Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden Page A

good advice. In the Pecking school district, I was state-of-the-art where special education was concerned.
    This came as a disheartening insight, because if I’d learned anything over the years, it was how much I didn’t know. Access to a wide range of professional colleagues—psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, social workers, speech therapists, other special education teachers—had always been an important part of my method of operation. If I couldn’t come up with a solution of my own to try, I’d find someone who could, or, at the very least, someone to shoot ideas around with. Suddenly, however, I was isolated. Twenty-three miles separated me from even the nearest special education teachers, who were in Falls River. And while Falls River undoubtedly had a full complement of mental health services and related resource personnel, I knew none of them personally and was too shy in my reduced status as teacher to phone them and ask for complimentary advice out of the blue.
    My single professional contact was Arkie Peterson. I’d only seen her a handful of times since January, usually at meetings, and as a consequence, we’d had very little opportunity to talk. A brief look at district statistics told me why I didn’t see her more often. Arkie was responsible not only for the Pecking school district but for more than twelve hundred other students spread over a wide, sparsely populated rural area. Although based in an office in the administration building in Falls River, she spent most of her time on the road and was scheduled to be at her desk only on Thursday afternoons. Hence, the biggest trick of all with Arkie was catching her.
    Increasingly, I felt the need to discuss Jadie’s case in depth with another professional. In the classroom, Jadie was making slow but steady social progress. While still disinclined to speak spontaneously, she did now join in with the boys and participate in group activities, and just occasionally Jeremiah could provoke her into arguing. However, it wasn’t the classroom that concerned me most. Rather, it was our little after-school sessions, and I honestly did not know what to make of those.
    As time went by, I was beginning to doubt the likelihood of any significant brain damage. When Jadie did speak, she was generally forthright and articulate. There was none of the hesitance or slight spaciness that I had come to associate with aphasics; instead, she maintained the aura of intense control that so characterized elective mutism. Thus, I was satisfied that Jadie’s problems were psychological, without physical underpinnings. The question that remained unanswered was to what extent she was disturbed. In class she gave every indication of being well grounded in reality and functioning on a fairly high level, certainly much higher than any of the boys. On the other hand, after school, when she was alone with me, Jadie’s conversations were often weird and unreal.
    Arkie was the only person I felt I could turn to in regard to Jadie. My affinity for Arkie, based mostly on that first meeting in January, had been instant. Despite her Dolly Parton appearance, she struck me as an intelligent, articulate woman with sufficient experience to give the kind of feedback I was feeling so in need of.
    “Hey!” Arkie cried cheerfully down the phone, when I finally managed to track her down. “How are you surviving?”
    I explained that things weren’t going too badly in general but that I felt I needed a chance to discuss Jadie’s case more completely, especially now that we were coming up to the end of the school year and needed to make decisions for the next year’s placement.
    There was a pause and through the phone I could hear the shuffling of paper. “Listen, Tor, I’ll tell you what,” Arkie said. “My schedule’s pure hell at the moment, and if I waited for a decent amount of time to get out to Pecking, it’d be next fall already. So what are you doing next Friday night?