Free Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden

but it was dagger sharp. An ideal script for a horror film.
    On Friday of that week, I decided to attempt collage making with the children. Coming in with a large collection of old magazines and a box containing a huge assortment of riffraff—everything from feathers and chunks of sponge to bottle caps and uncooked pasta—I tried to explain the elusive nature of a work of art. We had been studying a loosely constructed unit on emotions, and I hoped to relate their collages to this, saying that when everyone was finished, we’d talk as a group about their work, about what feelings the collages generated in the people looking at them, and what feelings had gone into making them.
    The boys dived into the box with lively abandon and set to work immediately.
    Reuben loved the pieces of fabric, particularly the bits of silk and velvet. Picking each one up tenderly from the box, he stroked them against his upper lip and flapped his hands in excitement.
    Philip, in the chair next to Reuben’s, had a Montgomery Ward catalogue out and was enthusiastically cutting out pictures of toys and pasting them down.
    “What have we here?” I asked, pulling a chair up and sitting down beside him.
    “Haaahhh,” Philip breathed. His whole vocabulary consisted of heavily breathed syllables, most of which were unintelligible to me.
    “Toys?” I inquired.
    He gestured wildly.
    “That’s his Christmas stocking,” Jeremiah said from across the table. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you. Ain’t it, Phil? Him and me are making up pictures of what we want in our Christmas stockings.”
    I thought it best not to point out to Jeremiah that this was the twenty-ninth of March.
    “And Jadie, too,” Jeremiah said, expansively gesturing to include them all. “Jadie and me and Philip are doing that for our collage. What Santa’s gonna bring us.” Jeremiah was pasting down pictures of Jaguars and gold bullion bars.
    Fact was, Jadie was doing nothing. She sat humped over in her chair, her chin almost on the tabletop. She stared morosely at the blank piece of paper in front of her.
    “Having a hard time getting started?” I asked.
    No response.
    “You know, of course, you don’t have to do a Christmas stocking. That was Jeremiah’s idea. If he’d like to fill his paper with a collage of things he’d like to find in his Christmas stocking, that’s lovely, but you can choose to do something else. You can make your collage any way you want it.”
    Silence.
    “An important thing with art is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just look in the box and see what catches your attention.”
    A pause. I regarded her. “You know how we’ve been talking about emotions lately? About that place way down inside you where your feelings are? Look down there and find out what you’re feeling. Right now. See if you can make a collage of what you find.”
    I went back to the boys and left Jadie alone with her blank piece of paper. She usually did very well with tasks that were rigidly laid out, such as her academic work, but she always seemed to have trouble with ambiguous projects. Consequently, I didn’t want to be tempted into structuring the activity too much for her.
    When I looked over a while later, Jadie had begun to work. Taking up one of the magazines, she started cutting out pictures. I watched a moment, trying to discern a relationship among the pictures, but I couldn’t.
    Jeremiah had nearly finished his collage and was beginning to grow restless. He leaned over Jadie’s shoulder. “What you doing?”
    Jadie didn’t respond. She just kept cutting out. Then, after acquiring about two dozen pictures, she shoved the magazines away. Laying the pictures in front of her, she took up her scissors again and started carefully snipping the pictures into small bits.
    “Man, lady, look at her. She’s crazy, all right. Look what that girlie’s doing,” Jeremiah shouted.
    I shot him a black look.
    “You’re crazy,” he said to