Instant best friend
The first day of junior high, in the midst of so much newness and uncertainty, I found an instant best friend.
Marissa and I lived on the same road a couple miles apart and had gone to the same elementary school, but we’d been in different classes. I knew her only as the girl with long wavy hair and glasses who made straight A’s and was rumored to have played the piano with the Wichita Symphony.
In the cafeteria over lunch, we discovered that we both loved the movie Escape to Witch Mountain; in it, the central characters were from another planet and had psychic powers.
Marissa’s favorite book was Lois Duncan’s A Gift of Magic and I had just read Zoe Sherburne’s The Girl Who Knew Tomorrow, both books about ESP. We both loved Noel Streatfeild’s novels about kids who danced and sang.
Another of her favorites was Elizabeth Enright’s Spiderweb for Two. She was beside herself with excitement when I told her that there were more books about the Melendy family.
Over the next few months, Marissa and I were inspired by those books to create a treasure hunt with rhyming clues for a friend, to plan a backyard carnival that we never followed up on, and to try out for the school play. We were both shy and struck by stage fright when it was our turn to audition, so neither of us made it. But that didn’t stop us from continuing to come up with creative activities.
That friendship would lead me, years later, to write my middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground.
The planet Leshma
Marissa and I conducted ESP experiments, created a secret code that only we could read, and played with the Ouija Board—much to the horror of my mom, a devout Christian.
Mom was convinced that the board would invite demons into my life. I was uneasy, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to play with the board.
I was both terrified and thrilled when the Ouija Spirit told us that we were from the planet Leshma, sisters who’d travelled in a flying saucer to earth. Our names were Wendy and Carla Jactq—names that convinced me that we weren’t pushing the planchette ourselves. After all, would either of us deliberately choose such unappealing common names?
Our parents were Bene and Gruce Jactq. We, Wendy and Carla, had three more sisters: Abigmxs, Icuagsclsurag, and Mindy, Wendy’s twin. The two of us had left Leshma behind to find out more about our ancestors, who’d originally been from earth.
Departing from our home planet, we had to renounce our extrasensory powers. “Will we ever reunite with our real family?” Marissa asked.
After a time, the Ouija Board said. Unless will see.
“Will see what?” we urged.
“I-T,” it spelled.
We copied all of the Ouija board’s answers, even these mysterious ones, onto small pieces of paper—the Leshma Papers, we called them. We ceremoniously rolled them up tight and dropped them through the opening of a blue Avon statuette of a pioneer girl. She wore an aproned skirt over layers of petticoats that disguised the roll of papers inside.
We were awed to discover that we had a common memory: both of us arriving on earth in a rectangular beam of light, more like an elevator than a flying saucer. It didn’t occur to me till years later that this was an image straight from Escape to Witch Mountain.
The friendship shifts
By the end of that year, our friendship mostly crumbled as our interests diverged. I was briefly devastated.
While our friendship never returned to the same level of intensity, though, we remained bonded by those memories of Leshma. When we were 15, we conducted another treasure hunt with rhyming clues for a friend who was moving away. We worked together to make a latch hook rug with a rubber duck on it in honor of the secret codename our friend used in notes, which was Rubber Ducky.
Another time we planned to write and perform a musical. But the magic of those childhood schemes had faded, and soon we moved on to other things.
I didn’t see Marissa for years, but once in college, she came to have lunch at my house. She had a baby by then, and I was married. We reminisced about Leshma.
Writing the story of a friendship
When I set out many years later to write the story for the entertainment of my then-six-year-old daughter, it was a tribute to that friendship as well as a way of recapturing a tumultuous pre-adolescent year.
Last summer, I saw Marissa again for the first time in thirty years. “Remember the Ouija Board?” she said. “Remember the Leshma papers?” I told her that I still have them, somewhere in my attic, a roll of paper with faded ink.
Gradually as I wrote Anny’s story about her sixth grade year, I decided that the Leshma story wasn’t going to fit. I had to invent more dramatic encounters with the Ouija Board in order to effectively portray Anny’s fears of being haunted or possessed.
Still, I hope the book also captures the humor of those characters and our affection for the girls we once were. I hope it does justice to the imaginations we still recapture when we tell stories from our childhoods.
About Nancy McCabe
Like her Fires Burning Underground narrator Anny, Nancy McCabe has always loved books and writing and secret codes and dancing and making things, spending many hours when she was young creating rugs, pillows, and potholders, some of which were awful. But she embraces the quote, “The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those who sang best.”
She is the author of a young adult novel, Vaulting through Time, a new adult ghost story, Following Disasters, and several nonfiction books for adults. She lives in northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches writing workshops to all ages.
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