Graveyard Slot by Michelle Schusterman (classic children's novels .TXT) 📕

“Kat!”

Dad’s bloodshot eyes were wide with panic. I collapsed against him, squeezing mine shut.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice unusually high. I’d never heard him sound this frightened before. Still holding me tightly, he leaned into the bathroom.

“I didn’t do it.” My words came out muffled against his chest.

“Honey, it’s okay. It’s just a broken glass, no big deal.”

“What?”

Slowly, I pulled away from him and turned around. No words. No scratches. The mirror, the walls—everything was back to normal, except for the broken glass scattered on the tile floor.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a tentative step forward. “Ow!”

“Stop.” Before I had time to respond, Dad swept me up and carried me over to the chair. He knelt in front of me, carefully inspecting the bottoms of my feet. “Don’t move,” he ordered. I sat with my legs hovering a few feet off the floor while he grabbed the first-aid kit he had stashed in the closet and turned on the lights.

“I don’t feel anything” I said as he began picking tiny shards from my left foot. “Am I bleeding?”

“I don’t think so,” Dad replied, squinting. “Looks like there are a few tiny cuts, but it could’ve been worse.” He glanced at me. “So . . . wanna tell me what happened?”

I squirmed when he started to apply ointment to one of the cuts. “I saw . . . I thought I saw something in the bathroom,” I said at last. “Scratches.”

Dad’s brow furrowed. “Scratches?”

“On the walls and mirror. It . . .” It spelled I WANT OUT. I exhaled slowly. “It scared me and I dropped the glass.”

He closed the first-aid kit and studied me. “It’s not like you to see things.”

“Yeah.” Because it’s not me.

“I can’t remember the last time you had a nightmare,” he said. “Especially one that made you scream like that. Scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. Then I realized what he’d said. “Nightmare? I wasn’t asleep!”

“Well, there aren’t any scratches in the bathroom, right?” Dad smiled a little. “You conked out really early, and hard. I knocked over my suitcase when I came in and you didn’t even budge. Sounds to me like you were sleepwalking.”

I started to shake my head, then stopped. What was the point of arguing? Sure, maybe I was sleepwalking. Or maybe the ghost of a dead Brazilian singer’s daughter, who might be possessing me, is making me see things. That’s also a perfectly reasonable explanation, right?

After we cleaned up the rest of the glass, Dad turned on the TV and found a sitcom. He claimed he was too awake and felt like watching something, but I knew he was doing it because he thought I was scared. Two minutes into the show and he was snoring as loud as ever. I lay awake, listening to the laugh track and counting the bumps on the ceiling.

In all honesty, I was scared. But not of the dark or of nightmares.

I was afraid of myself.

By the time I dragged myself out of bed, Dad was gone. I skipped showering—the memory of the scratches all over the tile was a little too fresh—and brushed my teeth and hair without looking in the mirror. When I got down to the lobby, Jamie was sitting on the sofa looking through a bunch of papers. He beamed when he saw me.

“Hey!”

“Hi!” I sat down, suddenly wishing I’d at least glanced at my reflection. “Where is everybody?”

“The church.” Jamie held out a napkin-wrapped muffin. “Breakfast room closed a few minutes ago, so I grabbed this for you.”

“Thanks.” I took the muffin gratefully. “Sorry I didn’t help edit last night.”

“It’s okay! Your dad said you crashed pretty early.”

I picked off a piece of muffin but didn’t eat it. “Yeah. I wasn’t feeling good.”

Jamie was silent for a moment. I waited, wondering if he was going to ask what was wrong, or why I was acting so weird lately. I still wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share. Especially after last night.

“Oscar and I have a theory,” he suddenly announced, and my stomach turned over.

“About what?”

“You.”

“Um. Okay?”

“So yesterday during Ouija, the message started out I want,” Jamie began. I nodded, trying not to shiver at the words. “Which could have been the same message you got from Ana back in Salvador, I want out. We were thinking it’s possible Ana came with you.”

My face grew warm. “I’ve sort of wondered about that, too. Actually, I—I asked Sam and Roland about it because I kind of saw her at the waterfall.”

Jamie’s eyes widened. “You did? Oscar didn’t mention that.”

“I never told him,” I admitted. “Anyway, Sam said she’d have to have a pretty big reason to leave her mother’s grave and follow us, and I . . . I just have no idea why she’d do that.”

“I do.” Jamie leaned forward. “This is going to seem kind of out there, though.”

“Probably no weirder than what I’ve been thinking.” I tried to sound casual, but my stomach was knotting up tighter and tighter. Oscar and Jamie didn’t even know about the message on the cave walls or in the bathroom. If they thought I was possessed, too . . .

“Okay.” Jamie took a deep breath. “We think you might be an exorcist.”

I gaped at him. “A . . . what?”

“You know, a person who performs exorcisms,” he explained eagerly. “After the Daems episode, everyone was freaking out about Emily. But some of the fans in the forums were more interested in what happened to Lidia. Especially after you blogged about Red Leer, how he’d been possessing her for, like, a week, how you’d gotten rid of him by using the flash on your camera. One person posted this theory: He thinks you basically performed an exorcism. Which is true, if you think about it,” Jamie added. “An exorcism is forcing a spirit out of another person’s body, right?”

I blinked a few times. Bizarre as the idea was, it did make sense.

“So last night, Oscar and I stayed up researching exorcisms,”