797 words
This one was fun to write because it has a lot of dialogue and I love writing dialogue. I didn’t get to the prompt, but it’s not hard to see where this was going. And I suppose it’s not very original; how many horror stories have started with this premise? But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
“We shouldn’t be messing with this.” Katy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, something she did when she was nervous. She was sitting away from the group, outside the circle that had formed on the floor of Carla’s expansive bedroom. The other girls’ heads were bowed in reverence, the air filled with stifled giggles and insistent hushing.
“Shhhhhhh!” Carla looked back at Katy. “You’re making me lose my concentration.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “And you’re blocking the energy with your negativity,” she said this with an air of superiority.
Katy gathered her sleeping bag around her body. She’d wish she could have brought Pongo. Her stuffed bear would been helpful in this situation, but she knew that would be social suicide. No one her age still slept with stuffies. At least, no one admitted it. Looking around Carla’s room, there were plenty of fluffy characters with button eyes and felt faces, but none of them took up residence on the bed. Suspiciously so, Katy thought. She cleared her throat. “It’s just that I saw a movie where—”
All four of the girls snapped their heads toward Katy and hissed in unison. “Oh my god, Katy,” Carla rolled her eyes. “If you’re so scared you should go to the TV room or something,” she said, turning her attention back to the middle of the circle.
“Or go home,” Rachel said. “You could call your dad or something.” She smiled slyly at the group. Carla made a half-hearted attempt to suppress a giggle, then arranged her face in exaggerated seriousness.
“Rachel. That’s mean.” She almost broke again, but she managed to keep her features straight.
Rachel shrugged. “I’m just saying if she’s scared, we wouldn’t want to traumatize her.”
Carla nodded gravely toward Katy. “I mean, she is right,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot lately. If this is too much for you, you could, you know. Leave?”
Katy had seen this look on Carla’s face before, and on Rachel’s, and on Sammie’s and Rianne’s, and all of the other girls’ faces at school. It was like a shared joke she didn’t understand, but she had a feeling it was at her expense. It was like their faces and their words said one thing, but there was another hidden meaning underneath, spoken in a language she didn’t know, like when she turned the TV to channel 12 when she got home from school. They showed Spanish soap operas, and Katy would sometimes watch them to see if she could figure out what was going on.
But what Katy couldn’t understand was, if this were a joke, what made it funny? If they were saying nice things to her but actually didn’t mean them, how was that amusing? Jokes had a punchline, something unexpected with the outcome, or a play on words. Pretending to be nice but really being mean didn’t have a punchline, as far as Katy knew. She didn’t know how to react in these instances, so she took what they said at face value.
“No, I’m okay, thanks,” she said, and that made the group glance at one another and smirk. Katy knew she had just delivered the punchline. “But it’s just—”
“Jesus Christ, Katy, could you not—” there was a unanimous gasp, and Carla’s head swiveled toward the group. “Stop it, Rachel,” she said.
“I’m not doing it,” Rachel said, shaking her head.
“Seriously. Knock it off,” Carla said.
“I swear to God, I’m not doing it,” she said.
Katy quietly inched toward the circle. She seemed to have disappeared from the room, the joke over. All four girls’ eyes were locked on the glossy board in the middle of the circle, Rachel and Carla’s fingertips lightly resting on the plastic arrow thingy. Katy knew it was called a “planchette,” but had decided to keep that information to herself.
The planchette was moving.
“Rianne, get the notebook, get the notebook!” Carla said, and Rianne did what she was told, flipping it to a new page and clicking her Hello Kitty pen ready.
The planchette was moving with stuttering, indecisive movements, like a toddler just learning to walk. It looked sleepy and disoriented.
“I swear to God, Rachel, if you’re doing this on purpose, I’m going to—”
“I’m not,” Rachel said again, and there was no mistaking her expression or her tone. It was definitely fear.
The planchette was more confident now, exploring the alphabet printed on the game board, like it was tasting it. It stopped, its round window displaying an “H.”
“H!” the four girls said in unison, and Rianne dutifully wrote it down.
The planchette moved again, this time landing on “I.”
“I!” the girls sang out. “Hi!” Carla said, looking relieved. “It’s saying hi! Awww, that’s cute.” “Hi!” she said, lowering her head closer to the board as if someone was inside it.
Clamhead 