A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  CHAPTER

  3

  Monday came, its sky dripping with rain.

  “Go on, then,” Aunt Nan and Aunt Dee said as the door to the bus yawned open.

  Pram had never ridden a bus before, and she found the largeness of the vehicle daunting.

  “Haven’t got all day, cookie,” the woman at the steering wheel said. She was pear shaped.

  Hesitantly, Pram boarded the bus. Its floor vibrated from the engine, amplifying her nerves, causing goose bumps. She felt goose bumps only when she was around Felix, mostly, or on the mornings she awoke with an inexplicable chill in her blood and learned at the breakfast table that one of the elders had passed.

  The other kids filled all the seats. They are paper cutouts rather than people, Pram thought. They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite. It eased Pram’s mind to pretend that they were dead—that this was a bus that had crashed somewhere. But most ghosts were friendly, or at least talkative. Like Clara in the tailor shop, and the dead man who wandered the road that led into town, who often forgot he was dead and tried to flag down cars to give him a ride. They realized Pram could hear them, and they had hundreds of years’ worth of words for her. None of these children said a word to her.

  At the end of a very long, very lonely walk down the aisle, Pram found a vacant seat. There she made herself small against the window, and the bus began to move.

  The empty seat at the back of the school bus was like a cold hug. It wasn’t kind, but it wasn’t unkind, either. It kept her safe and invisible. Pram began seeking more such places once she arrived at the school. She found an empty seat at the back of the classroom, beside the window and in front of the cubbies that held the lunch boxes, which were curtained by soggy raincoats on hooks.

  “You’re in my seat,” a boy said.

  His eyes were blue, and so bright they were like an accusation. He was nothing like the gray kids on the bus and in the hallways. He was as alive as could be.

  “Your name isn’t on it,” Pram said with as much confidence as she could muster. To further assert herself, she raised her chin.

  The boy with the blue eyes smirked, and Pram wasn’t sure if this was to be a kind smirk or a cruel one. “My name’s right there,” he said. “Under your hand.”

  He nodded to her palm, and when she removed it from the desk, she realized that it had been covering the initials C.B.

  “Clarence Blue,” he said.

  “Those letters could mean anything,” Pram said. “‘Courageous Beast,’ or ‘Crusty Bread.’”

  “They stand for ‘Clarence Blue,’” he said. “I should know. I’m the one who carved them.”

  Pram traced her fingertip along the slope of the C. “You have nice penmanship,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Clarence said.

  The bell rang. It was shrill and it startled Pram.

  “Take your seats!” the teacher called from the front of the room.

  Pram didn’t budge. She had found a spot fair and square, even if someone else’s name had been carved into it.

  Clarence took the seat beside her, his eyes on her the entire time. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he’d smiled for a moment.

  As it would turn out, Clarence always favored the most hidden seats. During lunch, Pram ran into him when they both happened to approach the last table before the exit, beside the trash bins and under a light that had gone out. Unlike with the school desk, there was room for both of them here.

  “After you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Pram replied.

  She opened her lunch box and began unwrapping the slab of strawberry cake her aunts had packed for her lunch.

  Clarence raised an eyebrow. “Your mother lets you eat cake for lunch?”

  “My mother doesn’t let me do anything,” Pram said. “She’s dead.”

  Clarence stared at his sandwich. “Oh.”

  Pram took a fork to her cake, bitter with herself for having said something so strange. Death made people uncomfortable; her aunts had taught her this. The elders made people uncomfortable, too, and that was why they had been left with her aunts to be cared for.

  The only ones that made Pram uncomfortable were the living.

  “My mother’s dead, too,” Clarence said.

  “Oh,” Pram said. “Would you like some cake?” It was too much cake for a small girl to eat alone; her aunts (Aunt Nan in particular) showed their pity with food.

  “Yes, please,” Clarence said.

  Pram severed the cake slice in half with her fork. And as she shared her cake, she wondered why Clarence sought out the shadows the way that she did. He had a face that was just right for making friends. Dozens of friends, if he wanted. To Pram, most of the people in the living world were gray, but Clarence was bright and vivid. In fact, he was the loveliest living thing she’d ever seen. Why would someone like that want to hide?

  She couldn’t know that Clarence was wondering the same thing about her.

  The bell rang, once again startling Pram. She packed up her lunch box and then she stood.

  “Wait,” Clarence said. “You know my name, but I still don’t know yours.”

  “Pram,” she said.

  “What about your last name?” he said.

  Nobody had ever asked Pram for her last name. She almost didn’t remember it. “Bellamy.”

  “Last names are important,” he said. “Last names are older than us. They draw a line way back into our history, further than we can follow it.”

  “Bellamy” had been her mother’s last name, which her mother had shared with her older sisters, Pram’s aunts. Pram didn’t know her father, but she supposed the line of his family history led into the sea. Her mother had fallen madly in love with a sailor, and that was how Pram was conceived. That was all her aunts had told her of her father. He was a sailor, and he left one day and never returned. He never came to collect his daughter—if he even knew he had a daughter at all.

  Pram had been told that her mother died in childbirth, and that it was likely her father never knew about her, and they didn’t know how to reach him. Her aunts made up this lie to protect her, and to provide her with closure. They couldn’t know the horrible guilt it had given Pram—a guilt that would only increase each year as she grew to appreciate the tragedy of it. She had ended a love affair between a beautiful young woman and a sailor. She felt that, at the very least, she owed her father an apology. And at the very most, she owed him a daughter, if he would have her.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Felix stepped out of the tree’s trunk. “How was school?” he said.

  “All right,” Pram said, searching the grass because she thought she’d seen a ladybug. She didn’t see much of them this time of year, so it was a fair guess that it was a ghost. The only way to know the difference between a living insect and a ghostly one was that the ghosts were impossible to catch. She’d cupped her hands around several of them over the years, and when she opened her hands, they would be empty. The insects would reappear on her nose or in her hair. It was a game they played.

  “Just all right?” Felix said. “Were the other kids as cruel as you’d thought?”

  Pram shook her head. “They didn’t even know I was there.”

  “They clearly weren’t looking,” Felix said. He couldn’t imagine anyone not noticing Pram.

  “I like it better that way,” Pram said.

  “Me, too,” Felix said. He stared at the grass. His cheeks were pink. He was quite good at mimicking the living. “I wish we were the only two people in the world,” he said.

  “Maybe not the only two,” Pram said. “There should be some exceptions. My father, for starters.”

  “Are you still going on about that?” Felix said. “He didn’t want you, which means he’s a fool.”

  “He might not know about me,” Pram said. “Or he might be angry with me.”

  “Why wo
uld he be angry?” Felix said.

  “Because I killed my mother,” Pram said.

  “If he thinks that, he really is a fool,” Felix said.

  He frowned to see Pram’s glum face. He grabbed the ribbon tied in her hair. With a single pull it came undone, and Pram’s white hair opened from its ponytail like it was coming to bloom.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Want it back?” he said, and ran away.

  “Felix!” Pram chased him counterclockwise around the pond, trying to be angry but laughing instead.

  He had an unfair advantage over her, being a ghost. He could have disappeared. But he let her catch him. He felt the full weight of her when she crashed into him and knocked him to the ground. He felt her bony knees on his stomach and her hands on his shoulders. She reminded him of what it had been like to be alive.

  “Got you,” she said, and snatched her ribbon from his fist.

  She hopped to her feet and fixed her ponytail while Felix lay in the grass, watching her.

  “Pram!” Aunt Dee called from the doorstep. “Come in and wash up for dinner.”

  “I have to go,” Pram told Felix. She didn’t even give him a chance to say good-bye before she ran off.

  He watched her go. Her ponytail flew behind her like a kite made from a piece of sun.

  “Did you have a nice time at school today?” one of the elders—Ms. Pruitt—asked as Pram splashed her cheeks at the kitchen sink.

  “It wasn’t bad,” Pram said.

  “I’m teaching advanced watercolors this year,” Ms. Pruitt said. “Come to my classroom and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

  “I will, Ms. Pruitt,” Pram said. Pram knew that the elders lived in their own imaginary lands. She liked to pretend those imaginary lands were real, though, and that she was surrounded by artists and poets and professional jockeys. It made the house seem magical instead of sad.

  At the dinner table that evening, there was minimal fussing from the elders. Aunt Nan, who usually had a scant few minutes to eat her own meal, had to get up only twice, to retrieve a thrown napkin and wipe a dribbly chin.

  “Have you made any friends at school?” Aunt Nan asked.

  “I don’t know if you’d call him a friend,” Pram said. “But there was one boy who was nice.”

  “By this time next year, you’ll have a lovely shape,” Ms. Pruitt said. “You’ll be an early bloomer. I’ve drawn a lot of ladies, you know.”

  Pram stared at her plate, blushing.

  She’d been worried for some time about growing up. Hanging over the staircase was a black-and-white photo of her mother wearing a polka-dotted swimsuit that overlapped her thighs. She was angelic, with perfectly rolled bangs and a lemon-wedge smile. To go along with the picture, Pram’s aunts told her lots of nice stories about her mother. She was the fastest swimmer in her class; she had a good singing voice; she liked reading poetry. It was a lot of pressure for Pram to be her only legacy. She could never hope to be so pretty. Ms. Pruitt might have thought Pram would have a lovely shape, but she also thought she was an art teacher, and sometimes a radio announcer.

  “Is he a handsome boy?” Aunt Dee asked, fixing Edgar’s oxygen tank.

  “How should I know?” Pram said. “He was a boy, that’s all. I don’t even remember what he looked like.” But she was lying, of course.

  “Hmm,” Aunt Dee said.

  Aunt Nan sighed.

  After dinner, Pram went upstairs to have her evening bath. As she reached the last stair, she heard Aunt Dee whisper, “I do hope this boy is real.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The following morning, Pram raced to the desk with C.B.’s initials carved into it. But Clarence had beaten her to it. He sat tall and proud, with his ankle crossed over his knee.

  Pram tried not to sulk as she fell into the desk beside his. One of its legs was shorter than the other, and it wobbled when she leaned forward.

  “You have to wake up pretty early to beat me,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Pram said.

  “But since you shared your cake with me yesterday, I have something for you. Look.”

  Pram looked where he was pointing. Down and diagonal from his initials, he had carved P.B. into the desk. Pram Bellamy. “I thought we could share it, since we both like sitting here so much,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Pram said. She wanted to hug him, but she thought this would be too strange.

  Every day for the next week, they sat together at lunch in the usual spot. The pity of Pram’s aunts had worn out by Tuesday, and instead of cake for lunch, they had given her a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Pram nibbled it slowly, careful not to let any of it stick to her teeth.

  “I was thinking about what you said last week,” Clarence said. “About your mother.”

  “I said only that she died,” Pram said, biting into her sandwich.

  “Right. There’s a woman in town who can contact her. I haven’t been to her myself, but I see flyers on light posts all over, so she must be good.”

  Pram considered this as she chewed, ever worrying about the peanut butter sticking to her teeth.

  Her silence concerned Clarence. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  “She might be fake,” Pram said. “If she can speak to the dead, I’d think she’d want to keep it a secret.” Pram had never met another person who she believed could talk to ghosts. But she had seen several posters in town for spiritualists, and she’d heard radio ads with howling-wind sound effects and metallic thunder—all fakes, she suspected. People would pay good money to have access to the dead, and so it was a thriving business. Pram found it detestable that anyone would prey on such a cruel hope.

  “Maybe,” Clarence agreed. “It’s just . . .” He trailed off.

  “What?” Pram said.

  He shook his head and gnawed pensively on his straw.

  She stared at him until he answered.

  “My mother died last October,” he said. “And since then, things have been disappearing from one place and reappearing in another. Some mornings when I wake up, the curtains are drawn. She used to do that to get me out of bed. I wonder if I’m being haunted.”

  He probably wasn’t being haunted, Pram thought. Objects like curtains and hairbrushes and things failed to hold the interest of ghosts. Although Pram did recall having an argument with Felix once and going to bed only to discover one of her stuffed bears had been hidden.

  Mostly, though, grief made people misplace things. She’d seen it happen to the elders, and to her, when she was thinking about her father. She might forget to cap the toothpaste or set her shoes in a different place because her mind was elsewhere.

  “She’ll cost money,” Pram said.

  “I’ve got that,” Clarence said.

  Pram took another bite of her sandwich and swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said. “When?”

  “Friday. We can go there after school.”

  “I’ll have to ask my aunts,” she said, though she didn’t think it would be a problem. They would be happy she’d made a friend.

  “I can introduce myself,” he said.

  “Good idea,” she said. They might believe he was imaginary otherwise, the way they believed Felix was imaginary.

  On Friday, Clarence rode home with Pram on the bus. He didn’t have to ask her which seat she preferred; he went straight to the back and let her take the seat by the window. They didn’t talk, and Pram wondered if he’d noticed her hair. That morning, Aunt Dee had walked in on Pram’s clumsy attempt at a braid, and with a sympathetic laugh, she’d fixed it into two perfectly braided pigtails with mismatched ribbons.

  She spotted Felix as the bus drove past the pond. He was swinging from a tree branch and propelling himself into the water. For months he’d been trying to get her to climb with him, but she’d refused.

  Clarence followed her gaze to the pond. “What are you staring at?” he asked.

&
nbsp; “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No.”

  They got off the bus and didn’t talk during most of the short walk to Pram’s house. It was a chilly September day, and Pram knew that if she were to touch Felix’s skin, it would be chilly as well. But she wondered what it would be like to touch a living boy—if he’d be warmer.

  “Where do you live?” Clarence asked.

  “In that house over there,” Pram said, nodding ahead. Hers was the only house in sight, with crumbling white paint and a rusted red star on the front door.

  “‘Aging’ is spelled wrong,” Clarence said.

  “I know.”

  They climbed the front steps, and Pram pushed open the front door and said, “I’m home! I’ve brought the boy I told you about.” She hesitated to say “friend” because that was a powerful word, and she didn’t want to scare him off.

  “Hello,” he said to the room of milling elders, who paid them no mind. He had no way of knowing that none of the female elders were Pram’s aunts. For all he knew, she lived among them, caring for them as a sort of youthful queen.

  Aunt Nan came out of the kitchen, wringing her hands on a dishcloth. “So you did,” she said excitedly. “Dee, Pram’s brought home a friend.”

  Pram waited nervously to see if Clarence would object to being called her friend. He didn’t.

  Aunt Dee bounded down the stairs, trying in vain to smooth her hair back against its gray bun. “I see that,” she said, grinning like a madwoman. “Hello, welcome, would you like something to eat?”

  “We aren’t staying,” Pram said. “We’re going to walk into town.”

  The smile faded from Aunt Dee’s face. “Town? What for?”

  “To see a show,” Clarence said smoothly. It wasn’t a lie; the spiritualist was performing a show, which was one of the many reasons Pram thought she was a fake.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Aunt Nan said.

  “My father will drive us home. He’ll be off from work by then,” Clarence said. “I could give you his phone number if you’d like.”