Dreaming of Amelia (20 page)

Those, my dear, are me.

I'll leave you with some ghostly sounds to help you sleep:

SHRIEEEEK! SHRIEK. HOWL! SHRIEK!

CLATTER CLATTER CLATTER!

SIGGGGHGHHHH! SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!

CLANG!

CLANG!

Moan.

Yours evermore,

The Ghost

[As you've no doubt guessed, the ghost's recollections of events from my childhood are accurate — and include details I don't think I've ever told friends.

I spent this morning asking all the computer experts I know for their views on how a hacker might infiltrate my Word document like this. They were mystified.

The above was the final ‘letter' I received from the Ghost. I watched the screen for another half-hour or so. I typed repeated (and increasingly manic/angry/pleading) letters of my own. There is no need to include those here. The only response was silence and a relentlessly blank screen.

I sign off myself now, hopeful that my readers might offer an answer. And terrified, I am ashamed to admit, of typing at this computer. The ghost interrupting, keys falling away beneath my fingers — like slipping down a staircase in the dark.]

End of Transcript

Emily Thompson

THE STORY OF TERM 2 AS A GHOST STORY

1.

Listen!

I have a story to tell!

Come closer and I will tell it! Closer! Closer, I say!

No. Seriously. Closer than that.

Okay, great.

My story is a ghost story!
And, by lucky chance, it is also the story of Term 2!!

Every word in this story will be true. Oh, you will doubt me repeatedly. But then you will apologise for doubting! When you come face to face with a ghost! Along with categorical, documentary proof that this ghost not only exists but is alive and well and living in the Art Rooms of my school, such documentary evidence to include a photograph that will make the hairs stand up on —

But I am getting ahead of you.

And so, without further manifestation, here it is!

The story begins early in the morning on the first day of the term. Close your eyes, picture a ghostly, shimmering effect, and then? Startle yourself with an image of me with a group of my friends. We are prancing along the frosty streets —

Excuse me. We were not prancing. In the spirit of honesty,
I have to say that we'd been up all night and were nearly comatose, so, no, we were not prancing.

Never mind.

We reached our favourite café and the coffees were embalming to our souls.

It so happens that I was sitting beside my friend Astrid. She had broken up with a boyfriend the night before, so now we were lost in intensity. That is, she was listing the boyfriend's flaws.

Now, most details of this conversation mean nothing to my story — and I leave them on the table with our empty coffee cups . . . However, this one detail. I will tell it.

Astrid told me that one of her boyfriend's flaws took place early in the year. It was the second day of the year, she said, and she and the boyfriend were in Geography in Room 27B of the Art Rooms.

As she uttered those words — Room 27B of the Art Rooms — a curious twinge hit me. I am deathly serious. The twinge hit the centre of my upper lip. I touched my lip and the twinge went away. I remember that I thought to myself:
Huh
.

Astrid explained that she had been chatting quietly with the boyfriend — when suddenly —
suddenly
— she had felt cold.

Not just cold, you understand, but freezing cold. As if icicles taken from the Danish Alps were spearing the back of her neck. (Those are Astrid's vivid words.)

She decided not to mention how cold she was to the boyfriend. She would keep talking and let her chilliness shine in her eyes. If he loved her, he would notice.

But did he? Did he say, tenderly, ‘Are you cold?' Or: ‘Why are your eyes shining so strangely?'

No. None of the above.

And that was a flaw.

At this point in my conversation with Astrid, I paused. Being a fair and reasonable girl, I wondered if Astrid was the same.

I took a thoughtful sip of my latte, looked up — and there was Seb.

(I give you a line, dear reader, to catch your breath.)

Seb is a Brookfield boy. He was standing at the counter waiting for coffee. I had not seen him for months, not since he broke up with Lydia, but now he was raising a finger in the air to say hello. He was grinning at me in his friendly Seb way, and yet
—
and
yet
, I thought I saw something complicated in that grin. My eyes flew to the seat opposite, where Lydia had been sitting. It was empty. Where was she? I looked around and found her through the window: she was standing alone on the footpath outside. I turned back to Seb. And suddenly all was clear to me.

Seb had just seen Lydia outside.

He had asked her to get back together with him.

And she had said no.

You may wonder how I knew all this.

I simply did.

I am a student of love.

‘I
know
,' I said to Astrid, taking a guess at what she'd been saying, and she continued speaking of her breakup. (Leaving a perfectly great guy was taking its toll.)

I'm sorry to say that I did not concentrate. All I could think was that the
true
tragedy was the breakup of Lydia and Seb.

Oh, Lydia,
I thought,
it is great that you are Lydia, but must you always be?

There she stood on the path outside, deep and proud in thought, but to me her shoulders looked vulnerable and cold.

Cold.

Something cold struck me in the face.

I realised what it was: Astrid had said she'd felt freezing cold on the second day of term. I remembered that day. It had been very, very hot.

But Astrid had felt freezing cold?!
How could this be?

One week later, I knew how it could be.

There was a ghost in the Art Rooms.

2.

‘A ghost in the Art Rooms?!' you exclaim, and look around nervously. (Especially if you happen to be reading this story in the Art Rooms, LOL.)

Be calm, gentle reader. We still have a little time before the terror begins. (We also have time before we see Astrid again — between us, that is a relief. It's great to have a friend like Astrid, but sometimes it's even greater to take a break from her.)

Come! Take my hand! We will trip through the term — and you will watch out for ghostly clues . . .

That first week of term — well, what happened? We were getting our half-yearly exams back, so teachers kept pulling stacks of papers from their bags, and trying to make their faces solemn. They never succeed at solemn at these times. I think they are just too proud of themselves for having got the marking done.

Why? Why so proud? I mean,
marking is their job.
(But this is an aside.)

Some of my marks made me ecstatic beyond reason, and some were like machine-guns blasting black holes in my heart.

That is how it always is with exam results for me, and I think that you, sweet reader of this ghost story, will agree that there is something
very wrong
with an educational institution that gives out inconsistent marks. Think about it. If I deserve good marks in
some
subjects, then logically I deserve them in the rest. It's a mathematical equation and maths is always right. (Otherwise, what's the point of it?)

So, I was very busy that week. I had to have a series of mood swings because of my exam results, and the swings swung extra low when the following horrific event occurred.

An Economics class had just finished and I was talking to Mr Ludovico about my exam result.

‘Economics is not an exact science,' I explained. ‘If it was, there would not be global financial meltdowns. Therefore, you can't actually judge that I was wrong in any of the questions, and you should increase my mark.'

He laughed. ‘If we tried out some of
your
economic theories, Em,' he said, ‘the meltdown would be more than just global.'

Then he sauntered from the room.

I turned to Cass and pointed out that Mr Ludovico made no sense. What else was there besides global? Global covered everything. That was its point.

People were packing up around me.

I said that Mr Ludovico's laugh sounds like an espresso machine.

I said that
weeks ago now
, I had asked Mr Ludovico to sign my application for Law at Sydney University, and he still hadn't done it. (It's a new requirement this year: the application has to be signed by your school principal.)

‘It's supposed to be just a formality,' I said. ‘But of course, Mr L has to turn it into a kind of a power play. He's probably going to make me wait until the day it's due.'

Cass said that Mr Ludovico is on the KL Mason Patterson
Trust Fund Committee with her mum, and her mum says he never comes to meetings because he's always too busy.

‘He should not have taken on the job of principal,' I said, ‘if he could not cope with the responsibilities.'

Cass agreed.

‘Don't forget, you should all be reading the
Financial Review
,' said a voice.

It was Mr Ludovico.

He was standing in the doorway, speaking to the room.

He hadn't left at all.

He must have heard every word I said.

3.

So. That happened.

What else?

Well, my mother collected my brother and me from school. This was unique. Mum is a busy lawyer but this year she has taken long service leave, to work on her Masters and spend more time with us. She is excited by everything about being a mum as she's never actually done it before. She even gets excited by traffic jams.

‘Who knew there'd be so much traffic at three-thirty in the afternoon?' she says. ‘I guess a
part
of me knew there was a
school rush hour
, but was it a conscious part?'

And when we slow down for school speed zones she says, ‘It's great that the kids are safe, but do they really need to be
this
safe?'

She's just joking around, but it makes the drive almost like a party, since William and I catch her craziness.

4.

The second week of term began — and so did the rehearsals for the Brookfield-Ashbury Drama Production. Lyd, Cass and
I are in the English stream of the production which means we're on the team of scriptwriters. There's a complicated thing about us writing and rehearsing at the same time, which is too tedious to explain, so I will only say that it's a total disaster.

Never mind.

The first rehearsal was in the morning. (Morning rehearsals are ridiculous because people do not turn up, including me, I mean to say, I'm sleepy enough as it is.)

It was astonishing, that first rehearsal, and here is why:

Brookfielders came to our school.

I know: Why astonishing? It's a Brookfield-Ashbury production, so of course Brookfielders came.

And yet I was astonished. You see, even though I had ‘known' that the Brookfielders were coming, I think that a profound part of me had not ‘believed' it.

I never expected to see Brookfielders in my school except as an invading force.

And to be honest, they do look very strange here. Maybe their uniforms clash with the walls?

Anyway, there we were in the auditorium, watching the Brookfielders arrive. Ironically, they didn't seem to realise how strange they looked. They wandered around easygoingly, without even caring that their shirts were untucked or that their shoes were multiple and downtrodden. (Here at Ashbury our shoes are all the same: black, shiny and reflective.)

A few of the Brookfielders looked at our audio system. It is the kind used by the UN General Council — and yet it only made the Brookfielders laugh.

Strange. Never mind.

More Brookfielders arrived, and one of them . . . was Seb!

He paused in the doorway, letting other Brookfielders push their way around him, and you could see he was relaxing his
shoulders. It is most heartbreaking, I think, when a confident person like Seb has trouble relaxing his shoulders.

Then he noticed Lyd, Cass and me, and grinned his Seb grin. It's a grin that makes his eyes as reflective as my shoes. He came straight towards us. I had strength of character and didn't turn to watch Lydia for her reaction. But even without turning, I could feel it.

She was brighter, warmer, and an electric force field flew up around her so that anyone who tried to touch her would have dropped dead on the spot.

I stepped away a little.

The force field hid the bright, warm Lydia, but being a student of love, I knew that she was there. Poor Seb is just a boy, however, and could only see the force field.

His grin broke in half.

Bravely, he joined us anyway, and Lydia raised an eyebrow at him.

Seb told us that Mr Garcia, the director of the drama, had sent him a letter, asking him to supervise set design. He did not say this to show off; he was letting Lydia know that he was not there just to chase her.

Her force field relaxed.

We wondered how news of Seb's artistry had reached Mr Garcia — maybe the sweet picture books Seb and Lyd used to make together; they used to circulate at our school until the principal banned them because they were too violent — but then we were interrupted by the
next
astonishment!

Amelia and Riley walked in . . . !

Last term Mr G had asked them to join and they'd been all: ‘No, no, not in a million years, thanks for asking.'

This term they must have been all: ‘Okay.'