Nomy: The Story of a Little Girl, a Ghost Cat, and a Teleporting Dog

By Adam B. Ford

Nine-year-old Nomy has moved to a new area, where she lives with her mother and grandparents in the last house in a crumbling ghost town. As she explores her surroundings, she hikes every day with her dog through deep forests and farm fields, encountering wild animals and a mysterious mist that seeps among the trees, full of magic and mystery. B

• Language: English
• Publisher: H Bar Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989372430

Adam B. Ford

Adam B. Ford lives in Vermont with his two dogs, Bulo and Koey. Bulo has mastered the art of teleportation around the Green Mountain National Forest (the inspiration for the setting of this book), but Koey is still working on her skills. Both of them have far too much energy and insist on being taken for walks every day. When he's not writing, Adam teaches snowboarding and plays ultimate Frisbee. Someday he might grow up.

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Nomy

The Story of a Little Girl, a Ghost Cat, and a Teleporting Dog

©2024 Adam B. Ford

Cover Illustration by Bronwyn Gruet - bronwyngruet.com
©2023 Bronwyn Gruet

The typefaces used in this book are Charis SIL by SIL International; Smythe by Vernon Adams; Macondo and Macondo Swash by John Vargas Beltran at johnvargasbeltran.com; Avarta Cadavra by TypeAliens.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data provided by Five Rainbows Cataloging Services

Names: Ford, Adam B., author.

Title: Nomy : the Story of a Little Girl, a Ghost Cat, and a Teleporting Dog / Adam B. Ford.

Description: Wallingford, VT : H Bar Press, 2024. | Summary: A pair of bullies force nine-year-old Nomy to rely on a mythical ghost cat to save her friends. | Audience: Grades 4-8.

Identifiers:ISBN 979-8-9893724-1-6 (hardcover)ISBN 979-8-9893724-2-3 (paperback)ISBN 979-8-9893724-3-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Farms—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Bullying—Fiction. | Teleportation—Fiction. | Ghost towns—Fiction. | Ghosts—Fiction. | Puma—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Themes / Bullying. | JUVENILE FICTION / Lifestyles / Farm & Ranch Life. | JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / Lions, Tigers, Leopards, etc. | JUVENILE FICTION / Ghost Stories.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.F67 No 2024 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.F67 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023920676

Contents

1 Buddy and Crow 1

2 Nomy 7

3 Fourth Grade 14

4 Presentations 21

5 Missus Wapachoo 29

6 Catamounts 36

7 Momma Bear 44

8 Trouble 50

9 Anna and Bulo 59

10 Mr. Pratt 66

11 The Trap 77

12 Maple Syrup 85

13 Singled Out 95

14 A Meal for Bulo 104

15 A Goat and a Bear 116

16 The Ghost Cat 125

17 Zinnia 132

18 Rescue 138

19 Reward 143

20 The Cat’s Claw 155

21 Two Gifts 167

A note on the word i

Throughout this book, the word i is not capitalized. I’ve always found it odd that of all the pronouns, this one was, for some reason, written with a capital letter. It seemed wrong to me and i stopped capitalizing that word sometime in my youth. I’ve grown used to it, and i hope that by the end of this book, you will too.

Chapter 1

Buddy and Crow

Buddy and Crow were not brother and sister, although most people thought that they were. They were probably cousins (they shared the same last name after all—Stanch), but even their family members weren’t exactly sure about that. The Stanches weren’t the kind of people who looked too carefully into their own family tree. Perhaps this was because they weren’t sure what they might find about whom had married whom, how they might be related to known criminals, or which long-dead relative was run out of town for stealing chickens, but the most likely reason was that they simply didn’t care.

The Stanches lived in a couple of pre-manufactured houses at the end of Scout Road, right where the school bus turnaround was. Scout road didn’t actually end right there, though. It kept going up into the woods. But just past where the Stanches lived, the road changed its name to Old Scout Camp Road and the change was marked with a battered old sign that said NO WINTER MAINTENANCE PAST THIS POINT. Anybody who drove past the Stanches and up into the woods probably had a good reason to go there, as the road was bumpy and rutted and wasn’t the kind of road that you’d want to be on unless you really had to be. Most cars that came to the end of Scout Road parked in the school bus turnaround which was right across the street from the Stanches and the people in them gathered their gear and their dogs and set off into the woods to reach the hiking trails that ran all over this part of the forest. Hardly anyone came to the end of Scout Road to visit the Stanches and the Stanches were fine with that. They weren’t at all happy about all of the people parking at the end of their road (and they did consider it to be their road) and complained to the town council about it. But after the sheriff visited them more than once to explain that the bus turnaround was public property, they let the matter go, although they still weren’t happy about it.

There were two run-down, rotting houses on the Stanch property which were once newly-manufactured from a nice clean facility and parked on this lot then slowly crumbled around their occupants. There were a dozen more shacks, barns, coops, sheds, and who knows what else as well, scattered about, stretching off into the trees, most of them surrounded by all manner of rusting things—cars, tractors, washing machines, farm tools—and piles of random wood and metal things, none of which were in any kind of working order. What used to be a grass lawn at some point in the past was now a field of weeds, which made the property look wild and uncared for, but also hid a lot of the junk that was simply everywhere. There were worn paths through the weeds made by the members of the Stanch family as they moved from one building to another and a wider worn-out area out front that served as a driveway and parking area for old cars and trucks—some of which ran, some of which didn’t.

Buddy and Crow may have lived in the same house or maybe Buddy lived in one and Crow in the other. It didn’t really matter. They lived with some parents, aunts and uncles, perhaps a grandparent or two, and a few more friends or relatives, all staying in the assorted shacks among the weeds on their property and not associating with anyone else in the town. They preferred it that way—they wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them. The problem was that all of the Stanches (and whoever else was living there) couldn’t help but bother people. They complained about people on their land, they complained about people on their road, they complained when the mail was late, they complained when the school bus was early, they just complained about anything and everything. And whenever any of them had to drive into the town of Rosebury, they would almost always get into some argument with someone for seemingly no reason at all. All the people of the town who’d lived there long enough knew to avoid any of the Stanches whenever they were out and about. It was simply easier that way.

Buddy and Crow, having grown up in an environment of adults who were petty and mean, were probably the meanest of the whole clan. They would go out of their way to bully other children. They would push and shove and complain and harass and all the while they would claim that they were only defending themselves because they were sure that everyone was out to get them. It didn’t help that both Crow and Buddy were bigger than all of their classmates. They were large, muscular children to begin with, but they were also a year or two older than the kids in the same grade because their parents didn’t even know that they had to send their children to school and so Buddy and Crow started first grade much later than they should have.

Because they lived in a small town, there was only one classroom per grade, so Buddy and Crow were in the same class, which wasn’t ideal, since they were the type of kids who, when separated, could be almost civil to other people, but when they were together, they pushed each other to act badly and do worse and worse things. Their teachers tried to keep them on opposite sides of the classroom but Buddy and Crow would always end up next to each other and eventually the teachers and all of the other children simply gave them a lot of space and tried not to deal with them. A couple teachers had really made an effort to teach these awful kids something, but others mostly gave up and only tried to keep them in line and have them survive the school day without hurting anyone.

Buddy had a real name, but no one remembered it. When he was small, his father started calling him my little buddy and the name stuck. The student rolls at the school listed him as Buddy Stanch and that was that. Crow had a real name as well, and she was listed as Cora Stanch, but no one called her that. Whenever a new school year started, her new teacher would call her by the name Cora, but Crow would never answer and eventually the teacher would give up and call her Crow, just like everyone else did. It suited her, and here’s why. Crow was mean. She teased and taunted and bullied and hit. And whenever she was mean, she enjoyed it, and she laughed. She laughed at tripping girls into the mud. She laughed at shoving boys into lockers. She laughed at throwing dirt clods at kids on the playground. She laughed at kicking dogs and punching classmates and stomping on bugs and scratching cars and smashing toys. She laughed and laughed, watching other people being miserable. And that laugh—that laugh that scraped and scratched out of her throat at every mean thing that she did—that laugh sounded just like a crow.

So Buddy and Crow lived their lives with all of their mean relatives and friends among the mess around their falling-down houses at the end of Scout Road. They rode into town and bothered people. They went to school and bothered people. Sometimes they stood at the end of the worn area of their yard where the working and non-working cars were parked and bothered whoever happened to come down to the end of Scout Road. The fact that very few people ever had a reason to come down to the end of Scout Road also bothered Buddy and Crow because they liked to bother people, and it annoyed them when they didn’t have anyone to bother. In fact, it was usually only hikers who came down to the end of Scout Road and they, if they knew about the Stanches, would park their cars and hurry off into the woods before anyone had a chance to yell at them. The Stanches—all of them, but Buddy and Crow in particular—were just mean, bothersome people, through and through, and no one liked them, not one little bit.

You should know, however, that one day in the future, when Buddy and Crow had been the meanest that they ever could be, they would disappear into the woods and no one would ever hear from them ever again. And more importantly, no one would ever, in the slightest, miss Crow and Buddy Stanch.

But this story isn’t about them.

Chapter 2

Nomy

Nomy Tmakwa was nine years old. She was not mean or awful or spiteful. She was just a little girl with a keen mind and a pleasant manner. She was small, but fierce.

Nomy lived in an old house deep in the woods with her mother and grandparents. The house wasn’t too small or too large, and it sat in among maples and hemlocks near the end of a rutted old dirt road that ran up the hill from the gravel road and petered off into the woods, past the other old houses in the little town of Calverton which really wasn’t even a town anymore. Nomy’s grandparents Atian and Winnie had lived in Calverton a long time ago when it was still a town—when there was a post office and a general store and a lot of other houses and shops. But when the last slab of granite had been dug out of the nearby quarry and the lumber mill closed down, well, there simply wasn’t enough work in this town and slowly, one by one, house by house, the people started leaving—moving to places with jobs and paved roads and grocery stores and movie theaters. Eventually the only family left was the Tmakwas, who kept their house looking prim and cared for, even as the houses surrounding them slowly began to rot and fall apart. The pretty tended lawns became patches of weeds which were taken over by shrubs and briers and eventually stands of trees grew around and sometimes through all of the buildings, leaving nothing but ghosts of houses on crumbling foundations.

It’s a ghost town, said Nomy’s mother Anna when they’d moved there at the beginning of the summer. But Grammy and Pop (for that is what Nomy called her grandparents) always said that there may be ghosts in some of the old buildings, but the town was still their home and as