Ghost Girl by Delia Ray

Author:Delia Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summer took me by surprise. I had stayed so close to our hollow all spring, I was amazed when Daddy came home saying work was hard to come by with the farmers in the valley so worried about drought.

Then I remembered it hadn’t rained since that day in early May when the Hoovers came to the Sunday prayer meeting. But living in our hollow under Doubletop, with the mountain blocking out the sun most of the day, the ground around our cabin still felt damp and spongy under my bare feet. And the spring was running fine, plenty enough to water our vegetable patch up in the clearing.

Still, Daddy stood on the porch, shaking his head and saying it was going to be a long summer. That’s when it hit me. “Do you know what the date is?” I asked in a rush.

Daddy gave me a strange look. “June. The twentieth,” he said. “Why?”

“Just wondering,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm. But inside, I felt my stomach turn queasy. June. I remembered Miss Vest telling the class that school let out in June. We’d all have a break from our lessons, she had said, and she planned to spend her three months of vacation with her family in Kentucky. What if she had left already?

The next day Mama was so busy lining up chores for Daddy, she barely noticed me heading out the door. “I’ll be weeding up at the clearing,” I called as I grabbed the hoe next to the back step. I started up the path toward the garden, then veered off into the woods, leaving my hoe in the crook of a tree. Then I ran, not even stopping to check the stones in the creek for Aunt Birdy like usual. I wasn’t wearing the sling anymore, but my arm still ached sometimes and I had to keep it bent against my side while I ran, like a broken wing.

By the time I started up the last slope toward the schoolyard, sweat was trickling down between my shoulder blades. At the top of the hill, I stopped, hugging my arm and squinting against the baking sun.

I was too late. With the blinds drawn down, the schoolhouse looked naked and lonely. The yard had been swept clean of lunch pails and balls and jump ropes. It was so still, I could hear a squirrel scrabbling through the bare branches of the chestnut. Off in the distance, the mountains stretched out in quiet green waves.

I wandered up to the front steps and stared at the clumps of pink petunias Miss Vest must have planted before she left. They needed watering. I knelt down and yanked at a couple dandelions that had pushed their way up through the drooping flowers. The tops kept snapping off in my hands.

Miss Vest had given up on me, all right. She must have planted her flower bed with Ida or Luella or one of the other girls. Now she was off in Kentucky for the whole summer, maybe for good, and I hadn’t even told her goodbye.

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