"She's really not that bad, once you get to know her a bit."
"I don't know, I just can't seem to shake the feeling that she'd hiding something. That she's not what she says she is."
"What, a teenage girl?" The scorn was almost audible in Sam's voice.
"She just doesn't feel right."
An exasperated sigh. "So you're seriously basing your entire opinion of someone on a static shock they gave you in the middle of history class?"
"No. And it wasn't a static shock! It was…something else."
"What, so you think she's a -"
"I don't know." Danny sounded frustrated, like he was trying to say something but wasn't sure what the words he wanted were. "She doesn't set off my ghost sense or anything, but there's something just not normal about her."
Coraline frowned. Ghost sense? What did that mean?
She knew she shouldn't be eavesdropping, that it wouldn't exactly help her case that she was trustworthy and totally normal, really, but she just seemed to keep stumbling onto conversations that concerned her. And what normal person didn't want to know what other people really thought of them?
Anyway, it actually wasn't her fault this time. She'd just been coming out of the classroom and heard Sam's voice, but had stopped when she'd realised her friend was talking to Danny. Coraline had not guessed wrong about what Danny thought of her, and had thought it might be a good idea to keep her distance.
She didn't understand it. She'd thought they'd been getting along fairly well – well, at least as well as she and Wybie did (although since that was a relationship built on mutual insults, convenience, and trial by fire, perhaps it wasn't the best comparison). But whatever had happened in history class had broken that, and Coraline didn't understand why.
She didn't understand what had happened, either, but what with her here in town and a poltergeist living in – well, haunting Coraline's house, she wasn't surprised that weird things were happening around her. Maybe she had tried to reach her again, and the stone had stopped her. Or maybe it had been something completely different. Coraline had no way of knowing, and while it bothered her a little that something had caused the stone to react like that and she had no idea what it was, she supposed that she'd have to wait until it happened again to find out why.
No, what she had to deal with right now was what was in front of her. And that meant seeing her off again, and that meant gaining Sam's trust enough to convince her that Coraline really wasn't crazy when she started blathering about evil other mothers and buttons and doors. But she wasn't going to do that if one of Sam's best friends didn't trust Coraline at all. It had been hard enough getting Wybie to believe her, and he'd seen the hand chasing her –
Coraline started down the hall toward her locker, the first glimmerings of an idea gathering in the back of her mind. If she gave them some kind of proof, something undeniable and real, they'd have to believe her, wouldn't they? But what could she use as proof? All she had left of the adventure were her memories, Wybie's word, a snow globe without anything standing in the bottom, and a stone with a hole in it.
She swung open her locker door, still mulling it over, and grabbed her backpack.
...
Coraline was woken by the sound of something scraping across the floor.
She groaned and rolled over in bed to face her alarm clock, which said, in big, red letters, 1:12 AM. Coraline shut her eyes, and listened. The sound had stopped when she'd rolled over, but a few seconds after she shut her eyes, it started again, not very loud but insistent, as if something heavy were being pushed across her floor.
She cast around mentally for anything heavy in her room that might be pushed across the floor, and drew a blank. Other than the bookcase and the dresser, all she could think of were the boxes of books that –
She sat straight up in bed, and a stack of boxes taller than she was jolted to a stop at the foot of her bed, quivering slightly and looking innocent. Coraline couldn't suppress another groan.
"Fine. I get it. You're scary. Ooo, so scary." She waggled her fingers, possibly for emphasis, possibly to enhance her sarcasm, even she wasn't sure. It was, after all, the middle of the night. "Now will you please push off and let me go back to bed?"
The little man in the knit hat materialized at the foot of Coraline's bed. "I am the Box Ghost!" he announced proudly, and Coraline wondered why anyone would be so proud of something so silly. "And I have come to liberate these cardboard containers from your cruel enslavement!"
"Fine," Coraline snapped, and the little man puffed out his chest, drawing a deep breath as if preparing to shout something, and then deflated.
"Fine?"
"Yes. Fine. Take the boxes. Just leave the books on my shelves." Coraline waved vaguely at where she thought the bookshelves were. It was hard to tell, even in the faint bluish glow the little man seemed to generate. She wondered, for a moment, why she wasn't scared, but really, it wasn't surprising. She'd seen some truly scary things in her life, and a little man with a hang-up about cardboard boxes, even if he was a ghost, didn't rate even a frightened gasp. "And if you wouldn't mind being a little quieter about it. It's the middle of the night, and some of us are trying to sleep."
"I am the Box Ghost!" the little man tried again, waving his hands above his head, in case it got a reaction this time. The crates of books began to glow faintly bluish, and to slowly orbit around him.
Coraline blinked sleep out of her eyes. "Yes, we've been introduced. Look, if you want the boxes then take them, just leave the books here and let me sleep."
She couldn't quite tell, her eyes were still bleary, but it looked like the little man's bottom lip was quivering slightly. "You – you're giving me boxes?"
"Yes." Coraline bit back a yawn.
The little man faded slowly from sight, but the room echoed with familiar ghostly laughter. Coraline groaned again, and rolled over, burying her head under her pillow as books whizzed around overhead. She'd have to do something about her poltergeist, and soon, before he got her in any more trouble. It was surely only a matter of time before –
"Coraline Jones! It's one o'clock in the morning!"
Coraline pulled her pillow down further over her ears.