The Ghost of Oak by Fallon Sousa Page B

finally agreed to do what their pal
said.
             They squeezed into their beat-up old pickup truck, and did 90
miles per hour down to the local cemetery, blasting heavy metal on
the radio. When the crowd arrived at the cemetery, they jumped out
of the pickup, and onto the sidewalk. One by one, they climbed the
fence with ease, and began to search for a grave worth robbing.
Then clumsily, one of the men tripped on a grave. He looked at the
engraving on the stone. It read:
                                           Ellen Mary McDonald
                 
                                     1880-1965
             "Hey guys!" he yelled, addressing his friends. "My daddy told
me about that old lady when I was a kid. His little bro was the
dude who found her body. She was filthy rich.
            "Good choice." replied the brave man who had suggested this
particular crime. "Looks like you're not so stupid after all." The
"stupid" one growled at him.
     
             They grabbed their shovels and started digging. After about a
quarter hour, the ends of their rusty old garden shovels scraped at
a cheap wooden casket.
     
            "Doesn't look like she was rich," One man commented, eying
his chum suspiciously.
     
             They opened the coffin anyway, revealing a skeleton in ratty
black clothes. They had just thought that they were wrong about her
wealth, when they spotted the locket, grinning and already eager to
snatch it. The bravest one grabbed it fast, before anyone could
back out of the deal. He managed to get to the sidewalk, before he
keeled over, dead. The others stood behind, fixing up the crime
scene the best that they could.
     
          When, they saw their friend/leader dead after
returning to the sidewalk, they scooped him up, and threw him into
the pickup, without noticing that the locket lay on the cement
behind them. And then and there at 1:30 am that day, they drove
off, never to be seen again. They probably fled to Mexico, or
Australia after that, but nobody really knew for sure. But one
thing was for sure. There would always be some kind of punishment
for those who chose to mess around with that
locket.

Chapter One
      "Hey,
Katie!" yelled Jasmine Thomas.
              Jasmine was Katie Smith's best friend in all of
White Elementary School. Katie was ten, and in the fourth grade.
Most kids thought she was a sissy, due to her ongoing fears of
things that most ten-year-olds had long since got over. Any little
noise or shadow was enough for her imagination to go wild, and
she'd start freaking out. Once, when she was five, she got so
scared of a mall Santa Claus, that she started to cry and ran back
to her mother immediately.
            Despite this, her friend "Jazz" as she preferred to be
called, always sided with her when someone made fun of her, and the
bullies always obeyed Jazz as if they were in a trance, since she
did come across kind of scary and tough, even though she had a
gentle heart and made a great best friend.
           "Hey, Jazz, what's up, girl," Replied
Katie.
           Jasmine laughed. "You sound so old when you talk
like that, Katie. Like a teenager. I hope you're not turning into a
popular girl! Are you? Hello, earth to Katie Marie Smith. Are you
with me, girl?" Jasmine clapped her hand over her mouth, and
apologized to Katie, who was still blushing tremendously from,
Jazz's comment about her starting to sound like a teenager. She
forced herself to stop and apologized to Jazz.
            Earlier that year, they promised each other that they would
never be popular, try to be popular, act popular, or even look
popular. Trying to talk like a teenager was against their rules,
because popular girls tried to sound older than what they really
were. Regardless of the fact that they had just broken their rules
of friendship, Jasmine and Katie were glad to