Free Dancing on the Edge by Han Nolan Page B

mystery?”
    â€œWhat?” I asked.
    â€œHow we are. People, I mean. We always got to be wearing slogans and advertisements all over ourselves. Why, we’re nothing more than walking billboards.”
    â€œBut if people didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have your great seat belt painting business.”
    Grandaddy Opal nodded and wiped the sweat off his face with a rag he pulled out of his back pocket. “Sure enough, but it’s interesting what people take pride in, ain’t it? Painted gold dollar signs yesterday, little bitty ones on all four seat belts. Took me all day. It’s their identity—the fancy car, the bumper stickers, the big wheels—like they’re afraid they’ll forget who they are ’less they can flash it around all the do-dah day.”
    â€œTheir identity?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Grandaddy Opal? If you were going to paint my seat belt, what would you paint?”
    Grandaddy Opal paused with the paintbrush pointed at the sail of the boat. “Girl, if I was painting your seat belt, well, I wouldn’t paint it atall. You ain’t a billboard. No sir, I’d just plain leave it blank.”
    He said it, and I knew he was right.

Chapter 8
    G RANDADDY O PAL hadn’t been the only one affected by the winds of change. In the late fall, Gigi joined a group called The Other Realms, a group of mediums, clairvoyants, and channelers who got together monthly and planned conferences where people learned about the occult. For once Gigi had friends who called her up and came over to the house more than once, and who invited her to dinners and get-togethers. I asked Gigi about friends, since neither one of us ever had any before. She said the only people she ever got a chance to meet were her clients and they couldn’t be her friends because it would destroy the mystery of her. “They have to believe I’m different,” she said. “That I don’t eat or sleep or go to the bathroom like normal people. They don’t want to see me walking around town in a pair of jeans licking on an ice-cream cone. Someone like that wouldn’t be able to contact the spirit world. Understand? They have to believe it’s possible. They have to believe, or it won’t work.”
    I understood. The mystery of me kept people away, also, or drew them to me, with their dirt balls and their eggs, anything they could throw.
    Now that Gigi had joined The Other Realms, she became much more open and outspoken about what she did. She taught me about astral planes and mental planes and how a nebulous appearance of the astral body meant an imperfect development, and an ovoid appearance was a more perfect development. She said Grandaddy Opal and I had nebulous astral bodies and she had an ovoid one. She said there must be a special reason why I was nebulous. That it must have to do with the way I came into the world. I looked up the word nebulous in the dictionary. It means hazy, indistinct. I closed my eyes after looking up the word and I knew what Gigi said was so. I felt nebulous.
    Grandaddy Opal knew about The Other Realms group, and he reminded Gigi of their agreement. Gigi said she wasn’t doing anything in his house. The place wasn’t filled with incense or candles, and if he’d ignore her doings she’d ignore his. This she said looking pointedly at me. Grandaddy Opal muttered and cussed and Gigi said, “Why, you’re just afraid. You’re just like everybody else. You know what occult means? It means it’s beyond the range of ordinary knowledge. So now, why are people so afraid of knowing more?”
    â€œâ€™Cause some of that stuff we oughtn’t to be knowing, that’s why,” Grandaddy Opal said. “It’s dangerous getting into that business, and you had better leave Miracle out of it.”
    â€œDon’t you tell me!” Gigi said.
    Whenever I heard those words,