The Tracks by Sally Royer-Derr (little readers TXT) 📕

a friendship with. Develop a friendship with a ghost. That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. And if I wasn’t the idiot who’d done so, I would think I was crazy. Actually, I still wasn’t too sure about my sanity at this moment.

I took a deep breath. I had to see what else Tommy had hidden in the wall. Creeping back under the bed, I cautiously stuck my hand back into the hole. I rummaged around and felt what I thought was a book. It was a book of sorts. An old calendar from three years ago with various magazine clippings taped on the pages. I pushed it out from under my bed and slid my body out, too. Leaning against my bed, I paged through it.

Mostly they were pictures of places. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Las Vegas, Chicago. Along with the magazine images were sketches. Not like the ones in the clubhouse. These were darker. One was a teenage boy choking himself. Droplets of blood dripped from his bulging eyes onto his bare chest. Another was a drawing of a beautiful woman with a blackened eye and a swollen lip. There were two images of her. One showed defeat and sadness in her eyes. Another held an almost needy allure. My guess it was Tommy’s mother.

But the one that caught my attention the most was at the end of the book. A detailed drawing of the tracks I knew well. And a familiar boy riding his bike along them in frayed jeans and a gray T-shirt.

I laid the book down and decided to dig everything out from behind the wall. I needed to examine every piece of what he’d left there. For some reason, he’d left them for me to see.

Chapter Fifteen

I surveyed my bedroom floor, the contents of Tommy’s hiding place strewn across it. A half-empty pack of cigarettes, curled at the top. A dark-blue lighter. An old Playboy magazine that I’d rather not dwell on. And a letter. Written to his father.

I got up and opened my bedroom window as far as it would go. I slid back down on the floor and I uncurled the cigarette pack. Breathing a sigh of relief as the lighter lit its flame, I placed a cigarette between my lips. And inhaled.

I’d sneaked some of Sam’s cigarettes every so often. I never experienced the coughing fits that you saw on TV of first-time smokers. Wasn’t something I made a habit of doing. I knew it was disgusting. But sometimes I enjoyed it. It calmed me.

I leaned back against my bed and picked up the letter. His handwriting was messy, a combination of print and cursive that was difficult to read.

Dear Dad,

I don’t know why I’m writing this. It’s not like you care that I ever existed. But you’ve been on my mind a lot lately for some reason. I wished I could have known you. At least a little bit. I wonder if Mom would be different if you’d stuck around. She’s so desperate and needy. About men, really about everything. We don’t have much of a relationship because her life revolves around whatever man happens to be here. But at least she stuck around. She didn’t write me off as a piece of crap before she’d even met me. Like you did.

That was the end of the letter. He hadn’t signed it. I doubted he had finished writing it. I turned the paper over. Some scribbled numbers on the back. 12-14-88. Looked like a locker combination. I squinted. His handwriting was so hard to read. No. 25-14-33. Most definitely a locker combination.

My locker combination.

This was getting freakier by the minute. We shared the same trailer. The same school locker. I took another drag of the cigarette, slowly exhaling the smoke into the empty room. Confusion reigned in my mind, overshadowed only by my curiosity. There must be a reason all of this was happening to me. A logical reason.

Standing, I stubbed out my cigarette in a glass on my nightstand. A leftover from last night. I gathered everything I’d found and put it in a shoebox in the back of my stuffed closet. It may be summer, but I needed to go to school.

***

I parked my bike in front of the red-brick building. A few cars were in the front parking lot. I knew the school wasn’t completely closed over summer. I’d heard my teacher talking about how she needed to move certain things in her room, so the custodian could clean during break.

My flip-flops squeaked as I entered the front doors. Nobody was there to stop me and ask me what I was doing, like during the school year. The halls were empty.

I hurried down the south corridor to my old locker, keeping a careful eye out for any inquisitive janitors. My squeaky flip-flops did little to hide my presence, so I took them off, carrying them while I continued down the hallway.

I reached my locker and quickly entered my combination. Mine and Tommy’s. A familiar click, and I slid the door open. I scanned the empty metal box I’d called home for nine months of the year. It smelled of ammonia cleaner. Any remnants of my existence wiped away with a sponge. I didn’t know what I thought I would find here. Anything Tommy would have left in the locker would have been long cleaned away. Still, I placed my fingers along the back and glided them throughout the smooth surface, searching for any noticeable change.

Nothing unusual. I pushed my fingers around the corners. And finally the floor. I even studied the door. Nothing caught my attention. I stood back and peered into its emptiness once again. Something was in there. Even though I couldn’t see it, yet, I felt with certainty something was waiting inside for me.