I am the Skeleton in the Closet

Activity Day

My elementary school was just a left off of a main road once the road disappeared into a big wooded area. The school, just like my house, was teetering on a knife's edge between two different townships. It was just west enough to count as a Clarkston district school, but literally the very next road off of Main Street was in the next town over. The elementary school was surprisingly large, each grade had four classrooms with at least thirty students in them. When they made us run the mile it was only about seven times around the school. In the back was a giant play structure with several different places to play. The main structure had a slide at least twenty feet tall that had to have supports attached to it's yellow underside to make sure it didn't fall. That was attached to a long purple staircase with four different entrances, all of which required a different sort of climbing to concur. From there, a flat raised portion allowed access to the rest of the structure. The whole jungle gym was typically filled with kids that liked playing tag during recess. Behind that structure was a number of swings and monkey bars that were filled with all the kids that were obsessed with climbing. In a separate patch there was another set of swings, a smaller play structure, a monkey bar dome, and teeter totter. There were hardly any kids that hung out here. It was kind of the reject spot for the kids that either looked weird, acted weird, or were handicapped.

The two rectangular wood chip patches weren't but ten feet away from each other separated only by a poor excuse for a strip of grass and some yellow, purple and green picnic tables where the card game fanatics played. Behind those two structures there was a massive hill that led up into the dense woods behind the school. They used that hill for sledding in the winter. Far out to the left of the play structures was another big hill, but only about half the size of the sledding hill, that curved around an open field that housed two soccer fields and ended around the baseball diamond. Behind those was a giant tree that had the perfect shade during the warmer months. If you didn't play tag and you weren't obsessed with swinging/climbing you were out running around in this giant field. Of course we all needed supervision and there weren't always enough Recess Lady's to get this area. When there were though, I would typically hang out back there digging holes in the mud patch at the base of the long curved hill with the few friends I had.

In fourth grade I met my first actual friend Emma, though we had nicknamed her Elmo. She wasn't nearly as girly as the others, in fact, I really thought of her more as a guy than anything. She had the look anyway. Usually a worn out dark blue hoodie covered her baggy boyish clothing. Emma wasn't as afraid as I was of not embracing the stereotype, or her parents were just more open about it. We both had an interest in ghost stories and all things creepy. The school's favourite ghost story was about Bloody Mary.

Everyone has their own story in their own town. I'm sure other schools in the area thought differently, but our story revolved around an abandoned house on the schools property. Way out in the corner of the playground, past the shading tree, was an old house. Creepy. The kind that all of the characters in a scary movie are drawn to before they're all gruesomely murdered. According to our story a girl died in that house, Mary. Now there is no actual evidence that a girl died in that house, of course there had once been a family that lived there. It had to have been donated somehow, schools don't just waste money on useless housing. However, as the story went her parents were well established murderers that never got caught. So well established in fact that when their daughter turned sixteen they gave her an old family relic, a dagger, that was used for the first kill whenever the youngest turned sixteen. As a result of this, and her messed up past, Mary used that dagger to kill her parents and then herself by a quick slice to the throat, hence the name "Bloody Mary". Now she supposedly haunted the school yard and when you go in the bathroom, turn out the light, and say her name three times while turning in a circle she'll grab you and drag you into the mirror. For those lucky enough to escape that end, three scratches adorned their cheek from where she scratched at them trying to pull them in. She was behind any and everything that happened in the school. No matter how big or small.