A Curious Tale of the In-Between (2 page)

“You’re getting older now,” Aunt Nan said. “Ms. Appleworth doesn’t think it’s fair that a girl as bright as you is being taught by the likes of us.”

“You’re great teachers,” Pram said, although she knew that she was being generous. Her aunts could barely keep up with her arithmetic worksheets, and they didn’t know the definitions of nearly as many words as Pram did.

Aunt Dee leaned toward Pram and patted her cheek sympathetically. “Ms. Appleworth just wants you to have a good education. That’s her job, you know: to make sure that children are getting a good education. You’ll start on Monday, and we’ll see how it goes.”

The air inside the house had grown thin. “I’d like to go outside now,” she said.

“Brush your hair first,” Aunt Dee said.

“
And your teeth,” Aunt Nan said.

Pram trudged upstairs, her feet feeling twice as heavy. When she returned downstairs, her aunts presented her with toast and more jam than they’d usually allow. It was the best that they could do.

She wasn’t hungry, but she understood the gesture and she ate the whole slice.

Once outside, Pram ran as fast as she could through the fallen leaves. She ran until she reached the pond; she sat at its edge and stared at the green water until her eyes felt heavy with tears.

“The others will make fun of me,” she said.

A cloud blocked the sun, then moved away from it, as though playing a game with the light.

“What others?”

Pram wiped at her runny nose. “Felix,” she said as the boy sat beside her. “You startled me.”

“Why are you crying?” he said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were so.” He turned his head to the pond and blew, and the reflection of the leaves turned gold. Pram blinked, and they had changed back to normal. She giggled, and Felix smiled with triumph.

“They’re making me go to school,” Pram said. “I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I’ve read about how cruel kids can be.”

“
Are you afraid they’ll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel?” Felix said.

“Both, I suppose.” Pram touched the pond with the heel of her foot. “Have you ever been to school?”

“No,” Felix said. “But I always thought it seemed fun.”

“It won’t be,” she said. “It won’t take the other kids long to realize I’m strange.”

“I don’t think you’re strange,” Felix said.

Pram fell back into the grass, sighing. “You’re a ghost,” she said. “You’re strange, too.”

“A little rude to bring it up like that,” Felix said, lying beside her. “I still have feelings.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Pram said. “I’m sorry. But don’t you see? The other kids will catch me talking to myself and ridicule me.”

“You aren’t talking to yourself,” Felix said, reaching up his arms and arranging his fingers like a picture frame. The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

“But they’d see it that way,” she said.

Felix shrugged. “You’ll have to be clever and not get caught.”

Pram was indeed very clever about not getting caught. In Smith’s tailor shop, where Aunt Dee brought their clothes for repair, there was a ghost named Clara; she wore
a
burgundy dress and a feathered hat. She knew she wasn’t alive, but she liked to pretend, twirling about the shop, trying to sell Pram bolts of fabric. She spoke to Pram in English, followed by a prompt translation in French.

While Aunt Dee talked to the tailor, Pram would hide behind the bolts of fabric and play along with Clara, asking to see the silks and for pricing on buttons. But Pram was very careful, and she had never been caught talking to her. And Clara was a mischievous one; she wanted Pram to be caught, just to amuse herself. As it was, Aunt Dee just thought Pram was fascinated by the buttons pinned to the wall there.

Felix was the only ghost that Pram saw every day, though, and therefore it was trickier for Pram to keep him a secret. It did help that her aunts thought he was imaginary; to them she was just a child whose imagination was growing with her.

“Maybe your first day won’t be scary,” he said. “My first day as a ghost wasn’t scary. At least, not that I can remember.”

Pram turned her head to him. “You’ve always told me that you don’t remember the day you died.”

“That’s just it. I don’t remember. So how scary could it have been?”

Pram laughed. “I wonder if you were as interesting when you were alive as you are now.”

“
Don’t know,” Felix said. “But the spirit world probably changed me. It’s quite different here.”

“How so?” Pram asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to explain it. Just different. You can see more than regular living people can see—me, for instance. But there are other things you’d have to be dead to see.”

“Maybe I’ll see for myself when I’m old and dead, then,” Pram said.

“Don’t be in any hurry,” Felix said. “I like you alive. I like the way you see things. It makes you who you are, the way the spirit world makes me who I am.”

“I like you, too,” Pram said.

They watched the clouds for a while, and then, feeling bold, Pram grabbed Felix’s hand. His touch was like the ground on a sunny day—she could feel the warmth from where the light had touched him, but beneath that she could feel dead, earthy coldness. She wished he were alive. She wished that when her heart was beating double, she could give one of those hearts to him and then press her ear to his chest and feel it beating.

Across the grassy field, in the two-hundred-year-old colonial, Aunt Dee stood at the window, watching Pram, who lay alone by the pond.

Maybe more time among the living would do the girl some good, she thought.

CHAPTER

3

M
onday came, its sky dripping with rain.

“Go on, then,” Aunt Nan and Aunt Dee said as the door to the bus yawned open.

Pram had never ridden a bus before, and she found the largeness of the vehicle daunting.

“Haven’t got all day, cookie,” the woman at the steering wheel said. She was pear shaped.

Hesitantly, Pram boarded the bus. Its floor vibrated from the engine, amplifying her nerves, causing goose bumps. She felt goose bumps only when she was around Felix, mostly, or on the mornings she awoke with an inexplicable chill in her blood and learned at the breakfast table that one of the elders had passed.

The other kids filled all the seats.
They are paper cutouts
rather
than people
, Pram thought.
They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite.
It eased Pram’s mind to pretend that they were dead—that this was a bus that had crashed somewhere. But most ghosts were friendly, or at least talkative. Like Clara in the tailor shop, and the dead man who wandered the road that led into town, who often forgot he was dead and tried to flag down cars to give him a ride. They realized Pram could hear them, and they had hundreds of years’ worth of words for her. None of these children said a word to her.

At the end of a very long, very lonely walk down the aisle, Pram found a vacant seat. There she made herself small against the window, and the bus began to move.

The empty seat at the back of the school bus was like a cold hug. It wasn’t kind, but it wasn’t unkind, either. It kept her safe and invisible. Pram began seeking more such places once she arrived at the school. She found an empty seat at the back of the classroom, beside the window and in front of the cubbies that held the lunch boxes, which were curtained by soggy raincoats on hooks.

“You’re in my seat,” a boy said.

His eyes were blue, and so bright they were like an accusation. He was nothing like the gray kids on the bus and in the hallways. He was as alive as could be.

“Your name isn’t on it,” Pram said with as much
confidence
as she could muster. To further assert herself, she raised her chin.

The boy with the blue eyes smirked, and Pram wasn’t sure if this was to be a kind smirk or a cruel one. “My name’s right there,” he said. “Under your hand.”

He nodded to her palm, and when she removed it from the desk, she realized that it had been covering the initials
C.B.

“Clarence Blue,” he said.

“Those letters could mean anything,” Pram said. “‘Courageous Beast,’ or ‘Crusty Bread.’”

“They stand for ‘Clarence Blue,’” he said. “I should know. I’m the one who carved them.”

Pram traced her fingertip along the slope of the
C
. “You have nice penmanship,” she said.

“Thank you,” Clarence said.

The bell rang. It was shrill and it startled Pram.

“Take your seats!” the teacher called from the front of the room.

Pram didn’t budge. She had found a spot fair and square, even if someone else’s name had been carved into it.

Clarence took the seat beside her, his eyes on her the entire time. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he’d smiled for a moment.

As it would turn out, Clarence always favored the most
hidden
seats. During lunch, Pram ran into him when they both happened to approach the last table before the exit, beside the trash bins and under a light that had gone out. Unlike with the school desk, there was room for both of them here.

“After you,” he said.

“Thank you,” Pram replied.

She opened her lunch box and began unwrapping the slab of strawberry cake her aunts had packed for her lunch.

Clarence raised an eyebrow. “Your mother lets you eat cake for lunch?”

“My mother doesn’t let me do anything,” Pram said. “She’s dead.”

Clarence stared at his sandwich. “Oh.”

Pram took a fork to her cake, bitter with herself for having said something so strange. Death made people uncomfortable; her aunts had taught her this. The elders made people uncomfortable, too, and that was why they had been left with her aunts to be cared for.

The only ones that made Pram uncomfortable were the living.

“My mother’s dead, too,” Clarence said.

“Oh,” Pram said. “Would you like some cake?” It was too much cake for a small girl to eat alone; her aunts (Aunt Nan in particular) showed their pity with food.

“
Yes, please,” Clarence said.

Pram severed the cake slice in half with her fork. And as she shared her cake, she wondered why Clarence sought out the shadows the way that she did. He had a face that was just right for making friends. Dozens of friends, if he wanted. To Pram, most of the people in the living world were gray, but Clarence was bright and vivid. In fact, he was the loveliest living thing she’d ever seen. Why would someone like that want to hide?

She couldn’t know that Clarence was wondering the same thing about her.

The bell rang, once again startling Pram. She packed up her lunch box and then she stood.

“Wait,” Clarence said. “You know my name, but I still don’t know yours.”

“Pram,” she said.

“What about your last name?” he said.

Nobody had ever asked Pram for her last name. She almost didn’t remember it. “Bellamy.”

“Last names are important,” he said. “Last names are older than us. They draw a line way back into our history, further than we can follow it.”

“Bellamy” had been her mother’s last name, which her mother had shared with her older sisters, Pram’s aunts. Pram didn’t know her father, but she supposed the line of his family history led into the sea. Her mother had fallen
madly
in love with a sailor, and that was how Pram was conceived. That was all her aunts had told her of her father. He was a sailor, and he left one day and never returned. He never came to collect his daughter—if he even knew he had a daughter at all.

Pram had been told that her mother died in childbirth, and that it was likely her father never knew about her, and they didn’t know how to reach him. Her aunts made up this lie to protect her, and to provide her with closure. They couldn’t know the horrible guilt it had given Pram—a guilt that would only increase each year as she grew to appreciate the tragedy of it. She had ended a love affair between a beautiful young woman and a sailor. She felt that, at the very least, she owed her father an apology. And at the very most, she owed him a daughter, if he would have her.

CHAPTER

4

F
elix stepped out of the tree’s trunk. “How was school?” he said.

“All right,” Pram said, searching the grass because she thought she’d seen a ladybug. She didn’t see much of them this time of year, so it was a fair guess that it was a ghost. The only way to know the difference between a living insect and a ghostly one was that the ghosts were impossible to catch. She’d cupped her hands around several of them over the years, and when she opened her hands, they would be empty. The insects would reappear on her nose or in her hair. It was a game they played.

“Just all right?” Felix said. “Were the other kids as cruel as you’d thought?”

Pram
shook her head. “They didn’t even know I was there.”

“They clearly weren’t looking,” Felix said. He couldn’t imagine anyone not noticing Pram.

“I like it better that way,” Pram said.

“Me, too,” Felix said. He stared at the grass. His cheeks were pink. He was quite good at mimicking the living. “I wish we were the only two people in the world,” he said.

“Maybe not the only two,” Pram said. “There should be some exceptions. My father, for starters.”

“Are you still going on about that?” Felix said. “He didn’t want you, which means he’s a fool.”

“He might not know about me,” Pram said. “Or he might be angry with me.”

“Why would he be angry?” Felix said.

“Because I killed my mother,” Pram said.

“If he thinks that, he really is a fool,” Felix said.

He frowned to see Pram’s glum face. He grabbed the ribbon tied in her hair. With a single pull it came undone, and Pram’s white hair opened from its ponytail like it was coming to bloom.

“Hey,” she said.

“Want it back?” he said, and ran away.