Technically, it was Abby’s Ouija board.
Tuesday had stolen it from Abby’s room during the wake. No. It wasn’t a wake. What do you call it when everyone goes back to a house after a funeral to eat cold cuts and prepared salads and make strained conversation? A memorial? But could it even be a real memorial if there hadn’t been a real funeral?
It wasn’t a real funeral. There had been no official death. There was no obituary. There was no body. Abby was still considered a missing person. Even so, one morning they’d lowered an empty casket into the ground – empty except for a pair of purple Doc Martens, a few photographs, and the High Priestess card from Abby’s Rider-Waite deck, which Tuesday had slipped in when Abby’s dad, Fred, wasn’t looking. (She couldn’t bury the whole deck; dropping the whole deck in would have meant that she’d given up hope, and she hadn’t, not then.) By noon, Tuesday was at her presumed-dead best friend’s house, dragging a chip through French onion dip. Tuesday was sixteen. Abby was sixteen too. She would have turned seventeen in November if she hadn’t disappeared in July.
Tuesday’s parents and her big brother Ollie were eating chips too, and Ms. Heck, their English teacher, and a bunch of people from school and the neighborhood and of course Fred, who was vibrating with grief. Tuesday could almost still feel the pain of watching Fred hovering, fluttering, asking if he could get people anything to drink, trying to take care of everyone else so he wouldn’t have to stop, not even for a second.
All funerals are for the living, but this funeral, this premature burial, was explicitly for Fred. He was already a widower. Tuesday didn’t know if there was a word for the surviving parent of a (presumed) dead child, but now he was that too. He had tried to hope for the rest of July and most of August, and that was enough; he couldn’t live with the uncertainty. She’d heard her parents talking about it, late, on the back porch, a little drunk. “He said he’d rather proceed as though she were dead than live with false hope,” her dad squeaked. “Can you – can you imagine? Is that pessimism? Is that – what is that?” And her mother said, “It’s a ritual. A rite. A motion to go through simply to move.”
Tuesday, at the memorial, fled to Abby’s room, which looked exactly the same as it had every day of Abby’s life, or at least all the days of her life during which she and Tuesday had been friends. Matted purple shag carpet, a black bedspread with purple pillows. Taped to her sloped ceiling, a blue and black and white movie poster: a woman, buried to her waist in the ground, trying to pull herself free but held down by a disembodied arm, a rotting hand wrapped around her throat. I’m going to be one of the evil dead, Tues. None of this nice dead business for me. Sneaks and platform clogs lined up at the end of the bed. A pile of clean socks and T-shirts stacked on her dresser.
You would never guess that two months ago she had vanished off the face of the earth.
Or off the edge of Derby Wharf at least. Into the water, probably – into the cold Atlantic, all while Tuesday was fast asleep in her bed. Tuesday was supposed to be staying over at Abby’s, but they’d had a fight. Sort of. It was a dumb fight. Abby had wanted to go out to the light station at the end of Derby Wharf that night, and Tuesday didn’t. For years, they’d walked out during the day – it was their usual meander around town, down by the old counting house and out the long concrete stretch of the wharf to the tiny white light-house at the end. They’d lean against the light station and scuff their feet over the crumbling stone and most of the time they talked, but sometimes all they did was sit and watch the sea and the sky. Tuesday would only be able to articulate later – years later, with the language of time and adulthood – that that was the first time she understood it was possible to be with another person and not feel at all alone.
That June, right after school ended, they started going out to the light station in the middle of the night. It had been Abby’s idea – of course – but Tuesday needed little convincing to get on board. They each filled their backpacks. Abby with candles and matches and a spell book she’d found and, naturally, the Ouija board. Tuesday with sweet and salty snacks, Oreos and chips and two bottles of chilled Sprite and, once, two teeny bottles of cherry-flavored vodka she’d found at the back of her parents’ liquor cabinet. They snuck out of their houses, two girls in the dark world, packing spells and candles.
She knew her parents would have freaked out, but she didn’t care. They weren’t trespassing – the wharf was a national historic site, and it was open twenty-four hours; she’d checked at the visitor center. And they weren’t actually summoning, like, demons. They were trying to talk to people who had died – recently, in town, or historically, at sea, always with limited success (This Ouija is broken, said Abby, we need a better board) – yes, but mostly they were talking to each other. Making each other laugh. It was a ritual, all right: they were tasting their own freedom. And they were getting away with it.
The reason Tuesday hadn’t wanted to go that night was because it was raining. And because, earlier that day, Abby had asked Tuesday what she thought about trying to contact the ghost of Abby’s dead mother. Tuesday had said sure, but her gut went tight and cold and dug in its heels. She didn’t want to have to tell Abby the truth: that she didn’t really believe believe in this stuff. And that she felt a strange breed of shame – shame for the plain dumb luck that her mother was still alive when Abby’s wasn’t.
“Wimp,” said Abby. “It’s just rain.”
“Rain is cold,” said Tuesday. “And it’s not supposed to rain tomorrow.”
It seemed like an airtight argument.
“Well then, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Abby said. They were in the Hobbeses’ downstairs den, watching The Evil Dead on video for the zillionth time, and though Tuesday wasn’t done with her bowl of vanilla ice cream and jimmies and radioactive-red maraschino cherries, she knew Abby had told her to leave. So she left. Hours later, tucked warm into her bed and tired of fretting, she figured, when she saw Abby tomorrow, that they’d do what they always did: pick