The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp Read Online Free PDF Page A

finally she said, “Daisy-Rae,” looking like she might try to climb her wall.
    “Pleased to meet you, Daisy-Rae. Why don’t you come on out of . . . there? This isn’t any way tocarry on a conversation.” I strolled away to the sinks to give her time to pull herself together.
    “Well, all right,” came her voice from the cubbyhole, “but just for a minute.”
    The plumbing at the high school is first-rate, but I’d never run across anybody so fond of it before. My suspicions deepened as they often do. Something was definitely rotten in the state of Denmark.
    A chain was pulled from within. Water flushed, and Daisy-Rae edged out. She was a tall and gawky type, putting me in the mind of a wild turkey. Her pigtails were tied up with binder twine, and her elbows were out of her flannel shirt sleeves.
    “You in from the country?”
    “How’d you know?” said Daisy-Rae.

    That’s how I found a new friend. Unless you’re slower than I thought, you’ll have figured out what I saw at once. Daisy-Rae was a stowaway here at Bluff City High School. She’d never signed herself up on the rollbook, and she’d never darkened the homeroom door. Daisy-Rae had been down here in a cubbyhole of the girls’ rest room since Labor Day, sitting her life away.
    I confronted her with the facts of her case just to clear the air.
    She turned a ghastly green. “How do you know so much?” She glanced toward the door, but it was too late to run.
    “Oh, I have my ways,” I said. “For one thing, I’mGifted with the Second Sight. I can see the Unseen and the Living Dead, which is about what you are, hanging out down here day in and day out.”
    “Oh,” said Daisy-Rae, kind of goggle-eyed, “I thought we just run into one another by accident.”
    “Well, in this case we did,” I admitted. “But what I can’t figure is this: How come you don’t go to class like everybody else?”
    Daisy-Rae rammed one big toe against the other. She was one awkward girl. “Well, I
meant
to,” she said. “I come to school that first day, but all them faces in that big schoolyard was just a blur. I says to myself,
Daisy-Rae, you’re nothin’ but a girl from the backwoods and the hollers. A place like this could chew you up and spit you out.”
    I nodded in sympathy, knowing the feeling.
    “Then a bell rung, like they do,” Daisy-Rae went on, “and everybody ganged into the schoolhouse. When I got inside, nobody said boo to me, and I didn’t know which way to turn. I come across this indoor outhouse, so I just went in one of them little horse stalls, banged the door shut, and flopped down.”
    “Well, I never,” I declared. “And you been here ever since!”
    “I go home at night,” Daisy-Rae said. “You can leave after they ring that bell the sixteenth time.”
    And I thought I’d heard everything.
    “Of course, this place fills up with girls at lunch and in them short spaces between the bells.”
    “Them—those short spaces between the bells iswhen we’re going from one class to another,” I explained.
    “Is that right?” says Daisy-Rae. “That’s interesting.”
    “What do you do when the other girls come in here?”
    “I just pop out of my stall and mill around with them at the sinks. None of these girls notice me. Seems like they can’t focus on anybody they don’t already know.”
    That’s about the size of it.
    “At lunch I go out in the schoolyard and climb that shade tree out there.”
    “I never noticed you,” I said.
    “Well, that’s the point, ain’t it? They wouldn’t know one country kid from another anyhow. The teachers ain’t no different.”
    Bad though her grammar is, Daisy-Rae rattled on, being starved for company. I didn’t mind, as I found her story interesting. She was rawboned as a new colt, but she had her wits about her. I admire that.
    “Beats me why you go to all the work of coming to school at all. Your paw and maw make you?”
    Daisy-Rae flapped a bony hand in the air. “Aw,