“Like fish?”
“Like rainbow fish and coral and underwater plants and all kinds of things. She can’t just go down into that kingdom with mousy-brown hair, you know? She’d be out of place.”
Leah nods as if this is totally sensible. “Cool. What’s it called? Marinabology?”
“Muh-reen bi-ol-o-jee,” Vivi says. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A teacher.” This is Leah’s stock answer to something a lot of adults ask kids. Also, this might be the only profession she knows other than chef. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Vivi presses her for more. “Okay, clear your mind. Like, totally blank—are you picturing nothing in your head? Nothing at all. Infinite black space.”
Leah pinches her eyes shut. “Uh-huh.”
“You can be anything, anything in the whole world. Imagine the entire blue-and-green planet with swirly white clouds—the way it looks from space. Out of everything on this enormous Earth, what do you most want to be?”
Leah considers this. “A peacock.”
I almost choke on my laugh. She’s the funniest, most creative kid in the world. “You’d be a peacock?”
She nods, eyebrows pulled down. I know that look. It says, You better not be teasing me. And I’m not. “They’re blue and their feathers are the prettiest.”
Vivi stares at her, totally serious, with her lips pursed in curiosity. “What makes you think you can’t be one?” She says this like she truly doesn’t understand why peacock isn’t a profession.
“I guess . . .” Leah’s little face creases between her eyebrows and beside her mouth. “I guess I don’t know how.”
“Oh.” Vivi shrugs. “I do.”
“You do?”
I try to imagine Vivi turning my sister into a peacock, but the image won’t come. Maybe if I turn my head away, Vivi would shoot sparks at my sister with a wand, turning her into a peacock. It wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.
“Of course I do. We’ll work on it soon, okay?”
“Okay!” Leah’s excitement leans into a yawn.
“Bedtime, sleepyhead,” I announce. “You too, Bekah.”
“I was going upstairs anyway,” Bekah says, flipping her hair as she gets off the couch. Leah, however, gives me a murderous look, like I’m embarrassing her.
“Jonah,” she howls. “Noooo.”
Vivi slides in easily, climbing to her feet. “Leah, if you don’t go to bed, how will we hang out tomorrow?”
Leah turns. “We’ll hang out tomorrow?”
“Sure. If you want.”
Leah hugs Vivi’s legs, squeezing quickly, and then bounces upstairs.
I shake my head as Leah disappears around the corner. Now it’s just me and Vivi, and I’m not sure what to say. I’d rather flirt by making her really good food. “A peacock. Leah’s a riot sometimes.”
Vivi shrugs. “She was probably a peacock in a past life. Her spirit is still part avian.”
I feel my eyebrows rise. “You believe in reincarnation?”
She gives me the eyebrows right back. “You don’t?”
Um, no, I do not. “So, what have you been in a past life?”
“It’s not what; it’s who,” she says. “I’ve been a dolphin and a ballerina, probably in the 1920s or so, and I used to be part of a pack of stratocumulus clouds. Those are the only ones I know for sure.”
Either this girl is certifiable or she’s saying this for my entertainment. But the craziest part is that I can imagine all those things. I can picture her above the waves in the slick body of a gray dolphin. I can imagine her in a tutu or floating above the stratosphere as a puff of cloud. I feel oddly out of touch with my own self, that I don’t know what I used to be. Or, apparently, who I used to be. “I must be new to the world.”
Vivi shakes her head vehemently. “No, no. I can always tell when this is someone’s first life. This is Bekah’s first life, for example, so you should cut her some slack because it’s really hard to figure things out without having some preexistence instincts.”
“So, who did I used to be?”
She tilts her head, and the curls on that side fall toward the ground. Her eyes are looking through me. She places her hands on my chest, palms warm. I tense up so any muscles there will be more pronounced.
“Hmm,” she says. “In your last life, you spent many years as a tree—oak, I think. Somewhere in the Great Plains. It’s why you feel deep roots in this life, here with your family. Your tree life was so long that you still have strong instincts to shelter little ones. You may not remember it, but your shoulders do.”
She slides her hands over my shoulders, but I know she means it to be clinical. An examination, like she’s diagnosing me with former lives. I’m not sure where to look, so close to her face. Skim milk skin, dark eyebrows. My mom used to watch all those old black-and-white films. I never understood them, but the first dirty dream I ever had was about Brigitte Bardot. No! Think about . . . cooking. Vegetables. Parsnip! Parsnips are hideous.