Page 124 of Switch!
“And your dad?”
“I haven’t seen him in years. He never got along with my mom. Not long after they split, we lost contact with him.”
“Under mysterious circumstances?” Trixie asks, sounding hopeful. “Maybe he swapped bodies with someone.”
“I doubt it, but I guess anything is possible. I have wondered if… Never mind.”
“What?”
“He was full-blooded Native American. Maybe this is part of their culture somehow. It can’t be common, obviously, but what if there’s a myth or legend that explains everything. I wish I knew more about my heritage.”
“I bet we can figure it out,” Trixie says, glancing over at me. “We make a good team.”
I look out the driver-side window so she can’t see my goofy smile. “Yeah. We do.”
We reach Patrick’s apartment soon after, and once we’ve packed everything we need into the car’s trunk—which is in the hood, for some reason—we drive to the grocery store. We’ve already established that taking Gary’s food isn’t stealing anything important, so it isn’t much of a logical leap to justify taking the food he would eventually buy. In other words, we use the credit card again.
Once we’re back at Gary’s place, we unload the groceries in the kitchen, and I start working on a marinade for the steaks we’ll be having for dinner. While I’m busy, Trixie sits at the breakfast bar with my laptop, doing research.
“A lot of Native American cultures believed in two souls,” she informs me.
“I read about that,” I reply. “Isn’t that when a guy feels like he has the soul of a woman or vice versa? Sort of a transgendered thing?”
“That’s a two-spirit, which is different and more like a third gender. This article says most American tribes believed thateveryonehas two souls. One that animates the body to give it life, and another called a free soul, which wanders when we’re asleep. Maybe that’s what you are. A free soul that’s on the move.”
I spare her an incredulous look before I resume cooking.
“Don’t dismiss it right away,” she says. “When you were possessing Caleb in class, your original body was fine.”
“Because the silver cord still connected me to it.”
“Sure, but maybe the other soul kept your body alive. According to this, if the free soul gets trapped in the world of the dead for too long, it can kill you.”
“The world of the dead… Do you think that’s the void?”
“Could be.”
“Great. I guess Gismonda was telling the truth.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t tell you about that?” I rinse my hands in the sink and grab a dish towel to dry them. “I met her at the psychic fair, right before you. She’s the reason why I went to the discussion group.”
“The Circle of Light,” Trixie says in a spooky voice while wiggling her fingers. “Tell me everything!”
I do, and she’s increasingly excited as I continue. I can tell she’s struggling not to interrupt, and to her credit, she manages to stay quiet until the end of my story.
“So after all of that, she hands me a flyer and says the spirits want me to join the group so I won’t be alone.”
“Game changer!” Trixie says. “Don’t you see? This answers the question from before. Thereareother people like us. Gismonda is one of them!”
“You think so?”
“She has her own superpower, doesn’t she?” Trixie scrunches up her face. “I wonder how it works. I bet she has the answers we need. Does she live in Seattle, or was she only there for the fair?”
When I shrug, she turns to the laptop to find out. I finish prepping the food. Once the steaks are soaked in marinade and placed in the fridge, I lean against the counter, increasingly antsy to hear what she’s discovered.
“Got it,” Trixie says at last. “Like most psychics, she works out of her home. We could go there and ask her to join us.”
