Going Underground

by Susan Vaught

  “Are you going to talk to her?”

  “No.” My shovelful of dirt splatters on the college brochures, but Marvin reaches over, shakes the dirt off them, and moves them next to Gertrude.

  He waits a few seconds. “Mind if I talk to her?”

  I jam my shovel double-hard into the ground. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Marvin looks triumphant, like he has the answers to all his questions. He’s not mad that I can tell, or even interested in talking about the weather, because he’s easy, and I’m way glad. Marvin burrito-farts, and he digs, and I dig, and Fred sings a garbled verse of “Baa, Baa Black Sheep.” If I really believed in God, like a traditional fatherlike God in the sky, I’d think he sent Fred to stick pins in my brain right when I need to be stuck.

  I’m not sure what I think about God, or what God thinks about me, but I’m sure that whoever Fairy Girl is, she’s sad because somebody important to her died. That makes me double-sure that the last thing she needs is the biggest black sheep in Duke’s Ridge interrupting her peace at the cemetery.

  Three Years Ago: In My Dreams

  “It’s not like having sex.” Cory’s voice sounds whispery through the phone, and I know she’s probably under her covers with her door locked and her lights off, because it’s midnight. If we get caught talking, we’ll be so fried.

  It’s amazing.

  Cory’s way amazing.

  The picture she texted me—I can’t stop staring at it. She’s so beautiful, clothes off or on, doesn’t matter. I don’t want to tell her that the only naked women I’ve seen before are porn pictures on the Internet and some movies and magazines, but if I did tell her, I’d be sure to say she’s prettier.

  She is.

  She looks real, and soft, and the light on her skin is perfect. One day, when I do touch her naked, I want it to be in a bed with nice sheets like she has in the picture, and candlelight. Or maybe in a hot tub with the water slowly moving around both of us. Or maybe outside on a blanket in the moonlight, somewhere quiet and private and just right. I want it all to be pretty, like she is.

  The thought of touching her makes my body ache. It makes my brain burn. I’ve joked about wanting this or that, or this girl or that one before—but I didn’t know what want even meant. Now I know, and it’s hard to think.

  “It’s not like sex,” I tell her through the speakerphone, keeping my voice low as I stare at the picture. “But it kinda is.”

  “Can’t get pregnant from it.” Her laugh makes me feel watery inside, like I don’t have as many bones as I’m supposed to.

  “I want to see you,” she says. Quiet. To the point.

  My face goes hot, but she’s not asking to see my face. She doesn’t keep at me about it, and I know she won’t, not tonight anyway, but it’s something she wants from me, and I like giving Cory what she wants.

  But taking a picture of myself?

  That feels stupid.

  Sort of a rush, but stupid, too.

  I’ll be embarrassed as all get-out. And I’m sure a guy’s body won’t look as good as a girl’s in a picture like that, especially when the girl is Cory, but—

  But what the hell.

  Really, it’s not sex, and you can’t get pregnant from it, like she said. And I trust Cory not to get all movie-whack-job and pass the picture around if she gets pissed at me. Besides, we’re not putting our faces on pictures, even if Cory’s little rose tattoo beside her belly button gives her away. Her dad so doesn’t know about that tattoo, but her mom thought it was okay.

  I make sure I’m stretched out as best I can under the covers, and that stuff’s … you know … arranged as much as it can be, and make sure I’m not too close or touching anything, and I snap the picture.

  From the speakerphone, I hear a soft giggle, and then, “Did you take it?”

  I get the phone back up high enough to say, “Yeah.”

  Then I check the picture out.

  Okay, that is so not something I want to stare at for very long. I click Save, then start a message to Cory.

  “Let me see,” she says, all happy sounding, which makes my face go even hotter.

  “Just a sec.” I’m aching all over, getting tense—in lots of ways—needing some relief. This isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a huge deal.

  My finger hovers over Send, and I can’t help wondering stupid crap like, has she seen bigger ones? Better ones?

  How many has she seen?

  Whose?

  Don’t go there.

  But seriously, how am I supposed to know if my junk, uh, looks good, or whatever?

  Worrying about how I look makes everything … deflate a little bit. That’s probably good.

  “It’s me,” Cory tells me like she’s reading my mind. “You know I’ll like it.”

  She doesn’t say, I showed you mine, now show me yours, but she could, and she’d be right. I didn’t exactly say no when she told me what she was doing under her covers.

  I close my eyes and press the button, and it’s gone.

  Now I’m so hot I have to come out from under the covers, but I wiggle all around and leave my head under so the light from the phone doesn’t spill into the room and maybe sneak under my door to bust me to my parents. I don’t think they’re up, but who knows. Rescued animals vomit a lot, so Mom and Dad are always washing sheets in the middle of the night.

  This is taking forever.

  Has she seen it yet?

  She should have seen it by now.

  I can’t breathe.

  Totally stupid. Why did I send that? She’ll think I’m stupid when she sees it. I don’t feel like art, like the picture of her that she sent me.

  Her breathing echoes into the phone, then stops, then starts back.

  “What?” Damn. Too loud. Take a breath.

  I take a breath.

  Cory says, “I think you’re hot.”

  I’m definitely hot, as in inferno, but the other meaning? “Guys aren’t supposed to be hot. Are we?”

  “Yes, you are too supposed to be, and you are.”

  I manage not to cough or choke or puke like one of Mom’s rescued animals, so that’s good, even if I can’t manage to say anything that makes any sense.

  Cory’s voice drops, like her mouth is closer to the phone. “One day, I want to look in person. One day soon.”

  When I swallow, I feel like I’ve got sand in my throat, but I get “Okay” out without sounding like I need a gallon of water to talk right.

  “I want to see you because you’re hot.”

  She’s teasing me now, only not really.

  I start to smile. “Stop saying that.”

  “No,” she whispers. Then quick, but not panicked. “I have to go. Love you.”

  And she’s gone.

  “Love you, too,” I tell my phone, even though it’s telling me what time the call ended, and I’m getting a little more sure. Cory really will be the one, and I’ll find some way to make it pretty. I think that’s my job, if I like her a lot, to make our first time together something special for her, and I do like her a lot.

  But … will I know what to do?

  I know all about protection, and babies are definitely not in any of my plans until after my career’s up and going, and I’m through with professional sports. That part’s not an issue.

  It’s … the rest of it.

  The actual sex.

  I’ve watched it in movies. I’ve talked to my dad about it, though not in details like how-to or ways to make Cory the happiest. (Dad would croak on the spot if I asked him something like that.)

  I’d call Marvin, but he doesn’t know any more than me, and he won’t hear his phone because he’ll have his headphones in like he always does at night. I don’t know how anybody can listen to music all the time. All that background noise would make my brain rattle—and when does he have time to think?

  I think when I listen to music, he always tells me, I just don’t think about bad things.

  From down
in the laundry room, I hear a smoke-detector screech noise and barely hold back a groan.

  It’s that parrot.

  The thing won’t even eat unless I’m around, and Mom’s saying the parrot thinks I’m its person.

  I’m not. Definitely not.

  I don’t know why anybody would want a parrot. If the parrot did learn to talk, or if it made noises all time, when would I get time to think? You know, about Cory and stuff. About how it will be. And where. And when.

  Something like this will probably take lots of thinking and some whole new plans, if I’m going to get it right, and I definitely want to get it right. With no Marvin or music or parrots or Dad or anything like that, and definitely no plumbers with pipe wrenches.

  “Shut up,” I mutter at my door as the parrot makes another smoke-detector screech. “No parrots allowed.”

  No parrots. No pipe wrenches.

  Yep.

  Lots of thinking to do. Lots of plans to make.

  Always Never Lasts Forever

  (“Use Somebody”—Kings of Leon. Great name. If I had a band, I’d call it Gravehound. Or maybe Eighteen Inches.)

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  I am writing to request permission to apply to Mission Heights Community College. I have a felony conviction that occurred when I was fourteen years old, but I am almost eighteen now, and much has changed in my life …

  Dear Ann Smith:

  I am writing to you in your capacity as Director of Admissions of Blue Sky Community College to request permission to apply. Per your brochure, people with felony convictions may offer an application with permission from you and your board, following a comprehensive letter of explanation …

  Dear Dean Johnson:

  I would like to request permission to submit an application to West Mountain Community College. Enclosed, please find the required letter of explanation concerning my felony conviction, along with a recommendation statement from my probation officer …

  Now, really, how bad do my letters suck?

  Go on. You can say it. They totally blow.

  If you were a Sir or a Madam or a Director of Admissions or a Dean of Admissions, would you bother to give me a chance?

  No.

  Really puts weight on that What’s the point? question.

  But Branson has his requirements and his deadlines, and the big clock of the universe is ticking away toward my birthday next August, so I keep writing and getting turned down or ignored. The rest of the time I bust my ass at school, then out here at Rock Hill. And I’ve been trying hard not to spy on Fairy Girl.

  Trying.

  Not … always succeeding.

  Maybe Rock Hill’s not the best place to spend my time, but other than home, Rock Hill is my only place. I learn a lot just by being here. For example, I’ve learned this: four kinds of people come to cemeteries.

  First, obviously, there’s the dead kind.

  Second, there’s people like Harper and me and the funeral home reps and the headstone carvers and setters who work in graveyards for a living. We’re supposed to be there. We’ve got important stuff to do, and respect for the environment we’re supposed to do it in, and even though we’re sort of wrapped up in a fog of everybody else’s sadness, we keep seeing clearly, and we get our jobs done.

  Next, you’ve got the people who are burying loved ones and visiting loved ones and grieving loved ones—like Fairy Girl. They’ve got important stuff to do, too. They stand or sit, they cross arms and clench fists or touch gravestones, they keep stone faces or cry, and sometimes, they talk with Harper and me when we’re digging or covering graves or doing other duties around Rock Hill.

  So, dead people, working people, and grieving people aren’t really an issue, because we’re all supposed to be in the cemetery. It’s the fourth kind of people found in graveyards who cause problems. Freaks and weirdos. These are the assholes who graffiti headstones; the jerk-offs who sit in groups with candles and tell ghost stories and leave beer bottles and roaches tossed everywhere; the nut jobs who think graves are special places to make out with their girlfriends; and the morbid goofballs who think they’re vampires, or going to find vampires, or just want to think about death and be around death all the time.

  Cherie Blankenship, the one and only younger sister of Jonas the pinhead football player who hits Marvin for a hobby, the girl who cannot comprehend simple phrases like no or hell no or blow off, the girl who redefines oblivion on a daily basis, has morbid goofball written all over her. When she’s out of school, she wears Goth clothes and makeup, but not because she understands the Goth philosophy or feels it or believes it. She thinks all the black looks good. She likes that the trippy makeup upsets her parents and bugs the pinhead. She thinks maybe I’ll find her mysterious or irresistible or some shit, so she slathers on the persona and shows up graveside to irritate the hell out of me at least once a week.

  “Fifteen’ll get you twenty,” Harper tells me like he always does when he sees Vampirella pulling up in her little green hybrid that her parents got her for her birthday.

  I grunt like I always do when he says that, then remember the song where the line came from—Jimmy Buffett’s “Livingston Saturday Night.” Marvin gave me my entire Buffett collection the week I got home from Juvenile.

  Music to chill by, he called it.

  Cherie, who is probably constitutionally incapable of chilling, is actually sixteen and a year behind me in school. She’s driving slow on the main road through Rock Hill, and I know she’s looking for me.

  Great.

  It’s Wednesday night and Harper’s foggy breath smells like beer and the fresh peanut butter Marvin dropped off before he split. We’re hollowing out a larger-than-usual grave for an extra-large casket coming from two counties over for a burial Thursday morning. What’s left of Harper’s six-pack is in the grave behind us, but I never touch the stuff. Drinking would screw my probation big-time, and besides, I have an aversion to drinking anything that smells that much like cow piss. Marvin’s at work at Duke’s Ridge Mall, which hopefully doesn’t smell like cow piss, but you never know. He’s selling cookies. (“Great way to meet chicks, you should try it—chocolate, man. Gets ’em every time.…”)

  In her travel cage next to the dirt pile, Fred quits playing in her water dish, poofs out her feathers, and makes an ear-splitting smoke-detector screech in Cherie’s direction.

  Harper runs a sun-spotted, knotty hand through his sweaty gray hair and glares over the edge of the grave we’re standing inside, propped on our shovels as Cherie swoops down on our location. He’s about an inch shorter than me, so I’ve got a better view of Cherie’s long black skirt and lacey long-sleeved black shirt. She’s got her dyed-black hair pulled back and fixed with some kind of chopstick-looking things, and her eye-shadow and lipstick, freshly applied because no black makeup is allowed at school, glisten in the late afternoon sun.

  She’s not ugly—don’t get me wrong on that point. The girl is fine. Some people would consider her beautiful, even in the Halloween getup with all the dangling metal jewelry. It’s not that I don’t notice her, or care about her a little, even, like a big brother might care about a kid sister. It’s just that I don’t know her, like I keep trying to tell her, and she doesn’t know me.

  Because she’s not real.

  And I’m not real.

  I mean, I’m not what she thinks I am, this tortured and dangerous dark prince who can save her from the boredom that hangs around her like a shroud. She doesn’t see me. She just sees the character she wants me to play. I can’t explain it any better than that. Marvin doesn’t quite get it when I try to tell him how I feel about Cherie, but even he thinks she’s too far gone from normal to rehabilitate.

  “Hello, little birdie,” Cherie says to Fred, who gives her another ear popper of a smoke-detector screech. That’s a special noise for Fred. She only makes it when she’s scared, in real trouble, or face-to-face with somebody she really despises. Cherie sits down next to Fred’s cage,
anyway, and Fred plasters her little gray parrot body against the bars, doing her best to snap through the metal and get out to assault Cherie’s big black clodhoppers, or maybe tear into all that lace and black cotton.

  As usual, Cherie doesn’t notice Fred’s less than favorable response to her. “So who is this grave for?”

  “He’s not from around here,” I say, because Harper’s scowling too much to talk. He hates digging oversized graves, anyway, and adding Cherie to the equation means he’s jabbing his shovel with a lot of extra force.

  “Pretty big guy, huh?” Cherie’s eyes go wide and bright as she mentally measures the hole we’re working on. She knows the drill—and all the usual dimensions. “Wonder if he had a heart attack, or maybe a stroke?” She teases out the ends of her long curly hair with black-tipped nails she has to take on and off, because black nail polish isn’t allowed at our school, either. “Obesity is a big risk factor for all kinds of diseases.”

  I don’t say a word, and neither does Harper. The man we’re digging a grave for died in a car wreck, but if we say that, Cherie will want details that will make us both sick.

  “How was your day?” she asks me, more or less ignoring Harper, which is fine, because he strains brain muscles ignoring her, too.

  “Busy.” I’m smiling, but Cherie’s never figured out that’s bad. “Had tests in first and second period.”

  She blinks her too-thick mascara at me and gives me a little pout. “I didn’t see you at lunch today. Again.”

  Because I saw you first. Out loud, my answer is, “Yeah. Marvin and I had stuff to do for Advanced Math.”

  “Advanced Math, AP English, Physics—I don’t know why you wear yourself out with such hard classes.” She laughs and it sounds real instead of all fakey, at least. “Is it just because Marvin does? It’s not like you can go to Notre Dame with him, right? They’re way too Catholic for you. My dad says sex offenders can’t go to college at all.”

  I wish she’d go away. Anywhere but here would be just fine.

  “It’s your senior year,” she goes on, just like she’d go on even if I told her to shut up. “Have some fun. I plan to party next year, only you won’t be there.”