Sure, I debated for about three seconds in the sweltering heat, then nodded. I could take the abuse for five minutes. Maybe it would appease Karen enough to lower her threat to elevated. Besides it was so hot, it took most of my energy to breathe. If I didn’t have to walk the rest of the way home, I wasn’t.
An SUV with dark tinted windows pulled up behind the bug, but couldn’t go around it with steady traffic passing in the oncoming lane.
“Hurry up!” Audrey shouted over the putt-putt of the bug.
Vanessa scooted over, and I tried to get in, but Karen drove forward, then stopped.
Audrey yelled, “Come on, Heather, you’re blocking traffic.”
Debating the wisdom of attempting to get in the car a second time and knowing whoever was in that SUV behind us was watching, I walked forward. Please, whoever you are, do not spread rumors of my humiliation on FaceBook.
Just as I my left foot touched on the floor mat, the bee-yotch gunned the gas. The bug lurched forward again, then stopped about five feet away. “Come on, Prin-cess!”
The SUV scooted up to where I stood, adjusting my backpack. The window lowered.
“If you fall for that prank again,” Drew’s deep voice called out over the faint strains of Rod Stewart singing some song my mom would like, “you’re not the girl I think you are. Get in.”
Noting a distressed looking Morgan locked into in her purple booster on the bench seat behind Drew, I climbed in and reveled in the fact that Drew Blanton cared. . . about me. My hand shook as I adjusted the air conditioner vent to blow toward my face. “Thanks.”
Yes, I know, not clever or funny. Boring.
Leaving a little rubber on the road, Karen’s bug squealed off toward our house. My heart pounded as I imagined what their faces would look like when Drew dropped me off. But then I realized that with my luck, they wouldn’t see. If I told them, they’d think I was lying.
My joy somewhat deflated, I locked my seatbelt. “Interesting music choice.”
“Squirt likes it,” Drew said.
“And how does she know who Rod Stewart is?” I asked, adding a teasing lilt to my raspy voice. I had all of three minutes to charm Drew. I wasn’t going to waste a second.
“Not me, if that’s what you’re thinking. My mom and Ryan, Morgan’s dad.”
I almost sighed aloud in relief that my hero didn’t have a weakness for aging pop stars who start singing old people’s music.
“Why are those girls being mean to you?” Morgan asked.
“They’re friends of my sister,” I said. “They’re always mean to me.” I knew it didn’t really answer the question, but how did I explain my sister’s warped friends to a five-year-old?
Drew kept his eyes on the road. “Tell me where to turn.”
“Not that Audrey’s friends being poopy bothers me,” I lied.
Drew shook his head. “It bothers you, and they know it. Like I tell the squirt, you gotta ignore it or laugh it off.”
Confirmation that he cared about me. Oh, my, God. I almost stopped breathing. Wait, now. I had to get a hold of myself.
“Are you going to do something silly today?” she asked me.
I looked back at Morgan, who was adjusting her stretchy lavender headband, the lines of her frown much too deep for a little kid.
“You never can tell,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows.
Morgan wasn’t amused by my answer, but Drew smiled. I loved how something I said tickled him. I loved how his hands kept a loose hold on the steering wheel at four and eight o’clock. I loved that he cared how Audrey’s butthead friends treated me. And in a matter of minutes, I would love the expressions that would break on all their faces when I climbed out of the car and Drew leaned over to kiss me. Okay, so the kiss was pure fantasy.
“Take a left. And the next right,” I said, happy just knowing that Drew drove me home. Even if no one saw or believed me.
As Drew pulled into the driveway, the drama was at a fever pitch. I had to hand it to Audrey, she already had Grandma outside wringing her hands and one of my parents on the cell phone from the way she was shouting into her razor.
Wishing his SUV didn’t have dark windows, I got out. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Any time,” he said, and I got goose pimples even though I knew he didn’t really mean it.
“It’s some guy,” Audrey said into her phone, then graced me with a snide smirk. “Some strange guy. Heather got into a car with a stranger.”
“He’s not a stranger. Even you know—”
Grandma hugged me against her soft frame, cutting off my air and therefore my sentence. “Don’t ever scare us like that again.”
“I wasn’t the one scaring you,” I pointed out once I could fill my lungs again.
Drew wisely retreated down the driveway, then drove forward again and lowered the dark tinted window so that his gorgeous face was completely visible. Yay, me!
“Heather,” he said, “You left your backpack. Here.”
Audrey’s face fell. Karen and Vanessa gaped as I took my backpack from the most gorgeous junior at Pecan Hills High. I swear I did not leave it on purpose. But I proudly admit it was a stroke of unconscious genius.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “And be a good girl, so you can get off restriction. I miss seeing you at the pool.”
My heart was near about ready to burst. Drew had conferred his seal of approval on me. It was a wonder Audrey and her friends didn’t bow at my feet. Why weren’t they now bowing and telling me they weren’t worthy?
Audrey snorted. “How much did you pay him to say that?”
Always at the ready to believe the worst of me, Karen and Vanessa laughed, but I could see from the uncertainty in Audrey’s beady brown eyes that she was a little stunned and unsure of her own status now that Drew made it known that he liked me. Yeah, I understood that it was only as a friend . . . probably. But still.
I couldn’t top my brief moment of triumph, so I went inside. I had an important matter to take care of with Amy. I ran up the stairs, and dropped my backpack near a pile of papers teetering on the corner of my desk next to a pocket of cold air that had to be my haint. “I know you’re here. The least you can do is apologize.”
She materialized, pouting, hands hidden under her ghostly cotton pinafore. “I ain’t the one who was being mean.”
“So getting me banned from the library and almost arrested for trying to steal a book from special collections doesn’t require an apology?”
Amy looked through me, chilling me, even more than the air-conditioning spewing from the vent above the desk. My papers slid off their precipice and fluttered down to the floor.
“You do realize that if I don’t go to Jekyll Island, you don’t go. And Aunt Geneva might be able to see you, and then Audrey will know without a doubt that I’m the biggest freak, and she’ll tell everyone because even though people believe it, blood isn’t thicker than water, and I will be the pariah of the freshman class—”
“I could go if’n I wanted to,” she interrupted, in a taunting tone.
“Right. So then why do you hang around me all the time? Why don’t you leave?”
“I don’t want to. Besides leaving is not what true friends do.”
“Are you my true friend?”
“Why else would I keep that boy you don’t like from coming outside to talk to you when you’re making eyes at Drew?”
Okay, I was actually touched. “You did that, for me?”
“Yup.”
“But I . . . you . . . he . . .”
“You’re not making a lick of sense.”
No I wasn’t. What she’d done was pretty nice.
“I’m sorry.” I tried to hug Amy, and probably would have looked pretty stupid or crazy if anyone walked in on me.
She shrugged off my attempt at affection, but she wasn’t going to derail my need for some answers about what had happened at the library. Especially when she just now admitt
ed that she could leave if she wanted to. “What’s so special about that book? Why did you want it?”
“It’s mine.”
“So it’s some book you had as a kid. Who cares if the library has it now? Don’t you want to give someone else the opportunity to read it?”
She stamped her ghostly foot through the shag rug and underlying hardwood. “No! No one has a right to read my private thoughts. I don’t want strangers to know.”
“Okay, I’m officially confused. Private thoughts? What is this book? What will they know?”
Her body wavered like heat over asphalt. “It’s my journal. I don’t want people reading it. I don’t want strangers knowing my family died because of me.”
That’s when some of this haunting business started to make sense. What was keeping Amy here had nothing to do with her wanting to have fun with me. That had been a decoy. She couldn’t go be with her family because she felt guilty.
As with everything else ghost-related, moving her along was going to be more complicated than I’d originally thought. “Listen, Amy, I’m going to help you get back to your family.” Somehow.
“I don’t want to be with them,” she said. “I want to be with you. Even if you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.” I tried patting her ethereal shoulder. I hoped she wouldn’t take this opportunity to cry and moan like she had at the library. “How could I hate my imaginary friend? But you know you can’t stay with me forever.”
Hurt flickered in her. I could hear it like a radio frequency.
“Seriously, Amy. Some day I’ll go to college and have a life outside this neighborhood. When I get really old, I’ll die, too, and I’m planning on going to heaven, not staying here. What will you do then?”
She made the constipated face at me. “See? You do hate me. If you didn’t, you’d say I could come with you. But you don’t think I’m going to heaven. You think I’m going somewhere different.”
Somehow we were no longer on why she felt guilty. “Look, sometimes you do things that embarrass me or get me in trouble, and it makes me mad, but I don’t hate you. And I don’t think you’re going to—”
“Don’t say it!”
“Then again we can’t be sure of where any of us are going.”
“You think I’m bad.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not the one doing the accounting. That’s between you and the Big Guy.” Time to switch tactics. “Don’t you think your family misses you? That they want you with them?”
She kicked at the pile of clean clothes folded in my laundry basket that I hadn’t yet put away like I was supposed to. “Can’t I just be part of your family?”
“How would that work when I’m the only one who can see you? Your family is probably waiting for you. They’ve been waiting an awfully long time.”
“People don’t wait for people they hate.”
“Did your mother or father ever say they hated you?” Now I sounded like Mom, when we were talking about why Audrey and I couldn’t get along.
“No, but how do you know they don’t?”
“Because . . .” Nothing. I had nothing to convince her, just like Mom never had anything to convince me except the statement that we were family and that Audrey loved me in her own way. But I couldn’t let my relationship with the bee-yotch affect my ability to move Amy along.
“See? You can’t think of one.” She folded her arms over her chest and glowered at me. “I’m not never leaving.”
Oh, yes, she was. My problem? I couldn’t get back into the library and that special collections room for at least two weeks. Something in there might prove to Amy her family didn’t hate her. If the library had her diary, maybe they had other Malcolm memorabilia.
A girl, after all, had a right to protect her vacation and the rest of her life. Amy wasn’t going to be a permanent fixture in mine.
Sure, I know this all looks selfish on the surface, but my haint friend would be happier in the long run with her own peeps.
Whether she wanted me to or not, I would prove to Amy that her family still loved her.
Chapter Fourteen
Let me say right now, I do not recommend tramping around the woods at night, trying to find some creepy old cemetery, no matter how close to your house you think it is.
Remember how I’d wanted to help Amy? Well, this was where I wound up. Sure, I’d uncovered a Malcolm family tree on the internet that showed other Malcolms named their daughters Amy, so there wasn’t, like, some huge stigma attached to her name, which in my mind meant that her family didn’t hate her. But no. That didn’t convince her. She repeated that she “wasn’t going.” To her parents and heaven, I assumed.
I couldn’t go either, meaning back to the library yet to access the stuff in special collections.
So I got the brilliant idea to find her gravestone. Back then people sometimes wrote stuff about the people who died on the gravestone. Not like today, where they just give the name and birth and death dates. So I found the cemetery where I was almost 100% sure she was buried. I even showed Dad and told him that I’d stumbled upon the Malcolm family stuff in the special collections room and that I was interested in finding this cemetery that had to be close to our house.
He offered to help me . . . once I was off restriction and had turned my paper in.
I couldn’t wait that long. Especially since I found the old cemetery map that I overlaid on a current one, and, presto, I knew where the cemetery was. Not too far from the house, in some woods, or what people now call green space. It was too tempting not to sneak out. Mom and Dad were sound asleep. They’d never know.
Roquefort pulled me along the road. We didn’t have sidewalks or much of a shoulder, so I came dangerously close to twisting my ankle in some of the divots in the ground that sloped toward the run-off ditch.
I’d calculated that it would take me around forty-five minutes to find the cemetery. I had some of Mom’s newsprint and a hard, waxy Conte crayon to take a rubbing. No cell phone, of course, because they’d hidden it from me until I was off restriction. I put a whistle around my neck in case someone attacked me, and I had some pepper spray I’d taken from Mom’s purse, but I felt pretty safe with Amy and the dog along. I figured a ghost made a great security guard, as long as she wanted to cooperate. I crept along with my flashlight in one hand and Roquefort’s leash in the other. My backpack also held my EpiPen, just in case.
Once we got to the section of undeveloped land where I suspected the cemetery hid, the stupid dog wanted to run off. She kept her nose to the ground, snorffling the scent of some animal. I had a hard time controlling our rate of speed.
Amy sniffed the air. “Smells like rain.”
“Nice try, but I checked the weather forecast,” I said. “Ten percent chance of a pop-up shower, i.e. not gonna happen.”
The deeper into the woods I went, following this old path, the more worried I became, not that I’d admit it to Amy.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Roquefort added to the evening by baying loudly, then dragging me behind her into a mess of briars where she stopped and whined like she was hurt. So I had to reach down to help her out of the briars that stabbed me like hundreds of sharp needles despite my long-sleeved tee. Luckily, the thorns couldn’t penetrate my thick jeans. I added a tick check to things I had to do before going to bed.
Thanks to my trusty flashlight we found the path again.
“Roquefort, you’d best be a good girl,” I said, checking her paws, petting her. I got a wet lick on the cheek. Dog slobber. I guess that meant she was grateful.
She seemed anxious to move along, and I didn’t want to be out here any longer than I had to. We resumed our walk through the mashed leaves and pine straw.
All was fine until I heard a sound like the whoosh of a full garbage bag being tossed above me. I looked up and saw the dark outline of an owl gliding through the pines. Was it only seconds later, a tiny shriek filled the woods only to stop abruptly.
&n
bsp; “Mouse or vole,” Amy said matter-of-factly.
I tried not to shudder or be shocked, but I’m not a big nature girl. To be honest, though, as gross as rodents being carried off by large predatory birds is, I had plenty of other worries tensing me up.
What if the dead people came out of their graves like in that classic Thriller video? What if I gathered more ghosts? And then I had to help, like, four or five of them?
“Do you even know where you’re going?” Amy asked, now just far enough in front of me that every frond she disturbed whipped me in the face.
“Of course I know,” I lied. I mean, I thought this was the right path, but it was dark, and it didn’t look like anyone had used it in a while.
A gust of wind stirred the trees, branches creaked, the thin-trunked pines swayed. Yet another fear gripped me. What if I met up with some serial killer disposing of a body? Roquefort would roll over and ask him to rub her belly. Amy would be happy. I’d join her in the afterworld, and we’d become tag team haunters.
No. I had to think positively. Amy was trying to throw me off. For some reason, she didn’t want me to see that graveyard.
I stopped when we reached what appeared to be a fork in the path. I unzipped my backpack. I flashed the light on my map. No fork. The flashlight flickered like the battery was losing juice.
“Stop it,” I said, certain that Amy was somehow affecting the connection. If I couldn’t see, I’d be in real trouble. It wasn’t like Roquefort was Lassie. And no, I didn’t have any extra batteries. I would have brought some if there’d been any in the battery drawer.
“Go left,” Amy said.
Right side of the path it was. I shoved the map back in the pack and took the route opposite the one Amy picked.
“I said left.”
“Oh, so now, suddenly, you’re all gung-ho about my coming out here?” I asked and kept on my not so merry way. “So much so that you’re going to tell me where the stupid graveyard is? Like I believe you.”
“Suit yourself,” Amy sniffed. “I don’t care if you go the wrong way.”
Haint Misbehavin' Page 16
