Unnamed Ghost Book Chapter 1: Janet Goes To A Seance

The only slumber party I was ever invited to was a seance.

People tell me it's crazy that I pretty much missed out on such a quintessential experience of girlhood- those late night conversations with elbows propped up on pillows, the whispered secrets under cover of darkness- but to me it makes perfect sense. By the time I was twelve I had entered this weird genderless gray area where nobody wanted to see me in pajamas, and the invitations never came.

The one gathering I did go to wasn’t one of those nerdy little shin-digs my friends think of when they talk about slumber parties- it was the entirety of the popular girl coterie, gathered on Halloween night to summon a ghost. Getting invited to such a party should have been some kind of testament to my social prowess, but in this case it was not. Elise, my best friend who straddled the line between cool and not, got me the connection. She was invited because she knew a guy who knew a guy whose parents had a ouija board in their attic, and she brought me as a plus one. We dressed up in matching costumes- two iconic sisters from an anime we liked.

We rang the doorbell and our teenage hostess, whose name even then I didn’t know, opened the door. She was dressed like a witch, with a violet and black tulle skirt that hung stiffly above her ankles. She stared at us and scrunched her face as if trying to remember who the hell we were. After a moment, Elise held up the ouija board that had been squished precariously between her arm and side. The hostess’s eyes widened with realization, and she gave us a nervous smile and hurried us to the basement.

We walked down a flight of stairs into the largest basement I had ever seen, with a gym and a movie theater and enough room to fit my entire house as decoration. Hammock chairs, mattresses and sleeping bags formed a cultish ring around a cluster of scented candles that I realized was the summoning circle. Elise placed her ouija board in the middle, cautiously, almost ceremoniously, as if she was giving a gift to an angry god, and we set down our sleeping bags to wait.

I don’t remember how long we waited, but at a certain point the hostess bonked a spoon against her Stanley cup with the gravitas of someone about to give a speech at a wedding, and the room fell silent.

“Girls,” she said. She spoke in a hissing whisper, likely not wanting her parents to discover us, “As you probably know, Elise was able to get us a ouija board,” she pronounced it like oo-ja, “So we’re going to summon a ghost!”

Everyone cheered softly, and we huddled around the center, watching as the hostess walked around the room, flicking off all the lights. One of her friends, a girl in a pumpkin costume, lit the candles.

The hostess kneeled beside the board, held her shaking hand to the planchette, then withdrew it. Her friend Rosie, dressed as a Pink Lady, leaned towards her and whispered something in her ear. Never play alone. The hostess nodded and the two of them motioned for everyone to put their hands on the planchette. We lifted it onto the board together, all ten to twenty seventh graders trying not to show their fear as the shadows in the giant room seemed to skitter across the walls like cockroaches.

Rosie led the pack, and ideomotor effect or not it’s still surprising to me how real words started to spell themselves out on the board. We had an entire conversation with the spirit, a young boy who had apparently been murdered. By the end, we were all satisfied with the small act of rebellion against our Christian parents, and settled down to watch a mildly creepy movie.

To Elise, and presumably the other girls, it was just simple fun, a small secret shared between us that didn’t hold much weight in the grander scheme of teenage life. But to me, it was something more- all because of that girl- Rosie O’Connor. Rosie, the only one to never falter or show fear as her acrylic-tipped fingers were guided by the planchette. Rosie, the one who the spirit seemed to speak through, whose voice echoed across the walls as she read each letter with surprising solemnity. Rosie, the one who clarified after the seance that she didn’t believe in ghosts, yet still told her friend not to play alone.

Before then, she had seemed like a basic but vaguely pretty popular girl, but after that night I started to wonder about her. I started to notice the way her eyes glazed over when her friends talked about crushes. I noticed that while she talked about a boyfriend in the next town over, nobody had ever seen him. I noticed how she spent lunch drawing checkerboard patterns on napkins instead of eating, and how she sat in class running her hands over her neck and stroking her Adam’s apple.

And I noticed, eventually, that I was madly in love with her.

***

Rosie died.

Four years after the Halloween party, during her junior year, she started to perform in plays at a local theater company. It was a small business, just starting out, and the stages were poorly constructed, the lights not up to code. Something broke, went awry, and during her big solo the entire thing came tumbling down. I wasn’t there. I had gone to an earlier show, considered buying her flowers but never did. It was such a stupid, senseless way to die that when I was informed of it I almost laughed. But of course, I didn’t.

We only had a few conversations over the years, which made me feel embarrassed, almost shameful, about how much I mourned her. I found myself unable to explain my change in demeanor to my friends, after a few days it seemed odd to spare more than a passing thought about the girl I barely knew. But I couldn’t help it. After all, for all that time I had believed I was in love with her, and that I had all the time in the world to tell her that.

I went to her funeral. Almost everyone in the school passed by, it was a pretty big event considering she’d only been around for sixteen years. It wasn’t an open casket, but the closed coffin was a key centerpiece, and I tried not to look at it. I didn’t want to imagine someone I knew as a corpse.

I saw her parents, dressed in black, standing slightly farther apart than one would expect, as if there was a thin wall between them. They didn’t bear a particular resemblance to their daughter, except for their faces, which like hers were unsettlingly symmetrical. I stood as far away from them as possible, ate the stale cookies that were laid out on a small table off to the side.

After the funeral, I went home and quietly cried in my bed for a few hours, hating myself all the while. And I had this sort of revelation, that maybe falling in love with anyone, especially someone you’re intimidated by, someone you barely know, never ends well. I realized you can never let yourself get too attached to the ticking time bombs that are other people.

So I resolved myself to forget that Rosie ever existed.