot up like a rocket but keep my mouth sealed shut.
She left her body on purpose?

Kevin picks at a seam on his jeans and answers Bryce. “Yeah. I know it’s such bull, except ...”

“Except what?”

Kevin looks at Cassie, like he’s talking only to her. “Late last night I snuck out my bedroom window and met Bryce to T.P. Mrs. Zimmer’s house.”

Now Sam straightens up. “The math teacher? You toilet papered her house?”

“She gives too much homework.”

Sam shakes his head. “She yelled at me today because when I came to class I had toilet paper stuck on my shoe!”

I close my eyes and wish we weren’t related.

Bryce laughs out loud. Kevin grins, punching Sam in the shoulder. “Sorry, man.” Then he turns around and looks at Bryce. “But my step-mom knows we did it.”

“Derp. Why’d you tell her?”

“I didn’t. She says she saw us when she was floating around out of her body.”

Ashley giggles. “Come on!”

Bryce shakes his head. “Someone must have seen us and told her.”

Kevin’s face crumples like he’s eaten something bad. “I don’t know. She said she was right next to us and could even hear us talking about Coach. She got it right, too.”

“This is messed up, dude,” Bryce says. Everyone goes quiet.

“So she controlled it?” I break the silence. “She decided then and there that she was going to leave her body and go somewhere and she did it? She controlled when she went out and when she went back?”

Kevin bites his bottom lip again. “That’s what she says.”

“And you believe her? You believe she did it?” I feel Cassie’s eyes on me, burning through me, but I don’t look at her.
If I could control it, really control it ... if I could go where I wanted, do what I wanted, when I wanted
,
maybe
that would change everything. Everything.

Kevin shrugs. “No, I don’t believe her. It was just freaky, that’s all.”

“But,” I say. “But ... if it were true ... if she could really control it ... imagine the kind of power she’d have. She could follow you around whenever she wanted. Pretty powerful stuff.”
Cool. Very, very cool.

Everyone in the room stares at me.

Kevin studies me for a long time, then he turns to Bryce. “I’m hungry. Let’s grab something to eat.” They get up and all of us follow them to the kitchen, except for Rhea and Tyrone who wave and shut the door behind us. On the way up the stairs, I feel fuzzy and lightheaded and it has nothing to do with the beer.

Cassie pokes me in the shoulder and whispers in my ear. “Hey, you okay? Are you weirding out on me, Sylvie?”

“Did you hear Kevin?” I whisper. “His step-mom leaves her body! Like me!”

“You
are
weirding out.” Cassie bangs her knuckles on my temple. “Earth to Sylvie.”

We haven’t ever talked about my out-of-body experiences since that one night of truth and dare. And especially not after the whole hallucination debacle with the doctors. But I’ve always assumed she believed me. I mean, she knows to shake me when I melt on her. And when she does, she always smiles at me and says, “Welcome back.”

But maybe she never knew whether to really believe me or not.

Well, can you blame her, Sylvie? You didn’t know whether to believe you.

In the kitchen, things go on around me, but I stand still, thinking and leaning against the wall. For once, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Bryce pulls out a pack of marshmallows from the cupboard. Sam says something to him and suddenly the whole group is cheering around the microwave, watching the marshmallow blow up to ten times its normal size. Bryce pulls it out and offers it to Ashley, who laughs as it deflates before her eyes.

Kevin’s step-mom left her body
. All this time I wasn’t sure what was actually happening to me when I slipped out of myself. Whether it was real. Whether I was crazy. After seeing the schizophrenic reference that one time, I was afraid to research it more. Afraid to talk to anyone. Afraid of what I’d find out. I’ve been living with this ... thing all by myself. But now ... someone else did it. And then wanted to do it again. Figured she’d learn to control it. Saw the power in it.

“So.” Ashley comes up to me, licking marshmallow off her fingers, breaking my concentration. “Having fun?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” My voice is sharp. We’ve been in the same English class since freshman year, but this is the first time she’s ever talked to me to say something other than, “Faint much
?”

“Uh ... duh ... it’s supposed to mean ‘are you having fun?’”

I look at her for a minute, taking in her smug expression and the casual way she flips back her chestnut hair. I’m not sure if she’s really trying to be nice or making fun of me. But before I can decide, she sucks in a breath then exhales loudly, “Bitch!” She goes back to Bryce, wrapping her arms around his waist and leaning over to whisper something to Latisha.

Heat rushes to my cheeks. I should have given her the benefit of the doubt.

Sam pokes my arm with a sticky marshmallow finger and smiles. “This is great, but we gotta go. It’s almost 11:00.”

Ten minutes later when we get into Cassie’s parents’ car, Sam bursts out, “They were nice to me!”

Cassie grins. I turn around to look at Sam. “Did I miss something?”

“The marshmallows ... can you believe they’d never microwaved them before? I thought everyone had done that.”

“Didn’t you notice Bryce and Kevin and all them were slapping Sam on the back?” Cassie turns off of Bryce’s street and heads towards my dad’s place.

They like
Sam
? I shake my head. No. I didn’t notice.

“Next time it’s Mentos in Coke.” Sam is practically beaming. I’ve never seen him like this before.

“You were pretty quiet at the end, there, Sylvie. If it’s about Kevin sitting next to me, it’s not my fault. I was kind of worried, what with the beer and everything that you might get upset. ” Cassie glances at me with pleading eyes, then focuses once more on the road when the car swerves.

“No, everything’s fine. I was just ... thinking, that’s all.”

“Find something good, will you?” Cassie points to the radio with her chin. I fiddle with the control, stopping on a station that’s playing
Satisfaction
by the Rolling Stones.

“'Cuz I try and I try ... ” Cassie and I sing. We’ve heard it trillions of times in Mr. Crawford’s Geography class. But Sam hums along and asks, “Who sings this?”

“Hey,” I say. “We’ve got to get rid of the beer smell on our breath.” I pull gum out of my purse and hand it to Cassie and Sam.

Sam raises his T-shirt to his nose. “What about the smoke?”

“What did you do, when you went to those parties this past summer?” I ask Cassie.

“
I
didn’t do a thing. My parents don’t care what I do.”

“I wish that were the case for us right now.” I yank the pine tree air freshener from off the rearview mirror and rub the thing all over my clothes. “This is gonna have to do.”

She lifts one eyebrow. “Pine scent? That’s ... creative. Too bad I don’t keep Febreze in the car like Evan. He had a whole slew of stuff he did after a party. Called it his ‘Smelling Sober’ ritual. I told you that.”

Evan. One of the guys she’d dated over the summer. “No you didn’t.”

She just shrugs. “Maybe I don’t tell you everything.”

I look at her French manicured fingernails on the steering wheel, then down at my own unpainted ones, cut short. I think of tonight’s conversation at the party and of all the times I’ve left my own body.
Yeah.
Well, maybe I won’t tell you everything, either.

When we pull up to Dad’s apartment building, Mom’s car is parked outside.

“Oh, no. We’re dead.” Sam slides further into the back seat, deflating like the marshmallow Bryce offered Ashley earlier.

“Come on.” Both of us get out and wait for Cassie to speed off before walking the twenty steps to the apartment building. It’s a decent complex: sandy brick squares with large picture windows and wrought iron rails on the balconies. Despite Dad’s move seeming sudden to me, I know he was actually looking for a place for a while. To get away from her. From me. From us. Maybe from everything.

When we walk into his apartment, they’re arguing. Of course.

“—in your care. How could you let them go?” This from my mother who looks on the verge of tears. She always looks on the verge of tears lately.

“I’m still their father and I—” Dad sees us and put a cheesy smile on his face like we’re three years old and can’t understand what’s happening. “Hello! I see you two are on time, just like we said.” Here he gives an ‘I told you so’ look to my mother. But her eyes are probably too full of tears to see it.