From the Other Side
an excerpt

She stood in the corner of the room, feet together, hands and arms rigidly at her sides, and her head bowed. Long dark, wavy hair hung to her elbows, stringy strands of it obscuring her eyes, eyes that seemed to glance up at me every few moment, eyes that were endless pits of blackness. Her skin clung to her bones, pale and translucent, her entire persona possessing the ethereal presence of being here, yet not here all at the same time.
She was dead.
I continued to stare at her as Mrs. Finnley shuffled our last week’s math tests and began combing through the rows, handing them back one by one. Muffled utterances of disappointment sounded from beside me, utterances that I ignored, utterances that were certainly from my best friend, Victor Waynwright, as he most likely received a grade far below what he had expected. When Mrs. Finnley tossed my test on my desk, I spared the briefest moment to register a perfect grade and crammed it in my black messenger bag sitting at my feet, returning my eyes to the ghost standing in the corner.
The ghost had barely twitched; however, the moment my eyes had returned to her being, her eyes shot up through her curtain of hair, locking onto mine in the midst of all the activity around me. Tingles ran down my back likes waves of an electric current surging through my spine. I shivered and drew my arms closer into my body. They always had this effect on me. No matter what, your body always reacted to the existence of something from beyond.
The pace of math class shifted as the rustling of test papers being stuffed into folders turned into the slam of textbooks being opened and the day’s lesson beginning. Mrs. Finnley began listing a string of numbers and symbols on the blackboard, the piece of chalk clipping along as it formed each character upon the board. Her voice drifted through my head, slipping through my brain like thin oil, not a word sticking as my eyes remained stuck upon the ghost of the girl.
A million thoughts ran through my head. Who was she? How’d she die? When did she die? And most importantly, what did she want from me?
A nudge at my side, and I looked up.
“Francesca…” I cringed at the use of my full name. “…can you answer the question?” the teacher asked, her eyes trained upon me as everybody turned around and stared at me as it became evident that I hadn’t been listening.
Victor nudged me again, his hot pink nail polish adorned finger pointing to a specific problem in the book open on my desk. I looked at him, a smile of thanks on my lips, and then at the exercise. A quick calculation in my head, a sum of numbers and symbols, and I looked up at Mrs. Finnley.
“Sixteen ‘x’ cubed plus twenty three ‘y’ squared,” I said, rechecking the problem, making sure my answer was accurate.
My teacher spared me a moment’s glance, her gaze challenging. I met her eyes, eyes of wrinkled, muddy brown, with equal strength, knowing my answer to be correct.
“Correct,” she quipped, giving me a cursory look before moving on
Suppressing an eye roll, I returned my attention to the ghost in the corner, but she was gone, faded back into the realms of in between.