Haunted Girls

Although this story was mainly written for the boarding school prompt, I tired to include something from ever prompt. I hope you like it!

It was not that Ginny hadn’t provoked her latest suspension. She had. But it hadn’t been all her fault. Laura and Aimee had come up with the idea. She had only provided the lighters. Her father smoked. It hadn’t been that difficult to get them.

Home-schooling had driven her mother insane, she barely slept, and her father grew more and more absent.

Trees passed by slower and slower until they blurred into one colour.

They had barely spoken for the last hour. Her mother wouldn’t stop looking in the rear-view mirror with heavy eyes. She was just going to school. It wasn’t like they were seeing her off to war. Ginny had rolled her eyes so much, they now burned. 

She could see the school from afar as they exited the highway. It was a funny looking building. She couldn’t decide on what exactly it looked like, perhaps one of those fake Victorian houses that she had seen at a theme park on her tenth birthday. She could almost see the line of little kids and their tired parents wait in front of the gates.

The gravel underneath them screamed when they pulled up to the school courtyard too quickly. The car stopped abruptly. Her mother had killed the engine. It wasn’t like her to do that, she was an excellent driver, but something about today was off. They had never been this nervous when bringing her to a new school before. Ginny herself had never been this nervous before, but she told herself that it was nothing.

She paid no mind to the strange building as she left the car. Instead, she pulled out her phone. It was broken at the side; courtesy of the little incident at her last school.

“Great”, she sighed. Not a single bar lit up her phone screen. “No reception.”

“You’re to go to school here, to concentrate on your studies and not to chat to your friends.”

“So, you’re just going to dump me here?” She waved her phone at the grey mansion with the orange windows. Her other schools had been cubes of concrete, but this one was the scariest so far. Boarding school. She couldn’t even leave this place after class was done.

“Darling”, her mother said, and for some reason, there were tears lining her eyes, “I wish that you could stay with us. There is nothing more in this world that I want than for you to stay with us, but it is time.”

The front door opened quietly. She would have expected the doors to squeal from their hinges, but they were dead quiet. A tall man with a mop of black curls stood where the door had been.

“Welcome”, he said and smiled. “I’m the headmaster of this school, Mr. Charon, but all my students call me Charon. You must be Ginny.”

Her mother spoke in her stead. She hated this part of going to a new school. Why couldn’t she just skip the boring introduction and cut straight to the threats of what would happen if she didn’t graduate.

“I’m so glad you’re taking her. We are not bad parents, and we wish that we could keep her, don’t we, Arthur”, her mother looked to her father, who was kicking the gravel left to right, flinging some at her and at their new car. “I just want her to-“

“Of course, that is why I founded this school”, Mr. Charon said and smiled again. “You must say goodbye to your parents now. Find me when you’re done.” As if he had evaporated into the air, he was gone in a second.

“Goodbye.” Ginny grabbed her backpack and her suitcase ready for two months of torture.

“Wait.” She looked at her mother, tissues dabbing at rivers of tears. “Promise you’ll be good”, her mother said and opened her arms for a hug, but let them fall at her sides.

“When has that ever worked?”

“No”, her mother screamed in an uncalled-for panic. “You must try, this time you must try. Promise it.”

“Alright, alright, I promise.” Ginny looked to her father, but he couldn’t even look at her. She heard him whisper ‘my little girl’, but he refused to make eye contact with her. It hurt just the tiniest bit.

“Can I go now?”

A soft nod was her answer. Her parents always had to be so overdramatic. A week after the accident, they had worn black clothes from head to toe.

The school was dead quiet. It was October, a few weeks into the school year. Where were all the students? They might be in class, but she couldn’t hear a single thing. Even the strictest schools had students who talked loud enough that you could hear their chatter echo through the hallway. An enormous portrait hung at the back wall. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought it her new headmaster, but by the looks of it, the portrait was too old for that to be true.

“In here”, said a voice to her left. The door to an office was wide open, and she could smell a fire burning in there. There had been another principal’s office that had reeked of fire and burning hate.

Ginny sat down in the armchair on the other side of the desk. She hadn’t been asked to do that and her mother would call her rude, but her mother wasn’t here, and she would not stand in the corner like some scolded child.

They sat in his office for a while, neither of them saying a word. The office, just like the rest of the school, looked like a catalogue haunted house. She would fire the cleaning service if she was in charge.

“My phone doesn’t work on campus.”

“We encourage our students to leave all worldly things behind.”

“Sounds like a prison.”

“No”, he laughed, and laughed genuinely as if she had said something funny and not insulting to his institution. “No, quite the opposite. We want our students to be free spirited.”

His face changed then. No longer was it littered with laugh lines and freckles that brought her the familiarity of her mother. The muscles in his face hardened.

She knew the look all too well. After thirteen suspensions and seven expulsions she should know that look. This was going to be the part were he told her how bad she had been, that this school would set her right, this school was different than all the others, they would break her and assemble her again anew and of course, this school was her last hope. Nothing she hadn’t heard before, and nothing she wouldn’t hear ever again. If she had to place a bet, she would say that by Christmas Day she would be sent packing.

“You have roamed the earth far too long. You need to move on.” For a second, she thought he would reach out and grab her hand, but he didn’t. He sat behind his desk, unchanged and stoic like a marble statue.

“This school will help you. All my girls make it into the afterlife.”

She remembered then, the fire at the school. The one she and her friends had started. It had gotten out of control so quickly, the smoke. There had been so much smoke.

After life. Did he mean college and whatever was awaiting her after graduation?

“I don’t understand”, she said instead.

“No one truly does.”

She thought there was wind howling through the halls, but she could not feel it prickle against her skin. Not a single hair on her head moved, yet she could see the candle on Mr. Charons desk flicker.

He did not say a single word to her. His hands were folded in front of him and there was a smile on his lips. He was waiting for something or someone. She was sure of it.

The firm wood door creaked as someone opened it. The woman in front of her resembled the painting in the hallway. She had hollow eyes, and if it weren’t for the extensive jewellery, she could have been a nun.

“This is the matron. She will look after you whenever you’re not in class.”

“Welcome to Moorwood Academy for Haunted Girls.” Her words were like ice.

“Haunted”, she said. “Nice analogy for troubled.” That’s what the other schools had called her if they had been nice. Some teachers and principals had used more colourful language.

“Troubled.” Mr. Charon brought a finger to his temple. “You could say our girls are troubled, but we are here to help with that.” He smiled at her again. A true and genuine smile. Something about him was comforting but something also made her want to knock his teeth out.

“You may go now, get settled in, meet your roommate.”

“Roommate? I thought older students always got single rooms in these sorts of places.”

There was his stupid smile again. “Not here. We want all our girls to live with a friend.” Friend, she could make her own friends.

“Come now”, the matron said. She could work in a scare maze with a voice like that.

She followed the matron down the corridors. They had taken so many turns, she was sure she would never find her way out again. Perhaps that was the purpose of a building so large with dark corridors and no electricity.

Throughout the house she thought what she interpreted as wailing. Then again, it was an interpretation. It was probably nothing, just an old house with old wooden panels and wind flowing through its rooms.

The girl in her room did not look up when she entered. She also didn’t give Ginny her name.

The matron had to make introductions. “Nancy, this is Ginny. She’ll be your roommate. For now.”

Ginny wanted to ask what that meant; for now. She was not going to leave this school until Christmas break. Were they expecting trouble from her? She did not dare to ask. The matron scared her with her black eyes and constant scowl. Her heels screeched as she turned around and left Ginny alone with this stranger. She had met far too many new people today.

“How long have you been dead?” Nancy didn’t even turn around too look at her.

“On the inside? Years.” That usually earned her a laugh. But it did not this time. The other girl’s face was set in stone when she did finally look up.

“No, stupid. Dead. How long have you been dead? When did you kick the old bucket? When did your clock run out? I’ve been dead for three months.”

“I’m not dead”, she said, but her voice trembled. “Stupid”, she added quickly. Her attempt at getting back at her roommate was desperate and pathetic, and she knew it.

“Why are you here then? Why did your parents send you here if you’re not dead and still roaming around, refusing to leave? Answer me that if you’re so smart.” Her eyes narrowed.

“I’m dead?”

“That’s the requirement for the school. We’re all haunted girls. Died too young, and our spirits refuse to walk into the light. Did you not know that”, she laughed.

“But my parents- I was home schooled- the accident-“

“Home schooled? Or rather you haunted their house after you died, and they brought you here so you can learn to pass through to the other side.”

The familiar feeling of sick rising in her throat moved her inside her room quickly. She sank down to the bed and the ugly quilted throw. Her body felt out of place, wrong. This stupid girl in her stupid room in this stupid school was wrong.

“I don’t even know how I died”, she whispered through her teeth. The fire in the principal’s office. She thought she had made it outside.

“Inhaled a lot of smoke I would say”, Nancy pointed at her throat, “It’s all grey and burnt. So, did you smoke a lot or can you remember being in a fire.”

“My throat is not grey.” She had seen her throat for the last three moths in mirrors. It was not grey.

“See for yourself then.” Nancy reached into the pockets of her skirt and the cool metal of a pocket mirror slipped into her hands.

 Nancy was right. Her throat was a dark grey. Angry burn marks littered her skin.

As Ginny closed her dead hands around her own throat, she heard the other dead girl cackle from the other side of the room.

“How, how did you die”, she asked.

She only shrugged. “Some idiot sat fire to the school I used to clean on Monday mornings for some extra money on the side.” Nancy had the same marks on her own throat.