Freaks Out! (10 page)

“Which isn't helped by her supposedly [this is mum speaking so I reckon supposedly is OK?] best friend frightening her half to death!”

“It was Rags,” I said.

“It was
you
!” said Mum. “Seriously, Frankie, I want you to promise me… no more seances. Do I have your word?”

I said yes, cos what else could I say?

“I know it just seems like a bit of fun,” said Mum, “and I'm not saying there's any real harm in it, but some people do find it upsetting.
Sensitive
people,” said Mum. “Like Jem. You wouldn't want to be responsible for turning her into a nervous wreck, would you?”

I agreed that I wouldn't. It was all a bit depressing. I just didn't see how Skye was ever going to find her pencil.

It is very hard to admit this, but if it hadn't been for Angel I might almost have given up. Me, that hates to be beaten! And
Angel
, of all people. Not that she encouraged me. She was still going on about the seance and how I was just, like, totally irresponsible and nobody in their right mind could say
she
had anything to do with it.

But then this spooky thing happened. I got up on Tuesday morning to hear Angel screeching in the bathroom. Mum came scudding up the stairs going,
“What on earth is the matter now?” I scudded after her, followed by Rags. We found Angel with her face close to the bathroom mirror, screeching as she pulled open one of her eyes and hysterically peered at it.

“What's the problem?” said Mum.

“My eye!” Angel spun round, dramatically. “Look at it!”

Me and Mum both looked. Seemed just like any ordinary sort of eye to me.

“It's red!” wailed Angel.

“Nonsense,” said Mum. “A little bit pink, that's all.”

“That's how it started last time!”

A few months back she'd had this infection –
minor
infection – and had to put drops in her eyes. Nobody except her would ever have noticed there was anything wrong, but she'd gone, like, way over the top and refused to leave the house for days on end. Now she was at it again.

“How can I go out with my eye like this?”

“Oh, don't be so dramatic!” said Mum. “If it makes
you any happier, we'll bathe it in salt water. For goodness' sake! Don't go
looking
for trouble.”

That was when it struck me. It was one of my horoscopes:
Be on the lookout: trouble ahead.
How spooky was that???

 

“I just feel so guilty!” I waited till me and Jem were on our own next day, walking round the schoolyard at break. I didn't want to say anything in front of Skye.

Jem said, “Cos of Angel's eye?”

“No! There's nothing the matter with her eye, she's just a drama queen. But don't you see? It was one of my predictions!
Be on the lookout: trouble ahead.
”

Jem did this thing where she twitches her nose like a rabbit. “I don't get it,” she said. “What's it got to do with Angel?”

“It's what she was doing! She was looking in the mirror… on the lookout! Convincing herself that her eye was going to go again. Plus,” I added, just to make things quite plain, “it's trouble
ahead.
Right? Your
eyes
are in your
head
!”

Jem said, “So what? Doesn't mean your horoscope was put with her star sign. It's probably just coincidence.”

She'd tried saying that before. But it had to be more than just coincidence. That was the third of my predictions to come true!

“Thing is,” I said, “we can't afford to just give up. Not when I might be the cause of everything. It'd be like letting Skye down.”

“Mm. I s'pose,” Jem admitted somewhat reluctantly. “But I don't want any more seances!”

I told her that we couldn't, anyway, cos I'd promised Mum. “But that doesn't mean we can't try something else.”

“Like what?”

“I'll think of something,” I said.

I thought about it all the rest of the day. I'd tried the tea leaves; I'd tried the pendulum; I'd tried the crystal ball. What
hadn't
I tried? And then, suddenly, it came to me – a Ouija board!

As soon as I'd got home and had my tea, I raced up to my room and put “Ouija boards” into the computer. From what I read, I really, honestly couldn't see there was anything for Mum to get fussed over. It wasn't like we'd actually be meeting any spirits; just asking questions and waiting for the answers to appear. All you needed was a board with numbers and letters on it, and something to use as a pointer.

I had an absolutely brilliant idea for the pointer! Just a few weeks ago I had accidentally let Rags into Mum and Dad's bedroom when I'd gone in there to use the printer, and by mistake I had knocked a load of stuff off Dad's desk, including the mouse, which Rags had immediately jumped on. By the time I got it off him, it wasn't working any more. As I said to Dad, it wasn't Rags' fault; he probably thought it was a rat. Dad agreed that Rags wasn't to blame. He seemed to think if it was anyone's fault, it was mine for letting him in there. They always say that. Everything is always my fault. I am used to it.

Anyway, I'd brought the shattered mouse back to my room for Rags to play with, except he didn't seem interested any more, now that he'd successfully killed it, so I'd chucked it in my waste bin and there it was, just waiting to be recycled. I do believe in recycling! The little wheel it ran on was still working. All I had to do was find something, like a pencil stub, maybe, and stick it on the end, and hey presto! (Magic word.) A perfect pointer!

For the board I
could
just have used sheets of paper Sellotaped together, but I like to do things properly. I waited till Dad had gone off to the DIY store, where I knew he'd be most of the afternoon (Dad just loves the DIY store!), and I waited till Mum was safely shut up in the front room with one of her ladies, where I knew she would also be most of the afternoon, cos she had this big fitting to do on bridesmaids' outfits. I didn't know where Tom was, but Tom didn't matter. What was important was that my annoying sister was also out. I could get to work with no one to spy on me!

I went down to Dad's shed (the one they accused me of setting fire to) and looked around to see what I could find. Dad has all sorts of useful and interesting stuff in his shed. There was a large cardboard box on the workbench. Empty! Exactly what I needed. It was a good box, nice and stiff. I slit it down the sides very neatly and carefully and cut round the bottom edges so that I ended up with a large rectangle. Perfect!

I took it indoors and up to my room – creeping on tiptoe along the hall, just in case – and spent the next hour lovingly decorating it. At the top, on one side, in red felt tip, I wrote the word “YES”, and on the other side, “NO”. I then took a black marker and wrote the letters A to M in a half-circle, and underneath, in another half-circle, N to Z. Underneath that, I put numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, like it said on
Make your own Ouija Board
. As a finishing touch, down at the bottom, I wrote “Thank you”, cos of needing to be polite and treating the spirits with respect.

I was quite proud of my Ouija board! I wish we did that sort of thing at school, instead of boring cooking and sewing. We did once make houses out of shoeboxes when I was at primary school, but Rags went and sat on mine and squashed it. I bet if he hadn't, it would have been one of the ones on display. I sometimes think that if I don't go for a career helping people, like giving them advice, or telling them what to do, I could have a career making things. If there
are
careers in making things. Maybe I could be an inventor. It is just a thought.

When Dad came back from the DIY shop, he brought a copy of one of the local free papers with him. Guess what I saw on the first page? An ad for Ouija board sessions!

 

YOUR QUESTIONS CHANNELLED
THROUGH GENUINE PSYCHIC.
ANSWERS GUARANTEED.

 

How often did that happen? It had to be an omen!

 

Excitedly, first thing Monday morning, I told Jem and Skye about it.

“On the front page… an advert! There's this woman that you go to and she asks questions for you and gets the answers.”

“You're suggesting we ought to go to her?” said Skye.

“No! I'm just saying… it's an omen!”

Jem seemed doubtful. “I thought omens were bad?”

“Not if they're good ones.”

“But how would you know?”

“What she means,” said Skye, “is it's like a sign, saying ‘
Go for it!'
”

“But it could be a
bad
sign.”

“If it comes to that,” I said, “anything could be anything.”

There was a pause.

“That is so profound,” said Skye.

Well, I thought it was.

Jem said, “I don't get why you're so excited.”

“
Because
–” I tried not to sound too triumphant – “I've already made a Ouija board for us! It's all ready and waiting. We can ask it things whenever we like. It's just a question of where we do it. See, I'm not sure we should use my place again cos of – well, cos of Rags.” I didn't want to admit that it was cos of Mum. Playing with a Ouija board mightn't be the same as holding a seance, but I sort of had this feeling she still wouldn't be too happy. Probably Jem's mum wouldn't, either, which only left Skye, and even she seemed hesitant.

She said, “I
suppose
you could come round after school. Just so long as we don't let Mum know what we're doing. She says she doesn't want me to keep on searching. She says it's making me upset and I should just try to forget about it.”

That was
three
of our mums against us. Life certainly is an uphill struggle at times.

Anyway, we decided that if we were going to do it, then we should get on and
do
it. I said that
next day I would bring the Ouija board into school with me – which, as it turned out, was one of those things that was easier said than done. No way would it fit into my schoolbag. I had to use a big carrier and hope Mum wouldn't ask me what I'd got in there, which fortunately she didn't, being in too much of a hurry to get rid of me so she could make a start on her bridesmaids' outfits.

Angel's beady eyes, needless to say, homed in. She said, “What's in there?” Like it was anything to do with her. I told her quite smartly that it was none of her business, whereupon she swished her hair and said, “Suit yourself! Not really interested, anyway.” So why ask? She just can't
ever
stop interfering.

At break time I showed the board to Skye and Jem. They were impressed! You could tell. They gazed at it for a long time without speaking. I could see the awe on their faces. And then Skye said, “Why have you put S before R? Is that some kind of special Ouija thing?”

I must admit to being a little irritated. “It's just a small mistake,” I said. I mean, really! Like it mattered. The letters were all there; who cared what order they came in?

“What's this?” said Jem, picking up the mouse.

“That's the pointer,” I said.

“Why's it got a bit of old pencil stuck on it?”

“So that it can point!”

“I thought with a Ouija board you used a tumbler,” said Skye.

“Well, we're using a mouse!” It was
my
board; it was
my
idea. “If you think you can do any better…”

“You don't have to get all huffed up,” said Skye. “I was only asking.”

I was about to put the board back in its carrier bag when Daisy Hooper came clumping past.

“Ooh, is that a Weejy board?” she said. “We played with one of those at Christmas. My gran got a message from a girl she was at school with. She didn't even know she'd died! Dead scary.”

There are times when I could happily
throttle
Daisy Hooper. Opening her big mouth. It was all we needed! Jem plucked anxiously at my sleeve as we went back into school.

“I don't want to do it if it's going to be scary!”

“It's not,” I said soothingly. “There's nothing to be frightened of. We're just going to ask questions.
I'm
going to ask questions.” I paused. “Cos of me being the one that's read about it. Plus,” I added carelessly, “me being the one that's most likely psychic.”

I waited for Jem to start up about the huge hairy monsters racing across her kitchen floor, and how it was exactly what she'd written in her horoscope, but it seemed she wasn't interested any more in having psychic powers cos she just chewed her bottom lip and didn't say anything.

“You are still coming, aren't you?” I whispered as the bell rang for the end of afternoon school.

I half expected her to find some excuse, like she'd suddenly remembered she'd got to be home early, or she had a dentist appointment, but one thing we always do, we always stick by one another. Jem said
she'd already told her mum she'd be late home.

“Only not
too
late.”

Me and Skye agreed, not
too
late. We told her that she was being very brave.

“I wouldn't do it for just anyone,” said Jem, sounding rather pitiful.

I said, “Of course you wouldn't! It's the sort of thing you only do for your friends. But honestly, it won't be like last time. I mean, for one thing, we're doing it in daylight.”

“Yes, and it's only questions and answers,” said Skye. “Nothing spooky.”

“There won't be any dead people?”

Patiently I explained that all the dead people were “up there”.

“So how do they answer questions?”

“Well, it's like this sort of…
energy.
Psychic energy. Flowing down.” I dabbled my fingers in the air, to show the energy rippling through space. “What it'll do, it'll flow down my arm and into my hand, and that's what'll make the mouse move.”

“What about
our
hands?” said Skye. “Where are they going to be?”

“On the mouse! Everybody puts their fingers on it.”

“Do we have to?” said Jem. “Couldn't I just sit and watch?”

Skye looked at me doubtfully. “Would it work with just two of us?”

I didn't see why not. “Might even work better,” I said, “cos then we'd have someone to write down the messages. Save us having to keep breaking off. Jem can be our secretary! Special Ouija secretary.”