The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp Read online

  With so much on my mind, I’d nearly forgotten history class until this rude reminder. Alexander smoothed the front of his argyle sweater and expanded his chest to its limit.

  “Now that we’re in high school,” he said, “we’re not kids who’ll swallow everything we’re told.”

  “Is that a fact?” I retorted. His voice had changed some more over the summer, and he clearly liked the sound of it. I lit into him.

  “Alexander, I’ve had it up to here with lectures. You’re sounding more like Letty Shambaugh every minute, and it’ll be a cold day in you-know-where when I need advice from either one of you.”

  I felt my face heat up, though I’d meant to keep calm. A person can take only so much.

  “I’m only speaking for your own good, Blossom. And of course, on behalf of the freshman class.” He pointed to his beanie. Being provoked, I scanned the ground for a rock big enough to lay across the side of his head. But there’s never one when you need it.

  “Some friend you turned out to be, Alexander,” I said, more in sorrow than in anger. “Here I am just coming out of Miss Fuller’s locker room with some real interesting news I might be willing to share. But all you can do is carp and complain. I suppose you were hanging around just to put me in my place.”

  Alexander cast his eyes to the sky. “Don’t flatter yourself, Blossom. I’m hanging around because we’re going to have a meeting of freshman class officers.”

  “You and Letty are getting too thick to stir,” I remarked.

  Alexander spoke then of what he called “the entire slate of officers.” Letty had appointed Harriet Hochhuth secretary, Ione Williams treasurer, and Tess and Bess Beasley sergeants at arms.

  “Trust Letty to make officers out of her whole club,” I said. “And what business do you have to conduct anyhow?”

  Alexander drew himself up importantly. “One item of business is the Halloween Festival, when each class holds a fund-raising event. Us officers have got to come up with a crackerjack event for Halloween night to show the entire school there are no flies on the freshman class.”

  “Is that a fact?” I replied, as this was the first I’d heard of the so-called Halloween Festival. “It sounds to me like the school’s trying to keep us busy on Halloween night so certain parties I could name won’t get up to mischief and outright vandalism.”

  “That kind of Halloweening is kid stuff, Blossom.” Alexander spoke in his deepest voice.

  “Then you’ve come a long way from last Halloween, when you and Bub Timmons and Champ Ferguson and Les Dawson came to considerable grief when you tried to turn over Old Man Leverette’s privy.”

  Alexander’s ears went pink. He pushed right past me up the steps to his freshman officers’ meeting. But at the top he turned to fire a parting shot.

  “And, Blossom,” he said, “take my advice and stop wearing that old grade school spelling medal. Nobody gives a hoot in high school.” Then he vanished.

  There I stood, without a friend in the world and eight months to go in the school year. Though I can generally manage to keep my sunny side up, my spirits were low on that October afternoon.

  But it is always darkest before the dawn. I was to find a friend sooner than I knew, and in quite an unexpected place.

  4

  WHETHER IT’S DUE TO MY SECOND SIGHT OR NOT, I’ve always been drawn to people—even the living—who are lonely or troubled in their thoughts. It seems to be my fate. Possibly Miss Fuller pining for love of Mr. Lacy at her desk in the locker room is an example. A better example than her cropped up in the following week.

  For reasons of his own, Mr. Lacy formed the habit of sending me off on various errands during history class. As this gave me freedom and a relief from history, it suited us both.

  One afternoon I was killing time after I’d delivered the attendance slip to the main office. As is my habit, I dropped into the girls’ rest room down in the cellar of the school.

  Mama and me don’t have running water piped in at home, so the sight of all that white tile and rushing water at your beck and call is a comfort. Moreover, the conveniences are all in little cubbyholes with doors on them. I believe people deserve their privacy, especially me.

  The girls’ rest room is strictly modern with rolls of paper where you’d expect to find pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I was sitting at my ease in one of the cubbyholes that afternoon when something came over me that seemed supernatural. Though I didn’t Vibrate, my flesh crawled as I sensed I wasn’t alone.

  With the thought came a low sob from the next cubbyhole. Glancing down, I saw under the half wall between us a foot planted there in a broken boot. Another sob followed the first. When I heard paper tearing from the roll, I figured my neighbor was of the living. Still, you never know.

  Settling my skirts, I stole out to investigate, but my squeaking door gave me away. The next door over was yanked open from within, and there I stood, staring straight inside at a girl still sitting.

  She had a pinched face and a slack jaw. Slumped there with her skirttails hitched up, she was blowing her nose with a square of the paper they provide. Her nappy old flannel jacket and a feed sack skirt made me a regular fashion plate by contrast. From her general condition I took her to be one of the kids in from the country. Her hair was arranged roughly into pigtails, and there was more than mud on her boots.

  It’s not my way to stand around chatting to people in these circumstances. But the girl gazed up at me with eyes as sad as Miss Fuller’s, set in a face far sadder.

  “You didn’t see me,” she said in a country drawl. “Bear that in mind.”

  “If I wasn’t to see you, why did you open your door?”

  “I get lonesome,” she whined, sniffing a red nose. “I reckon I’d have opened up even if you’d been one of them teachers. It’s a sight how lonesome you can get in a big, busy place like Bluff City.”

  It was neither big nor busy there in her cubbyhole, but I let that pass.

  “You a freshman?” I asked, just making small talk.

  “I reckon,” she replied.

  “Then where’s your beanie?” I pointed to my own, bristling with a hatpin on my head.

  “Is that what them things mean?” she said. “I wondered.”

  Country children are slow to catch on to our ways, but this example was slower than most. I began to have suspicions.

  “Say, listen, if you’re a freshman, how come you aren’t in Miss Blankenship’s homeroom?”

  “Who?” The girl drew back. “What?”

  I had her cornered, and she saw that, so I changed my tack. “My name’s Blossom Culp. What’s yours?”

  She didn’t like giving out her name. But finally she said, “Daisy-Rae,” looking like she might try to climb her wall.

  “Pleased to meet you, Daisy-Rae. Why don’t you come on out of . . . there? This isn’t any way to carry on a conversation.” I strolled away to the sinks to give her time to pull herself together.

  “Well, all right,” came her voice from the cubbyhole, “but just for a minute.”

  The plumbing at the high school is first-rate, but I’d never run across anybody so fond of it before. My suspicions deepened as they often do. Something was definitely rotten in the state of Denmark.

  A chain was pulled from within. Water flushed, and Daisy-Rae edged out. She was a tall and gawky type, putting me in the mind of a wild turkey. Her pigtails were tied up with binder twine, and her elbows were out of her flannel shirt sleeves.

  “You in from the country?”

  “How’d you know?” said Daisy-Rae.

  That’s how I found a new friend. Unless you’re slower than I thought, you’ll have figured out what I saw at once. Daisy-Rae was a stowaway here at Bluff City High School. She’d never signed herself up on the rollbook, and she’d never darkened the homeroom door. Daisy-Rae had been down here in a cubbyhole of the girls’ rest room since Labor Day, sitting her life away.

  I confronted her with the facts
of her case just to clear the air.

  She turned a ghastly green. “How do you know so much?” She glanced toward the door, but it was too late to run.

  “Oh, I have my ways,” I said. “For one thing, I’m Gifted with the Second Sight. I can see the Unseen and the Living Dead, which is about what you are, hanging out down here day in and day out.”

  “Oh,” said Daisy-Rae, kind of goggle-eyed, “I thought we just run into one another by accident.”

  “Well, in this case we did,” I admitted. “But what I can’t figure is this: How come you don’t go to class like everybody else?”

  Daisy-Rae rammed one big toe against the other. She was one awkward girl. “Well, I meant to,” she said. “I come to school that first day, but all them faces in that big schoolyard was just a blur. I says to myself, Daisy-Rae, you’re nothin’ but a girl from the backwoods and the hollers. A place like this could chew you up and spit you out.”

  I nodded in sympathy, knowing the feeling.

  “Then a bell rung, like they do,” Daisy-Rae went on, “and everybody ganged into the schoolhouse. When I got inside, nobody said boo to me, and I didn’t know which way to turn. I come across this indoor outhouse, so I just went in one of them little horse stalls, banged the door shut, and flopped down.”

  “Well, I never,” I declared. “And you been here ever since!”

  “I go home at night,” Daisy-Rae said. “You can leave after they ring that bell the sixteenth time.”

  And I thought I’d heard everything.

  “Of course, this place fills up with girls at lunch and in them short spaces between the bells.”

  “Them—those short spaces between the bells is when we’re going from one class to another,” I explained.

  “Is that right?” says Daisy-Rae. “That’s interesting.”

  “What do you do when the other girls come in here?”

  “I just pop out of my stall and mill around with them at the sinks. None of these girls notice me. Seems like they can’t focus on anybody they don’t already know.”

  That’s about the size of it.

  “At lunch I go out in the schoolyard and climb that shade tree out there.”

  “I never noticed you,” I said.

  “Well, that’s the point, ain’t it? They wouldn’t know one country kid from another anyhow. The teachers ain’t no different.”

  Bad though her grammar is, Daisy-Rae rattled on, being starved for company. I didn’t mind, as I found her story interesting. She was rawboned as a new colt, but she had her wits about her. I admire that.

  “Beats me why you go to all the work of coming to school at all. Your paw and maw make you?”

  Daisy-Rae flapped a bony hand in the air. “Aw, naw,” she said. “Paw’s dead, and Maw’s up in Michigan, pickin’ fruit. I come to town on account of Roderick. He’s my little brother. That one-room school out in the country wasn’t doin’ him no good. So I brought him in here and signed him up at the Horace Mann School across the road. I thought I’d come over to the high school and pick up some education for myself till I thought better of it.”

  “Your brother . . . Roderick . . . was he too smart for a country school?”

  Daisy-Rae pondered, scratching her head with a long finger.

  “To tell you the truth, they couldn’t do nothin’ with him there. He’s medium simple.”

  “How’s he doing at Horace Mann?”

  “Oh, right well,” she said. “In town it seems like they take a long time to catch up with you.”

  She had a point there. I could have named her several numskulls of my acquaintance who got passed from grade to grade eventually.

  “Roderick don’t mind it,” Daisy-Rae said. “Of course, he’d just as soon be one place as another.”

  This world is full of wonders. Daisy-Rae was one, and I had no doubt that Roderick was another. “If you’ll take my advice,” I told her, “you’ll turn yourself in and start going to classes. I grant you, it’s like a stretch in jail, but at least it’s not solitary confinement.” I made a meaningful gesture to her stall.

  “Well, I wasn’t lookin’ for advice exactly,” Daisy-Rae said in a thoughtful way. Then fear entered her watery eyes. “You wouldn’t turn me in, would you?”

  “Who me?” I replied. “A friend wouldn’t do that, and you can count me as a friend.”

  My words seemed to work magic. Daisy-Rae was pitifully snaggle-toothed, but her smile shone with a rare beauty then. It was a cautious smile to begin with. Then she beamed at me, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

  The bell rang, rattling the window grates.

  “That’s old number sixteen,” Daisy-Rae noted. “Another day, another dollar, as the sayin’ goes. I reckon we can all go on home now.”

  5

  JUST WHEN I’D BEEN FEELING EXTRA-FRIENDLESS, now I had me a Secret Pal. In the weeks that followed, I’d nip down to the rest room after my errands and pass the time of day with Daisy-Rae. We both looked forward to it. Once in a while, during biology or Hamlet or the shower room, I even envied Daisy-Rae her quiet life.

  Still, her situation worried me. “I know you got to wait around till your brother gets out of school every day,” I said to her, “but why don’t you get out and walk around the town or something?”

  She waved this well-meant suggestion away. “I’m nothin’ but a country girl, and I’d get lost in a big place like Bluff City. Besides, I’ll need a warm spot like this, come winter.”

  “You’re a truant, you know,” I informed her.

  “I thought a truant was one who don’t come to school,” she replied. “I come to school.”

  She had me there.

  Out in the schoolyard at lunch, she stayed up her tree. But she could talk the gold out of your teeth when we were on our own down in the rest room. In worldly ways she was backward. But there were no flies on her when it came to noticing things.

  “That towheaded boy in the fancy sweater,” she said to me one time, “you got a soft spot for him?”

  I like to have dropped my teeth. “If you mean Alexander Armsworth,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Daisy-Rae smirked. “I seen the way you look at him out there in the yard. He’s standoffish, though, ain’t he?”

  “Alexander goes his way, and I go mine,” I said, somewhat prissy. But you don’t stay on your high horse long around Daisy-Rae.

  “That Alexander,” she remarked, “he’s runnin’ in bad company.”

  There was more truth than poetry to that observation. “You mean those two big galoots, Bub Timmons and Champ Ferguson,” I said. “Alexander’s a very well-brought-up boy, and he’s trying to live it down. I’ve told him myself he ought to stay clear of Bub and Champ. Bub’s spent five semesters in the sophomore year, and Champ’s old enough to get married.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Daisy-Rae said, smirking again. I suspected she knew more than she was letting on.

  “What do you know?” says I.

  She reached down under her skirts and scratched at a flea bite through a hole in her stocking. “When nobody notices you’re there, you hear things. Besides, Roderick and me, we live out just past Leverette’s Woods. We cut through on our way home. You know that swimmin’ hole out there with the big rope hangin’ down?”

  “I heard tell of it,” I said.

  “Well, them three—that Bub and Champ and yore Alexander—they mosey out there about every afternoon these warm days to swim. That’s where they do their big talkin’ and smokin’ and makin’ plans for Halloween. It’s a sight. Me and Roderick, we spy on ’em.”

  “Smoking?” says I. “If Alexander’s mama gets wind of him smoking, she’ll wear him out. And as to Halloween, what are you talking about, Daisy-Rae? Alexander’s on the committee for the Halloween Festival. He’s left Halloween pranks and stunts behind him, to hear him tell it.”

  Again Daisy-Rae smirked.

  That’s how I happened to pay a visit out to Lever
ette’s Woods myself one mild October afternoon, guided there by Daisy-Rae and her little brother, Roderick. Whatever Alexander was up to, I meant to get to the bottom of it.

  Old Man Leverette once owned all that territory out past the streetcar trestle over Snake Creek. He owned the woods that bear his name, with a well-known Lovers’ Lane winding through it and the swimming hole. He also once occupied a large frame farmhouse just beyond the woods, now going to rack and ruin. Come to find out, Daisy-Rae and her brother occupied a chicken coop behind the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse.

  Old Man Leverette himself has retired into Bluff City. However, since he’s a lover of peace and quiet, he’d have done better to keep to the countryside.

  I met Daisy-Rae under the shade tree after school. She knew how to blend in with the crowd. I never saw her coming till she was right there beside me.

  She wasn’t easy in her mind till we’d crossed the road to where her brother, Roderick, sat waiting on the steps of Horace Mann School. He was a pathetic little gnome of about nine, and there was no doubt that him and Daisy-Rae were blood kin. Like her, he was slack-jawed, with a face far older than the rest of him.

  As his only garment, he wore a small pair of bib overalls. His bare shoulders had no more meat on them than a coat hanger. He shambled toward us. His posture was bad, and since he was clutching his middle, I figured he had the bellyache.

  But Daisy-Rae, being a big sister, summed up the situation. “Now what have you got?” she inquired, taking him by an ear and giving him a good shake.

  Roderick’s teeth rattled, but he said nothing.

  “Come on.” Daisy-Rae turned his ear inside out. “Let’s see what it is this time.” She reached down inside the bib of his overalls and felt around in there. Presently she drew up a long tail with a gray mouse struggling at the end of it.

  I’m not nervous of vermin, but the idea of carrying around a live mouse with those scratchy little claws down the front of your overalls gave me the willies. Daisy-Rae swung the mouse by the tail over her head and let fly with it. The mouse lit running.