Samantha, September 9, 2007

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Where's your mother? said the old guy, he just came up to me and asked, I mean this was like a really, really old guy, way older than Grandpa, older even than the Prefect from the Class of 1827, the one who was haunting the boathouse on the secluded lake in the Tyrolean mountains, of course the Prefect had been young and handsome in 1827, that was the big question about the ghost, whether he kept getting older after he died which would have made him like a zillion years old, my mom always gets mad me when I say a zillion because it's not a scientific number, so she makes me do the math and figure it out, if my mom were here she'd make me say that In the book, which is set in World War I, they just call it the War in the book, but none of the characters has to go anywhere near the battles or the trenches which were totally gross, the ghost would be like exactly 110 years old, which is 1917 minus 1827 plus 20, which is the age the Prefect was when he mysteriously disappeared and probably drowned at the bottom of the lake. Which is so stupid of my mom, because she can't do any math in her head herself, she's always asking me questions like What's 63 minus 47?, she should really just get herself a calculator instead of interrupting me all the time when I'm reading, and anyway it might as well be a zillion because in the opinion of Wilhelmina, the main character, ghosts don't get any older, they always stay the same age as they were when they died, or if they do get older, it's like what actually happens to their bodies, which means if you drown that your ghost would first get fat and bloated and disgusting and then get eaten by fishes, so Wilhelmina was like way, way more afraid of the school of fish with intelligent eyes that looked at her when she fell out of the boat and sank way down into the lake, but she didn't drown that time because she managed to take off the heavy shoes she was wearing and swim back up to the surface and get rescued, and they rowed her back to shore with her bare feet, which were totally scandalous because these were the old days when girls were expected to wear stupid heavy clothes which caused lots of unnecessary drownings. So if it wasn't a ghost, Wilhelmina figured there must be a real old man hanging around the boathouse and she made a plan to catch him by hiding overnight behind an old piece of sailcloth, and I was just reading that part, which sounds scary but it wasn't really because I'd already read the other books in the series and Wilhelmina always knows what she's doing, and that's when the real old man, I mean like really real, in my world, not the book, he came up to me and started asking me where my mother was, and I could tell he didn't really want to find my mother, he was worried about me being there by myself. So I was like, my Dad's up on the roof, I'm totally okay, just leave me alone and let me read, really I just said my Dad was around somewhere but that's what I meant, and the old man just looked at me and the old ladies started to come over and get him and he just shook his head and said, Nose always in a book, you should go out and play, and it was like I knew he wasn't talking to me at all, he was talking to someone else, a long time ago.