The Forgotten Girl

by India Hill Brown

  Although Mr. Hammond had encouraged Iris to go to the Cleanup Club meeting, she couldn’t help but feel annoyed. She could’ve sworn she’d read in the school newspaper that they picked a day and time for the Cleanup Club that made it easy for any student to attend. She felt they assumed the step team girls would never want to participate, or that they were just forgotten about when the faculty checked on any clubs or teams that may overlap time wise. Plus, with Heather there and Chelsea as the president, they probably had everyone else pressured into voting for their project. How would Iris get enough votes to clean up the old cemetery? And fixing the perfectly good basketball court, of all things? That did nothing for anyone! At least cleaning up the cemetery would help people’s loved ones get the respect and recognition they deserved. Iris’s thoughts spiraled. She was cranky. She hadn’t had good sleep in days, waking up every few hours with a new nightmare, thinking that Avery was in her room.

  “Iris!”

  Iris jumped, making the remaining students in the classroom laugh.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “You’re going to be late for your next class.”

  Sure enough, Iris looked around her English class and realized that, besides the few students who laughed at her while picking up their books and walking out of class, the room was empty. The first bell was still ringing.

  “Oh—sorry, Mrs. Lawson. I was just thinking about something.”

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Lawson looked at Iris with concern. Iris flashed her a smile.

  “Yes. I was just daydreaming. Have a good day, Mrs. Lawson!” she added for good measure.

  “You, too, Iris.” She went back to gathering her own papers, and Iris sighed with relief.

  Iris walked out of class into the busy hallway. All around her students were chatting, laughing, pretending to play basketball with balled-up pieces of paper. Iris blocked everything out, wandering through the hallway like she was a ghost herself.

  “Iris!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Lawson! I—”

  But Iris looked right into the eyes of Kayla.

  “Mrs. Lawson? Girl, are you okay?”

  Iris nodded a little too fast. Act normal, Iris.

  “My bad, girl. I’m just thinking about a test. What’s up?”

  “I was asking are you ready for step practice after school?”

  Kayla looked at Iris expectantly. Kayla was a slow learner when it came to stepping, but when she finally caught on and stepped with confidence, she was really good.

  “Oh yeah. I have a new combination I want to try out today. I think it’ll work really well.”

  Kayla nodded excitedly. “Okay, cool! And I could come to your house sometime to practice if I need to, right?”

  “Of course, Kayla.”

  “Great. See you at practice!” Kayla whipped around, her fluffy curls bouncing behind her.

  Iris walked through the crowd, clutching her books. She needed to focus. The dead couldn’t take over her life.

  “I’ll see you after the meeting,” Daniel said as they put their books back in their lockers. Daniel had agreed to check out the meeting and speak on behalf of their project.

  “Okay. Let me know how it goes!”

  “I will.” Daniel walked away, his huge book bag taking over his skinny frame. Iris took a deep breath and exhaled, letting go of all her stresses of this school day.

  Even though she was left out of the Young Captains ceremony and couldn’t go to the Cleanup Club meeting, and girls like Heather tried to belittle step, she knew all that would be behind her once she got there.

  It was time for step practice, one of Iris’s favorite things in the world.

  Because once she got there, all that would matter was the way her beads clanked against one another with every head turn, the way their stomps echoed through the gym, the precision of each straight arm, switching from left to right, the way they’d slap their thighs so many times in a row, they’d have red handprints on them when they got home. The way the team moved from spot to spot with each transition. The satisfaction of nailing the routine. She loved step. And no one, not Heather or even Avery, was going to take that away from her.

  Iris went into the bathroom and changed into sneakers, sweatpants, and her blue-and-yellow step team shirt, and pulled her braids back into a beaded ponytail. She looked around for other girls to walk to practice with but didn’t see any of them. Maybe it was for the better. As the captain, she liked to be the first one to arrive.

  She waited for the other girls to show up, going over one of their most complicated steps in her head.

  “Hey!”

  Iris almost jumped out of her skin.

  She turned around to see Naomi, one of the other girls on the step team. Naomi was really good, one of the best. When Iris wasn’t leading the more popular steps, she called on Naomi to do it.

  “You okay?” Naomi said, peering at Iris. “You look sick.”

  “Hey, girl,” Iris said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just … cold.”

  The word was thick on her tongue.

  “Oh. Well, we’ll warm up soon enough, right?” Naomi said, getting on the floor to stretch.

  “Yup. That’s right.”

  Pretty soon, the other girls showed up, dressed out and ready for practice. Iris sighed, letting go of her uneasiness.

  “I have a new combination I’m working on for us,” Iris said, pacing in front of the girls. Their advisor was sitting in the back of the gym, half watching, half working on paperwork. She was nice enough, but quiet, and didn’t really know a lot about the step team. “Let’s start off with the Dazed step, and afterward, go into the No One Can Step Like Us transition. I think those flow really well together. Naomi’s going to start off Dazed, and I’m going to lead the transition step.”

  The girls murmured, saying this new arrangement sounded like a good idea.

  Iris smiled.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” she said, lining up behind Naomi.

  “Naomi? On your count.”

  Naomi cleared her throat. “Five … six … seven … eight!”

  Stomp … stomp … clap … stomp … clap …

  Naomi started the step off slowly, her arms windmilling with each move.

  Left … right … left … right …

  Her head turned from side to side, every movement as slow as molasses.

  Then she stopped. She stood in place.

  “Dazed!” she called out.

  From there, all the girls joined in, doing exactly what Naomi did, but faster, all the stomps, claps, and arm and head motions coming together to make one cohesive beat. Iris named this step Dazed because that’s how she felt when she was done doing it: dizzy from the head swinging and dazed from the crowd cheering her on.

  The step ended, and the girls stood in place, their arms tight by their sides. They were about to transition into a new formation, and it was Iris’s turned to lead.

  “There’s no use of crying, no reason to fuss!” Iris chanted, doing a step for each syllable.

  “No other step team can step like us!

  “We came, to step, and that’s what we’ll do!

  “We are the Nelson’s Pond girls wearing yellow and blue!”

  The other girls repeated the chant, joining in the step, but this time they moved to a new transition—instead of four straight lines, they became a diamond, where Iris would be the tip.

  “Kayla! Straighten out that arm!” Iris called out.

  They did this chant four times until the diamond shape was formed. When they all took the final step together, it boomed, echoing through the gym.

  Silence, then—

  “Iris! That was amazing. That goes together way better than the other transition!” Jeanie, another girl on the step team, said.

  “Thanks,” Iris said, smiling.

  “You’re so good at this. You’re so creative! How do you make up these steps?”

  “I come up with the beat first,” Iris explained.
“What I want it to sound like … then I make up the movements to go with it.”

  “You have a real talent for this, Iris!” Jeanie said. “You’re such a great captain.”

  The other girls nodded and patted Iris on the back, and despite herself, Iris felt good. Of course she still felt bad about not being invited to the Young Captains Award Ceremony, but her teammates recognized her, and that still meant something.

  “We’re all talented,” she said.

  Kayla looked down and shuffled her feet.

  “All of us,” Iris repeated. “We all have different strengths. I couldn’t have a team by myself.”

  The girls continued step practice, laughing, stepping, helping one another.

  When practice ended, Iris felt lighter and warmer than she had in a while. She went over to discuss some things with her advisor while the other girls headed to the locker room.

  By the time Iris finished and walked outside, all the other girls had already been picked up or had headed home. Iris was alone again.

  A gust of wind blew hard, making her stumble, almost as though someone had pushed her from behind. Iris shivered in the cold air. The feeling of dread crept back in.

  Iris and Daniel had agreed to meet up after Iris’s practice and walk home together, so she could hear about the meeting immediately. The more Daniel talked about the Cleanup Club meeting, the angrier Iris got.

  “I gave them some facts about the segregated cemetery situation in North Carolina and Easaw, and told them that we believed we found one within walking distance to the school,” Daniel said as they walked across campus. “Heather was trying to challenge me with everything I said—even when Chelsea was trying to be receptive. She kept talking about how she’s already talked to volunteers about fixing up the basketball court, and how excited they already were … to me, it sounds like she’s pushing for it to be less about fixing up the court, and more about planting flowers, which makes no sense really, because it’s all concrete! Planting flowers is fine, but planting flowers around the outskirts of a basketball court for this purpose seems like a waste of people’s time to me. Then, she took a dig at the court itself, saying that if she had her way, she’d just do away with it altogether.”

  Iris stopped in her tracks, noting the edge in Daniel’s voice. “She said what?”

  Daniel nodded. “I don’t think it’s a lost cause, though. I think Heather is threatened by the idea that her project might not get voted on, because she only tried to talk down on the cemetery cleanup anytime someone else had something good to say about it. Even Mr. Hammond said that the historical context of it was really intriguing. He said he can’t wait to see our project.”

  The historical context …

  If Mr. Hammond was intrigued by that part, they needed more historical context. He was the advisor—maybe he could sway the decision. It wasn’t just about her beating Heather. It was about Avery, and all the other people laid to rest there.

  And about having the best project.

  Iris grabbed Daniel’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go back to the library.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, just for a little while! We have some more research to do on the project.”

  They turned back around in the direction of the school, a strong gust of wind guiding them there.

  Iris and Daniel walked to the nonfiction section of the school library.

  “If Mr. Hammond was moved by the historical context of the cemetery, then let’s give it to him,” Iris said, marching through the library, Daniel by her side. They needed something else to drive their point home and make this project the best it could be. It needed to be voted on.

  “Suga said even the town library was segregated before,” Daniel said, running his hands down the spines of the worn, older books.

  Iris paused, her eyes suddenly wide. “This school was probably segregated at one point! When did it open?”

  Maybe reminding students that their own school had been segregated would make them care about the people still segregated in their graves.

  “I can’t remember, but we can easily find out,” Daniel said, stopping at one book and pulling it straight out: The History of Nelson’s Pond Middle. It was a thin book. Iris noticed it was published by The Old North Publishing, a local publishing company. She remembered the name because another student was doing their project about it. “Look!” Daniel continued. “We can find out when this school opened, and if segregation was still legal here back then.”

  “Good idea,” Iris said. The two of them sat down and flipped through pages, skimming past lots of blurry black-and-white images of Nelson’s Pond on the wooded land before the school was built. She thought of the photo of Suga, posing in front of her house near the pond. She didn’t recall Suga ever saying she attended Nelson’s Pond Middle. Maybe it really was segregated back then.

  With each page flip, there was more history about Nelson’s Pond. Iris was getting impatient. The historical context of the pond had nothing to do with the cemetery she wanted the Cleanup Club to restore.

  They turned the page again.

  Iris saw five White men in suits, holding shovels and wearing hard hats. According to the caption, one of them was named George Nelson.

  “This is when they broke ground for the school,” Iris whispered, turning another page.

  Next there was a picture of the first class of students to graduate from Nelson’s Pond Middle, in 1950.

  “I guess the school wasn’t integrated at this point,” Daniel said, looking over the smiling White faces and turning the page.

  “Wait,” Iris said, grabbing his arm. “Look!”

  There was a small section on the bottom left-hand page, talking about the desegregation of Nelson’s Pond Middle in 1955.

  Daniel ran his fingers over the small, grainy picture.

  There were nine Black children sitting in chairs, some smiling, some solemn, all clutching their books.

  Iris suddenly felt sad, thinking about what they must’ve gone through trying to fit in. How they probably wanted to cry, or be upset, but had to keep going, learning.

  She looked closer, her eyes scanning the bottom of the page. Wanting to know more.

  Then she screamed and jumped back out of her seat, ignoring the librarian’s plea to be quiet as she looked at the face, frozen in time, the same face that visited her in her dreams. There, in the photo, was a young girl with two pigtails and round eyes. Only here, they were sparkling, not those dark eye sockets that seemed to suck the light from a room.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Daniel asked.

  She pointed at the fourth name.

  Avery Moore.

  This was no dream, no nightmare. Avery Moore’s spirit was really visiting her.

  “Daniel!” she exclaimed, the librarian shushing her again. “This is the exact face I’ve been dreaming about! I had never seen—never even heard of Avery Moore until we saw that grave! How could I be dreaming about her? I think—I think she’s really visiting me!”

  Iris was shaking. There was an actual ghost coming into her room at night. No wonder her dreams felt different than all the other ones. They weren’t dreams.

  Daniel had a funny look on his face as he stared at Iris.

  “Iris,” Daniel said cautiously. “You had to have seen her somewhere before, maybe in one of our history books. You know, I read that you can’t dream of a face you’ve never seen, it’s always a face you’ve seen before, even if it was a stranger’s that you’ve only seen one time …”

  “It’s not a dream, Daniel,” Iris said, slightly irritated. Wasn’t he listening? “She’s actually visiting me. That explains why there was a smudge on that picture I took. That was her. Why my room always feels so cold when I see her. Why my windows are always open the next morning. She’s real and … and …”

  She trailed off, her mind spinning. Why was the ghost of Avery Moore visiting Iris? What did she want?

  “Iris Rose, I only want
to be your friend,” the spirit said. “Remember me.”

  Remember her.

  Avery Moore was one of the first students to desegregate Nelson’s Pond Middle.

  Why hadn’t she heard about her before? In the history books, like Daniel said? She would’ve remembered that.

  A girl who did a great thing, who was maybe killed by the spirits of the snow, was buried in an abandoned, segregated graveyard in her neighborhood? Why wasn’t there anything in the school, on the Hall of Fame wall, talking about Avery or the other eight kids?

  This was happening for a reason. She’d never seen Avery before, but now both images of her, alive and dead, were stained in her mind.

  If there was no trace of Avery even going to this school when she was one of the nine who desegregated it, the same thing was on track to happen to Iris, her step team, her project. She wouldn’t let that happen.

  She wouldn’t let this project go to the wayside. She wouldn’t let the people in this school forget anyone else.

  Avery wanted to be remembered, just like Iris. They’d remember Avery with their project, and she’d probably go away.

  Right?

  Iris looked up to find Daniel staring at her for a long while, a sad expression on his face.

  “What?” Iris asked. She knew Daniel probably didn’t believe her. This was hard to believe herself.

  He just shook his head. “Nothing. This information about Avery desegregating the school is just the historical context our project needs.” He scribbled down notes. “She deserves a better grave.”

  Iris and Daniel worked as long as they could before the librarian kicked them out. Daniel was upset, too, especially when he thought about his own father. “Someone’s dad is buried in that graveyard,” Daniel had said as they looked through the archives of old newspapers in the library. “Can you imagine? Not knowing where your dad was buried?”

  In most articles, the students who desegregated Nelson’s Pond Middle weren’t mentioned by name. They were referred to as “colored” or “the Nelson Nine.” Once Iris and Daniel found that out, they were able to uncover more information about the nine kids who desegregated the school, even if they were only mentioned as a group.