Wink Wink Kiss Kiss

32 MATTHEW BAKER WINK WINK KISS KISS B efore they leave for the mystic society’s costume ball, Alex’s sister makes Alex swear (as she’s helping him with the clipping on of his clip-on bowtie, her toothbrush clenched between her half-brushed teeth, Marina talking through a mouthful of toothpaste and foam) that he will not cooperate with these suburban bourgeoisie, that he will not yield to their propaganda, that he will not eat even one of their exquisite truffles or tarts or puffs of meringue. Despite their many protests, she reminds him, despite their boycotting of dinner-plate vegetables and household chores (boycotts that were ended within a matter of minutes, broken by the embargoes their parents then imposed on the television, the iPods and iPads, and even New Super Mario Bros. Wii), they will be forced to attend the mystic society’s ball, but he should consider it not an opportunity to “make new friends,” as their stepfather has suggested, not a night for flirting with and wooing seventh-grade women in their bourgeoisie dresses and heels, but rather an opportunity to infiltrate this sect of Alabamian capitalists and tyrants and to destroy them, a night to sabotage this costly gala, this private celebration of gluttony and glut and the exploitation of the proletariat. Before Alex can once again take this vow (a vow Marina has forced him to make at least once a day over the past week, usually on the bus ride to school in the morning), their stepfather walks past the bathroom carrying red heels for their mother and overhears Marina’s anti-capitalist propaganda, and so once again Marina and their stepfather (whom Marina calls “Padre” despite his insistence on “Dad”) get into a fight regarding Mao and the Kennedys and, of course, as always, Cuba, a fight that carries them from bathroom to staircase to kitchen and (at one point) even onto the deck, and that results in their leaving for the costume ball almost an hour later than originally planned. Marina is a communist for the same reason that she is an occultist and a listener-of-crunk: because she is fourteen years old 33 Baker and because her parents are capitalists, Catholics, and listeners -of-jazz. She and her best friend, Anna Firmat, are obsessed with the one haunted house in Mobile for which they could find any documentation—an estate on the outskirts of town that had been razed to the ground during the Civil War by (allegedly ) a group of runaway slaves, with the plantation’s owners and the owner’s children and an elderly unwed aunt trapped inside , the ghosts of whom are now supposed to haunt the site of their death. Alex (whose name Marina sometimes pronounces as if it were spelled “Alux”) doesn’t believe in ghosts, not even after Marina held a séance (or, in other words, made Alex sit on the floor of her bedroom while she shuttered the windows and lit candles and did a little dance and acted as a medium between Alex and the spirits) during which she introduced him to a casket girl (who had almost “perished” in 1709 from “black vomit” and who apparently just ended up getting run over by a runaway “charabanc” in 1711 anyway) and someone named Clotilde (who didn’t have much to say aside from “The sea, the sea! Alack, the sea!” and who afterward Marina said she thought must have been the restless spirit of a “merperson ” who had died on land, “far, far away from their undersea kingdom”). Afterward Marina’s room had been raided by their parents, who had seized her candles and dowsing twigs and casting bones and matches. Only her hand-me-down tarot cards (from Anna) survived the raid (she’d taken them to school in her purse). Instead of replacing them with more casting bones and candles, the next day Marina brought home an armful of books from the public library, including a diary by Raúl and a book of Fidel’s letters, and skipped dinner to hole up in her room (in a makeshift tent she’d made out of bed...