by Shelly Brown
I considered calling out for my parents, but when they came what was I going to say? Hey guys, I see ghosts. Can I sleep in your bed? And if I did tell my mom then she’d tell the ladies at church and the girls at the gym and word would get back to school faster than ice melts in the summer. Then I’d have to eat all of the rest of my lunches with Justin . . . at the crazy table.
I shuddered at the thought, and ready to accept my fate as the host body to a demonic ghost infant, I took the baby.
Like in my hands.
I actually touched the squirmy, dead baby with my own clean, living hands.
But what followed justified my decision.
Silence. I could hear a cricket outside chirping the last chirps of warm weather.
The baby had a body. I could feel the flabby rolls under the full long-sleeved nightgown it was wearing. I always imagined ghosts more like a fog, visible but untouchable. I squished it a little and it felt plump and soft. But there were two things that were yucky. First, it wasn’t warm like I was expecting. Or even cold. I wouldn’t say it had any temperature at all. Second, it was a ghost. A colorless, slightly transparent, jittering ghost. I held her (I think it was a her—it was wearing a dress after all) with my arms fully extended. I’m not sure what I thought it was going to do if I brought it any closer—suck out my soul through my nose? (I saw that on a movie trailer one time.) Bite my face? (It wasn’t a zombie . . . I didn’t think.)
The girl just stood there and looked at me while my arms shook under the weight of the chunky baby. How could ghosts weigh that much?
The baby was falling asleep, and though I still didn’t want to pull it in close to me, I decided I could probably lay it down on my bed and sneak out to sleep in my mom’s scrapbooking room.
Its eyes closed and I laid her down gently. She wiggled a little but it looked like my plan was going to work. Carefully I slipped my hands off of her so I could leave. Her eyes flew open and she immediately began screaming. I placed a hand atop her small body, and like an on/off switch, she stopped, her eyes fluttering shut. I sat with one hand on the baby, having a staring contest with the girl. The boy crawled onto the foot of my bed, pulled his socks up as high as he could, then curled up where my feet normally go. I wanted to complain but he wasn’t touching me and wasn’t jumping off of or onto anything. He was kind of peaceful looking all snuggled up, and I wasn’t going to sleep in my bed anyways.
I felt myself drifting, so with painstaking slowness I eased my hand off of the baby. She awoke instantly.
The screaming woke me up real good and I placed my hand back. I was too tired to keep my eyes open anymore so I rested them and my head, just until I could get the baby asleep. Then I’d go sleep somewhere else.
It was like I was a baby-sitter for ghosts. But I was pretty sure no one was going to pay me.
At least these ghost kids hadn’t done me any harm.
Yet.
***
“Why are you sleeping like that T-cup?”
I awoke facing the warm sunlight coming in through my window—and with a child across the top of my pillow. My head was awkwardly kinked. There was a baby under my arm, pinning that arm behind me, and the boy was still at my feet forcing me to sleep at an odd angle.
I had slept through the night with ghosts in my room. No, in my bed. In my teeny-tiny twin bed.
Dead people.
And I lived to tell about it.
I shuddered and jumped out of bed, waking the baby. Its screams were shrill and I plugged my ears. Catching a glimpse of my mother’s worried face I unplugged my ears and tried to act cool.
The girl was beside me in mere moments holding the baby out for me to take. Why did that thing suddenly become my responsibility?
My mom’s mouth was moving. I’m sure she was saying something, but I didn’t hear a word. I tried to read her lips but all I got was “spam for the janitors,” and that didn’t make any sense to me. I nodded, hoping that was the right answer.
The girl pushed the baby against me so I would take it and I teetered, almost losing my balance, but I was smart enough to maintain eye contact with my mother and not acknowledge the girl at all. Still reading lips I caught, “Hello Kitty,” a bunch of “you’s,” and “beaver,” then she put her hand to my forehead. Pulling her hand away she looked at me like I was supposed to answer a question. I tried really hard to remember the shapes her mouth made and create a sentence out of the strange words I had heard but nothing came to me.
She shouted behind her and my dad came out of their room, adjusting his tie. She was telling him something.
This could get bad. My dad was always the first to over-react to situations. Like the Justin-in-my-room incident.
She turned back to me and her lips moved something like “pool today,” when I heard a scream come from right behind me. I didn’t have time to brace myself before the boy jumped on my back, making me lose my balance and have to brace myself on the wall. It must have been fun because he didn’t continue screaming but pulled on my shoulders for some sort of piggy-back ride or something.
My parent’s eyes got huge.
Oh thank heavens. It’s not just me.
I pried him off my back and held him by the shoulders between us. “Can you see him?” He kept flickering in my grasp until I couldn’t feel him at all and he jittered away.
My mom brought her face really close to mine. Almost nose to nose. “Her eyes aren’t dilated. I think they might be able to see her today. T-cup, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I can hear you,” I said quietly since she was so close.
She smiled a huge smile and went back to talking with my dad.
Like a foghorn in the ear, both the girl and the baby appeared beside me in full wail. If I ignored them, they would eventually go away. Right?
My nerves danced on the brink of collapsing. The boy jumped on my back again. This time I tripped and fell forward onto my hands and knees. I shook him off and covered my hands to my ears. The boy didn’t like being tossed to the ground and bellowed on the other side of me. The baby’s wailing, the girl’s frustrated cries, and the pained howls of the boy sounded exactly the same, and as they all let that awful sound out of their gaping mouths, I felt my sanity evaporate.
I screamed.
It was my turn to scream.
I felt a tug at my elbows. Two totally disturbed parents pulled me to my feet.
They were talking but I still couldn’t understand it all. My mom said, “until nine-thirty,” and my dad said, “if Mike takes my spot.”
I shook them off my arms and reached out and took the baby in my hands.
Baby quiet. Girl quiet. The boy held on to my leg then shut his mouth.
The only noise I heard was my mom. “Why are you doing that?” She pointed to my arms out to my side.
“This arm fell asleep and feels really funny.” I used my free arm to hit the arm that held the baby. “It just needs to wake up.” I let my head nod with confidence as if this was all part of a perfectly normal morning.
My dad looked skeptical and said to my mom, “You call as soon as the offices open and we’ll just keep her home today.”
“What?” I panicked. “I can’t stay home today. It’s the Friday before elections. If I stay home today, Kevin will win because there’s still the leather kickers, and the goth kids, and the band nerds who haven’t seemed to choose between us. And I have a math test.” With my free hand I pulled at my dad’s shirt and pleaded. “A really important math test. Please, please, please don’t make me stay home.”
My dad looked firm but my mom looked pliable. I hugged her arm.
“Mommy, please let me go to school. I couldn’t hear because there was ringing in my ears. It happens sometimes in the morning. It happens to lots of people. Like Justin . . .” I had mentioned Justin because I knew my mother loved him,
but unfortunately my dad perked up at his name. “. . . And Mrs. Fenden, my history teacher . . .” I was running out of lies. “I just can’t miss today. It’s critical.”
Mom turned to Dad, tilting her head and dropping her brows. “She is working really hard on this campaign.”
He shrugged. “I think we should take her in.”
Chapter 14
More Running
Tiffany
I beat Justin outside that morning, and he came out of his house licking his palm.
“What are you doing?” He looked like a grooming cat or something.
“Pancake syrup,” was his reply as he wiped the remainder on his jeans. He gave me a quizzical look. “Are you feeling okay?”
I noticed that my shirt wasn’t tucked in all of the way, fixed it, and then ran my fingers through my hair. “Yeah, why?”
His head tilted to one side as he kept studying me. “I don’t mean to be rude but you look really tired.”
“Oh, that.” I yawned and started walking. “There were ghosts in my bed.”
“What?” He pulled his head back in surprise. It took him a second to process what I had said. “They were in your bed?”
I didn’t see Jessica join us, so when she spoke it startled me. “What are you guys talking about?” She made a what-kind-of-conversation-is-this face.
I looked at Justin who just looked back at me with his eyebrows raised.
“Stuff . . .” I said, trying to lie. It was a bad lie and I knew it. “Stuff . . . ed animals. I had stuffed animals in my bed.” Not bad. Maybe I wasn’t such a bad liar after all.
“Ookaay.” The way she dragged out the word made it both a statement and a question.
Mario joined us and Jessica started walking with him.
Justin leaned in towards me so that the others couldn’t hear. “I have a few ideas of ways that we can figure out what they want and get rid of them. Come by my house after school.”
“Cross country,” I said matter-of-factly.
Justin shook his head. “What is wrong with you?” I raised my fist to punch him in the arm, but he grabbed at my fist with both hands. “Fine, just text me when you’re home.”
Why did I even go to school that day?
It was positively horrid.
The children decided to show up in science. Mean Mr. Leibmen was explaining plant classification for the third time. Nobody understood it, and he was getting angrier and angrier when the screaming started. Such a screech, that I couldn’t hear whether he was talking about genus and species or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
They weren’t even close enough for me to take the baby. No, they screamed at me from across the room. I stared at my desk to keep from looking at any of them when the girl next to me tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to Mr. Leibmen. He looked at me like he was expecting me to respond. I shrugged. He asked me another question. Reluctantly, I shrugged again. The kids around me looked like they were laughing which made Mr. Leibmen squish his eyebrows and point to the door.
He kicked kids out of his class all of the time, but I had never been kicked out of any class before. I sat in the hall for the rest of the period holding a ghost baby so it wouldn’t scream at me. Both the girl and the boy tried to talk to me, but it just sounded like screaming. Was this some crazy torment I was going to have to face forever?
I only had to sit in the hall until the end of the period, but when the bell rang I felt the tears well up in my eyes as I made the walk of shame back into the room to get my stuff.
And it didn’t get any better from there.
Lunch was less than stellar as I was the brunt of more than a few jokes about my “looking tired” and acting weird in science. I tried to sneak the ghost kids’ part of my cookie but they didn’t seem interested in food. They were only interested in crawling under all of the lunch tables (super gross!) which made me nervous that at any moment someone would jump up on the bench because something touched their foot.
They walked right into math with me. As if math wasn’t terrible enough on it’s own. As long as I held the baby, the other kids sat on the ground playing some sort of game with their hands. Kevin sat right across from me making it the most uncomfortable class of the day. He was brilliant at math and I was less than average. But math doesn’t win elections. The teacher passed out our tests, and I took a deep breath. I had already cried in one class, I wasn’t about to make it two.
The first question was easy. We had the same one in our homework the night before. As I was showing my work the baby reached out and grabbed my test.
The ghosts didn’t seem to interact with the physical world much except to mess with my life. The mirror, the mugs, my test.
I caught it before she could throw it on the ground. My sudden movement got the attention of Kevin, who gave me a funny look then went back to his test.
I pulled the paper out of the grip of the child then flattened it on my desk.
She tried to snatch it again. I rested my forearm on it to keep it from moving but she was crumpling up the bottom half of the sheet. She pulled it towards her gummy mouth, stretching her lips towards the corner she had in her hand. I yanked it out of her grip and set the paper on the far corner of my desk. With one arm I held the baby far enough away that her stubby arms couldn’t reach the paper, and with the other hand I leaned across the desk and tried to finish my math test.
I caught a glimpse of Kevin. His mouth was slightly open like he was going to say something and his pencil was poised as if to write but his eyes darted between my bouncing knee and my oddly placed test.
When the bell rang, I turned in my half-finished test and gritted my teeth as I made my way into the noisy hall.
And to add salt to my wounds, all we did in cross country was run.
Chapter 15
Busted (Again)
Tiffany
Justin plopped down on his family room floor with a stack of printer paper and a box of crayons, and motioned for me to join him on the ground. Reluctant, I slinked off the couch, my legs burning from all of that awful running, and landed on the rug with a thump.
“Are we having a coloring contest?”
He smiled as he opened the crayons. We used to have coloring contests when we were kids, and our parents would be the judges. We always tied, even though my pictures were always way more awesome than his.
“Nope.” He looked around the room. “Are they here?”
The girl and baby were standing right next to me and the boy was jumping on the couch. “Yeah.” I reached up and took the baby from the girl and set it in my lap. I handed it a piece of paper and let it smash, and lick, and tear at it.
Justin sat up straighter and dropped his brows, staring at what would have looked like a floating paper in my lap, then looked about to make sure that Kori wasn’t around to see the strangeness. The muted dance music let us know that she was still inside her room with the door shut. Hannah was at work, so we were safe.
Justin became all business. He set a piece of paper between us and put a crayon on top of it. “Do you think you can help me convince them to draw us pictures?”
I motioned for the girl to take the crayon and she did, smiling. I noticed Justin’s chest rose and fell faster as he watched her draw. Except he couldn’t be watching her. He was watching a crayon float in the air and draw on a paper all by itself. It was really interesting to me that he was scared of something that I wasn’t. That never happened.
“Ask her if she can tell us what she needs,” he said fixated on the paper.
I looked over at the girl but she just nodded and changed to a pink crayon. Her loose dark curls fell around her face as she concentrated on drawing.
“I think she heard you.”
The girl drew a circle . . . with a face . . . and sticks coming out the bottom.
“Is th
at you?” I asked.
She nodded and drew four more circles.
“Are there more of you guys?”
She nodded and kept adding details to her picture.
“Brothers and sisters?”
She shook her head.
Justin scooted in close to me so that he could see the picture better. It was a bit squishy, but with Justin it didn’t bother me. We had been invading each other’s bubbles way before either of us knew what personal space was.
Maybe that was it. “Friends?”
She stopped drawing and seemed to be thinking about how to answer.
I pointed to the first three circles. “These are you guys.” She nodded. Then I pointed to the last two. “Are these your friends?”
She shook her head and went back to drawing hair on the circles.
“Are they bad people?”
She looked at me like I was crazy and shook her head. The boy stopped jumping and came over to watch her draw.
She started to draw a clear R.
“She can spell?” There was excitement in Justin’s voice. “How old did you say she looked? Have her write what it is she wants.”
I looked at her. She really had to concentrate to write the R and looked too young to write, but maybe I was wrong. Her mouth was screwed up tight as she drew a letter O. Either an O or circle person without a face yet. “We want to know how to help you.”
Without looking up from her work she smiled and went back to writing. This time a lower case b.
Justin was studying the picture. “Rob? Is one of them named Rob? Where they robbed? Ask her if they were robbed.”
Without me saying anything, the girl shook her head and drew a Y.
“Roby?” Justin said.
The boy grabbed a crayon and was about to start writing on the floor when I caught him and pulled the crayon out of his hand. He started wailing and I gave it back to him with a piece of paper. He seemed to understand what that meant and started scribbling. We both leaned in to see what the boy was drawing but it seemed to be mayhem more than anything worth watching.