The Forgotten Girl

by India Hill Brown

  Then he saw a light outside, turning on and off, on and off, on and off.

  The signal from Iris. She wanted him to come outside.

  Again? At night?

  Daniel sucked his teeth. She’d promised that she wouldn’t ask him to come out again if he went with her the first time, and look at how horribly that turned out. They ended up making snow angels on top of someone’s grave.

  She was waiting for his response. What should he say?

  He didn’t want to go, but he didn’t think it was safe for Iris to go alone either. That was too complicated to say through flashlight.

  Maybe if he could just—

  “Daniel?”

  He heard his mom’s voice, moving smoothly through the dark to his ears.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “Are you okay? You went to bed early tonight.” The lingering smell of tonight’s roast beef and potato dinner reached his nose. He was stuffed. Relaxed. Unwilling to sneak out and risk having his mom come into his room in the middle of the night to find an empty bed, unwilling to let her think she lost another person she loved.

  Daniel hoped Iris didn’t do the flashlight signal again while his mom was standing there.

  “I’m okay, Mama,” he said. “I promise.”

  “Goodnight, I love you so much.” She closed the door.

  It was settled. He couldn’t go, even if he wanted to. He reached under the bed and picked up his flashlight, and turned it on for ten seconds.

  The signal for no.

  Daniel flashed his light once for ten seconds.

  He wasn’t coming.

  Iris’s stomach sank. She knew he probably wouldn’t, but she was still keeping her hopes up.

  Oh well.

  She walked downstairs, shielding the tablet that was already in the pocket of her puffer coat.

  “I’ll be right back, Daddy,” she said to her father. “I’m getting my tablet from Daniel’s.”

  “Okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off the TV.

  Iris slipped outside, the air cold and thick, the overcast sky an inky blue.

  She looked one more time at her house, making sure her mom wasn’t peeking out the window.

  She wasn’t. She was probably too busy with Vashti anyway.

  Iris walked, crossing her arms, looking at the line of trees swaying behind the houses.

  “Trees talk to each other,” Suga once told her. “My aunt was afraid of them. She said she could hear what they were saying.”

  Iris felt the trees were telling her to come back to the grave.

  She answered them, walking with her arms still crossed, the only sounds the crunch of ice and slush beneath her feet.

  She walked straight past the houses to the big clearing, without stopping or slowing down.

  There were the hand- and footprints she and Daniel had made a few days ago, distorted in the ice, melting into one another, mixing with the mud underneath. The sight made her nauseous.

  She walked into the smaller clearing, the darkness falling over her instantly.

  Everything seemed sharper around the edges. Stark. The branches of the trees pointier at the ends, the twigs on the ground like worms.

  Iris looked at the snow angel she made. While the hand- and footprints were warped, this snow angel was still perfect. An icy snow angel with a grave marker in the middle of her chest.

  It was very still. No sound. It felt like the calm before the storm.

  She broke that silence when she decided to take a picture of the grave marker with her tablet. They could use it in their project, during their final presentation. She fumbled with the tablet, her gloveless fingers cold as she took a picture of the angel, of Avery Moore’s grave. The flash that lit up the snow didn’t reach the darkness beyond the clearing.

  Tsst.

  She whirled around, hearing something that sounded like a twig snapping.

  She had the sudden, overwhelming feeling that someone was right behind her, about to tap her shoulder.

  Suga said if you looked over your left shoulder and saw a ghost, it was probably the devil. If you looked over your right, it was likely an angel. Iris had no intentions of looking over her left shoulder.

  She turned her head ever so slightly to the right, looking out of her peripheral vision.

  Nothing.

  As much as Iris had felt drawn into this clearing, she now wanted to run away, straight back into the house, into her bed, with her night-light. But she was already here. She wished Daniel was, too.

  She looked at the gravestone again.

  Avery Moore.

  She studied it, ran her fingers over it, got on her hands and knees and started scraping snow, twigs, dirt away.

  She kept going, clearing the area of snow, the frozen earth hard and cold under her nails.

  Her left hand hit something. She grabbed a fistful of dirt and tugged it up, seeing a crumbling block.

  Another gravestone.

  There was a small glass pane in the middle with words scribbled on it in pen. Iris couldn’t make out the name. It looked like it could’ve said HENRY, but she could make out the years: 1915–1950.

  “Wow,” Iris mouthed, the cloud of heat lingering too long in front of her mouth before fading away.

  Iris dug and dug, grabbing for answers, even using her foot to take up dirt and slush.

  Every so often, her hand hit something else solid.

  Iris kept digging, holes all around her.

  She’d uncovered five grave markers.

  She was sitting in the middle of a graveyard.

  Iris thought of all the bodies under her.

  Something cold hit her nose.

  Snow.

  Oh no.

  They take the children in the snow

  feeding on their fright.

  A cold gush of air washed over Iris like a bucket of water.

  The spirits of the snow were coming for her. Iris should’ve never come here by herself.

  Something was behind her.

  Don’t look, don’t look, Iris willed herself, but the urge was too strong.

  She could feel a presence.

  But instead of body heat, she felt cold air.

  She peeked around her right shoulder, held in her shriek.

  There was a little girl, standing with her back to Iris.

  “Hello?” Iris said.

  She didn’t answer.

  She wore a light dress that didn’t even cover her bare legs, but she kept completely still despite the harsh cold.

  What was this girl doing out here? Had she come from one of the neighbors’ houses?

  “Hello?” Iris repeated.

  The girl slowly turned around; her eyes were black holes, swallowing the moonlight. She was smiling, but unmoving.

  This was the same girl Iris saw in her dream.

  She couldn’t be real. Was Iris dreaming again?

  But she wasn’t in her bed, she was outside.

  Iris saw straight through the girl to the trees behind her. Iris backed up slowly, and her foot slipped on the icy snow angel, pulling Iris down to the grave.

  She felt frozen to her spot.

  Was this girl a spirit of the snow?

  Iris whimpered. If she fed off of fright, she’d feast on Iris, right there. She was going to be eaten in the snow by this spirit and her family thought she was at Daniel’s, getting her tablet. They wouldn’t even know where she went. They were probably playing with Vashti, reading her stories.

  She needed to do something, be brave, so that the spirit couldn’t feed off of her fright.

  Forget this, Iris thought.

  Instead, she made a run for it. She ran as fast as she could, trying to avoid the girl.

  Iris slipped on the ice again and fell facedown.

  She scrambled up, turned around to see where the girl was.

  The girl vanished into thin air, turning into branches and twigs and tree trunks and nothing at all.

  She was there and then gone
, just like in the dream.

  Iris didn’t hesitate. She slipped again as she exited the little clearing, the big clearing, crossed the street, ran to her house.

  She dashed through the front door and slammed it behind her. Iris let the door block out the fear and dread and terror, and let the warmth of her familiar home wash over her.

  Daddy glanced at her and smiled before turning his attention back to the TV.

  A noise came from the kitchen.

  Iris jumped. “What was—”

  “Iris, your sister wanted to tell you goodnight.” It was Mama yelling from the kitchen, pouring herself something to drink. She heard the clinks of glasses, the flow of liquid. “She just lay down not too long ago.”

  “Okay, I’m going upstairs now.” Iris sprinted up, to get as far away from the front door as possible.

  She was imagining things. She dreamed about the girl before, and she was in a dark and scary place and had been thinking about her again. You were thinking about Suga’s story, that’s all, Iris told herself, her feet thudding on the stairs. She still couldn’t shake the feeling of something dark behind her.

  She heard her sister, giggling softly, talking in her room. She threw the door open, the only light coming from Vashti’s night-light.

  “What are you laughing at? Who are you talking to?” Iris asked frantically.

  There was a shadow of a girl on the wall.

  Iris jumped backward out of the room, then realized it was one of Vashti’s dolls on the floor, causing a distorted silhouette.

  “My friend,” Vashti said. Iris could hear the grin in her voice.

  Iris tried to calm her pounding heart. She looked at the doll, a smile frozen on its face.

  “Your friend?”

  “Yes. Do you want to meet her?”

  Stop. Vashti always did this. She loved her dolls. Iris wouldn’t let herself think anything else.

  “No. It’s getting late. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Sissy.”

  Iris gave her sister a kiss on her forehead before leaving the room. Vashti’s skin was cool to the touch.

  Calm down, Iris, she told herself.

  Her mind was playing tricks on her, with what she saw … it was kind of scary, being out there alone in a graveyard. Of course she’d think she saw a ghost in the trees.

  An entire graveyard. Right in their neighborhood. They could focus in on it for their project and find out why it was back there, unmarked. Why all those graves were back there. Forgotten about. She shivered as she thought of herself out there, standing on top of them.

  She hastily changed into a pair of pajama pants with snowflakes whirling all around them, and an old step team shirt. She turned on her night-light and pulled the covers high over her head.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  The tree branches played their eerie song on her window, and Iris squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the spirits of the snow wouldn’t come for her tonight in her dreams.

  “There were at least five grave markers out there!” Iris whispered-shouted. She’d been trying to tell Daniel this story all day, but they had a test in social studies, and by the time they got their lunch in the cafeteria, the period was basically over.

  Now it was the end of the school day and they were in the school library, doing research for their project and recapping the strange events from the night before.

  “Daniel, we’re walking distance from a graveyard that we didn’t even know existed!”

  “That’s what our project is for,” Daniel said, logging on to the school computer, pushing up his glasses. “We can find out why those graves are abandoned back there, but in the safety of the library.”

  Iris wanted to know why there was a graveyard in her neighborhood that no one knew about, eerie nightmares aside. She wanted to know why all those people had been forgotten about.

  She went to the Web browser and typed in one of the few legible names on any of the graves back there.

  Avery Moore, Easaw, NC.

  Nothing popped up.

  She tried again, including the date and their neighborhood.

  Still nothing.

  It was like there was no trace of this girl. But she knew she’d lived. Along with all those other people who had graves.

  Maybe the spirits of the snow killed her.

  Maybe the spirits killed them all.

  She’d searched for spirits of the snow in vain, knowing that Suga’s legend wouldn’t come up. Although there were tales of winter spirits in different cultures, she didn’t find one that fit Suga’s tale. She didn’t tell Daniel, knowing he would tell her “I told you so.”

  She searched again, typing in the name of their neighborhood and graves. The only thing that came up that time was Sampson’s Perpetual Care, where Daniel’s father was buried.

  “Daniel,” Iris said. “Why is there no mention of that grave—or any grave in our neighborhood—online? Look—that Avery girl’s name is not even coming up!”

  “Hmm.” Daniel shrugged. “That could be a good thing to talk about in our slideshow for the project.”

  She tried again, searching abandoned graveyards in Easaw, NC.

  After scrolling through a few websites, she found a very old, very plain website with a gray background and a black-and-white picture of woods with a single headstone peeking through the trees.

  Iris shivered. It wasn’t their neighborhood, but this graveyard looked similar.

  There are many reasons for unmarked or abandoned graveyards, the website stated, one of the most common being segregation, which occurred even after death. Some segregation occurred in the form of a single, divided cemetery—when this was the case, there were two sets of caretakers to look after their respective races, with Whites usually getting the more attractive plots. There was also the practice of having completely separate cemeteries. As communities changed, especially through the Great Migration when African Americans fled the Jim Crow South to move to Northern cities, the cemeteries solely for African Americans or the African American spaces in cemeteries were left untended, overgrown, and eventually forgotten.

  Iris was immediately transported back to a conversation her mom once had with Mrs. Stone, about how the neighborhood they lived in was once predominately Black.

  It clicked.

  No wonder she felt so strange in that graveyard. No wonder the trees swayed, begging for her attention. They were trying to be noticed. Trying to draw attention to the forgotten lives back there.

  The thought made the hair on her neck stand up. She was upset about being forgotten by the principal, but she couldn’t even imagine being forgotten in a way like this. That was almost scarier than being in the dark.

  “Daniel!” she whisper-shouted again. “This graveyard probably wasn’t just abandoned. It was probably segregated, too. Think about it.” She passed him her tablet.

  Daniel skimmed the page and then looked at Iris, deep thought and sorrow washing over his face.

  “You’re probably right. That’s so sad.”

  “But we can help them!” Iris’s thoughts were turning a mile a minute. “With our project, we can bring recognition to the people buried there! Instead of talking about graves, we can focus our project on segregated graveyards!”

  They could have the best project and do something good at the same time. Iris’s stomach did flips. She knew there was a reason she went back.

  “Hey,” Iris said thoughtfully, “do you think our parents know anything about this?”

  “Maybe,” Daniel said. “But how can we ask them about this graveyard without revealing that we snuck out? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  Iris tapped her finger on her chin.

  “I’ll take the heat.”

  “Iris—”

  “Come on, it’s okay. It’s just more research, remember? And you’ll owe me one.”

  Daniel sighed at his friend, but gave her a small smile that Iris returned shakily. They were one step closer to having a great p
roject and figuring out what was up with that graveyard, but Iris couldn’t shake that feeling of dread that followed her to school that morning.

  “What was the Avery girl’s last name again? Moore?” Daniel typed and frowned. “Avery Moore … Easaw … Hmm. Her name didn’t pop up.”

  “I know. Hey, maybe there was some more information about her on her grave. I took a picture of it last night.”

  Iris pulled out her tablet and scrolled to the pictures she took last night in the clearing.

  She dropped it with a loud clunk, and an even louder gasp.

  “Do you see that? What is that?”

  She pointed to the picture of Avery Moore’s grave, the snow angel sparkling all around it. In the back corner of the picture, near the darkest part of the woods, was a dark, smudgy shadow.

  To Iris, it looked like a girl.

  Her senses were on edge.

  She heard every page turn, every door close, every footstep in the library.

  She shivered, watching Daniel with wide eyes as he looked at the picture.

  He paused while taking a pencil out of his book bag. He licked his finger and tried to wipe the smudge off, like it was a smear on the glass.

  It didn’t budge.

  “Daniel! I thought it was my imagination, but I think I saw a little girl out there. The same one I dreamed about. That’s probably her! What if she was real?”

  The thought chilled her, the hairs on her arms standing straight up. She rubbed them, her own fingers feeling foreign and cold.

  “If it was the same girl you dreamed about, you’re probably imagining her again. Or what if it was a real person, watching you?”

  It reminded Iris of what Suga once told them. “Sometimes, the living is more scary than the dead.”

  She looked at the picture one more time, trying to make out what that smudge was.

  “There’s something going on back there, Daniel.”

  They had to dig deeper.

  “Mama.”

  Iris was trying to get her attention but she was still talking to Vashti. She’d come home from school on Friday to find her little sister in an almost identical hairstyle to hers, and she wasn’t happy about it.

  They were at the table, eating a big dinner of lasagna, garlic bread, and salad that Daddy made. Daniel and his mom came this time, too, but Suga had stayed home, as there was fresh snow on the ground. Iris couldn’t blame her. She felt like the witch that rode her back, the spirits of the snow, the girl with black holes for eyes, and the dead buried across the street were all among them tonight. The feeling of dread was so strong, dark, and solid behind her, she could practically touch it. Like something would jump out and grab her at any second.