Ivy and Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go (3 page)

Bean
tried
not to talk. She promised not to talk. But every day she talked. Mostly, she was trying to be helpful. She was trying to explain things to kids who didn’t understand. For example, regrouping. Eric didn’t understand regrouping. Ms. Aruba-Tate had explained it, but he didn’t understand it. So he added instead of subtracting. Bean couldn’t stand to watch him add when she knew he was supposed to subtract. Just knowing that he was adding made it impossible for her to do her own subtraction. She had to tell him that he was doing it wrong. She had to tell him how to do it right.

“Bean is only responsible for Bean,” Ms. Aruba-Tate kept saying. But Bean thought that wasn’t true, because Ms. Aruba-Tate also kept saying that a class was like a family. And families were responsible for each other. When Bean pointed this out, Ms. Aruba-Tate opened her mouth and then closed it again.

Ivy was very quiet. She was the quietest kid in the class. So Ms. Aruba-Tate kept putting Bean back with Ivy. “I think she hopes it will rub off on me,” Bean explained to her mom. “But so far, it hasn’t.”

Even though she hadn’t learned how to be quiet, Bean had learned a lot by sitting next to Ivy. One thing she had learned was that Ivy wasn’t as quiet as she seemed. Ivy talked. She just talked so softly that no one could hear her.

After lunch, the second-graders had science. They were doing a unit on dinosaurs. Bean’s favorites were the ones that had big, bony skulls they cracked together when they fought. Ivy liked the bird-dinosaurs with feathers and sharp claws and red eyeballs.

Today, the second-graders were learning about swimming dinosaurs. Actually, they weren’t dinosaurs at all. Ms. Aruba-Tate
was saying, “These prehistoric creatures are called
marine reptiles
. One marine reptile is—”

“Pteranodon!” Eric hollered, waving his arm in the air.

“Plesiosaur,” breathed Ivy so only Bean could hear her.

“Plesiosaur,” said Bean out loud.

“I like the way that Emma is raising her hand. Emma?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.

Emma stared at her. “Um. I forget.”

Ms. Aruba-Tate said, “Bean, will you repeat what you said?”

“Plesiosaur,” said Bean. “Ivy said it, really.”

“Thank you, Ivy and Bean,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. Then she held up a picture of something that looked like a whale and a giraffe glued together.

“Who’s that ugly guy?” Dusit shouted. Then he laughed so hard that he fell out of his chair.

“Dusit, will you please go sit on the rug?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.

“Do sit, Dusit!” hollered Eric. He fell out of his chair, too.

Ms. Aruba-Tate put the picture down in her lap. “Class, if you can’t make more mature decisions, I will have to put our marine reptile materials away,” she said. “Is that what I should do?”

“Noooooooo,” the second grade muttered, feeling ashamed. They loved marine reptiles and they loved Ms. Aruba-Tate.

Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled. She held up the picture. “Now, the largest of the Plesiosaurs was the Elasmosaur. As you can see in this picture, it had an extremely long neck. Does anyone have a
theory
about why such a long neck would be useful?”

“You could wrap it around somebody’s body and squeeze them until they were dead!” yelled Drew. “Like this!” He put his arm around Vanessa’s neck and began to squeeze.

“Drew! Stop that!”

“I wasn’t going to do it for real! I was just showing!”

Bean raised her hand. “Maybe they could reach up out of the water and eat birds or something.”

“That’s an interesting theory, Bean,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Does anyone else have a theory?”

“Other way around,” Ivy murmured.

“What?” said Bean.

“They reached down under the water,” breathed Ivy.

“Ivy has a theory, Ms. Aruba-Tate,” said Bean.

“Do you want to share it with the rest of us, Ivy?” asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.

“The Elasmosaur probably used its long neck to go down to the seafloor and eat stuff there,” said Ivy softly.

“Very good thinking, you two!” Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled. “And Drew, your theory may be correct as well—please leave Vanessa alone—but unfortunately we have no way of proving these theories one way or the other since the Elasmosaur is—what’s the word, boys and girls?”

“Extinct!” they hollered.

“Except for the Loch Ness monster,” said Ivy softly.

“Yes, Ivy?” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Can you name another type of marine reptile?”

“Uh,” said Ivy. She was stuck. Ms. Aruba-Tate probably didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster. Ivy couldn’t think of any other marine reptiles. “I said, Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Oh!” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Go along.”

After the door had closed behind Ivy, Bean waved her hand in the air. “Ms. Aruba-Tate, I have to go, too.”

“Are you sure, Bean?” asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.

“Yes! Bad!” Bean held her breath, trying to turn her face red. If your face was red, Ms. Aruba-Tate usually let you go.

Ms. Aruba-Tate still looked doubtful. “Go on then. But come back ASAP.” ASAP was Ms. Aruba-Tate’s word for
fast
.

Ivy was standing outside the bathroom door. She was staring at the ground.

“Whatcha looking at?” asked Bean.

“Portal,” said Ivy, pointing to a whitish stain on the cement.

“What?”

“It’s a portal. A door. To the underworld. This is where the ghost is coming in.” Ivy kneeled down to touch the stain.

Bean felt a little shiver on the back of her head. A haunted bathroom was cool, but a door to the underworld was creepy. The stain
did
kind of look like a ghost. She didn’t feel so excited about the ghost anymore. “Why would a ghost come to our bathroom, anyway?” she asked, kneeling beside Ivy.

“The school was probably built on top of graves,” said Ivy. “When they do that, it disturbs the spirits, so they wander around, all sad and miserable, haunting whatever was built on top of them.”

“But it’s not our fault. We didn’t decide to build the school here.”

Ivy shook her head. “Ghosts don’t care.” Her voice got mysterious. “And now they will seek revenge on the intruders who ruined their graves.”

“Revenge,” said Bean, staring at the spot. She imagined cloudy shapes whirling down the breezeway toward Ms. Aruba-Tate’s classroom.