Our Little Secret
I didn’t know she was dead the first time I saw her.
It was my first day at Credence High School. I had gone the whole morning trying to shake out all my nerves by folding origami animals from my notes. I was folding a butterfly while our teacher lectured on about physics. She angled herself toward the whiteboard, writing formulas with a squeaky red marker.
When I was in third grade, a boy in my class died from a bee sting. They brought in a pastel-clothed counselor with earrings I wanted to pull on. She taught us songs and art projects and how to fold origami butterflies. I didn’t know that the butterflies were born only because a peer of mine had died. I never forgot how to make them. I continued learning different ways to fold.
I was creasing the wing when I heard her singing. It was the kind of singing you do when you think none of your family can hear, but not loud enough to gather an audience. The song itself bordered on the edge of familiarity. I couldn’t place a name to it, but I recognized the melody as something my mother used to play on her odd days. I couldn’t pull my attention away. I waited for the teacher to turn around and yell at the distraction, but she didn’t. She kept writing and everyone continued to scribble after her.
I paused my origami and turned around in my desk. She had perched herself on one of the lab tables, swinging her legs like a kid. Her short, dark hair framed her face gently, and a baby blue dress fell to her knees. Her skin was pale, but her cheeks bloomed, as did the tip of her sloped nose. I couldn’t help but stare—she seemed out of place. I felt a kinship instantly.
“Puck,” the teacher said. “Face forward, please.”
The teacher, a large woman who went by Ms. Hobner, turned back to the board.
“What about her?” I asked.
Ms. Hobner capped her marker and spun back again.
I stabbed my thumb over my shoulder. “Why’s she get to sit on the table and sing and we’ve all got to sit in these desks and rot?”
“Rot?” she repeated.
Everyone around me had turned to look at the girl. They started to whisper.
“All right,” Ms. Hobner said, striding to her desk and ripping a pink slip from her organized mess. “If you want to pick up the role of class clown on your first day with me, then you’ve got to explain that to the dean.”
I scrunched my eyebrows and scoffed as Ms. Hobner wobbled down the aisle of desks toward me.
“You see someone?” a boy asked, leaning across the aisle that separated us.
“She’s sitting—” I swiveled around and stared at the spot where she had been. It was unoccupied. I wondered how she could have crossed the room to slip out the door without anyone noticing. I also wondered if I had seen something I hadn’t been meant to, but then Ms. Hobner slapped the slip on my desk. By the end of the period, I had folded it into a butterfly.
Every night, when I’d lie down to sleep, I’d expect to become an animal in my dreams.
I always hoped that when I shut my eyes and let my consciousness float off, that I’d be something else. I watched a lot of nature documentaries. When I was in middle school I subscribed to the National Geographic magazine. I would sneak to the mailbox and grab my copy before my mom found out. I canceled my subscription after she died.
The previous night I had a dream that I was a fox and had slipped into water. I was floating, dragged along by the undercurrents of the ocean. When I looked around me, all I saw was a foggy blue. There was no above and no below. I felt terror, and yet peace.
“I don’t think you saw the ghost,” Chris told me.
He insisted on sitting outside on the grass during our lunch hour because he felt cramped being inside for too long. I wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t been the dead of winter in Montana. According to Chris, students loved coming out to sit in the grass. I found this funny, because the two of us were the only maniacs on the frosted ground. I wore my ochre-yellow parka with my scarf wrapped around my throat, but I still curled into myself for warmth.
Chris was my boyfriend. I met him months before my mom and I took a trip to Montana to visit my uncle. This was her old hometown where she grew up. Before my dad remarried and moved to the East Coast, he told me that Mom left Montana because of an incident with her then boyfriend. When I tried to ask about it she would get hostile and reclusive. On the two times we had visited Montana in my upbringing, she always seemed tortured.
Chris and I had kept in contact through messaging all summer. We had a lot more to talk about through text. Being with him in person was already different and disappointing. It was like he had emerged from a cocoon I hadn’t known he was building, and he hadn’t told me he was becoming a moth. Not being around someone in person can aid in sculpting them into whoever you want them to be.
I pressed the side of my pencil against the drawing on my lap. I tried to draw animals as exact as I could get them—fur texture and everything. Trying to learn something with my eyes and feeding it to my hands was proving difficult.
I caught my reflection in the long windows along the side of the building. My long, red hair frizzed from my parka’s static. My straight bangs were a bit frazzled, but I lifted a gloved hand to smooth them. This only made them worse. My face, as well, was too young and too freckled.
“Did I tell you about how this place’s supposed to be haunted? Or did somebody else?” Chris asked.
I looked up, smacking the eraser end of my pencil against the pad of paper. “No. Nobody said anything to me. And what’s it matter?”
“I don’t believe in life after death,” he said, catching me off guard. “When you die, you fall into nothing. Like falling asleep.”
“You dream when you’re asleep,” I said.
“Not always.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek and looked back down to my miserable hedgehog. I needed a reference photo. I pulled my phone from my back pocket.
“What do you believe in, anyway?” he asked.
I plugged “hedgehog paws” into the search bar. I stared at the spinning blue circle. One by one, hedgehogs popped onto my screen.
“Puck?”
I looked up and tilted my screen away from him. “Hm?”
“What do you believe in?”
And then, from across the stretch of grass, I saw her. I could feel my pupils expand. It felt strange, but what was even stranger was that she was standing right there. Blue dress waving at her knees, white socks peeking at her ankles. The petals of her Peter Pan collar bloomed outward like the moon had been cracked in half and set at her throat.
I flipped my sketchbook shut, determined. I zipped my backpack and shrugged it over my shoulder, feeling my books jam into my back. I marched across the crunching grass toward her, leaving Chris with no hesitation.
“Oh, okay. See you later,” he mumbled.
She stumbled backward, faltering around the corner of the brick building. I looped around and stopped in front of her, halting in shadow. I thought that she seemed gentle and pure—like a dove. Maybe a mourning dove. Her doe eyes blinked at me, startled and unsure, and then I threw my backpack at her.
She didn’t duck. The backpack went sailing straight through her. It was like her image had been projected onto the molecules in the air. My backpack slouched over in the hard dirt, defeated.
“What the fuck,” I panted.
“You¾you can see me,” she breathed. Her voice was high and smooth. I didn’t expect that to come out of her, but I guess she didn’t expect my backpack to come hurtling at her either.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and her mouth tugged delicately into a smile. She drew in a breath and then leapt in the air, throwing her arms up. She squealed, spinning on the spot.
“You can see me!” she cried. “Oh my God! You can see me!”
“Why did my backpack—how did—why is everyone saying you’re a ghost?”
“Well,” she huffed, jumping to a spot. She extended her hand to me, pale and small. “For starters . . . I’m Bonnie. Bonnie Rutherford. It was 1980 in the south fire escape.” She gazed upward. It seemed that what she was looking for was in the clouds. “. . . And you can see me! Nobody’s been able to see me before. Sometimes they can feel my presence or catch a shiver but . . . well, anyhow!” She laughed, chime-like, and faltered forward a bit with the force of it, the skin around her eyes crinkling. “Now, I’m still here because of all the unfinished business stuff. Sorry—this is just so exciting!”
I looked over her shoulder and saw two people come bursting out a side door, clamoring up against the brick wall. Bonnie gasped, stumbling forward to grasp my wrist. I snapped my eyes back to her.
“Maybe you can help me with my unfinished business!” she cried. This has got to mean something, right?”
The guy pinned the girl’s hands above her head, kissing her neck against the brick wall. I wrinkled my nose and looked back at Bonnie who had clasped her hands together under her chin in a gleeful squeeze.
“Do you want to be friends?” she asked.
“Fuck off,” I spat.
I scooped my backpack off the frosted ground and made my way back to the front of the building. I steered clear of Chris, sitting in the cold like a penguin, and pushed into the cafeteria. I found an empty table and sat alone, slowly shredding a paper napkin and trying to slow my throbbing heart until the bell rang.
After school, I went straight to my part-time job. I managed to snag a cashiering position at White Fox, the closest grocery. I got the job when I first moved so that I’d have an excuse to spend more time away from my uncle’s house. He was a quiet man, and kind too, but his being my mom’s brother, kept trying to flesh out all these things I’d spent so much time pushing back. He offered to let me borrow his truck so I could drive to and from my job, but I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car since my mom decided it seemed a comfortable place to die.
I rang people through my checkout line with the right amount of exhaustingly polite small talk. Most customers would have the tendency to stand in silence and pretend to be fascinated with promotional posters or the sale flyer. Toward the end of my shift, a female duo threw a frozen bag of fries and a jar of salsa on the belt. As I scanned it through, one of the girls said, “It’s salsa-fry night. You ever tried fries with salsa?”
I looked up. She was addressing me.
“Oh,” I faltered. “Uh, no. I haven’t.”
“It’s, like, our thing,” she continued, dissolving into giggles when her friend elbowed her in embarrassment. “Fries and salsa. Salty and spicy, right? Kind of weird, but it’s our thing.”
I didn’t say anything, but stand there and gaze over toward the frozen aisle. As she poked at the card reader, she said aloud, “But all best friends have something weird about them, right? Like their own quirk.”
After they grabbed their bags and left through the automatic door, their interaction lingered. Not quite parasitic, but more of a persistent nibbling. I rang up a few other customers, but I couldn’t stop tapping my foot. Something bled through my gut, although I tried not to allow it. Accompanying this were blips of Bonnie—bright-eyed when she realized I could see her, her hand shooting out like a striking snake to grasp my wrist, her blue-eyed blink when we had both come to halt beside the building.
I ripped off a generous amount of receipt paper and began to fold it into a bird. My anxious heartbeat throbbed through my ears, thwacking against my eardrums, as I folded the tail and wing over themselves a couple times to give an accordion effect.
It looked like a dove. It reminded me of the ghost—of Bonnie.
I drummed my fingers against the scale of the register. I flipped the light off and collected my bus fare and coat. After I punched out and ignored the dumbfounded shouts from my manager, I shrugged my coat on and slipped out White Fox’s automatic door.
I boarded the bus that was meant to take me back to my uncle’s, but I couldn’t stop bouncing my leg or chewing on the dry bits of my bottom lip.
I leaned against the window and watched as streetlights blew past. I was tired of following rules. Everything brought me dissatisfaction.
I got off a few stops earlier than I should’ve, walking for a block before I found myself in front of Credence High School. All the windows were black with abandon.
I ran across the grass, feeling watched in the darkness. The building towered over me and I imagined it coming alive and crushing me like a real-life whack-a-mole. I pushed against the front doors, the bar compressing but not opening. Locked.
I leapt down the concrete steps and hurried along the side of the building. I tried pushing the windows up until, finally, one around the back gave under my push. With a startling, loud scrape, the window slid up and stayed. Counting to three, I jumped up, pitching forward through the window much faster than I expected. I tumbled inside, knocking into a desk and causing sound to explode throughout the room.
I rolled onto my back, splayed like a defeated starfish, and heaved for air. I slapped my hand against my forehead and closed my eyes. What are you doing, Puck?
“Graceful.”
I looked up and saw Bonnie, perched on the edge of a desk. I groaned in pain and pushed myself up.
“I was watching you race around and squeak your hands against the windows. Took me a minute to realize what you were trying to do.”
“Then why,” I panted, “didn’t you let me in?”
She stuck her button nose up. “Why would I?”
I remembered my parting words to her in the yard. I never considered myself the type of person to sincerely tell someone to fuck off. But I never considered myself to be the person to trespass in their high school at night by diving through a window, and yet there I was.
“Look, I’m sorry about earlier,” I sighed. I leaned against the wall next to the open window, cupping my throbbing elbow. “I shouldn’t have told you to fuck off. I’m Puck by the way.”
Bonnie eyed me before the corner of her mouth tugged up. “Puck,” she echoed, my name popping on her lips. “You’re an oddball. Who breaks into their school to issue an apology?”
“The same person who talks to ghosts.”
Then, she smiled. It made her eyes crinkle and cheeks bunch up. Her dark, pixie cut hair flounced as she swiveled and leapt from the desk, landing before me. “Well, then. It’s nice to meet you, friend.”
She held her hand out to me.
“What was it you said earlier—about helping you?”
“Oh, my unfinished business!” she breathed. “Yeah, come on! Let’s go.”
I grasped her hand, not expecting her to be solid. I drew in a quick breath, looking down at our clasped hands. She tugged me along, solid in our connection, but lucent in form.
And that was how the strangest night of my life began. With holding the hand of a ghost.
“Welcome to ‘Ask Bonnie,’” Bonnie said, lying flat on her back along the diving board. She folded her pale hands behind her head and crossed her ankles. “Don’t be shy.”
We had taken to the pool. With a flip of a switch, the dark water had lit up like it was filled with the liquid from glow sticks. The ripples that broke the surface when no one had touched it enticed me so much that I couldn’t resist.
“Well, how about this,” I panted, standing at the edge in bra and boy short underpants. “Why are you here, Bonnie? Why Credence? Why not the mall or . . . Africa?” I padded up in my bare feet to the edge of the deep end. The underwater lights acted like lamps, turning the bare bits of my skin a wavy blue and yellow. “Why stay in a stupid high school?”
Bonnie, relaxing atop the highest board, turned onto her side. She supported her head with her palm, her elbow like a camera tripod. “Why do people stay anywhere? It’s familiar territory. The illusion of home.”
I looked up at her, clutching my arms around myself. “Are you actually dead?”
Bonnie laughed aloud, a high but throaty sound. I hadn’t heard anyone laugh like that in so long I had forgotten what it was like, to hear someone laugh; I mean, really laugh. She flopped over onto her stomach, gripping the edge of the board. It bobbed with her movement.
“You threw a backpack through me,” she said. “Unless I have superpowers, I’d say you’re probably right.”
I gazed toward the ceiling beams. The movement of the water continued to wave glowing globs around at everything. But the diving board blocked Bonnie from the light.
“How did you die?” I asked her.
After a few bobs of the board, she popped herself into a sitting position. Her thin legs hung off the edge, dangling. She continued to grip the sides like she was afraid of falling.
“I was running up the fire escape stairs to get to the second floor,” she explained. “I have this twin brother, Thomas. But I called him Thom-ato. He hated it.” I smiled, and she paused. “He wrote in a notebook about how this teacher was a bitch. I think he drew a really crude picture as well—I can’t remember. Being his sister obligated me to be annoying and show the lady his drawing of her, you know? Well, he ran up a different way and got there before me. The door at the top flew open just as I reached for it. All I remember from this moment was this huge sound—like a gunshot. Ya know, like, just this bang! And then I fell back, down the stairs, and all I know is that I was weightless. And then . . . I was nothing.”
I was watching the waves of the water. On the bottom, there were stripes painted. Maybe this was to show swimmers where the bottom was—to prevent them from going too far. The water lapped against the grates on the sides of the pool to prevent overflowing. I stood on a grate, feeling it gush over my feet.
“It was an accident,” she continued. “How was he supposed to know what would happen? My parents ended up disowning him. He and his girlfriend split. They were together for awhile. But after that . . .” she drummed her fingers along the side of the board. “I forgive him, but I don’t know if he ever forgave himself.”
“And that’s your unfinished business?” I asked. “To give him closure?”
“I can’t bring myself to go and see him alone,” she said. “I don’t know how to communicate with him. He’s not open to me. It’s like he’s blocked off from me. He must blame himself.”
“If my actions resulted in the death of someone I loved, I’d blame myself too.”
“Yeah, well,” Bonnie scoffed. “I’ve never loved.”
I pulled a hair tie from my wrist and used it to twist my red mane up into a bun.
“Come on,” I said. “First you tell me you’re a ghost, and now you’re telling me you’ve never loved?”
Bonnie laughed defensively. “I distanced myself from people. If you keep your distance, you keep your heart. Of course I regret it now, but how was I supposed to know when I’d go? I thought I had my whole life ahead of me.
“But now I need help with my unfinished business. I’ve got to give my brother closure.” She smiled. “Once completed, I’ll be free.”
“I think you should suffer a little longer,” I teased. “Thirty years might not be long enough for someone who never let themselves love others.”
She laughed again, the sound echoing. She pushed herself into a standing position, the board rocking. “All right, you know what? You’ve got to keep that part our little secret.”
I made a zipping motion with my lips and flicked the zipper into the water. Bonnie stepped off the board and plummeted down into the glowing water. When she pierced the water, it didn’t react. When she bobbed to the surface, her pixie cut was maintained and dry.
I leapt in, sound muffling and tumbling as I submerged. The water lapsed around me, pressing into my skin and blurring my vision. Tiny bubbles rose from my nostrils, I blinked, and then she was right in front of me. Dry, not affected by the wetness. She laughed, but the sound became muffled with the density of the water.
Excited by this bit of reality, feeling like it was unreality, something lightened in my stomach. Sensing this, Bonnie pushed her hand out toward me. Her palm knocked gingerly into the center of my chest, and I felt her skin as it connected.
When we both broke the surface, I asked her, “Have you ever seen someone fold origami animals out of napkins?”
Part II forthcoming in the Winter Issue
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Aurora Hattendorf grew up in the small town of Elgin, Illinois before attending Columbia College Chicago. They’ve never been previously published.