Cara Shultz: The Dark World

I stood up and carefully slid the book back into its space on the shelf, my fingers brushing the worn blue-and-gold spine of the 1955 yearbook. I yanked the book off the shelf and rapidly flipped through the pages, looking for a photo of Dottie. I needed more evidence that she once lived—that the girl in the bathroom was, indeed, a ghost. But when I didn’t find Dottie listed among the sophomores, I found myself looking up her sister, Lorraine. She was beautiful in that polished, fifties way, with blond bangs rolled thickly, eyebrows perfectly plucked and arched. But Lorraine’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes—they looked heartsick. Grief-stricken. And where most seniors penned cryptic comments and inside jokes for their yearbook inscriptions, Lorraine’s merely said, “Polkadottie, I miss you every day.”

I grabbed the yearbook and ran back up to the bathroom, but Dottie wasn’t there.

“Boo,” I heard from behind me, and I dropped the yearbook on the floor. The binding hit the white tile with a loud slap that reverberated in the bathroom, and I yelped.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help it!” she said with a lighthearted giggle, her brown eyes glinting with mischievous joy as I picked up the yearbook.

“This is about you, isn’t it?” I asked gingerly, flipping through the book and opening it to her sister’s page.

Dottie studied her sister’s words, her eyes misting over with what looked like tears, and I wondered if ghosts could cry.

“Oh, Rainey,” she murmured, blinking back the mist. “Of course she would do something like that. I should have talked to her before...before I...” Her voice trailed off, her eyes sorrowful. And then Dottie told me her story, about how she rashly decided to kill herself after she found out she was pregnant. I told her my story, which sounded like a fairy tale compared to her heartbreaking, tragic end. I didn’t get home until nine o’clock that night, which led my very worried parents to ground me.

But I didn’t care: it’s not like I was going to go anywhere that was more intriguing than the third-floor bathroom at school. It was where Dottie died—where she felt the strongest. I spent every free period, every lunch hour, in the bathroom talking with Dottie. When I was in class, she roamed the halls, spying on teachers, sometimes whispering answers to me when I was stuck on a test. It was pretty helpful, since I couldn’t exactly concentrate on my studies while my mind reeled with the fact that I could communicate with spirits. And Dottie made it her personal mission to make sure I’d beat Pepper as valedictorian, since she felt responsible for my social leprosy.

There was only one downside to having a ghost as a best friend—other than people thinking I was insane and all—Dottie couldn’t leave the school. When she was in my world, she was tethered to Holy Ass, as they had nicknamed the school when Dottie was a student. When I was away from the building for too long—home sick or on vacation—Dottie was sucked back to that dark world, as she called it. Where it was at once hollow and filled with nightmares. She didn’t like to talk about it, no matter how many times I’d tried to wheedle some details out of her.

My cell phone beeped, breaking me out of my reverie. I didn’t bother to look at it—I got the same text every day from my father, just “checking in.”

“You have to go?”

“Yeah. You’d think I was brought home regularly by the cops or something, the way my parents stalk my every move,” I huffed. “I’m not a delinquent. I’m just apparently crazy. But you know my parents.”

“No, I actually don’t,” Dottie reminded me with a wry smile, and I instantly regretted my off-the-cuff comment. “But I wish I did. I wish we could have slumber parties, listen to records, watch color TV and all that.” She smiled bashfully. “I get so lonely.”

“Me, too,” I admitted. My time away from Holy Assumption wasn’t an undead nightmare like Dottie’s, but Bellevue Kelly’s phone didn’t exactly ring a whole lot. I was a little lonely, too.

“Maybe you’ll meet a boy soon,” Dottie chirped, not-so-subtly segueing to her favorite topic—boys. She was perpetually a boy-crazy fifteen-year-old and, in spite of her crushing experiences with the opposite sex, remained a true romantic.

I, however, was a realist and merely snorted in reply. “Yeah, wish me luck finding a guy that doesn’t mind when I have a scintillating conversation with the walls.” I’d gotten better at telling the difference between ghosts and humans, but every now and then I screwed up, earning wary glances from anyone within earshot. The last guy I dated—okay, Chris was the only guy I’d dated, for a whopping streak of three dates—was two years ago, back during sophomore year at my first school. On our final date, I’d talked to a ghost by the carousel in Central Park. You could say it was a bit of a romance-killer.

“You should talk more to that new boy. He’s quiet, but he seems nice,” Dottie mused, “and he’s always borrowing pens from you and talking to you about assignments.”

“Who, that Logan guy?” I asked, surprised, and Dottie nodded, wagging her arched eyebrows up and down. “He wants my pens. Not my sweet, sweet lovin’.”

“Your pens are pink with feathers and glitter and purple paw prints on them,” Dottie said, folding her arms, before adding with a saucy tone, “I doubt it’s really your pens he wants.”

“Oh, please,” I scoffed. “He’d use crayons if he didn’t have anything to write with. I’m pretty sure I’d use eyeliner if I was pen-less before a pop quiz.”

“Look, he’s not exactly my type,” she said, waving her hands dismissively, “but he’s a potential dreamboat if he got a proper haircut.”

“He’s a transfer who hasn’t heard yet what a psycho I’m supposed to be and suffers from a debilitating inability to bring in school supplies,” I countered. I didn’t tell Dottie that I’d started bringing in extra pens in case Logan needed to borrow one. Why encourage her? “Besides, Dots, you make it sound like he’s fawning all over me when he’s merely polite.” Logan had slid into the seat across from me in the library only last week while I ate Hershey’s Kisses and studied Spanish. He’d quietly asked questions about our assignment as Dottie hovered over me, gushing about him and offering incredibly outdated advice on flirting. She practically had me dropping a handkerchief, leaving me wondering if she was from 1950 or 1850. I’d done my best to tune her out—even casually scratched the side of my cheek with my middle finger to give her the hint—but Dottie wasn’t much for subtlety.

I jumped off the radiator, my feet slapping against the white tile floor with a dull thud. I wanted an end to this conversation—quickly. There was no point in getting my hopes up. I was destined to check “forever alone” under my relationship status for the rest of my life.

“Maybe you’ll meet a guy who can talk to ghosts,” she said, a faraway look on her face. “When you come back to visit me after graduation, you’ll have some wonderful stories to share about the dreamy Big Man on Campus who fell for you at college.”

Dottie was too busy swooning over the fluffy fairy tale she was spinning about my fictional college life to think about what me going to college really meant: that Dottie would stay trapped on the other side.

Dottie couldn’t follow me when I left the confines of our school, and she couldn’t seem to materialize in our world unless I stayed close to where she’d died—the third floor of our school.

“I’ll walk you down—I want to be near the library,” Dottie told me. I nodded, and pulled open the bathroom door for Dottie. She didn’t like walking through walls.