Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  “I don’t want to play with them,” I say.

  “Well, we all have to do things in life that we don’t like. I have to do things I don’t like all the time. That’s part of growing up. Stop crying now, Thera. We’re having a lesson after break about staying safe and keeping off the streets so nothing happens to you, so you’ll have to pay attention to that.”

  “I’m not crying for me, I’m crying for Billie,” I say. “I don’t care what Hattie says, but Billie would be really upset with her for saying those nasty things to me.”

  “We can’t know that now that she’s gone,” Mrs. Adamson says in a weird way, and I suddenly stop crying and start hiccupping.

  The lesson about staying safe seems to be mainly about us not being allowed to do anything.

  “Don’t go out after school,” Mrs. A says. “Don’t go out after dark. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t take sweets off strangers. Don’t dawdle on the way home. Don’t wear anything provocative.”

  “What’s provocative?” I ask.

  “Anything that shows skin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you show skin and the other girls don’t, you’ll stand out. Don’t tempt fate.” She turns away from me and addresses Hattie in particular. “Don’t put makeup on. Don’t answer back if a man harasses you in the street, just run away. Don’t go walking in the fields.” Mrs. A sits down behind her desk and looks unhappy. “Don’t talk to men you don’t know. Don’t flirt with anyone. Do you know what I mean? Don’t engage. Don’t say anything…inappropriate.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t…I don’t know, Thera,” Mrs. A says really quietly. She puts her hand to her forehead. She looks really pale. Mrs. A is already a pale person, really small and pale, and sort of pretty I guess, but not beautiful like Mummy.

  She has a whiny voice and is always asking us not to do things: don’t climb on this, don’t all talk at once, don’t breathe so loud. She sighs and has headaches a lot. She’s not a great teacher. Mrs. Kimberley, who we had in Year Two, was way better. “It’s really difficult to explain. It’s so confusing, how these things just…happen.”

  “Wait.” I frown. “Do you know what’s happened to Billie?”

  She looks at me like I’m speaking another language. “Are the grown-ups and the police keeping something from us?”

  “No, Thera, no.” She shakes her head. “Stop asking questions. You’re just a little girl. You don’t understand. You can’t protect yourself. None of us can.”

  Just then the door opens, and a black dog comes through it. It moves its head as if it is looking for someone, and then, when it sees me, it comes toward me, jumps up onto my desk, and turns into the ghostly girl. She bangs her hands on the table in front of me and looks into my eyes. She’s so close I can feel the cold coming off her. I can’t move, but my eyes are wide. She leans in toward me, so our noses are almost touching. “She wants to talk to you,” the girl whispers.

  That night, I dream about Billie. She is confused and lost out in the fields, calling for me. It starts to rain, and the drops are running in her eyes and for some reason she can’t close them. (That was weird of me to dream, since it’s been hot and dry all week.) I dreamt that finally she found my house and she was outside my window, but the window of my room at home is on the second floor so this was also weird. She tapped on the window and when I sat up in bed, I saw the ghostly girl was behind her. I yelled at Billie to turn around, or run away, but she didn’t move, and the girl came closer. Billie just kept tapping at the glass.

  When I wake up, a summer storm is raging outside the window, and the rain lashes the glass in a rhythmic pattern. The time on my clock says half past midnight—the witching hour. I go to my window and open the curtains. Lightning explodes in a massive crack down through the sky and the thunder roars a second later like it’s angry. The storm must be right over us. The door flies open behind me, and Sam leaps into my spare bed and dives under the covers. I open the window and lean out, feeling the rain. Outside, our swing is swinging with no one on it. Beyond the fence, under the bright moon, the flowers in the fallow field shiver like waves on the sea, humungous lines where the wind presses down their stems in patterns. To the right, the pig field is empty; the sows are sleeping with their piglets in their sheds, their little half-circle corrugated-iron homes reflecting the lightning each time it strikes. They are arranged in two triangles, one above the other, in a way that looks like the letter “B.” I frown at them, thinking it’s a trick of my eyes, but they really do look like a “B,” every time the lightning lights them up. The trees on the horizon are black against the dirty sky. When the lightning cracks they look like cutout puppet-theatre scenery. I squint. When the sky lights up, I think I see a figure walking beneath the trees.

  “What are you doing?” Sam whines. “The lightning’ll hit you.”

  “What if Billie didn’t run away, Sam?” I whisper. “Do you think she’s out in this? Is she cold? Is she wet?”

  “Stop it,” Sam says. “Shut up.”

  “Is she hungry? When we run away we always take Rice Krispies Squares.” I close my eyes and try to connect to her mind. “Billie. Billie?”

  “Stop saying her name,” Sam groans, hiding himself under the covers.

  I open my eyes again and strain to see her in the fields. “She’s out there. I can feel her.”

  Sam starts to cry. “Thera, don’t.”

  I scan the horizon one last time. “Don’t be scared, silly.

  There’s nothing to be scared of while I’m here.”

  “You’re not much older than me.”

  “I’m your big sister. It’s my duty to protect you with my life. I’d die for you if I had to. Mum and Dad would want it that way.”

  “Billie doesn’t have a big sister,” Sam says.

  “She has me,” I say.

  Suddenly there is something in the corner of my vision. I look down at the swing. For a fraction of a second, I see Billie. I gasp. Then she’s gone. I strain my eyes and search for her in the dark.

  Granddad has taught me about astral projection. If Billie is trapped somewhere by a pervert, she could be sending out a projection of herself to get someone to find her. And who would she send it to? No one else but me would both recognize her and believe it was true, because adults don’t believe in things like the spirit world and being psychic, except for Granddad. Also, the Ouija book said that kids see and hear things adults don’t, like bats and ghosts.

  The rain touches my eyeballs. I blink the drops away, and they fall down my face like tears.

  “Thera!” Sam moans.

  I turn back to him. I want to tell him about Billie, but he’s too scared already, so instead I shut the casing and the sound of the thunder gets quieter, and I climb into his bed. “Shh, go to sleep,” I say.

  “What if Billie never comes back?” Sam says, sobbing. “What if she’s lost forever?”

  “She’ll come back,” I say confidently. “I’m going to find her. I’m her best friend, and I’m brave and tenacious.”

  “What’s tenacious?”

  “Granddad taught me it. It means like a dog with a bone, not letting go.”

  Sam sniffs. “What?”

  “Sam, go to sleep. I’ll stay awake and sit by you.”

  When Sam decides to go to sleep, he always goes quickly. He twitches and snuffles, like a hedgehog.

  While Sam is sleeping, I think. I’ve been reading the Ouija book, and in the last chapter I read I learned all about automatic writing. It’s like Ouija, but it’s easier to do on your own, and it can be used to contact missing people just as much as dead people. It seems less dangerous, because you’re not releasing any spirits into the nonspirit world, you’re just talking to a ghost that remains in the spirit world, like a phone call. You hold a pencil loosely in your hand, over a piece of paper,
and the spirit or missing person takes hold of the pencil. The people who do it never know what they’re writing until they’re done, and the handwriting is different from their own, as if the ghost itself is moving the hand just like it used to write, in Victorian sloping script or whatever. Old people’s handwriting, like Granddad’s, elegant and joined up.

  I slip out of bed and go to my bookcase. In my plastic art basket I find my A3 art pad and a 2B pencil, Billie’s favorite. I sit cross-legged on my bed, with the pad of paper balancing on my knees, and hold the pencil loosely, like the book said. I close my eyes and think of her.

  For a while, nothing happens. I hear the wind outside, and decide to open the window again because it might be easier for her to reach me, then I get back on the bed and wait. On the pad, I notice I’ve made a few little flicks of pencil, but on closer scrutiny they don’t make any letters. They just look like a pile of twigs, like a little fire. I close my eyes again, and suddenly I feel the rain on my face.

  It’s not coming from the window. The window is too far away. I feel cold and damp. I smell freshness, like the moors and peat and morning dew. She’s outside. I feel my body stiffen up, like when Mr. Kent put his hand on my knee. I feel like someone is holding my arms, and I know I have contacted someone. “Billie?” I whisper, hoping it’s her and not an evil spirit, but it doesn’t feel like the ghost girl, or the black dog.

  My chest tightens, and it’s hard to breathe. I tremble and shake so hard that all my muscles feel strange, and I search with my left hand for my heartbeat because I think it’s racing. But it’s not. It’s steady and soft. Suddenly I splutter, like I’m drowning, and then I open my eyes, gasping for air, like Sam when he needs his puffer. I must have been holding my breath or something. My breathing slows down after I’ve been sitting for a while. I shiver. I look down at my paper. Nothing.

  Hmm, hang on. I frown. It’s dark and hard to see, but it looks like there is a scribble in the center of the page. I take both sides of the pad in my hands, stand up and walk to the window, where the moon has just come out, making the world outside brighter than my room. I hold the piece of the paper out toward the night sky.

  There, in pale gray, in handwriting different than mine, rounder and more spaced apart, like Billie’s, are two words:

  F I N D M E

  I’m going to tell you a story…about a little girl just like you. She is sweet and kind and good to her mother and takes care of her younger brothers and sisters. She is pretty and thin and has blonde hair. She tries hard to be good, and to do well in school. It’s me. Before you ask. There are things she knows she is supposed to be, like bright and beautiful and fun and witty. But she always falls short. She’s not quite clever enough to be top in her class. In a class of thirty, she comes out about tenth. What her mother calls “borderline dumb.” She looks good with a lot of makeup on, but she’s not allowed to wear it at school. They say it makes her look like a tramp. Without the makeup, she’s on the average side of pretty. Not the pretty side of average, which would be a lot worse, but still. What her father calls “good enough.” She isn’t witty, but she laughs hard at jokes. She’s fun but anxious. She’s not wild like Jessica Urle, a busty firecracker in the same class who the boys all like. She’s plain, sweet, and not offending anybody, sitting there at the back of the crowd, laughing along with everyone and offering to chip in for a bottle of beer. (Other girls get their drinks paid for.)

  She has had a few boyfriends, but she was too scared to do more than hold their hands, and they didn’t like her enough to insist on a kiss. She’s just not the kind to inspire that kind of pressure, or devotion.

  Not yet. But then secondary school is over. And it is time for university. She gets into one; that she is relieved about. She knew she would, even though her mother doubted her. Of course, it’s an average one. An average university for an average person.

  Finally she can get away from home, away from the pain of being more invisible than other girls, less somehow. What was it about her that no one saw any real potential? People didn’t feel that way about Jessica Urle. Or bold Nora Cunningham, who shouted when she spoke. Or wily Karen Vernon, with her brassy Bardot hair, who used her quick wit to mock the boys mercilessly. Well, they were beautiful. And she wasn’t. Scrawny. No boobs. Too little. Were these the words that flitted through the boys’ heads when she walked by? It set her cheeks on fire to think about it. They would all be laughing, having fun with Jessica or Karen as she walked past, and there it was, that horrible feeling, hovering right on the edge of lives well-lived, always wishing, waiting.

  Her body, heating up, responding to them, and at the same time clenching, withdrawing, confused by itself. And when they did talk to her, they teased her. Four Eyes, because back then she wore big, blue-framed glasses. Bambi, because she tripped once in assembly, in front of the entire school. Pink Pants, because that was what everyone had seen. The shame of it.

  She kept her face very still at those times, still and smiling, when the boys all surrounded her but never spoke to her, when she had to pass through them on the way to class, clutching the straps of her school bag across her breasts.

  School is out. She packs her bags over and over again. The summer heat is stifling. Mother keeps her in the house, like a maid, cleaning, cooking, the butt of Dad’s sexist jokes. She waits on her single bed quietly while, even quieter than that, rage grows in the pit of her being.

  We are running through the fallow field. It is the next day, a Thursday, after school. We have escaped from Nanny with cold Pop-Tarts in tinfoil and Um Bongo in our bags. I feel bad because Nanny was supposed to be babysitting us and we are not allowed out, so Mum will be mad at her, but we had to go. We are tracker dogs on a mission. Billie needs me.

  We run over molehills and past reeds, getting small cuts on the sides of our legs. “Come on, Sam!” I shout. He’s lagging behind.

  We get to the border of what we can see through the window and keep going, out of sight of the house. Our village is about 150 houses in a valley surrounded by farmland: flat, wide, gold fields that go on forever. We run through a couple of fields and over a couple of tracks, and then we are almost at the top of the low hill. At the bottom is where we left Billie. “Look for clues as we go,” I shout back.

  “Like what?” Sam calls.

  “If she’s somewhere nearby, she might have dropped her bag, or something inside it. Or if it’s the man…” I falter. “If the walker we met has taken her and he’s keeping her somewhere, he might have dropped an item of clothing, a watch, his wallet, maybe even a sandwich crust.”

  We work quickly, parting the taller grasses as we go and running over the uneven ground. I push with my leg muscles as I near the top, willing myself to keep up speed. There is not a moment to lose. When I reach the top of the hill, though, I freeze. Sam is running so fast to catch up that he bumps into me. He looks around me, down through the barley field. “Wow,” he breathes raggedly.

  Below us, police cars and a crowd of people are gathered on the muddy track between the barley and wheat. A farther line of men and women stretches all the way along the wheat field where Billie and I parted. They are moving through the field, away from us, toward Billie’s house.

  Sam passes me his binoculars, which he got for bird watching on his last birthday. I put them up to my eyes. The police officers’ heads sway from side to side as they walk, pressing down the crop with their hands, and bending over into it. I dip lower with the binoculars.

  On the track, Farmer Rawley, who owns most of the fields on this side of the village, is scratching the bottom half of his face with one hand, watching them. He leans on the hood of his Land Rover and stamps his foot into the dirt.

  The lady police officer, Georgie, is talking to a policeman. I blush, remembering our exchange, and take my eyes off the binoculars, feeling guilty.

  “What is it?” Sam asks.

  I gulp. I haven’t
told him about the police interview. He knows about the walker, of course—he was there—but I haven’t said that word: “pervert.” I also haven’t told Sam that Billie spoke to me through a psychic connection, or that it might be my fault that she is missing. “Nothing.”

  I am about to hand the binoculars back to Sam when there is a shout from the field below. One of the policemen sticks his hand straight up in the air and turns to look back at the police by the cars. I swiftly plug the binoculars back in my eye sockets.

  The policeman waits, along with the others in the line, as a figure dressed in white, with a mask on, shuffles through the wheat. It comes on a diagonal, not crossing the policeman’s path, and carries a few bits in its hands. It bends down in front of the policeman. They are near to the far edge of the field, where there is a thin footpath that leads past the field and off away from Billie’s house. To get to her house, you have to cross over the footpath and walk straight through another two fields. The white-clothed figure holds up something to the sun. I leave Sam and race along the ridge, holding the binoculars against my face, to get a better look.

  “Don’t trip!” I hear Sam yell.

  I refocus the lenses. The figure has a dainty nose. It is a lady, holding up something white between a pair of tweezers. She turns it over and I see the writing, in the red felt-tip pen Billie carried around all last Saturday. It is the paper predictor.

  For half an hour after they find the predictor, not much happens. It’s a hot day and we are impatient, drinking our Um Bongos, taking photos of them with my Olympus and watching them through the binoculars, both of us quiet and nervous. A few more people put on white clothes, and then they carry a white tent out to where they found the predictor. I don’t understand why they’re not moving farther along Billie’s path, now that they’ve found one thing. That’s what I would be doing if I were a policeman. Shouldn’t they be looking for her? And not just her stuff? I gaze beyond all the tiny police people to the thin, raised footpath.