Read Online Yellow by Megan Jacobson - Free Book Online Page A

you miss them?’
    â€˜Someone killed me and he hasn’t been caught, and I think that’s why I can’t leave here.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜You gotta make sure he’s locked up, so he doesn’t do it again. He’ll probably do it again. It’s the only way, Kirra. Please . . .’
    I weigh up my options. I have no friends. Lark’s wet footprints walk home from the surf in the wrong direction. Whatever semblance of a mother I had has been drowned at the bottom of a gin bottle, ever since Lark left.
    And yet.
    Murder?
    Goose pimples crawl all over my skin.
    â€˜I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it, Boogie,’ I whisper, and the wind snatches my words away as soon as they leave my lips. I can almost see them fly through the air and tangle on the overhead branches. I hang up the receiver and I walk home, stomping hard to scare the snakes away. The snakes are the least of my fears right now.
    My skin is still goosepimpled when I reach home, like braille all over my body. I run my fingers over the bumps on my forearm and I wonder what those bumps would say if they were really braille.
    I know what they would say.
    A blind person could run their fingers across the goosebumps on my arm and read the words
I need help
.
    I take out the yellow pages again and call the local police station. I count the rings as I cradle the receiver against my chin, and this reminds me of Boogie again, and even more goosebumps crowd the ones that are already there. After ten rings I’m about to hang up when a gruff voice answers the phone.
    â€˜Superintendent Donald McGinty here.’
    I know who the police superintendant is. Everyone does. He’s in his early sixties and people think he’s brave on account of a purple birthmark that clings to half his face, the type that would make most people shy away from local television appearances and school assembly speeches, but not him. His weak chin juts out, high and proud, from the folds of his neck when he speaks, and the eye that glares out from behind the purple part dares you to mock him. Nobody dares. That eye alone has scared countless kids from dabbling with delinquency. He lives alone, has done since his wife died twenty years ago, and his house squats in the middle of a two-acre hobby farm next to the bush, not too far from the school. I’d been there before. There’s always a pile of old wood scraps, tarps, Roundup containers and corrugated iron sheets for kids to plunder for tree houses and leaky rafts that only ever get a little ways down the creek before we all have to jump ship. I’m glad that I don’t have to speak to him in person. It makes me ashamed, but I don’t like to look at his face.
    â€˜Hello?’ he asks again, his patience tested. ‘How can I help?’ I can hear the muffled sounds of an understaffed, overworked police station in the background. I’m not quite sure what to say. How can you explain that the ghost of a boy who haunts a tele­phone box has just told you he was murdered?
    â€˜Hi,’ I stutter. ‘Ummm, I was after information about a kid who might have been murdered. It happened twenty years ago, apparently . . .’
    There’s a slurping sound in my ear, and I’m pretty sure Superintendent McGinty is swilling a long cup of coffee.
    â€˜I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. It’s classified under the Privacy Act. Is there anything else I can do for you today?’
    I shake my head, and then realise he can’t hear me.
    â€˜No, that’s all –’
    Before I finish speaking he’s hung up the phone.
    I replace the receiver. It was stupid to think that anyone would bother helping me.
    Anybody other than a ghost, that is.

The person in the cubicle next to me has diarrhoea. It’s lunch, and I’m hiding out in the school toilets. Even the library isn’t a sanctuary today, everybody who sees