The Grave Winner

by Lindsey Loucks

  When we entered Jo’s house, the phone was ringing.

  “It’s probably Mom and Dad checking up on you, Cal,” Jo said, racing to answer it.

  I looked into the dark mouth of the basement and the palms of my hands grew sweaty. Jo’s bedroom was down there, and I wanted to try on my new-used shirt. I’d been in the basement hundreds of times. My hallucinations of dead Sarah were turning me into a wuss. I flicked the light switch and sighed my relief at the familiar surroundings.

  Callum cleared his throat behind me. “Leigh.”

  “Hmm?” I said and turned to face him.

  “I’m sorry. About…your mom.” He looked in every direction but mine while he spoke.

  There was the inevitable awkwardness I hadn’t missed.

  “Thanks.” I toed at some mud on my boot and sighed.

  “I…uh…got you something.” He searched the pockets of his jeans. A small silver circle engraved with lilacs lay in his outstretched hand.

  My mouth dropped open, but I couldn’t breathe because my lungs were being crushed by a swell of emotion.

  “I saw you looking at it, so I thought maybe you’d like to have it.”

  All I could do was nod. I couldn’t even bring myself to touch it.

  “Leigh?” His voice was just above a whisper, his hand still outstretched. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I forced myself to look away from the ring, to look at him. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever given me.”

  My feet moved forward on their own, and I ended up in Callum’s personal bubble. The warmth of his eyes made me think he didn’t mind I was so close to him. This made me bolder, more than I usually was with boys. I brushed the torn fabric at his neck with my fingertips, preparing myself for what I was about to do. Both my arms slid around his neck, and I pressed myself against him in a hug. The electric current between us was immediate.

  Maybe that’s why he hugged me back.

  I rested my head in the crook of his neck, amazed at how solid he felt. Every muscle inside him molded itself to me but still stayed firm. A girl could get used to this.

  But I didn’t get used to it because he pulled away from me. He took my hand and pressed the ring into it. I wasn’t willing to let him go yet so I grabbed his hand. The silver circle rested between our palms.

  “Uh…” Jo shuffled into the entryway, her face pale.

  Callum pulled his hand away from mine so quickly that the ring almost fell. In that moment, I was aware of two things: the sudden absence of Callum’s buzz touch and something was wrong with Jo.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You might want to sit down for this,” Jo said, sitting on the small bench just inside the door.

  We didn’t sit.

  “What?” Callum demanded.

  “That was Miguel from Spanish class. I don’t know what happened. But Sarah? Suicide Sarah from school?” Jo shook her head. “She’s not dead. She’s back.”

  A stapler and duct tape. Those were the items I needed pronto; otherwise I would completely lose my mind.

  Megan and Lily stood in front of me in the lunch line. The two cheerleaders jumped, clapped, and jabbed at the air with their fists while their boobs bungee jumped for the benefit of a dozen ogling boys at a nearby table. It was Monday, not a game day. They didn’t even have their against-dress code cheer outfits on. Were they cheering on the students as they attempted to eat the starchy-smelling cafeteria food? Go! Swallow! Go! Indigestion! Go! Puke!

  I really wanted to staple the two Energizer Bunnies to the floor.

  The duct tape was to cover every mouth in Krapper. Sarah’s return had unleashed the gossip hounds, and the news had made it to every link in the world’s blab food chain. National and international news teams crowded the hallways and supposedly set up camp outside Sarah’s house. The cafeteria buzzed, but I didn’t want to hear any of it. Since I saw Sarah right after it happened, I knew it wasn’t some happy miracle. The look on her face had been anything but joyful. Icy fear licked up my back just thinking about her.

  Plus, the fact that people discussed Sarah right in front of me, three days after Mom’s funeral, made me want to hurt someone. Bad. I didn’t want to think about dead Sarah or her return when Mom’s death felt so fresh.

  “This is all too weird. My grandma is buried in that cemetery,” Megan said, jumping, clapping, and jabbing furiously. Bits of glitter flashed up and down her perfectly tanned arms, evidence of the blood drive posters she’d plastered everywhere.

  “Do you think Sarah will cheer with us again? I heard her hair turned white, so if she does come back, she’d have to dye it first,” Lily said, her wavy blonde ponytail bobbing. She always had a pink lily flower tucked behind her ear, probably to remind herself what her name was. Somehow it stayed put while she bounced.

  “I know, right?” Megan stopped bouncing long enough to pat her dark hair. “I love being famous by association. I’ve been interviewed by every national news station, plus the one in France. But I couldn’t believe channel thirteen cut from me to Sarah’s lawn.”

  “Ugh. What is up with that?” Clap, clap. “I wonder if she’s, like, okay. Her ‘rents won’t let anyone see her. They don’t even answer their phone.”

  “Do you think they’ll take down her memory plaque in the lobby?” Jump, jab, clap.

  “I don’t know.” Jab, kick. “I hope she doesn’t go all suicidal again.”

  “Everyone says it was Lazy Russ Syndrome that brought her back to life.” Jump, clap.

  My limit of bouncy conversation reached, I scanned the cafeteria to see if the principal or any teachers were looking. Everyone seemed preoccupied with flapping their mouths, so I bumped into the two girls. Hard. They lost their footing, but they grabbed onto each other and shot me a beyond-pissed-off look.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, blinking innocently. “I tripped over my shoelaces.”

  “Then why don’t you tie them, you stupid freak?” Megan said through clenched teeth as she ripped her askew fake eyelashes from her face.

  My hands balled into fists. “I think I’ll use them to tie a book to both of your hands. It’s Lazarus Syndrome, Lily, not Lazy Russ.”

  Their only response was more glaring. Typical. Everything at Krapper High School was typical: pretty stupid cheerleaders, jocks, nerds, and freaks. If you didn’t fit into one of those four categories, then you were a circle in a square school. That summed up the whole town.

  It occurred to me, as I grabbed my tray piled high with brown mush and French fries, that Mom was a circle. She was too good for this town. Maybe that’s why she was plucked from it.

  I fingered the ring Callum gave me and made my way to the library with my tray. As if the ring pulled him to me, there he was, rounding the corner of the cafeteria with his disheveled hair, ripped jeans, and torn t-shirt. The principal, Mr. Mallory, walked next to him and gestured wildly as he spoke. A slow smile lit up Callum’s entire face. A flush tingled through me from the tips of my ears to my chest, where its heat caressed the weight there.

  My feet floated past him. I didn’t remember if I smiled back or not because I was too confused about pretty much everything to know what my mouth did.

  News people dotted the entire hallway, some talking excitedly into the blank eyes of cameras. Others were interviewing students.

  Some junior girl blabbed into the nearest microphone, “It’s just like Lazarus in the Bible when he came back from the dead.”

  “Even the black footprints in the graveyard?” the male reporter asked.

  The girl shrugged. “Well, maybe not just like Lazarus.”

  I gritted my teeth and kept walking.

  One lady leaned against the trophy case, a red-tipped hand flying over her cell phone keys, the other furiously scratching her eyebrow. Her cameraman stood next to her with the bulky camera on his shoulder, pointing and adjusting the lens to aim right down her low cut lacy red shirt.

  “Two down.” The lady
smiled and gave one last tap to the phone keys. “One to go.”

  “What d’ya mean? You gonna do one more story about the dead girl?” The cameraman tightened the lens and grinned. Strings of drool were going to drop at his feet any second.

  I yanked open the door of the library. Why did the news have to be here and feed the excitement about Sarah’s return? It was the very last thing I wanted to think about. I wanted to slam the door to make them all jump, but it whispered shut like always.

  The buzz of the cafeteria and hallway drowned in the hum of ancient computers that sounded like they might take flight any minute. Ms. Hansen, the librarian, frowned at her computer and chewed on the ends of her long, gray hair. A freshman drummed his fingers on the long checkout desk, a stack of books piled high next to him. When Ms. Hansen saw me, her eyes widened as though she was surprised, but she waved.

  Jo and I were two of her favorites. We knew we were when she showed us the banned book collection hidden in her office at the beginning of our freshman year. In nearly two years’ time, we’d devoured every racist, bad language-spotted, evolution-based, naughty book we could get our hands on and were better educated because of it.

  I joined Jo at our usual table underneath the poster from the 1980s with a mohawked guy reading on a bench. At the bottom of the poster, it said, “Be a rebel – read!”

  “Your face is red. You okay?” Jo asked. Her hair was extra brassy orange today from her new dye job.

  My face did feel hot. From anger, terror, or seeing Callum? I wasn’t sure.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You didn’t have to come to school.” She picked apart a fry and popped a piece into her mouth. The sleeve of her flowery peasant top skidded across the brown mush on her tray. She made a face as she wiped it off with a napkin.

  “I couldn’t stay home,” I said. Wavy lines followed my fork as I raked it through the mystery meal.

  “Is it any better here?”

  I dug a hole into the mush that reached to the bottom. “I have to tell you something.” That was our code for this is big, so listen good.

  “Okay.”

  “I saw Sarah after Mom’s funeral,” I said just above a whisper. “Right after she came back.”

  Jo froze. “Say what?”

  I dropped a fry into the mush hole.

  Jo leaned into me, her mouth open, eyes wide. “You did? But, Leigh…you don’t think…I know what you’re thinking.” She finally blinked. “That’s not a pet cemetery. What happened to Sarah was just some weird cosmic occurrence. Google says Lazarus Syndrome is very rare. Only Lazarus and a few other people have come back from the dead.”

  I forked the brown stuff over the fry and buried it. “But she was dead. The whole school closed down for her funeral. Then she spontaneously woke up and clawed herself out of her grave. That’s not supposed to happen.”

  “It doesn’t mean it’ll happen again.”

  My fork skidded up the mound of mush to make it taller. “I don’t think it was some happy miracle like Lazarus Syndrome that brought her back to life.”

  “Then what was it?”

  I shrugged as I made the mound even taller.

  “It won’t happen again,” Jo said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  When she didn’t say anything, I looked up at her. Red rimmed her eyes. “Do you want her to come back like that?” she whispered.

  I put my fork down next to my tray and studied my ring again. If there was one thing in this world I wanted, it was Mom. But not like that. I shivered at the thought of her clawing her way out of the wooden box and up to the surface of the earth.

  When I realized I hadn’t given Jo an answer, I shook my head hard enough to kill a few brain cells.

  I turned down Jo’s invitation to add names to her recycling petition after school because I had things to do. Things I didn’t want anyone to know about.

  Darby was probably at the public library with her friend Maria and her mom. Dad was still at work. The house was mine for the two seconds I would be here. I swept through the silence, carrying my boots. My gaze caught on something on top of the fireplace mantel—a framed picture of the four of us smiling happily. Mom had bribed me with new studded black wristbands so I would give a genuine smile for the photo. It worked. I’d even gone without black eyeliner that day. I grabbed the frame, put it in my backpack, and headed out to the garage. With my boots back on my feet, I pressed the glowing orange button to open the garage door.

  There were no cars in here. The space reserved for Mom’s would stay vacant forever. Crossing over the emptiness with my eyes stinging, I found Mom’s small shovel with the white handle and her purple gardening gloves on the shelf. They went into my backpack, too.

  A small pile of bricks left over from Dad’s attempt at walling in the patio sat in the corner. I rearranged the picture frame so the glass wouldn’t scratch and stuffed as many bricks as I could carry inside.

  After zipping my backpack closed, I tested my old bicycle by rolling it out onto the driveway. The wheels squeaked, but the tires were inflated and the chain wasn’t dangling loose. Back in the garage, I jabbed at the glowing button, bolted out, and hopped over the motion sensors before the falling door squished me. If that were an Olympic sport, I would win every time.

  My feet couldn’t pedal fast enough. The wind whipped through my clothes, causing me to balloon out in places I normally didn’t. My hair circled around my head like Medusa’s unwieldy snakes. At least the sun was shining. For now.

  As soon as I saw the gates, I pedaled harder. A line of flagpoles along the entrance jangled empty ropes against the metal. My bike shot through the opening underneath the metal Heartland Cemetery sign.

  A path of tiny, white rocks branched off numerous times to form similar paths. I bumped past headstones and statues, most of them worn by time and Kansas weather. A little concrete girl with slumped shoulders covered her face to hide her grief. Cold shivered through me even though I was all sweaty.

  I slowed my bike to a crawl as I neared Mom’s grave. Her name was scrawled across a plastic sign anchored in the ground by a metal wire, a placeholder for her headstone. Her grave looked undisturbed, the dirt packed tight. Relief rushed through me and tangled at the back of my throat. She was still here.

  Looking around for someplace to lean my bike, my gaze fell on Sarah’s footprints that still marked the grass over by the black tree in the middle of a bunch of others. No wonder I couldn’t see her tree from the gates the day of Mom’s burial. Taller, thicker trees surrounded it. I took a deep breath and looked away. Everything I thought I’d imagined really had happened that day.

  I rested my bike against a nearby live tree and looked down at Mom’s grave. She needed to know what I was about to do, but I didn’t want anyone else to hear me, alive or dead. I shook my head at my own logic. But Sarah’s coming back wasn’t logical, so nothing else had to be, either. I decided I would explain everything to Mom inside the safety and privacy of my own head. The mother/daughter psychic bond still had to apply.

  A hefty sigh escaped my mouth as I opened my backpack. Mom, I love you. I miss you so much that my heart doesn’t beat anymore. It only echoes in the empty space you left behind.

  I knelt next to her grave and plunged the sharp end of her white handled garden shovel into the new grass.

  But Sarah was dead and then she came back. I don’t know if this is some kind of buy one life get one free deal, but you shouldn’t take that deal.

  Dirt flew through the air as I dug deeper.

  I don’t want you to come back. Not like Sarah.

  Grit wedged under my fingernails.

  You should stay where you are, and we’ll join you when we can.

  “What are you doing?”

  I screamed and shrank away from the voice. A shadowy figure blocked the sun.

  “I said what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I spat and stood to face the shadow. After I blinked a
few times, I realized it was a boy, but the stubble around his chin made him look like he was eighteen or something. He removed the hood from his head, and blond hair fell in soft curls just above his ears. His green sweatshirt matched his eyes, which were so sharp and clear, they seemed to carve out a piece of my soul. I stepped away from him, suddenly aware I was staring.

  “Whatever it is you’re doing, you can’t. You’ll attract the wrong kind of attention.” He grabbed my arm. “Do you understand me?”

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. I tried to yank my arm away from him, but his grip was a vise. “Let me go or I’ll scream.”

  “Go ahead and scream,” the boy said, but he let me go. “The dead won’t care.”

  I snatched the shovel from the ground, ready to use his face to test the durability of the blade. Screw his good looks. Who did this guy think he was?

  “Girrrl,” he read from my new-used t-shirt and smirked. “Is that supposed to make people afraid of you?”

  I squeezed the shovel’s handle. “No, but you will be when I carve off your face.”

  The boy laughed, and at the same time, there was a faint tinkle of a bell. He didn’t react to the sound, making me wonder if I’d imagined it. Fantastic. Bell sounds now? Did Whaty-Whats sell straitjackets?

  “You’re brave. I’ll give you that much. But you’re built like a twig.” He stepped closer and pierced me with his eyes. “Twigs break easily.”

  I lined my voice with razor blades and said, “Try it.”

  He studied me for a long time, and his ferocity seemed to dull a little. “Promise me.” He gestured to Mom’s grave with the narrow hole in the middle. “Promise me you’ll fill that hole back up, take all your stuff, and go.”

  “Why should I listen to you? Do you work here or something?”

  “Just promise me.”

  “Fine. I promise,” I said and rooted through my backpack. “See ya’.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Are you leaving?”

  I pressed my earbuds in and pushed up the volume on my mp3 player, nodding to the beat of Bikini Kill instead of his question.