My sister, Mia, died in a tragic drunk driving accident when she was eighteen. Bad luck. At least, that’s what people said. Except that she’d been letting drunk boys drive her home from the city every weekend since she started high school. Spin the roulette wheel one two many times, and it’s bound to come up double-zero.
She died in 1999. I was a sophomore and on a totally different path. Instead of shaking off my middle school goth phase like most of my friends, I’d doubled down. I’d read my way through all of the basic Wicca books and moved on to darker stuff you had to find at antique bookstores.
At Mia’s funeral, I brought a pair of antique scissors with me, and when I got to the coffin, I leaned over as if to kiss her forehead. As I did, I surreptitiously cut a lock of hair, quickly shoving it into my pocket.
The spell itself was pretty basic once I had the hair. At midnight on the one-month anniversary of her death, I tied the hair as a braided ring around my left pinky and knelt at Mia’s gravestone, kissing it thirteen times. Between each kiss, I repeated the incantation, “In the name of the mother, the daughter, the sister, I invite you in. In the name of the mother, the daughter, the sister, I invite you in.”
As I repeated the words for the final time, the braided ring suddenly bound tight around my finger, cutting off the circulation. And then I heard Mia’s voice in my head. “Where am I?”
“You’re a passenger,” I whispered. “You’re in me now, seeing everything I see. Feeling everything I feel.”
“I can’t move,” she said. “Why can’t I move?”
I could tell she was panicking. I tried to remember what the book had suggested about coaching the dead through their return to our world.
“I am giving you control of the pinky finger,” I said, “the one bound with your hair. Ease the bindings there and take control… Now.”
I felt the braid relax, and then the finger began to wiggle, completely out of my control.
“It’s moving!” she shouted inside my head, thrilled. “Give me another one! Give me the hand!”
“Not yet,” I said. “Be grateful for what you have.”
But Mia was not grateful. All night long, she kept me up, begging for more. Finally, I relented and gave her the entire left hand, even the left arm. I tried to sleep, but it was kind of hard with her raising her hand all night and letting it flop to the mattress.
As I got ready for school the next day, I made her give the arm back, and she reduced her control back to just the pinky. It was just too hard to get dressed otherwise. I went through my morning routine, putting on a black lace corset top and baggy jeans with holes at the knees. The whole time, Mia made gagging noises.
“You do realize we’re the same size, right?” she complained. “Go raid my closet. Believe me, you have my permission. There are a couple of new dresses I never even got to wear.”
“Remember that you’re a passenger,” I said, gently chiding her and trying to remember what my books had said. “As the recently dead, it may be difficult for you to come to terms with your new position. Please remember that I am your host.”
“Some host,” she said.
At school, Mia zoned out, basically letting me get through my classes undisturbed. Every once in a while, she’d ask if it was time for lunch yet, but mostly she was quiet.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“It’s just… weird here. Everything is the same, but I’m not here. They’re just all going through the same routine, like I never existed.”
“It’s been a month,” I said. “People move on.”
We sat outside in the spring warmth, watching the skaters practice ollies in the parking lot.
“Which is the one you like?” asked Mia, and I pointed out a tall, skinny guy named Dan that I’d been crushing on since freshman year. We had kind of a a cute, flirty friendship going on, but I’d never had the guts to make a move.
“We should go talk to him,” she said.
“Are you kidding? He’s busy.”
But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt the pinky lifting up, basically taking the rest of the arm with it. Before I knew it, Mia had taken the arm over again and was waving to Dan, who skated across the parking lot toward us.
“Sup?” he asked, and I totally froze.
“Give me the mouth,” said Mia. “You’re making us look stupid.”
“There’s no us. It’s just me,” I said in my head.
“You all good?” asked Dan.
“Do it,” said Mia. “You’re blowing this.”
And so I gave her my lips, my tongue, my throat.
“I saw you land that kickflip,” I heard myself say. “Any way you could teach me sometime?”
“Definitely,” said Dan. “Just takes some practice!”
“Hey, are you up to anything after school?” I asked.
“Just hanging out with some friends. You want to kick it?”
“I’m there,” I said.
My last period was study hall, and Mia convinced me we could skip out early and head home.
“This is your big shot to get Dan to like you,” she said. “Let’s make it count.”
We headed into her room and started leafing through her outfits. Finally, she found a floral print sundress and grabbed it from its hanger.
“No way in hell,” I said, but she just started taking my jeans off. When had I given her control of my whole left arm? I couldn’t remember. In fact, I realized she had taken both legs too. I was stuck in my right hand, only up to the wrist.
I tried to fight her, wiggling my fingers as she discarded my clothes and put on her own, but it was no use. Soon enough, I was dressed just like her.
“This isn’t funny,” I said. “You need to give me back my body. Now.”
Mia laughed.
“What were you using it for anyway,” she asked, as she washed my makeup off in the sink. She wiped away my black mascara and pulled out her own, more subtle blue eyeshadow and lip gloss. “I was always the fun one, you know?”
“I invited you in,” I said, fear suddenly filling my small section of my own body. I realized only a small section of me was trembling. Terrified. The other part–the Mia part–was thrilled and happy. “I wanted to give you a second shot at life. To be a passenger.”
“I’ve never been a passenger,” she said. “I’m the driver. Always. And that’s how it’s going to be from now on. I’ve got a second shot, and I’m taking it. No way I’m going to sit on the sidelines and watch you live your boring ass existence. So just go do what you always do: sit on the sidelines and watch me live.”
I wanted to scream, but I had no voice, no lips. She’d taken them all. I tried to will myself up the right arm and made it as far as the elbow. I reached up and smacked the lip gloss out of her hand. It clattered into the sink.
“Big mistake,” she said, and suddenly, I felt her will pushing at mine, harder than I’d even imagined. I left the elbow, even the hand. My whole self was pushed into the tiny space at the joint of the right pinky.
At Dan’s house, Mia didn’t miss a beat.
“What’re we drinking?” she asked.
“We were just gonna smoke a little bit and watch some Mitch Hedfield standup,” he said.
She gestured over at his parents’ liquor cabinet.
“Can you make me a fuzzy navel?” she asked.
“Did you change your outfit?”
She ignored him and walked over to the bottles, opening some vodka.
“How about shots? You guys know how to do shots, right?”
If I could have cried, I would have. But all I could do was barely wiggle in place. I tried to push up through the finger, into the hand, but Mia’s will was just too strong. It was like trying to do pushups with my tongue. No matter how hard I tried, I knew that I would never be stronger than her.
Mia and the guys started drinking, and she curled up next to Dan on the couch, stroking his hair. I might have been thrilled, except it wasn’t me doing it. It was her. Soon, she was nibbling at his earlobe, asking if he wanted to show her his room.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do this. This isn’t what I wanted.”
“What you wanted was to pine on the sidelines and never make a move. Face it, you’ve been acting like the dead one your whole life. Well, get ready to start seeing what actual living looks like.”
She took him in the room and pushed him down on the bed, pulling up her dress. But when she started in on his belt, he gently grabbed her wrists and told her to stop.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve always thought you were a cool girl… but this isn’t you. I know you just lost your sister last month. I’m sure that kind of fucked you up emotionally. I don’t want to, you know, take advantage.”
“Forget about my sister,” she said, reaching for his belt again.
He shook his head. “I think you should go.”
Mia stormed out of the bedroom, pulling on her dress and she marched down the hall. Then she grabbed the handle of vodka and blew out the front door, leaving it swinging open behind her.
For a while, we walked the city streets, drinking freely from the bottle. Once or twice, she nearly wandered into traffic, and I felt our heart skip. Despite what she said, I wasn’t living my life like a dead girl. I was just trying to live it slow.
And I loved my nights staying up late, reading spells and watching the room rise of the distant mountains. I even loved the pain of pining for a boy I was too scared to talk to. I loved being alive.
And now it was too late. She’d taken my body and was living life her way, fast and reckless. I’d never get it back.
By the time we got back home, the bottle was gone, and Mia could barely stand. She headed into the kitchen and microwaved some leftover pizza.
Then, as we watched the numbers on the microwave something started to shift. Dead drunk, her grasp on my body started to slip. I pushed slightly at the wall of will she’d built around me, and found it porous and spongy. Carefully, so I didn’t alert her, I slipped out of my cage and up into the hand, the arm.
Out of the corner of our eye, I spotted the meat cutting scissors in the knife block. If I could reach over and grab them, then I could snip the loop of hair on my left pinky and release the binding. Mia would be gone.
Ever so gently, I pushed my will into our right leg and took a small step toward the block. Then I ran my hand along the counter toward the scissors and grabbed them. This was my one and only chance. If I blew it now, she’d be on high alert, and I’d be back in the right pinky again, probably forever.
In one quick motion, I grabbed the scissors and hooked them under the braided hair, but when I tried to cut it, it didn’t snap. It was like trying to cut an iron band in half. Mia’s laughter filled my head.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, right?” she asked. “I saw that move coming a mile away. I’ve got like half my soul in that ring, sis, keeping it strong as a diamond. You’d have an easier time cutting the kitchen counter in half.”
I felt her starting to push me back. But before she took the arm back, I made my move. I moved the blades of the scissors from the ring to the joint of my left finger and squeezed as hard as I could.
“What the fuck?!” I heard her screaming, but by then it was too late for her. Her essence drained from me fast, like water down a bathtub drain, all flowing out into the severed finger.
Of course, I told everyone it was an accident. I’d been cutting the pizza and slipped. Maybe people believed me, or maybe they chalked it up to the grief of losing a sister. I really didn’t care.
As for the finger, I kept it safely hidden. I knew the doctors would want to reattach it, and I couldn’t have that. I told them I must have lost it down the disposal when I was panicking over the accident.
It’s been more than two decades now, and I never did grow out of my goth phase. I run a little bookstore in the city, specializing in a very particular set of tomes.
Sometimes I help people get things they want. Very special things that require a little help from someone like me.
Of course, many of the spells call for the use of a captured soul, one that must undergo some very unpleasant suffering to make the magic function. Most people in my line of work don’t have access to one of those.
In the end, I’m thankful to my sister for all that she taught me. And for all of the sacrifices she continues to make so that I can live the life I always dreamed of.