Kindred Spirits Read Online Free

you Amish or something?”
    “No. We’re
just...different.”
    Adam shrugs. “Different’s
okay. You want to see my room?”
    “Sure.”
    The walls of Adam’s room
are covered with posters and cardboard cut-outs of Frankenstein,
    Dracula, and the Wolf
Man. An inflatable Frankenstein almost as tall as I am is propped up in one
corner. An inflatable skeleton hangs by its wrists from chains on the ceiling.
“I like your Halloween decorations,” I say.
    “They’re
not Halloween decorations,” Adam says. “This is always how my room looks.”
    I suddenly feel like less
of a weirdo. Or maybe Adam just seems like more of one. “Well,
that’s...interesting.”
    “I love scary movies,
scary books, anything scary.” He flops down on a pile of cushions in front of
his bookshelf. Looking behind him, I see that lots of the books have words like
“shivers” or”shudders” in the titles. “Mom and Dad will let me watch any horror
movie I want, as long as it was made before nineteen-seventy. They say the ones
made after that are too violent. That’s my movie collection over there.”
    I look through the movie
titles. “Dracula,” “The Invisible Man,” “Frankenstein,” “Bride of
Frankenstein,” “The Mummy.” I pull “The Mummy” off the shelf and laugh when the
face on the cover is the face of the mummy I saw inside Adam’s head.  So that’s
where it came from!
    “What’s funny?” Adam
asks.
    “Oh, nothing.” I look
down at the case that holds the movie. “I was just thinking that I’ve never
held a mummy case before.” Of course, that wasn’t what I was thinking at all.
    Adam laughs. “That’s
pretty good. Say, wanna play a game?”
    At my house, whenever
somebody says, “Let’s play a game,” it usually means a card game like Hearts or
gin rummy. The kind of game Adam means is a video game with a little man who
sucks up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. I’m sure Abigail would disapprove.
    “So,” Adam says, after he
pushes the game’s “start” button, “do you believe in ghosts?”
    I figure he’ll think I’m
nuts if I say, “Sure, my best friend is a ghost,” so I just say, “Uh...do you?”
    “Sure,”
he says, sucking up a ghost on the screen. “I don’t see any reason why they
can’t exist. My dad says there’s no scientific proof that ghosts exist, but I don’t
think there’s any scientific proof that they don’t exist either. Besides,
scientists don’t know everything.”
    “I believe in them, too,”
I say. “There’s a lot of stuff in the world that people can’t explain.”
    “Yeah,”Adam says.
“Ghosts,crop circles,alien abductions, ESP’”
    I don’t even think before I say, “I have
it.”
    Adam drops the video game
controller. “What did you say?”
    “I have it. ESP, or
something like it. All the women in my family do.”
    Adam’s mouth is open wide. “No way!”
    It feels so good to be
able to talk about this that my words spill out on top of each other. “We’re
not witches like people say, but we have something my granny calls the Sight.
We can see into people’s minds. Like when you stood up in home room yesterday I
saw that you used to live in a big red brick apartment building in a city.
There was a basketball court and two kids’one white and one black’that you used
to play with.”
    It’s a second or two
before Adam can say anything. Then he says, “But you can’t know that!”
    “Sure I can. I can’t
explain why I know it, but I know it.”
    “Can...can you see people’s futures,
too?”
    “Not like Granny can. The
Sight gets stronger as you get older, so Mom and Granny have it more than I do.
Mostly I can just see people’s thoughts, and I can only do that some of the
time.
    Sometimes I’ll get a feeling about
somebody’s future, unless it’s my own. Mom and Granny and I have the Sight when
it comes to other people, but we can’t see anything about ourselves.”
    “Whoa,”
Adam says, looking at me like I’m an