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

room.
    Inside, a group of freshmen giggled and yelped as they waded barefoot through ankle-deep water to retrieve books, papers, and sweatshirts from their lockers. “Gross! It smells like a whole aquarium of fish died in here!” someone complained.
    Gilda noticed Sheila purposefully dropping her English paper into the water.
    Maybe she’s not so dumb after all
, Gilda thought.
She knows the flooding is a good excuse for a paper extension
.
    A loud scream pierced through the noise in the locker room. The girls fell silent and turned their attention to Tiara, who stood paralyzed, pointing at a spot on the ground.
    “I see her,” she said. “Right … there!” She seemed genuinely petrified.
    Because of her rebellious insistence on black lipstick and leather accessories, many girls kept a safe distance from Tiara even when she was behaving normally. Now, rather than rushing to see what had terrified her, they simply gawked like motorists gazing at a car accident.
    Propelled by curiosity, Gilda alone hurried over to see what Tiara was looking at.
    “It’s
her
again!” Tiara seemed close to tears.
    “
What is she talking about
?” the girls whispered amongst themselves. “She’s so weird!” someone said a little too loudly.
    Gilda stared into the floodwater, but try as she might, she couldn’t see anything except the murky liquid in which several ruined, sopping notebooks floated.
    Tiara turned to face the other girls in the locker room. “I just saw a
ghost
, in case any of you are interested.”
    The girls stared at Tiara.
    “The ghost of Dolores Lambert—that girl who drowned—she’s right here in the room with us!”
    At this, several girls made a splashing beeline toward the doorway, as if they had just learned that a school of piranhas was swimming around their feet.
    Gilda pulled a small pen flashlight from her backpack and shone it into the water. “I still don’t see anything, Tiara.”
    “I definitely saw something. I
told
you she was after me.”
    The few girls who had remained to gather their belongings squealed in unison as the room suddenly went dark.
    “Oh, crap,” Tiara whispered.
    Gilda felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.
Maybe Tiara is right
, she thought.
    The door burst open and one of the school’s maintenance workers shouted into the room. “Ladies! Everybody out!”
    The girls left the locker room as Mrs. McCracken’s voice blared over the PA system: “Ladies, as you can see, we have some flooding. Please remain calm and stay away from the locker rooms for the remainder of the day.”
    “I’m going to the nurse’s office,” said Tiara, whose face had a greenish hue.
    “Are you okay?” Gilda had noticed that Tiara often asked to go to the nurse’s office during class. She wondered what Tiara did there.
    “I feel really weird. I have a splitting headache.”
    Gilda wanted to ask Tiara more questions about the face she had seen in the water, but Tiara dodged away hastily, making it clear that she was in no mood to talk.
    News that Tiara had seen a ghost in the freshman locker room spread quickly, and by the end of the day, Dolores Lambert had made her presence known to several freshmen: she appeared as a mysterious reflection in the glass surface of a vending machine (from which she prevented three candy bars from emerging); she made drinking water taste “heinous”; she “put something sticky” in a student’s hand; she pulled hair and pinched buttocks.
    People are acting very strange
, Gilda thought as she walked past the Triplets, who sat outside the nurse’s office, crying.
Are they acting this way because the school is haunted, or because they’re just having fun being scared
?
    Lights continued to turn off without warning throughoutthe day, and the distraught girls speculated and prayed that they would be sent home. No announcement of school cancellation came, however. They remained stuck at school—trapped in a dark, damp, mildewy