Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator (4 page)

I loitered for a moment longer, until the secretary looked up and made a shooing motion—like I was a pesky mosquito buzzing in her ear. “Go to class,” she repeated. “You’ll be called down for an appointment as soon as possible.”

Meh.
Gym
. I considered hiding in the library or the nearest bathroom until first period was over, but skipping class usually meant detention, and detention meant spending even more time at school. I could stomach gym for one day. After all, it was the first day of class, and nothing ever happened on the first day.

Feeling like a clueless freshman, I checked the map in the school handbook and crossed the courtyard in the general direction of the gym. On the way, I looked over the rest of my schedule. At least there were no other disasters listed. I’d even gotten a fifth-period drawing class as my other elective.

I crossed onto one of the walkways and stepped into another building, where I ended up at one end of a long hallway. One side of the hall was lined with trophy cases. The other sported the most god-awful mural I’d ever seen—a crooked, disproportionate, yellow-and-green Trojan warrior with a football impaled on his sword. Wow. Had the principal lost a bet with another school or something?

A set of double doors, one green and one yellow, loomed ominously at the end of the hallway. Heading toward them was like making that final stroll to the execution chamber. Dead girl walking.

Maybe it sounds overdramatic, but I don’t think it’s possible to express how much I hate gym.

Hoping the guidance counselor was zipping down the line of discontented sophomores at somewhere near the speed of sound, I pushed open the gym doors and slipped inside.

Immediately, a basketball came flying at my face. I screamed and ducked; the ball bounced off the top of my
head, which hurt, but not as much as if it had smacked me on the nose.

“Hey!” A beer-gutted man in a green-and-yellow cap stalked over, a whistle on a lanyard bouncing against his wide chest. “You’re supposed to come in through the locker room entrance.”

I rubbed my throbbing scalp.

“Sorry, I didn’t know. I’m looking for…” I paused and glanced at my schedule. “Beginning Gym with Coach…Frucile. Is that you?”

“No, I’m Coach Perelli,” the man snarled, as though I’d committed an unforgivable sin just by approaching him. “Coach Frucile’s back there.” He jammed a thumb over his shoulder toward a group gathered at the other end of the gym. When he turned back to the tall boys, his stomach jiggled under his Palmetto High Basketball T-shirt.

I made my way around the perimeter of the gym, keeping an eye out in case any more rogue sports equipment decided to attack. The pain in my head was down to a minor pounding, but I wondered if I should tell this Frucile person what had happened. Maybe I’d get sent to the school nurse. Regardless of whether I was actually hurt, sitting in the nurse’s office sounded a lot better—and safer—than staying here.

Before I could speak up, though, a muscular woman
with short red hair beat me to it. “Beginning Gym? You’re late! Name!” she barked.

It took me a second to realize she’d meant that as a question. “Um, Violet Addison.”

“Addison.” She held a clipboard with what I assumed was an attendance sheet, but she seemed to freeze for a moment when she heard my name. She looked up, focused on me, blinked. “You’re Addison.”

“Um, yeah.”

She paused for another second, then made a mark on the clipboard. Weird.

I tried for sympathy. “I just got hit with a basketball, and—”

“Basketball unit isn’t until November. Get in line.” Behind her, the class stood in four straight, timid lines.

“Okay, but—”

“You’ve already missed five minutes of orientation. In line!”

Her tone made me panicky. “Which line?”

“Pick one!”

If I’d had a tail, I would’ve tucked it between my legs. I left my bag near the wall with the others and retreated meekly to the shortest line. My face felt hot; being singled out always makes me blush, something that’s mortifyingly obvious when you’re as pale as I am. The coach went back to
her orientation speech, yammering about attendance and doctor’s notes and gym clothes. Since I had no intention of staying in her class, I tuned out until I heard her holler, “Addison!”

Oh, what now?

“Get up here. I’m using you as an example of inappropriate footwear.”

The lead weight in the pit of my stomach turned into a total cannonball. I trudged up beside her, while everyone stared at me.

She pointed to my feet, but she addressed the entire group. “I don’t want to see shoes like this in my class. Proper sneakers only.”

I looked down at my poor, defenseless Chucks. “These are sneakers.”

“No arch support, bad traction, poorly padded soles,” she rattled off. “Make sure you have acceptable athletic shoes when we start dressing out next week. And those of you with long hair like this,” she continued, still gesturing toward me, “make sure it’s pulled back. Addison, back in line.”

Fuming, I obeyed her latest command, letting my hair fall in my face in defiance.

Ten minutes later she called over Coach Perelli, and they both walked us to the locker rooms. There the group split into girls and boys. Perelli followed the boys into their
locker room, while Frucile followed the girls into ours.

Everything was okay for about three seconds. Then I felt it. I felt it and I wanted to run. Something supernatural was in the locker room with us, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to know better. It built up around me like a storm cloud, all anger and rage, and hot, clammy fear, and the longer I stood there, the stronger it grew. It came from everywhere at once in the too-warm room. I felt its clammy tendrils wrapping around me, pulling me deeper, closer, toward a darkened alcove to the right.

It usually takes a lot to scare me, but five minutes in the girls’ locker room did the trick.

The presence was so strong—why couldn’t anyone else feel it? My classmates stood around looking bored and fiddling with their lockers while Frucile continued her orientation lecture, barking louder and faster than ever.

“School-approved locks only! Locks are five dollars, which you’ll get back at the end of the semester if you return the lock in working condition. My office is over there,” she said, pointing to a closed-off space to the left of the main changing area. “And the showers are right here.” She walked to the dark alcove and hit a wall switch. A row of fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed to life, revealing a series of tiled stalls sporting meager green-and-yellow shower curtains.

There was something so wrong in that alcove. You
could’ve covered me in mud and dog crap, and I still wouldn’t have showered in there. I guess Frucile kept talking; I couldn’t hear her over the blood drumming in my ears. As the thing and its endless, invisible dread swirled around me—trapping, constricting—the edges of my vision began to go white. The air around me went freezing cold, then swelteringly hot again. I couldn’t breathe.

I needed to get out of there. I spun around and went back into the gym. If the coach called after me, I didn’t hear. I couldn’t. There was only the roar of my pulse and that thing’s silent yet deafening rage.

Back in the gym, I bent over, resting my hands on my knees. I could finally fill my lungs again; I had never before appreciated the simple luxury of a deep breath. I had no idea what had just happened; all I knew was that I’d never encountered anything like that before, and I was never, ever going back in that locker room. Whatever was in there, it couldn’t have been a ghost. Mom had taught me when I was little that ghosts might be scary, but they were never threatening or just plain evil. That thing in there, though? Totally evil. The lead cannonball in my stomach grew roots and became an anchor.

I was still catching my breath when the class filed back in, chased by Coach Frucile.

“Addison!” she said when she saw me. “I don’t
appreciate you leaving in the middle of orientation.”

“Asthma attack,” I lied. “My inhaler was in my bag.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask to see the inhaler as proof, since I didn’t have one.

“Don’t think you’ll be able to use that as an excuse in my class without a doctor’s note,” she said. Then she clapped her hands and went back to yelling at everyone instead of just me. “Get back in your lines. These are your teams for the semester. We have just enough time for a volleyball intro before the bell rings.”

The anchor grew big enough to ground a cruise ship.

“Addison! You serve.” Coach Frucile lobbed a volleyball at me. I screamed and jumped aside to avoid another collision; my left sneaker skidded on the freshly varnished floor, and I fell backward onto my butt.

“That’s why I require proper sneakers,” Coach Frucile told the class.

Screw this. It wasn’t like I was staying in the class, so I didn’t need to play nice with Coach Frucile, especially since she was so hell-bent on picking on me. Embarrassed tears pricked my eyes as I grabbed my bag and left—through the side entrance this time. I ducked into a nearby restroom and waited until the bell rang; it took me that long to stop shaking.

I had Algebra II second period, but I was only in class
for ten minutes before a student aide from the guidance office showed up with a slip of paper bearing my name. Sweet. Meanwhile, poor Emerson Bean, Esq., sat in a classroom somewhere, miserably waiting to be summoned.

I was ushered into the office of Mrs. Ortiz, the sophomore guidance counselor. Mrs. Ortiz already had my transcript and schedule pulled up on her computer; she smiled pleasantly but blankly across her desk, giving no sign that she remembered me from when I’d registered the week before. She had tired eyes with dark bags underneath.

“Hi, Violet. What seems to be the trouble?”

“I’m in the wrong class,” I said, sitting down.

Her eyes darted back and forth as she skimmed my schedule on her monitor. “I’m not seeing a problem. Which class?”

“Beginning Gym.” I shivered, still shaken from my freaky locker-room experience. “I was supposed to have Intro to Film.”

“Hmm.” She hit a few keys. “Nope. Intro to Film is full. We had to place you elsewhere.”

“I picked alternates, too. Intro to Poetry. Pottery.”

“I’m afraid those are full as well.”

I tried to remember the other choices. “I’ll take anything that isn’t gym. Home Ec? Chorus? Drama? Intro to Basket Weaving?”

Mrs. Ortiz chuckled but shook her head. “I don’t see any alternatives that’ll fit your schedule. Stick with gym for now. It’s a requirement for graduation anyway, so you might as well get it out of the way.”

Ohhhh, no. No way. “I took a semester of gym last year at Lakewood; I already have that credit.”

She looked at my records again. “I don’t…Oh, okay. Personal Fitness. A Personal Fitness credit from the Brevard County school system can’t be transferred as a gym credit here. They’re categorized differently.”

“But it was a gym class! With awful gym clothes and grumpy coaches and basketballs hitting me in the head, just like here!”

“I understand that, but the system won’t let me reclassify the credit on your transcript.”

“So I’m stuck?”

“It’s just a semester, Violet.”

Yeah, a semester of drowning in horror in that locker room.

“Coach Frucile and I don’t get along. I already left today’s class early because she threw a volleyball at me.”

“I’ll write you a note and say you were meeting with me.” Mrs. Ortiz scribbled on a pad and tore off the top sheet. “Give her that tomorrow. She’ll excuse you for today.”

Out of arguments, I took the note and left. Maybe
Dad would be okay with me serving daily detentions for the rest of the semester. That was exactly what I’d be doing, since I intended to skip first period every day until the spring.

Returning to Algebra II meant crossing from one building to another. There was a puddle in the walkway, probably from one of Florida’s regular afternoon showers the day before. I splashed through it without a thought, went inside, and squelched down the hallway toward my classroom.

“Do you mind?” someone said behind me. The voice was gruff and familiar. “I just mopped that!”

I yelped a little in surprise and spun around. “Henry?”

Sure enough, the ghostly janitor stood a few feet away, busily mopping. “Yeah, who else? Told you I worked for the school system, didn’t I?”

“Sorry, I was just—”

“Look at that mess.” He jabbed his mop at my wet footprints. “And this darn thing ain’t good for nothing anymore.” Apparently the giddiness he’d felt at the thought of going back to his job instead of finding his wife had worn off.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Darn kids today don’t have any respect. Didn’t your mother ever teach you to wipe your feet?”

And that was when my patience—what was left of it—gave out. “Oh, shut up, newbie,” I said, forgetting to keep my voice low. “Either cross over or quit your bitching!”

“Violet?”

I glanced over to where Mrs. Brown, my Algebra II teacher, stared curiously at me from the classroom doorway. Oh crap.

“Everything okay?” she asked uncertainly.

“Um, yeah.” I shrugged.

“Why don’t you come back in, then?” She spoke in the sort of soothing tone one might use on a seriously unstable person, and since she’d just seen me apparently talking to myself, she probably thought that was the case.

I nodded and returned to my seat, ignoring the stares I got along the way. Everyone in the class had apparently heard my little outburst; I hadn’t done my reputation any favors with that one.

The state of Florida has this funny habit of building or renovating schools so that they’re just big enough for the current population of the district, which means they start running out of room as soon as more families move nearby. Palmetto High is more than sixty years old; it’s the oldest school in the area, and its last renovation was more than five years ago, which explained the bank of portables out back. Connected by a crooked, hastily poured concrete walkway, the trailers sat in a marshy field, the kind of not-quite-swampland that floods and attracts snakes during the rainy season, and wasps all year long.