Malcolm was from North Brunswick, but transferred to the charter school when he was in second grade, thanks to the enrollment lottery. Nowadays that would be harder to do, because the school is established and its lottery fills up with students from its three home districts; but at the time the charter school was younger and never filled up its vacancies with local students. There were even a couple students from the Oranges who attended.
Anyway, back to Malcolm. Being as his family was new to the school and unfamiliar with its calendar, his mother (understandably) assumed that it was open the same days as the schools his older sisters and brother went to, and so that Halloween she packed him a lunch and dropped him off as usual since it was a Monday morning, and everyone had school on Mondays.
He got to school, and when he didn't see anyone running around outside, he just assumed he was late, so he went in. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. There were teachers there, and there were students; but none of them was anyone he knew. Feeling very confused and unsure what to do, he walked to his classroom and sat down.
Now when people think of schools that are closed, particularly on holidays like Halloween or Christmas, we usually think of them as empty. They're not. They're always filled with the ghosts of students who went there and the teachers who led the classrooms. Some of them died there, and others just had nowhere else to go, but they all come back. How could they not? When they were alive that was where they spent half their time. The school remembers, and it pulls them back.
So Malcolm sat there in class with a classroom full of 20 other students, all of whom were dead. The teacher? Also dead.
About halfway through show-and-tell, he realized he was the only one in the room who was breathing. This made him feel very awkward.
Not long after that they went to gym class, where the teacher had them play dodgeball. He felt he was at a disadvantage because the ball actually would hit him,whereas it went through the other students.
He had always loved music class but this new teacher played everything in a minor key and had them enter and leave the room to Chopin's funeral march.
When they returned to class and started their personal education packets, Malcolm started to feel that the other children were pointing at him and laughing. By the time it came for circle time and everyone gathered on the carpet, no one wanted to sit next to him and he was ready to cry.
The teacher noticed how sad and lonely he looked, so she encouraged him to sit next to her. She was pale and it was very cold next to her, but Malcolm didn't want to be disrespectful so he sat right next to her, criss-cross the way he had been taught.
"Now I know if you're here, you're probably still feeling upset about how you died and that's why you don't want to cross over," the teacher said. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and it took a moment for Malcolm to realize what it was she just had said.
"Let's take a moment to talk about how we died, and share with each other how that makes us feel, and what we've been doing in all the time since," she said in her reasonable teacher voice. "Malcolm, why don't you go first?"
"But I'm not dead!" he protested. "I'm a live boy."
There are moments in every school when the entire classroom is focused on one student, and that student does something inappropriate. Maybe the student farts, or breaks the desk when they sit down, or just says something unrelated to the class activity. Whatever it is, it's something that turns the entire classroom on its head, wrests control from the teacher and leaves all the other students laughing.
That was what happened to Malcolm. The entire class burst into laughter and even the teacher had a hard time stifling back her giggles. His ears burning, Malcolm ran from the classroom while shouts of "Live boy! Live boy!" followed him.
He ducked into bathroom to escape the taunting, but in his hurry, he failed to realize it was the girls room. A girl ghost shrieked when she saw him, and her face melted away until he screamed and tried to run away, only to find that the door had closed behind already.
"Live boy! Live boy! Go away, live boy!" The taunts followed him out into the hall and all the way to the office. There he discovered that the door was locked, and the receptionist wouldn't let him out until school was over for the day. It was only 10 o'clock.
"Go back to class, live boy," she said.
Heartbroken, defeated and dreading the thought of eating lunch surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, Malcolm started shuffling back to class, when he found himself staring at the large trash bin the custodian was getting ready to take outside. Malcolm climbed inside and burrowed his way in until he was completely covered with paper towels and other trash. A moment later, the bin began to roll down the hallway, and ten minutes later he was free.
Alas, the story does not have a happy ending. When he made it home an hour later, pale and weak in the knees from his ordeal, his mother would have none of it.
"No son of mine is playing hookey," she said. "Your sisters are at school, and your brother is at school, and you are going back to school this minute. Ghost teachers and ghost classmates. The very idea!"
She took him back to the charter school and watched from the car as her son, defeated, walked back in.
On Tuesday, the education director came to school after a three-day weekend and found a disciplinary note on her desk with Malcolm's name on it that said he had been found truant and was being held after for punishment.
He has never been seen since.
Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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