Yesterday was Sunday and I was bored, stranded at my grandma's house with my cousins and my sisters after church. We were all just sitting around, waiting for dinner to be ready, and watching a Super Sweet 16 marathon on MTV. After about the 60th episode, I was completely sick of Range Rovers and diamonds and sparkles and thousand dollar dresses. My sisters were getting antsy too (funny how our guy cousins were still into it, even though they wanted to watch the game'). We decided to explore, and look through the junk in our mother's old room. Our grandma is great, because she never throws anything away, which means we get to put on our mom's clothes from the seventies, play her records, and try to picture her as a teenager (which is kind of creepy actually). This day was pretty much the same, with my younger sister Ginny and I camped out by the makeup table and Kat (she's the baby in the family) crawling around under the beds, putting on roller skates and giggling a lot.

Ginny and I were in the process of rifling through some old drawers (I still refuse to acknowledge that my mother ever wore hot pink lipstick) when Kat shrieked at the top of her lungs. Since she can be sort of a prima donna anyway, we didn't react. But she kept shrieking and started jumping up and down while yelling "Ouija." With nothing better to do, the three of us sat down in a circle on the floor and attempted to speak to the dead.

It's funny, I haven't used a Ouija board in years - not since my neighbor Lynn and I rode our bikes to the old cemetery near our houses, dusted a grave with salt (to hold in the spirits) and chanted. Back then, I totally believed we were communicating with ghosts, and it used to freak me out. It always seemed like the wind would sweep through the trees just as the board announced some spirit was there with us. Later, when we biked back home, I thought I would see faces in the windows of the houses we passed. It feels silly to even write that now. I guess as we get older, the world of fantasy seems to disappear, and we no longer believe in the power of the supernatural like we used to. That's good in a way. But sitting on the floor with my sisters really made me miss Ouija Boards, and the feelings of excitement and anticipation that I always got from using one.

Mostly, Oujia Boards remind me of big girly sleepovers, the kind where twenty or so girls get together, eat way too much candy, light way too many candles and gossip the whole night. No one ever slept, and Ouija Boards always made a late night appearance. I'm sixteen now, a Junior in High School, and those kinds of slumber parties are pretty much a thing of the past. But there was a time, sixth grade through ninth, when every weekend hosted a huge gathering of girls at someone's house.

All sleepovers followed the same basic structure: we'd arrive before the sun went down, tromping into the house with sleeping-bags under our arms. For me and my friends this house was usually Kelly's, the sleepover queen' of our class, mostly because her bedroom was in the basement and her parents would leave us alone for the entire night. After everyone showed up we'd usually go outside for a while, ride bikes, play hide-and-seek throughout the whole neighborhood, or try to look into Justin's bedroom (the hot guy who lived next door). When it started to get dark we'd go back inside to watch horror movies, or do our nails or something. But most importantly, this was when we'd eat.

Girls at sleepovers can eat a lot. A super lot. Pizza, homemade cookies, chips, soda, candy, and on and on. Of course we'd all swear we never normally ate like this, but everyone was probably lying (I know I was). After the food we'd play games, usually truth-or-dare, which is a game I'm convinced was created to ruin lives. The dares were always disgusting things, like licking the toilet seat, or making out with a wall. The truths were even worse. They were always designed to hurt the most (Who do you like the least in this room? Whose boyfriend would you kiss?). In fact, it seemed like most of our sleepover games' were designed to hurt and humiliate. This was the part of the night that was the least fun.

The thing about a sleepover is that it's a group of girls entertaining each other. And girls can be really mean. Especially big groups of girls. Especially when you're in Junior High. When you get a room full of girls together, at some point, blood will fly. And I don't mean tiny sleepovers with close friends. I'm talking about these big sleepovers, where you're only really friends with a couple of girls and you're just trying to get along with everyone else. Toss in games like truth-or-dare and the effect is catastrophic. I don't think I've ever been to a sleepover where someone wasn't crying by 9 o'clock. Things started to fester as the night went on, with small groups of girls pairing off and whispering about the others. It seemed like the only time we could all get along was when we brought out the Ouija Board.

There was something about Ouija Boards that bonded us together. When we were all hovered over that little plastic pointer, our fingers touching, concentrating on the same thing, we finally had fun. Maybe it was the setting. The Ouija Board was always the last game, the game we played at 3 o'clock in the morning, when we should have been in bed hours ago and all the lights were out except for a few candles we lit earlier. Then the room seemed kind of romantic and dark. Let's face it, we were half asleep anyway and even though we knew somebody was pushing that thing toward the letters we just didn't care. We were all united then, trying to communicate with the dead. And yes, in the daytime it seemed ridiculous that we had talked to the soul of a dead boy who was in love with one of the girls in the room (it never quite spelled out which one - we all must have been pushing it at that point), but at night it wasn't ridiculous, it was real, and even a little bit frightening. We would let ourselves get completely caught up in the game.

Yeah, sure, sometimes the Ouija Board scared the crap out of us, especially when it predicted someone's death (it was always in 2 days). But we knew from experience that it usually wasn't true. And besides, it was a good kind of scared, the kind of scared that brought us together and let us squeal and hug and generally act annoying.

The same sort of feeling went for light as a feather, stiff as a board.' You know, the game where everyone in the group puts their fingers under one person and they all concentrate (concentration is the key here) on something tragic and meaningful and chant "light as a feather, stiff as a board" while magically lifting the girl up into the air with no amount of effort wasted? If you've never done this, immediately go out, round up some friends, light some incense and give it a whirl because I swear to God it works. It especially works when someone has just told a story about the death of her dog and everyone at the party is crying and really concentrating and we'd all lift up another girl as if she weighed nothing. As we held that girl high above our heads (I'm talking 5 feet off the ground here) everyone would just feel this connection. When we'd finally place her back on the ground, it was like we had done something heroic and special and unique. This accomplishment may not sound like a lot, but at 4 o'clock in the morning when coming off an intense sugar high it was a huge deal.

As our sleepovers got more and more bogged down by insecurities about our bodies, our friendships, our shifts into Junior High and then High School, the only thing that stayed pure within all of it was the bond we could form over talking to ghosts and breaking the laws of gravity. After we played these games, we'd always put out the candles and go to bed. Well we'd try to go to bed, but mostly we'd spend the rest of the night whispering, laughing and annoying the girls who were actually trying to sleep. When we woke up' in the morning, we wouldn't remember the petty arguments in the beginning of the night, or our embarrassment over confessing to having a crush on someone's boyfriend, or how someone else got slapped across the face (ok, maybe we'd remember that), but instead we'd remember how we had tapped into our powers of levitation, or how the spirit of Bryan Goodman lives in Kelly's basement probably still pining over one of us.