Spoonbenders

ALSO BY DARYL GREGORY NOVELS

Pandemonium

The Devil’s Alphabet

Raising Stony Mayhall

Afterparty

We Are All Completely Fine

Harrison Squared SHORT FICTION

Unpossible and Other Stories

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2017 by Daryl Gregory

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gregory, Daryl, author.

Title: Spoonbenders : a novel / Daryl Gregory.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047297 (print) | LCCN 2016058405 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524731823 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524731830 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524711245 (open market)

Subjects: LCSH: Psychic ability—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3607.R48836 S68 2017 (print) | LCC PS3607.R48836 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016047297

Ebook ISBN 9781524731830

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover images: (background) diane555/Getty Images; (frames) Mark Lund/Getty Images

Cover design by Oliver Munday

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“You’d think that whatever causes these things to happen doesn’t want them to be proved.”

—URI GELLER

1995 JUNE

1 Matty

Matty Telemachus left his body for the first time in the summer of 1995, when he was fourteen years old. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that his body expelled him, sending his consciousness flying on a geyser of lust and shame.

Just before it happened, he was kneeling in a closet, one sweaty hand pressed to the chalky drywall, his right eye lined up with the hole at the back of an unwired electrical outlet box. On the other side of the wall was his cousin Mary Alice and her chubby white-blonde friend. Janice? Janelle? Probably Janelle. The girls—both two years older than him, juniors, women—lay on the bed side by side, propped up on their elbows, facing in his direction. Janelle wore a spangled T-shirt, but Mary Alice—who the year before had announced that she would respond only to “Malice”—wore an oversized red flannel shirt that hung off her shoulder. His eye was drawn to the gaping neck of the shirt, following that swell of skin down down down into shadow. He was pretty sure she was wearing a black bra.

They were looking at a school yearbook while listening to Mary Alice’s CD Walkman, sharing foam headphones between them like a wishbone. Matty couldn’t hear the music, but even if he could, it was probably no band he’d heard of. Someone calling herself Malice wouldn’t tolerate anything popular. Once she’d caught him humming Hootie & the Blowfish and the look of scorn on her face made his throat close.

She didn’t seem to like him as a matter of policy, even though he had proof that she once did: a Christmas Polaroid of a four-year-old Mary Alice, beaming, with her brown arms wrapped around his white toddler body. But in the six months since Matty and his mom had moved back to Chicago and into Grandpa Teddy’s house, he’d seen Mary Alice practically every other week, and she’d barely spoken to him. He tried to match her cool and pretend she wasn’t in the room. Then she’d walk past, sideswiping him with the scent of bubblegum and cigarettes, and the rational part of his brain would swerve off the road and crash into a tree.

Out of desperation, he set down three commandments for himself:

1. If your cousin is in the room, do not try to look down her shirt. It’s creepy.

2. Do not have lustful thoughts about your cousin.

3. Under no circumstances should you touch yourself while having lustful thoughts about your cousin.