IT WAS A MADHOUSE all morning long, and little learning took place. Every class period was a Halloween party, though I doubt things were much better on a regular day. As for decoration, they had no orange and black crepe paper. Instead, all the walls were brightened up with a thing called graffiti, much of it poorly spelled.
Before the first class, which may have been English, I mumbled to Jeremy in alarm, “I’ll be one too many when they take attendance.”
“Take what?” Jeremy asked, and into the room we ganged. There was much milling around in there, and I swear to this day I never spied the teacher. If this was the Gifted bunch, may I never see the slow ones.
But I soon saw a sight all too familiar to me: a gang of stuck-up girls sitting in a tight clump. Remembering the Sunny Thoughts and Busy Fingers Sisterhood, I meant to give this bunch all the free air they could breathe. When I settled into a desk, Jeremy drifted away. This being eighth grade, everybody steered clear of the opposite sex.
One stuck-up girl spotted me at once. She was pretty to a fault and wore a ballerina costume with a sickeningly pink tutu. In her hand she carried a wand with a glittering little star at the end of it. She waved it around in sweeping gestures.
“Oh, you guys,” she said to the girls, “like, look!” She waved her wand at me. “That is so grisly, like I am sure.”
“Ew,” said all her group, looking my way. “Gross us out,” they said in a chorus.
“That is so ill,” said the pig girl in the picture hat. “Gag me with a spoon. Really. Is that makeup or a mask? And what does the eighteen mean on her . . . hat?”
“Oh, I know what that means,” said the ballerina, wielding her wand. “On an Ugly Scale of one to fifteen, she’s an eighteen.”
The whole group rocked with laughter, like they were supposed to.
I had the durnedest feeling I’d been through all this before.
“But who is she?” wondered the pig girl.
At that the ballerina, quick to take charge, jumped up and began counting the noses of her bunch with the wand: “Melissa, Kelly, April, Chrissy, Michelle, Hilary, Heidi.” She sighed with relief. “We’re all here.” Then she flopped down, and the group closed ranks around her, losing all interest in me.
But I hadn’t lost all interest in them. I edged out of my desk and made my way across the littered room to where they clustered like birds of bright plumage.
“Ew, get away,” said several.
“Like, no way is she going to sit with us,” said the pig person.
“For sure,” came a chorus, and they all looked to the ballerina for leadership.
Arranging my fur piece, I marched up to her.
She tapped her wand nervously on the desk, as all eyes were upon her, including my beady black ones. “Say, sister,” I said, “what’s your name?”
They all gasped in shock.
“That’s Heather,” said several, amazed at my ignorance.
“Is that a fact?” I remarked, taking a closer look. I had the odd notion I knew her.
“You must be like really new in town. Really,” breathed the pig. “Like a foreigner or something.”
“Oh, no,” I answered. “I’m an . . . old settler in these parts.” I grinned at them in Mama’s evil way. “Sort of the Spirit of Halloween Past.” They shrank.
“In fact,” I said, warming up, “I’m planning to tell fortunes and give readings and bring messages from various worlds to customers at a certain Halloween Festival . . . tomorrow night.”
I had them listening now. But Heather drew in her cheeks and said, “I’m sure,” in a mocking way.
“In fact, I feel one of my trances coming on right now.” I swayed slightly and let my eyes roll back in my head like Mama does.
I had them in the palm of my hand now, though many threatened to rolf on the floor. “Barf City,” said the pig.
I swayed some more and let my long, bony finger reach out, drawing a bead on Heather’s forehead.
“She is so zeeked out,” said Heather uncertainly, “like, forget it, okay?”
By now my eyes were staring at the back of my skull. “I have a message for a girl name of Heather that comes to her from the Great Beyond,” I moaned in a truly hideous voice. “This is your grandmother speaking, Heather, honey,” I continued, squeaking like an old lady.
“I am so sure,” Heather said to her group. “How could she know my family, she’s so scruff. Besides, Grandma isn’t in the Great Beyond. She’s down in Sun City, Arizona.”
“It is I, Heather, honey,” I squeaked hollowly, “Grandma, down here in—ah—Sun City. Just wanted to say hello and . . . stay as sweet as you are, precious.”
“Wig me out,” said Heather, scratching at her little golden curls with her wand. “If you’re so smart,” she said to me, “what’s my grandma’s name?”
I had her there.
“Why, Heather, honey,” I answered in a real far-off voice, “you know my name as well as your own. We were always one of the First Families of Bluff City. Silly child, I am the former LETTY SHAMBAUGH.”
Heather’s wand clattered to the floor. “Grandma!” she shrieked, both wigging and zeeking right out. Even her tutu collapsed in a quivering pink mass. As her group closed around her pale and trembling form, the pig girl rose up, shouting, “Somebody go for a guidance counselor for Heather!” The pig straightened her picture hat in a businesslike way, ready to assume command of the group.
I withdrew.
That was the only bright spot in a dismal morning. We moved from Halloween party to Halloween party, all at the taxpayers’ expense. After my run-in with Heather’s bunch nobody would come near me. Several whispered remarks, though, and pointed my way.
I noticed Jeremy wasn’t doing much better. In every class there was a bunch of boys in a tighter clump than the girls. But Jeremy was never one of them.
He sat forlorn and friendless at a desk while the others entertained themselves by pouring Halloween punch from paper cups on one another. Occasionally one of them would come over to drum on Jeremy’s bowl with a pencil. Otherwise, he seemed to be a perfect outcast.
I supposed Jeremy, being right smart, didn’t fit in. The dumb ones always make the best followers. Still, he was one lonesome kid. I know the feeling.
By noon I was up to here with Bluffleigh Heights Magnet Middle School. We all were following an evil cooking smell to a place called the cafeteria when I remarked to Jeremy, “How’s about you and me playing hooky?”
“Playing what?” he said, stumping along on his big silver legs.
“It’s a rotten shame to waste the day in a place like this,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got to start thinking about getting back you-know-where. Tonight’s the night I’m to report to Old Man Leverette when those boys are going to make a mess of his front porch. I just naturally have to be there to teach—”
“Oh, I don’t think you can get back that quick, Blossom.” He spoke in a rush, like he didn’t want me to go. “But we can cut out of school if you want to. How about checking out the mall? We could always cruise past Radio Shack and have a look at their components.”
It didn’t sound like my kind of place. We made a sharp turn just before the cafeteria and slipped outside through a fire door. A person couldn’t hear herself think in that school.
“Now where?” Jeremy wondered.
“Bluff City.” I spoke firmly. He reminded me of Daisy-Rae and Roderick. It was uphill work to get them into town, too. “There’s got to be something left of the town I knew, and I mean to find it, Jeremy. I know curiosity killed the cat. But satisfaction brought that cat back.”
“It’s a long way,” he said, “and this costume is pretty heavy.”
I thought he might slip back home and change into his regular clothes. I had no doubt he could pull this off, as his mama was not a noticing kind of woman. Besides, she’d be at her . . . designer sheet luncheon. But he pointed out that since I was going dressed as I was, he’d better stick to his costume.
Away we labored over the curving streets of Bluffleigh Heights on a brisk autumn afternoon seventy years hence.
Jeremy was a good companion, though mostly quiet inside his fogbound bowl. We walked for a quarter of an hour, and still I could see nothing familiar. It’s a sight how homesick a person can get this near home.
What looked like pastureland in Old Man Leverette’s south forty turned out to be something called the Little League field. When we came to where the old streetcar trestle spanned Snake Creek, there was only a wide highway bridge choked with automobiles speeding past a 7-Eleven store at the far end.
A lump was fast forming in my throat. Being a sensitive type, Jeremy noticed. His spectacles were steamed up, and his bowl was blurry; but he didn’t miss much. “Tell me what it was like, Blossom. The olden days, I mean.”
Since he seemed to know no history whatsoever, I told him various true stories.
One of them was how I happened to borrow a chicken from Old Man Leverette. That just naturally brought up the swimming hole in Leverette’s Woods and how I chanced to observe Alexander Armsworth and his cronies swimming and smoking in the altogether.
I went on to tell him about Mr. Ambrose Lacy, who had both Miss Spaulding and Miss Fuller on the string. I told him about Letty Shambaugh and her club and how Alexander took her to the moving pictures. And that brought up Daisy-Rae and Roderick. I worked in pretty nearly everybody.
I even mentioned how my mama’s occult Powers had warned her of the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse and its eerie Vibrations.
“She was plugging into my malfunctioning electronic impulses,” Jeremy observed. “There are people who can pick up shortwave radio on their hearing aids and false teeth. Your mom is probably a natural transistor.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” I said.
All this conversation carried us right into town. There beside a busy street was a sign that read:
WELCOME TO BLUFF CITY
68,002
“Sixty-eight thousand and two what?”
Jeremy blinked. “People.”
“Well, I’ll be a ring-tailed monkey!” I exclaimed.
On we went, deeper into this swollen Bluff City. Then, with minds of their own, my feet swerved away from the sidewalk. We took off across a vacant lot and down an alley.
Jeremy had to struggle along in his Galaxy boots over ruts and a number of objects labeled NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN. “Where are we heading?” He peered anxiously at the backs of various buildings.
“I’m switched if I know,” I said. “It just feels right.”
It wasn’t a minute more before I saw a familiar sight against the sky. It was the roof and bell tower of Horace Mann School. The bell tower was boarded up, and there were missing shingles on the roof; but my eyes misted over at sight of the old place.
Dragging Jeremy along, I said, “Well, of course. It’s all crystal clear to me now. This route we’ve been following down back alleys was once the streetcar right-of-way. Many’s the time I’ve walked the rails along here.”
Grunting to keep up, Jeremy followed my skipping form into the old schoolyard.
“And here’s where we had our graduation day maypole dance last—”
A sign above the schoolhouse door caught my eye. It was a new one, and it read:
MAE SPAULDING MEMORIAL
MEDIA CENTER
Substance Abuse Counseling Available
I blinked. This was more information than I could . . . program. Instead, I grabbed Jeremy’s puffy sleeve. “And right across the road is Bluff City High—”
But across the paved street was no such thing. My old high school had been leveled. In its place was a large, rude structure topped by a gaudy sign:
INTOWN MOTEL DAY RATES WATER BEDS CABLE TV ICE MACHINES
My heart sank. They had erased my world.