Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 by Homecoming Page B

person might as easily look fifty years old as thirty. A time, it occurred to Scarlet, now long passed. She felt badly about not having an apple to leave on Ms. Pierce’s desk.
    “Welcome. We’ve been expecting you, but … ,” Ms. Pierce stammered. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name, miss.”
    “Um, Scarlet, Scarlet Kensington, ma’am,” she replied in an uncharacteristically respectful tone. “But I don’t think you’ve been expecting me.”
    “Of course we have, Scarlet,” Ms. Pierce assured her, emphasizing Scarlet’s name so as to commit it to memory. “And there is your seat, the last open desk, at the back.”
    Scarlet had a feeling she knew where this was going, but before she could object, Ms. Pierce handed her a textbook, took her by the arm, and led her halfway to the seat. Scarlet looked from side to side along the way and realized that there was not a soul in the room whom she recognized. This was not good. Rather than pipe up, however, Scarlet was determined to have a little patience and wait until class was over to approach Ms. Pierce with her dilemma. No point, she thought, in making the real dead kids feel like she was slumming it or something.
    “Now class,” Ms. Pierce resumed, “as we are all here together at last, let’s review the orientation film one last time. You can follow along in your Deadiquette books.”
    The lights dimmed and Scarlet watched the film out of the corner of one eye and scanned her classmates with the other. She definitely did not recognize these kids. Then Scarlet was startled by a tap on her shoulder.
    “Hi, Scarlet,” a boy behind her said as she turned to look at him. “I’m Gary.”
    Gary, or Green Gary as he was known to his friends on the Other Side, was a nice, outdoorsy-looking kid dressed in baggy burlap clothes and hemp sneakers. He appeared totally normal except that his lower torso was misshapen and almost completely twisted around, like an old tree trunk.
    “Hi, Gary,” Scarlet whispered, trying hard to look him in the eye given his posture. “I’m looking for a girl named Charlotte Usher. Do you know her?”
    “No,” Gary answered quietly, “but I haven’t been here as long as some of the others.”
    “Hey, Lisa,” he whispered over to the next row. “Do you know some girl named Charlotte?”
    Lipo Lisa was a totally groomed, moisturized, waxed, and buff girl. Even in the darkened classroom, she seemed to shine and sparkle. The kind of girl who could give Petula and the Wendys a run for their money, Scarlet thought, except she wasn’t a showhorse, she was a workhorse. Lisa was multitasking, watching the movie and doing book curls with her Deadiquette text, when Gary interrupted her workout.
    “Never heard of her,” Lisa grunted, barely breaking her rhythm.
    “Thanks anyway,” Scarlet said sarcastically. “Guess she’s too busy working her jelly to say much, huh?”
    “She can’t say much,” Gary said. “She died during a botched liposuction procedure on her neck and her facial muscles are pretty much paralyzed.”
    “She must have had her brain sucked out first,” Scarlet quipped.
    “Lisa considers herself the wave of the future, a beauty martyr,” Gary said sincerely.
    “Well, I hope she gets to meet the seventy-two plastic surgeons at some point, then,” Scarlet cracked.
    She began idly checking out whatever names on toe tags she could read in the dim glow of the projector. There was Polly, Tilly, Bianca, and Andy, to name a few. Scarlet was just starting to imagine how each of these kids died, but didn’t need to, thanks to an unexpected whisper in her ear from Gary.
    “There’s A.D.D. Andy, a skater who tried to five-oh it off a cement truck,” Gary informed her. “Only the cement churner turned on, and well, Andy was sidewalk.”
    “Jackass,” Scarlet said devilishly.
    “Yeah, he did get a lot of hits on YouTube though,” Gary said, trying to be positive.
    “And Tilly over there?” Scarlet