by Shelly Brown
I wiped at the front of my shirt, knocking cherry pits off. “I just needed . . .” It felt like a cherry pit was caught in my throat but I knew it wasn’t. “I was just trying . . .” The boy grabbed my leg in a hug and looked up at me. His huge eyes trying to comfort my own.
I had failed.
The grave idea didn’t work.
Getting the White Witch to help didn’t work.
I didn’t have any more bravery in me. That was all of my brain-power. It was all I had to give.
Then the memory of the speeches slammed into me. The bouncing baby. The crazy boy. The head slams.
I rubbed my bruised forehead and a few tears slipped.
A warm wind whipped past and with it the word: Hurtado.
I didn’t recognize the voice at all. At first I looked at the girl, but she gave me big eyes that said she had heard it as well.
We both looked around. Hills of yellowing grass, khaki colored dirt trails, a random oasis of trees here and there, and the lone cemetery. Nothing else.
“Hurtado?” I repeated to the girl. She nodded.
Justin looked befuddled. “Did you just say something in Spanish?”
I shrugged. “Maybe? I just heard someone say that word. Hurtado. Does it mean anything to you?”
“No, but I can google it.”
“You do that,” I ordered like a boss. “Right now I just want to go home.”
He brushed a few cherries out of my braid and we started back.
It was a quiet walk. My mind was too full, heavy, saturated. My mouth was unqualified for the job of expressing my thoughts. Awesome? Freaky? Discouraging? Nothing sounded right. So I just put one foot in front of the other until we turned on Shannondale Drive. Then a question formed and it repeated in my head incessantly until I just let it slip out of my lips. “Are there a lot of those kinds of ghosts?”
Justin chewed on his lips. “Umm, yeah.”
I know I should have made these connections earlier but it was at this moment when I really saw Justin for the first time in years. “So all through fourth grade when you said you saw ghosts, you really did.”
He nodded. Nobody would talk to him about it. Nobody believed him. I wonder if he saw anything as scary as the White Witch when he was that young.
Justin looked up. “The sun’s almost down. You should really consider using the sage tonight.”
I wasn’t going to school smelling like that sage stick, but I didn’t feel like fighting with him about it. “Maybe.”
“Call me if you need some. If you decide not to, just fall asleep before dark.”
Umm, asleep before seven? That wasn’t going to happen. “Sure.”
The kids were dragging their feet the entire walk home. Between their parents graves and the witch, they seemed emotionally drained. I took the baby from the girl and nestled it in my arms. It wasn’t warm, like a real baby, but it was soft and sweet. It buried its head under my chin.
We reached our houses and stopped.
Justin hesitated. He had something to say but no words were coming out. “Call me if you need anything, alright?”
I saluted him. “Can do, commando!”
His sober expression slipped and he chuckled.
Chapter 22
Night of the New Moon
Tiffany
The house smelled like lasagna, and for the first time in years, all I wanted to do was sit down with my mom and dad and eat homemade Italian food.
“T-cup, it’s you!” Mom came out of the kitchen and met me in the living room. “Where have you been? You were supposed to be back from cross country two hours ago. I called Jessica and she told me that you and Justin went somewhere after school.”
Dad came down the stairs. “You didn’t tell me that. She was with Justin?” His face got stern. “Tiffany, this secret lovers thing has got to stop. You see where it got Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d overreact,” Mom said, then put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you remember what it was like to be young and in love?” She practically sang the last part.
My desire to be home was gone in a flash, like a fat kid down a slip-n-slide.
My desire to eat Italian food was still strong though.
“Eww, mom. I’m not in love with Justin. We just went to the library.” Going for a hike together sounded too much like a date or something. “Can we eat now?”
Mom nodded and we walked to the table. “Jessica also told me about the speeches today . . .”
I explained over dinner that I had a muscle spasm in my leg and it was so bad that twice I accidentally hit my head on the podium. I wasn’t sure she was going to buy it, but she went on to say “I’m sorry” about a trillion times, and “that must have been embarrassing” just a hair shy of a gajillion.
Dad didn’t seem to care about the election at all, but kept bringing the conversation back to Justin, and how we should have rules with boys, and how I was too young to date or kiss or even hold hands. Mom offered to take me shopping to get my mind off the bad day, and for the first time in my life that didn’t even appeal to me. I just wanted to finish dinner and go to bed. I could see the twilight turn to dusk outside the kitchen window and remembered what Justin had said about getting to bed before dark.
I shoveled in the last of my salad while Mom talked about how when she was younger, a boy in her high school spewed vomit all over the floor during his speech, so my mishap could have been worse. Her descriptions were a little too much for the dinner table.
Then something tickled the bottom of my leg.
I thought it was one of the kids so I reached down and tried to swat their hand away when I felt tiny hairy moving limbs brush my fingers. Then at once I felt them rush up my legs. When I looked it was like a million spiders and bugs. Maybe not a million but way more than fifty. I jumped up from the table and shook my legs, swatting at them. More of them had crawled up my chair and some of them were scurrying across the table. Most of them were spiders, but I did notice a grasshopper jumping on my plate.
One of the spiders leapt from my leg to my hand and I screamed. It was a peculiar spider with strange stripes—like the spider that I smashed in the hall at school. That’s when it struck me that all of the bugs had a faint grey glow to them. Ghost bugs.
Mom jumped up to help me but was confused when she didn’t see anything. “What is it?”
I shook my hand hard until the spider fell off. “Did you see that?” I said while still wiping at my leg.
With brows arched in unbelief, both of my parents pretended to look around the room.
They didn’t see anything. Maybe I was crazy. I faked like it was nothing. “Oh, there was a terrible bug, like really gross, but it must have flown away.” My heart was pounding in my chest and I was fighting the urge to scream as ghost spiders continued to crawl all over me.
I shuddered. “I’m all done with dinner and I’m feeling really tired. Can I be excused from the table?”
Mom looked really worried but said, “Of course.”
I took my plate and nearly chucked it into the sink. The kids followed me as I raced up the stairs. The boy kept trying to play with the bugs, but the girl stayed far away. I could hear my parents talking about doctors.
When I got to my room I turned on my lights and looked out my window. Dang it. Justin’s blinds were down. He knew I would need him tonight, that’s why he dropped all of those stupid hints, so how could he desert me like that?
I texted him.
Spiders.
Within seconds his blinds flew up. He was standing there in some lame flannel pajamas, holding a book. He set the book down and started typing with his thumbs.
Meet you outside.
I nodded and he shut his blinds.
In my hair!
There w
as something crawling in my hair!
I shook my head hard.
There was no way my parents would have let me just leave, so I opened my window and popped out my screen. As I started to crawl through, the girl reached out and tried to pull me back in.
Right, I had the baby in my arms. I had almost forgotten. Probably shouldn’t walk on roofs with infants.
Even ghost infants.
I handed her the baby and stumbled across the roof to the tree in the side yard.
I had plotted my whole life to escape my room using the roof-tree route. Like if there was a fire. Or if I wanted to sneak out to meet a really cute boy. Or if my parents became dictators who could no longer be tolerated—then I would run away using that method. But never had I thought I would be using it to meet Justin Henderson so he could help me figure out how to get rid of a whole bunch of bugs that I believed may or may not be ghosts.
I reached out for the closest limb. It wasn’t as thick as I was hoping but I didn’t have many other options. I pushed myself to the edge of the roof, gripped the limb with both hands, and dangled above the ground way higher than was safe. The bugs crawling across my hands gave me the willies. I considered letting go but took one more look at how far I was from the ground and thought better of it. That’s when I felt the spider crawl up my neck, across my cheek, and in my ear. He seemed to be circling outside the cavern that is my ear, perhaps making a nesting plan. It was more than I could bear. I needed my hands something desperate so I let go and hit the ground hard.
I wouldn’t recommend doing that.
My legs hurt, but I was otherwise okay. I tried to pull the ear spider away but I must have scared it because it retreated further inside. The feeling of having a spider (ghost or not ghost) living in your ear is something I wouldn’t wish on even Kevin Sendheim.
I sat on the lawn and swished my legs on the grass while I used my hands to swat at the rest of my body.
They were everywhere. It felt like tiny legs were skittering around every part of me. I threw my head back and let out a silent scream then quickly closed my mouth for fear they would find their way inside.
Justin came out dressed in a t-shirt and jean shorts with another paper bag. He wiped something off his face then jerked his hand around like he was trying to get something off of it.
“Bugs?” I said, ticked off. “Why didn’t you just say bugs?” I felt the ear spider crawl out on its own so I immediately plugged the hole with my pinky.
He sat next to me on the lawn. “I didn’t know if it was just me or if it would happen to you as well. I’ve never met anyone who has problems like me. I’m not used to other people understanding what I go through. If I had said bugs would you have thought I was crazy?”
“No!” I said still swatting and shaking. “Well, yes. Probably.”
“I’m sorry I should have just told you anyway. It’s karma.”
“What?” Did he just name the bugs?
“Karma. It’s like when you do something good so something good happens to you . . .”
“I’m not following you at all.” Another spider crawled into the hollow of my neck and gave me shivers so I pulled the finger out of my ear and started flailing. “Oh my gosh, I can’t stand this anymore!”
He started brushing bugs off of my shoulders and back. “Or when you do something bad, something bad happens to you. It’s like that. You killed all of these bugs.” He paused and looked at me. “Well, in your case mostly spiders.” He got quiet again looking at me. “That’s a lot of spiders, Tiffy.” He wiped his face again. He really only had ten or so bugs that I could see. Lucky.
“Ugh! Just help me!”
“Right.” He handed me the bag. “Do you remember what I told you last time?”
I opened the bag and looked inside. It was those sage branches and leaves bundled together with string. “I remember.”
“Do you think you can do it? Otherwise it’s going to be really hard to sleep. Trust me.” He swiped at the back of his neck.
A car drove by and its lights were bright. I tried to pretend like everything was normal, but I couldn’t stand it and ran my fingers through my hair trying to get a particularly tickly visitor out.
The car passed and I gave a quiet bellow while stomping my legs and hitting myself all over. Justin reached over and tried to brush something off my neck when the front door opened and we were pooled in yellow light.
“Justin,” my father growled.
Chapter 23
Election Day
Tiffany
My dad officially grounded me for sneaking out and sent me to my room, so I slammed my door. It was really the only say I had in the whole matter.
The children jumped at the sight of me. The boy deserved to jump though because he was throwing all of my shoes out of my closet. I managed to hide the paper bag so that my dad couldn’t ask me about the dried bundle of leaves. Inside was everything I needed. I did just as Justin said. When I lit it, a few bugs close to my hands fell away. In my enthusiasm I waved the stinky smoky stick over my body like the guards at the airport do with those portable metal detectors.
It was amazing. Like pesticide for ghosts. I could literally feel them vanish.
Relief.
Every inch of my skin felt relieved.
Even inches I hadn’t realized had been invaded. (Under my armpits? Really?)
I went around the room like Justin had told me to. Well, that’s not exactly true. I ran, and leapt, and sang A Whole New World from Aladdin all around my room. When I finished, I extinguished the smoking end and crawled into a bugless bed. It felt like all was right with the world again. I couldn’t get rid of the smile on my face.
The next morning I awoke feeling more rested than I had in over a week. As I made my way to the bathroom, I saw the kids in the hall playing some sort of chasing game. It made me happy to see them having fun.
Aha!
That was why I had slept so well. I didn’t have any kids in my bed. Maybe they wouldn’t need me as much anymore and I could have some of my old life back. Good day for it too because it was election day.
I hauled a big box out my front door and Justin, seeing me struggle with it, offered to carry it for me.
“Candy bars?” Justin said lifting a flap and peeking in the box. “You went all out. Are these for bribe day?”
I nodded, pretty smug with myself. He was right. Most people brought stickers and pencils on bribe day. Candy bars would be a big deal.
“Should we put some of these in your backpack?” he asked looking at my unzipped bag.
“No, I’ve got the baby in there.” I really did, too. That way I didn’t have to hold my arms all weird and she wouldn’t scream and ruin yet another day.
Justin reached into the backpack and pulled his hand out empty. He shook his head. “It’s still so strange to me.”
“What? Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe you, but it bothers me that I can’t see them. I’ve never imagined that there were ghosts I couldn’t see.” He lifted the box a few times, guessing at the weight. “How many candy bars do you have in here? One hundred?”
“Two hundred. Will it be enough?”
“Enough for at least two hundred votes.”
I grinned. Sometimes it was nice to have three hundred fifty kids in your class.
Jessica was waiting on her lawn with her arms folded, watching us.
“Morning Jessica!” I was in a winning mood.
“Morning.” Jessica caught up with us then said slowly. “Tiff, you stink.”
I showered that morning so that comment felt like it came out of nowhere. “What do you mean?”
“You smell like Justin.” She leaned in and smelled my jean vest. “Yep, it’s you. What’s going on?”
I pulled my collar up to my nose and she was ri
ght. My clothes smelled like the plant smoke. “Nothing.” I lied.
Mario showed up and immediately went to see what Justin was carrying but Jessica wouldn’t let me be. “Something is going on. After the speeches you went off with him. Sara said she saw you guys walking downtown together, and last night when I drove by your house you both were sitting on your lawn.” She lowered her voice. “I mean, I know we’re friends with Justin but I thought we agreed not to be friends with Justin. Are you guys dating? Because your mom said,” she leaned in close so the boys wouldn’t hear, “that your dad caught you guys kissing in your bedroom. I have chosen to block that mental image from my mind because I am hoping beyond hope you are going to tell me that it’s not true.”
I could have killed my mom. “Not true at all! I’ve never kissed anyone. If I was going to kiss someone it would be the hot lifeguard from the waterslide park, not Justin Henderson.”
Jessica gave an understanding “mmm” as I’m sure her mind went with mine to the statuesque tan god in a white t-shirt and red shorts who surveyed our splashing each summer.
But that still didn’t explain the other stuff. “He’s just tutoring me and that is all.”
“In what?”
“Art.”
Art? Dumbest lie ever.
She didn’t say anything more, but her silence and her squinty eyes told me that she didn’t believe me.
I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her the whole truth, but I knew exactly how she would have reacted. The same way she reacted when Justin started telling people that he saw ghosts. I couldn’t tell her and I knew it.
“I only smell like Justin because last night I was having trouble sleeping so he gave me this incense herb that he uses to fall asleep. That’s what you saw last night. He came over to help, is all.” I took another sniff of my collar. “I didn’t realize it would make me smell so bad though.” I tried to air it out by shaking it.
Jessica helped me pass out candy bars. I was surprised how many people were willing to forgive my melt down yesterday as long as I handed them chocolate.