by Laura Tims
“I don’t care how famous this song is,” Nov grunts. “It’s creepy how they keep playing it on repeat.”
Abe Gordon, Adam’s grandfather, sings over the speakers: “And I’ll carry you down to the quarry, once it’s dark and there’s no point sayin’ sorry . . .”
Suddenly everyone is shuffling, taking their seats, and Mr. Gordon picks up the microphone.
“Adam was . . . my son.” Mr. Gordon strangles the mic. His voice filters through gravel. “And he was . . . his grandfather’s grandson. He’d’ve made it as far as my father, that’s the musical talent he had. . . .”
Parents have no idea how little they know about the people they gave life to.
“Adam—” And then Mr. Gordon shakes his head, takes a deep breath, and pukes. The mic broadcasts the sound, the smell hitting us all at once. He staggers. An Asian guy I’ve never seen before—his hair gelled in short spikes and a T-shirt blazing orange underneath a too-small black vest—leaps up, catching Mr. Gordon’s elbow. I can’t hear what the guy says as he quickly steers Mr. Gordon past us and out the door, but his tone’s low and comforting.
“Jeeesus,” November mutters.
“Who’s that guy?” I whisper. “Why’s Mr. Gordon his responsibility?”
She shrugs.
Two funeral home employees clean up while Abe Gordon continues to sing about the quarry where the grandson he never met died. It used to be a love song, now it’s a dirge. Sweat laminates my shirt to my back. I want to take off my skin.
There’s whispers throughout the crowd. No one knows what’s happening now. But then Cassius approaches the mic, his black eye puffed purple. The overhead lights wash out the paler parts of him. From here, it’s like someone splattered him with paint.
“What’s he doing?” November mumbles.
“I was Adam’s best friend. . . .” he starts.
Cassius is the school artist. Adam was the school musician. The sweet-voiced daydreamer and the smirking asshole. I grip the minibottle in my pocket.
“And I’m here to tell you he was a fucking prick.”
An audible gasp sounds. A new kind of silence washes over the room. My throat seals shut.
I should have been the one brave enough to say it.
Cassius stares helplessly around the room. His eyes hit mine, and I fold into the bench. Then he drops the mic, tucks in his shoulders, and walks out fast, chased by glares and whispers.
“Someone’s gotta go after him.” November squeezes my shoulder, and then she’s gone. I guess funerals mean taking responsibility for the sadness of people you barely know.
Everyone waits for some family member to grab the wheel, but Mr. Gordon was all Adam had. So after another awkward moment, people start rising. Slowly, a queue forms. Final good-byes. I stand behind everybody else.
The line moves joltingly, like an execution, a pause for each person to leap off the cliff at the end. Tears. Murmurs. Propped between pews is a photo collage of Adam through the years: A toddler with the ghost of his face mashes a toy keyboard. An eight-year-old reaches through reindeer wrapping paper for the fretboard of a guitar. Was this kid-version of Adam always capable of what he did? If something changed, what and when? Did he notice?
I step up to the casket and see that each hard, crisp tendril of his hair is arranged specifically on the pillow, arms bent over his chest, mouth locked, hidden stitches disappearing into his temple. There’s no rush of memories from my missing night. If something had changed in me to make me capable of murder, I’d notice, right?
People look at bodies to understand how they’re just empty houses, and then they’re not scared anymore, right?
I hate him. I hate him so much I wish I’d killed him—
No! I dig my fingernails into my palms. I don’t want to be scary. Or to wish for that.
But I am. And I do.
The funeral home bathroom is all fake elegance—fake marble sinks, plastic craft-store flowers in a plastic vase, a plastic doily underneath. But there’s nothing realer than a toilet, or the things people write on the wall above one. Sharpie underneath the door hinge: I still have your sweater. This is grief, dirty and cold. It’s hiding in a bathroom and doing your shameful things where no one else can see. Mostly it’s the word carved in tiny letters above the coat hook: please.
Please don’t let me be a girl who looks at a dead person and wishes she’d killed him. Let me be what someone peering in would see, a girl crying, too tall maybe, hair too wild, but nobody’s nightmare.
Grace used to hide in the bathroom in kindergarten, as soon as Mom dropped us off. She’d come out only if I promised to hold her hand.
I take out my bottle, drop it. It clatters like the world’s ending, but doesn’t break. I swallow the contents. Breathe. It’s my head, I’m in control of it, and Adam’s dead, dead, dead.
Through the wall, there’s the dry rasp of someone throwing up in the men’s room. Then a thud, a ceramic clonk, and a softly whispered “fuck.”
I know what it is to swear hopelessly to yourself in a bathroom. So I gather myself and go next door.
I’ve never been in a men’s room. It’s the same as the girls’, minus the fake flowers, plus a urinal. A man’s legs stick out under the door to the only stall.
I step forward.
The stranger from earlier is looping Mr. Gordon’s arm over his shoulders. He’s shed his vest, his orange shirt flecked with puke. He braces himself against the tiles, face dimming with that kind of desperation people get when they have to lift something way too heavy for them.
“Can I help?” It comes out so normal.
He looks up, relieved. “Thanks, would you mind?” he pants. “I wanna take him to his car.”
We maneuver Mr. Gordon up, his legs jumbling, suit ruined. This is real alcohol. An adult going to the store and buying a forty and drinking all of it.
The parking lot’s cold for upstate New York in October, though the sunlight’s laser sharp, the kind that always burns me and spares Grace, thanks to the SPF-30 moisturizer she puts on every day. We prop Mr. Gordon against his blue Mazda. He slouches semiconscious against the hood. The stranger wipes his forehead, smiles gratefully at me.
“Thank you so much. I’m Levi. You’re the nicest person in the world.”
It’s like every word’s tattooed on his heart, he’s so sincere.
He’s two inches shorter than me. Eyebrows, perfect. His upper lip’s fuller than the bottom. If he combined with Grace and me, we’d have an even mouth.
“I had no idea what I was gonna do with him in there,” he says.
We realize simultaneously we have no idea what we’re going to do with him out here.
“You don’t drive, do you?”
I shake my head. “I just got my permit. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He rolls a shoulder, winces, crouches. Mr. Gordon grumbles nonsense. There’s a special kind of shittiness about an adult whose life’s a train wreck. I have time to fix mine. But maybe that’s what he thought when he was sixteen.
My phone buzzes. It’s November.
Giving Cassius a ride home. Lemme know if u need me to come back for ya.
People start filtering out, looking at the sky and the ground and every car in the lot except Mr. Gordon’s. The easiest way to deal with a problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist, as taught by my parents. Only Ms. Bell heads toward us. There’re rules against staff touching students, but she hugs me. Levi, too. He hugs her back tight.
“You guys know each other?” I’m stuck on the mystery of who he is.
“Nope.” Ms. Bell bends and shouts, “Mr. Gordon!” A groan. She straightens. “Joy, I’m bringin’ my car around, and I’m takin’ him home. He won’t get to see his son bein’ buried, but if you ask me, I don’t think he’d see it even if we plonked him down next to the minister.”
It takes her three minutes to back her car up to us. We tip Mr. Gordon into the backseat.
After she’s driven off,
Levi says, “Thanks again. For helping, and for being the first person in Stanwick I’ve talked to. Makes me think all of you must be pretty nice.”
He doesn’t see the train wreck. But it’s not as obvious on me, like a pukey suit and Jell-O legs. “I can’t believe he got so wasted.”
“It’s not his fault. People do things to cope.”
“People shouldn’t need . . . that kind of coping.”
“Everyone has something they use to cope.” His eyes are wood brown, oak branches, sunlight. “Doesn’t make ’em bad people.”
I should ask how he knew Adam, but I don’t want to hear that they were friends. Maybe he helped Mr. Gordon for the same reason November’s giving Cassius a ride home.
“The graveyard’s across the road,” he says hesitantly. “Walk with me?”
I nod and walk with him.
Grace and I were seven the last time we came to the graveyard. It was after some nameless great-uncle had a heart attack in front of Antiques Roadshow. I stole a daisy from someone else’s grave, put it in Grace’s hair, and cried when Mom snatched it back.
Now it’s a summer graveyard with winter air. We surround the fresh pit, everyone silent. Adam’ll lie here forever, neutralized. He won’t follow me out.
The minister tells some nice lies about Adam, and then several men lift the casket and lower it into the open hole. I’ll make sure they don’t fuck it up. This is why the time machine didn’t work yesterday—they hadn’t buried him yet. Grace’ll be fine as soon as he’s covered in dirt.
Kennedy cries for real, heaving sobs over the dirt patter. Sarah clings to her back. I’m rigid. No girl should ever cry for him.
Grace never cried.
Then Levi’s beside Kennedy, whispering gently to her. She quiets. Does he know her? Or does he just know what to say? If I were like him, I’d’ve found the right words to tell Grace in the exercise room. I’d’ve found the right words in the summer.
The shovel noise devolves from artillery fire to heavy rainfall. One foot of dirt. Two. The graveyard empties. The sun dips lower and the men work until there’s a mound of clean earth.
But there’s no magic text from Grace announcing she’s okay. Nothing teleports me back to the beginning of the summer. I’m still here. He’s still here.
He is going to follow me out.
“Joy?”
I turn. Levi’s still here, too. I realize we’re alone next to the grave. Everyone must’ve left.
He touches my wrist, and I yank back.
“Sorry,” he says immediately. “Um.”
I look away. Half the graves nearby have fresh flowers. Daisies. Grace’s favorite.
“You must’ve cared a lot about him.”
If dead people can make someone pay ten dollars for a bunch of flowers at the grocery store and drive here to drop them off, what else can they do?
“I hated him,” I say.
“Oh.” Sadness fits him worse than that vest.
“He—” The truth claws my throat. I choke on it. “Never mind. Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. I don’t mean to swear so much.”
“It’s fucking fine.” He smiles a little bit. Even though the sun’s setting, the graveyard lightens.
But his smile disappears when he glances at the grave again. It’s clear he wishes Adam weren’t dead. Which means he and I are fundamentally incompatible human beings.
I start to say bye, but instead, suddenly, I’m gulping. I can’t control anything that comes out of my mouth, but I can control what comes out of my eyes. I’m not going to cry over Adam’s grave. I take a deep breath. And then tears leak out anyway.
“Whoa, hey. It’s okay.”
Strangers say that like they know what’s okay and what’s not.
“Death is hard.” He lifts his hands: I’m not going to hurt you. “Even if you didn’t like him. Sometimes that makes it harder.”
I don’t want him to take responsibility for my sadness. But he’s making me feel a little better. What doorway did he find into my head, and how can I find the same one into Grace’s?
“How’d you get here if you don’t drive?” I ask.
“Came with my, um. My dad.” A cold breeze speckles his bare arms with goose bumps. He tugs a baseball cap out of his pocket, puts it on. It’s bent, threads sprouting from the brim. It messes up his hair. “Looks like I’ll be hoofing it.”
I love that he says hoofing it.
“Lemme give you a ride.” I text Mom. “You deserve a favor, helping out Mr. Gordon like that.”
“Ah, yeah. I forgot it’s not that obvious. Perils of being mixed race. My mom’s Vietnamese. He’s the aforementioned dad I won’t be riding back with.”
Levi is—Adam’s brother?
“It doesn’t feel obvious to me, either. Trust me.”
I’ve been standing here talking to him like a friend.
“I haven’t seen him since I was nine.”
Nausea rolls over me.
“I swear our left pinkies are both crooked. Or they were when we were little. Meant to check if his still was.” He stares at the grave for the hundredth time. “I forgot to look.”
I betrayed Grace by smiling at him.
“Why’d you hate him?” he asks tentatively. “I had this idea of him in my head. I’m wondering how right I was.”
Breathe.
Before I realize it, I’m walking away, hurrying toward the graveyard gate, abandoning Levi. He catches up to me by the curb. He smells like cinnamon and summer wheat. No more breathing, not while he’s in a hundred-mile radius.
“Sorry if I said something wrong.”
I look at him. There’s no Adam in his angular ears, or in the earring I just noticed, a thin silver hoop. No Adam in his freckles, few but dark: three in a line from the edge of his left eye to his cheekbone, one underneath the right edge of his mouth, a faint one on the tip of his nose.
His Adam parts are hidden, which makes them more dangerous.
“I don’t mind walking home.” He backs away. “I’ll see you around. Nice to meet you, Joy.”
The Gordons’ house is a half-hour trek, and he might not be used to walking, if he’s not from Stanwick. The wind shoves his T-shirt against his shoulder blades. Some boys are so skinny it makes my chest hurt.
“Wait.” The word tastes like guilt. “My mom’ll be here any minute.”
In the car, Mom’s knuckles whiten more on the steering wheel with every hundred feet. She and Grace get those lines on their foreheads when they’re holding something in.
“How was it?” she asks warily.
“It was a funeral, Mom. It was sad.”
“Horrible accident, what happened.” Dad twists in the front seat to face Levi, who’s beside me in the back. “You a friend of Joy’s from school?”
“Nah.” Levi presses against the window. Is he doing it because he wants to get away from me, or because he knows I want to get away from him? “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying, though, so I’m enrolled at school here. Starting tomorrow.”
How does he not know how long he’ll be staying?
“You just moved here?” Dad’s shirt says Just Do It! in awful red letters.
“I flew here from Indiana for the funeral, and I’ll be staying with my . . . dad.” He picks at his battered baseball cap. It’s a little too small. “Adam was my half brother.”
“Oh.” Mom fills the car with pity like steam.
Dad fires off an instant “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be. It’s no big deal.” He rotates the hoop in his earlobe. “I mean, it’s a big deal, just for everyone else, since I never knew Adam. I mean, it’s still a big deal to me, but other people . . . never mind.”
He mutters something that sounds like idiot.
“Stay away from that quarry,” says Mom suddenly. “It’s dangerous how kids hang out there, just because of the song. Your father and I and some other parents are starting a petition to have the town fence it off.”
> Yeah. Seal it away.
We arrive at the house. It slants on the hill, like a claw that popped out of the earth, glass and wood. The lawn’s blisteringly green. The night Grace and I came here together, the first night, the night, I tore off my shoes after the long walk and buried my toes in the grass. She kept hers on. Told me to hurry up, please, she didn’t want to make him wait.
The night of his birthday party, I kept my shoes on. That’s all I remember.
Levi gets out, thanks us for the ride, traipses up the steps. It takes him a while to open the door, like he’s not used to the lock. It’s hard to leave anyone here to this dark slash of a house, the quarry lurking past the trees.
But he’s enemy territory.
Mom and Dad fidget on the way back. They’re like twins, too, blond and tall, doing everything in tandem, always putting on ChapStick. I have no idea who they are.
“I know you’ll run upstairs to your computer the minute we get home, so your father and I wanted to ask you something.” Mom stops too hard at a red light. My head jerks. “Is something going on with Grace?”
They used to ask her about me. I’d hear them in the living room—Is something going on with Joy?
She’s fine, she’d say. Because she was on my side. Because my job was to protect her and bring her out of her shell and their job was to get in the way.
I shove my toe into the front of my sneaker. “What d’you mean?”
“It’s this independent project thing she’s doing with her teachers,” says Mom. “It’s an amazing opportunity, and of course we want to support her academically.”
“But we’re starting to wonder if it’s a good idea for her to be out of school for the whole semester,” Dad adds. “Even if the principal okayed it and the teachers are working with her from home. She’s in her room a lot these days.”
They’re worried about her grades.
“I hang out in my room a lot.”
“But you and Grace have different . . . approaches,” says Mom.
“Maybe she’s depressed or something,” I bite out.
“What would she be depressed about?” asks Dad, surprised.
“I don’t think she’s depressed,” says Mom, like someone would say I don’t think she’s a purple giraffe. “Moody, maybe. I was exactly the same at her age.”
