Raise Your Body to the Sky by Annmarie Kelly

We held séances during fifth-grade recess, on the picnic table where the janitors took their cigarette breaks. We weren’t children naturally skilled in the occult, but Kelsey Miller’s most recent birthday fell on Halloween, so her sleepover had been shrouded in mystery and haunt. Initially, we engaged in parent-approved activities: us in blindfolds, our hands thrust into cold spaghetti zombie intestines and chilled grape eyeballs. But after the pepperoni pizza had been consumed, after Mrs. Miller had rinsed the eyeballs and returned them to the fridge for breakfast, she’d said goodnight, reminded us to make good choices, and retired upstairs with a Danielle Steel novel.

That’s when the real party started.

Kelsey’s older sister Kiley taught us a supernatural script, which didn’t exactly involve us communicating with the dead so much as playing at death ourselves. According to Kiley, one girl needed to lie on the floor while everyone knelt around her and listened to an invented description of how that victim had perished. If the story was convincing enough, we would then be able to slide two fingers beneath our friend’s body and lift her off the ground. Years later, I’d come to understand this wasn’t a séance at all but merely a party trick explained by the physics of synchronized weight distribution. However, back then, we always trusted those short, busty Miller girls who knew important things that we didn’t.

Kelsey got her period in fourth grade. I remember because we were both crossing guards, and as we walked to our Cardinal Drive post, she asked me to “check her.” In middle school, I’d come to know this phrase intimately, examining friends for everything from panty lines to hickeys, but as a ten-year-old, I didn’t know what she meant. And it was only when Kelsey turned her backside to me that I noticed the rust-colored blood cascading down the inseams of her pink parachute pants, a horror I’d never known to fear.

“A little,” I replied. She frowned and looped a hoodie around her waist, a menstrual wardrobe trick I’d implement myself in the years to come.

I don’t know why Kelsey invited me to her parties. She was so popular. Her mom threw her birthdays with friends, while I shared mine with my brothers and Grandpa Kel, who spent those evenings reminiscing about the war. Kelsey wore Guess jeans and push-up bras; I sported brown loafers and hand-me-downs. Maybe Mrs. Miller made Kelsey include all the girls from our class. As a parent, I’ve insisted on such manners from my own kids. I’m only now realizing it’s been more for me than for them, because I was once a child afraid of being left out.

But when it came to dastardly storytelling, I ruled. I killed my classmates with car bombs and house fires. Murderers crept in first-floor windows and poisonous snakes slid between Holly Hobbie sheets. I’d massage our victim’s temples, elaborating upon the details of their imagined deaths. How Carla had startled a man with a chainsaw in her backyard. How June’s baby blue Volkswagen spun out of a hairpin turn.

When other girls rotated in, they didn’t sell the deaths. “Um, I guess it was raining….” Inevitably, I’d be begged back into service to describe the fallen oak that severed the electricity and sent our victim hurling head over toes down basement stairs.

Looking back, that fifth-grade fall exuded psychic darkness. Our class read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which terrified me, especially the death of Nicodemus, a rat who suffocated beneath a collapsed house. That same year, a classmate was diagnosed with leukemia. We had a schoolwide assembly about the disease, and while I imagine someone surely said, “You can’t catch leukemia from Sean,” all I could think about was how I’d probably catch leukemia from Sean, unless a house collapsed on me first. And that spring, my other grandfather died at his own hand, and like a true 80s family, we never spoke of it. So, for a time, when I was young, death seemed to swirl around me, unavoidable and out-of-control. No wonder I tried to wrangle and best it in stories. I suppose I still do.

I don’t know whose idea it was to bring our so-called séances to school. Maybe Tracy Haggerty? Or maybe it was Kelsey herself. All I know is that I spent one blissful week slaughtering students in the strange light of day.

We were chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board” when one of the janitors shut us down. They didn’t care about our stories of violence or killing. They just wanted their table back to smoke. We’d have to find somewhere else to raise our bodies to the sky.

Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Quinn Dombrowski