An Excerpt
I felt like posting an excerpt today from my book on submission, SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRITS. This scene takes place about halfway through the book after some supernatural sleuthing and the nerdy boy she likes almost kissing her.
The Love of Writing| 10k Weekend Challenge! (w/ Live Blogging) » »Nathan followed me home. When I turned off my truck, I stared at the little farmhouse that squatted on the small lot. This was my home. This was where Mom had instructed me on the finer techniques of astral projection and bone magic, where Laura and I had spent many weekend nights full of thriller movie marathons, massive popcorn ingestion and epic prank phone calls, and where I’d last seen my dad. Mom never found out he’d given me lock picks the day she’d told him she couldn’t handle his museum art thefts and Beverly Hills break-ins any longer.
I couldn’t imagine being forced to leave here. I couldn’t image what would happen if the repossession trucks pulled up, their big tires forcing muddy ruts into our front yard, and I didn’t want to think about how everyone would finally know what was really going on with my mother. We’d have no place to go.
I jumped when Nathan knocked on the driver-side window. His eyebrows were crinkled together like he could tell something was wrong. I hadn’t told him about the foreclosure notice. Even though I’d spilled so much, there were a lot of details of my life I hadn’t shared. I took a slow, deep breath that reached all the way to my toes before I opened the door and stepped out into the chilly, early fall weather. I couldn’t believe I was introducing Nathan to my mom.
Nathan’s eyes scanned the house as we trekked to the front door, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was mentally comparing it to his own residence, all three stories of it, big enough that it could eat this one and still be hungry. But most of all I wondered if he noticed how the gutters sagged, how the grass had morphed into yellow weeds, how dirt clung to the shutters from the time I’d tried to clean them and only made the speckles turn to smears.
“Is this one of those old farmhouses?” Nathan asked while I unlocked the door.
“Yeah.” I strode inside, dropped my backpack to the floor and stuck my hands in my jean pockets. “Mom always talked about having it renovated…”
“Wow, what’s this?” One of Mom’s Siberian drums on the hall table had caught his eye.
“That’s called the Witch’s Drum.” I picked up the drum with careful fingers and held it out to Nathan. “A shaman clan in Siberia gave it to my mom as a gift when she helped fight against some ‘corporate’ shamans who were trying to take control over them.” This only made me think of Mom’s admission that her attack had been because of politics. Could that case have had anything to do with what happened to her?
I pointed to the bone hanging off the side. “That’s reindeer bone, and the skin used to make the drum is reindeer, too.”
Nathan ran his fingers very lightly over the paintings on the skin—symbols for healing or traveling to the Borderland. “This is so cool. What’s it for?”
“Nostalgic decoration.” I took the drum back and placed it on the table. “Forever ago, it used to be part of a shaman’s incantation, but most of the drums were destroyed in the 18th century by people who thought shamans were Satan-worshippers. So, they were forced to figure out a way to do the incantations without drums.”
“That sucks.” He stared at the drums almost in awe. “What was the solution?”
“Just drawing single runes like I do now. The drums had all the symbols a shaman would need painted on them,” I said, pointing at the banishing rune scrawled on the surface in black ink, “and they’d knock the reindeer bone against the one they needed for a particular incantation. Now we draw whichever one we need. They just came up with ways to morph the magic differently than they used to.”
“They couldn’t just make more drums?” Nathan asked.
“No, anyone who tried got hung.”
“That’s…intense.” Nathan eyes met mine, and my breath hung in the air before me like it was frozen there. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. All I could focus on was Nathan and how we’d almost kissed in the car. I could almost feel his forehead on mine again, and I felt my body instinctively moving closer to him. He was a magnet, and I was iron.
“Holly?” My mom called out from the living room. “Is someone with you?”
“Yeah,” I yelled, feeling the force field break between us. “Ready to meet my mom?”
I thought about warning him again of what she was like now, but our feet were moving us closer to the living room, and I didn’t want her to overhear me tell someone how dead to the world she was. We stepped into the room, and Mom’s eyes zeroed in on Nathan. For a moment, she was the eagle-eyed shaman whose gaze couldn’t miss even the outline of penny in someone’s pocket.
“Mom, this is Nathan, a…friend from school. Nathan, Mom.”
He smiled and moved forward. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Bennett.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Nathan.” My mom’s wobbly smile made an appearance just before her eyes clouded over. My shoulders sagged, and I looked away, but Nathan kept right on talking because he didn’t know that meant she’d disappeared.
“The Hobbit,” he said, referencing the book on the side table by her chair. “I love that book.”
The silence that followed was like a pillow suffocating the room.
“So does Mom. I read it aloud to her sometimes.” Still looking away, I headed toward the kitchen. “I’m going to make her some lunch before we get going. Want a sandwich or something?”
I expected him to follow, but instead, I heard the familiar creak that meant he’d taken post in the recliner that crouched across from Mom’s usual spot.
“Sure,” he said.
As I grabbed three plates from the cabinet and threw bread on each, I heard Nathan talking, his deep, soft voice traveling the short space from the living room to the kitchen. I tossed slices of bologna on the plates, still hearing Nathan’s voice. I wondered how long it would take him to realize Mom wasn’t going to respond.
When I’d spread generic-brand mayonnaise onto each sandwich, I headed back into the living room and stopped short in the doorway. Nathan sat across from Mom, The Hobbit in his hands and reading aloud from chapter five. Curly strands of his hair fell in his eyes. His jaw clenched as he turned a page, and I realized that when he did that, it meant he was concentrating hard on something. He kept reading, and I watched as Mom blinked and gave him a smile he didn’t see because he was too focused on the page.
I should have kissed him.
Comments
Great scene here! I love Nathan, he’s adorable. And there are some kick-butt lines like this one: “big enough that it could eat this one and still be hungry.”
Also, I want her to kiss him too!
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