IT TOOK ME A COUPLE OF DAYS to get Darla to talk to me again. On Monday when I saw her at school, she acted like Darwin did that one time and said stuff about me like I wasn’t even there. I really hated that. I said I was sorry I didn’t want her to kiss me up on Sand Mountain, and she just looked up at the sky and said, “Some boys are so conceited, they actually think some girls want to kiss them, when that’s just the biggest lie.” Then she walked away real fast like she was busy. It wasn’t fair that I was the one to apologize, of course, but saying sorry wasn’t too hard — I’d had so much practice that it sort of came natural.

On Tuesday night I made Tink watch that old movie Heidi with me on TV that had Shirley Temple in it, so I could try to talk to Darla about it since I knew she was so crazy about Shirley Temple and all, but that didn’t work, either. When I saw her the next day, she just looked up at the sky that time, too, and said, “I think I see Superman.” It was the dumbest trick in the world but I fell for it, and when I looked up, she ran away and jumped on her bike.

My mom told me she read in the paper that Shirley Temple had gotten married and I tried to talk to Darla about that on Thursday, but she just said everybody already knew that old news, for goodness sake. I could tell I was making progress, though, because at least she said it to me and not just sort of about me.

Finally on Friday she decided we could be friends again, I guess, because she showed up at my house after school — or rather she sat on her bike across the street from our house until I finally happened to go outside and see her. She said why didn’t we go back to that old bridge at Bowlegs Creek, so we did and she showed me some of her tap steps, with our feet hanging over the edge so I could do it along with her without getting my feet twisted up and falling down and hurting myself. We were kind of in a rhythm — kick, tap, step, slide, kick, tap, step, slide, tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa — and since I wasn’t sure what else to talk about, I told her that my dad planned to knock down the Skeleton Hotel as part of his campaign promises.

Darla pointed her toes way out and rolled her feet down like they were bananas, which she had told me was what ballerinas did. She said, “You know it’s haunted, don’t you?”

I said sure I did. Everybody knew it was haunted from when they were building it and two guys up on the top got knocked off a girder. One fell straight down and broke all his bones but he lived. The other one — a colored guy — grabbed on to a rope and hung on there for a long time. At first he yelled for help, then he cried, then he got quiet, then his hands and him just slipped away. They said he didn’t make a sound the whole way down. Just fell and died.

Darla asked me if I’d ever heard him.

“Heard the ghost?” I said.

She sniffed. “Heard the Howler.”

I asked her what was the Howler and she kicked me. “It’s who howls on the top of the Skeleton Hotel. It’s what makes it haunted. What did you think it was — a dumb dog?”

I said no, I thought it was that colored guy, but I didn’t think he would howl or anything like that. I started to explain about him not making a sound at the end and when he fell, so it didn’t make sense for him to start howling now, ten years later.

Darla folded her arms and sniffed again.

“Well, I heard it, so I ought to know.”

I didn’t actually believe her for a second, but she said it was true, and then she told me this story about how one time her family was driving home from Tampa and got back to Sand Mountain at midnight and their car stalled at the one stoplight in town. Nobody was anywhere, but Darla’s mom figured the police had to drive by sometime, so they just waited in the road. It was dead quiet, not even a dog, not even another car, nothing. Just the Sinclair station on one corner, City Hall on another corner, the new 7-Eleven on the other, and the Skeleton Hotel on the other, with the tarps rolled down on the sides of the ground floor where they had the farmers’ market.

Darwin fell asleep. Their mom fell asleep. Their grandfather had already been asleep and never even woke up when the car died. After a while Darla got out. She thought it was funny to be there in the middle of the road, just stopped under the light. She practiced her tap dancing. When she got tired, she lay down in the road, right directly under the stoplight. The road was still warm even though the sun had gone down a long time before. Green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red. She tried to see if she could hold her breath through the whole of green-yellow-red. She did that for a while and so admitted to me that maybe she was dizzy from a lack of oxygen, but that was when she heard the howling from the top of the Skeleton Hotel. It scared her so bad she said she thought she was going to soil herself, which I didn’t know what that meant but pretended I did.

Anyway, when she heard that stuff, Darla jumped back in her car and screamed and woke everybody up. Her mom didn’t know what was going on and for some reason just turned the key in the ignition and the car started right up. Darla kept screaming and was too scared to talk when her mom asked her what was the matter, why was she screaming, so her mom slapped Darla in the face to make her stop, but that just made Darla keep screaming, so her mom put her hand over Darla’s mouth and kept it there and drove on home with one hand.

She finally calmed down and told her mom about what she heard at the Skeleton Hotel, and her mom told her to just hush and never mind what she heard, she was a girl with too much imagination and it was going to get her in trouble someday and she should quit making up stories, that it was probably a dog somewhere and she was confused and she was old enough that she shouldn’t get so hysterical about things.

“But I really heard it,” Darla told me. “Nobody believes me, but I really heard it.”

Her voice turned into a whisper. “So I think we should go back there before your dad tears it down.”

I said, “What do you mean?” even though I already knew, and she started talking about the Howler of the Skeleton Hotel like it was a Nancy Drew book, which she had obviously read a lot of, and since I had read all the Hardy Boys, I said “Sure,” like I did that sort of thing all the time. I thought about telling her I had a magnifying glass we could use, although I had no idea how that would help, but you never knew. But then I thought maybe that was something I ought to keep to myself.

I said maybe we could buy a special notebook and see if we could find some invisible ink to write everything down, and have a secret meeting back at Bowlegs Creek to plan out what we were going to do, and I could bring some sandwiches if Darla brought something for us to drink. She nodded a lot, like what I was saying made plenty of sense, but once I shut up, she just said, “We better go tonight.” I told her they didn’t have the election until November and this was still September, and my Dad wouldn’t win, anyway, because he never won, and probably nobody else wanted to tear down the Skeleton Hotel, but Darla said we couldn’t be sure.

“Once an idea gets around, people believe it just because somebody said it was a good idea,” she said. “It’s the same as gossip and the way people believe all of that. And I can’t stand gossip. Not one little bit.”

She looked at me hard, then she added, “The thing I like about you is you’re not a big fat gossip like some people.” Her face was all red when she finished, and I thought maybe it had something to do with what happened in the cemetery with the colored boy, which I still hadn’t ever asked her about.

I had to go — it was Friday afternoon and my dad was making me go with them to the varsity game that night — but before I did, Darla told me the trick to making yourself wake up at a certain time was to repeat that time over and over in your mind as you were falling asleep and then you’d automatically wake up when you wanted to. So when we got back home after the game and finally went to bed, I said, “Midnight, midnight, midnight, midnight,” until Wayne started snoring on the bottom bunk, and then I said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” but he wouldn’t until finally I whacked him with my pillow.

At 12:30 somebody woke me up scratching at the window, or I dreamed about somebody scratching at the window. I sat up with my heart running so fast I thought it would explode, then I remembered.

“You were supposed to meet me at midnight,” Darla said once I got outside, which took about ten hours because the floor creaked every time I took a step, and I kept thinking I heard somebody else getting out of bed, and the window got stuck when I tried to open it, and the screen fell out when I pushed it.

I said I was sorry, it was Wayne’s fault, which was the only phony excuse I could come up with, and it wasn’t really an excuse, just blaming somebody else, but Darla didn’t catch me on it; she just said, “Who’s Wayne?”

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not, but I guess she was. She was always surprising me like that, making a big issue out of not knowing things I just assumed she knew because it was stuff everybody just knew. “He’s my brother,” I said. “You know — Wayne Turner? My brother? Wayne?”

She said, “Oh, big deal, so you have a brother, I have a brother, everybody has a brother, so what about it?”

I said, “So nothing about it, but you asked was all.” It was turning into another one of those conversations with Darla, which never made sense to me, and made even less sense the more I tried to make it make sense, but it did help me get over being so nervous, I guess, and by the time I decided to give up on the whole dumb conversation, we were all the way down Orange to Second, and a little ways down Second toward downtown.

I stopped.

“What?” Darla said. “Why’d you do that?”

I said I was listening. I wanted to see if I heard anything. She said, “Good idea,” and we both froze, standing on the edge of David Tremblay’s yard under their oak tree where it bent low to the ground. I heard her breathing and I heard myself breathing. I smelled her, too. She had on perfume. And she was wearing jeans rolled up really high, which I had never seen before, like she was expecting a flood, and a black T-shirt that was big on her, and tennis shoes. You never knew with Darla what she would look like, except for her hair, which was always the same. I said, “Let’s go,” but she said to wait; she thought she heard something. I listened some more but didn’t hear anything, so we took off again.

A block later she grabbed my arm. “I heard it again,” she said. I asked her what and she said footsteps. I started to say something else but she squeezed my arm and said, “Be quiet,” and this time I heard something for real, too, and when I looked back where Darla was looking, I saw the shape of somebody in the shadows just off the street about half a block away.

“Run,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “Let’s keep going and see if he follows us.”

“OK,” I said. So we walked a ways and stopped. He walked a ways and stopped. We walked some more. He walked some more. I could hardly breathe and neither could Darla, judging by her hiccups. It was dark as anything for most of the block, and even darker under the trees. There were clouds, so no stars or moon, so the only light just about anywhere was the streetlights at the end of the block. When we got to the next corner, we ran across it and into the shadows again and then waited to see who it was when he got in the light, but I was shaking so hard everything looked blurry to me. Darla was shaking, too. “I have to pee,” she said, which surprised me since I had never heard her talk like that before. For a second it almost made me forget somebody was following us.

Who, it turned out, was just Wayne.