Olivia had study hall after Social Studies and wanted nothing more than to get on one of the library computers. Google Translate was the plan, but Bobby was already in study hall, with two sophomores. One was wearing velour, the other had a T-shirt celebrating the Super Mario Bros. Bobby was apparently part of the intersection between heavy metal longhair and Dungeons and Dragons weirdo, and was leading the small group in some sort of paper-and-pencil game. She walked past them, and got online. The latest French insult translated literally to, “You have the body of a dog and the IQ of a five-year.” An IP lookup turned up nothing but an anonymous proxy—YOUIDIOT.COM was registered to a cybersquatter, and the insults seem to have come from a couple of webpages featuring popular French slurs. Then Olivia felt a finger on her shoulder. It was the boy in velour, who whispered silently that she should join Bobby’s table.
Bobby and the boys weren’t playing a game at all, or at least no game with rules. Instead, they had created a ouija board of sorts out of piece of foolscap, and had an origami planchette, with two pencils under it allowing it to roll. Bobby introduced the boys as Tyler and Charles, and then pointed to the results of their work so far.
BRING GIRL HERE.
Charles had been keeping the notes.
“Who are you supposed to be talking to?” Olivia asked. She wasn’t a skeptic, but the whole thing seemed rather ludicrous. Ouija boards worked best when made from fancy wood rather than by Hasbro in some Mexican factory, and when used in dark rooms by a circle full of earnest girls. Three dudes under the fluorescents using plain old paper couldn’t really get anything going. But Bobby did get Olivia’s witchy-sense a’buzzin’, so she took a seat.
“Robert’s grandmother,” Tyler of the velour shirt said. His arms looked like little pipe cleaners.
“French?”
“Yes,” Charles said. Bobby wasn’t saying anything, just peering intently at Olivia.
“What languages do you guys take?”
“Spanish,” said Charles.
“I tested out,” Tyler said. “I did take Latin when I was in Catholic school.” Everyone looked at him. “Long story.”
“Are you on my blog?” Olivia asked the piece of foolscap before her. It seemed as good a place as any to direct her query. The boys put their hands on the planchette and it moved to YES.
“Well, that means that one of you guys are pranking my blog, nothing more.”
“Ask her something else,” Bobby said.
“Who are you and what do you want with me?” Olivia crossed her arms and looked at Bobby. “To make things easy for you, answer in your native language, okay?” She took the pencil and paper. “I’ll transcribe.”
The boys moved the planchette slowly but confidently to M, then to A, then hesitated and moved it to R. Then the bell rang and study hall was over and the spell was broken.
“You guys are jerks,” Olivia said.
“No, it’s not like that!” Bobby insisted.
“What was her name?”
“Marthe. Rufus,” he said. “My maternal grandmother.”
“That’s why they don’t have the same last name!” Tyler offered as the study hall monitor came to sweep them out. Everyone just stared at him. “Ah, nevermind,” he said.
Marthe Rufus was an odd enough name. Sounded French, Olivia supposed, and not like something someone would make up on the fly, like FiFi La Rue or whatnot. She cut seventh period and walked the long way to get the city bus. On her phone, she Googled “Marthe Rufus” and there were a few English-language hits. A very slim Wikipedia entry was the first one. It had little more than dates of birth and death, and a brief note. Rufus was an avant-garde clothing designer and mother of one who had died in Vichy France during the Second World War, of “an apparent suicide.” There was a citation link but it was dead, and in French anyway, and even archive.org didn’t catch a cap of the site when it did exist. The other useful link was to a few weeks ago, and was for an obituary in the Westlake Picayune. Bobby’s mother, it sounded like, had killed herself. Poor kid, Olivia thought.
She got home and was alone. Her father wouldn’t be back till late, so she defrosted some breakfast tacos, though that was against house rules, and got online immediately. She asked around after Marthe Rufus, and got a few responses, and even a picture of the one surviving garment from the encyclopediast MsCantBeWrong. The look was very Rodarte, but with an industrial tinge due to wartime rationing and materials. It was weird and flowy, except for the short skirt with an angled hem. The top of the dress was organic, with an odd texture as though decorated with bundles of tightly twisted wheat, and then there was that gimp along the edge, just like the impossible garment. Then FashionBOG sent in another picture. Same garment, on the same model, except the garment was upside down. The skirt was actually made stiff, and acted as a strapless and cylindrical tube top. The flowery top was now a bottom with a very narrow hem, and the model had to pose with her legs tightly shut as one would when shoving two legs through a hole meant for one’s neck. The garment looked stranger, but just as good, as it did right-side up. Or maybe the second picture was the garment right-side up, and the first one was upside-down. Either way, it was reminiscent of the ten yards of weird fabric snaked across the floor of Olivia’s bedroom.
Olivia had another question: Anyone know anything about ouija boards? she typed. What she really wanted to type was I wish we could be friends in real life, and that you could all come over and look at this thing and help me figure it out. And could someone bring a ouija board? And some pizza? She wished she had somebody to call who would just drop by and keep her company.
MsCantBeWrong had the answer: There’s an app for that.
A dozen people chimed in to say that they were so excited to see a ouija board app and that they were all going to download it immediately, but Olivia actually did. According to the whimsical instructions on the app, the mass worldwide connectivity of the Internet and mobile environments had made “legacy” boards with their “analog displays” and “manual communication” systems obsolete. All you had to do was select a language, type in a question, and wait. Olivia was feeling very witchy, like in the moments before a storm, when the air smelled like the sea.
She typed her question in English, and set the language to French. And she waited. She went to Facebook and played a little Bejeweled Blitz. She checked back to the discussion of Rufus, but nobody had much to say about her except what anyone could Google. Nothing came through on the oiuja board app, so she Googled the app to look for reviews, but they were the usual mix of five-star fantasies from morons, and one-star rants from even bigger morons who were actually upset when the free download didn’t come bundled with actual magical powers. Best most people could figure was that the app distributed questions to random users, and it was users who input the answers to one another. Not that anyone on the whole Internet had come forward to say that they had answered any questions, or even to describe how one could find the textbox for answering questions.
Olivia’s father came home. She did her homework, which wasn’t much. As her father put it, “Hey, it’s Texas.” He’d been born in Texas and escaped! to New York! for grad school, but now he was back and taught Shakespeare at the community college. “Apparently,” he said over a dinner of Trader Joe’s vegetarian lasagna, “he was a sexist! And a racist! Every reaction paper agreed, so it must be true, right? No notion of changing times, or mores, or that there is even more than one way to be a good person.” Then he laughed, and Olivia grew worried about UT and marketing majors again. They watched some movie on the Sundance Channel that was subtitled even though it was already in English and then retired to their respective bedrooms. Olivia chose tomorrow’s outfit—definitely the dark-rinse high-waisted jeans since things were getting a little intense for tights and skirts with Bobby and the boys, and an old man cardigan and a tuxedo shirt with ruffles for underneath it. One silk flower for her hair, another for the top buttonhole in the cardigan, which was missing its button anyway, and pictures were taken and cropped and prepped for the Tuesday morning post.
And at midnight, Olivia’s phone went on again, as did her monitor. It was the ouija board app, spewing out some French. She copied and pasted the output into a Word file and saved it, then headed over to Google Translate. There was a liquid ton of calumny—Olivia was stupid, and shit, and could eat shit, and probably eats shit every day, and was an idiot, and Olivia’s mother sucks off bears in the forest and it took Olivia’s mother nine months to take a shit, in the woods, among the bears, and thus Olivia was born . . . and that was all stuff from the French insult webpages, as though someone was just copying and pasting from them. But interspersed with the insults was a set of instructions on how to wear the garment. One wears it inside out. So to be as beautiful inside as one is outside.
That is, Olivia read, one soaks the garment in a tub and twists one end of it tightly, as though wringing it out. Then swallow it—with a note to Olivia to swallow it like her mother was probably swallowing all sorts of things in hell now. There was a special lubricant in the gimp and otherwise limning the muslin that made the garment easy to swallow. It would snake through the small and large intestines and the stomach and then “come out.” Marthe Rufus, for all her foul insults, was surprisingly discrete about from where the garment would emerge. The bottom would be worn like a skirt. The top would wear like a “vest-blouse-display,” at least according to Google Translate. It was a true exercise in avant fashion—nobody had ever even conceived of dressing the body’s interior organs—but it was also practical, as “the model could not eat or drink while in the garment, and thus would not stain it, or grow fat like a pig.” Then there were some insults about Olivia’s father, who was also a pig who birthed a stupid idiot daughter who didn’t understand the first thing about style.