by Javier Bateman

Little girls are insane. I don’t mean this as a bad thing, simply an observation. 

Perhaps they feel that bubbling sense of indignation and rage against a patriarchal society from the get-go, and need to channel it into something cathartic. Maybe they have some form of witchiness, passed down over ages like a hand-me-down of the bizarre.

Whatever the cause, there is something that inspires little girls to make potions out of mud, and lay curses on boys who are mean to them in choir. 

I am not even a girl anymore, and still, I resonate so strongly with weird little girls. Was it my undiagnosed ADHD? Queerness? Intergenerational mental health issues?

Yes, probably. But that doesn’t make a good lead-in to the story, so let’s all pretend it’s a mystery. 

I am saying all this as a preface; to wash my own hands of guilt over the story you are about to read. The story of how, at ten years old, along with another ten-year-old girl, I tried to convince my best friend she was haunted.

It started innocently enough. My best friend Amy and I messed with each other constantly. It rarely went far—changing each other’s desktops in the computer lab, jumpscaring the other when we slept over, pouring glitter into birthday cards. Harmless fun; jovial—jolly, even. Amy often got the one-up on me because she was a horror fan and I wasn’t. Thus, I was a) Much more gullible, and b) Much easier to frighten. 

A new girl, Sarah, arrived at our school. Amy and I both made friends with her. We would often sit next to a memorial plaque in the school quadrangle and eat lunch together. 

One day, all at once, I saw an opportunity; something blossoming,the little cogs of my pre-teen mind turning. 

Amy went to the water fountain. I turned to Sarah and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny to pretend Amy is haunted?” 

Sarah answered without hesitation: “Yes. Yes it would.”

In retrospect, maybe I should have been concerned how immediately down for psychological torture Sarah was. But hindsight is 20/20, and I’ve had glasses since I was 5.

We started small. Stuff Amy and I would do to each other normally. We moved her belongings around in class. We hid her eraser or keychain in weird places. When she asked us where her things were, we said we never touched them. 

After a few days of choreographed gaslighting, we decided Amy was ready for the next layer of our plan —we would pin the blame on a ghost attached to the memorial plaque we ate lunch near. It must have latched onto Amy.

Amy didn’t believe us, for some reason. 

So, like any reasonable children, we doubled down. I spent my time in the computer lab ‘researching’ the memorial plaque. I pointed out the similarities between Amy and one of the random girls listed on the memorial plaque. 

Sarah was a fan of Buffy, so naturally, she started copying Willow and pretended she could sense an “energy” coming from Amy.

Amy remained unconvinced. She rolled her eyes and told us we were both being stupid. And we were, absolutely. But it just made us want to try harder, go bigger. 

Sarah, taking initiative, pretended she was a conduit for the ghost. As we sat together in class, Sarah would seize up and stare into the distance, reciting  cliché horror quotes  from films that Amy had definitely already seen.

You know, little girl stuff. 

Committed to the bit, whilst Sarah was ‘possessed’, I would live out my ghost hunter fantasies and give  Amy advice she definitely did not ask for. 

I put salt packets in Amy’s book bag (she didn’t appreciate it). 

I described what the ghost looked like from my ‘research’ so we could find her (I just described Amy to Amy). 

I brought my iPod to school so the ‘ghost’ could intercept the frequencies (the only song on my iPod was Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas, which, whilst not important to the story, is important to me). 

At one point, Sarah and I made a Ouija board out of paper and brought it to school so Amy could ‘commune’ with the ghost.  Amy ended up calling us “stupid” because no matter what we asked it, Sarah kept moving the cardboard planchette to spell out A-M-Y.

Amy remained unimpressed with our efforts, but we had no intention of stopping: like some rom-com male lead, it just made us try harder. 

Our plans became increasingly elaborate and far-fetched, especially for two children with no disposable income. Could we project onto something, somehow? What if one of us dressed as the ghost and the other took a photograph?

Sarah became more and more committed to the bit. She pitched ideas that made me laugh nervously. What if she cut off her hair whilst possessed? What if she wrote notes in real blood? 

Ah, the repercussions of my own actions: there they were.

I forgot, of course, that whilst all little girls were insane, some were more so than others. 

Like some sort of unhinged Icarus, I had flown too close to the sun. I’d created a creature from my own hubris: Frankenstein and his Monster. Gatsby and that damn green light. And me–weird wrangling the weirder.

I managed, with all the persuasion a ten-year-old can muster, to talk Sarah down from her borderline illegal method-acting. Instead, we would get to the school oval early to write an ominous threat in the dirt. Do I remember the threat? No. Do I remember the relief when she agreed? Yes.

A teacher saw us on the oval, at 6am, with our drawing stick. They asked us what we were doing. 

In what might have been the understatement of the year, I said, ‘Drawing?’

To which the teacher replied, ‘Why in the dirt?’

To which Sarah responded, ‘We want it to be scary.’

To which the teacher, taking a sip of coffee, said, ‘Make sure to leave the stick outside.’

Success

At recess, we sat with Amy near the message. We pointed it out to her, feigning shock. She was unimpressed.She said she had seen us that morning and knew we did it.

Not success

We pretended to have no memory of the event, claiming we both must have been possessed when we wrote it. Amy rolled her eyes and ate her recess elsewhere, which, considering everything, was very level-headed of her. 

Sarah had the insatiable mind of an artist and wanted more. But my undiagnosed ADHD brain was getting tired of the same joke, and I worried that if I didn’t stop Sarah now, she might actually commune with the dead, purely for authenticity’s sake.

We came clean. Amy was relieved. Not because she’d been particularly scared, but because she, too, was bored of the constant psychological warfare. 

The rest of the school year continued without much drama. I moved on to different schemes.

In fact, I had completely forgotten about the haunting. The memories only came back when Amy was over for dinner recently; I was complaining about a high school friend who tormented me with crocodile puns for months. Amy took a sip of her drink and remarked casually, ‘Remember when you tried to gaslight me into thinking I was haunted?’

Amy and I have not seen Sarah since we were both ten, but I hope she knows that even though Amy and I remain scared of her, I have nothing but respect for her commitment to the bit. Moral? No. Ethical? Absolutely not. But committed. 

Is there a moral here? Amy says we did it because we were ‘Fucking weird.’ Which, yeah. We were. And it was weird.

But we were little girls, and I’d argue that’s as much a reason as anything.

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Javier Bateman (they/he) is a trans nonbinary, chronically ill writer, history nerd and poet. He resides on unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar. He’s been published in Enbylife journal and Blue Bottle Journal and has upcoming projects with Sunder Journal and Goblincat Zines. You can find them at @romeo_no_homeo on Instagram