The raven haired girl

Secrets

Olivia was humming a happy tune as she let herself into the house. She’d started doing it on her walk home. If she’d stopped and thought about it, she would have realised that she never hummed on the waye. On her walks home, she was usually thinking dark thoughts and concocting plans of revenge. But she wasn’t thinking about humming or having foul thoughts about her classmates. She was thinking about Ben. He was so cool. He didn’t make fun of her, he didn’t act like she was a total reject of society, and he wasn’t afraid of her. It was neat. Charlotte was the same way, but she wasn’t afraid of a girl. Olivia smiled to herself. A boy liked her. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts, that she was caught completely off guard by the tiny cannonball of frenetic energy that hits her in the legs at the front door. She fell in a heap. She lay there for a minute blinking. What had just happened? Her mind quickly figured it out as something began touching her cheeks. It felt disturbingly like l*****g.

Gran had heard her fall. She rushed from the back of the house. “Olivia, are you all right?”

“The ghost dog made me fall again. I think he’s a malevolent spirit.”

Gran chuckled. “He seems perfectly friendly to me.”

Olivia rolled her eyes.

Chowder whined next to her.

“He seems to like you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“He scampers off whenever you come into the house. Why don’t you play with him while I finish up with Mrs McCann?”

Olivia stared at her in disbelief. She wanted her to play with an invisible dog?

“Here use this, Mrs McCann says it was his favourite toy.” She pulled a red squeaky toy out of her pocket. When she squeezed it, the ghost dog let out an excited yap. Olivia took the ball reluctantly. Not believing that she was doing this, she tossed it across the room. It floated back to her in a bobbing fashion and dropped back at her feet. She scowled at the floor. She did not want to play with the ghost dog, but gran had already retreated to her office. She picked up the ball and tossed it again.

Really, the dog didn’t annoy her that much. As ghosts went, he was pretty innocuous, but still, he was a ghost. If anyone had seen her, they would have freaked out at what they saw. There she was throwing a ball and it was coming back to her.

She had to get used to this sort of thing from an early age. She was pretty sure that she could hear ghosts since she was born, but she hadn’t known it was unusual until she was five. It was normal for kids to have invisible friends, but not invisible dead friends. When she told her schoolmates about these ‘friends’, they’d run screaming for the teacher. She had realised very quickly that no one else heard the rich, chuckling voice of the late elementary school principal admonishing students not to run in the halls or the requests from the little boy named Harry who wanted to play hide and go seek. She’d learned quickly that she had to keep quiet about what she’d heard. The only person she could tell was gran. Other people just didn’t want to hear it.

She threw the ball across the room and listened to chowders invisible paws click across the hardwood floor. She wondered what he did when he was at home with Mrs McCann.

The sound of a car starting behind the house alerted Olivia of Mrs McCann’s departure.

She threw the ball one last time, but it lay where it landed. Chowder was gone. If only all of her ghostly encounters were so simple.