Spookygirl: Paranormal Investigator

by Jill Baguchinsky

  And that was when my patience—what was left of it—gave out. “Oh, shut up, newbie,” I said, forgetting to keep my voice low. “Either cross over or quit your bitching!”

  “Violet?”

  I glanced over to where Mrs. Brown, my Algebra II teacher, stared curiously at me from the classroom doorway. Oh crap.

  “Everything okay?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Um, yeah.” I shrugged.

  “Why don’t you come back in, then?” She spoke in the sort of soothing tone one might use on a seriously unstable person, and since she’d just seen me apparently talking to myself, she probably thought that was the case.

  I nodded and returned to my seat, ignoring the stares I got along the way. Everyone in the class had apparently heard my little outburst; I hadn’t done my reputation any favors with that one.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ghost Jock and Gabriel Saint Rochester Rochester Saint Gabriel

  The state of Florida has this funny habit of building or renovating schools so that they’re just big enough for the current population of the district, which means they start running out of room as soon as more families move nearby. Palmetto High is more than sixty years old; it’s the oldest school in the area, and its last renovation was more than five years ago, which explained the bank of portables out back. Connected by a crooked, hastily poured concrete walkway, the trailers sat in a marshy field, the kind of not-quite-swampland that floods and attracts snakes during the rainy season, and wasps all year long.

  Palmetto’s overcrowding also explained the chronic lack of seating in the cafeteria. After fourth period I walked into the packed room, surveyed the clique-segregated tables—populars, jocks, emos, goths, punks, and every other kid who was happy to fit into a pre-established mold—and walked back out. Definitely not my kind of thing. Since I couldn’t wander the school without a hall pass, I ducked into a stairwell and waited for the bell.

  After my bizarre morning, it was with great relief that I finally headed to the art wing for Intro to Drawing. On the way, a loud crash in the hall made me glance over my shoulder. A couple of bigger guys in Palmetto football jerseys had shoved this short, skinny kid into the locker bank as they went by. Jerks. It’s not so bad being ignored when that’s the alternative.

  Palmetto’s drawing room was big and airy; it was a corner room, with huge windows on two walls letting in lots of natural light. The industrial tile floor was splattered with years of spilled paint, the brightness of which made me think of a new box of crayons.

  Mr. Connelly, the drawing teacher, stood by the door, checking off names and giving instructions. “We’ve got two classes in here this period,” he said. “If you’re here for Intro to Drawing, tape a piece of newsprint to one of those drawing boards and pick a bench on the right side of the room.” Most of the students in the room had moved to the right; it looked like only two were in the more advanced class on the left. They were left alone to do as they pleased for the most part. Luckies.

  Like most intro-level electives, Intro to Drawing had everything from overeager freshmen to uninterested seniors who just needed an art credit to graduate. Once my class was settled, Mr. Connelly gave the usual orientation spiel. Then he explained that we’d be studying perspective first, and he told us to sketch a view of the classroom from our seats, paying special attention to angles and lines.

  I’d barely penciled in the walls and floor when someone behind me hissed, “Hey!” Figuring the hisser was talking to a friend, I ignored him.

  He didn’t give up, though.

  “Hey, girl with the black hair!”

  I wasn’t in the mood. Continuing to ignore him, I sketched in the windows.

  Then something brushed by my feet. I looked down to see my messenger bag sliding slowly away from me. I stomped on one corner, pinning it in place, then turned to glare at the sandy-haired guy tugging on the strap.

  “Quit it.”

  It was one of the bullies from the hallway, the ones wearing the Palmetto jerseys. I hoped he’d gotten detention for not following the dress code. He grinned at me with the kind of perfect teeth that were probably sporting a full set of braces a year or two earlier—with green and yellow spacers, I bet. More interestingly, a ghost was peering curiously over his shoulder. The ghost also wore a jersey. Dress codes don’t mean much when you’re dead.

  “How come you didn’t answer me?” the guy asked.

  “I’m busy.”

  “You’re that Addison chick, right?”

  “Why?”

  “Your dad runs that funeral home.”

  The guy turned to his fellow jersey-wearing jocks. “See? Told you it was her.”

  A blond girl squinted at me. “And you seriously live right there in the funeral home? How can you stand it with all those dead bodies around?” She wore a snug yellow T-shirt with CHEERLEADER and a palmetto leaf printed in green across the chest. How come no one seemed to be following the dress code but me?

  “It’s just my dad’s job. And we live upstairs. Not with the bodies.”

  Cheerleader wrinkled her nose. “Doesn’t it smell?”

  Oh, I so did not have the patience for this garbage. “The bodies are nothing. It’s the ghosts you gotta watch out for.” I gave Ghost Jock a pointed I-see-you glance, then stood up and moved to another bench.

  Some ghosts know right away that I can see them; it takes others longer to catch on, and Ghost Jock was apparently of the slower variety. His eyes widened and followed me. Like Henry the janitor, he was blue and filmy and translucent.

  “Is she serious?” Cheerleader whispered to the head jock.

  “Don’t be a dumbass, Cherry,” Head Jock said back.

  (Cherry? Really? Come on. Her name matched her glittery red lip gloss, and that was just sad.)

  “But I heard she freaked out in the hall this morning.”

  “She’s making it up.”

  I went back and stood beside Head Jock and quietly said, “I think the ghost standing behind you would back me up.” I knew I was committing some kind of popularity suicide by squaring off against a jock and a cheerleader this early in the year, but I didn’t care. I hated them on principle.

  Ghost Jock rolled his eyes and gestured for me to be quiet.

  “What the hell do you mean?” Head Jock glanced around.

  “He’s tall, dark haired, and he’s wearing a Palmetto jersey. Number Forty-eight. Friend of yours?” I grabbed a fresh sheet of newsprint and went to a different drawing bench.

  Mr. Connelly had been helping another student figure out the angles of the ceiling, but he glanced up when he saw I was moving around. “Is there a problem?”

  “Nope. Just wanted another perspective,” I said.

  He nodded. “Next time, though, pick a spot and stick with it. All right?”

  I nodded and got settled again, then started sketching furiously, trying to finish. I was angry and elated and terrified at the same time. Why had I done that? I’d just outed myself and the whole ghost thing to the entire class.

  I could still hear Head Jock and Cherry Cheerleader muttering to each other. Cherry looked almost agitated enough to cry—not a good idea, considering the gobs of mascara she wore. “How could she know about Dirk?”

  “Lucky guess?” Head Jock was shaken, too, although he was making a huge effort to hide it.

  “The accident was two years ago!”

  “It was big news. She probably saw it on TV or something. Or maybe she memorizes obituaries when she’s not busy hanging out with dead bodies.”

  Cherry shook her head. “I don’t know. That was really spooky.”

  Still standing nearby, Ghost Jock, otherwise known as Dead Dirk, glared at me and gave me the finger. Now that was interesting. The ghosts who didn’t want me around were most often the ones with unfinished business. They were unsettled and fussy, not ready to accept the reality of their deaths. I figured Dead Dirk was still hanging around his teammates because he just wasn’t ready to m
an up and move on.

  I got maybe five more minutes of sketching done before someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Busy,” I muttered.

  “Can you really see ghosts and stuff?” It was a boy’s voice again, but hesitant and genuine and almost hopeful instead of teasing and disdainful.

  I sighed, leaned my drawing board against the front of the bench, and turned to my right. “Yeah. Why?”

  It was the boy I’d seen get pushed into the lockers. He was small, with the kind of slightly awkward features he might eventually grow into. His black hair, an obvious home dye job, was tousled and unkempt, and he had dark eyeliner smudged around his eyes. Unlike the jocks and Cherry, he wore the requisite collared shirt and khaki trousers, but he’d doodled in permanent ink on the left knee of his pants, and despite the late August heat, he wore black-and-white striped arm warmers that ended in fingerless gloves. Cheer up, emo kid, I thought.

  “You’re Violet, right?” he asked.

  I narrowed my eyes a little. “Yeah. And?”

  “The same Violet who went to Palmetto Elementary?”

  Well, this was a different line of questioning. I nodded; that was where I’d gone to school before switching districts.

  “We were both in Mrs. Green’s class in second grade.”

  “Oh. Okay.” No lightbulbs of recognition went off.

  “I’m Tim Williams. We sat at the same table when Mrs. Green made us do those science activities in groups.”

  I vaguely recalled something about sitting in groups of four while Mrs. Green frumped around the room and made us do boring experiments with things like magnets. Magnets! Oh yeah. “You’re the kid who swallowed a magnet that one day.”

  Any thrill over being remembered was flushed right out of him. “I went to the emergency room because of that.”

  It was all coming back to me. Timmy Williams had had light brown hair and huge teeth. He’d worn T-shirts with puppies on them, and he’d had a habit of picking his nose and eating whatever he dug out. He looked pretty different now. I hoped his eating habits had also changed.

  “So anyway,” he said, “that’s cool about the ghosts.”

  “Uh, okay.” No one had ever described my abilities as “cool” before.

  “What’s it like? Do you get to cross them over and send them into the light and all that stuff?”

  I tried to draw and whisper at the same time. “Not really. I mostly just see them around. I can talk to them, but they don’t always feel like talking back.”

  Tim looked almost enthralled. “Is Dirk Reynolds really here?”

  “Number Forty-eight? Yeah, he’s over there with the other jocks. What happened to him?”

  “Car accident a couple of years ago. He was a junior when those guys up there were all freshmen; they’re juniors now. Do you really live in a funeral home?”

  I sighed. “Above, not in. My dad owns Addison Funeral Services, and we live in the apartment upstairs.”

  “Sweet. Maybe I can come over some time.”

  “Seriously, Timmy?” I tried to pay attention to my sketch.

  “It’s Tim. Not Timmy. But I’m changing it as soon as I turn eighteen, anyway. I’m going to be Gabriel Saint Rochester.”

  I paused, the point of my pencil pressed against the paper. “There’s no Saint Rochester.”

  “I know, but it sounds so cool.”

  “So why not use Rochester Saint Gabriel instead? At least there was a Saint Gabriel.”

  “Rochester Saint Gabriel…” He mulled it over. “Awesome. I can use that?”

  “Knock yourself out. But why do you want to be a Rochester instead of a Tim?”

  “It matches my nature,” he said somberly. I could tell he wanted me to ask what he meant by that, but I didn’t feel like it. “You should hang out with us soon.”

  “‘Us?’”

  “Me and my friends. They’d like you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well…we’re into the whole goth thing, too.”

  “I thought you were emo.”

  He looked a little put out.

  I shrugged. “Sorry. But no, I’m not goth.” I kind of hate it when people make assumptions like that. Just because I have black hair and pale skin and wear a lot of black and think about death a lot…Okay, I see where they get it. I’m not goth, though. I’m not emo, I’m not punk, I’m not scene, I’m not any of that. I’m just me, and I don’t like being stereotyped.

  “Oh. Well, my friends would like you anyway. And Isobel’s been kind of wanting to meet you, so if you’d let me introduce you, I could, you know, score some points…” His voice trailed off and he looked sort of embarrassed.

  I felt bad for the kid. Clearly he needed help upping his cool factor, and being pushed around by the jocks wasn’t doing him any favors. Plus, he did think seeing ghosts was cool.…

  “Fine,” I said. “Take me to your goths, Rochester Saint Gabriel.”

  It turned out Tim and I also had the same Chemistry class sixth period, so we walked there together. On the way, near a bank of lockers, Tim spotted a group of somber-looking kids and dragged me over. Several of them nodded at him, but one tall girl—the only one who’d ignored the dress code and looked legitimately spooky—ignored him.

  Of course, she was the one he chose to address, which told me who she was even before he said her name. “Hi, Isobel,” he said, slightly hesitant.

  Instead of returning the greeting, she rolled her eyes and pursed her dark red lips. “What?”

  Tim took a step back as if he thought she might bite. She certainly looked capable of it—her pale skin and elaborate, dark eye makeup made her look almost vampiric, and she wore a corseted black dress that looked straight out of Dracula. She had long black hair and short bangs that were shot through with streaks of red, and her overly arched eyebrows might have left her looking constantly surprised if the rest of her expression weren’t so sour.

  “This, uh,” Tim stammered, “this is…”

  “I’m Violet Addison,” I said, to save his skin. It might’ve taken him all of sixth period to finish his sentence.

  Isobel’s eyes widened, and now she really did look surprised. “You’re the funeral home girl?”

  “That would be me.”

  “She talks to ghosts, too.” Tim threw in helpfully.

  Isobel looked extremely interested in this, but the warning bell rang, saving me from further explanation.

  “Gotta go!” I said, grabbing Tim’s sleeve and pulling him away. “See you around!”

  We made our way to chem, and I could tell Tim was sulking.

  “She wanted to talk to us!” He pouted. “Don’t you realize how rare it is for a junior like Isobel to even acknowledge me?”

  “And now she’ll want to talk to us again,” I said. “Always leave ’em wanting more.” Not that I was at all interested in another goth encounter, but Tim obviously had a thing for Isobel, and I felt kind of oddly protective. In some ways, he seemed as weird as me, and that made me want to help him out. Kind of.

  “So what’s with the dress code?” I asked, choosing a lab table and stowing my bag under my stool. “Isobel sure wasn’t following it.”

  “Her, in a white polo? She’d have to be dead first.”

  “She kind of looked that way already.”

  Tim grinned a little. “The dress code’s not really in effect the first week of school. She’ll look like that all year, though. She’ll get a week of suspension, but she doesn’t care.”

  “What about the jocks in drawing?”

  He snorted dismissively. “Them? Like they have to follow any of the rules.”

  “They don’t have to wear these stupid uniforms?”

  “Not as long as they’re wearing something related to Palmetto sports.”

  That sucked. “So just because they can catch a ball or knock people down or do backflips—”

  “What, you thought high school was for learning?”

  We both snickered at that. N
othing cements a friendship as quickly as shared disdain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  no respect for half vampires

  After the last bell, Tim followed me to the bus loop like a lost puppy and asked if he could please, please visit Addison Funeral Services. At first I wished he’d go away; I really didn’t feel like being shadowed anymore and I had a lot on my mind with the whole locker-room thing. Then a couple of jocks in Palmetto jerseys walked by on their way to the student parking lot. One of them—I recognized him from drawing class—saw Tim and paused like he’d just spotted easy prey. I realized Tim was probably in for more harassment if I left him on his own, so I agreed to his request and quickly led him away from the jocks and toward my bus. He could be annoying, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to get his butt kicked. I gave the jock the stink eye over my shoulder as we retreated.

  Dad was still working on Ralph Wilson’s mother when we got to the mortuary. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be around to cause any trouble. I introduced Tim, so he at least got a peek at the embalming room. Then I showed him around the rest of the downstairs and explained the ins and outs of death spackle. He was fascinated; I wondered if that was genuine, or if he was just trying to be a good goth.

  When we went upstairs, I tried to open the door to the apartment, but it wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t locked; the knob turned easily. I gave it a short shove and managed to open it a few inches, but then it slammed in my face like someone was blocking it from the other side.

  “You know, I should probably tell you about Buster before we go in,” I said, pushing against the door with my shoulder but not really expecting it to give. I’d silently debated whether to introduce Tim to Buster. I suppose I could have gone up by myself and put Buster in his crate before letting Tim into the apartment, but Tim was so enthusiastic I couldn’t resist letting him have the full abnormal-poltergeist experience. Plus, I kind of wanted to mess with him. “Buster’s sort of—OOF!” The door opened easily this time, and I went sprawling into the living room, which was freezing. My breath came out in visible puffs.