Free Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

said.
    I smiled. “Thanks.”
    She gestured toward Vi, who was standing a few feet away talking to Janie Spriggs, and said, “I never realized before tonight that you’re the pretty twin.”
    There were, I see now, insults for both Vi and me embedded in this comment, but I was so caught off guard that all I could say, in genuine confusion, was “But we’re identical.”
    Marisa shook her head. “Barely.” Twelve days later, she called to invite me to her birthday party.

    As I discovered, a hot tub was the least of the Mazarelli family’s treasures. A vast, lushly carpeted basement rec room also contained an enormous television set opposite a three-sided brown leather sectional sofa, ping-pong and pool tables, a player piano, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a gumball machine, and a dartboard whose bull’s-eye was the tomato icon of Mazarelli’s Pizza. Fourteen guests including me were in attendance, and the slumber party started with a pre-dinner staking out of sleeping bag locations (I hadn’t expected to land the prime real estate near Marisa herself and therefore wasn’t troubled that I didn’t) and proceeded with Mazarelli’s pizza for dinner, the boxes carried out with a kind of showy fake humility by Marisa’s father; a sundae bar set up along the Mazarellis’ dining room table; the ceremonial unwrapping of presents; a ten- P.M . dip in the hot tub, which entailed much shrieking and the revelation that Marisa wore a yellow string bikini; a post-hot-tub viewing of
The Exorcist
(I spent large chunks of it with my eyes closed, reconstructing in my mind the plot of the first
Back to the Future
); and finally the time at which some girls started falling asleep just as others caught their second wind. There was talk of prank-calling boys, but instead Marisa brought down from the living room the Ouija board she’d been given a few hours before by Abby Balmer.
    I was on my way to my sleeping bag after using the bathroom adjacent to Marisa’s bedroom—of course Marisa had her own bathroom—when I paused by a handful of girls who’d clustered around the Ouija board. They sat on the floor next to the pool table, and soon I found myself sitting, too. Marisa was cross-legged on one side of the board and Abby was on the other, their fingertips not quite meeting on the planchette, which was made of plastic and shaped like an upside-down heart with a circular window near the top. I didn’t know what question they’d asked before my arrival, but I watched as the planchette slid over the letters O-N, followed by a chorus of squeals. Although I’d heard of Ouija boards, I’d never seen one. But I knew immediately that they were using it wrong—they were forcing the letters, picking them, instead of allowing the letters to be picked.
    “Ask it Jason Davis or Jason Trachsel,” said a girl named Beth Wheatley, and Marisa gave her a withering look.
    “Obviously, it’s Jason Trachsel,” she said.
Who likes me?
That must have been the question Marisa had asked the board. Jason Trachsel was the agreed-upon best-looking boy in our class—his mom was Korean and his dad was white, which meant he was the only Asian person in the eighth grade, and he was already expected to make the varsity soccer team the following year as a freshman at Kirkwood High School—while Jason Davis was a quiet boy with a center part. “Does he want to kiss me?” Marisa asked.
    At the top of the board, flanked by a menacing sun and a gloomy moon, and separated from each other by a skeleton head with wings and devil horns, were the words
yes
and
no
. As we waited,
yes
appeared beneath the planchette’s window in Gothic script.
    “Does he want to go all the way with me?” Marisa asked.
    Yes
.
    She glanced around at us and said merrily, “Not that I would.”
    “Does he have wet dreams about Marisa?” cried out Debby Geegan. Neither of my parents had ever initiated a birds-and-bees conversation with Vi and me, and Debby was the person who