I lived in my grandmother's attic. Low, slanted, wooden ceiling, pink carpet, more rectangle than sqaure--my grandma's attic. My canopy sat high off the floor on a set of drawers, and just to switch up routine, sometimes I'd sleep under my bed. In all my teenage weirdness, I willingly told my grandma this on more than one occasion. She'd sigh and look at me and ask me if I wanted some cereal for breakfast. Or eggs and toast. Or a glass of orange juice. I'd close my eyes and touch my head and pretend to consult my spirit guides on the matter.
On a cold Christmas day, when I was ten, my other grandma took me by the wrist and lead me away from her house full of family into one of the bedrooms and handed me a secret present. Don't take it out there, she told me. Don't talk about it until you're at home tomorrow. It was a Ouija board. I wonder who she was trying to hide it from.
The Ouija board lived in the attic with me along with everything I owned. My friend Jamie came home from school with me one day to wait on her mom to pick her up. I talked her into the Ouija board first thing. 513, 513, 513, it told us over and over. At exactly 5:13pm that afternoon, a very loud horn honked. Her mom! Two days later her mom told us that she had a dream we were running through the cemetary leaping over tombstones like we were in a track race.
My best friend Whitney and I played with it every other Friday night when she would spend the night with me. We would play Beatles albums and try to contact John Lennon, my favorite. Her favorite, George, was still among the living. We'd ask him about the future, about love, about flowers. We'd ask him to prove he was really there with us. The room would go cold, and once, the Bible carefully placed on top of my broken CD player slid off and the lid of the player popped open stopping the music.
George died five years later. Our Ouija board days long over, Whitney and I drove south from Ohio to South Carolina to spend Thanksgiving at the beach at my mom's empty beach house--for sale, but not yet sold. We listened to Beatles albums all the way down; Whitney cried every time a George song played.
My mom's house was on Folly Beach--a barrier island off the coast of Charleston. The warm salty air stuck to our skin, and the smell of the ocean made us dizzy. The Realtor forgot to leave us the key outside the door as promised so we were locked out our first night. After a couple drinks at a local beach dive bar, we grabbed some blankets from the car and slept under the stars on the beach.
"Orion," I said and pointed up. "Remember when I put all those glow in the dark stars on the ceiling in my grandma's attic? I never could get the constellations quite right."
"That's right," she said. "You're grandma really freaked out about that one. She took them all down a week later while we were in school."
"And I put them back up."
"And she took them back down. They were nice while they lasted."
The waves crashed hard on the shore--the tide inching ever closer to us in the night.
"Remember when we use to play with the Ouija board in your grandma's attic?" she asked in a moment of ocean calm.
"Yeah, it was nice while it lasted."
