I’M SITTING ON THE floor in front of the mirror on my closet door.
School starts tomorrow. I know those guys think that I’m dying to step into Anisha’s platform shoes and rule the school. She moved to Ottawa and, as her ex-best friend, they naturally think I’m next in line to the throne. What they don’t know is exactly how ex I am.
They can find someone else for Anisha’s job, because I’ve got other plans. Traveling plans. My new life in France will be clean of everything that came before. I’m going to be a loner until Mom sends for me. It won’t be long. Any day now Dad will get the call, and I’ll be flying away from here forever.
I reach up into the closet and pull on a pair of white pants that are short on me. I throw them onto the bed behind me with the six other rejected outfits.
The hardest part about deciding to be a loner is creating a good loner outfit. I want to look like one of those rebel girls in the movies who is secretly more beautiful than the pretty girls.
Anisha was pretty. She had perfectly smooth skin, like dark honey, and long, glistening black hair. I bowed down to her like she was the Queen of Sheba. I gave her my black cat T-shirt just because she said she liked it. And I let her trade me on the nail polishes we got from the dollar store because she said the red I got went better with her complexion than the orange she bought.
I was her lady-in-waiting. I was one of those dolls that isn’t Barbie but is made to stand beside her at parties — one of those cheap imitation Barbies whose legs won’t bend.
I part my hair down the middle and comb it straight against my ears. It makes my head pointy. My eyebrows arch up way too high on my forehead so that I always seem surprised, but my face isn’t so bad that it’s ugly. I have my mother’s deep-set, spooky charcoal gray eyes at least, even if my hair is stringy and mousy. Leon says it’s golden. Dad says it’s like light, light, light chocolate.
I run my fingers through it to fluff it up.
I should show up like this, in my undershirt with my hair mussed.
“Leave me alone.” I mouth the words a couple of times and toss my head.
I try to think of real loners and come up with J.W. Reane, the guy who spits on his arm and then draws pictures in the spit. He talks to the ceiling when he answers in class, like he’s talking to some fly up there. Even the teachers don’t like calling on him.
I go to my desk for the postcards. They’re in a big envelope at the back of the top drawer. I toss the clothes off the bed and arrange the cards under the comforter in case Dad comes in. I listen for sounds in the hall and start the spell. I touch the sides of each postcard in order.
“North, East, South, West. Who is the one that you love the best?”
I whisper the chant. If I do it wrong on one of the postcards, I start over again. That’s one of the rules.
RULES FOR THE SPELL
It’s hard to make the box on the bed because the mattress can shift and knock the whole thing down. But I can’t do it on the desk anymore since Dad walked in that time and almost caught me.
It was 2:07 A.M. I told him I was writing a postcard to Anisha.
The desk top was slippery for the cards. The sheet on the bed gives them traction and it makes less noise when the cards fall down. The box is never perfectly square because the postcards aren’t all the same size. The floor usually ends up floating in the middle, only touching one or two of the wall cards. I try not to let the gaps at the side and the bottom be too big, so my chant energy won’t leak out.
Some nights it takes a long time to make the box, and I have to start over from the beginning.
When the box is standing, I put myself inside it. I close my eyes and make myself be in the box. I concentrate on the writing on the walls. My head follows her hand drawing the letters, the loops, the arcs, the crosses on the t’s, the dots above the i’s. I always end with the loop on the 1 in the word Angel It’s my goodnight word.