“Believe what you want, but life is so much more fun and rewarding when you let yourself believe in the magic. Everybody has to believe in something or another. Hmmm?”
“Whatever. That’s absurd. What did you find out about it?”
“Oxymoron… It’s absurd, yet you want to know about the magic. Do you really think that dress just showed up in the window for no reason at all? Hardly. The wand is very old. At least five-hundred years. It came from anenchanted dimension, a place even your own reality can’t undermine. It was designed to help twin flames unite, and that’s what it has been doing.”
“But, why? Why is that so important?”
“You can do more together than apart.”
“Like what? I don’t get it? I mean, even if I do see him that doesn’t mean we’re going to be like a couple or anything. I’m still married. Remember?”
“That’s on you. I’m just a pawn placed in your path to help you get there.”
“Get where? The reunion?”
“Is that where you need to go?”
I dropped my hands, slapping them off my hips in frustration. “Can you answer a straight question?”
“Can you just take the wand, and go find your twin?Why don’t you start asking yourself what it is you’re scared of? What is it you’re afraid of finding there?”
I snorted and picked up a green stone from the shelf, tossed it in the air, and caught it midair. “I have no idea. I don’t even know why I’m going or why I care so much about this stupid dress.”
“Because you left something there. Nothing can evolve without movement, you know. Only you can make you stuck. Nobody else. The only person you’re obligated to is you. Align your own energy.”
“I’m not stuck, for God’s sake. I’m freer than I’ve ever been in my life. I could go buy anything I wanted to buy right now. And I’m not going to apologize for that. I’m not ashamed to say I am where I am. I would say I’ve done pretty damn good in my life, and I’ve worked for every bit of it.”
“Oh yeah, those things you’ve worked your entire life for. We’re talking about two different types of freedom, honey. Mine doesn’t cost you your life or your money,” Roxy assured me in a matter of fact tone, dropping the long wand to my hand.
I knew what kind of free she was talking about. The kind where butterflies land on your nose, the kind where you jump off bridges into ice cold water just because, the kind where you ride the Ferris wheel until you’re sick. I did know that kind of free, but I wasn’t a seven-year-old little kid. Everyone had to grow up. My eyes dropped to the beautiful wand in my hand. It didn’t look at all like the one I’d made from a coat hanger in high school. It was breathtaking. Like the dress. Magical. That’s the only wordeven close to describing how magnificent it was.
Even though it was the exact same wand I’d held before, I was still mesmerized by its beauty. “I can’t believe I’m about to ask this, but...what should I expect from it?”
“Nobody really knows how it works. It seems to have a mind of its own. Just be careful what you wish for.”
I chuckled at her warning, deciding not to elaborate any further. I wasn’t going to have a real conversation about magical wands and wishes that didn’t come true, but I would borrow it for my reunion. It made the majestic costume whole, and I couldn’t wait to show it off. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”
“Let go of everything that is not authenticallyyou, Jessie. You know what that is. Focus on your own alignment. The rest is holding you back.”
Without lying, I softly questioned what she was saying. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes, you do. Watch for—.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Watch for the signs. Is that it?”
“Your reunion is on the same night as the harvest full moon. You might find yourself in some strange energy. Don’t be frightened. And remember, you are not your story. Your story is a part of your life, but you are not it. Go into this with an open mind and wake up.”
“Wake up? Wake up to what? Where?”
“Wherever you need to go, child.”
“You’re so exhausting. You spit out all this mumbo jumbo that makes zero sense, and I am not a child.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what this is all about. Get out of here. I have an appointment. You can tell me about it when you get back.”
“Wait, you’re not going to extort money from me this time?”
“Eh, give it to a homeless person on your way back to work. This is a time for you to close all that empty space between you and your real life. Embrace it, keep it fun, and create it how you really want it. Not the way others tell you to want it. Create it from a place in here,” Roxy said, her hand over her heart, once again spitting word vomit I didn’t understand.
Lucky for me, homeless people didn’t hang around this side of town. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll bring your wand back one day next week on my lunch break.”
“I’m sure it will be back when it needs to be.”
“Can’t you be just a little bit normal?”
“I’ll never be your kind of normal. The clarity is coming, child. It always does, but you have to see it.You’re right there. You’re right on the breakthrough of something big.”
Because I didn’t know how to respond to the things she said, I said goodbye. “Okay, see you around.”
“Jessie.”
“Huh?” I questioned, turning to her soft, raspy voice.
“You didn’t come here to be like everyone else.”
I only nodded, understanding what she was saying but unable to process it. Things were changing all around me, and I couldn’t deny it. Sure, there was a good chance I had lost my mind, but I couldn’t have turned back had I tried.
Chapter Four
Without telling Eric, I took a vacation day on Friday. He thought I was flying out after work,which was the original plan, but I waited too long. The cheapest flight I could find was over five-hundredbucks. Eric would never have agreed to that, and I didn’t know how I could justify it. Not when he was right, and I hadn’t seen any of these people since I’d left there thirty-years ago.
This was real, and I was really goingthrough with it. Eric would kill me if he ever found out, and to say I wore my nerves on my sleeve would be an understatement. Anxious adrenaline pumped through my veins for three straight hours, half way across I-85. My knuckles were white from holding on so tight, my jaw hurt from gritting my teeth, and my back was sore from sitting up so straight. I didn’t really think about anything at all during the first half of my trip. I was way too worked up to think about anything, and I didn’t even know why. It wasn’t like I hadn’t snuck around and done things without telling Eric before. I had. Lots of times, but this was in another state, over six-hundred miles away.
By the time I’d made it to I-77, I had relaxed enough to enjoy an eighties station, trying to remember my high school years. The strange part was the fact my memory always wanted to go to another time. Like those years were insignificant or something. They weren’t at all, and I didn’t get that. High school was one of the best times of my life, but it was never those times I remembered. The simplest thing reminded me of those first few years, and I would drift off to that same place, once upon another time, but never high school. Like the low flying airplane descending to land not far in front of me.
It was the summer after second grade. We were bored out of our minds because it was raining, and my grams wouldn’t let us go outside. Plus, she was making me stay in the yard cause I didn’t answer her when she called me at dark time. That’s cause we wasn’t close enough to hear her. We was over at Mr. Hester’s dairy farm trying to catch the new kittens. We were going to sell them and make enough money to buy a bb gun, but we couldn’t catch any of them.
My grams took me with her earlier that day to go to town, and we had lunch at Roger’s Diner. I ate a burger and fries while she talked to Betty Jones about Marybeth from church having a baby, but I
didn’t pay much attention to that causeI didn’t even know what having a baby out of a wet lock even meant.I paid attention to the blue sky and the big white clouds, but mostly, I paid attention to the airplanes I watched fly over town. Three of them in a row.
“Hey, Grams, where’re all those planes coming from?”
My gram placed her hand over mine and gave me a lecture with her eyes for being rude.
“Where? Is there an airport up there?
“Huh, Gram? Is there?”
“Stop, Jessie. You’re being rude.”
“Well, just tell me is there, and I’ll stop.”
“Yes, now stop interrupting. It’s not very polite.”
Me and Royal had snuck into a Sunday movie a couple weeks before that, and the kids laid flat down just off the runway of an airport and watched the planes go over. I wanted to do that. And now I found an airport to do it. Sure, it was a hike, but we’d walked fartherthan that lots of times. Unfortunately, my Grams wouldn’t let me out of her sight that day and not just because it was raining.
“I’m bored. There’s nothing to do in here. Can’t we at least go in the barn?”
“No, you can’t. You’re not allowed to go out of this yard ever again!”
“That’s not fair. We was just catching crawdads in the creek.”
“Yeah, that’s why Margaret saw you running from her barn.”
“That wasn’t me. I told you.”
“Right, and it wasn’t Royal either. You left the gate open. All their cows got out, and they had to round them all up again. You’re not going outside.”
“There’s nothing to do in here.”
Royal took a deck of cards from his back pocket, the same deck I’d traded him when we visited the gypsy lady at the fair. “I know what we can do.”
“I don’t want to play cards, and don’t throw them. I’m not playing fifty-two-pickup either.”
“No, it’s something different than that. Well, it’s still fifty-two-pickup, but we have to write on them first.”
“Why?”
“For the things we’re going to do. We can cut up some pictures and paste them on the cards. Then we toss them into the air and pick one with our eyes closed. Here, you get to pick half, and I get to pick half.”
“Adventures? Like laying on the ground at the airport?”
“Yes, like that.”
“What about a hot air balloon ride?”
Royal shrugged a shoulder and agreed. “Sure, I don’t care, if we can find one.”
We spent so much time on those cards it wasn’t even funny. Of course, there were a lot of things we couldn’t actually do. Like hike The Grand Canyon, ride in a hot air balloon, or go to Peru. We didn’t even know where that was, but it looked cool on the National Geographic special we’d watched on television a couple nights before, and we were going there. Our little minds were dead set on it. We did sneak to the airport though, but we got caught before we got to the runway. A policeman brought us home, and I didn’t see Royal for five whole days. He didn’t even come to Sunday school.
As I drove on,I wondered why I never went to his house, not really knowing where I was going, why I was going there, or what I expected to find when I got there. Royal always just came to my Grams. Sometimes before I was even out of bed, and usually until it was time for us to go to bed. Most of the time we were always together, but sometimes if we got in trouble, Royal wouldn’t come over, and I was pretty sure I knew why, but not then. Then, I believed him, but not now. Now I knew why he would stay away for a few days at a time here and there, and in my heart, I knew his little body wasn’t bruised because he was so accident prone. Royal could climb trees like a chimp, literally jump and swing from one branch to the other without falling, yet I believed him when he said he fell down.
At just after five in the evening, I pulled into town, astounded at what thirty years could do to a place. It was like a new town had beenbuilt on the outskirts of the real town and the old town had died. The hardware store on the corner was gone, the barbershop was now a tattoo parlor, Roger’s Diner was completely gone, building and all, and Archie’s little gas station was now a car lot. The movie theater I had spent so much time in wasn’t there either, the windows boarded up, and so was the skating rink where I’d spent so many Saturday nights. It was like the first eighteen years of my life had never existed, but they had, and no matter how much I wanted to go back and change them, I couldn’t.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this heavy sadness I felt in my chest. What I felt was a knowing. A knowing that no matter how far away you move or how many years have passed, you can never really run. You can go on and pretend your entire life that you can, but you can’t. That’s what I thought about while circling town square. Even as different and grown up as it was, I still felt like I’d never left, the memories of my youth haunting me to my very core. Circling around the back side of town toward the elementary school I had attended, I slowed almost to a stop. It was gone too, replaced by a strip mall, yet the memories still lingered. The slide may have been gone, but I could still see me flying down it. Corduroy pants made you go super-fast down that thing, I remembered with a smile.
Sitting at a four-way in the parking lot, I envisioned going to school there. I didn’t meet Jan or Leigh until middle school when our elementary schools collided, but Wendy came to Grainsville in third grade because of her dad’s work. He ran the fancy hotel they had built where the old Cartlight factory used to be. She fascinated me because she was so different than the other kids. Her clothes were always so pretty, her hair was curled with long ringlets, she smelled like roses, and her lips always glistened from the many flavors of lip gloss she carried in her purse. I was barely allowed to wear chap stick, and the only purse I had was a toy with Casper the friendly ghost sewn on to it. Wendy’s was like a real purse but for little girls.
I could see us as miniature people in the third grade, waiting in line to get on one of two buses. That’s all we really needed back then. If I had to guess, I would say there were less than a hundred kids in the entire building, and half of them walked.
Royal and I were in line, getting ready to step on the bus to go home. The bus driver would never let us on until the second bell rang, even if it was cold out. That bellmeant you only had five minutes until the next one or you were left behind. Our bus driver, Charlie would do it too, but we didn’t have to worry. Royal and I werealways the first ones there so we could get the back seats, but not that day.
“Hey, you want to go cat-fishing at Willow Pond? Jimmy said he got one this big last weekend.”
I looked over my shoulder atRoyal with a frown. “He did not. There ain’t no cat-fishes that big. Different Strokes is on tonight anyway.”
The new girl, Wendy, interrupted before Royal could tell me we’d go after the show. That’s what he was about to say. I always knew what he was going to say before he said it, and so did he. We were always finishing each other’s sentences or saying the exact same things at the exact same time. Of course, I was the one who always said Jinx the fastest. That boy owed me so many Cokes it wasn’t funny.
“Why do you talk to that smelly boy? Do you want to come over to my house tonight? My mom said it was okay. She can talk to your mom if you want.”
By then I’d learned some people didn’t think fondly of my mom. Mostly the women at the church my grams went to. They didn’t appreciate the way she was raising her daughter, and they didn’t think it was right she just left me with my grams while she ran around, sometimes to other states for months at a time. They didn’t think it was right my grams was raising me either. That was what the ladies from church told Momone night while she was there, and I was supposed to be in bed. I sat on the top step and listened while they tried to save her soul and guilt her into being a mom. Of course, she told them to mind their own business, and then she told them all to go to hell. I went to bed then. I hated it when she fought with my grams.
“Okay.
My mom is out of town for work. She does important stuff, but I can ask my grams.”
Wendy and I exchanged numbers and went our separate ways. Even though the bus drove right past her house, she never rode the bus. Her mom picked her up in a fancy gold Buick.
“Hey, I thought we was gonna sneak to Willow Pond, and your mom isn’t out of town for work. You lied.” Royal pouted as the doors opened on the bus.
“Shut up, Royal. You don’t know everything, and Wendy is right. How’scome you never take a bath? You wore that shirt yesterday. That’s why you get picked on. Cause you’re always dirty, and you smell like cheese and maple syrup.”
I left Royal standing there and stomped my way to the back of the bus where I sat alone with my arms crossed. Royal didn’t try to sit beside me because I put my feet up, so he couldn’t, but I did see him. This time, though, I saw what I hadn’t seen then. He was hurt, and I was mean. He kept his attention out the window, but I could see his lip quiver sometimes, and he wasn’t very good at hiding the tears he swiped away.
And I didn’t even care.
I went to Wendy’s house, but first we ate at the fancy hotel restaurant. Then we swam in her pool right in her own back yard. I’d never had a friend like Wendy before. Actually, I’d never had a friend besides Royal before. She had more Barbie’s than the whole Sears and Roebuck catalogue. She even had a camper and a pool for them. I spent the most amazing night of my seven year life that night, pampered with a rose scented bubble bath, movies on a floor model, colored television, popcorn, and soda. I also witnessed, for the first time, how a mommy was supposed to act.
Clara was the nicest mommy in the world. She was always stroking Wendy’s hair and saying sweet stuff to her. She even tucked us in and kissed us goodnight. Even me. Even when my mom did come around, all I ever got was a, ‘go to bed,’ or ‘if you get up one more time.’ I could still remember how soft the pink sheets were. My sheets were never that soft, let alone that fragrant.
A horn blowing behind me caused the elementary school to fade, turning back into the strip mall, and I moved on. “What the hell are you doing here, Jessie?”