The Hauntings of Tucker Foley

or alternatively: Sharp, Is What It Is

Tucker saw his first ghost when he was eight. This is how he remembers it.

He tore across the classroom with a yell, relishing the way the soles of his sneakers lit up bright red, blue, and green for all of his third grade classmates to see. That was his ulterior motive for chasing Star; his pretense was that he was enraged at her for her attempt to deal a cowardly and dastardly blow to his grades. Just before, she'd drawn an ugly line in colored pencil across Tucker's multiplication worksheet. Luckily, Tucker was good at multiplication, so her plan had failed miserably. Now Tucker just had to formulate his own plan for what to do if he caught her.

Or...deal with that after lunch. The bell had just rung, signalling Tucker's favorite time of day, and the assistant teacher was calling for him and Star to join the line.

The hallway of Tucker's elementary school was an ecosystem in its own right, a hectic breeding ground for all things colorful and unfamiliar. Posters upon posters upon crayon-drawings were tacked onto sagging corkboards, and the walls were a scratched-up but still pleasant shade of robin's-egg blue. En route, Tucker got to peek into the classrooms of the older kids (in fifth grade they made dioramas, but you also had to learn the states, and all fifty?! Tucker could never) and even passed Star going the other direction hand-in-hand with the assistant English teacher, heading toward where Tucker vaguely supposed the principal's office was. Revenge was no longer warranted, then, and all was right in the universe.

Most of the third graders' still-anxious parents packed them lunch every day, but a few kids (mostly the ones with an older sibling or three) got the mini pizzas or mac and cheese or the occasional reviled vegetable, generally with a side of animal crackers and a choice of juice. For the sake of these exception students, the classes filed through a cafeteria room in rotating sections on their way to the outdoor lunch tables while the teachers leaned against the walls and gossiped. With so many kids in such a state of excitement (this far into most of their scholarly careers the joy of lunchtime remained undimmed, even though they did it every day), it was easy for someone to get lost in the commotion. Tucker pushed doggedly through the pulsing throng and was almost to the open door when a hand on his shoulder arrested his progress.

Tucker's whole body tingled. Like pins and needles, only more, like there were actual needles sliding and scraping downward just beneath his skin. He gasped and turned around quickly.

One of the lunch ladies was bending over to talk to him. She wore a big pink dress and an apron, and her face had the appropriate friendly wrinkles Tucker had come to associate with grandmotherly warmth, but there was something in her eyes that unnerved him. They were strangely...empty.

Her voice, though, was as smooth and buttery as the fake cheese on the cafeteria's Kraft mac, and something about it put Tucker at ease. "Mr. Foley?" That was confusing because for a split second he looked around for his dad, but then as soon as he understood that he was Mr. Foley, the title felt quite flattering. "Would you do me a favor, dear, and go fetch me another package of pepperoni from the freezer?"

Tucker looked around, but none of the teachers seemed to have noticed them. "Um. Me?" He didn't think a grown-up had ever asked him for anything besides, like, cleaning his room or times tables.

She nodded seriously. "It's quite urgent. Children need lots of protein for their developing brains. And it's a bit heavy, so you should fetch a teacher to help get it down from the shelf. Would you do that for me, Tucker?"

It was kind of cool to be given a mission like this. Like a real-life version of one of the cool older-kid video games Tucker's cousins on his dad's side were allowed to play. "Okay!"

"What a gentleman." She winked, jolly, but behind the sweep of short eyelashes her eye was glossy and fixed. The needles pricked more insistently at the inside of Tucker's skin.

But then she turned and headed back toward the lunch counter, and the feeling subsided and went dormant along with the part of Tucker that was questioning this situation. He ran over to Mr. Nguyen, his favorite science teacher (from last year, unfortunately. The current one had yelled at Sam for reading in class, so Tucker was her mortal enemy for life). "Mr. Nin? I need help."

He smiled and bent down a bit. "Sure, Tuck, what is it?"

"I need to go to the freezer."

Mr. Nguyen's smile got a little bit confused at the edges. Tucker clarified, "The lunch lady said they need more pepperoni? And she told me to get somebody to lift things."

Mr. Nguyen full-on frowned and straightened up to survey the aproned ladies behind the counter, in the process pulling his tie just a little bit further out of the clip halfway down his white dress shirt. "They shouldn't...huh. Let me see about this."

He started to head for the counter, and Tucker panicked. He wouldn't get to finish the quest! He grabbed for his teacher's shirt. "She said it's urgent. That means right now, right?"

"Uh...yes." Mr. Nguyen stared at the counter for another second, then shrugged. "Okay, Tuck, and you want to come with?"

"Yeah!"

Mr. Nguyen laughed and grabbed the attention of the Social Studies teacher, briefly notifying her of where he was going with Tucker and asking her to keep an eye on the second grade Section B for a few minutes. Then he pushed back through the door they'd come in from, holding it open so Tucker could follow. Older kids ambled around the hallways in messy lines, talking and laughing, and Tucker kept to the wall so as not to bump into them. He and his guide had to tromp a surprisingly long distance down the hall, actually past the third grade homeroom; Mr. Nguyen explained that they kept medicine stuff there too and needed to be close to the youngest kids. That the freezer was near Pre-K and the cafeteria was all the way past the fifth graders' rooms was just bad planning. Heh, and some grown-up had made this all up? Tucker could architect better than that.

At last, the threadbare brown carpet became somewhat grimy tile as they turned down a nondescript hallway on the left of the main thoroughfare. Before them loomed a giant set of shiny metal doors with fogged-up windows too high up for Tucker to see in anyways. To someone of Tucker's slightly-above-four-foot stature, the doors loomed large as the gates to the underworld (though to say Tucker was pulling his mental image from a reliable source would be giving children's book illustrators far too much credit).

Mr. Nguyen strode up and pushed. "Huh. That's weird." He took a deep breath, set his shoulders, and pushed hard on the door on the right. There was a long, slow, screeching of metal. Cold air rolled over Tucker with a lazy, slow malevolence. Then, "What…?"

The first thing Tucker saw was Star, kneeling on the ground next to a long metal shelf and examining the cans of tuna with great fascination. The assistant English teacher, Mr. Browning, was standing in the opposite corner, staring wide-eyed at the doors.

Mr. Nguyen appeared, for a minute, as frozen as the canned fish. Tucker watched in confusion as his face darkened. Visibly. Tucker wouldn't recognize the parallel until much later, but he looked almost as impossibly angry as the blue-haired girl on the landing. "Dave. Why was this door blocked." It was not a question, and Mr. Nguyen didn't give him a chance to answer. "It's against school policy and a breach of contract for a teacher to be alone with a child at any point without notifying another teacher. Does someone else know you're here?"

Mr. Browning–Dave, apparently–swallowed and searched for words. Tucker could see visible spit hit the plastic-wrapped meat next to him as he sputtered, "I–of course–"

"He said I could see where they kept the food!" Star piped up excitedly, blonde hair sticking up behind her headband. "We just got here. Tuck, you wanna see the cheese?"

Tucker shrugged and went to join her, enmity forgotten. "Okay, but first I gotta get pepperoni for the lunch lady. It's urgent, so I gotta do it right now."

He turned back toward where he'd seen the meat (Mr. Browning's spit was freezing on it, ew), and almost bumped into Mr. Nguyen's back. He was standing in the middle of the freezer, blocking Tucker's view. "That's okay, I'll get the pepperoni later. Can you and Star get back to the cafeteria okay?" He paused, and Tucker figured he was considering that, although he couldn't see his face. "Never mind, you guys just go into the room directly across the hall and get Ms. Holly. You know her, right, Tuck? She'll take you back." He dug his phone out of his back pocket without looking at it.

Tucker frowned. "But she said urgent–"

"Now, Tucker. Go with Star." Tucker's heart flip-flopped in surprise at the tone.

Star was already out the open door. She shot Tucker a mischievous smile over her shoulder and revealed the can of frozen fish she had hidden in the folds of her dress. At least she had gotten something out of her trip all the way across the school. Tucker hadn't completed his own mission, and he was starting to get really cold. He scowled and left with Star, but at the last minute his mom's teachings on good manners struggled past his sullen mood. "Thanks, Mr. Nguyen. Bye, Mr. Browning."

Mr. Nguyen didn't answer. He was dialling a number on his phone. Tucker followed a skipping Star across the hall to Ms. Holly's room. Ms. Holly, the second grade teacher who also ran bi-monthly, barely-controlled art classes, gave them a weird, indecipherable look like Mr. Nguyen's before stretching a cheerful smile over it and leading them back to the cafeteria.

Tucker was worried the lunch ladies would be mad that he hadn't completed his mission, but they were apparently doing okay serving lunch, and no one mentioned pepperoni to him again. He headed to his class' tables and sat down with Mikey, bragged about seeing the freezer, rubbed the bone-deep chill out of his arms, and pretty soon forgot the whole incident.

The next day was a Saturday, so he thought it was weird when his mom bundled him into the car after breakfast and headed to school, though he was reassured when she laughed and said no, she wasn't making him do extra school on the weekend. The school was empty except for the janitor, who was listening to music on an iPod Touch. Lucky. Tucker's mom led him with a warm hand on his back toward the principal's office, which raised the hairs on the back of his neck again. The hallways seemed to narrow and darken, his breath sharpening in his throat. Was he in trouble so bad that they'd brought in the principal on a Saturday just for him?!

No, his mom and Principal Tuhoe quickly assured him, he wasn't in trouble.

"In fact," the principal continued, smiling in that way people smile at kids but with a hint of something else sharpening the indulgent edge, "you helped prevent something very bad." He glanced at Tucker's mom. Tucker's mom shook her head. He looked confused. "Uh, Mrs. Foley, school policy would—but you're choosing not to…?"

She shook her head. "Later. Not...not just yet."

Mr. Tuhoe looked like Tucker's teachers when someone played just a bit too violently with the Polly Pockets, but all he did was nod. "Tucker, we brought you in here because we were hoping you could identify the lady who sent you to the freezer. Do you think you could do that for me?"

Could he? Tucker thought back to their meeting. An image jumped immediately to his mind: her face as she crouched down close to him, all friendly wrinkles framing empty eyes. A wave of chills, apparently left over from his time in the freezer, crawled up his spine. Yes, he would definitely recognize that face if he saw it again. He nodded with all the solemnity he could manage.

"Okay, Tucker. Here's the employees who were working in the cafeteria that day." Mr. Tuhoe slid an open binder across the desk. Inside, a series of printed pages in plastic sleeves displayed (mostly) smiling pictures of women who looked vaguely familiar next to text providing their names, availability, and other information. Some of their pictures had been circled in red marker. Mr. Tuhoe leaned a bit over the desk as Tucker paged slowly through the binder, distracted by the way the plastic sleeves slithered across each other and stuck together due to the static cling. "Do you see the lady you met here? I circled the ones who should have been working that day."

Tucker made it all the way past the lunch ladies and through another ten or so staff members to the end of the binder, but he didn't see anyone who even resembled her. He looked up and only then became aware of both his mom and the principal watching him closely, of the tension that had been building in the room. "She's not there."

His mom leaned down over him to flip the binder back to the start. "Are you sure, baby? Could you look again?"

Tucker obediently started again, rubbing the edges of the pages between his fingers to make sure two sleeves didn't stick together anywhere, but again he came up empty. "Sorry, she really isn't here."

His mom and the principal exchanged a loaded look (had he ever seen an adult look nervous like that before?). "Could you tell us what she looked like? And what she was wearing?" asked Mr. Tuhoe.

"Uhh...she was a white lady, and real old…." The detail about how her eyes were weird didn't seem like the kind of thing they were looking for, and mentioning her wrinkles would probably be rude and make his mom mad at him. "She had a pink dress and one of those—those hair thingies, the net thingies."

"That...doesn't sound like anyone who's worked here, at least while I've been here."

"So you have no idea who was in your school, talking to my child?!" Tucker's mom was still leaning half-over him with a hand splayed out on the desk, but now her focus was on Mr. Tuhoe and the knuckles on that hand were pale.

Mr. Tuhoe was moving a lot more than he had been when they'd entered, fidgeting with his hands on the desk as he leaned back a bit more in his chair. "I assure you, Mrs. Foley, the school is already in the midst of a thorough investigation. Mr. Browning will never work in education again—"

"That's it? That's all that's going to happen to him?!" Tucker, leaning into her warm side like this, could feel his mom shaking.

"There's nothing else we can do, Mrs. Foley, there's no way to prove intent! We've put him on multiple watchlists for schools nationwide, but other than that we can't…" He trailed off, rocking back and forth slightly in his chair.

The school never released any sort of formal statement, and as far as Tucker knew none of those involved said much. Once Tucker was old enough to figure out what had really happened, he often wondered about Star: if she knew now, if she'd ever realized the danger, what she did with that can of tuna. They attended different middle schools, but now she went to high school with him, and he would pass her in the hall, or have her in his math class–he even participated in a group project with her once. And every time they made eye contact, he would wonder if there was some connection, a shared something that came from knowing a pseudo-secret no one else around them knew. He never asked. She never told.

So in the end, Tucker never got the answers he wanted, and the lunch lady never got her pepperoni.

~(*0*)~

The point is:

Tucker saw his first ghost when he was eight. In the intervening years he caught a few glimpses, got a few eerie vibes when expired consciousnesses fluttered briefly against his own, but the next ghost he really interacted with was the blue-haired girl.

So it seemed like a reasonable thing to assume that the cosmos had exhausted themselves with this new torture and the horror was over, for a while.

Nope.

On Wednesday, Tucker passed the blue-haired girl in the hallway between first and second periods. He didn't even register it at first, then almost choked and whirled around, jostling several annoyed classmates unprepared for his sudden stop. She had already disappeared into the throng of students, leaving him unsure if he'd really seen her or if some sophomore had just entered her punk phase with a slightly bedraggled dye job.

One period later, Tucker was ten minutes into his Physics class, taking a bored stab at the example problem Mr. Marcel had just written on the board, when he felt a little trickle of nausea down the back of his throat. Someone near the back of the room snickered loudly, disturbing the quiet classroom. Tucker glanced over his shoulder and then immediately bolted out of his seat, banging his hip on the table and dropping his calculator with a clatter onto the floor. The blue-haired girl was sitting at a desk in the back corner, staring straight ahead at the board.

Tucker froze, watching her. She didn't react, though other students were giving him weird looks. Mr. Marcel cleared his throat. "Tucker. Everything alright?"

Tucker didn't take his eyes off the corner desk. "Uh—yeah, yeah."

Mr. Marcel crooked an eyebrow. "Are you sick? You're looking a bit off. Do you need to leave the room?"

The hallways were empty. Maybe she was in the classroom, but so were thirty other kids; the hallways were empty. "That's—thanks, Mr. Mercer, but that's okay. I'm okay. Thanks."

"Are you sure? You look like you've seen a—"

"No, I'm great!". He flashed his best charming "hey there, ladies" grin. "Really. Peachy keen."

Mr. Marcel's eyebrow was on the verge of disappearing into his prominent forehead wrinkles. "Alllright then. Now, who can tell me about the work done on this structure? Mikey?"

While Mikey wrestled a somewhat strident but correct answer out around his new braces, Tucker slowly picked up his calculator and sat back down, still staring at the girl in the corner. She didn't even glance at him, staying perfectly still with her eyes fixed somewhere beyond the whiteboard. Tucker turned to face it as well, then quickly glanced back, almost expecting her to have disappeared while he wasn't looking. Still there.

"Tucker! Am I boring you with this?" Mr. Marcel was glaring at him, marker hovering above the whiteboard.

"Uh–no, no way. I swear, Mr. Marcel, physics is my passion and practically my sole reason for being."

Mr. Marcel smiled reluctantly with one side of his mouth, and Tucker was again reminded of the value of doing his physics homework and bringing brownies to the teacher's lounge every once in a while. "It'd better be. Now, I need everyone's attention for this next part; you'll probably need to know this for the AP test and I'm not going to cover it again before May."

Tucker felt sick to his stomach; his uh-oh feeling was going full-force. He risked another quick glance over his shoulder. Still there.

It was like knowing there was a really big spider on your wall but not being able to squash it or leave the room–as a person with extreme arachnophobia. He couldn't concentrate on anything but the violent pounding of his heart and the acute awareness of her proximity to him. Whenever he wasn't looking at her, he could almost feel her coming closer, could picture her unfolding from the desk and doing that jerky and yet somehow too-smooth walk forward to breathe down the back of his neck...and then he turned around, and she hadn't moved. Not a muscle, or whatever hid under her skin. So he would reluctantly turn back to the board for as long as he dared, and then the cycle repeated. She only moved once in the full 35 minutes of class time: Five minutes before the bell, he looked back and caught her chewing slowly and deliberately on a pencil. Gleaming spit was visible on it from where he sat. She still wasn't looking at him.

When the bell rang, Tucker leapt out of his seat with only slightly more alacrity than everyone else in the class. He looked down for just a fraction of a panicky second to shove his notebook in his backpack (he hadn't taken any notes) and violently jerk the stubborn zippers closed. When he looked back at the corner desk, it was empty. He scanned the room. She was nowhere to be seen.

Only then did he notice the maimed yellow pencil sitting innocuously on his desk, two feet from his face.

Backpack over one shoulder, Tucker sprinted out the door and down the hall to his locker, turning sideways to slip between the wall and the edge of the passing period crowd. Sam was at her own locker already–the one next to his. Thank God. He banged into the lockers and slid halfway down, trying to calm his ragged breathing.

Sam jumped at his sudden entrance, then immediately slammed her locker shut. "Oh my God, Tucker, what happened?"

Sam would freak out if he told her. She'd call it a hallucination and might even tell his parents if she was really worried. "Nothing. Just didn't realize there was someone behind me and got jumpscared. It was nothing." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, fighting the backpack strap still hanging over one elbow, and then quickly tore them away again to glance both ways down the hallway.

"Tucker, if Dash or somebody did something–" Her face was murderous.

"Nonono, I swear! I would tell you. I just got freaked out. It was dumb."

"Okay, Tuck…." He could tell she was unconvinced. "Just...remember, my parents are major donors, okay? If we need to try to get my mom involved, or forge something from her or whatever we need to do, we can do that. Anytime."

"Yeah, I know. I swear, it wasn't anything bad." Slowly, he stood up and managed to calm his ragged breathing, tearing his eyes from the hall long enough to input his locker combination. "What do we have next, English?"

He didn't see the blue-haired girl again that day. Maybe she could only appear for so long, or maybe she'd filled her daily haunting quota or something. Still, not seeing her didn't exactly help his nerves; he was jumpy enough in English that Danny kept giving him weird looks and, albeit jokingly, asked him after class if he was okay. When he got home, he finished all his homework downstairs with his mom in the kitchen (she'd taken a sick day) and then reaped the rewards of leaving on all the lights in the upstairs rooms that morning, with the doors open so he could sprint up the stairs and straight to his bed, polar bears be damned. He left the light on in his room all night. He barely even dozed. On Thursday, he was possibly even more on edge because if she showed up three days in a row, then that was a pattern, and he didn't know how long he could function like this.

And luckily, the blue-haired girl didn't show up on Thursday.

No, on Thursday, September 19th, Tucker met the hunter.