That next morning when we were getting in the car to go to school, I looked up at the sky. I always thought how cool it was in the early morning when you could look up and see a moon in the early morning light. Even though the sun was rising, the moon was still there. It was almost completely full, and tonight it would be a full bright circle. I loved having moonlight pouring through my window, so I was to sure to have my blinds drawn that night while I was falling asleep.
We went to school, and I thought about my interaction with Mallory the previous day. Maybe this time I would be a little more cool about talking to her. I didn’t like how yesterday had turned out, so we were going to give it another try.
I knew she would be by her locker when I got there, so I would go straight and talk to her and hope that Ky’Rique would not appear again like he did the other day and knock me off course. But instead, as I was rounding the corner she found me.
We ran smack dab into each other and she dropped a bunch of her books and notebooks.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!” she yelled.
I became all sorts of flustered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. I bent down and started picking up a bunch of her books that she had dropped and started handing them back to her. One of them was her sketch book. This one was open to a picture of train tracks, and on them were a bunch of bones. I stood looking at them.
“Hey, no peeking, give me that,” she said, snatching the sketch book away from me.
I stared at her. “Do you live near the train tracks?”
She glared at me. “None of your business.” She hugged her books to her chest and stormed past me in the direction she had been going.
I thought about just letting her go and not saying another world, but the sight of those bones nagged at me, so I went after her. I pushed by other kids in the hallway.
“Hey, wait!” I called after her as she pushed out the door and headed towards the Arts and Music building. It was cold out, and the sky was still a dim blue in the rising sun.
She turned and glared at me, but she didn’t slow her pace. “Why are you following me?” she spat.
“Have you seen the bones? The bones on the train tracks? My brother and I saw them yesterday when we were walking home from school.”
She froze and stared at me, her brown eyes as unnerving as a watching cat. “You…saw the bones?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I said. “What are they, like a dog or deer’s bones or something?”
She was silent for a moment. “You can see the bones…” she said after a moment.
“Yeah, so what? Why did you draw them? Do they—” I almost asked her if they had something to do with her missing sister, but I stopped myself. That would come off as rude, I knew.
Mallory looked up at the sky. Just above the top of the oak tree that sat in the courtyard was the moon that I had seen that morning. It was fainter now, a ghost fading into the brightening blue of the sky. “The moon is going to be full tonight…”
She was starting to freak me out. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. “Yeah, it’s a full moon. So?”
She got near me, her face an inch from mine so I could smell her breath as she whispered to me. It smelled like peppermint gum. “Don’t go to the tracks tonight,” she hissed. “Whatever happens, do not go to the tracks tonight.”
I looked at her, confused beyond belief. It was like she had just told me that all of our teachers were actually aliens in disguise. With that she turned and went to the Arts and Music building, hunching her shoulders as if she were cold. She disappeared inside.
Really, I should have been thinking about how weird and strange she was. But all I could think about was why she didn’t want me to go to the train tracks that night. And what did it have to do with a full moon?
It didn’t make sense, but I got a chill.
Something wasn’t right.