Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt Read Free Book Online Page B

stepping in for Adeline. She seemed nervous again, allowing herself one small nibble at her pretty thumbnail. “There’s supposed to be this library ghost? And if you ask her things, she can help you with your schoolwork? Because she believed in education?”
    â€œOk,” I said. “And?”
    â€œAnd we want her to help us? According to the legend, you’re supposed to find this dirt, see. That’s the first thing. And then you get a sensitive person to be the ghost’s, um, mouth. Voice. And, um, we thought, you seemed pretty sensitive.”
    I looked around the room, waiting for one of the girls to burst into laughter. But they were nodding, attentive. Leslie and Bernice held hands, and despite my fear of being made a fool of, I was intrigued. Back in Moscow I’d been raised by the state to believe in sensible ideas, focusing on practical knowledge and hard work instead of fairytales about life after death. God was forbidden in my childhood, and spook stories, too, those hair-raising articles of the capitalist imagination, designed to lull the overrun masses into a submissive stupor, while the revolution was designed, instead, to wake us up. But the pragmatism required by my Soviet education never quite took, with me. Maybe because my mother had been full of superstitions—sit on a cold stone and lose your childbearing abilities; go to sleep with wet hair and you’ll wake up with thewalking flu; whistle below the full moon and you’re inviting something malign to tea—or maybe just because I didn’t feel that my physical senses were perfect enough to grasp everything the universe had to offer. And then, too, my parents died, which felt like something that might happen to somebody else, suggesting that I wasn’t living my own proper life. Anyway, beyond any ghostly concerns, I hadn’t been completely honest with Adeline when I said my grades were fine. They could’ve been better. They could always have been better.
    â€œSo how do we get the dirt?” I asked.
    Cindy nudged Marion with her toe, and the younger girl reached into a knapsack, pulling out a paper bag. She shook it, and I heard the soft sprinkling of earth.
    â€œOpen your hands,” Marion instructed, and I did so, making a little bowl. She shook a bit of the dirt onto my palms.
    â€œAnd you all just thought I could do this? Because I seem … open?”
    â€œWell, that,” Cindy agreed. “And, honestly, none of us wanted to. We figured if you said no, we’d tell Margaret you follow her around copying her every move.”
    â€œWhat?” I retracted my hands a bit, losing a light dusting of soil.
    â€œCareful!” Cindy said. “Look, it’s no big deal. We just thought, if we were Margaret, then we wouldn’t want our creepy roommate tailing us like a creepy shadow. Not that you’re necessarily creepy,” she assured me with a shrug. “And I mean, you said yes, so we don’t have to tell Margaret anything anyway.”
    My face burned. In a way, it had worked: my plan to get noticed and find my place among the other girls. But this was not the place I had wanted, or the notice I was hoping for. The ghostly dirt felt cool in my hands, and gave off the vaguest scent of grass and stone.
    â€œWhat do we do now?” I asked, not looking up.
    â€œNow we’re going to say a poem,” Marion told me. She was the calmest of them, and her voice was pleasant. Lulling. “You just listen to the poem, and each of us will light a candle. Then the Gray Governess is supposed to speak.”
    â€œOk,” I said. It didn’t sound so bad. Around me, everyone nodded, and Adeline gently pushed me into the center of the circle. I sat down, and they arranged themselves at an even distance, pulling out short tapers and passing a box of matches hand to hand. Louise stood up and turned off the lights. There was just the soft glow of the