Leah kept her eye on the empty white sky and on a girl’s dirty sneakers that hung over the side of the slide, talking to someone else, ignoring Leah completely, they all ignored her at first. A calamity of floral scent from the flowering vines on the fence nearby, the names of which she would never know, trembled. They ignored her at first and then a boy with hair that curled at the nape of his neck hooted at her in the hall. He said, “I’d run away too if I was your brother. I wouldn’t want to be the brother of no fat lezzie.” And the boys around him howled. They all cackled and clapped and there were girls in pristine Tretorns by lockers covering the grins and the boy said, “You know he’s dead. You know that, right? He’s probably dead somewhere. Probably covered in maggots, crawling all in and out of his mouth and eye.” And then he ran over to her as she stood stricken on the wide tile of the hallway and put his arm around her, “Don’t cry, baby. It will be okay. I heard he’s haunting the third floor girls’ bathroom now. You can see him every time you take a shit.” And everyone in the hall died, just absolutely died, and Leah shook and her skin boiled with blood.
On the playground the girls in the bright shoes talked on the slide. “Do you ever think about it? About being dead? About going to heaven or hell? About being trapped, forever, inside a house? A ghost? Do you wonder what it would be like to be forever but to not be alive? That would be terrible, wouldn’t it? I mean, to have to be in the school forever? Or to have to live in your house forever and to have to watch your parents cry every night and to have to watch them get old and die and to see new people move in and not care about you or even know you lived there and have to watch people go to the bathroom and sleep together and they can’t hear you and it never ends? And what if the house burns down? What happens to you? Do you get to go to heaven then or do you have to haunt an empty lot forever and ever? Haunt a gravel pit? Haunt a grassy path? Haunt a parking lot? That doesn’t seem right. I’ve never heard of a ghost in a parking lot or in a park. I know you think about it. I know you think about him and wonder where he is. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know. Wait, listen, wait. Do you ever think—”
One morning, she woke with a pop, like the string on a bow snapping. She sat up and the room was a watery blur. Yelling, she made it down the steps to where her mother was standing in the morning sunlight that came through the high foyer windows. “I think something is wrong,” she said. Her eyes were bleeding. She had to go to school for three days with bandages across both eyes. For three days the edges of the whispers in the rooms and halls were sharpened. Every poisoned sibilant and each spiteful plosive expanded to fill the whole of her sensory experience. Rather than listen to the teacher talk about long division and Kentucky history and sedimentary rocks, she heard nothing but a swarm of empty sounds that she was certain were meant for her. After the bandages came off, her eyes were still red for several days and framed by large new glasses, and the boys in line for lunch leaned over and asked if her face was getting its period and then, so proud of themselves, they couldn’t even laugh. One boy who’d been held back two years sat next to her during lunch while the other smaller boys watched and he put his hand on her leg and told her that she was really getting nice titties and even the girls laughed, because it was embarrassing to have breasts, and Leah, ashamed to have her body noticed, tried to fold up inside herself. “I saw him,” someone shouted and then they would roll back their eyes, and moan a moan that would fill the school’s hallway, bright with winter light.
They weren’t bad children, were they? They just wanted to carve their names into something while they were still sharp.
“—no one is watching us—”
That was her life for the next three years. When she looked back on the time now, Leah didn’t remember much. Nothing stood out. She went to school, but there were only about three or four days that she really remembered. That round boy crying and the light on her father’s straining neck as he shouted about the call from the school. The day her teacher fell down and broke her leg. The day a boy brought gin to school in a medicine bottle and after drinking it, threw a dull ninja star at the principal’s calf. The day there was a fire drill while it snowed. She couldn’t remember much at all from those years at home. It was as though they’d never been, days unwritten by whoever was creating her life. She would lie in bed in her one-bedroom apartment and feel the breeze sneak in and slip across her bare legs and she would slowly lower her mind back and back, trying to find something she’d forgotten, but those years were mostly empty. The bright days of Jacob’s life outshone everything that came after. The few memories she had of her parents from that time were memories of her mother or father talking to her, or to one another, or to someone else, about Jacob. When she did well in school, her mother would talk about how bright Jacob had been. When she was punished for disobeying her parents, they would often get lost halfway through their reproach, falling into a reverie, remembering some time that Jacob had misbehaved, remembering how mad they’d gotten at him then and become so overwhelmed with regret for what sharp words they’d used with the boy, that they would just walk off, leaving Leah uncertain whether she was still in trouble or not.
Edna L. Toliver Elementary School was a three-story brick building with six granite steps leading up to the wide red front doors, four Doric columns holding the pediment far above the still drowsing heads of sleepy children who wandered in. It had once been the only school, but now was less than half full, the town’s young families having ended up in newer houses in newer parts of town, in newer school districts with newer schools. Old tile walls and plaster ceilings with crumbling places where the water got in and wide halls lined with doors into classrooms and pipes that clanged in winter. Windows obscured with dust, but so high the janitorial staff could not reach them to clean. At the center of the old school, a courtyard no one ever used, its doors always locked. Leah Shepherd would look out into it, at the broken fountain and the overgrown grass and imagined it was a cursed place where the cursed bodies of bad children were buried after having died from being paddled.
And on the third floor were locked rooms, unused, with blinds drawn against the sun, rooms full of old student files, out-of-date textbooks, broken desks and broken chalkboards and broken record players. The lights in the hall were always out, the only illumination being from one window at the far end of the hall, a window that faced out into the courtyard. The empty classrooms were dark with dark shades drawn over the windows in the doors.