Ouija
Lisa is the cousin I do the Ouija board with. We put our small hands on the planchette, waiting for guidance. We are too young to light candles, but we dim the lights and that will have to do. We feel the push and pull of each other. We swear we feel a presence.
“Are you moving it?” I ask, annoyed.
“No!” she insists. “Are you?”
“No,” I whisper.
We hold our breath. We let ourselves be pulled around the board, the planchette stopping on letters. We begin to sweat.
“This is crazy,” I say.
“I know,” Lisa agrees.
She always agrees with what I say.
Lisa is the one you want to do the Ouija board with. She’ll believe what you believe. She’s not afraid to pretend. She’s the one I memorize Salt-N-Pepa lyrics with, the one who makes up contests like how many cartwheels can we do in a row and how many Luden’s cherry cough drops can fit in our mouths at once. She scrawls her name in permanent marker on the back of the basement stairs–”Lisa wuz here.” If I teach her something, like a handstand or how to draw in bubble letters, she has this knack of surpassing me–holding her legs straighter than mine, curving her “S’s” perfectly.
Out of all my cousins, Lisa is the one I play with the most. We make pacts–pinky promises and cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-dies. We make an effort at everything. If we commit to hide and seek, we shove our bodies behind couches, crouch in the doorways of outdoor sheds. When we play a game of tag, Lisa hurls herself off the front porch just to avoid being caught.
“Stop pushing it so hard,” I say.
“I’m not!” she insists.
So, when we decide to take the Ouija board out, we vow to wholly believe that spirits can move objects, that someone from the other side is waiting to tell us “yes” or “no.” We prepare questions beforehand. We sit criss-cross-applesauce on Grams’s polyester bedspread. When we ask a spirit how they died and the planchette spells out “rubella,” we spend an hour researching German measles and when they were most rampant.
We ride our bikes through trails in the woods, we build forts, and we man our grandparents’ farmstand together. We play “Bloody Mary” and scare ourselves into a frenzy. By the time we say her name in the mirror three times, in the dark of deep dark night, we’re already running down the hallway. We never think to ask the Ouija board about the future.
By the time she is eight, no one is allowed to tell Lisa what to do. If anyone tries to, they’re toast. She cries and wails and turns bright red, like a wet tomato. She spits and smacks, and no one is safe, not even Grams. It’s not like we aren’t allowed to tell her “no.” It’s just that she gets away with so much. It’s just that if you tell her “no,” you have to be ready for the consequences. She scratches and squeezes your skin until dots of blood appear. She throws things–pillows, cups, decks of cards, toys. She hates the word “no.” She hates you for saying it.
“What should we ask it today?” she says.
The only way to get her to stop is to threaten to call the cops. You have to pick up the phone and do that thing where you pretend to dial a bunch of numbers and talk to a dial tone. She’ll stop and fall to her knees, pleading with you to hang up. When she’s sure you’ve changed your mind, she’ll grab a freeze pop and watch cartoons.
There are times I feel bad for her. Like when I push her away and she falls on her behind or when she cries so hard she gags herself. I can’t guess what it feels like to resist every rule you’re up against; there are so many: You can’t take the strawberries out of their pints after they’ve been weighed; you can’t tease the cat or run up the basement stairs; you have to say “please”; you can’t do cartwheels in the living room; and you aren’t allowed to scrape all the chocolate out of the Neapolitan box of ice cream. She breaks them all. My mother tells me, “wait ‘til she gets older, just wait.”
“What if we contact the Devil by accident?” she asks.
“I doubt it,” I say.
No matter what, we have always been obsessed with talking to the “other side.” We want to hear what they have to tell us. We think they will whisper to us about how they live, what happens when we die, what they are currently doing in their “other side” lives.
“Is someone here with us?” I ask.
Things get worse just like my mother prophesied. Lisa drops out of high school because she doesn’t want to go. She fights so much she earns the nickname “Rocky” from our grandfather. She comes home with black eyes and swollen lips, and each time she tells us, “You should see the other girl.” We tell her to stop; we hint that she’s gone too far. But “stop” sounds a lot like “no,” and each time we ask her to come back to shore, she swims a little further out.
“Swear that you’re not pushing it,” I say.
“I swear. I swear on my life.”
Lisa dyes her hair black, like crows’ feathers, except brittle. She’s become addicted to so many drugs I’ve lost track. She has a son she doesn’t call on Christmas. He stays with my parents on Christmas Eve, and I write him a note while he sleeps, pretending I am Santa. The word on the street is that she lives in the woods now, like a witch or a wild animal. She calls when she needs money. Only when she needs money.
“Who are you?” I ask the spirit of the Ouija board.
Lisa has another baby and gives him up for adoption. The story goes that she entered the hospital in bloody underwear and booty shorts and the baby was addicted to drugs at birth. She says she’ll change, maybe come back home, get her life together. But when she gets some money from the adoptive parents, she’s gone.
“She’ll either be in jail or they’ll find her dead in a ditch,” my mother says. At some point we put the Ouija board away for the last time. It still sits in my parents’ basement coated with dust, our fingerprints still on the board. I wonder if we had thought to ask it different questions, what answers we could have been told.
“Tell us if this is real,” I say.
There is a picture of Lisa and me as kids somewhere catching snowflakes on our tongues. There’s another of us in a pile of leaves, our arms wrapped around each other. We used to lie on our backs in the grass and try to see images in the clouds–a rabbit, a cat, Daffy Duck. She always saw Daffy Duck. Sometimes I still see her in dreams. Sometimes it’s not her, but I know it is. It’s hazy, like dreams are, but I can still make her out. She sits criss-cross-applesauce on the bed, grinning, pushing the planchette toward “yes.”
Janelle Greco is a writer and training director living in Brooklyn, NY, although she often escapes to Long Island. Her stories focus on the idea of home, growing up, mental health, and family–what they pass down to us and what they leave behind. Her work has previously appeared in The Sun, Hobart After Dark, Maudlin House, Pigeon Pages, and other publications. She is grateful for her varied work experience in both a mens’ shelter and now with a teen writing program. She is a firm believer in the power of storytelling; she hopes you write stories too.
