Ghost Girl

by Delia Ray

  Miss Vest yanked the door shut behind us. “Goodness,” she said, sighing and pulling off her coat. “Now I know why the Hoovers decided to stay in Washington this week.”

  She helped me hang up my sweater, then stopped, giving me a sly look. “I’m just glad I caught up with you before those newspapermen had a chance to run you off down the mountain again.”

  I smiled back.

  “So you are the one I saw hiding behind the lumber pile on my first visit here,” she said. She smoothed her hand along the side of my head. “I thought so. I’d remember that hair anywhere.”

  I blushed, suddenly wanting to fade into the row of coats hanging on the wall. She probably thought I was some sort of freakish thing with my hair and eyelashes, so pale and washed-out looking.

  “Where are my manners?” Miss Vest said. “I haven’t even introduced myself properly. I’ll be your new teacher, in case you were wondering. And I’ll be living here at the schoolhouse. That door behind you leads right into my apartment.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the door and nodded, pretending I didn’t already know her name, that I hadn’t been thinking about her moving into the schoolhouse for months.

  I was still standing there gazing into her wide brown eyes when another door beside us burst open and I heard Miss Vest let out a little gasp.

  “What on earth?” she yelped, and I followed her into what must have been the classroom. It looked like a lightning storm had hit. The electric lights were blinking on and off, and in every corner of the room there was some kind of commotion. Mrs. Woodard’s baby was squalling and the Woodard boys were playing chase around the desks and a few other kids were drawing on the chalkboard while their parents gossiped in the corner.

  Miss Vest hurried off. I saw her scoot across the room and catch little Alvin Hurt playing with the light switch. Like me, Alvin probably had never seen electric lights before except down at Taggart’s. For a minute I stood in the doorway, not knowing what to do. Then I noticed Dewey and his older sister, Ida, standing nearby with three of the newspaper people gathered around them. Dewey was answering questions, beaming like a cat in the sun. You could have heard him all the way outside, bragging about his new shotgun and how he didn’t really need to be at school, he had already taught himself to read.

  One of the reporters was a lady wearing lipstick red enough to flag a train. I saw her smile and give something to Ida—a black enamel vanity case. Ida squealed when the lady leaned over and showed her how to snap it open. “Oh, thank you, Miss Daniels!” she cried. “Look at that! It’s got a little mirror and rouge inside. Can I really keep it?”

  “Sure you can, honey,” the lady said. Just then Ida looked up and caught me watching, but she didn’t even smile or say hello. She twirled around and ran off to show her compact to Luella Hudgins and some other girls talking in the corner.

  “Can I have your attention, please?” Miss Vest called from the front of the room. Through the crowd, I could see her standing by her desk, biting her lip as she waited for everyone to quiet down, but no one was listening. Dewey and the reporters went on grinning and talking. A few more kids and their parents filed in the door, and over by the woodstove Silas Hudgins spit a mouthful of tobacco juice into the coal bucket.

  Miss Vest made an impatient face. Then she grabbed a wooden-handled bell on her desk and shook it. At first nobody paid attention to that, either, but then she shook it again—this time hard enough to set everyone’s teeth to rattling. I almost laughed, thinking about Aunt Birdy and the bell at Taggart’s.

  The whole room got quiet as a graveyard. Even the Woodard baby stopped crying.

  “Thank you,” Miss Vest said, looking a little embarrassed. She set the bell gently back on her desk. Then she said, “I’d like to welcome you all to the President’s Mountain School. We’ve all been waiting for this day for a very long time. . . .”

  Miss Vest spoke with her hands. I’d never seen anyone talk that way before, sweeping their arms back and forth through the air to make a point. But Miss Vest made it look natural, with her sparkly bracelet and her long, graceful fingers. I was watching so close I barely heard what she was saying until she stopped moving long enough to glance at her wristwatch.

  “It’s after nine o’clock,” she said, finishing her speech. “So I’m afraid we’ll need to say goodbye to all our visitors and members of the press for now.”

  The Woodard brothers, Dewey and Ida, Luella, Alvin, and all the other kids started scrambling for the finest pick of desks. By the time I found a place, the only one left was over in the corner beside a tall, ornery boy named Poke McClure. I’d seen Poke smile only once in my life, a long time ago when he had caught Riley and me wandering on his property. He had chased us through the woods, chucking crab apples at our backs.

  Most of the parents were shuffling toward the door now, but the newspaper people didn’t show any signs of leaving. When I turned around in my seat to give them an evil eye, I saw the lady reporter waving her hand back and forth.

  “Oh, Miss Vest,” she called out. “Just a few more questions. What about the Hoovers? Didn’t the president want to be here for opening day?”

  Miss Vest shook her head. “The Hoovers didn’t want to add to the confusion by coming up today. They plan on visiting a little later this spring, once the roads are a bit more passable and the children have settled into a good routine.”

  A few reporters sighed and huffed and set to complaining in the back of the room. Miss Vest acted like she didn’t hear. She pushed a piece of her wavy brown hair behind one ear and straightened a tall jar of dried pussy willows on her desk.

  But the lady reporter wasn’t done yet. “We hear you’ll be living right here at the schoolhouse. What about your living quarters? Are they comfortable?”

  “Very,” Miss Vest said, smiling. “The Hoovers have made wonderful arrangements for me. There’s a sitting room with a fireplace and a modern kitchen and large bedroom—even a spare bedroom for guests upstairs.”

  “Do you think we might have a little tour later?” the lady asked with a flutter of her thick black eyelashes. She sounded almost flirty.

  Miss Vest stopped for a second, considering, then said, “I suppose that could be arranged.”

  “Miss Vest!” someone else hollered from the doorway. I recognized the voice right off. It was Mr. Swanky again. “Can you tell us where you taught before coming to the Blue Ridge?”

  Miss Vest’s cheeks turned pink. “Well, this is my first official teaching position, but—”

  “Your first?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Aren’t you concerned, Miss Vest? I mean, this being your very first assignment, and here you are living all alone on top of a mountain in the dead of winter, responsible for teaching twenty-two children who have never stepped foot in a school before. . . . I mean, do you really think you’re ready for this?”

  “Well . . .” Miss Vest said in her careful voice, “the president and first lady of the United States seem to think so.”

  Everybody in the room busted out laughing. I could have cheered at the bushwhacked look on Mr. Swanky’s face.

  Before he could say anything else, Miss Vest called out, “Sergeant Jordan?” and like magic, a tall marine with a bristle-brush haircut appeared and started herding all the reporters toward the coatroom.

  When the room was still again, Miss Vest let out a big breath of air. She looked up and down the rows, taking us all in, and we stared back. At that moment I reckoned everyone was thinking the exact same thing—that Miss Christine Vest was the smartest, bravest, most beautiful woman we had ever laid eyes on.

  Five

  The reporters kept coming. Day after day a new round of notebook scribblers tromped through the classroom, pestering Miss Vest with more questions and leaving their muddy tracks on the floor. There were other visitors, too—men in dark suits from the school board, prissy do-gooder ladies from down in the valley, all sorts of nosy people hoping to catch sight of the Hoovers.


  Then one morning a group of girls from a school named St. Anne’s Academy came to visit. They all wore matching dresses and had ribbons in their hair, and they stared and whispered a lot until a short, chubby woman they called “Headmistress” told them to “please remain silent while observing.”

  “We just wanted to see the wonderful things you’re accomplishing here,” the woman said to Miss Vest with a smile full of teeth. “And we’ve brought along some donated school supplies and clothing for the children. Would you like the girls to bring in the donations now?”

  “Oh, no,” Miss Vest said quickly. “Of course, we’re extremely grateful for your donations, but it might be less disruptive for the class if you left the items on the porch when you go.”

  I felt the muscles in my jaw relax a little. Thank goodness Miss Vest had enough sense to know how ashamed we would be if we had to sit there and watch those rich girls pass out their hand-me-downs. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of clothes they had brought for us. Maybe there would be starched, white blouses like the ones they were wearing, and enough red satin hair ribbons for every girl in the class.

  “How long were you planning on staying?” Miss Vest asked. I could see she was working to stay polite.

  “Oh, not more than an hour or two,” the headmistress answered. “We’ll just stand back against the wall. Please continue on with your lessons. You just pretend we’re not even here.”

  Miss Vest pressed her lips together like she was holding back a puff of steam. “All right,” she finally managed to say. “We’ll just finish up our phonics exercises and reading lesson, then we’ll let you be on your way.” She turned on her heel and walked back to the chalkboard.

  “All right, children,” Miss Vest began. “Let’s pick up where we left off. Who wants to recite the alphabet today?”

  No hands went up.

  “No one? Well, then, let’s recite together: A . . . B . . . C . . .”

  With the girls in the back of the room watching, we did a fine job with the alphabet. Usually things were a lot worse. Nobody had learned to sit still yet. With all the wiggling and squirming going on, I sometimes felt as if I was in a room full of puppies. Whenever Miss Vest started to teach her lessons, the Woodard brothers scuffed their boots on the floor and let their eyes wander. Ida checked her face in her new compact five times a minute, and Alvin worked on the hole in his trousers till it was the size of a soup bowl. But the worst was Poke. All day long, he jiggled his long, skinny legs up and down under his desktop, till my own chair was shimmying back and forth across the floor.

  “Very good,” Miss Vest said when we got to Z without stopping. “Now, how about vowels. Luella?”

  Luella was our prize student. She never made a mistake.

  Next were letter sounds, and after a while we were doing so well Miss Vest made a game of it. She wrote a letter on the blackboard and called somebody’s name, and that person had to say, as quick as they could, what sound the letter made.

  She wrote a B and called on Dewey.

  “Buh,” Dewey said.

  She wrote a L and called on me.

  “Luh,” I said, glad to get my turn out of the way.

  Ida made the sound for N, and Rainey Walker managed to remember both sounds for the tricky G.

  We were answering faster and faster and Miss Vest was smiling. Then she wrote W on the board and called out, “Poke!”

  At first he didn’t answer. Then he said, “Duh.”

  I knew why he said “Duh.” Because of double-U. “Duh” for double-U.

  But all of a sudden, we heard a snicker behind us. Then two or three more of the St. Anne’s girls started giggling. Miss Vest looked mad enough to spit.

  “Girls!” the headmistress lady snapped. “Quiet, please!”

  But it was too late. A dark shade of red was already creeping up Poke’s neck, past his big Adam’s apple, up to the roots of his tangled black hair. He stared down at the top of his desk.

  I was surprised. I didn’t think the day would ever come when I felt sorry for Poke McClure. I turned around and glared at the line of girls leaning against the back wall. One of them still had a smirk playing along the corners of her mouth. The words were on the tip of my tongue. “Go back to where you came from,” I was aching to say. “I wouldn’t wear your old castoffs if you paid me.”

  I wasn’t the only one who refused to go near the boxes of hand-me-downs. Nobody wanted to touch those clothes after the St. Anne’s girls had laughed at us. And not long after their visit, the marines set up sawhorses at the bottom of the schoolhouse road and started turning all the reporters and other callers away. I was tickled. Maybe now I’d be able to learn something without a bunch of busybodies looking over my shoulder.

  But we hadn’t heard the last of the reporters. One morning Sergeant Jordan showed up with a fat brown envelope from the White House filled with newspaper stories about the President’s Mountain School. Even though it was time for penmanship, Miss Vest loosened up on the rules for once. She passed around the stack of clippings and let everybody laugh and talk and take turns squinting at the photographs and the long rows of tiny print.

  “Hey, there’s me again!” Dewey kept shouting. It was true. Almost every article showed a picture of Dewey, standing by the blackboard, lounging on the schoolhouse steps, him and Ida walking home with big grins on their faces.

  “You’re famous, Dewey,” Miss Vest said as she glanced over some of the clippings. “The Washington Post, the Evening Star, the New York World. Did you know they’re calling you possum boy?”

  “Yep,” Dewey said proudly. “On account of me giving President Hoover that baby possum for his birthday. That’s when he and Miz Hoover got the idea to build our school.” He looked around to see who was listening.

  Beside me, Poke made a disgusted noise in his throat. We had all heard that story fifty times already. And everybody had seen the reporters slipping Dewey change, even dollar bills, as he fed them more and more of his tall tales for their newspapers. I had overheard Ida telling her friends that Dewey had saved up enough money to buy himself a new suit of clothes at Taggart’s.

  When the pile of clippings finally came around to me, I flipped through the stack as quick as I could, scared of seeing a picture of my ugly boots spread across a whole page. But luckily, I showed up in only one photograph. We were all sitting at our desks in the picture. I looked scrawny, with my mouth hanging half-open and my hair a white blur around my head. I had to stop myself from reaching down and smudging out my face with my finger.

  Just then Miss Vest announced that it was time for penmanship.

  “Oh, come on, Miss Vest,” Dewey begged. “Can’t you read some of the newspapers out loud? Please? So we can see what they’re saying about us?”

  “Not now, Dewey,” she told him, gathering the clippings back into a stack. “We’re already way behind on our lessons this week. I’ll tack the articles up on the bulletin board later so that you can all look at them more this afternoon.”

  Everybody sighed, and we pulled sheets of paper out of our desks.

  Penmanship meant we had to copy long rows of letters and rhyming words from the blackboard. Miss Vest read the words out loud: bat, hat, cat, bed, fed, red. But as usual, whenever I started writing, the letters seemed to swim together, and my hand felt sweaty and cramped holding on to my pencil.

  When I first started school, I thought reading might come fast and all at once like a streak of lightning. But now a month or more had already gone by, and still no lightning bolt had hit. As soon as I got home every afternoon, Mama asked to see my work. She wasn’t too impressed with my pages full of letters and crayon drawings. “When are you gonna start reading books?” she wanted to know. “Soon,” I kept saying.

  I could never tell her that the letters just didn’t make sense, that all the blackboard exercises made me feel itchy and restless, like my whole body was covered in poison ivy blisters.

  Poke must hav
e been feeling the same way. During penmanship, he stared out the window, jiggling his legs like always. I sneaked a look over at his paper. He had copied only one row of letters from the blackboard so far, and his writing looked even worse than mine, all running downhill and smeared with pencil lead.

  Miss Vest was watching Poke, too.

  “Poke, are you having trouble with this assignment?” she asked.

  “No,” he muttered, hunching over his paper.

  Miss Vest started to walk toward us. Poke wouldn’t look up at her. Instead, he kept filling in a big O on his paper, making the circle black and angry looking, until all of a sudden, his pencil point snapped.

  “Can I help?” Miss Vest asked quietly.

  “I said no,” Poke hissed, keeping his teeth clenched. Then he flung his pencil down and slouched back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

  Miss Vest tried not to flinch. She stood over him for a minute, staring down at the top of his head without saying a word. When he still wouldn’t look up at her, she started back to her desk. I heard her sigh as she walked away. The truth was, nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the assignment. Luella had borrowed Ida’s compact to paint two red spots of rouge on her cheeks, and up front some little kids were whispering and poking each other in the ribs.

  Then Dewey spoke up. “Most of us are done, Miss Vest. Recess ain’t for another ten minutes. Don’t we have time for some of those newspaper stories now?”

  At first I thought Miss Vest was getting ready to lose her temper. She swiped a mussed piece of hair behind her ear and stared at Dewey hard, but then she said, “As a matter of fact, I think we do have some time.” Everybody looked up from what they were doing. Her voice sounded funny, too high and too cheerful.

  “Maybe hearing what those reporters have to say about us is just what we need right now.” She grabbed up the stack of clippings and started shuffling through them. “Let’s see. . . . Here’s one called ‘Clans of Hillbilly Folk Welcome Book Learning in Hoover’s Dark Hollow.’ Or what about ‘Wild Young Mountaineers Swarm to Hoover School’?”