The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  The other girl is stout and has shoulder-length hair that she wears swept into combs on either side of her head, and a mole at the corner of her mouth. He paused to listen before continuing. She seems to take great delight in barking out orders to smaller students who have the misfortune of being late.

  The two girls exchanged looks. “Bulldog,” they whispered at exactly the same time. Bulldog’s real name was Maria; she was sixteen and believed that if she enforced the school rules to the letter, she’d have a real shot at being head girl when she was seventeen. Being head girl was the dream of Bulldog’s heart, and she threw herself into her prefectorial duties with all the enthusiasm and ferocity of the animal that was her nickname. Being caught by Bulldog, they knew, would mean a brisk march to the principal’s office and the end of their mission.

  “Can’t let her catch us,” Jing said softly, looking as worried as Suraya felt. Suraya nodded.

  And then Jing’s phone rang.

  The tinny notes of the Imperial March blared through the quiet morning air like a foghorn. “Stop it, quickly, turn it off!” Suraya hissed as Jing’s eyes widened in panic, and she fumbled to get her phone out of her pocket. “Why do you even have it with you?! That’s against school rules!”

  “YOU try telling my mother she can’t contact me during the day! Want me to die is it?”

  The stout one is looking this way, Pink said warningly.

  “Jing, TURN OFF YOUR PHONE.” If a whisper could also be a shout, Suraya’s was a bellow. In her confusion, Jing accidentally pressed the green Answer Call button, and her mother’s shrill voice wafted through the receiver. “Ah girl? Can you hear me? You forgot your lunch lah, you need me to bring to you? Hello? Hello?”

  “Jing!” Suraya’s voice was imploring.

  Jing finally managed to locate the button that powered her phone down and Aunty Soo’s voice fizzled into silence.

  They waited, holding their breath.

  They are conferring, Pink said. They keep looking over here with puzzled expressions. The tall one is saying, “But there is nobody there.”

  A pause. Then Pink: The stout one is walking this way.

  Oh no. “Bulldog’s coming,” Suraya whispered, and Jing shot her a look of pure despair. Suraya cast around desperately, looking for somewhere they could hide. But except for the wrappers and cigarette butts scattered carelessly along the alleyway, there was nowhere to go. Instead, she pressed her body as close to the wall as it would go and prayed for Bulldog to lose interest and go away.

  She is getting closer.

  They could hear her now, walking toward where they stood hidden. Bulldog’s steps were distinctive; she didn’t walk so much as march everywhere she went, the steady thud of her footsteps announcing her arrival well before you actually saw her face.

  “Maria!” It was the high-pitched voice of their discipline teacher Mrs. Ng, laced with a generous dose of irritation. “Maria! What ARE you doing?”

  “I heard something just now, teacher!” Bulldog yelled back. “I just wanted to check it out.”

  “Nonsense! There’s nothing there but rubbish and bad smells.” The teacher’s sniff carried all the way to where the two girls stood, their hearts pounding, Bulldog just steps away. “Get back here at once. Assembly is over, and classes are about to begin.”

  “Okay, teacher.” The reply was grumpy, but Suraya knew Bulldog would do as she was told. The rules were too important to ignore.

  Sure enough, the heavy steps thudded back toward the school, getting fainter and fainter until they couldn’t be heard at all.

  They are gone, Pink said at last. It is safe for you to come out now.

  They changed in a scrub of woodland by the shophouses, fishing their regular clothes out of the bottoms of their backpacks and taking turns, careful not to glance at each other’s bodies for fear of embarrassing each other (and themselves). Jing had turned her phone back on as soon as the coast was clear, and it took Suraya fifteen painful minutes to stop her friend agonizing over how to respond to her mother(“I HUNG UP on her, Sooz, she’s going to KILL ME”) and put on the baju kurung Suraya had brought for her from home and insisted she wear. Jing was fine with this; what she wasn’t fine with was the fact that nothing about it fit the way it was supposed to.

  “These sleeves are too long,” Jing moaned, waving her hands so that the excess material flapped about. “The waist is too big. The sarong is dragging on the floor. I feel like a little kid playing dress-up.”

  “Stop complaining lah.” Suraya reached over and began to fold Jing’s sleeves. “Look, see? We fold this up, then we fold at the waist, it’ll be fine. We want people to believe we’re sisters, right? And anyway, it’s a sign of respect.”

  Jing frowned. “Respect of what? A sign to who?”

  “When we visit a cemetery. It’s a sign of respect to the dead to be dressed modestly. Right, Pink?”

  The ghost shrugged. I do not know. It sounds like a very human rule to me.

  Suraya looked at him. “Really?” It was a thing she’d been told almost her entire life, and it unmoored her slightly to hear that it didn’t really seem to matter to a ghost himself.

  The dead don’t really think about what you’re wearing, he said matter-of-factly. Mostly on account of being dead.

  “Well, whatever the ghost thinks, I don’t have any other clothes, so unless the dead are okay with me being naked, this is what we’re going with,” said Jing.

  The dead definitely do not want that.

  “I’m not sure the living want that either,” said Suraya.

  Jing sighed noisily. “I may not be able to HEAR him, but I KNOW when you two are making fun of me, okay?!”

  They walked to the bus station in town, keeping close to walls and shadows when they could and trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  Inside, the little building was stifling; the walls bore flaking off-white paint, travel posters peeling at the corners, and an aging air-conditioning unit that groaned and belched out stale gusts of air every couple of minutes. Jing had booked their seats online, so all they had to do was find the right counter and collect their tickets. Still, they couldn’t risk getting sloppy, not when they were so close.

  “Let me do the talking,” Suraya said, shifting her backpack so that it sat more evenly on her shoulders. Jing still had the highly excitable look of exactly what she was: a kid skipping school.

  “Okay,” she said agreeably.

  They walked up to the counter, where a bored-looking woman in a pink headscarf tapped away at a game on her phone. Technicolor shapes beeped and booped and erupted in explosions of rainbow pixels as Suraya stood and waited to be acknowledged.

  “Excuse m—”

  “Wait ah.” The woman held up one finger, her eyes still glued to her screen, her thumb moving rapidly.

  “Umm. Okay.” They shuffled their feet awkwardly and waited. Every minute that dragged by, Suraya’s stomach knotted itself even further, until she thought she might throw up from sheer anxiety.

  More beeps and boops and one final explosion later, the woman sighed and put her phone down. “Can I help you?” she asked. The tone of her voice implied that she was doing them a huge favor by asking.

  “Umm, we booked tickets online?”

  “Booking number,” the woman said gruffly. “Please,” she added as an afterthought.

  Jing fished her phone out of her pocket, and Suraya quickly read off the string of letters and numbers as the woman entered them into her computer.

  “Two tickets to Gua Musang, Kelantan?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold on.” More tapping, and then the steady screech of an ancient printer. The woman’s eyes finally flicked over the two of them, and she frowned slightly. “A little young to be traveling so far all by yourselves, aren’t you? No school today?”

  Suraya froze. Beside her, she saw Jing’s arm move. “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” Jing mumbled, and Suraya quickly
kicked her in the shin. “Ow!”

  Suraya fixed her most winning smile on the woman with the pink headscarf. “Our grandmother is sick, and our mom left us with our dad and went to take care of her,” she said, her mind racing. “But now, uh . . . Opah is REALLY sick—like, dying and stuff—and our dad can’t take time off, but she really wants to see us, so . . .” She trailed off.

  Jing let out a theatrical sob. “Poor Opah.”

  The woman had already lost interest. “Whatever. Here you go. Platform 2.” She slid the tickets across the counter and Suraya grabbed them eagerly. “Just be careful. Don’t talk to strangers,” she added as an afterthought.

  “We won’t. Thank you!” They scampered away as quickly as they could, before she could ask them any more questions.

  Not that they needed to worry. She is playing her game again, Pink observed once they were a safe distance away. And she is losing. She is not very good.

  “I wonder if I should have told her the cheat code for that level,” Jing mused at almost exactly the same time. “Because she really sucked at that game, man. Oh well. Come on, let’s go find platform 2 before she thinks of more questions to ask us.”

  In their hurry to get away from the disinterested ticket lady, they didn’t notice the plump figure of a man just a few steps away.

  On a bench in a corner near the dustbins was the pawang, watching them intently.

  Twenty-Seven

  Ghost

  A RANDOM TUESDAY morning, as it turned out, was an excellent day for covert missions involving bus travel, because aside from an impeccably dressed gray-haired couple holding hands and a polished wooden cane each, a young man with headphones that sat atop an impossibly shaggy head of hair, and three girls in headscarves who went to sleep as soon as they settled into their seats, they had the entire bus to themselves.

  According to Jing’s phone, the journey to Gua Musang was supposed to take about four hours. But that was if they didn’t make any stops along the way. And as it turned out, this was a bus that did stop along the way, meandering into little towns and villages to load and offload passengers.

  The girls has been optimistic about this at first, using the time to go over the plan again and again and again. “We’ll go to the graveyard and look for a little kid’s grave,” Jing would say. “And then when we figure out which one is Pink’s, we’ll dig a hole for him there,” Suraya would continue, “so he can rejoin his body.”

  The rest of me. Pink repeated the words softly to himself, remembering the smell of damp earth and decaying flesh, the feel of living things wriggling all around him in the darkness. How to explain this feeling in the pit of his stomach? How to tell the only person he cared for that the rest of him was her, and not some pile of bones deep underground? Not for the first time, Pink cursed the emotions he was trying so hard not to feel. That’s what you get, being around them for so long, he thought dourly. Humanity is contagious.

  But he bit back his bitter thoughts as he watched the two go over and over their plan, and said nothing, not even as he saw their enthusiasm slowly begin to dip lower and lower with each stop the bus made, until it wheezed to a halt so their fearsomely mustached driver could have his lunch.

  “This is going to take forever,” Suraya said in despair. It was already 12:17 p.m.; they’d left at 9:27 when they were supposed to leave at 9:00 a.m.—a delay that was never explained—and they’d been here for an hour already, sitting on a bench spotted with peeling paint and rust spots and waiting for the driver, who was now taking luxuriant drags of a cigarette as he loudly talked politics with other taxi and bus drivers at the warong nearby. He was so relaxed that Pink was seriously considering a well-placed hex that would make his entire mustache fall in clumps into his gently sweating glass of iced lemon tea.

  Their destination was still almost an hour away, and there were countless stops before they got there. Suraya couldn’t stop moving, whether it was a jiggling leg or a tapping finger, and Pink could tell she was just about ready to crawl out of her own skin. He couldn’t blame her—he was starting to feel the same way himself.

  “Relax lah,” Jing said, taking a swig from a water bottle festooned with tiny Wookiees. “We have time.”

  I wouldn’t be so sure if I were her. It is only a matter of time before someone realizes you are gone, Pink pointed out.

  “I doubt anyone will notice when it comes to me,” Suraya muttered darkly. “Pink says people are going to notice we’re gone soon,” she said in answer to Jing’s confused expression.

  “But it’s not like they know where we went,” Jing said reasonably. “And even when we get there, it’s not like we can do anything until, like, really late at night. Imagine what all the old mosque uncles will say if they see two little girls digging up a grave in the middle of the afternoon.”

  Suraya laughed in spite of herself. “You have a point.” She smiled and grabbed Jing’s hand. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  “Me too, Sooz.”

  Pink sat on her shoulder, trying not to mind how easy they were with each other, how comfortable. How right. It was hard to look at them and not ask himself: Were we ever that way together?

  “You okay, Pink?” Suraya nudged him gently with one finger.

  He stirred. I am as well as can be expected, he said.

  “Are you excited to be heading home?” They watched as Jing wiped the sweat from her forehead with a tissue, then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into a nearby trash can. It missed, landing softly on the floor, and she clicked her tongue in irritation as she got up to retrieve it.

  No, Pink said. It was not a home. I just occupied space there.

  “Was my grandmother not nice to you, Pink?”

  He thought about this for a long time, trying to ignore the tears in Suraya’s eyes. This witch was not really very nice to anyone, he said slowly. But I suppose she was nicer to me than to most others, because I was useful to her.

  “She doesn’t sound like someone I would have liked.”

  Most people did not like the witch, and she did not care about being liked. Some people are like that. He nuzzled her cheek softly, trying to take the sting out of his words. Not you. Never you. But some people.

  Across the street, their bus driver stood up, his red plastic stool scraping harshly across the concrete floor of the warong. They watched as he hitched up his pants and bid his fellow drivers goodbye.

  “Back on the road,” Jing said, and they clambered back onto the bus once again.

  It was just after 4:00 p.m. by the time the old blue bus sputtered into the little village just outside Gua Musang, where Suraya got the driver to drop them off on his way to the big town. Jing and Suraya got off and tried to stretch the stiffness from their limbs as the bus roared away. Suraya’s shoulder sported a dark patch where she’d drooled in her sleep, and Pink saw her quickly pull her hair forward to cover it, hoping nobody would notice. Jing definitely hadn’t; she was too busy rubbing her rear, a look of consternation on her face. “It’s totally NUMB, Sooz,” she said, craning her head to look at it. “Like I can’t feel it AT ALL.”

  Please tell your friend to stop yelling about her buttocks, Pink said drily. We are trying to be incognito, after all.

  “Shh, Jing, people are looking.”

  “No they’re not,” Jing shot back, still grimacing, hands on her rear. “There’s too much going on for them to notice.”

  And it was true. The bus had deposited them in the middle of a bustling scene, near a market from which came the overpowering smell of fresh fish guts and wet garbage.

  “I didn’t think it would be . . . like this,” Suraya said. “Where did all these people come from? Where do we go now?” Pink had to hang on for dear life to her shoulder; as Suraya spoke, she dodged a motorcycle that whizzed by, then quickly ducked out of the way as a plump older lady strode past them, one hand holding a wicker basket filled to the brim with spoils from the market, the other hanging on to a little boy no older t
han five or six. He dragged his feet as he walked, kicking at pebbles, his mouth twisted into a mutinous pout. When he saw them watching, he stuck out his tongue and pulled the most grotesque face before his mother pulled him away, scolding as she went.

  Jing fished her phone out of her pocket and plugged the address into a navigation app. “This way,” she said, pointing. There was a bright little ding.

  “Another message from your mom?” Suraya asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Jing’s mother had begun sending more and more texts once 2:00 p.m. passed and she still wasn’t home, and after a while Jing had just stopped responding.

  Where r u

  i bought u McDonalds for lunch

  did u forget to tell me u have extra class or somethg

  The latest one she showed Suraya just said CALL ME in all caps, with a period at the end.

  “She used punctuation.” Jing gulped. “That can’t be good.”

  Suraya laid a comforting hand on her friend’s shoulder. Then, because they had to keep going, they started walking.

  “What. Is. Going. On.”

  Where the witch’s house was supposed to be was no house at all. Instead it was an upmarket café, complete with an extensive menu of specialty coffee written in an overly fancy font on a massive chalkboard, an interior replete with wood and chrome and exposed brick, and hipsters in tight jeans and horn-rimmed glasses.

  Pink turned accusingly to Jing, who shrugged helplessly. Do we have the right address?

  “Do we have the right address, Jing?” Suraya repeated.

  “Ya, of course!” Stung, Jing shoved her own glasses so they sat more firmly on her nose and stuck her phone in Suraya’s face. “See, Sooz? Tell him. No mistakes.”

  “I don’t understand,” Suraya whispered.

  I do, Pink said grimly. It came.

  “It?” Suraya asked. Jing was peering at them curiously now, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Progress. The word tasted bitter on his tongue. The witch had always been worried about progress, modernization slowly leeching away whatever belief people had left in the old ways and the old ghosts, “rendering old beings like you and I utterly useless,” she’d tell him with an indignant sniff.