Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her. Torey Hayden
fingers lightly along the walls and jumped with nimble feet up onto the benches and down again. On the third time around, she veered off unexpectedly and approached the vertical pipe. As so many times before, Jadie wrapped her arms and legs around it in a tight hug, but after clinging to it a few moments, this time she actually did shinny up. Before I realized what was happening, Jadie had reached the two smaller pipes traversing the room along one side and was out onto them, like a gymnast kneeling on parallel bars. Alarmed because she was a good six feet off the floor, I rose from my chair.
“Jade, those pipes weren’t made for climbing on.”
She laughed heartily.
“I’m not sure they can take your weight, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself, so come down now.”
She made no effort to get down off the pipes.
Grabbing the desk chair, I maneuvered it over and prepared to climb up to get her. This prompted a swift response. Jadie scurried out of range, still laughing, then, clutching one pipe, she let herself down off it backward, swung a moment or two in midair, and then finally dropped the last couple of feet to the floor.
In the classroom it was as if none of this had ever happened. Jadie’s days continued to be spent in nearly total silence, her body hunched over, her head down, her arms pulled up. I had to repeatedly quash the feeling that somehow I was making up those after-school visits, that I was the one with hallucinations. Indeed, during one bleak moment, I wondered if perhaps this hadn’t been June Harriman’s experience with Jadie, too. For the most part, I disciplined myself away from contemplating June Harriman too much. Not knowing her personal circumstances, but sharing her class, it was too easy to extrapolate from what we had in common to form opinions that might be wildly inaccurate and equally destructive. However, as I glanced across the classroom at Jadie, contorted in her chair, it struck me that perhaps this was why June Harriman had committed suicide—driven to believe that somehow she was the crazy one. It was just a one-off thought, but it was dagger sharp. An ideal script for a horror film.
On Friday of that week, I decided to attempt collage making with the children. Coming in with a large collection of old magazines and a box containing a huge assortment of riffraff—everything from feathers and chunks of sponge to bottle caps and uncooked pasta—I tried to explain the elusive nature of a work of art. We had been studying a loosely constructed unit on emotions, and I hoped to relate their collages to this, saying that when everyone was finished, we’d talk as a group about their work, about what feelings the collages generated in the people looking at them, and what feelings had gone into making them.
The boys dived into the box with lively abandon and set to work immediately.
Reuben loved the pieces of fabric, particularly the bits of silk and velvet. Picking each one up tenderly from the box, he stroked them against his upper lip and flapped his hands in excitement.
Philip, in the chair next to Reuben’s, had a Montgomery Ward catalogue out and was enthusiastically cutting out pictures of toys and pasting them down.
“What have we here?” I asked, pulling a chair up and sitting down beside him.
“Haaahhh,” Philip breathed. His whole vocabulary consisted of heavily breathed syllables, most of which were unintelligible to me.
“Toys?” I inquired.
He gestured wildly.
“That’s his Christmas stocking,” Jeremiah said from across the table. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you. Ain’t it, Phil? Him and me are making up pictures of what we want in our Christmas stockings.”
I thought it best not to point out to Jeremiah that this was the twenty-ninth of March.
“And Jadie, too,” Jeremiah said, expansively gesturing to include them all. “Jadie and me and Philip are doing that for our collage. What Santa’s gonna bring us.” Jeremiah was pasting down pictures of Jaguars and gold bullion bars.
Fact was, Jadie was doing nothing. She sat humped over in her chair, her chin almost on the tabletop. She stared morosely at the blank piece of paper in front of her.
“Having a hard time getting started?” I asked.
No response.
“You know, of course, you don’t have to do a Christmas stocking. That was Jeremiah’s idea. If he’d like to fill his paper with a collage of things he’d like to find in his Christmas stocking, that’s lovely, but you can choose to do something else. You can make your collage any way you want it.”
Silence.
“An important thing with art is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just look in the box and see what catches your attention.”
A pause. I regarded her. “You know how we’ve been talking about emotions lately? About that place way down inside you where your feelings are? Look down there and find out what you’re feeling. Right now. See if you can make a collage of what you find.”
I went back to the boys and left Jadie alone with her blank piece of paper. She usually did very well with tasks that were rigidly laid out, such as her academic work, but she always seemed to have trouble with ambiguous projects. Consequently, I didn’t want to be tempted into structuring the activity too much for her.
When I looked over a while later, Jadie had begun to work. Taking up one of the magazines, she started cutting out pictures. I watched a moment, trying to discern a relationship among the pictures, but I couldn’t.
Jeremiah had nearly finished his collage and was beginning to grow restless. He leaned over Jadie’s shoulder. “What you doing?”
Jadie didn’t respond. She just kept cutting out. Then, after acquiring about two dozen pictures, she shoved the magazines away. Laying the pictures in front of her, she took up her scissors again and started carefully snipping the pictures into small bits.
“Man, lady, look at her. She’s crazy, all right. Look what that girlie’s doing,” Jeremiah shouted.
I shot him a black look.
“You’re crazy,” he said to Jadie, then flopped into his chair and sighed dramatically. “I suppose we got to sit here waiting ’til she gets done now. She fucks around all the first part, when she shoulda been working, and now we got to wait. Hey, girlie, how come you’re always so slow? How come you never do stuff when the rest of us do? You just sit around like a retard.”
Ignoring him totally, Jadie continued with her cutting.
I realized my initial plan to talk about the collages as a group was going to have to be jettisoned, as, if we waited much longer, the boys’ behavior would deteriorate to a point of no return. Indeed, in the moment it took me to contemplate this, Jeremiah scooped up Reuben’s collage and sent it sailing through the air. “Hey, boog!” he shouted at Reuben, “Say ‘fuck.’”
“Say fuck,” Reuben echoed.
“Say ‘fuck,’ Reuben. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck it to you.”
I jammed a record onto the record player and began a rousing chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” to drown Jeremiah out. Catching Philip, I pulled him comically through the motions. We sang several verses in quick succession, all with lively, exaggerated actions to expend a bit of energy. Then, when the song came to an end, I picked up the book I’d been reading aloud to them and sat down on the carpet in the reading corner to start a new chapter. I read until the recess bell sounded.
Throughout all this, Jadie remained working at the table. When the bell rang, Jeremiah bolted past her on his way to the cloakroom.
“Hey, lady, look what she’s doing,” he cried and whipped up her paper before Jadie could stop him. He turned it for me to see.
The relationship among the disparate pictures became obvious now—they all contained a lot of red. Snipping them into small pieces, she’d stuck the pieces on, mosaic-style, to form a large circle around