Haint Misbehavin'

by Maureen Hardegree

  She disappeared again, but her laughter rang out, as if she was still standing in front of me. Either I was delusional or this kid was a master ventriloquist.

  “Um, like I said, I’m not playing. Did you hear me, little girl?”

  The girl’s voice rang out from under the row of vines behind me. “You’d best stop calling me little girl. My name’s Amy.”

  Okay. I could handle a lonely kid. Maybe she’d just moved to the neighborhood and hadn’t made any friends her own age, which I was guessing to be around ten.

  I have to admit that little kids aren’t my thing. My idea of hell? Working in the St. Mark’s nursery Sunday mornings.

  “There aren’t any more of you out here, are there?” I asked.

  “Nope. Just me.”

  Amy must have crawled out from her hiding spot when I wasn’t looking because the next thing I knew she was standing in my row. Her gaze dropped to my bare legs; she stared. Okay, so I didn’t have a good base tan yet. It wasn’t a crime.

  “Does your Mama know you’re out here in your bloomers, Heather?”

  Now that gave me the heebie jeebies. I knew I hadn’t told her my name. “What about my shorts?”

  She giggled and turned her face away as if she was embarrassed. So maybe it wasn’t a costume. Maybe she was a Mennonite or something.

  Since the kid already knew my name and could possibly tell on me for being mean, I probably should play with her. On the other hand, if I played with her, her mom might ask me to baby-sit. “I’m too busy to play.”

  “We’re playing. Now.” Amy sounded as miffed as Audrey does when someone leaves two Pringles at the bottom of the canister. I swear I don’t do it on purpose . . . most of the time.

  The little girl balled up her fists like she wanted to hit me, and then, I swear to God, she levitated off the ground. My heart drummed in my chest.

  There had to be a logical explanation for it. I must be having a sunstroke for real. I felt my forehead. My skin was sweaty, but normal, except for that tingle I feel just before I erupt in hives. I backed up to gain a little perspective. Amy followed. I don’t think heatstroke manifestations can do that.

  That left me with three options. I was insane, I was still in bed sleeping, or this Amy girl was playing some kind of cruel trick on me.

  She looked real; she wasn’t all filmy, so she had to be real, right?

  I steeled myself and focused on her arm. Slowly, I extended my pointing finger. My skin cooled, then crawled as my fingertip touched her sleeve, which suddenly lost its substance, yet remained three-dimensional. I poked right through her like she was some hologram, but no hologram was dimensional.

  Oh, my, God. I was crazy. My pulse sped so fast I could barely hear anything else. I stumbled back away from her, dropping the jar of dead beetles.

  If I wasn’t insane? Then this kid who could levitate and turn translucent was magic, or she was dead.

  My legs no longer worked. I was stuck, planted just like the vines that surrounded me. I tried to swallow, tried to remember how to breathe. “What are you?” I managed to croak.

  “I done told you, I’m Amy.”

  She levitated higher—as if I needed any more convincing of her ghostly nature at this point. Her little ankle boots rose nearly a foot off the ground. She came eye to eye with me, only her brown eyes didn’t reflect back my image.

  The elastic in the waistband of my underpants started to itch, and then I felt the two metal hooks in my bra and the elastic in the bra band rub against my skin along my rib cage, like it always did when I was nervous. I started scratching the top of my head, then at the bumps rising on my neck.

  The temperature of the air around me turned frosty. I rubbed my itchy arms against the chill. “I’m not sure what you are, Amy. I’m not even sure that I’m awake. For all I know, I could still be in bed, and you’re some bad dream. But just in case I’m wrong, could you please go away?”

  “Nope.”

  I prayed that if she was truly a ghost that she wasn’t like Geneva’s, who according to my aunt, was bent on sticking around. “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “I wanna play Hide and Go Seek.”

  Okay, this had to be a dream. Ghosts in movies don’t play cheesy kids’ games. They wanted to go toward the light or something like that.

  “If you don’t play with me, Heather, you’ll be right sor-ry,” she sang.

  That’s when one of the galvanized wires training the grape vine closest to me pinged and dropped its burden like someone had snapped it with cutters. The whole vine arm with its spurs and large leaves slumped, nearly touching the ground. It was rust, not Amy, because Amy didn’t exist, because I was in bed having a nightmare, because fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to stick me with a whiny kid ghost after years of trying to live down a nickname from preschool that wouldn’t die.

  Finally able to move, I swung around. I was going back to bed where I would wake up on the right side, the side where your sister’s best friend didn’t make fun of you getting your period, the side where people didn’t see ghosts, particularly the little snotty kind who attempt to blackmail you into playing games with them in the backyard.

  Ignore the cool air and the feeling that she’s watching me. Act normal. Pretend she’s not here.

  As I marched and scratched my way to the end of the row and up the side path toward the house, my little haint tagged along after me, making the vines shake in my wake, much like my stomach.

  I crossed the patio and stepped inside the breezeway, then glanced behind me, hoping she wasn’t there, but she was. Amy was focusing on the prominently displayed white board. The screen door banged behind me.

  “What’s this?” Amy asked.

  “Nothing that would interest you. It’s just a little insignificant competition between me and my sisters.”

  The grind and squeak of the garage door gears activating jerked my attention away from Amy.

  Audrey stuck her head out the back door. “Dad’s home!”

  Yah. Despite the scratch attack in full throttle, I managed to roll my eyes. “Figured that one out myself.”

  She slammed the door, and I turned toward Amy. “Now would be a really good time for you to leave.”

  Amy didn’t take the hint. Instead, she gazed at the felt eraser resting in the white board’s tray until it hovered several inches in the air.

  “Don’t you dare,” I hissed, attempting my best babysitter-is-going-to-put-you-in-time-out tone. I’m sure I didn’t seem all that threatening with the whole hive situation going on.

  The door to Dad’s car slammed shut.

  Air rushed along the front of my body as Amy moved forward, toward me. Then a chilly tingle started at the surface of my already overly stimulated skin and burrowed into my gut. My body felt like an itchy, too-tight pair of jeans. I couldn’t see Amy.

  Without me really wanting it to, my hand stopped scratching. I pushed the hair out of my eyes. Oh, my, God. It was like someone else was in charge of my body. The little brat was inside me, controlling me.

  I needed lots of Benadryl and an exorcist, and not necessarily in that order. She forced my hand to pluck the eraser from the air. In a flurry of felt-covered Styrofoam I couldn’t control, I wiped off Claire’s, Audrey’s, and my counts.

  I was close to hyperventilating as I struggled to regain control of my body. To ensure that Audrey didn’t have another reason to hate me, I picked up the green marker and popped the cap, which landed somewhere under one of the rocking chairs. I remembered what Audrey and Claire had posted. No one would ever know the counts had been erased. But when the marker squeaked as Amy forced my hand to write “milion” under my name, I knew she hadn’t left.

  “Two l’s, Einstein,” I snapped. “Get out of me!”

  She whooshed out at the same moment Dad opened the door from the garage to the breezeway. I dropped the marker, which landed softly on the outdoor carpet at my feet.

  Dad frowned at the board that no longer refl
ected a week’s worth of my sisters’ tallies, then glanced pointedly at the green marker, then at my face, which I suspected would soon pop with hives. He was doing the whole waiting thing. I hate when he does that. He says nothing, and I have to guess what he wants me to say, sort of like charades, only not any fun.

  I cut to the chase. “I didn’t do it.”

  His hazel eyes widened behind the small oval lenses of his glasses. “So who did? Roquefort? Or your imaginary friend?”

  Imaginary friend. I stopped itching and started sweating as I suddenly remembered my imaginary friend from childhood. I’d been four years old, and I’d called her Amy.

  Chapter Two

  Since yesterday’s white board incident, I hadn’t seen Amy . . . exactly. I felt her presence, though, like a constant breeze. Cold and frazzled, I jumped at every vibration, anticipating our next interaction. Audrey, of course, viewed my sweatshirt-wearing in the middle of summer as further proof of my unworthiness, which didn’t really help my goal of getting her to like me.

  Hazy memories of playing with Amy in the plastic turtle sandbox we used to have in the backyard returned to me, too. We’d have these swinging contests to see who could go highest and fastest. And when we’d played Hide and Seek, she’d always hole up in the Magnolia tree.

  I had questions I needed answered—like why me? Why now?

  My knowledge of movies featuring ghosts didn’t help me calm down either. From what I could see, ghosts rarely did anything nice, unless their name was Casper or they were married to some woman who cries really pretty.

  Thanks to my worries turning into nightmares, I woke up so early the next morning the robins were still digging for worms. Having nothing better to do, I headed out to the killing fields, not that the iPod downloads were all that important to me anymore. I had worse problems than losing some competition to my sisters.

  After I’d scraped I don’t know how many beetles to their soapy deaths, and couldn’t get the least bit excited about it, I turned the corner of the row I was working on and waded into a pool of frigid air. My skin chilled in a rising wave from the nail beds under my Spicy Tomato toenails, up over my drawstring pajama pants, past my torso and shoulders to the crown of my head. I shivered and glanced up at my little ghost nemesis floating above the vines and providing me with a clear view of old-fashioned bloomers.

  Maybe I should try turning the tables, show her I wasn’t afraid, even though I was. “I see London, I see France, I see Amy’s underpants.”

  She blushed, which kind of surprised me. I didn’t know ghosts could. Then she grabbed at her skirts and drifted down to ground level. “Are you gonna play with me?”

  “Depends.” I hadn’t played Hide and Seek in years, and I didn’t want to do so now with someone who had the unfair advantage of being able to completely disappear. Then again, I didn’t really want to deal with any more of her tricks, either. “Don’t you have anyone else you can ask?”

  Back and forth around her pinky, Amy twirled a strand of wheat-colored hair that had escaped her braid. “I asked you.”

  Claire liked kids and the fact that Aunt Geneva had a ghost friend. Maybe, with a little encouragement, Amy’d glom onto her. But what kind of sister would I be if I palmed the ghost off on the only sister I got along with? Easy answer—the Audrey kind.

  “So if I play games with you, that’s somehow going to help?” By help, I meant move her toward the light, but I suspected getting her to hit the highway to heaven couldn’t be as easy as playing a game—especially if Aunt Geneva’s ghost had been hanging around for years.

  Oh, God. What if I could see Aunt Gen’s ghost now? What if she could see Amy? The cereal I’d had for breakfast rose in my throat.

  Amy shrugged. “Maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t.”

  The vines closest to her trembled, disturbing several of the beetles. They flicked their iridescent wings and moved further down the row.

  “If you tell me exactly what I’m supposed to do to help you and why it has to be me, I’ll do it. I swear.”

  Carefully avoiding my gaze, Amy shrugged a second time. She knew. The little stinker just wasn’t telling.

  “Fine. Can you at least give me an inkling why you’re all of a sudden showing yourself to me now. I mean, again.”

  “Nope.”

  It had be related to my hypersensitivity and getting my period, which was the only thing of significance—other than seeing Amy—that had happened yesterday. And, of course, I must have inherited the family ghost gene.

  Amy flitted up and down the row a few times, then returned to where I stood. She stilled and hovered right in front of me, like one of the hummingbirds that come to Mom’s feeder. “Let’s play.”

  “What if I don’t want to play?” I asked, bracing myself for her answer. Yes, I was provoking her, but I had to know what I was up against. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I imagined.

  She kicked the hard mound of dirt near my feet. Clay chunks and a fine rusty dust rose briefly, then showered down on my feet and flip-flops. “If you don’t play, you get into a heap of trouble like you did yesterday.”

  My cereal inched even higher up my esophagus.

  Her wheat-colored braids swung as she cocked her head to the side. “How come you didn’t have to pick a switch? When I did something wrong, my mama’d send me outside to pick a switch from the privet hedge. She’d nettle my calves but good.”

  The occasional spanking and kneeling in the corner I’d experienced didn’t seem all that harsh compared to switching. “Parents do other stuff today, like take away your life-line to the outside world.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’d rather inflict mental and social damage . . . just . . . never mind.”

  I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of some woman in a long skirt slapping at Amy’s legs with a long-whip-like twig. She must have had a horrible childhood. I wondered if that was why she was still here, why she wanted to play.

  And if I played with her enough, she’d move on, right? She’d stopped being my imaginary friend at some point, so maybe the playing had worked but only temporarily. I wanted a permanent solution. Maybe I could figure out how to make her go away if I knew how she’d died.

  “I’m beginning to remember more about how much fun we had when we played before,” I said, “but I can’t exactly recall what it was that . . . brought you to your current state. Will you tell me?”

  “Nope. It ain’t none of your beeswax.”

  Um, no, it really was my business. After all, she was haunting me, making my less than stellar life even more complicated. I fully admit to being a tad selfish. I squeezed the grooved glass neck of my jar that had also cooled in Amy’s presence.

  She flickered in and out like the higher cable channels when there’s a storm. “I ain’t telling you another thing ‘til we play Hide and Go Seek.”

  Wishing there was some other way to get her to leave, I stalled, plunking a few more beetles into the cool Mason jar. “So is this how it works? I play with you, and you go away?”

  “I done told you, I’m done talking.”

  “Yeah, but here’s my problem. I don’t want to waste my time. I need to know what I get for playing.”

  “A considerable amount of fun.” She giggled, then disappeared completely.

  The air around me heated back to a normal late May morning temperature—somewhere in the upper seventies.

  “Hey!” I yelled. I hadn’t agreed to play.

  “Hey, yourself,” Claire said, her flip-flops slapping the flagstone on the patio. I hadn’t heard the door open.

  My stomach just about fell out of my butt. The stupid tag I’d forgotten to cut in the back of my new shirt scraped across my warming, rapidly hypersensitizing skin. I gulped air back into my lungs. That was close. Claire could have caught me talking to Amy. I tried not to think about that stupid tag scratching my tender flesh. I tried not to think about Amy lurking close by and listening.

  “So, do you
want to go to the pool today?” Claire asked. “Audrey’s working and she said she’d give us her snack bar discount.”

  “I doubt Audrey said ‘us.’ She probably said she’d give it to you.”

  “Same thing,” Claire said.

  “I don’t think so.” The last thing I needed was my little invisible friend accompanying me to the pool. The potential for disaster was colossal. And if I embarrassed Audrey while she was at work, she wouldn’t forgive me until she was in her thirties or forties.

  “I can’t believe you don’t want to go. Drew’s working today. Katie said Drew’s buzz cut is beyond cute. He looks even better than before, if you can imagine that.”

  I could imagine it. Not that I’m obsessed or anything. I do have this recurring daydream, though, where I walk through the gate and onto the pool deck and find Drew skimming pine straw and dead horseflies off the water’s surface, and he drops the skimmer, lowers his mirrored shades, and stares at me with those polar blue eyes that turn my skin to gooseflesh. Pretending I haven’t noticed him, I unzip my cover up, revealing honest-to-God, luscious breasts, displayed to great advantage by the gold lamé triangles of that string bikini Mom said was too old for me, which really meant too sexy.

  Trouble is, I only have lust-worthy breasts in my Drewdreams. Mine are closer to cherry tomatoes, but now that my hormones were kicking in (Yay, me!), I had high hopes they’d grow to prize-winning, beefsteak size. Unfortunately, I had bigger worries than my bra size today.

  The air to my left cooled. Amy reappeared. “Who is Drew? What’s this pool?”

  Claire didn’t seem to hear or see Amy. Roquefort could. The rest of the family? I couldn’t wait to find out.

  “Why don’t you start in the back rows, Claire, and we’ll meet in the middle?” I suggested. Once she was far enough away, I could explain to Amy that neither one of us were going to the pool.