Ghost Girl Read online

  “You certainly do like the fact that the door doesn’t open,” I said.

  “It’s locked. I’ve locked us in. No one else can be here. No windows they can see in at. No spiders gonna know. This is good.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “This is good,” she repeated. “I’m safe here.”

  “You feel safe.”

  What started as a pause grew. Jadie’s eyes had wandered from the doors, the walls, the floor to rest on my face. “You wanna see me stand up?” she asked, her tone almost conspiratorial.

  I nodded.

  Slowly, a bit stiffly, she straightened her posture until she was upright. Steadying herself with one hand on the wall, she thrust her shoulders back and her stomach out. She smiled at me, an easy, knowing smile.

  I smiled back. “Good.”

  Turning from me, she reached up and clasped a coat hook in each hand. Bracing her feet against the bench beneath the coat hooks, she arched her body outward, stretching what must have been very tight muscles. Repeatedly, she pulled herself up to the coat hook and then back in an odd kind of chin-up, until at last she audibly sighed with relief. All this time, neither of us spoke.

  Jadie climbed down from the bench and, still standing upright, turned her attention to pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan and adjusting her clothes. “I know what that sign means now,” she said quietly, not looking over.

  “What sign is that?”

  “Over by Ninth Street, there’s a brown church, and it’s got that sign out front. It says ‘Safe with God.’ I kept reading it when we went by, and I never knew what it meant.” She smiled. “But I do now. I’m safe in here, aren’t I? I’m safe with you.”

  The next afternoon Jadie appeared again after school. I’d ensconced myself early on in the cloakroom in readiness. The latch on the classroom door snicked and then came the quiet shuffling of Jadie’s feet across the classroom, until she finally appeared in the doorway of the cloakroom. I smiled at her, and there was a hint of a smile in return in Jadie’s eyes, although it never reached her lips. Opening my desk drawer, I took out the key.

  “Do you want to lock the doors?” I asked.

  This brought the broad, easy grin of a secret shared. She snatched the key from my hand and dashed for the far door to secure it, then back to the door beside my desk. She fastened the bit of masking tape over the keyhole, then pulled again at each of the doors to make sure they were fast. Already standing upright by the time she’d finished these tasks, she paused at the door into the classroom to gently caress the housing of the bolt.

  “You like that lock,” I said.

  “I’ve locked us in,” she replied.

  “We’re safe in here with the doors locked.”

  Again, Jadie went through the same calisthenics with the coat hooks to stretch her arm and back muscles. Then, in a totally unexpected flash of movement, she shot off around the cloakroom. Circling the room in a counter-clockwise direction, she ran her right hand along the wall as she went. I was surprised to see how rapidly she could move in the small space. Once, twice, three times she circled the room, all the while feeling the walls, the coat hooks, the benches. Then the large vertical pipe at the far end caught her attention. Putting her arms around it, Jadie hugged it, before wrapping her legs around it, too, as if to shinny up. She didn’t, but she remained like that for three or four minutes.

  Confounded, I sat in silence. Was this really the same child I’d had in class only a few hours earlier, the one who sat statuelike and never spoke unless spoken to? Was this Jadie?

  These afternoon visits quickly became a routine. Almost every day around 4:15 or 4:30 Jadie would appear, lock herself in with me, stand upright, and begin the circular jaunt around the room. There was seldom any variation in what she did, and, indeed, I seemed fairly superfluous to things. All her attention appeared focused on physical movement, relentlessly going around and around in the tiny room. After some twenty minutes of this frantic action, she’d stop, say she needed to go home, unlock all the doors again, and in the process fold back into the hunched crab of a girl we were used to.

  More than two weeks passed. Then there was a sudden variation in the theme. After arriving and locking the doors one afternoon, Jadie straightened up. I was expecting her coat hook calisthenics, when, abruptly, she screamed. It was a playful scream, a high-pitched, ear-splitting girlish squeal, and the small room resounded with it. Jadie spun around, a grin from ear to ear, and screamed again. And again. And again. I sat, deafened.

  Jadie danced, head thrown back, arms out. Around and around in a circle she went and she continued screaming. This must have gone on for five minutes or more before a knock came on the cloakroom door that led out into the hallway.

  “Torey?” It was Lucy’s voice, sounding alarmed. “Is everything all right in there?” She turned the doorknob, but, of course, being locked, the door did not open. Jadie, who had frozen at the sound of Lucy’s voice, let out an audible sigh when the door remained fast.

  “Yes, we’re okay,” I replied.

  “You sure? Do you need a hand with anything?”

  “No, it’s okay, Luce.”

  Muffled sounds came from beyond the door. “Well, all right,” Lucy said uncertainly. “If you’re sure.” Then she departed.

  Jadie remained stock-still until she was certain there was no one outside the door. Then she turned her head to look at me, and covering her mouth with her hand, she giggled. “She heard my voice,” she whispered.

  “Yes, she did, didn’t she?”

  “She heard me scream.”

  “And you’re still safe, aren’t you?” I said.

  Jadie bolted off across the room. Making three or four circles of it within seconds, she ran her fingers lightly along the walls and jumped with nimble feet up onto the benches and down again. On the third time around, she veered off unexpectedly and approached the vertical pipe. As so many times before, Jadie wrapped her arms and legs around it in a tight hug, but after clinging to it a few moments, this time she actually did shinny up. Before I realized what was happening, Jadie had reached the two smaller pipes traversing the room along one side and was out onto them, like a gymnast kneeling on parallel bars. Alarmed because she was a good six feet off the floor, I rose from my chair.

  “Jade, those pipes weren’t made for climbing on.”

  She laughed heartily.

  “I’m not sure they can take your weight, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself, so come down now.”

  She made no effort to get down off the pipes.

  Grabbing the desk chair, I maneuvered it over and prepared to climb up to get her. This prompted a swift response. Jadie scurried out of range, still laughing, then, clutching one pipe, she let herself down off it backward, swung a moment or two in midair, and then finally dropped the last couple of feet to the floor.

  In the classroom it was as if none of this had ever happened. Jadie’s days continued to be spent in nearly total silence, her body hunched over, her head down, her arms pulled up. I had to repeatedly quash the feeling that somehow I was making up those after-school visits, that I was the one with hallucinations. Indeed, during one bleak moment, I wondered if perhaps this hadn’t been June Harriman’s experience with Jadie, too. For the most part, I disciplined myself away from contemplating June Harriman too much. Not knowing her personal circumstances, but sharing her class, it was too easy to extrapolate from what we had in common to form opinions that might be wildly inaccurate and equally destructive. However, as I glanced across the classroom at Jadie, contorted in her chair, it struck me that perhaps this was why June Harriman had committed suicide—driven to believe that somehow she was the crazy one. It was just a one-off thought, but it was dagger sharp. An ideal script for a horror film.

  On Friday of that week, I decided to attempt collage making with the children. Coming in with a large collection of old magazines and a box containing a huge assortment of riffraff—everything from feathers and chunks
of sponge to bottle caps and uncooked pasta—I tried to explain the elusive nature of a work of art. We had been studying a loosely constructed unit on emotions, and I hoped to relate their collages to this, saying that when everyone was finished, we’d talk as a group about their work, about what feelings the collages generated in the people looking at them, and what feelings had gone into making them.

  The boys dived into the box with lively abandon and set to work immediately.

  Reuben loved the pieces of fabric, particularly the bits of silk and velvet. Picking each one up tenderly from the box, he stroked them against his upper lip and flapped his hands in excitement.

  Philip, in the chair next to Reuben’s, had a Montgomery Ward catalogue out and was enthusiastically cutting out pictures of toys and pasting them down.

  “What have we here?” I asked, pulling a chair up and sitting down beside him.

  “Haaahhh,” Philip breathed. His whole vocabulary consisted of heavily breathed syllables, most of which were unintelligible to me.

  “Toys?” I inquired.

  He gestured wildly.

  “That’s his Christmas stocking,” Jeremiah said from across the table. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you. Ain’t it, Phil? Him and me are making up pictures of what we want in our Christmas stockings.”

  I thought it best not to point out to Jeremiah that this was the twenty-ninth of March.

  “And Jadie, too,” Jeremiah said, expansively gesturing to include them all. “Jadie and me and Philip are doing that for our collage. What Santa’s gonna bring us.” Jeremiah was pasting down pictures of Jaguars and gold bullion bars.

  Fact was, Jadie was doing nothing. She sat humped over in her chair, her chin almost on the tabletop. She stared morosely at the blank piece of paper in front of her.

  “Having a hard time getting started?” I asked.

  No response.

  “You know, of course, you don’t have to do a Christmas stocking. That was Jeremiah’s idea. If he’d like to fill his paper with a collage of things he’d like to find in his Christmas stocking, that’s lovely, but you can choose to do something else. You can make your collage any way you want it.”

  Silence.

  “An important thing with art is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just look in the box and see what catches your attention.”

  A pause. I regarded her. “You know how we’ve been talking about emotions lately? About that place way down inside you where your feelings are? Look down there and find out what you’re feeling. Right now. See if you can make a collage of what you find.”

  I went back to the boys and left Jadie alone with her blank piece of paper. She usually did very well with tasks that were rigidly laid out, such as her academic work, but she always seemed to have trouble with ambiguous projects. Consequently, I didn’t want to be tempted into structuring the activity too much for her.

  When I looked over a while later, Jadie had begun to work. Taking up one of the magazines, she started cutting out pictures. I watched a moment, trying to discern a relationship among the pictures, but I couldn’t.

  Jeremiah had nearly finished his collage and was beginning to grow restless. He leaned over Jadie’s shoulder. “What you doing?”

  Jadie didn’t respond. She just kept cutting out. Then, after acquiring about two dozen pictures, she shoved the magazines away. Laying the pictures in front of her, she took up her scissors again and started carefully snipping the pictures into small bits.

  “Man, lady, look at her. She’s crazy, all right. Look what that girlie’s doing,” Jeremiah shouted.

  I shot him a black look.

  “You’re crazy,” he said to Jadie, then flopped into his chair and sighed dramatically. “I suppose we got to sit here waiting ’til she gets done now. She fucks around all the first part, when she shoulda been working, and now we got to wait. Hey, girlie, how come you’re always so slow? How come you never do stuff when the rest of us do? You just sit around like a retard.”

  Ignoring him totally, Jadie continued with her cutting.

  I realized my initial plan to talk about the collages as a group was going to have to be jettisoned, as, if we waited much longer, the boys’ behavior would deteriorate to a point of no return. Indeed, in the moment it took me to contemplate this, Jeremiah scooped up Reuben’s collage and sent it sailing through the air. “Hey, boog!” he shouted at Reuben, “Say ‘fuck.’”

  “Say fuck,” Reuben echoed.

  “Say ‘fuck,’ Reuben. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck it to you.”

  I jammed a record onto the record player and began a rousing chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” to drown Jeremiah out. Catching Philip, I pulled him comically through the motions. We sang several verses in quick succession, all with lively, exaggerated actions to expend a bit of energy. Then, when the song came to an end, I picked up the book I’d been reading aloud to them and sat down on the carpet in the reading corner to start a new chapter. I read until the recess bell sounded.

  Throughout all this, Jadie remained working at the table. When the bell rang, Jeremiah bolted past her on his way to the cloakroom.

  “Hey, lady, look what she’s doing,” he cried and whipped up her paper before Jadie could stop him. He turned it for me to see.

  The relationship among the disparate pictures became obvious now—they all contained a lot of red. Snipping them into small pieces, she’d stuck the pieces on, mosaic-style, to form a large circle around a black cross made out of yarn. That’s all the picture was: a quartered circle.

  “Hey, this is good, man!” Jeremiah cried. “You ain’t so stupid, if you don’t want to be.”

  “It is interesting, Jadie,” I said.

  “Interesting? Man, it’s grrrrr-eat!” Jeremiah shouted with Tony-the-Tiger ferocity. “You know what this is, lady? A bull’s-eye! Raa-aa-aaaTTT!” He tossed the paper into the air and machine gunned it with his finger.

  Jadie just sat.

  Bending down, I retrieved the collage from the floor and laid it back on the table, while Jeremiah pounced on Reuben and rode piggyback into the cloakroom. “You’ll have to tell us about it,” I said cheerfully. “The mosaic was a very clever idea.”

  Cupping her hands over her mouth, Jadie muttered something.

  “Pardon?”

  She hunched farther over and muttered again.

  “I’m afraid I can’t hear you, lovey.” I bent down very close to her. “What did you say?”

  “Throw it away.”

  “You want me to throw your collage away? After you’ve done so much work on it?”

  She nodded tensely, all her muscles rigid.

  “Is there a reason?”

  No response.

  “Something Jeremiah said? Did his taking it and playing with it upset you?”

  Faintly, she shook her head.

  “I think it’s interesting. I’d like to keep it. We don’t have to put it up, if you don’t want, but let’s not throw it away just yet. Okay?”

  Tears came to her eyes. “Throw it away.”

  “Why?”

  “X marks the spot.”

  Chapter Seven

  Over the years, I had acquired a large box of dolls and doll clothes. The dolls were of a type known as “Sasha” dolls, boy and girl dolls, appearing to be of middle-childhood age, with beige, nonethnic-colored skin, thick, combable hair, and wistful, rather enigmatic faces. I had six of them, two boys and four girls, plus two Sasha baby dolls. One year when I’d had a particularly boring summer job, I had filled the extra hours making doll clothes, and there was now an extensive wardrobe of shirts, pants, dresses, overalls, jackets, pajamas, underclothes, and anything else they could want for. A friend had caught the spirit and knitted small sweaters, hats, and mittens for them and even bootees for the babies. In addition, I’d collected small bits and pieces over the years to enhance play, such as appropriately sized dishes, bedclothing, stuffed animals, and a few tiny toys and books. These
had always been particularly successful toys, both in former classrooms and in therapeutic settings; so when all my things finally arrived at my apartment in Pecking and I came across the dolls while unpacking, I looked forward to bringing them into school. Unfortunately, cultural influences had arrived considerably ahead of me.

  “Dolls?” Jeremiah cried out in an utterly appalled voice. “You don’t expect me to play with a bunch of dolls, do you? Those are girls’ toys!” He jerked his hands back from the box, as if he’d contaminated them.

  “See here? Look. There are boy dolls in here, too. And good things to do with them. See here? See this little football? These boys could be getting ready for a football game. Maybe we could look in the scrap box and see if there is something to make a football helmet out of.”

  “Man, lady, if you think I’m going to play with dolls, you got another think coming. Come on, Phil. Come on, Reub, get away from them boogy dolls.”

  “You don’t have to play with them. Nobody has to play with anything in here, do they, Jeremiah? By the same token, there’s no need to make people feel bad for enjoying something interesting. One doesn’t need to think of them as dolls. They’re just … representations of people.”

  “They’re dolls.”

  It would have been easier at the beginning of the year. In all my previous classes, the dolls had simply been there from the start, and, like any other item in the room, they could be picked up, played with, and put down again without anyone paying too much attention; as a consequence, many of my boys had enjoyed them. Bringing them in like this, however, called too much attention to what they intrinsically were. Enticingly as I had set the dolls out on the back bookshelf, no one went near them.

  After school that day, Jadie arrived, as she now commonly did. She hobbled into the cloakroom, slammed the door, took the key from me, locked it, then pressed the little tab of masking tape over the keyhole. Afterward, she went and locked the other door. Immediately becoming upright, she gave a little scream. This over, she darted off around the room, circling it quickly, lithely. This done, she stopped. She scanned the room, then came to stand beside my desk.