Going Underground

by Susan Vaught

  That makes me work to stop thinking about her, to stop thinking about everything. It turns me into flatness and thinness, into a paper-doll person.

  If you want to make a paper doll of me, make it regular height with decent muscles, dark brown hair, and a smile. Mom and Dr. Mote say I smile a lot even when I should be really pissed off, that maybe my smiles actually mean I’m pissed off, but I don’t think it was always that way. Sometimes I think I remember smiling because I was happy—the Cory days—but now, maybe Mom and Dr. Mote are right, so don’t forget the smile. Don’t forget the little gray parrot with the red tail, either, because Fred’s always with me, on my shoulder, my arm, my chest, or my knee—or in her travel cage if I’m outside.

  If you make Marvin, he’s a little taller than me, more buff, with lighter brown hair, a few freckles, thick eyebrows, and he grins instead of smiles. He wears jeans and vintage T-shirts. Oh, and if he’s at my place, he’s usually holding Gertrude. Gertrude’s a fat cat who drools a lot.

  Make a medium-sized paper town for Duke’s Ridge, with a complex for G. W. Morton High School (big, square, brown brick, lots of buildings) on the south side. Then make a paper box for Marvin’s house near G. W., and my house about twenty miles out in the middle of nowhere with nothing nearby except Rock Hill Cemetery, a huge, rambling collection of gravestones, a little cottage in the back, and the funeral chapel near the stone front gate. If you want, make my parents and Marvin’s mom, but I wouldn’t put them at the houses. My folks are usually gone doing animal rescue stuff, and Ms. Brown works all the time at the refrigerator factory north of Duke’s Ridge. (Did you add the factory? It looks space-age because it’s all silver.) Make dozens or even hundreds of paper people for G. W. and kids downtown in Duke’s Ridge in the park around the square, and people in Walmart, and people at the little hospital in the middle of town, and the four-screen movie theater, and at the gas stations and grocery stores and all along the fast-food strip.

  You can move your Marvin doll anywhere you want because he goes lots of places. You can match him up with some of the other paper people at G. W. or all through Duke’s Ridge. He’s friendly. Most people like him, even though lots of them snicker about his name, and pinhead Jonas Blankenship, defensive end for the G. W. Eagles, calls him “the Great Marvolo” just before he slugs him in the arm.

  You can move everybody everywhere, except me. I stay apart from everybody except Marvin. I’m at G. W., Rock Hill, home, Dr. Mote’s office beside the little hospital (twice a month), and James Branson’s office on the square once a month for my probation meeting and to drop off college letters and pay off another chunk of my fines. Technically, now that I’m off house arrest and just on probation these last months until I turn eighteen, I could go more places as long as I’m home by ten o’clock curfew, but I’m used to my routine, and I don’t have a car and can’t get a driver’s license until after I’m off probation, so I stay in my regular spots. When Marvin gets an itch to drive somewhere else for a few, or go talk to people, I get nervous and stay quiet, so then my paper doll would look like invisible lines in the passenger seat. Nobody seems to see me, they don’t talk to me, and that’s fine.

  So, I’m invisible, or separate, or removed, or whatever you want to call it. I’m at home, at school, at therapy, at probation, or digging graves, but always sort of … I don’t know, lost in space, or secretly made out of paper, meant to get a little older, fade, then just blow away. Doesn’t seem like much point to thinking about the future, because I can’t really do anything I had planned, and I can’t figure out anything I’d rather do, so here I am.

  Lost in space, without the robots.

  That’s my life. Any questions?

  Oh. Right. That question.

  Which I’m not answering yet—but, like in Dr. Mote’s office, I’m not trying to be a dick. I just don’t have the words rehearsed, or know how to explain everything, or even if you’ll let me finish. If I start in the wrong place, you’ll walk away before you hear everything and you’ll just think I’m a shit. Maybe I am a shit, but I try not to be.

  It’s late September now, and I’m in Duke’s Ridge, in G. W., sitting with Marvin.

  I watch Marvin pull out the books for his next class, drop half of them, grin, and pick them up before he shuts his locker.

  “It’s mind-blowing how you never get mad at anything,” I tell him. “I wish I was like that.”

  “I get mad.” Marvin gets a better hold on the books he snatched off the green tile floor. His jeans are the same black color as the book on top, only not as shiny, and he’s wearing a vintage KISS T-shirt that looks like it’s really forty years old. The air in the hallway’s five different kinds of hot and stinky, but I’m not really paying attention to anything else in the hall but Marvin. No point, really. Nothing in the hall pays attention to me, other than him.

  I shift my grip on my backpack strap. “Name one time you’ve gotten mad. Just once.”

  Marvin’s big thick eyebrows bunch like his brain’s cramping as he thinks. “This year, or since I’ve known you?”

  “See, that kind of makes my point.” I push him away from the locker and into the blurry crowd of people clogging the halls between us and fifth period.

  “You don’t get mad at anything, even all the shit that should make you furious, so why’re you busting my balls?” He elbows through people, but he smiles at them before he bumps them out of the way.

  I don’t bother with the smiling part. “I get mad all the time. Like, every day, two or three times a day. I just don’t say anything.”

  “That’s your problem.” Marvin shuts up long enough to smile at five more people before we turn the last corner toward class. “That’s why your PO stays up your ass and your therapist always asks you if you’re about to turn serial killer. They know one day, the wrong thing’s gonna hit you, and you’re gonna blow like Vesuvius.”

  My stomach does a nervous weird thing inside, and it’s time to move on to new topics. “When was the last time Vesuvius erupted, anyway?”

  Marvin snickers. “This year, or since I’ve known you?”

  “Hey.”

  The female voice makes me jump, and two seconds later, I process who it belongs to and have to work not to groan.

  “Hi, Cherie,” Marvin says as she comes up from behind us before we can get to the classroom, because he’s always polite. It’s natural to him, like being a giant dork and not caring at all. Only the slight flush of red under his freckles gives away the fact he’s not really happy about her sneaking up on us.

  My eyes move like they’re on autopilot, double-checking to be sure that King Kong Jonas is nowhere nearby to be pissed off that I’m jawing with his baby sister. Though, really, nothing about her looks like a baby. Cherie’s dressed in her school best—black skirt, black shirt, black bag and shoes to match her black hair. She can’t do weird nails and makeup at school, but she’d do it if she thought she could get away with it.

  Cherie ignores Marvin and keeps her eyes on me. “Are you working today?”

  “Uh—I—um, probably. But Harper doesn’t want you—I mean, he doesn’t want me to talk to people while I’m digging.” I stop at the door to class. Probably should go inside, but that feels too, I don’t know. Abrupt or something.

  Cherie stares at the ceiling for a second before staring at me again. “It’s just graves. You can talk and shovel dirt.”

  “Not a good idea.” Marvin edges through the door, but Cherie doesn’t take the hint because she never does. In the hallway behind us, I notice a few faces turning in our direction, probably because it’s weird to see me talking to anybody besides Marvin.

  Cherie acts like Marvin didn’t even speak. “I want to see you, Del. It’s been like days. A week. Maybe almost two.”

  Damn. I’m smiling. I wish I wouldn’t do that, because people probably take it wrong, especially Cherie. “You don’t need to spend time with me. You’re not my girlfriend. I’m not your boyfriend. We don’t hav
e any reason to spend time together.”

  You think that was rude, right? Right? I know you do.

  That’s because you’re normal.

  Cherie is not.

  No matter what I say to her or how I say it, she never takes it bad—even when I want her to.

  She gives me a soft punch in the belly. “Don’t be like that. You know I just want to talk.”

  “But he doesn’t want to talk to you,” Marvin tells her.

  She turns her back on him completely.

  “How many different ways do we have to explain this to you?” Marvin asks. “Not wanted. Not welcome. Don’t bug Del at work.”

  Hmm. Marvin actually does sound a little irritated. I’d forgotten Cherie could get to him so totally. Maybe he is more regular than Vesuvius.

  “I’ll come by Rock Hill as soon as I can,” Cherie says, demonstrating whole new meanings for the word oblivion. Her smile is fast and bright, and it seems real enough, which always catches me off guard.

  She punches me in the belly again, a little harder this time, and then she’s gone, running off down the hall as first bell rings.

  Marvin and I stand in the door, matching big dorks, watching her fly away like a skinny little bat.

  “She doesn’t get it,” he says.

  “She doesn’t want to get it.”

  We have to move to let somebody in, so we go sit down.

  Both of us are sure Cherie will show up at Rock Hill, if not tonight, then tomorrow night, or soon enough, and she really, really, really needs to stop that.

  I Hate Peeing in Cups

  (“Keep on Tryin’ ”—Poco. Mellow music is good, especially when I’m not feeling mellow.)

  Fate chooses to smile on us, and Cherie’s not waiting at the graveyard when Marvin and I get there. I don’t have to worry about her or pissing off her gigantor brother, at least not this afternoon. All I have to do is stand in the sunlight under a cloudless sky next to Marvin, trying to dig a good grave. To make him happy, I leave the iPod off and I try not to hum stuff and drive him nuts.

  In front of me, hanging from a shade tree branch in her travel cage, Fred fluffs out her feathers, yawns obnoxiously loud (no, parrots don’t really yawn like that, it’s one of her sounds), then sighs and smacks her beak together.

  “Quit complaining.” I jam my shovel into the ground and flip a load of dirt onto the tarp on the right side of the grave, careful not to hit the neatly stacked squares of grass I cut out before I started digging. I’m about a foot down, with my perfect rectangle already forming. “It’s not that cold yet. Wait until winter. I’ll have to put a heater under your cage.”

  “Fred,” she says, in a tone that means, Yeah, right, are you finished yet, and where’s my damned apple?

  “It creeps me out when you talk to that bird like she’s human.” Marvin’s sitting on top of the first foot of dirt I piled on the tarp, holding Gertrude the fat drooling cat and eating a burrito. He’s wearing some of the burrito, too, smeared across the crinkled KISS logo on his shirt.

  “Fred talks better than a lot of humans I know.” I dig. I need to get at least two graves done before Saturday, because we have three burials on Sunday, all before noon. I’ve got a lot of work to do to get everything ready, and Harper’s already halfway sloshed. He won’t be much help, but Marvin will pitch in after he finishes his bag of burritos.

  “It’s still creepy,” Marvin says. “Why does she have to talk in your voice?”

  “Fred,” Fred says to Marvin in my voice, then makes a perfectly pitched fart noise and laughs about it.

  Marvin shakes his head. “That’s just messed up.”

  “Fred,” Fred says in Marvin’s voice, because she can talk like him and Dad and Mom, too, if she wants. She doesn’t blink at Marvin like Dr. Mote would, because parrots don’t really exactly blink, at least not as much as people, even though they can close their eyes.

  When Marvin doesn’t say anything, Fred burps like she’s sucked down a case of ginger ale.

  Parrots don’t really burp, either. It’s just a sound she makes, like the yawning and sighing and farting. I guess she learned most of them from me, which I suppose doesn’t say much for my personal habits. At least I usually don’t wear burrito juice. Just fresh grave dirt, and I wash that off as soon as I get home.

  Marvin burps back at Fred, shifts the cat in his lap, and digs in his greasy white paper sack for another burrito. He feeds the first bite to Gertrude, who is supposed to belong to my mother. Mom rescued her after her owner died, and Gertrude’s got a chewed ear and cataracts. I’ve mentioned she’s kind of fat, and she’s a little clumsy. She’s also gray like Fred, and she hangs out in my room whenever Marvin’s around, and usually follows us the mile and a half down my rural road to Rock Hill. I think she likes Marvin better than me or Mom and Dad, who are attending a fund-raiser at the next county’s animal shelter tonight.

  All the animals at my house got rescued from one big disaster or another. There’s some cats other than Gertrude—six right now, I think. I lose count of those, since they come and go after they get better and adoptable. We’ve got three dogs confiscated from drug dealers, and I’ve got Fred, who blew into some guy’s garage during a storm four years ago, then ended up at the hoarder’s house where Mom found her, and Dad’s working on a chicken. It’s a rooster with one eye that got used for fighting, and most of the time, the Humane Society just “humanely euthanizes” fighting roosters, but Dad’s gotten to be some kind of rooster whisperer or something. He keeps the one-eyed rooster in a way-fancy coop in the backyard, and it crows every morning and every evening, so Fred’s learning to crow.

  As if she’s reading my mind, she crows for Marvin a few times, then barks for good measure.

  Marvin hugs Gertrude a little closer, like maybe she’ll protect him. He might need protection from Fred. When she’s out of her cage, Fred likes to attack Marvin’s shoes and bite big hunks out of the soles.

  “That bird is possessed by the devil, Del. Really. Seriously.”

  I keep digging.

  Maybe Marvin counts as a rescue, since he started being my best friend in fifth grade after his dad ditched him and he and his mom had no place to live. They stayed with us for a while, but now they have their own place over on Backdrop Road, which isn’t out in the sticks like our house. We kind of have to live in the sticks, since my parents can’t stop rescuing things.

  I wonder if Marvin thinks I’m a rescue. That would fit, probably for lots of reasons. He didn’t ditch me like everybody else did when all the shit came down three years ago. There wasn’t any big fight or huge divorce from my old friends or anything. We were all just about to start high school, so we were going in lots of directions—me trying out for baseball, and Raulston, Tom, and Randall looking at freshman football, and Jason and Dutch had joined ROTC. Jenna and Lisa were going out for softball, and Cory wanted to sing in the chorus. She really did have a beautiful voice.

  She still has a beautiful voice, I guess, but I don’t know. She doesn’t live here anymore. None of them do. Jason, Tom, and Randall went to Chicago. Their families figured they’d stick out less in a bigger city. Raulston’s family took him back to California. Jenna and Lisa and Dutch all went west, too, but not as far—Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico. Some big towns, some little towns. Anywhere but Duke’s Ridge and the prying, interfering eyes of District Attorney William Kaison.

  My folks figured we’d be better off here, where people knew me and knew our family, since my charges were more serious than everybody else’s. Plus, they would have had to get permission from the court for us to move, and go through a lot of hassle, and we’ve had enough hassle for a while.

  When it was all said and done, Marvin wasn’t charged, but other than him, Cory was the only one Kaison didn’t tear to pieces. I’m glad for that at least. I’m not sure where she went, and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to ask, but I’d really like to know how she’s doing. She’s e-mailed me a few times to ask ab
out how I’m getting along, always from anonymous untraceable addresses, but I delete the e-mails. I’m too chickenshit to answer her. Digging graves for a job is one thing. Digging graves for myself to fall into in real life—thanks, that’s okay. Been there, done that, put my face in the dictionary next to the definition. Kaison’s out of office now, but who the hell knows about the woman who replaced him? She could be just as bad, or maybe even worse. I’m not taking any chances.

  About an hour later, Marvin’s still churning burrito farts, but we’re through with the first grave. He pitches his shovel out and hoists himself back to level ground. “I still think it’s weird we don’t have to dig six feet down.”

  “Eighteen inches.” I get out behind him and rub dirt off my lips. “Weird, how some stuff doesn’t have to go as deep as you think, right? But the plague was a long time ago, and nobody much robs graves anymore. Eighteen inches of dirt on top of what you’re burying, that’s the law here, but Harper says most states don’t even have laws about it anymore. He thinks four feet is plenty, as long as the casket’s normal size—and in the winter, four feet will be hard enough.”

  Marvin stretches out the kinks from digging, ignores Fred’s rendition of bombs whistling down and exploding on impact, and asks, “What’s the difference between a casket and a coffin?”

  “No idea.” I put down my shovel and stretch, too. Too bad Marvin ate all those burritos. It’s probably getting close to noon and I’m hungry now, but I’m betting Harper ate the rest of his peanut butter and bread yesterday. Probably no point in going to the small one-bedroom house he has at the back corner of the cemetery. Maybe later today, Marvin will make a grocery run for Harper.

  “If Harper sold caskets or coffins or whatever, he’d make a lot of money,” Marvin says.

  “Hello, bird,” Fred adds, just to get me to look at her, which I do, and I blow her a quick kiss.