Ivy and Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go

by Annie Barrows

  IVY + BEAN

  BOOK 2

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  IVY + BEAN BOOK 1

  “The deliciousness is in the details here, with both girls drawn distinctly and with flair.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “. . . illustrations deftly capture the girls’ personalities and the tale’s humor. . . . Barrows’s narrative brims with sprightly dialogue.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Readers are bound to embrace this spunky twosome and eagerly anticipate their continuing tales of mischief and mayhem.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  BOOK 3 COMING IN 2007

  IVY + BEAN

  AND THE GHOST THAT HAD TO GO

  BOOK 2

  written by annie barrows + illustrated by sophie blackall

  For Esme, finally —A. B.

  For Ms. Wissot, who is the best kind of teacher —S. B.

  First paperback edition published in 2007 by Chronicle Books LLC.

  Text © 2006 by Annie Barrows.

  Illustrations © 2006 by Sophie Blackall.

  All rights reserved.

  The illustrations in this book were rendered in Chinese ink.

  eISBN: 978-0-8118-7652-0

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Barrows, Annie.

  Ivy and Bean and the ghost that had to go /

  by Annie Barrows ; illustrated by Sophie Blackall.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Second-graders Ivy and Bean set out to expel the ghost who is living in the girls’ bathroom at their school.

  [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Ghosts—Fiction. 4. Bathrooms—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.]

  I. Title: Ghost that had to go. II. Blackall, Sophie, ill. III. Title.

  PZ7.B27576Jg 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005031790

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclekids.com

  CONTENTS

  THE GYMNASTICS CLUB

  THE OATH OF LIQUIDS

  WHO’S THAT UGLY GUY?

  THE PORTAL

  ZUZU SPILLS THE BEANS

  NO MORE NONSENSE

  THE POTION SOLUTION

  SNEAKY BEAN

  NO SUCH THING

  IN THE HAUNTED BATHROOM

  EXPELLED

  WHAT A GREAT DAY

  THE GYMNASTICS CLUB

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—wham! Bean crashed into the grass.

  “Ouch,” said Ivy, peeking through a hole in her sandwich. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “No. I’m just dizzy,” said Bean. She sat up, and the playground began to tilt. Ugh. She lay down again.

  Now Emma stood up. She lifted her hands above her head, took a big breath, and began. She did nine good cartwheels before she fell on her head.

  “Are you all right?” Ivy asked Emma with her mouth full of peanut butter.

  “Sort of,” said Emma.

  Now it was Zuzu’s turn. Zuzu was the best cartwheeler in the Gymnastics Club. She was also the best backbender. She could do seven round-offs in a row. Nobody else could do even one.

  Zuzu pulled down her ruffled pink shirt and raised her hands. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve cartwheels, and still Zuzu landed on her feet. Then she arched over backward. She flung her arms over her head and made a perfect backbend. She looked like a turned-over pink teacup. Then she rose back up—boing—like a doll with elastic in its legs.

  “Wow,” said Ivy.

  Bean jumped up. She just had to do twelve cartwheels.

  “Stand back!” she yelled.

  “Wait,” said Zuzu. “What about Ivy? Aren’t you going to do a cartwheel, Ivy?” “I’m guarding the jackets,” said Ivy.

  “But Ivy, this is the Gymnastics Club,” said Zuzu. “You can’t just guard jackets.”

  Why not? Ivy wondered.

  “We’ll teach you how to do it if you don’t know,” said Emma.

  “She knows,” said Bean. “She can do a cartwheel. I’ve seen her.”

  Ivy looked at Bean in surprise. Why was she saying that? Ivy had never done a cartwheel in her life. Slowly, Ivy put her sandwich down next to Emma’s jacket. “There’s just one little problem—” she began.

  “Hey, Leo!” yelled Bean suddenly. “You’d better watch out! If I get hit with that ball, there’s going to be trouble!”

  Leo was the leader of the soccer kids at Emerson School. Before there was a Gymnastics Club, the soccer kids had the whole field to themselves during lunch recess. When Bean and Emma and Zuzu and Ivy started the Gymnastics Club, they kept getting hit with soccer balls. One day, Bean got clobbered in the stomach, and she declared war on the soccer kids. She came to school with a bag of ripe plums and chased Leo down. When she caught him, she sat on him and rubbed plums into his hair. Rose the Yard Duty had been really mad. She told Leo and Bean that they had to work it out, or she would kick them all off the field.

  So Bean and Leo worked it out. The Gymnastics Club was supposed to have all the grass near the play structure. The soccer kids were supposed to keep their balls from hitting the Gymnastics Club. Bean promised not to bring plums to school anymore. After that, the war was mostly over.

  But now Leo looked mad. “It’s not even near you!” he yelled. He was right. The ball was on the other side of the field, near MacAdam, a weird kid who sat under the trees and ate dirt when he thought no one was looking.

  “Okay!” yelled Bean, feeling like a dork. She had only been trying to help Ivy.

  “Like I was saying, I can’t do a cartwheel at the moment,” said Ivy.

  “Why?” asked Zuzu with her hands on her hips.

  “Because,” Ivy said, “we’ve got an emergency situation going on. Right over there.” She pointed.

  Emma, Zuzu, and Bean followed Ivy’s pointing finger across the playground. She was pointing directly to the girls’ bathroom. The one right outside their classroom.

  THE OATH OF LIQUIDS

  “What?” said Emma.

  “What?” said Zuzu.

  “You don’t see it?” said Ivy.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Emma.

  Bean didn’t say anything. She was watching Ivy. What was going on?

  “I see a bathroom. I don’t see any emergency situation,” said Zuzu. She patted the little pink bow in her hair.

  Ivy stopped pointing and sighed. “Oh well. You probably wouldn’t believe me, anyway.”

  “I’d believe you,” said Bean. “Anyway, you have to tell me because of the oath.”

  Two Saturdays before, Ivy had told Bean about blood oaths. If you write down a promise and sign it with your own blood, then you have to keep the promise always. If you didn’t, the blood inside your body would curdle. Bean didn’t know what curdling was, so Ivy explained that it was like cottage cheese. How disgusting was that? Bean was ready to give it a try right away, but first they had to think of an oath. Bean wanted the oath to be about turning her older sister Nancy to stone, maybe not forever, but for a month at least. Ivy said no. It had to be something they could do for sure.

  In the end, they promised to tell each other all their secrets for the rest of their lives. Ivy wrote the words down with a silver marker. It looked very fancy. The problem was that the oath had to be signed at midnight. They tried for three days. Ivy tried staying awake until midnight. Bean tried waking herself up at midnight. They both tried sleeping on the floor, so that they would be really uncomfortable and wake up. Nothing worke
d.

  Ivy said it would be almost the same if they did it at the stroke of noon. The two girls squished into Bean’s old playhouse, and Ivy read the oath in a very serious voice. Then she got out a pin. She held it right above her finger, ready to stab herself. Almost ready to stab herself.

  “Blood attracts vampire bats,” she said suddenly.

  “Vampire bats?” said Bean.

  “Yeah. Vampire bats. They drink blood. Mostly, they drink cow blood, but they might get attracted to us if we sign the oath with blood.” She put the pin down.

  Bean understood. Poking your finger with a pin didn’t seem like a big deal until you were about to do it. She didn’t really want to poke her own finger, either.

  But they both felt disappointed. A blood oath had been such a great idea.

  “Why does it have to be blood?” asked Bean. “Why couldn’t it be something else from inside us?”

  “Like what?” Ivy looked interested. “Boogers?”

  “Yuck,” said Bean. “No. What about spit?”

  Ivy said, “Spit would be all right, I guess. I don’t want my spit to curdle, either.”

  Bean and Ivy never got much chance to spit because their mothers didn’t like it. So they each made a big one and gooshed it around into letters. They had more spit than they knew what to do with. The paper tore in one place. And you couldn’t really see their names when it dried. “That just makes it more mysterious,” Bean said.

  “It’s an oath of liquids,” said Ivy. “A powerful oath.”

  So now Ivy had to tell her secret to Bean.

  “Excuse me,” said Ivy politely to Emma and Zuzu. She pulled Bean a few steps away. “This morning,” whispered Ivy, “when I went to the bathroom, I got a funny feeling, like I was walking through a cold mist. And even though it was warm, I began to shiver. My teeth were chattering, like this.” Ivy smacked her teeth together. “And then I heard this strange whining noise, like this.” Ivy squealed with her mouth closed.

  Bean didn’t know what she was talking about. “Was it someone locked in a stall?” she guessed.

  “No! Don’t you get it?” Ivy’s eyes glowed.

  “Get what?”

  “It’s a ghost! The bathroom is haunted!” Ivy whisper-shouted.

  Bean spun around to look at the school. The long, open breezeway was dotted with blue doors. The first- and second-grade girls’ bathroom was in the middle of the breeze-way. Bean could see a girl coming out of the bathroom door right now.

  “Look!” Ivy grabbed her arm. “See the cloudy stuff right next to that girl’s head? See?” Bean squinted. The more she squinted, the more she could see a pale, milky cloud floating on the side of the bathroom door. The girl, stepping out into the breezeway, rubbed her arms. “See!” Ivy squeaked. “See! She’s cold because she just walked through a ghost.”

  And then Bean could see it clearly. The pale spot grew thicker, until it was a patch of fog about the size of a person. You couldn’t see through it to the inside of the bathroom. “I can see it,” whispered Bean. “Does it have yellowish eyes? Like little flashlights?”

  “Yes!” Ivy whispered, squeezing Bean’s arm. “Yes, it does!”

  They looked at each other and smiled. This was even better than a blood oath. “How totally cool!” shouted Bean. A haunted bathroom! In her own school!

  “What’s cool?” yelled Emma and Zuzu together. “Tell us!”

  But at that minute, the bell rang. Lunch was over.

  “We’ll tell,” said Ivy. “Right here. After school.”

  “You’re going to love it!” said Bean.

  WHO’S THAT UGLY GUY?

  Even before Ivy and Bean were friends, they had both been in Ms. Aruba-Tate’s second-grade class. They didn’t sit together. But after the day they threw worms at Bean’s sister Nancy, they asked Ms. Aruba-Tate if they could share a table. Ms. Aruba-Tate just loved it when people were friends. She smiled and said, “That’s wonderful, girls! The two of you will be a great team!” After a minute, though, she added, “But if there’s talking, I’m going to have to separate you.”

  So far, Ivy and Bean had been separated six times.

  This was not a big surprise. Bean had been separated from everyone in the class at least once. No matter who she sat next to, Bean talked. Even MacAdam, who mostly talked to himself, had to be separated from Bean. Once, Ms. Aruba-Tate had Bean sit by herself, but Bean just talked louder.

  Bean tried not to talk. She promised not to talk. But every day she talked. Mostly, she was trying to be helpful. She was trying to explain things to kids who didn’t understand. For example, regrouping. Eric didn’t understand regrouping. Ms. Aruba-Tate had explained it, but he didn’t understand it. So he added instead of subtracting. Bean couldn’t stand to watch him add when she knew he was supposed to subtract. Just knowing that he was adding made it impossible for her to do her own subtraction. She had to tell him that he was doing it wrong. She had to tell him how to do it right.

  “Bean is only responsible for Bean,” Ms. Aruba-Tate kept saying. But Bean thought that wasn’t true, because Ms. Aruba-Tate also kept saying that a class was like a family. And families were responsible for each other. When Bean pointed this out, Ms. Aruba-Tate opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  Ivy was very quiet. She was the quietest kid in the class. So Ms. Aruba-Tate kept putting Bean back with Ivy. “I think she hopes it will rub off on me,” Bean explained to her mom. “But so far, it hasn’t.”

  Even though she hadn’t learned how to be quiet, Bean had learned a lot by sitting next to Ivy. One thing she had learned was that Ivy wasn’t as quiet as she seemed. Ivy talked. She just talked so softly that no one could hear her.

  After lunch, the second-graders had science. They were doing a unit on dinosaurs. Bean’s favorites were the ones that had big, bony skulls they cracked together when they fought. Ivy liked the bird-dinosaurs with feathers and sharp claws and red eyeballs.

  Today, the second-graders were learning about swimming dinosaurs. Actually, they weren’t dinosaurs at all. Ms. Aruba-Tate was saying, “These prehistoric creatures are called marine reptiles. One marine reptile is—”

  “Pteranodon!” Eric hollered, waving his arm in the air.

  “Plesiosaur,” breathed Ivy so only Bean could hear her.

  “Plesiosaur,” said Bean out loud.

  “I like the way that Emma is raising her hand. Emma?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.

  Emma stared at her. “Um. I forget.”

  Ms. Aruba-Tate said, “Bean, will you repeat what you said?”

  “Plesiosaur,” said Bean. “Ivy said it, really.”

  “Thank you, Ivy and Bean,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. Then she held up a picture of something that looked like a whale and a giraffe glued together.

  “Who’s that ugly guy?” Dusit shouted. Then he laughed so hard that he fell out of his chair.

  “Dusit, will you please go sit on the rug?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.

  “Do sit, Dusit!” hollered Eric. He fell out of his chair, too.

  Ms. Aruba-Tate put the picture down in her lap. “Class, if you can’t make more mature decisions, I will have to put our marine reptile materials away,” she said. “Is that what I should do?”

  “Noooooooo,” the second grade muttered, feeling ashamed. They loved marine reptiles and they loved Ms. Aruba-Tate.

  Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled. She held up the picture. “Now, the largest of the Plesiosaurs was the Elasmosaur. As you can see in this picture, it had an extremely long neck. Does anyone have a theory about why such a long neck would be useful?”

  “You could wrap it around somebody’s body and squeeze them until they were dead!” yelled Drew. “Like this!” He put his arm around Vanessa’s neck and began to squeeze.

  “Drew! Stop that!”

  “I wasn’t going to do it for real! I was just showing!”

  Bean raised her hand. “Maybe they could reach up out of the water and eat birds or something.”

 
“That’s an interesting theory, Bean,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Does anyone else have a theory?”

  “Other way around,” Ivy murmured.

  “What?” said Bean.

  “They reached down under the water,” breathed Ivy.

  “Ivy has a theory, Ms. Aruba-Tate,” said Bean.

  “Do you want to share it with the rest of us, Ivy?” asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.

  “The Elasmosaur probably used its long neck to go down to the seafloor and eat stuff there,” said Ivy softly.

  “Very good thinking, you two!” Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled. “And Drew, your theory may be correct as well—please leave Vanessa alone—but unfortunately we have no way of proving these theories one way or the other since the Elasmosaur is—what’s the word, boys and girls?”

  “Extinct!” they hollered.

  “Except for the Loch Ness monster,” said Ivy softly.

  “Yes, Ivy?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Can you name another type of marine reptile?”

  “Uh,” said Ivy. She was stuck. Ms. Aruba-Tate probably didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster. Ivy couldn’t think of any other marine reptiles. “I said, Can I go to the bathroom?”

  “Oh!” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Go along.”

  After the door had closed behind Ivy, Bean waved her hand in the air. “Ms. Aruba-Tate, I have to go, too.”

  “Are you sure, Bean?” asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.

  “Yes! Bad!” Bean held her breath, trying to turn her face red. If your face was red, Ms. Aruba-Tate usually let you go.

  Ms. Aruba-Tate still looked doubtful. “Go on then. But come back ASAP.” ASAP was Ms. Aruba-Tate’s word for fast.

  THE PORTAL

  Ivy was standing outside the bathroom door. She was staring at the ground.

  “Whatcha looking at?” asked Bean.