Ghost Girl (22 page)

“But what about you?” I asked. “Will you still have something to wear this afternoon?

She shrugged.

“Hey, man, if this girl wants to let me wear her costume, don’t go making her feel like shit for it,” Jeremiah said. He swiped roughly at his still-wet cheeks. “Man, this girl wants to be a
friend.
”

“But what about you, Jadie?” I asked again.

“There’s no rule says you gotta wear a costume to the party,” Jadie replied.

“There is to go trick-or-treating, man,” Jeremiah said. “You can’t just go as a kid. They wouldn’t give you no candy.”

Jadie shrugged. “That’s all right. I don’t want to go. Neither me or Amber goes. That’s because Amber don’t like to go out after dark. She gets scared. She even has to sleep with the big light on in her bedroom. So, you see, we just don’t like that kind of stuff. Besides, candy rots your teeth.”

We spent the rest of the morning desperately trying to finish two hundred popcorn balls. About 11:30, I allowed Jadie to run home to get the costume for Jeremiah, and she returned with what I assume was supposed to turn the wearer into a leopard. Hard to know, though. The costume consisted of what appeared to be black-and-yellow-spotted long johns and a mask that could have been anything from a freckled dog to a bear with measles.

Jeremiah had to try it on immediately and to his dismay found it was at least two sizes too big and, moreover, tailless. To remedy the fit, I took large rubber bands and fastened up the arms and legs, then stuffed pillows from the reading area down his front.

“Hey!” he cried with delight. “Looks like I just ate somebody, huh? Grrrarrgh!” And he leaped up on Philip’s back, but the pillows gave him a surprise, bouncing him right back off again. To distract him, I suggested he search through the scrap box to find something to make a tail.

The afternoon quickly fell victim to Halloween mania as shrieking, overexcited scarecrows, hobos, and witches tore up and down the school corridors. My crowd were as bad as the rest. Having buttoned Philip into his bunny costume, buckled Reuben’s pirate’s belt, and restuffed Jeremiah’s stomach, I turned them all loose to run and scream with the others. The only exception to all this excitement was Jadie, who had taken the big tub of crayons and a coloring book and was sitting at my desk in the cloakroom, coloring a picture of horses in a field.

“Are you sure you don’t want to join us?” I asked, as I prepared to capture the boys and get them in line for the parade.

“I’m sure,” Jadie said without looking up.

“You don’t have to go in the parade, you know. You could just stand in the classroom door with me and watch.”

“No.”

So I left her to her coloring.

The corridors of the school reverberated with undiluted joy as the children marched up and down, each class joining as the parade wended by their room. Then, onward to the gym.

Jeremiah won his prize. In fact, all three boys won something, but Philip and Reuben received only badges saying “Join He-Man. Fight Cavities,” which they proudly stuck to their costumes. Jeremiah got not only a badge but also an eraser in the shape of a jack-o’-lantern.

“Lookit
this!
” he cried. “I got the best tail prize! I got the prize for the best tail in the
whole
school. He didn’t even know I made it myself. He probably thought it was store-bought. It was
that
good.”

Raising my head to see across the bobble of heads in the gym, I caught Mr. Tinbergen’s eye. I smiled. He winked.

Once the boys were involved in party games, I asked Lucy to keep an eye on them for a bit and slipped back to the classroom. Jadie was still at my desk, still coloring.

“They’ve started to play games. Don’t you want to come down?”

“No,” she said quietly, most of her attention still on the coloring.

“What’s the matter? What don’t you like about this?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I just don’t like it, that’s all.”

“But why? Usually you like parties. You always enjoy the games we play on people’s birthdays.”

“I don’t like Halloween.”

“Is it the costumes? Do they frighten you?”

“I just don’t like it.”

Grateful to be out of the deafening noise of the gym for a moment, I sat down on the right-hand bench and leaned back against the wall. Fleetingly aware of what an exhausting day it had been and how it wasn’t over yet, I sighed. That made Jadie look up. She didn’t lift her head, only her eyes, but briefly our eyes met. Then she returned to her coloring.

Silence enveloped us. The joy in the gym was audible, but barely, just a pleasant bit of embroidery on the silence. After a long stretch of cold weather, it was warm and sunny outside, and this, combined with the school’s ferocious central heating, made the small room warm and stuffy. I found myself unexpectedly sleepy.

“I could tell you how it happened,” Jadie said, her tone conversational. She didn’t look up.

Pulled back from the brink of closing my eyes, I glanced over.

“If you wanted me to, that is,” she added.

I didn’t know what she was referring to, but I nodded anyway. “Okay.”

“See, it was Halloween that other year. When Tashee was six.”

I nodded again.

“Me and her were both six. I’d been six in December and her birthday was in August. I knew it was important to be six. Miss Ellie kept saying that. She said it meant big things, ’cause me and Tashee were both six. She said everybody was going to be strong that year. She said we were going to get these wishes. Something about sixes and how you could make things come true. I didn’t understand it exactly, but I thought it meant I might get a Barbie house for Christmas. That’s what I wanted, but my mom said it cost too much money. I thought ’cause we were getting lucky out of sixes, I was going to get a Barbie house.”

Jadie paused. Her voice remained soft, her words flowing in a smooth, conversational way quite unlike her usual speech in the classroom. Even alone with me, there was usually much stopping and starting. Now she stopped, pensive, her eyes on the coloring book, as if assessing the picture she’d been working on.

“Then … it must have been September, I guess … I don’t know really, ’cause I didn’t know the months so good then, but …” She paused again, her brow wrinkled, her expression inward, as if concentrating hard. “Tashee and me were laying on the big table. We had our little dolls, and Miss Ellie told J.R. to take them and put them on the table behind us. So he did, and then Miss Ellie and Pam and everybody came around and first they kissed the dolls and then they kissed either me or Tashee, but we couldn’t see which dolls they were kissing, because the dolls were behind us. Tashee started crying, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know what was happening. Then J.R. took the candleholder and he hit Tashee’s doll and its head broke. That’s when I knew Tashee was going to die.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Indeed, I wasn’t even quite sure what she was telling me, because it didn’t make complete sense to me.

“It could have been me,” Jadie said pensively, and for the first time she looked up from her coloring book. “I could have died. I was six. But my doll didn’t get smashed, so I stayed alive.”

“And she did die?” I asked.

Jadie nodded. “Yeah, like I told you.”

I sat, speechless. I felt paralyzed, my feelings numb and unreachable. Nothing in my experience, in my previous work, had equipped me for this.

“When Miss Ellie put the knife in and the blood came out, like I was telling you, she caught it in a cup. We had to drink it. See, that’s where the power of the six was. It was warm. It was … sort of oily tasting. Kind of like if you take a sip of salad oil or something. It sort of slipped on your tongue.”

I’
m not sure how I got through the rest of that day. Emotions never really came back to me. A dull, nauseous feeling was there instead, making my head muzzy and my throat tight. More than once I thought I was in real danger of vomiting.

The kids screaming in the gym were too much to take. I returned tense and irritable and wished they would stay away from me. They wouldn’t, of course, and I got through the remainder of the party with my teeth gritted. Jadie, on the other hand, seemed absurdly calm and bantered cheerfully with Jeremiah when we came back to the room. Lucy saved me. Realizing I wasn’t feeling well, she volunteered to take my children with hers when the going-home bell rang, and she did, seeing them all down to the playground, including Jadie.

After they left, I fell wearily onto one of the benches in the cloakroom. Covering my eyes momentarily with my hands, I rested there a moment, then lowered them. All around me was the quiet familiarity of the school, the sound of the clock, the smell of the floor polish, the distant din of children on the playground; yet it was as if I were in some alien place, unable to move, unsure of what to do next.

What
was
happening with Jadie? Was she being abused? Were her stories true?
Could
they be true? Had some real child been murdered and Jadie made to drink her blood? The instant that thought came to me, the conversation with Hugh in the summer flashed back into my mind.
Satanism
.

Satanism? My concrete knowledge of such things was restricted to newspaper articles of cattle mutilations and the Manson family murders. I’d never been particularly interested in such subject matter. There were enough ordinary evils in the world to joust with; I’d never been attracted to the thought of worse and more unassailable ones. More to the point, I don’t think I could really believe in all that. I had no trouble in accepting that there were dangerously disturbed individuals capable of perpetrating unspeakable acts, and I had had enough contact with the fringes of society to accept that counterculture forms of religion, such as paganism and even devil worship, attracted a fair number of people, but I could not bring myself to believe there were large, wide-ranging networks of people regularly carrying out ritual murder andmayhem. These stories I’d always felt were mythic, the results of popular horror films and books and a few charismatic, headline-grabbing psychotics.

In terms of Jadie, I found it almost impossible to contemplate a connection with satanism. Even back when Hugh had first mentioned it, the idea had gone right out of my mind, simply because it seemed so farfetched. Now, alone after school, I touched the idea cautiously, like a tongue in a newly formed tooth socket, drawn to it, yet repulsed. Could Tashee have been a real child? How would Jadie have known about the taste of blood? What about the smashed dolls? Why would she make things like that up? How could she create such details, if she didn’t have firsthand knowledge?

Then as soon as those questions raised themselves, I was assailed by doubt. These were the things horror movies were made of. Indeed, some things Jadie had spoken of, like Miss Ellie putting Tashee’s bones back together and making her come alive again, could be extrapolated from the scenes of some quite popular and readily available horror films. Even the murder of a child and the drinking of its blood were pretty standard fare in some of the worse films. How would watching such movies affect an already disturbed child? Jadie had evidenced the year before that she was familiar with the operation of a video recorder. Did she have access to a collection of horror films, or worse, some of the pornographic ones? Was that why she had asked me if I had seen Miss Ellie killing Tashee on my TV, too?

Perhaps the worst part of all this speculation was the realization that whatever conclusion I came to, at this point I could do nothing. Horrific as it all sounded, I had no concrete evidence that anything was happening, and unless Jadie herself was willing to make accusations, I could not officially do anything. Much as I wanted to act, I knew that patience and alertness were all that was left open to me.

Friday found everyone tired and grumpy. Jeremiah had stayed up to all hours, doing God knows what, although how much of this was due to Halloween and how much to Jeremiah’s usual lack of parental supervision was hard to say. Jadie, too, complained of having stayed up too late and was now subdued and hollow-eyed. Change in routine made Reuben restless and distractible, and Brucie was cross about having missed the party. Philip, victim of Halloween excesses, did not come to school at all.

One of our regular class activities was journal keeping. All the children, except for Brucie, who had little control over a pencil or crayon, had a journal, and every day a certain amount of time was given over to writing and/or illustrating. I encouraged them to record their feelings, then ups and downs, their hopes, wishes, and dreams, as well as daily events. I tried to keep it an open, safe place where the child could express anything—even a negative opinion of me and my teaching methods—without fear of retaliation. I, in turn, wentthrough the journals nightly and left notes back to make it a form of useful communication.

Morning recess had been a trial that Friday. A pall of dank, dark, very Novemberish weather had descended on us in contrast to the bright day we’d had twenty-four hours earlier. It had been my turn at recess duty, so I’d stood out, shivering with the rest. Everybody seemed in a foul mood. Not only were my children prickly, but I pried apart two fifth-grade boys who were determinedly smashing each other’s faces into the asphalt, and I mopped blood off a first-grader, who had been tripped by an older child. Jeremiah fought with everybody in sight and finally finished recess in Mr. Tinbergen’s office. And some kid whose name I couldn’t remember was sick under the swings.