Free Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake by Jennifer Allison

down on the gas pedal as the light turned green. Driving on the shoulder of the road, she passed several cars, then swerved onto Woodward Avenue, accelerating to create as much distance as possible between herself and—and whatever it was she just saw.
    She felt queasy and short of breath, as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the car.
I’m just imagining things
, she told herself.
It was a homeless person
. But why had she seen her own name on the cardboard sign?
    Nikki felt sure that she had seen a ghost.

10

The Flood
    A s her alarm went off at 7:10, Gilda awoke groggily, remembering a bad dream. There had been something about being lost in the Garden of Contemplation. Tiara was there, trying to lead her somewhere, but someone else kept yelling, “You’re going the wrong way! It’s over here!” The frustrating thing was that she couldn’t see who was yelling at her. Gilda would have liked to spend more time analyzing her dream, but she was running late.
    Her morning routine involved savoring every last second of sleep before rushing to catch the 7:20 bus to Bloomfield Hills. The school uniform was crucial to this routine: had Gilda felt the need to
think
about what she might wear, she would never get to school on time.
    Gilda jumped out of bed, found her uniform lying crumpled on the floor, showered, brushed her teeth, detangled her hair, and stuffed a bagel into her backpack. She was out the door by 7:19, with one minute left to catch the bus.
    The rain had continued all day on Sunday, all night, and into the morning—a series of thunderstorms with tornado watches throughout the state. Gilda dashed through the downpour toward the bus, her untied shoelaces trailing in the mud andher broken umbrella violently inverting itself like a frightened octopus.
    Stuffed with umbrellas and open newspapers, the bus bristled with the early-morning hostility of people on their way to work. The only passenger wearing a school uniform amidst a sea of business attire, Gilda noticed people staring at her bare knees as if offended by their presence. “Yes, they’re
knees
,” she explained to a crisp-looking man in a suit whose eyes lingered on her legs too long. “They’re exposed for the purpose of my education.”
    The businessman quickly hid behind his newspaper.
    Gilda stared out the window at the buildings that sprawled along Woodward Avenue—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, the Royal Palms Motel, the Fur & Feathers pet store—and thought how strange it was that in a matter of minutes she would be in an environment that looked like a castle. She opened her notebook and wrote:
    I should be heading to school with excitement and eagerness to learn, but today I feel only weariness and foreboding. “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”
(
That’s from Hamlet .
)
    Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
fascinated Gilda because the main character of the play was a young man who spoke to his father’s ghost. She continued:
    I feel like I have something in common with Hamlet. For one thing, he obviously misses his dead father. He also can’t stand his stepfather, and he’s really mad at his mother forgoing out with him in the first place. Of course, Brad isn’t my stepfather yet
(
thank God!
)
and of course, he didn’t kill my father like Clandius did in Hamlet (as far as I know). Still, I think old Hamlet and I have something in common, especially on a gloomy day like today.
    When Gilda stepped into the school hallway, she drew stares and rueful smiles because of her wet hair and clothes. She made her way toward the freshman locker room, located at the school’s basement level, then turned the corner and gagged as she walked into the pungent odor of mildew and a shallow lake of standing water.
    “You don’t want to go in there!” Ashley splashed toward Gilda, covering her nose with her hand. “It’s totally flooded!”
    Curious to see for herself, Gilda took off her shoes and tiptoed through the water toward the locker