Where It Starts

"Nope.  She won't take us to the store to get one."  The back door closed with a thud behind Eva as she walked through the small dining room and into the living room.  She stopped with her hands on her hips near her friend Natalie who was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"Ugh.  My parents aren't going to help either."  Natalie was frustrated.

"Why not?" Eva asked, "Have you asked them?" 

"Seriously?"  Natalie asked sarcastically.  "She thinks they’re evil - like having the devil on speed dial."

Eva rolled her eyes, like only teenagers can do.

"I have an idea!"  Eva sprang to her feet and started rummaging through drawers and cabinets.  "We'll just have to make one."  She pulled a pen from a drawer and held it up triumphantly.  "Now I need paper."

Natalie grabbed her backpack and tore a sheet of loose leaf paper from her binder.

"Uh, no."  Eva grimaced.  "Pull a paper from my sketchbook.  It's nicer.  Heavier."

Natalie obliged her and handed her the nicer paper.

As Natalie described the phrases, letters, and symbols, Eva created a homemade Ouija board.  The letters of the alphabet, in a gentle arc centered on the page, spanned the entire width of the page.  "Yes" went into one corner and "No" into the opposite.  "Hello" and "Goodbye" occupied the remaining corners and the numbers 0 to 9 were spaced evenly across the bottom of the make-shift Ouija board.

"Hey, that doesn't look half bad," Eva remarked on her handiwork.  "It's not as nice as the kind you can buy from one of those big-box toy stores, but this will definitely do."

"It looks great, Eva," Natalie smirked.  "We need a pointer thingy still."

"A planchette?"  Eva asked the rhetorical question.

"Yeah," Natalie laughed at her own ignorance, a little embarrassed.  "whatever you call those things that usually look kinda like arrow heads with windows cut through the middle of them."

Eva scratched her head and looked slowly around the room.  After a moment, she leaned over and pulled open one of several junk drawers in the house.  She fished around in the back of the drawer before pulling out an old, empty cassette tape case.  Grabbing another sheet of sketchpad paper, Eva swiftly measured the case and cut the paper just right to neatly fit inside the cassette case.  Satisfied with the fit, she cut, in the middle of the paper, a hole that was just the right size to read the letters through.

"Viola!"  Eva placed the homemade planchette onto the homemade Ouija board.


Next scene: "All Moved In"