Ivy and Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go (2 page)

But now Leo looked mad. “It’s not even near you!” he yelled. He was right. The ball was on the other side of the field, near MacAdam, a weird kid who sat under the trees and ate dirt when he thought no one was looking.

“Okay!” yelled Bean, feeling like a dork. She had only been trying to help Ivy.

“Like I was saying, I can’t do a cartwheel at the moment,” said Ivy.

“Why?” asked Zuzu with her hands on her hips.

“Because,” Ivy said, “we’ve got an emergency situation going on. Right over there.” She pointed.

Emma, Zuzu, and Bean followed Ivy’s pointing finger across the playground. She was pointing directly to the girls’ bathroom. The one right outside their classroom.

“What?” said Emma.

“What?” said Zuzu.

“You don’t see it?” said Ivy.

“What are you talking about?” asked Emma.

Bean didn’t say anything. She was watching Ivy. What was going on?

“I see a bathroom. I don’t see any emergency situation,” said Zuzu. She patted the little pink bow in her hair.

Ivy stopped pointing and sighed. “Oh well. You probably wouldn’t believe me, anyway.”

“I’d believe you,” said Bean. “Anyway, you have to tell me because of the oath.”

Two Saturdays before, Ivy had told Bean about blood oaths. If you write down a promise and sign it with your own blood, then you have to keep the promise always. If you didn’t, the blood inside your body would curdle. Bean didn’t know what curdling was, so Ivy explained that it was like cottage cheese. How disgusting was that? Bean was ready to give it a try right away, but first they had to think of an oath. Bean wanted the oath to be about turning her older sister Nancy to stone, maybe not forever, but for a month at least. Ivy said no. It had to be something they could do for sure.

In the end, they promised to tell each other all their secrets for the rest of their lives. Ivy wrote the words down with a silver marker. It looked very fancy. The problem was that the oath had to be signed at midnight. They tried for three days. Ivy tried staying awake until midnight. Bean tried waking herself up at midnight. They both tried sleeping on the floor, so that they would be really uncomfortable and wake up. Nothing worked.

Ivy said it would be almost the same if they did it at the stroke of noon. The two girls squished into Bean’s old playhouse, and Ivy read the oath in a very serious voice. Then she got out a pin. She held it right above her finger, ready to stab herself. Almost ready to stab herself.

“Blood attracts vampire bats,” she said suddenly.

“Vampire bats?” said Bean.

“Yeah. Vampire bats. They drink blood. Mostly, they drink cow blood, but they might get attracted to us if we sign the oath with blood.” She put the pin down.

Bean understood. Poking your finger with a pin didn’t seem like a big deal until you were about to do it. She didn’t really want to poke her own finger, either.

But they both felt disappointed. A blood oath had been such a great idea.

“Why does it have to be blood?” asked Bean. “Why couldn’t it be something else from inside us?”

“Like what?” Ivy looked interested. “Boogers?”

“Yuck,” said Bean. “No. What about spit?”

Ivy said, “Spit would be all right, I guess. I don’t want my spit to curdle, either.”

Bean and Ivy never got much chance to spit because their mothers didn’t like it. So they each made a big one and gooshed it around into letters. They had more spit than they knew what to do with. The paper tore in one place. And you couldn’t really see their names when it dried. “That just makes it more mysterious,” Bean said.

“It’s an oath of liquids,” said Ivy. “A powerful oath.”

So now Ivy had to tell her secret to Bean.

“Excuse me,” said Ivy politely to Emma and Zuzu. She pulled Bean a few steps away. “This morning,” whispered Ivy, “when I went to the bathroom, I got a funny feeling, like I was walking through a cold mist. And even though it was warm, I began to shiver. My teeth were chattering, like this.” Ivy smacked her teeth together. “And then I heard this
strange whining noise, like this.” Ivy squealed with her mouth closed.

Bean didn’t know what she was talking about. “Was it someone locked in a stall?” she guessed.

“No! Don’t you get it?” Ivy’s eyes glowed.

“Get what?”

“It’s a ghost! The bathroom is haunted!” Ivy whisper-shouted.

Bean spun around to look at the school. The long, open breezeway was dotted with blue doors. The first- and second-grade girls’ bathroom was in the middle of the breeze-way. Bean could see a girl coming out of the bathroom door right now.

“Look!” Ivy grabbed her arm. “See the cloudy stuff right next to that girl’s head? See?” Bean squinted. The more she squinted, the more she could see a pale, milky cloud
floating on the side of the bathroom door. The girl, stepping out into the breezeway, rubbed her arms. “See!” Ivy squeaked. “See! She’s cold because she just walked through a ghost.”

And then Bean could see it clearly. The pale spot grew thicker, until it was a patch of fog about the size of a person. You couldn’t see through it to the inside of the bathroom. “I can see it,” whispered Bean. “Does it have yellowish eyes? Like little flashlights?”

“Yes!” Ivy whispered, squeezing Bean’s arm. “Yes, it does!”

They looked at each other and smiled. This was even better than a blood oath. “How totally cool!” shouted Bean. A haunted bathroom! In her own school!

“What’s cool?” yelled Emma and Zuzu together. “Tell us!”

But at that minute, the bell rang. Lunch was over.

“We’ll tell,” said Ivy. “Right here. After school.”

“You’re going to love it!” said Bean.

Even before Ivy and Bean were friends, they had both been in Ms. Aruba-Tate’s second-grade class. They didn’t sit together. But after the day they threw worms at Bean’s sister Nancy, they asked Ms. Aruba-Tate if they could share a table. Ms. Aruba-Tate just loved it when people were friends. She smiled and said, “That’s wonderful, girls! The two of you will be a great team!” After a minute, though, she added, “But if there’s talking, I’m going to have to separate you.”

So far, Ivy and Bean had been separated six times.

This was not a big surprise. Bean had been separated from everyone in the class at least once. No matter who she sat next to, Bean talked. Even MacAdam, who mostly talked to himself, had to be separated from Bean. Once, Ms. Aruba-Tate had Bean sit by herself, but Bean just talked louder.