Ghost Perfume | ✔

Chapter 6: Haunt Me (Part 2)

... She pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief ...

Viola's lines were beautiful, dark and romantic, but they stung me inside like a cut at my thread. Like an accusation. I knew green and yellow ... I knew patience, and pining in thought.

But things are changing, I reminded myself. I'm going to try to change them.

The bell rang for the end of the day. The class packed in a flurry of activity and rising voices. "Read Act Five if you haven't yet,'' Miss Bellow called. "There'll be a quiz tomorrow!''

Oh, I was wrung out.

There was a flaw in my plan to wait for Jackal: when waiting was tinged with fear, it was exhausting. I was acting suspicious too - jumping too much at noises, edging away from people, looking around a bit too wildly. Mr. Mooney had actually called on me in front of everyone, asking if there was a fly in my hair.

There was only one way, I'd decided, that I could really put an end to the waiting, and that was if I could find or call to Jackal myself.

I nodded surreptitiously at Carl and Lena as I packed my things. They'd appeared during lunch, frightened and confused and so obviously different from Jackal that I knew in my soul they were normal ghosts.

At my nod, now, they hovered closer. They followed me into the hallway.

I'd had an idea, and I hoped they could help me with it.

I stopped in the art room for tape to close up the hole in my boot.

Outside was a damp and cheerless scene - the snow trampled to grey slush on the paths between the school doors and the bus stops, the sky like a fogged and grimy window, hanging low over our heads. Idling yellow buses, and the line of parents' cars behind them, made the only spots of color. I walked around the building, away from the muted bustle of everyone's escape from school; I'd walk with Carl and Lena through part of the small forest that bordered the school on the other side, then I'd catch a public bus home from the town center.

I smiled at the shabby little collection of trees as I came into sight of them. I liked to walk in their steady, weather-beaten presence. I thought I focused better.

They stood thin and far-apart there on their blanket of fallen pine needles or snow. Surviving the years, and not claiming too loud to the title of forest. As they ran north they began to form a forest proper just a few miles away from the school, clustering denser, till they met the mountains.

Each tree alone was just a tree. Together, they gathered into something greater, countless, uncountable.

It was quiet in this sparse stretch. Not a soul except for my ghosts and I. The snow was pristine under the trees, only a couple of tracks of old footprints tracing a path.

I stepped along the footprints, addressing the ghosts. My boots crushed snow and pine leaves underfoot.

"So, first, I want to reiterate that you don't have to help me at all,'' I started. "Say the word that you want to cross the portal, and that's what I'll help you do.''

"Forget it,'' Carl said bracingly.

"You've made us curious,'' Lena said with a wink.

The couple smiled at me, wrinkles crinkling up around their mouths and eyes. They looked almost like a pair of siblings, in that way that couples have of seeming increasingly alike as they stayed together.