The Phantom Train (Chapter Two)
What is in that girl's drawing?
Dad dropped Connor off at the elementary school first, then he dropped me off at the middle school. I beelined straight for my locker, passing through the crowd of kids as they were scuttling about the halls, trying to enjoy every free moment that they could before being confined to the depressing walls of a classroom. It was only my second week of school, and I had only made a few friends, so I mostly kept to myself as I went to my locker and started getting my books out.
There was one girl in particular I wouldn’t have minded getting to know. She was a couple of lockers down from me, and I thought that her name was Mallory. She had this pretty chestnut brown hair that framed her face just right and these big dark eyes. I had a couple of classes with her, but she was really quiet, and always drawing in her notebook. She was putting stuff in her locker and I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Just as I got the courage to go up and talk to her, Ky’Rique stopped me in my tracks.
“What’s going on, Wesley?” he asked. Ky’Rique was a really short kid with a really high pitched voice, almost like he was always sucking helium. He had connected with me on the first day of school and he was nice to me. I was glad to have made a friend fairly fast, but now I watched in disappointment as Mallory walked the opposite way down the hall.
“Hey, Ky’Rique,” I said crestfallen. “How’s it going?”
He looked at me. “Bruh, you look like a zombie. You sleep okay?”
I rubbed at my eyes furiously. “Not really. Stupid train down the street woke me up.”
“Oh, I gotcha. I live near the tracks too. But I don’t notice it since I lived there my entire life. You’ll get used to it.”
I was about to tell him that I doubted it when the bell rang and we headed off to class.
The day went by pretty smoothly. I caught myself dozing off once or twice, but none of my teachers noticed and I was able to get to lunch without much trouble. I sat with Ky’Rique, and another kid named Judah who had this crazy red hair. We mostly talked about video games and how we hated Mr. Sebold’s class while munching on French fries. I looked across the room and saw Mallory again. She was sitting next to the window that was letting in the cold October light. She was scribbling hard in her sketch book.
“What do you guys know about Mallory?” I asked.
Judah’s mouth dropped open and I could see the mushed up food inside. “You like Mallory?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never talked to her. So I want to see what you guys know.”
“Man, that girl’s weird,” Ky’Rique piped up. “She never talks in class. Well, she used to.”
“Yeah, before her sister went missing,” Judah said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Her sister?”
“Yeah, dude,” Judah said. “Her sister is the little girl who went missing a couple of months back. No one knows what happened and they’re still looking for her.”
“I think a murderer got her,” Ky’rique said. He started tearing up his chicken nuggets into little pieces. “Ripped her to shreds and put her in a sack.”
I rolled my eyes and looked back across the cafeteria. Mallory was still scribbling in her notebook.
“Well, I’m going to go talk to her,” I said and stood up, my tray with my half-eaten food in my hands.
“Ohhhh, okay. Go Big Wesley, I see you,” Ky’Rique said, bobbing his head.
“Shut up,” I laughed. I was nervous, going to talk to a girl, especially in a cafeteria with a bunch of other kids watching, but you know, there was no time like the present.
I cut through the cafeteria to where Mallory was sitting. She didn’t seem to notice me as I came up to the table.
“Can I sit here?” I asked.
She looked up at me. There was no change in the expression on her face and I got a chill. She looked angry for some reason. I waited for a few heartbeats, but she didn’t say anything.
“Well, you’re not saying no, so I guess I can,” I said, trying to be more confident and cool than I actually felt. I plopped down in the seat across from hers. Her sketchbook was laid out in front of her. It looked like a really detailed drawing of something, but it was kind of hard to tell with it being upside down.
“Could I see that?” I asked. She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could speak, I had slid the sketchbook towards me and turned it right-side up. It wasn’t like me to take things without a person’s permission, but there was something familiar about the drawing.
It was a very detailed-drawing of a train. It was black and rushing up the tracks, and it looked like it was going to come rushing right off the page. Everything was dark about the drawing. She had used so much shading and it looked like she had been pressing down really hard so much that the train looked black. There was all this smoke or mist or something coming from the grate and front end of the train. But what really took me back, and what kind of scared me, was in the window of the front of the train was a skull-face. It was really creepy.
Maybe Ky’Rique had been right. Maybe this girl was weird.
“So, you like trains huh?” I asked.
She glared at me and snatched the sketchbook back. She got up and stormed out of the cafeteria as other kids looked on. I could see Ky’Rique and Judah giving me sympathetic looks from their table. I felt like a chump.
But I also felt on edge. There was something about her drawing that scared me. I remembered the howl of the train from the night before. Something about it, and the skull face grinning maniacally from the window of the train in her drawing, sent a chill through my body.
For some reason, I thought the drawing had to do with her missing sister.