Ghost Hedgehog

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  It’s like I got spikes on my back, and every ghost who wants to stick around on Earth grabs one and hangs on.

  Mrs. Jernigan, my fifth-grade teacher, was the first ghost who hooked on to me.

  My best friend Mike and I were sitting in the back corner of the classroom like always, near the window and a little beyond the range of Mrs. Jernigan’s chalk-throwing accuracy. We were sitting behind tall girls, so we could duck, too. The old radiator ticked beside me without letting out much heat, and the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. Mrs. Jernigan, a brown mountain behind her desk up front, stood and read to us from an account of the Battle of Concord; her voice droned. Spring was waiting just outside the window, but the day was rainy, so I wasn’t totally longing to be outside the way I usually did.

  Three shades lingered in our classroom, but they were really old and faded and easy to ignore. Better than my kindergarten classroom had been, where a kid had died from a fall the year before.

  Mike leaned over and muttered, “Gah, Jack. How can she make this boring? It’s about a fight!”

  Mrs. Jernigan stopped class by slapping her yardstick down on her desk, a tactic she used often. Her face got red. She laid into Mike for talking, but she left me alone, even though I was the one he’d been talking to. Mike was always the one who got in trouble. My superpower was going unnoticed, a skill I had developed as a reaction to getting noticed too much by the wrong people when I was little.

  One minute Mrs. Jernigan was this big woman in brown clothes with a wide-open mouth and all kinds of mean words coming out, and the next she sagged sideways and thumped to the floor.

  While all the girls were screaming except Laurie Hartnett, who whipped out her cell phone (strictly forbidden and confiscatable in Mrs. Jernigan’s class) and called 911, and all the guys were going, “Oh, gross,” something smoked up out of Mrs. Jernigan’s body and dived right for me. I felt this cold tingle in my back that just got worse.

  It wasn’t until I looked in a mirror in the boys’ bathroom later that day that I realized I had a new shadow hanging over me, with Mrs. Jernigan’s ominous outline.

  My dad said Mrs. Jernigan died of an excess of meanness—she had taught his fifth-grade class, too, and he still remembered her after he turned into a grown-up.

  Two days later, I was in the cafeteria when Mrs. Jernigan’s ghost woke up. Everybody in my class was there, our backpacks at our feet as we sat around three of the long brown tables, having our first group session with a counselor, who was supposed to stop us from being traumatized by Mrs. Jernigan’s death. The beige linoleum stank of disinfectant, and the lunch ladies were busy clanking behind the counter, putting together the vats of stuff they called food.

  Mrs. Jernigan woke up and argued with the counselor.

  “No, I’m not in a better place,” she yelled. “I’m in the same place, except everybody ignores me!”

  I hunched my shoulders.

  “Except you, Jack. What good is that? You’re such a spineless mouse!” She paced around, yelling so much I couldn’t hear what the counselor said. Mike told me later I hadn’t missed anything.

  Mrs. Jernigan was my constant companion. She hung on to my back and heard all the things people said about her after she died, and she saw and heard everything else that went on in my life, which was terminally embarrassing, but you can’t stop yourself from going to the bathroom or taking a shower. Well, not forever, anyway.

  So I had Mrs. Jernigan hanging on to my back, and that was a total nightmare, until the night I had a real nightmare.

  Six bony monsters twice my height dragged me toward a hole in the ground that was full of fire and wails and screams. I knew I was going down there to be burnt and tortured, and I was struggling without in any way affecting the monsters, when up popped Mrs. Jernigan, wielding a battle-ax. She looked wild, her hair loose from her bun and boiling around her head, and she was huge, even huger than she’d been in life. She was wearing a wild red dress and long red fingernails. Her eyes glowed with green fire, and her mouth was so red I wondered if she’d been drinking blood.

  Whack, whack, whack! Mrs. Jernigan swung her ax. Off went the monsters’ arms. They shrieked and fled down into the burning hole. I lay on the dark ground, monster hands still gripping my arms and legs, and me all scraped up from being dragged over rocks. Mrs. Jernigan dropped the ax and knelt beside me, and all the red on her toned down to orange. “Jack, are you all right?” she asked, prying monster hands off me and tossing them over her shoulder.

  I caught my breath and managed not to cry. “Yes, Mrs. Jernigan. Thanks for saving me.”

  “Yes, well,” she said. She sounded grumpy, the way she used to when a kid in her class sassed her. She pulled the last monster hand off me with a jerk that joggled my elbow. “You better wake up now, or you’ll be late for school.”

  Just like that, I woke up in my own bed, looking up at the pterodactyl flying above, and the little biplane next to it, and the zeppelin, and Mince the dragon, and the fuzzy puppet bat that was bigger than the dragon and the pterodactyl put together. Dad had helped me hang all those guys from my ceiling. I usually fell asleep deciding who was fighting who.

  I could tell by the light shining sideways on them that it was morning.

  I grabbed clothes and headed to the bathroom to pee and dress.

  When I took off my pajama shirt, I saw bruises on my arms like bony fingermarks, and just like that all my blood whooshed somewhere like my feet, leaving me dizzy.

  “Steady,” said Mrs. Jernigan, appearing behind me in the mirror. She looked like her teacher self, with a beige sweater over a brown dress, and thick glasses, her hair back in its too-tight bun. Only, instead of her usual glare and scowl, she looked almost…nice. “Steady, Jack.”

  “What happened?” I touched my new bruises. They hurt.

  She sat on the edge of the tub. I turned around and looked at her straight. “You know you’re a special boy,” she said.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, sarcastically. Special was my fourteen-year-old sister Amy, who could play the flute like somebody on a record, and got straight As. Me, I did a half-assed job on schoolwork and tried to avoid notice.

  “Come on, Jack. You can see things other kids can’t. Like me, for instance. Ever notice how no one else can see or hear me?”

  “Of course,” I said. That had totally bugged me.

  I had tried talking to Mike about it after Mrs. Jernigan died. He just laughed at me, and then he started avoiding me.

  And all the time, Mrs. Jernigan was nagging at me. “Do your homework, stand up straight, don’t sass your mother, stop whispering in class. Eat your vegetables. Stop sniffling. Don’t burp like that. It’s disgusting.” She was a total pain.

  “And nobody else sees the shades around us,” she said now.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. I’d been seeing shadows in the air when there was no one to cast them since I was little, before I could even talk about it. And pretty soon after I learned to talk, I learned not to talk about that. Amy shut me down. She kept punching me or telling me to shut up when I mentioned the shadows. She spooked
easily, and she was lots bigger and stronger than me.

  “You’re special,” Mrs. Jernigan repeated. “More sensitive to the dead, and more susceptible to the entities that drift around the human realm and might do you harm.”

  “Great,” I said. The good news just kept on coming.

  “It is great,” she said, “if you look at it from the right angle.”

  “Which angle is that?” I asked.

  “The angle where you look at me.”

  “No offense, Mrs. Jernigan, but looking at you isn’t that fun. Although in the dream, you looked—different.”

  “Did I?”

  “Oh yeah.” If she hadn’t been helping me, I would have been so scared of her. That combo of screaming red witch and demon. Kind of how I used to see her before I ran into real nightmare creatures.

  “I’m not talking about how I look,” she said, then frowned and adjusted her glasses. “I’m talking about what I can do for you.”

  “Aside from nag me, and watch me when I wish you wouldn’t?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  Before she could say anything else, Amy pounded on the bathroom door. “Jack! You better get your ass out of there. You’re already late, you little jerk.”

  I finished dressing, covering up the evidence of my dream adventure. If I had real bruises, had that hole in the ground been real, too?

  I sort of got what Mrs. Jernigan had been saying. I could look in her direction and see someone who had protected me from that.

  I picked up my second ghost later that day.

  Shades were constant in certain locations, like the two kids who had died in a car crash at the crosswalk on Fourth and Bethel, and the shadows in the alley behind the Blue Goose Tavern, where I guess some homeless guys had died of cold, and shades in the cemetery. Some shades were really faint, and some were fresh and dark.

  Some weren’t stuck, but followed people around, or seemed connected to things that moved, like cars and trains.

  Some of the shades had colors in them and looked more like people. Those were the ones I’d been ducking since I learned to walk.

  Although I remembered one shady fady lady who had hovered near my bed when I was really little and told me all kinds of strange stories I couldn’t understand at first, and later when I could, I realized they were kind of scary, although the kids in the stories sometimes survived. She wouldn’t come in my room if Mom or Dad were there reading me to sleep. Sometimes I preferred my parents’ stories, and sometimes I wanted Vo-Ma’s. She left, though, when I was about four, and I never knew why. Mom didn’t understand what I was crying about.

  I was walking past the 7-Eleven on my way home from school, without having finished my discussion with Mrs. Jernigan (we didn’t talk in public, a rule she came up with early on when I got in trouble with Ms. Arpel, Mrs. Jernigan’s replacement, for talking to myself), when my second hedgehog ghost hooked on. I was looking toward the lighted windows of the store, thinking about Coke, thinking I didn’t have enough money to get one, when a man standing just inside the double window doors came out, heading for me, although I didn’t see the doors open or close, and there was no jingle from the bell.

  He was a tall guy with short, spiky, bleached blond hair, an eyebrow piercing, black pointy-toed boots, striped black-and-white pants, and a white shirt with a big red stain over his chest. I wasn’t even sure he was dead when he walked over to me, although I couldn’t look away from that bloodstain on his shirt even enough to see what color his eyes were (gray-green, I found out later).

  “Hi,” he said to me. “You’re strangely attractive.”

  Before I could even ponder this, Mrs. Jernigan asked, “What do you need?”

  That was when I knew something strange was happening. She didn’t talk directly to people around us, though she sometimes muttered mean things about them, or mean funny things, which made me laugh for reasons live people didn’t understand and resented.

  “My mother doesn’t know what happened to me,” said the guy. “She’s been losing her mind in bits, and I couldn’t call anyone to take care of her before this—” He waved at the stain on his chest, and frowned, only it was the kind of frown with sad eyes that meant he was trying not to cry, an expression I had never seen on a grown man’s face before. “I don’t—“

  “Come,” said Mrs. Jernigan. She held out her hand, and the blond guy took it. I felt an intense chill on my back, then a kind of snap-suck, then a shudder, and the new guy was part of me.

  And also behind me. Mrs. Jernigan had been like that at first, too—stuck behind me so I only saw her in the mirror—but then she got a little looser and could move around near me so I could look her in the face.

  “This is Jack Wronski,” Mrs. Jernigan said, “and I’m Betty Jernigan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said the new ghost. “Roger Quicksilver. Jack, what are you?”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “But you—But I—You’re the first live person I’ve seen since this happened who—“

  “Jack is special,” Mrs. Jernigan said.

  “Oh, please,” I said.

  “He’ll make some calls for you,” Mrs. Jernigan said.

  Which bugged me. How much more of a pain could she be, telling strangers to hook on to me, and introducing me, and then telling strangers I’d do stuff for them, all without even asking me?

  “Jack, would you do that?” Roger asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. By this time I was home, climbing the steps up to our front porch. I stamped my feet and scraped the bottom of my shoes on the outdoor mat, the one with stiff bristles that got the mud off. “Now shut up until I get upstairs, okay?” I unlocked the door and walked in. The foyer was dark, but light came from down the hall toward the kitchen and Mom’s studio. “I’m home,” I yelled.

  “There’s a snack on the kitchen counter for you,” Mom yelled back from the studio. I went in and found a plate with carrots and celery and a sliced apple on it. Great. Just what I craved through that long stretch of school after lunch, when I got more and more starving. I grabbed the plate and ran upstairs. I picked up the phone handset off the upstairs hall cradle as I passed. I took everything into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.

  Then I stood in front of the mirror so I could see Roger again, a black, white, red, and bleached-blond vision against the petunia-spattered shower curtain. Mrs. Jernigan settled on the closed toilet beside me.

  “When did you die?” I asked Roger. Mrs. Jernigan had taken a couple of days to get color back after her smoky start, and at least that long before she started talking.

  “I’m not sure. What’s today?”

  “Thursday.”

  “It was Monday when I headed for work and stopped at the Seven-Eleven for coffee. Oh, my poor mother.” His face twisted again.

  I got a notebook and pencil out of my school backpack and set them on the counter. “Who do I call?”

  “Mrs. Rivera, she’s Mom’s caretaker during the day.” He told me a number and I wrote it down.

  “What am I gonna say?” I asked Mrs. Jernigan.

  “What’s your mother’s name?” Mrs. Jernigan asked Roger.

  “Helen McFarlane.”

  “Put the phone on speaker,” Mrs. Jernigan said.

  I dialed the number Roger had told me and pressed the speakerphone button. A woman answered.

  “Is this Mrs. Rivera?” I asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know me. I’m a friend of Roger’s.”

  “Roger,” she said, and started crying.

  “She knows,” I mouthed to Roger in the mirror. He nodded.

  “Is Roger’s mom okay? Are you taking care of her?” I asked.

  “They took her away. She’s not safe on her own, and I can’t stay with her round the clock,” she said.

  “Has she seen her?” Roger asked.

  “Have you seen her? Is she okay?” I asked.

  “Who are you, aga
in?” Mrs. Rivera said.

  “Do you know where they took her?” I asked.

  “I got caller ID. Your name is Wronski and I have your number, kid. You quit bugging me or I’ll call the phone company and report you.” She hung up.

  “Who else can Jack call?” Mrs. Jernigan asked.

  Which I guess I could have asked, only I hadn’t thought of it yet, and I was irritated by Mrs. Jernigan again.

  “My sister,” said Roger slowly, “except she hasn’t spoken to me since I came out two years ago, and she moved away so she wouldn’t have to take care of Mom. Other than that, I don’t know who.”

  “Well, this last call worked out so well,” I said. “Might as well try.”

  Roger gave me the number, and I dialed it and switched on the speakerphone. “What’s her name?” I asked as the phone rang.

  “Debbie,” said Roger. “Debbie McFarlane.”

  “McFarlane residence,” said a woman’s voice. “How may I help you?”

  “Is Debbie there?”

  “Deborah. Speaking,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said, and didn’t know what to say next.

  “Tell her you’re Roger’s friend,” said Mrs. Jernigan.

  But if she wasn’t speaking to Roger—I shrugged. “I’m a friend of Roger’s,” I said.

  “Why are you calling me?” she asked.

  I looked at Roger in the mirror, and Mrs. Jernigan on the toilet.

  “Did you know Roger’s dead?” I asked before they could give me another idea.

  “What?” It came out on a huff of air. Then a kind of strangled choking sound, and then some sobs.

  I sagged against the edge of the bathtub and held the phone in my lap, listening to a stranger cry miles away from where I was. I so didn’t know what to do next.

  “Roger’s dead, and he’s worried about his mom,” I said at last.

  “What?” she said, and sniffled. “Is this a prank call?” Now she was getting mad.

  “No,” I said. I swallowed. “I know this sounds weird. I’m sorry. I’m new at this. Roger got shot on Monday at work—“

  “I was getting coffee at the store on my way to work,” Roger said.