Shutter(16)

There, in the darkness, I could see the crime scene just as it was before we arrived, preserved in the silence. Erma’s ghost pulled itself back over the side of the bridge and looked straight at me.

“Time to wake up,” she said.





CHAPTER TEN

Pinhole

EVEN THOUGH GRANDMA and I tried to get back to normal, there was nothing but darkness for months. My aunt Ruth had tried to move into the house to help Grandma, but Grandma didn’t want her there. She was angry. Whenever she looked at Ruth, all Grandma could do was remember Gloria.

The lights that I saw now were strangers. They were at the post office checking their boxes or walking along the side of the road when Grandma and I drove to town. They were everywhere, just like the real people were, everywhere but at home.

When I went back to school, the kids were afraid of me. I’m not sure what they had heard, but I felt more alone than ever. Without Gloria to back me up, I wondered what would happen to me out on the schoolyard when no teachers were watching. But no one bothered me. They feared me. I spent almost all my time there by myself. Until the day I met Judith.

I was washing my hands at the sink, lathering up powdered pink soap when I saw Judith in the mirror for the first time, staring at me from the door. When I turned, she was gone. I looked back to the mirror, where she had moved closer. Her head drooped to the side like a puppy. She looked like she was in first grade, like me, and wore a gray dress with a white collar and brown shoes. Her face was colorless and her hair a dark black. A blue bow wrapped her braids. We stared at each other through the mirror until she spoke.

“Can you play with me?” Her voice was shaky and full of echoes.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Yes.” I barely finished the word before she appeared in front of me, no longer trapped inside that mirror in the bathroom.

We played almost every day after that, swinging together and hanging upside down on the monkey bars. We laughed and talked each day during recess. Eventually, I tried to take her picture, bringing Grandma’s black box to show and tell. Judith stood in front of the class facing me, a faint smile on her face when I pulled off the tape. No one believed it was a camera. No one but Judith.

I noticed that the other children had started to stare. One of my classmates walked over to me and Judith during recess. “My auntie says that you talk to dead people,” she said, food dried around the corners of her mouth. “Are you talking to someone dead now?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

Judith looked at me in silence and placed her finger over her lips.

“Nothing,” I said and watched my classmate walk back out into the sand.

After recess, the teachers had us line up single file and march into our classroom. Five girls, including myself and Judith, decided to go to the bathroom before going down the hallway. I finished quickly and headed toward the door, but Judith pulled me back.

“Don’t let them out,” Judith hissed.

“What do you mean?”

She started to laugh, a high, haunted laugh that spread through me as I shut off the lights in the bathroom. The girls, still sitting in the stalls, began to scream at the top of their lungs. I ran out and listened as stalls slammed open and closed and their little feet raced to the door. I held it shut as the girls cried and screamed inside. All Judith and I could do was laugh.

“Stop that right now, Rita.” Our teacher, Mrs. Smith, ran toward me and pried my fingers from the door handle. Judith’s laugh had become my own, echoing through the walls. When the door opened, the three girls rushed into the arms of Mrs. Smith, their faces wet and red. I was sent straight to the principal’s office. I was in trouble, and Judith was nowhere to be found.

I hated seeing Grandma walk into the principal’s office. She was tired—I could see it on her face, and I could feel it when she moved closer, sitting next to me in front of the principal’s looming wooden desk. They began to talk about me, about my difficult behavior, my isolation, my obsession with talking to myself, and now, this episode in the girls’ bathroom. I drowned it out and focused my energy on looking for Judith. It took only a few seconds for me to wish her into the room.

Judith stood quietly in the corner, perched beside the window, her appearance a misty haze.

“You got me in trouble, Judith,” I scolded. “You should be sitting here with me. This was your idea.”

Judith roared with laughter, her head pulled back, her neck elongated like a chain of bone. Even though she was a girl, I felt a timelessness to her evil.

“Who are you talking to, Rita?” Grandma’s voice broke through it.

Judith crept up behind Principal Bennett and rested her fingers over her pursed lips, her stare becoming harder.

“I’m so sorry to trouble you with this, Mrs. Todacheene, but Rita needs to learn that this is inappropriate behavior and will not be tolerated. I’m already getting calls from the parents of some of these girls. We’ve had to send them home early; they were so terrified.”

“Do you hear this, Rita?” Grandma raised her voice.

I looked at the ground. I had not wanted to hurt anyone. Thinking of the terror of the poor girls in the bathroom made my guts sink like a rock.

“I’m sorry, Grandma,” I said. I was sorry. Mostly that I had hurt my grandma. She had already been through so much, and here I was, making it even harder. “I’ll stop talking to her.”