Inside, the barn is dark and musty and smells so bad that I cough and cover my face with my hand. A barrel full of tools sits by the door, and there’s a dirty shovel propped into a pile of straw. The stalls are all empty, and there’s a loft on the far side.
I sit down in a corner and rest my suitcase between my legs. It’s the only nice thing I have, all brown and leather, with brass along the edges. I flip the latches open and push aside my small selection of clothes to reveal a tan bottom, though if you measured the depth on the inside and the size of the outside, you’d know the numbers don’t add up. I rub my fingers along the side, feel for the seams, and pry it up to reveal the secret compartment, a few inches deep.
I scan the contents, making sure everything’s there. The camera, my knives, cotton and glue, the black-painted board, a book of matches, a spool of string, a stack of yellowed photographs, along with other odds and ends I’ve stolen along the way.
I take everything out, refold, rearrange, count the pieces as if some of it might disappear if I don’t check it again and again. Maybe I should try to sleep. I didn’t get much of it last night, not on the noisy train or in the rattling cab. The barn floor is hard, but I arrange a pile of straw and circle it like a dog, trying to find a way to get—
“Freeze,” a voice says.
Out of the loft, a boy’s head rises. His eyes are wide like two little moons, and his yellow hair is as stiff and unkempt as the straw pile. He points a BB gun at me.
“What’re you doin’ here?” he asks, trying to make his voice sound deeper than it is.
I slide my suitcase behind me and stand.
“Good day,” I say, as pleasant as I can muster.
“Who are you?” He cocks the gun.
“Is that a Daisy rifle?” I ask, unfazed by his threat. His aim is off, and he can’t hold his hands steady.
“Markham,” he says, looking down at the name on the stock, and I start climbing the ladder.
“Stop it!”
“Oh, you’re not going to shoot me, and we both know it.”
I pull myself onto the loft and he backs up, holding the gun across his chest like a shield. Now that I’m closer I realize he’s as old as me, though he’s shorter and skinnier. He has a thin face and kind eyes, though he tries hide that.
“Do you live here, or are you running away too?” I ask.
He blinks, stunned at the question.
“Running away? You’re a runaway?” he asks, lowering his voice.
“Didn’t I just say that?”
I sit down, stretch out my legs like I own the place and he’s the one that’s visiting.
“Where you runnin’ from?” he asks.
“Florida,” I say, mainly because that’s the first state on my mind.
“Ain’t that far away?”
“It is, but I hopped a train and rode it north. Been wandering around for days, looking for a spot to stay. Where’s this?”
“Pennsylvania,” he says, sitting across from me, a snake enchanted by the charmer’s flute. “Right outside of Glensboro. You came all this way on your own?”
“So what if I did?” I say, stepping closer, waving my hand at the gun. “Let me see that.”
He doesn’t oblige.
“What was in that case of yours?” he asks, and suddenly I feel exposed, like all my secrets are there to be pulled apart and displayed for his greedy eyes.
“Nothing. Just some clothes and other things. Whatever I managed to take from home ’fore I ran away.”
“Looked like you had a knife,” he says.
I cluck my tongue.
“That’s my Hidden Place. Isn’t a girl allowed to have some secrets?” I ask, and try to change the topic of conversation. “What’s your name?”
“George,” he says. “You?”
“Violet,” I tell him. My mother’s name. “What are you doing out here with a gun?”
“Shooting,” he says, and on cue, a gray bird flaps its wings against the barn ceiling and settles on the edge of a triangle-shaped window. “They leave a mess all over the floor, and Pa says I either got to deal with them with my gun or clean it up with the mop.”
George props the gun on the loft rail and hunches over. He squints his eye and holds his breath, exhales and squeezes the trigger. The shot is off by a foot, and the bird flaps and flies out the window and away.
I start laughing and George’s face turns red. He stares at me with his mouth hanging wide open.
“You made me miss!”
“Did not. You got as much aim as a baby.”
He thrusts the gun at me and nods at a small target he has set up in the corner.
“You try to hit the center, then, if you think it’s so easy,” he says, but I shake my head.
“I’m not much for guns. It’s not ladylike.”
He eyes my torn dress and bloody leg.
“Ladylike,” he says with a laugh. “Can’t see you being too concerned with that.”
“You don’t know a thing about me.”
“Then tell me.”
I lean against the railing and cross my legs, realizing I have a fresh audience for my imagination.
“Let’s see. Well, I snuck out in the dead of night. It was freezing cold, and—”
“It was cold in Florida?”
“Sometimes,” I say. “We lived farther up north.”
He nods, as if that’s a good enough explanation.
“A train passed behind our house, same time every evening. I could hear it all the way across the swamp. I fought my way through, keeping an eye out for alligators, until I found the tracks. I waited until I could hear it coming, then I started to run, hoping I could catch it before it passed me.”
“It must have been going pretty fast.”
“It was,” I say. “But I made it. Ran with all my might and barely grabbed hold of the last car’s handle. You’ll never guess what I saw inside when I pulled myself in.”
“What?” he asks, spellbound.
“A whole group of drifters. Dozens of them. Men, mostly, and a few women down on their luck. They travel on trains all across the country, you know.”
“Wow,” George says.
“They were nice. We ate cans of cold food and sang songs all through the night. I wanted to get far away from home, so I stayed with them until we got to—”
What state is above Florida?
“—until we got to another state. I hopped off and set up camp in the woods. Lived there for a time, drinking from streams and eating fruit from the trees, going into town to steal whatever I could. And that’s when I saw it—the circus. It had just pulled in and was looking for help, so I told them I’ll do any job they want. Shoveling elephant dung. Cleaning the lion cage. I didn’t care by that point. Well, the one circus man takes one look at me and says, ‘You seem about the right size to be an acrobat, have you ever—’”
“You ain’t telling the truth.”
“What do you know about anything, George? You ever leave this town in your whole life?”
He looks down his legs.
“So . . . did you join them?”
“For a while. It was good while it lasted. We went from town to town, and they were teaching me lots of things. Said I could be the best acrobat in the world if I kept it up, but I don’t much trust circus types. Guess if I knew what was waiting for me after, I might have stuck it out.”
“Really? What happened next?”
George’s eyes are wide and innocent, and he’s caught in my web.
The story moves on to wild tales about my time picketing with the suffragettes, hitchhiking on highways, trips on riverboats, and the convent of nuns I escaped in Virginia. All of it’s made up of course, pieces of things I’d read in books or overheard from Mr. Spencer and his friends.
“So, what made you leave your home?” he asks, awestruck by my stories.
I move back in time, back when my mother and father were still alive, and John and I could play in the yard and run our hands through the flowers that lined the edge of the lake. I tell him about our house, the little school I went to, all the perfect days, one after the other. It’s still a story, but like most stories, contains a mixture of truth and lie. I tell him my parents died in a fire instead of the flu, and how I ran away before the court could take me to an orphanage.
“What happened to your brother?” he asks, interrupting me.
I pause for effect. “He died, too,” I say, stopping my story there. I was getting carried away, and it’s best not to tell him too much. “What about you?”
George tells me all about his three younger brothers and his dog and the little orange cat that hunts for birds in the garden. His voice is soft and smooth, and I like listening to it. He tells me about his school and his old teacher who whacks him on the ear whenever he gets an answer wrong, and how much he hates going and wishes he could be a runaway like me. I want to grab him, look him in the eyes, and tell him not to say a stupid thing like that. I want to tell him how lucky he is and how much I’d give to be able to go back to a time when school was all I had to worry about.
We sit in the loose straw for what feels like hours, and maybe it is, because the sun is lower in the sky now. Each day is getting shorter than the last.
George must trust me, because he slides a pile of straw to the side and lifts a board, revealing a secret compartment of his own.
“I have a Hidden Place, too,” he says, pulling out a metal box.
“What do you got there?”
“Treasures.”
“Well, go on, what’s inside?” I ask, and he hesitates to show me even though I can tell he wants to. Finally, he cracks it open and sorts through, holding stuff up piece by piece.
It’s just a bunch of old trash, mostly, scraps of paper and rusted metal pieces, funny-shaped rocks and old toys, but he handles each piece like it’s the most valuable thing in the world. There’s a pack of old, brown playing cards, a rusty pocketknife, some arrowheads, and a leather sack stuffed with fool’s gold. George has a story for everything, and I like listening to his adventures by the river and digging through mud under knotted trees.
“Oh! You have to see this!” he says, pulling out a metal tube. “Pa got this in town years ago but says it ain’t as good as his lamp, so he gave it to me.”
It’s shiny, and looks like the handle of a sword, except where the blade would be is a small disc of glass.
“What is it?”
He gives a mischievous grin and aims it into the corner of the loft. His thumb flicks a button and the end of the tube flashes light in a brilliant beam against the dark corner like Mr. Spencer’s camera flash, sending shadows of straw against the wall.
“Wow!” I say, and he switches it off. “Hey! Leave it on.”
“Can’t for more than a few seconds at a time,” he explains. “Burns out the bulb. It’s only good for quick flashes of light.”
“What’s it called?”
“Flashlight,” he says, and I laugh real hard at that because I think he’s making a joke, but then he points it at my face, switches it on, and bright spots appear in my vision. I fall over, laughing.
It’s nice to talk to someone other than John and Mr. Spencer.
“So, where you running away to, anyway?” George asks.
“The Silver Star Society.”
He looks at me, mouth open. I shouldn’t have told him.
“You ain’t really.”
I nod.
“Silver Star,” he whispers, like he’s in a trance.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Yes.” George leans in, whispers, “They say people can talk to the dead there.”
“That so?”
“You shouldn’t go,” he says.
“Why not? I thought maybe I could ask my parents what they thought of my new life.”
I’m teasing him now, but the words get caught in my throat. What would my parents think? They’d probably tell me to stop lying, and they’d be pretty sad about how Mr. Spencer treats us, but I know they’d be proud of how I take care of John.
“I’m serious. Don’t go.”
“Are you scared, George?”
“No. Everyone knows that place is a fake. You’re best turning around right now. They trick people into thinking they can talk to ghosts, but there’s no such thing. Pastor says it’s evil stuff, and anyone that goes there is likely to get possessed by the devil.”
“You’re not making much sense,” I say. “Either it’s fake or it’s the work of the devil. It can’t be both.”
“Sure can,” he says, and how do I argue with that?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, George. No one knows if ghosts are real.”
Except I do. They’re as real as the cotton and pictures hidden in my suitcase.
“Well, I know it’s a Spiritualist place, and Pa says it’s full of wicked people. He won’t let us go anywhere near it, even takes the longer route to church so we don’t see it when we cross the hill, and—”
“Which direction is it?” I ask, ready to end this conversation.
“That way.” He points. “Just a couple miles if you go through the woods.”
“I better be leaving, then,” I say, standing up and crawling down the ladder.
“Don’t go,” he says, poking his head up to peer down at me through the hole in the loft. “Whatever reason you want to talk to ghosts . . . it ain’t worth it.”
“I have to.”
“Will I see you again?” he asks, and I shake my head, smiling coyly.
“Not unless you visit the Silver Star Society. Ask for Liza if you’re brave enough.”
“Liza?” he says. “I thought you said your name was Violet.”
My face gets hot. I forgot about that. Mr. Spencer was right; I can’t keep my stories straight.
“Doesn’t matter what my name is,” I say, grabbing my suitcase and heading toward the door. “You can’t trust anything I say.”
“Well, who are you really?”
“Nobody,” I say. “I’m dead, George. Just a ghost.”
And I leave so fast that he probably thinks I’m telling the truth.