Ascending the Boneyard

by C. G. Watson

  My messenger bag is lying a few feet away. I move slowly, gather up the scattered socks and underwear, my phone charger, the gum pack—excruciatingly aware that whatever’s in this bag is all there is.

  I stumble backward, fall against the delivery truck, press myself into the cool metal siding. Snot and tears drip down my face, catch in the grooves of the roll-up door, trail down the side of it as I collapse to the ground, sputter-crying the way people do when they’re sure no one is there to hear them.

  You can’t help us, and we can’t help you.

  No one can save you.

  I wipe my face on my sleeve, lift my head up, let my gaze coast down the demolished highway. Familiar voices echo in the distance, drift toward me in jagged puffs of smoke.

  You’ve got full weps and max damage.

  Save it.

  Yeah . . .

  I gulp small pockets of fresh air, edge forward, pick my way through the twisted bumpers, cracked guardrails, strips of steel-belted radial tires littering the road.

  My shoulders square as I cough through the dense wall of smoke closing in on me, wince at the stench of burnt rubber and axle grease and barbecued engine parts that hang heavy all around me. I throw off the yellow-tinted goggles, not caring about the sting in my eyes without that protection.

  As I wave the thick smoke from my face, I see Haze standing a few feet away from me in his ski cap and sunglasses. His face mask is lying at my feet.

  I cast a squinted look down the street, then back the other way, but the road in front of me looks strangely, unexpectedly, the way it always has. Calm. Almost serene. No helicopters. No tanks. No gaping mortar holes in the road. Just kids and dogs and weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalks and cars driving past this exact spot where one month ago at ten minutes to four, Stan turned the wrong way down a one-way street and head-on collided with an unsuspecting Jeep before wrapping around a power pole.

  But even the site of impact looks unfairly normal. The spray of broken glass is gone now. The flames are gone. The smoke is gone.

  Everything.

  Gone.

  As if it never happened.

  As if my mom never existed.

  “Tosh,” Haze says, real low and slow. “Let go, man.”

  I look down, see my fingers gripped around the door handle of a bright yellow Termi-Pest truck.

  “I have to,” I tell him. “He took her, Haze. She’s waiting for someone to rescue her.”

  “You can’t,” he says. “She’s gone, Tosh.”

  I swallow against the blistering knot in my throat that dissolves my words as I say them.

  “How do you begin to process ‘does not exist’?”

  He shakes his head.

  A murmur of activity rises up around us, and I pivot my gaze in time to see the old man darting down the road toward me. Only something bolts him in place a few feet out: maybe the look on my face, or the sight of the bug truck behind me, or the lightning crack of realization that my uncharacteristically irrational decision to run away and his uncharacteristically rational decision to come after me have led him directly to ground zero. He scratches his well-developed pony keg through the deteriorating fabric of his shirt before taking a few clumsy steps back the way he came. That’s right; go home, I say inside my head. Take care of Devin. He needs you.

  As I scroll back toward Haze, my eye catches on a pair of black Chuck Taylors moving across the street.

  I zoom in on the shoes, work up to the cuffed jeans, to the SUPERGIRL T-shirt, to the sheen of sadness on the girl’s face.

  Haze follows my line of vision.

  “She’s okay, just so you know,” he says. “Her Jeep got totaled, but she didn’t get hurt too bad.”

  My head goes full-tilt fog for a moment. Fog so thick it blocks out sound. Blocks out everything.

  “You probably don’t remember any of that.”

  Haze moves forward as he talks, unwraps my fingers from around the door handle of the bug truck. He opens the door, locks it from the inside, clicks it shut, soft but firm, as I turn and watch the girl, as I count her steps to the corner, as she crosses the street toward us, as she leaves a bundle of fresh flowers not ten feet away from me, next to a bunch of other bundles in various stages of life or death. She kneels down, and I watch her lips moving, and I can’t tell if she’s praying or not, but it doesn’t matter. The sight of her lips raining invisible words over the flowers she brought shocks me out of my daze.

  Haze quietly slips my messenger bag from me, pulls the strap over his head as I keep staring.

  Mason?

  She stands up, tries to smile, but her eyes look like pictures of the earth from outer space, full of clouds and water.

  I look down, count the bouquets of flowers—same number as the number of days since my mom left.

  Since she died.

  My mom.

  Died.

  A soft burst of wind lifts the hair from around Mason’s face, and I want to acknowledge her kindness somehow, but I can’t. I can’t move or talk or think. I can’t . . .

  I can’t breathe.

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” she says. “It was just an accident.”

  No, I think. The go-karts were an accident. This was a choice. This was 1,586 choices that all could have been made differently if there were a way to turn back time. That’s what she wanted. It said so in her note.

  “I wish I could,” Mason says, as if she read my thoughts. “Go back and change things. But it doesn’t work that way.”

  I know it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t work that way. Some battles just have to be fought. No heals. No rezzes. No special weps. Just getting from one map through the next, pushing forward, until it doesn’t feel like the end is quite so near.

  It’s symbolic. The indestructible exoskeleton. The almost transcendental will to live.

  I look up in time to catch sight of a murmuration of starlings ascend into the sky, watch as thousands of blackbirds shift and spread and twist in an impossibly fragile yet beautiful dance. And just when it seems the birds are going to lose track of each other, to fall away in chaos, they pull back together as if by some internal, magnetic force.

  It’d be great if we all had that kind of compass. No one would ever have to worry about finding their way back, no matter how lost they got.

  A strange kind of feel-good bruise comes over me, but it’s the kind of pain that has substance, that lets you know there’s something to it. I lift a shaking hand and press it against my chest. I expect it to pass straight through a mess of broken panes, kicked-out bricks, rusted, bent rebar into a hollowed-out space inside me.

  Instead my palm lays out flat against the rise and fall of my rib cage, and I feel the steady beat of my own heart.

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have negotiated the map of writing this book on my own. I had a posse of CCs and healers, had platoons that flanked me or mapped for me so I could beat the mission and not wipe, who donned the gas mask and rode shotgun when I lost sight of the vision, the road, or the faith. There would be no Boneyard without the support of these stellar people, and so, with gratitude as undying as an UnderWorld cockroach, I thank the following:

  Erin Murphy, who has withstood approximately 312 weeks of Send Your Agent a Neurotic Email Days and never gave up on this story, even when it was as dismantled as an abandoned amusement park; Liesa Abrams, who saw something between the surreal lines and spaces of Tosh’s world that genuinely resonated with truth and beauty for her; e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, for asking that first question (“so tell me about this thing you’re writing”), for never sugarcoating her opinion, and for friendship so far above the call of duty it requires its own category; Rachel Watson, for talking me through the initial landscape of the game (to the point of hanging butcher paper from a door and literally drawing out a map of the Boneyard so I could visualize it); Joel Watson, who processed the initial story idea with me so thoroughly I felt like I knew Caleb Tosh to his core
by the time I started writing out his story; Tom Watson, who said the exact right combination of words that got me to understand what Tosh’s journey really was (even if we were talking about something entirely different at the time)—this manuscript would have stayed in the kill file had it not been for that conversation; Fran Gordon (you know Dad is smiling at us, right?); Lynne Bercaw (my SSPCH); Jennifer Salas (mi Chiquita Banana); Doug “Sure-I’ll-read-another-draft” Marshall; Erin Murphy’s Dog: Mike Jung, Ruth McNally Barshaw, Jeannie Mobley-Tanaka, Deborah Underwood, Kristin Wolden Nitz, Arthur A. Levine, and Conrad Wesselhoeft—Dawgs, your unfailing love and support have literally saved me—I’m deeply grateful for every single one of you (en boca al coniglio—arooooo!!); the entire EMLA Gango—the best book champions ever, and not just for me but every one of our agency siblings, in ways that make me sob with joy. And finally, special Ascent Credits to Joshua McCune and Susan Vaught, who were unquestioningly part of the Boneyard Expansion Pack.

  And to those who were kind enough (or crazy enough) to read drafts and share their thoughts along the way: Austin Rist (you should be on here at least three times), Carol and John Watson, Doug Marshall, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, Fran Gordon, Gwendolyn McIntyre (rest in peace, beautiful soul), Jeannie Mobley-Tanaka, Jennifer Salas, Joel Watson, Joshua McCune, Leigh Purtill, Lisa Gus, Lynne Bercaw, Missy Neal, Naheed Hasnat, Pennie Baxter, Rachel Watson, Ruth and Charlie Barshaw, Sheri Eichar, Sofie Bercaw, Susan Vaught.

  Each of us must negotiate our own internal landscape of pain and struggle—and yes, the journey can be challenging, the pain can be brutal, the loneliness, the fear, the isolation can feel surreal at times. But hang tough, my friend. Find your tribe, fight for yourself, be brave, and trust that you’ll come out on the other side with more of yourself than you had when you went in.

  C. G. WATSON is an educator and performing songwriter from Northern California. Ascending the Boneyard is her second novel for teens; she is also the author of Quad. She performs an exclusive once-a-year show with an all-author band called Erin Murphy’s Dog, and is the cofounder of Never Counted Out, a nonprofit organization that brings creative mentorship to at-risk youth around the country.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

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  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition February 2016

  Text copyright © 2016 by C.G. Watson

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2016 by Oliver Charles/Arcangel Images

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  Jacket designed by Regina Flath

  Interior designed by Tom Daly

  The text of this book was set in Weiss Std.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Watson, C. G.

  Ascending the boneyard / by C. G. Watson. — First Simon Pulse hardcover edition.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Overwhelmed by a series of losses, including an accident that left his brother in a wheelchair, his father’s abuse, and his mother’s departure, sixteen-year-old Tosh escapes into a video game, but soon the game becomes much more real than his life.

  [1. Virtual reality—Fiction. 2. Video games—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction. 6. People with disabilities—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.W415Asc 2016

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014049485

  ISBN 978-1-4814-3184-2 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-3186-6 (eBook)