Belman — not Little Belman, but the real Belman — was back giving us a hard time the next day at school. He came up behind us in the cafeteria and didn’t say anything at first. Julie had something called a bento box that her dad, who was Japanese, had made for her, with Japanese food: sushi, edamame, and seaweed salad. (Julie’s mom was American, and when she made Julie’s lunch it was usually just a peanut butter sandwich.) Belman grabbed a piece of sushi, lifted the top slice of bread off Greg’s peanut butter sandwich, and shoved the sushi down on the peanut butter. Then he smashed the bread back on top. He started to do something with Julie’s seaweed salad, but she pinched the back of his hand with her chopsticks and that stopped him.

“Hey, I was just going to look at it,” Belman said. “I never saw anybody eat grass before. I thought only cows did that.”

“It’s not grass,” Julie said. “Now leave us alone.”

Belman pretended to have his feelings hurt. “Ouch! Here I am just trying to be friendly and you’re being rude to me. That’s not nice.”

“You’re not nice,” Greg said, examining his sandwich and probably trying to decide if it would still be edible if he took the sushi off.

Belman’s voice changed, and so did the look on his face. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not. Especially when some little punks go scaring my sister. We look out for one another in my family, so you three better watch out.”

He didn’t wait for us to respond. Instead he grabbed Greg’s peanut butter sandwich — with the sushi still inside — and ate it. Then he left.

“I’m beginning to not like that guy,” Greg said, which was the understatement of the day.

That afternoon at band practice we had just worked our way through one song when Julie stopped playing, right in the middle of the chorus.

“What?” Greg asked. “Why’d you stop playing?”

“Because I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “About the ghost.”

Greg and I waited, still holding our guitar picks above the strings as if Julie might decide instead to finish the song. She didn’t.

“Well, ever since Little Belman said the ghost was a girl, I keep picturing his face and just, well, wondering.”

“You mean if he could actually be a girl?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I mean no. I mean I’m not sure. He’s so young, for one thing. And you can tell he doesn’t shave. There’s no beard or anything, or even, like, the stubble of a beard. Or peach fuzz. And remember how when we first saw him I said ‘she’ instead of ‘he,’ but I didn’t even realize it at first? Maybe I subconsciously recognized that the ghost was a girl even then.”

“That could be,” Greg said. “And another thing — we were talking about how the ghost had a New York accent and maybe an Irish accent, but did you guys notice he also has a pretty high voice, kind of like a girl’s?”

“This is crazy,” I said, even though I had noticed that, too. “Why would a girl be in the army? And pretending to be a boy?”

Greg drummed his fingers on his guitar for a second. “They let women in the army now,” he said.

“Yeah,” I countered. “But they didn’t let them in back then.”

“About that,” Julie said, “I’ve been doing some research.”

“And what did you find out?” I asked.

“That there were actually hundreds of women who fought in the Union and the Confederate armies during the Civil War. They dressed up like men, in uniforms, and just pretended they were guys.”

“Wow,” Greg said. “That is crazy. Why would they do that?”

“All kinds of reasons,” Julie said. “Maybe they wanted to serve with a family member, or even their husband, or maybe they just believed in the cause they were fighting for so much that they wanted to be part of the fight, or maybe for a lot of them it was for the money. There were a lot of really poor people back then, and women didn’t have a lot of options for jobs that paid very much.”

“But how could they get away with it?” I asked.

“From what I read, it wasn’t very hard,” Julie said. “They’d cut their hair short, and uniforms usually didn’t fit too well so they’d get a loose-fitting uniform. And a lot of times when you joined the army they didn’t have a doctor examine you, they just maybe looked at your teeth and made sure you had two arms and two legs and the right number of fingers and toes, and made sure you could see okay, and that you weren’t too obviously sick, and that was the end of it. So nobody ever saw you with your clothes off.”

“What about when you took a shower, or went to the bathroom?” Greg asked. “That must have been weird.”

“Not really,” Julie said. “Back then they hardly ever took baths or showered or anything. They slept in their uniforms. And if you went to the bathroom you could just go out in the woods and do your business and nobody had to see you. It just wasn’t that hard to pull off pretending you were a man. Or a teenage boy.”

“So are you saying that our ghost was — is — actually a girl?” I asked.

Julie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just saying that Little Belman got me wondering if it’s possible, that’s all.”

“Well, anything’s possible,” I said, though I still wasn’t buying the idea.

“Did you find out anything else in your research about this?” Greg asked, not ready to quit the topic.

Julie nodded. “Here’s the totally crazy part. There were at least three women that they know about who fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg. One was a girl, a teenager, named Lizzie Compton. She had joined the army — pretending to be a boy — when she was just thirteen or fourteen, and she fought in a bunch of battles, on the Union side. She got wounded during the Battle of Fredericksburg but recovered. That’s how they found out she was a girl — when the doctors were treating her and bandaging up her wounds.”

“What did they do then?” Greg asked.

“Made her leave the army,” Julie said, “but apparently she just joined up again under a different name and fought with another unit.”

Greg grinned. “That’s awesome.”

“And there was another woman, a lady named Sarah Edmonds,” Julie continued. “She used the fake name of Private Franklin Thompson, and during the Battle of Fredericksburg she was an orderly, and she rode a horse for twelve straight hours the day of the battle, under fire just about the whole time, bringing orders and reports from the headquarters to the front and back.”

“What about the others?” Greg asked. I was too dumbfounded by all Julie was saying to ask any questions myself.

“The third woman who fought on the Union side, they just knew she was from New Jersey, and she was a corporal at the start of the battle, but she was so fierce and heroic in battle that they promoted her to sergeant. And that’s not all.”

Greg and I were both just sitting there openmouthed, stunned by all Julie was telling us.

“It turned out that during the battle she was pregnant!” Julie exclaimed. “And a month later — just one month later! — she had a baby.”

That was so wild that Greg and I had to laugh and shake our heads. “You swear you’re not making this up?” Greg asked.

Julie raised her right hand. “I totally swear. And that lady Sarah Edmonds, she actually wrote a book that was sort of about her experiences in the war. In her book — which was a bestseller right after the war — she pretended that she had just been a nurse and a spy during the war, but stuff came out later that people knew about her actually being in uniform during the fighting and pretending to be a man.”

“So it’s definitely possible that our ghost is a girl!” I said, still not believing that I was saying such a thing. But the more Julie talked, and the more I pictured our ghost, and the more I thought about her voice and the way she looked, and how certain Little Belman was, the more I was starting to come around.

The dogs next door got louder again with their barking and we all looked over at the wall.

“This would be the perfect time for the ghost to show up,” Greg said. “You know, we’re talking about him and zeroing in on this big question, and then, boom, dogs start barking and then he shows up and remembers everything.”

“Just like in the movies,” Julie said.

“What movies?” Greg asked.

Julie sighed. “It’s just an expression, Greg. You know how movies always end in clichés. Coincidences happen. That sort of thing.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly a movie,” I said.

The ghost must have agreed, because he — or possibly she — didn’t show up that afternoon. We stumbled through a couple of songs and then we all went upstairs to head for home.