“OKAY, THE THEME OF HAMLET, GO,” Emily said. I was too distracted by her hair to pay attention to her question.
When she said black and pink hair, I assumed she meant a few pink highlights. Oh, no. She had colored the entire front part of her hair pink, and it gradually faded back into black. And not It’s a Girl! Pink. We’re talking full-on neon Sharpie, eighties throwback pink. Between the hair and her matching glittery lip gloss, I was mesmerized by all the neon. It was difficult, if not entirely impossible to concentrate on studying when your friend looked like the lovechild of a highlighter and a light bulb.
“Um,” I said, leaning back in the lumpy library chair. There was a definite funk to all the library chairs, like a mix of old gym clothes and feet. “I don't know. Something about his dead father. And something rotten in Denmark? Oh! And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. I remember that! Is that on there?”
Emily looked down at the study guide and rolled her eyes at me. “You didn't even fill it all in. Although this is some impressive doodling,” she said. “How am I supposed to know?”
“You didn't read it?”
“Bridget. If I can live my whole life without reading Shakespeare, I’ll die with no regrets,” she said. “Why haven't you dropped down to basic yet?”
“Mom won't let me. And they require parental permission. Trust me, I tried. I even tried to sign her name, and they called her just to verify.”
I'd been in all advanced classes since middle school, but my grades had tanked when Val died. Mom overlooked it for a while and let me take regular classes sophomore year so I didn’t kill my GPA. But now it had been almost two years, and I had to move on. Her words, not mine. After two summers of taking classes to catch up, I had a full load of advanced classes again.
Yeah, that was logical.
“My mom is just happy if I'm passing Dummy English,” Emily said. “Me read good.”
“Yeah, well, me gonna big fail test,” I said. “Hit me again.”
As Emily quizzed me on the play I hadn't read, not even the Cliff's Notes or the cover of the movie, I pulled out my phone to check the Find Natalie SOS group on Facebook. There had been a few posts by people claiming they'd heard from her, but no one seemed to have heard anything in nearly a week. Some people had left pointed comments like “She'll turn up...just like she always does,” which sparked a flurry of arguments over the seriousness of the whole thing. No one seemed overly concerned, and the few attempts at organizing search parties had fallen apart.
“Are you even listening to me?” Emily asked.
“Yes.”
“Are not,” she said, snatching my phone to look at the screen. “Still with the Natalie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you ask Hachi about her?”
“Haven’t seen her yet today,” Emily said. “Now focus, Daniel-san. Okay, Hamlet's dad was...”
“Kenneth Branagh?” I guessed. I remembered someone mentioning his name at some point in the last few weeks. Wow, where had I been? Oh yeah. Up to my ears in dead people drama.
“Screw it,” she said. “I love you, but you're gonna fail this one.”
“Oh well,” I said with a heavy sigh. I had spent a lot more time than usual lately doing research on ghosts and their histories. With my seventeenth birthday looming, I was trying to get in as much good karma as I could before I became Little Miss Normal again. “Guess you can’t win them all, huh?”
“Or any of them, apparently. You're gonna flunk for the semester if you're not careful,” Emily said as she folded the useless study guide and grabbed my notebook. I watched the motion carefully; the blue spiral notebook held all my notes and clippings about ghosts. But she stuck the paper in without a second glance, then started examining her zebra-striped nails.
“Grades are a form of patriarchal oppression,” I told her. I casually slid the blue notebook closer to me and tucked it under my disorganized binder. “And I will not tolerate it.”
“Yeah, go tell the Fraulein that. See how far it gets you,” Emily said.
“And since when do you care about grades?”
“I don't care about mine,” she said. “And I only care about yours because when you fail, I have to go to the movies by myself.”
“So you’re just using me,” I joked.
“Guilty as charged.”
The dissonant chime of the fifth period bell sounded. Like Pavlov's drooling dogs, my stomach started twisting into knots at the sound. I was going to fail so hard.
“Here goes nothing,” I said.
“Good luck.”
“You planning to go to class?”
Emily shrugged and took out her compact to check her lipstick. After perusing her lips, she took out a tube of sparkling gloss and carefully reapplied to her bottom lip. “She doesn't care when I'm late.”
So completely unfair.
I shook my head and headed out the back door of the library to the Language Arts hall. White cinderblock walls were plastered in neon poster boards reminding us, as if we could forget, about the Fall Court selection and all the spirit days next week. There were themed dress-up days for each day of the week. Cowboy Day, Eighties Day, and Nerd Day led up to Warrior Day on Friday when the Fall Court would be crowned at that evening's football game.
School spirit wasn't my thing, and I had plans to be as far away as possible. Friday was my birthday, which meant I would finally lose this stupid curse. Mom had grudgingly agreed to let me miss school on Friday. Of course, she thought I was simply celebrating my birthday, where I’d really be celebrating being a normal teenager again.
As her gift to me, Emily’s mom Kari was taking Emily and me shopping at the Mall of Georgia. Mom didn't really like Kari, but she had stepped up to help us after Val died, when even Dad had ditched us. She’d brought meal after meal for us when Mom was too depressed to get out of bed. She might not have been Responsible Parent of the Year, but Kari was all right by me.
Mrs. McDaniel was standing at the door. “Good afternoon, Ms. Young.”
“Good afternoon,” I said, ducking my head so she couldn't read the “I Didn't Study” message I felt blazed across my forehead.
There were already half a dozen other students in Mrs. McDaniel's room. The desks had been rearranged from their usual groups into rows for the test, which instantly made me nervous. The straight aisles between the rows were like a one-way street to Failsville, Population: Bridget Young.
A cluster of kids was grouped around Macie Reynolds, who was indisputably the smartest kid in the junior class. She was frantically reading through her flash cards again while her friends asked last minute questions. Give it up, I thought irritably. She would get the highest score if she dipped a hamster’s feet in ink and let it run across her test.
Another handful of girls milled around Allie Williams, who looked like she always did--picture freaking perfect. They were discussing the impending announcement of the Fall Court, of which Allie would no doubt be a member. She combed her fingers through her already flawless dark hair. I instinctively mimicked her, wincing as my fingers caught a tangle. If I had the best hair day of my life, and Allie walked through a hurricane, she would still have better hair.
Lucky bitch, I thought as I went for a seat. I finally chose a seat close to the window, on the opposite side of the room from Allie. In a final moment of optimism, or maybe desperation, I took out my copy of Hamlet. Its spine was still perfectly smooth, without those tell-tale reading creases like callused guitar fingers. I glanced through it, but it was definitely not the kind of thing you skimmed and then faked your way to a D.
I was vainly reading the commentary on the “To be, or not to be…” speech when John Chang slid into the desk in front of me and said, “Sup, Young?”
“Um, studying,” I said without looking up entirely. What did it look like I was doing, curing cancer?
“Hey, I’m going to see the new Vin Diesel movie this weekend. You want in?” When I hesitated, he said, “There’s a bunch of us. Kristen’s coming, and Nick and Justin, and probably Macie and Jaquira. It’ll be a group thing, no pressure.”
My heart thumped as I pretended to think it over. “Um…oh, gosh, I can’t. I just remembered I have to watch my little brother.” Truth was, Colin was probably better qualified to babysit me than vice versa, at least in Mom’s eyes.
John looked at me for a second like he wanted to give me a hard time, then finally said, “Okay. Well I’ll send you an invite on Facebook if something changes, cool?”
“Uh, it probably won’t,” I said. John winced a little and turned around to talk to another friend. I didn’t need pity invites, and I didn’t want to spend the whole evening wondering if they were thinking I was a total freak.
Mrs. McDaniel walked into the room and rang her silver hotel bell. As usual, she was dressed in black from head to toe, with huge turquoise jewelry and eye makeup that made Emily jealous. Emily had been trying all year to get me to ask if she got eyelash extensions. Right.
“Please clear your desks except for a pen or pencil,” she said as she circulated and checked our desks. “If you have your phone, please turn it off. Unless any of you are planning to be called in for an emergency open heart surgery. Then, by all means, set it to your loudest, most obnoxious setting. However, should your phone ring and you cannot present your current medical license, I will be forced to confiscate said phone and issue you a detention.”
Nervous laughter rippled through the room as a few of us pulled out phones. I had two phones—one was mine, and one was Valerie's. Yeah, it was weird. If it was anyone else, I'd be creeped out. I had on her old University of Georgia hoodie for good luck, a silver dragonfly pendant that had been her sixteenth birthday gift from Dad, and I was carrying her old phone. But the phone, at least, was for a good reason.
See, Val's phone was deactivated soon after she died. But no one informed the phone, apparently. Ever since Val’s death, her phone would ring every few months, with nothing but static on the other end. Within thirty minutes of the call, I’d encounter a new spirit. It was basically an early warning system for the lingering dead, so I always kept it on me. Unfortunately, it didn’t alert me every time a spirit was near. But when it rang, I knew to be ready. Being surprised by a ghost was not fun. But for now I switched both phones off and shoved them into my backpack.
A sheet of white paper landed in front of me. “You have the entire class period,” Mrs. McDaniel said as she paced, her high heels clicking on the tile floor in a distracting rhythm. “Please read the directions carefully for the essays; pick one or the other. Do not attempt to do both and gnash your teeth in lament when you can't finish them both. I will laugh at your misfortune and point to the directions in a most sarcastic fashion.”
We laughed in earnest. Mrs. McDaniel was by far the coolest teacher I'd ever had. I was miserably failing her class, but she didn't hold that against me. She had held me after class a few weeks before to tell me she knew I could do better, and that she knew I wouldn't disappoint her in the end.
I was glad that she had faith in me, because I sure didn't. The test might as well have been in French. Who the hell was Yorick? I sighed and puzzled through it, wracking my brain for snippets of our class discussions. Usually, I picked up a lot by listening. Problem was, I had been listening in class even less than I had been reading at home.
I hadn’t planned to be such a slacker. Over the last year, I had developed a bad habit of hiding my phone behind my thick binder. I made sure to periodically highlight my papers and nod thoughtfully while the discussion went on around me. To be fair, I wasn’t texting; I was searching old news articles for information on an unsolved hit-and-run from 1979.
By the time I was done with that case, the class had finished Act Two, and I hadn't even bought the book yet. I swore I was going to catch up with a couple of marathon reading sessions. Then Anna Cole appeared to me the day we started Act Four, and before I knew it, we had finished the entire play and I hadn't read a single word.
Enough was enough. I had to start paying attention and studying every day. The next book we read, I’d read ahead, take notes, and ask questions in class. Maybe.
Okay, I thought. You can do this. Maybe if I concentrated, I would remember something. Ugh. Why couldn't McDaniel give us multiple-choice tests? Then I could have gotten twenty-five percent on dumb luck.
I had just started to remember something about Ophelia when an electronic screech shattered the silence. The ear-splitting blast of music was so loud and distorted it was completely unrecognizable at first. I jumped in surprise and knocked my pencil off my desk. A dozen heads snapped around to the source of the sound. What idiot hadn’t turned off their phone? But no one was moving to turn it off, and I felt cold dread twisting in my stomach as the squalling resolved itself into a song I recognized.
From the front pocket of my backpack, Amy Winehouse belted, “Oh won't you come on over, stop making a fool out of me, why don't you come on over, Valerie?”
I looked up to see my sister at the desk in front of me grinning like a fool. She had her head turned carefully so I couldn't see the back. Her fingers twirled a lock of dark hair.
“Ms. Young?” Mrs. McDaniel said.
“I am so sorry,” I stammered. My fingers fumbled uselessly as I tried to turn off the blaring phone. I finally pried the battery off, silencing Amy in the middle of a “Valeriiiiiie.”
“I love that song,” Valerie said to me. I ignored her. My problems were big enough without me talking to thin air. This was just mean. She knew I had a test.
“The phone,” Mrs. McDaniel said. Her hand hovered expectantly over the test, and I didn't even protest as I put the phone and battery in her hand. She didn't look angry, but there was definitely some mild irritation in those arched brows.
“I am so sorry,” I said, my cheeks flushing as my classmates stared incredulously. Emily's English class would have been laughing and cheering. Why couldn't we trade?
“Get back to work,” Mrs. McDaniel said sharply, and everyone snapped back to their tests like obedient little drones. God, I wanted to sink into the floor and die.
I turned the test over to a blank page and scrawled, What are you doing here?!
“Just checking on you,” she said. “Sorry about the phone.” I heard her voice loud and clear, but no one else paid any attention. She craned her neck, the translucent spill of hair passing through my test and the desk beneath. “You should’ve studied.”
I was busy, I wrote, hoping that I was forming letters in a way that appropriately conveyed my irritation with her. I pondered, then added a frowny face.
“You want some help?” Val asked, unfazed by my frowny face. She moved behind Macie Reynolds in a jerky blur. “Wow, she's already halfway done. The character who represents Hamlet's foil is Laertes. That's number seventeen. Write that down.” She reappeared in the desk in front of me. “What else do you need?”
“Stop,” I wrote, and then underlined it three times. I turned back to my test. Though my conscience raised a vocal protest, I scribbled Laertes in the blank for number seventeen. I stared at it, and then erased it. I was a champion liar but I just couldn’t stomach cheating. Besides, I only lied because the truth would earn me an invitation to “talk to a professional.”
“It's not cheating,” Val said. I raised an eyebrow at her, and she put up her hands in surrender. “Okay, it kind of is. But you're going to fail.”
I shook my head and turned my test back over pointedly. I glanced over and saw Allie Williams staring at me like I had fourteen heads. Of course it would be her. I gave her an ugly look that made her snap her gaze back to her test. Allie and I had been best friends once upon a time, back before Val’s death. We grew up together, tried out for middle school cheerleading together, and cried together when we both got cut for having no talent beyond being able to walk and hold pompoms at the same time.
But most of my friends—except Emily—had disappeared when I made them uncomfortable with my grief. It had been cool for a while to be friends with poor Bridget, who had this thrilling family drama. I was a social accessory that made them look good for being sympathetic and supportive. But when I didn't bounce back to normal in a couple weeks, they got bored. When I needed them most, my “friends” disappeared. I used to get mad about, but I didn't hold it against them anymore.
I had changed. Seeing the dead had a way of changing your priorities in life. I really wasn’t the Bridget they used to know. Still, sometimes I wanted to slap them all, one in particular. It really wasn't fair that Allie Williams was Queen Bee around here while I was stuck seeing dead people, among them a prankster sister who got me detention and tried to get me to cheat on tests.
“Fine,” Val said with a sigh. “Don't be mad at me, Bridget. I'm just looking out for you.”
I glanced up at her, looking around quickly to make sure no one was watching. I whispered, “I know.”
“Okay,” she said. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”
I looked up at her for a long stretch, the test forgotten. Yes. No. Never.
See, the whole haunting thing sucked. But it did have its perks. Two years later, I still hadn’t really said goodbye to Val. Even in death, she watched out for me, just like she did when she was alive. She told me how to fix my hair and what clothes matched. She told me what to say to Mom to defuse her when she got door-slamming mad. She even told me exactly what Mom wanted for Christmas each year so I could surprise her and get brownie points. In every way that she could, she had kept on being my big sister, like nothing had changed.
And after my birthday, she would really be gone.
I shook my head at Val, and she nodded solemnly. Instead of trying to feed me answers, she sat quietly and watched me take the test.
Even before I finished my incoherent mess of an essay about Biblical imagery in the play, I knew I had failed. I kept my paper, pretending like I was really concentrating right up until the bell rang. In fact, I was carefully tracing the letters in the first dozen questions with my black pen. While my classmates made a mad rush for the door, I trudged over to Mrs. McDaniel, who already had a yellow detention slip for me.
“I'm so sorry,” I said again. “I thought I had turned it off.”
“It's okay, kiddo,” she said as she looked over my test. “I'm more concerned that you think Ophelia was Hamlet's father.”
“Right,” I said, looking down at my feet like my shoes were somehow responsible for my humiliating showing on the test.
“Look at me,” she said. She wasn't mean, but she was firm. Her face was serious as she asked, “Did you read the play?”
“No ma'am,” I admitted.
“Any of it?”
“No ma'am.”
I expected her to roll her eyes and shake her head in exasperation before telling me to go on and quit wasting her time, but she didn't. She actually looked concerned as she cocked her head, setting her turquoise earrings jingling. “You've been really distracted these last few weeks. Is there something I can do to help you?”
“Uh…not really,” I said. “I've just had a lot on my mind.”
“Well, if there's something I can do,” she said, her words hanging heavy as she trailed off. When the year started, she had accidentally called me Valerie, who had been a star student in her class the year she died. Apparently, I had looked completely mortified, because she stopped class to apologize. But the whole reason I had looked like that—mouth wide open, tomato red face—was because Valerie happened to be following me around that day, dishing the dirt on the teachers she knew. For a moment, when she called the wrong name, I thought McDaniel had actually seen her. Even so, she spent the next two weeks apologizing every time she saw me.
“It’s cool,” I said again. “I'm going to get it together.”
“Tell you what,” she said. “I'll let you retake this next Monday. Different exam, of course, and what you get this time is what you get.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “But you have to get focused. Whatever's on your mind, let’s deal with it and get you back on track. And if I can help you, please tell me.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And I will.”
“But you still have detention,” she said with a wry smile.
“I know,” I said. “Sorry again.”