Girl Meets Ghost

by Lauren Barnholdt

  “My mom’s favorite color was purple,” he says.

  Crap. “Well, I’m thinking of changing my favorite color to green.” This is a complete fabrication. I actually kind of hate green.

  “Green’s good for a favorite color,” Brandon says. He sounds distracted, like he’s not really paying attention. Not that I can blame him. I mean, it’s not the most fascinating topic, and besides, we pretty much had this exact same conversation in the car on the way home from the movie. But it’s not like I can just ask him about the green paper. He would think I was completely and totally out of my mind.

  “Do you have any favorite things that are green?” I ask, in a last-ditch effort to get some info out of him.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe grass? Oh, look, there’s my dad.” He points over to where his dad’s car is parked at the end of the road. “See you later, Kendall.”

  “Bye,” I say weakly. It’s only when he’s gone that I realize he didn’t say he would text me later or anything. And he didn’t try to hold my hand once.

  • • •

  “My life sucks,” I whine an hour later when I’m cozied up in a booth at the Garden Café across from Ellie.

  “Mine too,” Ellie says morosely. “Like, I thought I liked Kyle, but it turns out he’s just a big weirdo.”

  “Why, did he do something else?” I ask. I take a big bite of my cranberry scone and look warily over to the other side of the room, where Mrs. Dunham is sitting at a corner table and sort of . . . glaring at me. I’m pretty afraid of her, if you want to know the truth. She’s looking crankier than usual. Which probably means that she really, really wants me to do something. And something tells me I’d better figure out what it is. And fast.

  “Yes,” Ellie says. “Look.” She shoves her phone across the table at me, and I look at it. A text from Kyle. Sry abt last night, it says. I want to make it up 2 u! another date?

  “What’s wrong with that?” I ask. “At least he’s apologizing.” I check my own phone, but of course there’s still no text from Brandon. Not that I expected one so soon after we left each other, but still. I’m feeling very melancholy. I’m a little closer to getting rid of Danielle, but I still have no idea what Mrs. Dunham wants. It’s so upsetting that I’m wearing my hair plain and down. And I never wear it plain and down.

  “I don’t know,” Ellie says. She frowns into her apple walnut salad.

  “Ohmigod,” I say, realizing now what this is about. “You like him! You, like, really like him.”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Ellie,” I say, “you’ve had a crush on him for more than two days. That means you really, really like him. You like him like him.”

  “That’s way too many ‘likes’ to make sense.” But she blushes, letting me know that I’m right. “Anyway,” she says, “I do think you’re right that I’m being way too hard on him.” She takes a sip of her boysenberry iced tea. “And you’re also right that it wasn’t that nice of me to say that he looked a mess.”

  “No,” I agree, “it wasn’t.”

  “So, what’s going on with you?” she asks.

  “Nothing.” I fill her in on what happened today, as much as I can without revealing the stuff about Daniella and Mrs. Dunham. Not for the first time, I think about what would happen if I just told Ellie about seeing ghosts. But I know it’s too big of a risk. I’d be totally heartbroken if it messed up our friendship.

  “Don’t worry so much,” she says. “Brandon likes you. And if he can’t see how amazing you are, then he’s not the guy for you.”

  I rip off another piece of scone. “I just wish this whole liking-boys thing wasn’t so complicated. Remember how easy it used to be when we didn’t ever go out on dates?”

  “Yes.” Ellie sighs. It seems like it was forever ago, even though it’s really only been a few days.

  We spend the next hour talking and laughing, and by the time I leave, I’m feeling a little bit better. I mean, there’s nothing to be nervous about. Everything is going to work out. With me, with Brandon, with Daniella, even with Mrs. Dunham. I’m convinced of it, especially when she disappears in the middle of lunch and doesn’t come back.

  And that night I sleep better than I have in days.

  • • •

  But by the time lunch rolls around on Monday, I haven’t heard from Brandon at all. No texts, no phone calls, nothing. He even rushed into math and then rushed out, and he hardly even said anything to me except for “Hi” and “Bye.” We had a test, and so we didn’t have a chance to talk. Although the good thing is that I think I actually might have done okay on the test. Since I had nothing to do yesterday, Daniella quizzed me on all my equations. She’s actually very good at math. Who knew she could be so helpful?

  Of course, the one time I do well, Mr. Jacobi announces that we’re not going to be grading our papers in class. Apparently there’s been some kind of scandal with kids announcing the wrong grade and adding points on top of what they were really supposed to have. Mr. Jacobi seems shocked that anyone would do this, even though you’d have to be kind of stupid to trust a bunch of seventh graders to be honest about their grades.

  “Kyle and I are a couple!” Ellie squeals at lunch as she sits down next to me, her tray clattering onto the table. A piece of pineapple from her fruit cocktail flies off and onto the bench next to her.

  “Ohmigod,” I say. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” she says, blushing. “We decided this morning, after I apologized for what I said to him and accepted his apology for being so weird at the movies.”

  “Ellie! Your first boyfriend! Holy crap, this is major. We have to—”

  But before I can say anything, Kyle comes over to our table and sits down next to us. Oh. Right. Now that he’s Ellie’s boyfriend, I guess he’s going to be sitting with us at lunch. And then Brandon comes and sits down next to him! Okay. Don’t panic. Of course Brandon is going to sit here. Kyle’s his best friend, and so of course they’re going to sit together. Just be cool, I tell myself. No need to get all nervous.

  “So that was fun on Saturday,” I blurt. Oh, God. Way to be cool, Kendall.

  “What happened on Saturday?” Kyle asks. He reaches over and pulls a tater tot off Ellie’s tray and pops it into his mouth.

  “Nothing,” I say. “We just kept running into each other, that’s all.”

  “Where?” Kyle asks.

  “At the gymnastics meet,” Brandon says.

  “What gymnastics meet?” Ellie asks. “You never told me anything about a gymnastics meet.”

  Oh, God. “It was nothing,” I say. “I just went to go and see my friend Jen in her meet.”

  “Jen who?”

  “Ummm . . .” I rack my brains, trying to remember Jen’s last name. Do I even know her last name? “Smith.” It’s the first thing that pops into my head, because it’s the most common last name in the United States. So I have the most statistical chance of being right.

  “Jen Smith?” Ellie asks, frowning. “Never heard of her.”

  “Um, Brandon?” I ask quickly. “You wanna come with me to get some juice?”

  “But you have chocolate milk,” Ellie says.

  “I know,” I say, “but I want some juice.” I turn back to Brandon. “Will you come with me?” I need to get him away from Ellie before she starts asking me all kinds of questions that make it clear that I don’t know Jen at all, and have never shown any kind of interest in gymnastics.

  “Sure,” Brandon says.

  “So how’d you do on the test?” I ask Brandon once we’re in the lunch line. The long lunch line. The long lunch line we now have to wait in so that I can grab a juice. A juice I don’t even want.

  “I think I did okay,” he says. “How about you?” He’s being modest, of course. He probably got a hundred.

  “I think I did well, actually,” I say. “I kind of wish we’d gotten to grade them in class.”

  “Mr. Jacobi probably knew you did well, and so t
hat’s why he collected them,” Brandon says, teasing. “He probably made up that whole thing about people giving the wrong grades.”

  “Probably,” I say, grinning. “I’m, like, his arch-nemesis.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Well,” I say, grabbing a can of cranberry-grape juice as the line moves forward, “I’m always hanging out in the English office, and he doesn’t like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Why am I always hanging out there, or why doesn’t he like it?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m hanging out there because I know Mrs. D’Amico, the head of the English department. She was my grandmother’s best friend before she died.” Brandon squeezes my shoulder and gives me a smile when my grandma comes up. I really like that. Not just because the shoulder squeeze is sending bursts of electricity through my body, but because most people would give you a sympathetic look when you bring up someone close to you that died. But Brandon smiled, like, Wow, that’s really great that you have someone to remember your grandmother with. “And my theory is that Mr. Jacobi doesn’t like it because he likes Ms. Benson, the new English teacher. Her office is next to Mrs. D’Amico’s, and I don’t think Mr. Jacobi wants students seeing him hanging out there.”

  “He likes Ms. Benson?” Brandon asks.

  “Oops.” I clap my hand over my mouth. But I’m grinning. “It’s just a theory! Although I did see them flirting in the hall.”

  Brandon grins back. See? I tell myself. There’s nothing to be nervous about. Brandon has no idea that I don’t really know Jen, or that anything was amiss this weekend. I’m totally working myself up over nothing.

  Everything’s fine. All I have to do is just try to keep everything having to do with these stupid ghosts to myself. I haven’t even seen Mrs. Dunham for a couple of days, and even if she does come back, there’s no rule saying that I have to help her. At the very least, she’s going to have to give me some more info about what she’s talking about. Or at least stop being so confrontational.

  But then I see something. Something that kind of throws the whole plan about forgetting about the ghost stuff out the window. And that’s a piece of green paper, sticking out of Brandon’s book bag.

  • • •

  So here’s the thing. I try to ignore it. I really do. That stupid piece of green paper, I really, really, really try to just pretend I didn’t see it. But the problem is that it’s just . . . there. All day. I don’t know why I never noticed it before. Because now it’s taunting me. Every time I see Brandon, it’s peeking out of his bag. Seriously. Every. Single. Time. If the paper’s so important that his dead mom is haunting me because of it, you’d think he’d take better care of it. I mean, really. I want to ask him what’s on it, but the one time he catches me looking at it, at the end of the day, he looks all flustered and then quickly pushes it back into his bag.

  I’m in a horrible mood by the time school lets out, and it’s not helped by the fact that now I have to head over to the high school to have another run-in with Jen and tell her the info about Daniella stealing her boyfriend.

  “You’ll be able to convince her to talk to you now, though,” Daniella says. “Since you have personal information about her. Oh, and don’t forget to tell her about the digging.”

  “Okay,” I say, not wanting to burst her bubble by reminding her that Jen hates me. “I’ll tell her about the digging.” Not.

  “This is so great!” She’s cartwheeling all down the street as we walk to the high school. It could definitely be my imagination, but I think some of the drivers passing by are looking at me strange, thinking that I’m talking to myself. But obviously I don’t have time to think about that right now. I mean, I have much bigger issues. “When will I get to leave?” Daniella asks. “Once you tell her that I’m sorry for stealing her boyfriend, then do you think that I’ll just, like, pop away?” Her face is all excited. “Where will I go? I hope it doesn’t hurt.” She thinks about it. “Although, on the other hand, no pain, no gain, so . . .”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I say, which is, of course, a complete lie. I have no idea how any of this is going to go. But whatever. I’m all about trying to make her feel better. I mean, at least one of us should be happy.

  When we get to the school, the gymnastics team is finishing up their practice, and there are a few parents and some other kids sort of milling around, so I walk into the gym and take a seat in the bleachers. I guess they must let people in to watch once parents start arriving to pick up their kids. Of course, I’m not here to pick anyone up. But whatevs. I could totally be someone’s sister or something.

  Jen spots me across the gym, and I look away so that she doesn’t get too weirded out. But out of the corner of my eye I see one of her friends pointing at me and whispering.

  Great. Now I’m getting a reputation. A reputation as a scary stalker girl.

  “It’s okay,” Daniella says when she sees them staring at me. “I’ll be gone in a couple hours, and then you won’t even have to deal with this anymore.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I don’t think this is going to be as easy as she thinks, but I’m surprised to realize that I actually will miss her when she’s gone. Yeah, she’s been annoying, but she hasn’t been that bad—as far as ghosts go, anyway. And she did give me some very fab ideas for how to do my hair. And besides, once she’s gone, who knows who’s going to show up? It might be Brandon’s mom.

  “Hey, Kendall!” Someone calls my name, and I look up to see Jen standing at the bottom of the bleachers, waving up at me.

  “Yay!” Daniella says. “Look, she likes you now! Now let’s get this over with.” She cartwheels down the bleachers and onto the gym floor.

  “Hi,” I say, looking at Jen and pretending like I’m not there to stalk her. “You looked really great out there. Your back somersaults were amazing.” This, at least, is true. I’ve totally been reading up on gymnastics and working on getting the lingo down.

  “Thanks.” She looks down and pushes the toe of her sneaker into the gym floor. “Listen, can I talk to you for a second?”

  I’m surprised. And a little nervous. Is she going to threaten to get a restraining order or something? My dad would so not like that. I’d definitely be grounded. How would I explain that one to Brandon? “Sorry, Brandon. I can’t hang out for a while. I’m grounded for stalking that girl from the gymnastics meet.”

  “Sure,” I tell Jen. I take a deep breath, then get up and follow her out into the hall, around the corner, and into the locker room. It’s empty, I guess because the gymnastics team has their own separate sports locker room. This one must just be used for gym class. And it smells like it too. Eww.

  “So listen,” Jen says, sighing and pushing her hair back from her face. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, because I’m sure you’re a very nice girl. But you’re starting to freak me out a little bit.”

  “What do you mean?” I wrinkle up my forehead and cock my head to the side, like I’m confused. I’m trying to look innocent, but of course I know what she means. That I’m, like, her stalker. No, not like her stalker. I pretty much am her stalker.

  “I mean you keep showing up at all my gymnastics stuff. And I did some research on you, and I found out that you don’t even do gymnastics.”

  “You checked up on me?” I exclaim.

  “Yeah.” She plops her bag down onto one of the benches, and then pulls out a hoodie. She slides her arms into it and then zips it up. “You’re not the only one that can find out things about people, you know. Google and Facebook are available to everyone.”

  Crap. I knew I should have set my Facebook page to private.

  Daniella, who is now apparently starting to realize that things aren’t going to go as smoothly as she hoped, starts to have a meltdown. “Tell her you are into gymnastics!” she says. “I’ll help you! Go on, tell her you like to vault. I’ll feed you the information!”

  But I know this won’t help. It’s time to come clea
n.

  “Jen,” I say, “I’m sorry if I’ve freaked you out in any way. The thing is, you’re right. I’m not a gymnast.”

  “What are you doing?” Daniella yells. She tries to slap me on the back, but of course her arm just goes floating right through me. “Don’t tell her that! She’s not going to believe anything you say now.”

  “Then what are you doing?” Jen asks, picking up her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. Her eyes dart to the door, like she’s making sure she has a clear path in case she needs to escape. “Why are you obsessed with Daniella?”

  “I’m not.” I take a deep breath. “Daniella and I were friends.”

  Jen looks at me incredulously. “You were friends?”

  “Yes,” I say, “and I . . . I wanted to come and tell you something that I thought Daniella would want you to know.”

  “You’re lying!” Daniella shrieks. “We weren’t friends. God, if you were going to just lie anyway, you should have kept going with the thing about you being a gymnast.” She thinks about it. “Although, this could work.” She nods. “Go on.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

  “Like what?” Jen asks. Her face is kind of turning now from being scared to being a little . . . nervous. Almost like she knows what’s coming.

  “Like she wanted you to know that she’s sorry for stealing Travis from you.”

  Jen’s face goes white, and she drops her bag onto the floor. “How did you know about that?”

  “I told you,” I say, “we were friends.”

  “And she told you that?”

  “Yes,” I say. “She was really upset about it. She, um, wished it had never happened.” This, at least, isn’t a lie.

  “It’s true,” Daniella says to Jen. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m so, so, so sorry.” Her voice, just a second ago screechy and annoying, is now soft and apologetic.