A Festival of Ghosts

by William Alexander

  “That’s true.”

  “But you are unwilling, or unable, to make this kind of disruption go away?”

  “Both,” Rosa said. “Unwilling and unable.”

  Principal Ahmed looked annoyed and bewildered.

  Jasper tried to help. “Hauntings don’t go away completely. There is no away.”

  “We used to enjoy a complete lack of ghosts here in Ingot,” the principal pointed out wistfully.

  “But they weren’t gone,” Jasper explained. “Just pushed off to the side. That can’t last.”

  “Banishment never does,” Rosa added. “I watched what happened after somebody tried to banish one lone poltergeist from a library. It brought the whole building down.”

  She had been sitting in a playground swing across the street, watching—just watching—while the Kasey Princell Memorial Library collapsed. Her father had been responsible for that place, but it turned out to be too much for him. Both of Rosa’s parents had been inside when the trouble started. Only her mother made it out.

  The principal stopped clicking his pen cap. “You’re saying that it would potentially destroy our whole school to make the chalkboards usable.”

  Rosa shook her head, and tried to shake away the image of her dad’s library as it collapsed in on itself. “No. I’m saying that we shouldn’t try to unhaunt the classroom. But we should be able to appease whatever is in there and upset.”

  The principal put his pen down and clasped both hands tightly together. “What do you suggest, Miss Díaz?”

  For one panicked moment Rosa couldn’t think of any suggestions at all. What am I doing here? What’s my role supposed to be? Am I an appeasement specialist pretending to be a student, or am I a student pretending to be a specialist?

  “Treat the chalkboard like a mirror?” Jasper suggested.

  Rosa nodded. “Yes. Good. Okay. You know how you’re supposed to put coins and pebbles beneath a mirror?”

  “Not really,” the principal admitted.

  “Oh,” Rosa said. “Well you are. It’s a way to show respect to anything that might be inside that mirror, and to ask permission to use it. If the teachers put coins on the eraser trays right before class, then ghosts inside the chalkboard will be more likely to share. A little salt sprinkled over the tray wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  Principal Ahmed tried to take notes on his yellow pad of paper, but he gave up and threw the paper down. “Every time I write something, anything, it turns into a letter for someone named Beatrice. I don’t know any Beatrice. And now there’s a small blue flame hovering above my stapler.”

  He put his face in his hands and tried to breathe slowly.

  Rosa nudged Jasper. She pointed at a decorative pile of very small pumpkins on the principal’s desk. “Pass me one of those?”

  Jasper handed her a little pumpkin.

  Rosa took a pocketknife from her tool belt and began to carve into it.

  Principal Ahmed looked up from his hands. “I’m going to have to confiscate that, Miss Díaz. We don’t allow weapons at school.”

  “This is a tool, not a weapon.” She pulled a small trash can closer to dump the pumpkin innards inside.

  Jasper quietly groaned.

  “The knife will not leave this room,” Mr. Ahmed insisted.

  “Okay,” Rosa said. “It was cheap. I do go through a lot of them. Just let me finish this lantern—even though it isn’t really a lantern so much as a small orange coaster to put a candle on. I think it’ll work. Also, you should finish that letter.”

  “Excuse me?” he asked. “What letter?”

  “The one to Beatrice.” She searched the depths of her enormous backpack for a candle. “Finish writing it. Once that’s done you’ll probably be free to write other things.” She found a candle all the way down in the bottom of her backpack, set it inside the former pumpkin, and put both next to the stapler.

  The blue flame moved to the candlewick. Its color shifted to a warm and steady orange.

  The principal watched it burn. “Will I need to keep swapping in fresh candles?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” Rosa whispered. “This one looks like a wanderer to me. But here you go, just in case.” She put another couple of candles on the desk, along with her pocketknife. He took away the knife and put it in a drawer.

  I should go to Sir Agravain’s store after school for another one, Rosa thought. He’ll probably let me put it on Mom’s tab. Sir Agravain’s real, off-season name was Mr. Harrington. He ran the local hardware store. But at festival time he played a hapless knight who specialized in slapstick tumbles from the saddle. No one could fall off a horse as well as Sir Agravain.

  “Thank you both,” said Principal Ahmed. “I’ll inform all the teachers that they should bring small coins and salt packets to school in order to keep their chalkboards calm.”

  He took up his notepad, took a deep breath, and tried to finish Beatrice’s letter.

  “You’re welcome,” Rosa said cheerfully. She felt better, like she finally knew what her role was supposed to be.

  “It’s lunchtime,” Jasper said as they left the office. “Come on. I’ll show you where to find the cafeteria.”

  Ominous shadows watched them from dark corners of the hall.

  Rosa saw them and waved.

  7

  THE LUNCH ROOM WAS CLEARLY a gym most of the time, but foldable beige tables had turned it into a cafeteria. Basketball hoops had been winched up and out of the way. Four thick ropes hung down from one corner. Their dangling ends had been lashed together and looped over a hook on the wall.

  “What are those for?” Rosa asked Jasper as they stood in line.

  “Climbing up to the ceiling,” he said.

  “Why? What’s up there?”

  “You. Wondering why you’re there. It’s just something they make us do in gym class. Most kids don’t climb all the way up to the top, though.”

  “Hmm.” Rosa knew that she would force herself to climb all the way up to the top, even though she loathed heights. Because she loathed heights, really.

  Right at that moment the ceiling looked like a nicer place to be than the floor. Rosa felt like everyone was still staring at her, even though they were doing the opposite. Every other student studiously looked away from her, their necks and shoulders tensed up from the effort.

  The lunch line looped through the kitchen. Jasper pointed out what sorts of goop were likely to be tastier than others. They loaded up their plastic trays with the tastier goop.

  A pocket of silence followed them around. Conversations withered at each table as they walked by.

  Something whacked against the back of Rosa’s head. She almost dropped her lunch.

  Englebert Jones scrambled back to the table where Bobbie and Humphrey Talcott sat laughing.

  Rosa felt something tug at her hair. She thought that it might be ghostly hands trying to catch her attention again. But it wasn’t, not this time.

  “He stuck a wad of green gum in your hair,” Jasper told her.

  “Hmm.” Rosa poked at the gum. Then she smiled at her enemies. The smile made them uncomfortable enough to stop laughing and turn away.

  “Let’s eat outside,” Jasper suggested.

  “Can we do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Rosa sheathed her challenging smile and followed him outside.

  * * *

  The two picnic tables were already full of teachers. Students sat in clumps on the ground, most of them near the hopscotch and foursquare courts painted in fading yellow lines.

  Jasper led the way to the back of the playground, where a gnarled tree sat perched on top of a small, round hill.

  “This is the Lump,” he said when they reached the hill. “It’s good for very short sledding runs and King-of-the-Lump games, though the tree is the undisputed king.”

  Three other kids were eating their lunch beneath the King of the Lump. The twins, Tracey and Gladys-Marie, ha
d dressed identically today, right down to the purple hair ties in their natural ponytails and the matching frames of their thick glasses, but Jasper could always tell them apart anyway. Tracey loved comedies. Gladys-Marie liked action movies, but considered them comedies. Tracey had a gift for forgiveness. Gladys-Marie preferred revenge. Jasper had paid dearly for the Tadpole Incident when they were all nine years old. Neither twin had ever liked the Renaissance Festival, but they had different reasons for that. Tracey considered it silly. Gladys-Marie thought it was much too serious.

  Both twins were right in the middle of telling their friend Mike a ghost story from their summertime travels. This was how Jasper’s friends usually spent the first few days of school—by telling them about ghosts they had seen in places more haunted than Ingot.

  The tradition felt awkward to Jasper now that there weren’t any places more haunted than Ingot.

  Jasper and Rosa got welcoming waves as they sat down.

  Rosa tried and failed to pry the gum out of her hair.

  Neither twin paused in their storytelling.

  “We saw another one at the big upstate amusement park,” Gladys-Marie said. She took a bite of lunch. Tracey smoothly took up the story while her sister chewed.

  “If you sit in just the right seat on the Ferris wheel then a ghost girl comes to sit with you. She either fell from that seat, or she jumped. Or she was pushed. No one knows.”

  Tracey took a bite of her own lunch, so Gladys-Marie took up the telling. “I wanted to ask her how it happened. I was all set to ask, but once we were sitting there with her it just seemed tacky.”

  “She was right across from us, all tightly buttoned up with her hands clenched in her lap,” said Tracey. “She looked at the view. She didn’t look at us. She didn’t seem to see us at all.”

  “And she didn’t jump, or scream, or fall while we were watching,” Gladys-Marie added.

  “She just disappeared before we got to the ground,” Tracey said.

  “That was it.”

  “That’s all that happened.”

  “It was weird.”

  “Whoa,” said Mike. He tried to push his hair out of his eyes, but the blond locks fell right back into place. Mike’s hair always tried to hide him, as though quietly embarrassed for things that Mike himself never noticed or thought to be ashamed of.

  All three of them took shivering delight in just how unsatisfying that story was. The ghost girl’s unfinished business went round and round that Ferris wheel, and they didn’t know why. They wouldn’t ever know why.

  Jasper used to love hearing about that sort of thing. Now he had ghost stories of his own to share. Should he tell them about the half-lion who harassed festival mermaids? The stampeding tree who smashed its way through the royal joust, crushed a bunch of cars in the parking lot, and later turned out to be the Lady Isabelle? Should he try to describe the green-bleeding town founder who had maintained a copper wall between Ingot and all the rest of its ghosts?

  He gave up and made introductions instead.

  “Everybody, this is Rosa. She’s new. Lives in the library. Rosa, this is Tracey and Gladys-Marie. Tracey is on the left, Gladys-Marie on the right. That one is Mike.”

  The twins’ wide eyes widened further. Maybe they had heard of Rosa. Maybe they already knew who she was.

  “Hi,” Mike said. Then he jumped right into telling his own ghost story, even though his mouth was half-full of lunch goop. “I think my cat, Tootsie, is back. She died last year, but now I keep hearing her purr in the middle of the night like she’s trying to sleep on the next pillow. But there’s nothing there when I turn the lights on. Maybe I should set out some of her favorite treats. I still have a bag of them. Probably stale, but I bet she wouldn’t mind.”

  “You shouldn’t,” said Tracey.

  “Definitely not,” said Gladys-Marie. “If you feed the dead then they won’t ever leave you alone.”

  Rosa picked at the goop on her tray. “That’s not true.”

  Silence covered the Lump.

  “If your cat is sticking around,” Rosa went on, “then she won’t leave no matter what you do. So you might as well make her feel welcome. I bet she’d like a treat.”

  “Oh,” Mike said. “Good. Maybe I . . . okay.”

  The twins shared one of those looks meant to be inscrutable to everyone and everything else. They definitely knew who Rosa was.

  Jasper wished he’d picked a different place for lunch. He tried to think of something distracting to say. But then both twins scooted up closer to Rosa.

  “There’s gum in your hair,” Gladys-Marie whispered.

  “I know,” said Rosa. “I can’t get it out.”

  “Let me try.” Tracey took a fork to the tangled gum. “Don’t worry, I haven’t used this for anything food-related.”

  Rosa shrugged. “That’s okay. I’ve got Englebert spit in my hair already.”

  “Doesn’t he work at the Chevalier farm and the festival?” Gladys-Marie asked.

  “He used to,” Jasper said. “We fired him.”

  Gladys-Marie suggested other possible avenues of vengeance while her sister fought the gum wad with her fork. Rosa seemed to appreciate both, even though the fork was clearly tearing out some of her hair.

  Jasper felt less guilty for choosing this spot. He finished his goop.

  “Did you see any ghosts this summer?” Mike asked him.

  “Yeah,” Jasper said. “A few.” He still didn’t know where to start. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  Lunch ended. Recess passed. The bell rang. The green wad of gum maintained its stubborn grip in Rosa’s hair.

  “I’m sorry,” Tracey said, admitting defeat.

  “Don’t be,” Rosa said. “Thank you. I think you wounded it. I can finish it off when I get home.”

  They gathered up their trays and climbed down the Lump. Rosa walked slowly. She wasn’t in any hurry to go back inside the school.

  The cafeteria door let everyone else through before it slammed itself shut against Rosa, knocked the tray out of her hands, and clipped the side of her nose. Leftover goop splattered her shoes. Blood dripped on her shirt.

  She gave the door her most dangerous look.

  8

  THE NURSE STUFFED SOME COTTON into Rosa’s nose to stop the bleeding. The front of her shirt was already badly stained.

  “Did you know that you also have gum in your hair?” the nurse asked gently. Her own hair was bright red, and tied back even though it clearly didn’t want to be. Several scarlet locks escaped from the scrunchie.

  “Yes,” Rosa said, “I know.” The cotton swabs in her nostrils stretched her voice into a funny shape.

  “Peanut butter would help,” the nurse said. “Unless you’re allergic.”

  “I’m not,” Rosa said.

  “Then try it when you get home. Rub peanut butter into the gum to loosen its grip.”

  Rosa laughed. It hurt her nose. “That sounds like some sort of weird ritual.”

  The nurse also laughed, but nervously. “That’s funny. Especially coming from you.”

  “So you know who I am.”

  “Everyone knows who you are, Miss Díaz. And you can go back to class now. Your nose isn’t broken, but it will feel sore for a day or two.”

  “Okay,” Rosa said. “Thanks. Also, you should probably keep your window open.”

  The nurse tugged at her hair scrunchie. “Why is that?”

  “Kids come here when they’re hurt,” Rosa explained. “Over and over again. So all of that hurt is probably still here. It would be good to let some of it out.”

  “I see,” the nurse said. “Thank you?”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Rosa left and eventually figured out which class she was supposed to be in.

  Her fellow students spent extra effort to avoid her, alarmed by the scarlet stains on her shirt.

  Teachers started to ask her what happened, recognized who she was, and then stopped wanting to kno
w.

  It was a long afternoon.

  Rosa and Jasper walked home together, even though she told him not to. “Everyone is going to hate you just as much as they hate me. Go away. Save yourself. Leave me to sulk.”

  Jasper shrugged. “Too late. They’ve all seen us eat lunch together, so the damage is done. Lunch is important, you know. Most alliances are made and broken at lunchtime.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Rosa said. “I don’t know anything about how the living draw circles around each other.”

  “You’ll learn,” Jasper promised. “There’s another lesson following behind us.”

  “Oh really?” Rosa held up her phone and switched the screen around as if taking a selfie. She used the camera to glance back over her shoulder.

  Bobbie and Humphrey trailed behind them along with their sidekick, Englebert.

  Rosa put her phone away. “They seem to be unarmed. No slingshots, flamethrowers, ornate pole-arms, or gum. I still wish I had my sword.”

  “You still can’t kill them,” Jasper told her.

  “But I can hurt them.”

  “Play nice,” he said. “Remember that those two siblings are the mayor’s own kids.”

  “Says the guy who sicced a haunted horse on them just yesterday.”

  “True,” Jasper admitted. “But that was funny.”

  The library loomed ahead. It used to be a manor house, built by Bartholomew Barron to look like a small castle.

  “Almost there,” Rosa whispered. “Don’t rush. Don’t let them think they’re chasing us inside.”

  “I wonder what they want,” Jasper said.

  “I can hear them running to catch up with us,” Rosa said. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  She sat right down on the library steps and waited. Jasper sat with her.

  Humphrey and Englebert paused, hung back, and tried to look tough about the way they kept their distance.

  Bobbie Talcott came forward alone.

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

  Rosa looked at Jasper. Jasper looked at Rosa. Both shrugged.

  “Doing what, exactly?” Rosa asked.

  Bobbie’s scowl looked like it might silence songbirds and strangle their young. “The chalkboard freaked out today.”