by Amber Benson
“It’s always been this way,” the woman said as she picked up a book and stamped it with a big black stamp. “Why don’t you come down here and tell me your name.”
“But the floor was different—,” Noh started to protest, but the woman put a finger to her lips.
“Shush now, girl, you’re in a library.”
Feeling silly, Noh took the stairs one at a time, dragging out how long it took to reach the bottom. When her toes touched the floor, she realized that it felt very different than it had before. Her shoes no longer made a squeak-squeak sound as she crossed the marbled floor, and the layer of dust that had been all over the library seemed to have vanished.
The whole thing was very suspicious, as far as Noh was concerned.
The woman was waiting for Noh when she reached the circulation desk. Even though Noh wanted to dislike the woman for making her feel so stupid, she found herself instantly liking the wide, triple-chinned face; the long, black hair that was so black, it almost looked blue; and the bright violet eyes that seemed to brim with curiosity.
“I’m Catherine Alexander, the head librarian at New Newbridge,” the woman said, sticking out her humongous hand. “You must be Noleen-Anne. Your aunt has told me so much about you.”
Noh stuck out her own hand and took Catherine’s. The skin of the large woman’s fingers was soft and warm as she engulfed Noh’s hand in her own. She gave Noh a good, strong shake, then let her go. Noh could feel the reverberations of that handshake all the way up her arm and down her spine.
“Now, tell me, Noleen-Anne,” the big librarian said in a feathery whisper, “how would you like me to help you decipher that sheaf of papers you have crammed into your back pocket?”
The Lemon Solution
Catherine Alexander took the frayed papers that Noh handed her and spread them out on top of the polished oak circulation desk, where they mixed in with all the rest of the papers on top of the desk.
“Looks like a letter… to a fellow called Henry… from his mother,” Catherine Alexander said thoughtfully. “But this last one’s blank.” She suddenly lifted the page to her nose and gave it a giant sniff.
“Hmmm,” Catherine Alexander said, wiggling her nose and giving the paper a curious glance. This hmmm was very thoughtful as well.
Next she took a loupe—Noh knew that this was really just a tiny magnifying glass, because her dad used one for his work—that was attached to a long silver chain from her shirtfront pocket, and she leaned forward to examine the papers, placing the loupe right up to her left eyeball.
Noh, who didn’t have her own nifty magnifying glass, squeezed one eye shut (the right one) and put her head down next to Catherine Alexander’s. When she got bored with looking at the words that had been painstakingly written across the yellowing sheets of paper in long, looping cursive, she tilted her head so she could watch the librarian.
The magnifying glass made Catherine Alexander’s eye seem ten times bigger than it actually was. Noh wanted to laugh at how silly the librarian looked, but since the large woman appeared to be very seriously involved in deciphering the papers, she was afraid to even let out a giggle.
Catherine Alexander cleared her throat twice, then made a low hmmming sound down in the bottom of her throat. She took the loupe from her eye and offered it to Noh.
“I want your opinion on this,” Catherine Alexander said, pulling out the last page, the one that was blank, and helping Noh put the magnifying glass to her own eye. Noh had a feeling her eyeball looked just as big and funny as Catherine Alexander’s had only a few moments earlier.
Noh closed her right eye so she wouldn’t see double and peered down through the magnifying glass. She blinked twice, expecting to see something strange about the paper, but all she saw was nothing—just a lot bigger.
“I don’t see anything,” Noh said with disappointment as she lowered the loupe from her eye.
“Exactly!” Catherine Alexander said happily. “Nothing. That’s exactly what I thought too.”
She picked the lone paper up off the desktop, carried it across the room, and stopped at one of the polished oak reading tables. She pulled the lampshade off the table light and laid the paper on top of the bare bulb. Noh trailed a few steps behind her, totally baffled by what the librarian was doing.
“Just as I suspected,” Catherine Alexander said, squinting down at the paper. “Come look.”
She motioned for Noh to look at the paper as it baked over the lightbulb.
“Wow, that’s amazing!” Noh said, shaking her head to make sure she wasn’t imagining things, because her mind was definitely having a hard time believing what her eyes were seeing. Scrawled across the page, completely covering the whole page, was another letter! Only upon closer inspection, Noh realized that it wasn’t a letter at all, but a bunch of weird scientific notations. Decimals and fractions littered the page, but there were lots and lots of numbers, too.
“Invisible ink. Lemon juice, I think,” the librarian said.
“But why?” Noh asked. “What’s so important about a bunch of numbers that someone wanted to hide them like that?”
Catherine Alexander made a tut-tutting sound.
“I believe that this blank piece of paper houses an important secret. I don’t know how it got mixed up with your friend Henry’s letter, but somehow it did.”
“What kind of secret?” Noh said uncertainly. She wished now that she liked numbers half as much as she liked words so she could understand the secret too.
“These aren’t just numbers, Noh,” the librarian said, shaking her head. “They’re equations. And if I’m not mistaken, they may turn out to be even more important than I suspect.”
Inside Out
The West Wing was awash in ants, and Nelly had been the only one to notice it. All afternoon she’d monitored the ant army as it had amassed its troops in the foyer, and she had waited for them to do something that would explain why they had all decided to meet here in the burned-out West Wing.
Her eyes goggled in astonishment as she stared at all the insects marching by her feet. She realized that she had never seen so many of the little suckers in one place at one time in her whole life (or death). Of course, being the avid arthropod lover that she was, she’d had an ant farm back home in Michigan before she’d come to the New Newbridge Academy, but her extra-large plastic terrarium was nothing in comparison to this. There were so many ants that she couldn’t have counted them all, even if she’d wanted to.
Nelly wasn’t sure whom she was supposed to tell this important ant army information to—it wasn’t like when she was in school and could just tell a teacher whenever she had a problem. Nope. Now that she was dead, she was on her own.
When she’d tried to point out the ants’ strange behavior to Trina, her friend had only made fun of her, teasing her about the hardworking ants eating asbestos—like they don’t know asbestos is poisonous! They’re ants, not dummies, Nelly thought angrily.
But she knew better. She suspected that these ants were up to something… something different. And she was determined to discover what that something different was.
So while Trina had looked for Henry—he hadn’t been in his room, where he normally hid out during his nasty black moods—Nelly had gone off to find the answer to the ant army mystery. Besides, the search for Henry hadn’t really interested Nelly all that much, anyway. She’d always liked insects way better than people—and you could go ahead and lump ghosts right into the people category, as far as she was concerned.
In the end, Nelly hadn’t had to do too much discovering. She’d just followed the line of ants all the way out to where it started by the lake. She’d stood by the edge of the water and watched as more and more ants trooped out of the woods and joined the ever-growing line.
Next she’d followed her own footsteps back to the West Wing, stopping to examine the place where the ant line curved by the archery field, because there seemed to be a smaller line of ants intersecting the bi
gger line there. She’d wanted to follow the smaller line back to where it started, but something inside her brain told her that it was a dead end, that the ants were going to the New Newbridge Academy, and it didn’t matter one little bit where they were coming from.
When she got back to the West Wing, she did what she should have done in the first place: She looked to see exactly where the ants were going. She followed the line over to the base of the brick fireplace that stood across from the portrait of the school’s first trustee, Eustant P. Druthers, and found that, one by one, the ants were disappearing into a small hole in the hearth just below the fireplace grating.
After that, Nelly could find no trace of the ant line, no matter where she looked.
She was so busy trying to discover exactly where the ants were going that she didn’t notice the cold at first, but gradually she realized that she was feeling something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
“What in the—,” she started to say, her teeth beginning to chatter like a pair of windup teeth as all the drapes in the foyer dropped down, blocking out what little light was sneaking into the room through the windows.
It was so cold that when Nelly looked down at the ant army, even the insects seemed to be shivering on their stalklike legs. Suddenly a strange silence filled the empty air. Nelly looked up and saw a shimmering, golden orb materializing by the fireplace. As she stared at it, it grew larger and larger, until the orb was just big enough for Nelly to climb through.
She floated toward it, her mind and body drawn to the glowing thing like a kid to candy. Obviously, it was her turn to enter the light.
She wondered if when she got to the other side, her old dog, Brandy, would be there to greet her. She’d been so heartbroken when a car had hit the big golden retriever just days before she’d gone off to start her first year at the New Newbridge Academy.
It was a strange last thing to think, she decided, because she hadn’t thought about Brandy even once in almost fifteen years.
As she felt her essence beginning to merge with the glowing orb, Nelly had another strange thought. And for the death of her, she couldn’t have said where it came from.
What if this isn’t the real light but a fake light? One that doesn’t lead to the other side but to somewhere else entirely?
And then she was gone.
Up and Down the Stairs
Catherine Alexander had declined to go with Noh to Caleb DeMarck’s office. She said that she preferred staying in her library, where she always knew what was just around the corner, but she had given Noh a note to give to the physics teacher, explaining the urgency with which the librarian hoped he would decipher the equations that she and Noh had discovered.
Feeling like she was finally getting somewhere with her detecting, Noh walked out of the library, making sure to close the giant doors quietly behind her. Catherine Alexander had drawn a map for Noh, pointing out the way to the physics teacher’s office, but the more she walked and tried to follow the librarian’s directions, the more confusing the map became.
When she had first watched the librarian writing it, the map had looked very simple, a few directions here and there and a drawing or two. Yet every time Noh consulted the map for the next direction, the more directions there seemed to be. No matter what Noh did—whether she took a right turn at the atrium or a left turn at the basketball court, or took three sets of staircases up and two sets of staircases down—she found herself right back at the front entranceway to the main building.
The whole thing made Noh’s head hurt.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Noh opened the front door and went outside. She sat down on the steps that led to the main building and scratched her head. She wanted to crunch the map up into a tiny little ball and eat it. Maybe that way the map would get into her bloodstream and help her go the right way. She was almost tempted to go back to the library and ask the giant librarian why she’d given her a trick map, but she felt silly accusing someone of something that she wasn’t sure of. Maybe the map was really just a map and the problem was all in Noh’s head. She thought back to the cemetery she’d gone into after she’d left the train station. Hadn’t she had the same problem there? She’d had to go out the way she’d come in because she couldn’t get to the other side—and she definitely hadn’t had any kind of map then.
The idea that she might be “directionally impaired” made Noh’s tummy feel funny, like she’d eaten too many desserts.
She got up and stretched like a cat, deciding to try to get to the physics teacher’s office from another direction. Maybe if she went to the back entrance of the main building, she’d have better luck.
Trina had gone too far from the West Wing. She could feel it in her nonexistent bones. She’d been so busy looking for Henry and Thomas that she’d strayed all the way over to the main building.
“Henry!? Where are you!” she called one more time, her voice as chirpy as a baby bird’s. The more nervous she got—and she was starting to feel very nervous—the higher and more stretched her ghostly vocal cords became. If she didn’t find the boys and get back to the West Wing soon, her voice was probably going to fly away.
“Hey—who are you looking for?” a voice said from behind her, frightening her so badly, she nearly disappeared. She tried to place the owner of the voice, but she couldn’t—which was strange because she knew nearly all the ghosts at New Newbridge.
Wait a minute, Trina thought. There’s one voice I don’t know: the new girl’s! She had been so preoccupied that she had totally forgotten what Nelly had said about there being a new ghost at New Newbridge.
“You’re the new girl!” Trina said excitedly as she turned around and found a small, dark-haired girl about the same age as herself standing across from her. This new girl had a jacket wrapped around her waist, even though it was summer.
She’d probably been dead since the fall, Trina thought, and hadn’t even known it—hence the jacket.
The two girls stared at each other, a kind, welcoming smile on Trina’s face and a curious, pinched look on Noh’s.
“How do you know I’m new here?” Noh asked uncertainly. There was something about the redheaded girl in the jodhpurs and riding helmet that seemed off to Noh—she just couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
“Oh, Nelly told me all about you,” Trina said brightly, forgetting how only moments before she had been so worried about being far away from the West Wing. A new ghost at New Newbridge was an exciting thing. And as far as she was concerned, this new girl looked very promising, indeed.
“Is that the girl who kept scratching her arm?” Noh asked. She was almost certain that it was.
Trina nodded happily.
“I thought so,” Noh said. She had been right. All the kids she’d met so far at New Newbridge were ghosts. That’s how this girl knew Henry… because she was a ghost too!
“By the way, were you looking for a ghost named Henry?” Noh asked, hoping it was a different Henry from the one she’d met earlier—even though she knew it wasn’t.
Trina nodded again, her riding helmet bobbing up and down on her brightly colored head. She was so pale-skinned that Noh could see tiny reddish-brown freckles dotting almost every square inch of exposed skin on the girl’s arms and face.
“I hate to have to tell you this, but he’s gone,” Noh said finally.
“Gone?” the girl said, cocking her head curiously. The look on her face reminded Noh of a dog: one who’d just been scolded and didn’t know why.
“I just met him—he was crying in a room upstairs in the West Wing, and while we were talking, it got really cold and then a glowing orb appeared and he said it was his time,” Noh babbled, not sure if the other girl was even listening.
“His time?” the girl repeated. She looked even more confused than before.
“That’s what he said,” Noh offered. “And then he went into the light and disappeared.”
The other girl’s eyes got as wide as saucer
s and she stopped blinking. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“I’m sorry,” Noh said, feeling like that last bit of slime at the bottom of a slop bucket. “Are you okay?”
The girl nodded, then suddenly disappeared.
Ghost to Girl
Sorry about that,” the girl said as she magically reappeared in front of Noh. “I just wanted to check something out.”
“Oh,” Noh said. She didn’t know if she should be annoyed with the girl or not. She did think it was kind of rude for someone to simply disappear like that without telling you first.
“I wanted to ask Nelly something, but I couldn’t find her anywhere,” Trina said. “By the way, my name’s Trina. What’s yours?”
“Noh.”
Trina scrunched her eyebrows together.
“Well, that’s a funny-sounding name,” Trina said, then clapped her hand over her mouth with embarrassment. It was only after the words were out of her mouth that she realized how rude they sounded.
Noh glared at her. Glaring was something Noh hardly ever did. She was a pretty easygoing girl, but when someone poked fun at her name, it made her so mad that she wanted to scream.
“If my name’s funny-sounding, then so is yours,” Noh declared, her eyes narrowing. She wanted to say something else, something mean that would put the weird ghost girl in her place, but she knew it was wrong. It was okay to defend yourself, but if you took it any further than that, then you were as bad as the other person.
Trina clasped her hands together and looked squarely into Noh’s eyes.
“You’re right. We both have strange names.”
Noh had been prepared for a fight. Now she didn’t know what she was supposed to do—she hadn’t expected the other girl to agree with her like that.
“I’m sorry I was rude,” Trina continued, “but you said something that spooked me and I wasn’t really thinking right.”