Witches' Rave

by Andrew Jimenez

All is well between the breasts of passenger and slave
We'll never make it out alive to join the witches' rave
—Jeff Buckley, "Witches' Rave"

When I was in the seventh grade I thought I could control dice with my mind. I was on a coach bus moving south from Tampa, coming home from the Florida State Junior Thespian competition. My friend Vanessa had bought this "Psychic Abilities Exercise" kit. It had all these activities you could do to strengthen your sixth sense—from dice and instructions on how to focus your psychic will to guidelines on hypnosis and telepathy.

"Let's start with the dice, that sounds simple enough," she said. And we sat there for over an hour, tossing the Law of Probability into the kit's box top and concentrating like mad. We were dedicated, thirsty for the invisible power we were convinced existed between everything, drawing together and expanding apart. The manual said those who posses extreme control of their mind's eye can make the two dice land double six in one or two throws, but beginners should try one at a time until they have rolled six on each, then work up from there. No one told us we were being duped; unaware of odds and figures, we were too desperate for something to believe in to believe there wasn't something unbelievable that existed.

"What are you guys doing?" Aimee. Beautiful, simple Aimee. Her head stuck out from around the back of my seat, a pink amulet she had bought at a gift shop in Tampa swung from her precious ivory neck. I looked at her and tried to make her smile with my mind.

"Hey, doofus, I'm talking to you!" She smiled at herself and a scar below her lip bloomed like a scowl. Across the aisle behind her Freaky Friday played on one of the bus's small overhead TVs.

"Practicing our psychic power," Vanessa said finally. "It's fun, you wanna try?"

"Hey, Paulette!" Aimee disappeared behind my seat, reappearing again above the backs of Vanessa's and my seat with Paulette. "Take those things off," she demanded playfully, slapping Paulette's arm.

Paulette let her headphones drop to her shoulders. I could hear "Black Magic Woman" thinly buzzing out from them. "What's up, Punky?"

The three of us sometimes called Aimee that because she got the part of "Punky" on the late-'80s sitcom, Punky Brewster, but had to give it up after a dog attacked her so savagely, plastic surgery was needed on her face. The scar below her lip a parting gift.

"Vanessa and Andrew are trying to control dice with their minds," Aimee laughed, and so did her scar.

"Hey, cool!" Paulette's already large dark eyes excitedly stuck out of her oblique head. "Can I try?"

"Sure," said Vanessa. "How've you been doing, Andrew?"

"Not very good. I've only gotten two sixes in a row once."

"How about you, Vanessa?" Paulette was hopelessly cheerful.

"Well, I've gotten double sixes twice. Here, Andrew, switch seats with Paulette."

.

Sarah Peterson lived seven houses down the block in fifth grade. We'd hang out sometimes and wash our parents' cars, play Sega Genesis, or watch Freddy Kruger flicks. She was thirteen, so I—being an eleven-year-old boy who had a friend that was not only in middle school, but also a pretty girl—should've been recognized as the coolest kid ever.

"Tell anyone we're friends and I'll deny it and kick you're ass."

Our friendship started through her kid brother Eddie, who I hung out with because he had Sega Game Gear and she hung out with because she was grounded the whole summer due to a bad end-of-the-year report card. Eddie was a year younger than me and, as Sarah told me one day, so immature he didn't know the difference between horny and corny.

"Baby Got Back" was big on the radio at that time and he demonstrated his ignorance by rapping along that a big round butt made him so corny. She laughed at him, and I did too—except only for getting the lyric wrong. Although I didn't dare say it, I didn't know what either word meant.

A few weeks later, I was babysitting my brother and sisters while my parents were at a July Fourth party. Around midnight, Sarah knocked at the door. She said she'd gotten in a fight with her mom. She had what my mother called, "a mouth on her."

Sarah let herself in, sat down on the wicker-armed loveseat, and explained how her mother made her break up with her boyfriend because he was sixteen and in high school.

"I was so upset I just started cussing," she said as I poured her some apple juice. She stared silently at the TV while she drank. Some forgotten sitcom running its predictable course. I noticed how her moist eyes glowed from it in the dim light. When a commercial hit, she looked over at me, eyes like waterlogged headlights.

"Hey," putting her empty cup down on the mauve carpeting beside the couch, she almost whispered it. That dry-throated, hoarse, yet melodious way a girl's voice can sound when she's feeling exhausted or promiscuous. Or both.

Sarah leaned in and there we sat, arms like taut tent ropes, heads twisting side-to-side against tight lips. I felt something come down over me. Something hot. Nasty. Vicious. A burning coal in my belly, an unmined diamond set to rot forever. For dramatic effect, I'd like to say I saw sparks because of that kiss. Really, it was just the holiday fireworks lighting up the sliding glass windows all sorts of unnatural colors. Neon raved around us in Technicolor dances.

She let me touch her bare waist and I finally understood what horny meant.

.

I remember after sunset, somewhere south of Orlando, seeing stars hopping through an open field. I was still sitting next to Aimee, who was writing in a pewter-bound diary. Paulette and Vanessa were whispering in low tones in front of us. The Fugee's cover of "Killing Me Softly" was coming down from the bus's radio and I had been wishing for about an hour Aimee would rest up against my side. That something would bring us closer.

"Hey, Aimee, do you see that?" I almost whispered. "There are stars in that field over there."

"What? Where?"

"Right over there," I pointed. "And they're hopping."

"I don't see anything. It's probably just the glare of the city lights from where you're sitting." She leaned across me and her shirt, lying natural, revealed a bit of the skin of her side as she stretched to see out the window from my point of view. I felt the shape of her young, forming breasts on my right thigh and I rationalized trying to inch up her shirt further using my psychic will. "Your mind is just playing tricks on you." She sat back in her seat. "Maybe you should just go to sleep."

"What's happening?" I could see Vanessa's left eye jerk back and forth in its socket through the space between the back of her chair and the window.

"Andrew is seeing things." Aimee rolled her eyes and I felt just like a bubble headed for a spike.

"What kind of things?" Vanessa sat up, intrigued. Paulette had put her headphones back on and dozed off.

"Stars," I said. "Hopping through that field." I looked back again, but they had all vanished.

Vanessa looked out over the darkness. "Hopping?"

"Like rabbits, or something."

"Do you still see them?"

"No, not anymore," I resigned.

"Well then we must hurry."

"For what?" Aimee seemed to be shocked that Vanessa was taking this whole thing so seriously.

"For the telepathy to work best."

"The what?" I asked

"Mental telepathy," she said, starting to move out of her seat. "Here, Aimee, trade seats."

"Why?" Aimee protested, but did so anyway.

"The fact that you can see those stars means you've got something special. It also means that your psychic power is working at a higher potential right now and it's trying to tell you something."

She explained all this while situating herself where I was sitting, against the window, facing the aisle. She told me to lie down on my back with my head on her lap. Massaging my temples, she explained to me to close my eyes, completely clear my mind, and count down backwards from ten with her. She then went into a long, drawn out narrative where I was supposed to picture myself walking down this long, dirt road. She told me to visualize coming upon an old, Victorian house, and then describe it to her.

After I did that, she told me to go inside. She described the basic layout of the house to me, and then told me to go wherever I felt drawn to. Everywhere I went, she instructed me to describe what everything looked like and anything that might be happening.

"This is silly," Aimee said from over the back of her seat.

"Shhh!" Vanessa insisted, "You'll mess with his trance."

I described going up a long staircase. There were photographs of blonde girls in succession along the wall of the staircase. The girl in each picture was older than the girl in the last and they all looked like they could be Aimee's sisters.

"Ok, so do you think they're all each other's sisters?"

"Yeah, sure."

"What age do the oldest and youngest look?"

"The youngest looks about, nine or ten. And the oldest looks, I dunno, like an older teenager. And there's more picture frames than there are pictures. The last half of them are all empty."

I then described walking down a long hallway. There were many doors on each side; all of them were closed. Vanessa instructed me to pick one and open it.

"There's an old man with a beard, and a cane. He's in old-fashioned pajamas—you know, the robe thing with the little Santa-like cap. He's crying and trying to say something, but I can't really make out what."

"This is really ridiculous," I heard Aimee say.

"Try really hard and listen to him," Vanessa said.

"He's saying, S ... something with an S."

"I think you should stop it, guys." Aimee started to sound upset.

"Keep listening."

"S ... sorry. I think he's trying to say that he's sorry."

"Really, that's enough, Vanessa." Aimee's voice quivered.

I wanted to stop for Aimee, but Vanessa kept asking me more questions. "He's holding out his hands to me like he's pleading."

"Andrew, stop!" Aimee demanded.

"His face is all contorted and red and he's crying hysterically."

She pleaded now, "Stop him, Vanessa!" But Vanessa made me keep going. Something in me agreed with Aimee; this wasn't right for me. My responses became more frantic.

"I think he's trying to say he's sorry, but he's too hysterical. That's all. Really."

"What's his name, Andrew? Ask him if his name starts with an S."

"I said stop it!"

I shot up in my seat and looked up at Aimee. She was glaring hard at Vanessa, almost in tears. Some of our classmates sitting closest to us had woken up and were staring. Paulette stayed sleeping, with her headphones on. I could hear the music leaking out of them as she slept.

"Why'd you do that?" Vanessa asked Aimee.

"You know why," was all she said before she shot down in her seat and was silent. I found out from her later that as a little girl she had been kidnapped and molested by her own uncle. His name was Sam and he committed suicide while in prison. Aimee had told Vanessa all this just the night before, in the hotel room they shared.

Vanessa didn't try to console Aimee. "I think you've got something special," she told me, "and I think it has something to do with Aimee."

"Really?" Now I was interested.

"Well not all of it, but I think you might be a sort of channel for something important from her past. But that's not all of it, because all people who are channels also have a bit of their own agenda in everything they channel, too."

"I'm sorry, you lost me."

"Is the letter S of any significance to you? You should try and think back and remember anything of importance in your life that has to do with the letter S and see what that's trying to tell you. It could be important."

She then asked me to go ask Aimee to trade seats so she could talk to her. As I sat down next to Paulette, she mumbled something in her sleep, shifted in her seat, and leaned up against me. I looked at her sleeping and wondered if all that Vanessa told me meant that I was cursed or I was blessed. I couldn't tell. I decided to search out the window for the stars. Those gorgeous, raving stars. They were all mine.

.

My sophomore year in high school, I read in the newspaper that Sarah and her mother died on I-95 early one morning when Sarah fell asleep at the wheel and her car took a nosedive off an on-ramp. Stylistically edited sequences of a car sliding and tumbling across pavement flashed trough my mind as I read. The article had no photo accompaniment.

I had only seen her once since that night we kissed on my parents' loveseat. It was the following Halloween. We met accidentally while trick-or-treating—I as a ghost and she as herself. She was wearing a black shirt that said, "This is my Halloween Costume!"

I don't really remember, but we probably talked about how school was going so far—my end a reluctant positive to her undoubtedly negative. I do, however, remember vividly our visit to the last house in the neighborhood because the old widower who lived there treated with king-sized Milky Ways. We were the last kids out that night. Taking our tender time between houses. The sky was at the "magic hour," when night and day forget they are opposites and mingle in a cloak of gothic purple.

When we got to the old man's door, he told us he only had one bar left. Being a gentleman—and thinking she would split it—I let him give it to Sarah. As we walked back towards our street, she began to eat it.

"Man, I lucked out there, huh." A nugget smile, coated in pure milk chocolate, slowly, almost invisibly yellowing her inanimate enamel mouth.

"Yeah, Milky Ways are my favorite." Nudge nudge. Hint hint.

"Yeah, they're awesome—especially when they're king-sized," as she ate the whole thing—without offering me even the last sticky sweet bite.

I kept it hidden, but I'll never forget how unimportant that made me feel. Collectable. Like an inanimate object unfulfilled of my purpose gone dusty on a shelf among too many others just like me.

Sarah was grounded from going to a friend's party that night because of a Halloween prank involving her brother's sneakers and two raw eggs. So while my parents went out dressed as young lovers from the '50s to a Halloween party of their own, we stayed up late watching B-horror movies on TBS. We didn't kiss again, though we didn't pretend not to want to.

Not long before Christmas, Sarah's family mysteriously moved off the block, leaving the bank no choice but to put their house up for foreclosure. Not having spoken to her since that Halloween, I was glad that at least the article on her death gave some information about what she had recently been up to. Closure. She and her mother had apparently made up, she was not known to have been on any drugs when she died, and the reason she had fallen asleep at the wheel was that she had been working the graveyard shift with her mother's cleaning company to earn money for when she started school at Florida State the coming fall.

That night I had a dream about Sarah. We were on my parents' loveseat again, except when we kissed, her lips froze and turned blue. The lights that danced through the sliding doors were now demonic, menacing. Monochromatic waves of red as if a witches' rave flashed around us. Her bare waist felt like cold clay against my palm.

.

Vanessa and I are still friends to this day, and if you're the type to believe in that sort of thing, you could say our spirits are forever linked; although I tend to think a good friendship is just something that never falls apart. I've never told her about how I think Sarah is the significance of the letter S in my life; although I no longer believe in magic, psychic power, or spirits and the afterlife, I can't help but look to Sarah's death for some sort of guarantee. Some kind of definite answer to a question about life that I can't even formulate but am obsessed with knowing. Someone my age, that I knew well, that I physically touched and was touched by, is now dead while I go one living; although I know now that Sarah's death for me was the catalyst in a long process of realizing there is nothing we get in exchange for living, I can't help but wonder what makes me any more special than her. Why have I survived death this long?

Gradually, I've come to terms with that there's no eternal reward for living, no fair deal, no signing on the dotted line, no coupons, returns, or exchanges. I've come to believe this, slowly, like how a star's death comes in flickering stages. And when it dies, it creates a vacuum called a black hole, sucking in all knowledge existing around it. I can't tell if it's because she was so young, or that the last time I saw her we'd fallen asleep in front of the TV, and when I woke, she was gone—thus heaving my raving innocence into extinction like a flower blooming in reverse, or a star in a field of weeds suddenly realizing it's only a firecracker.

Copyright © Andrew Jimenez 2003