by Greg Herren
—and almost jumped out of my skin when Rachel grabbed my arm. “Come on,” she whispered urgently, “let’s go see what they’re doing.”
I opened my eyes and looked longingly back at Albert Tyler’s headstone before reluctantly following Rachel away.
It didn’t feel right walking away from Albert’s grave.
But that didn’t make any sense.
I looked back over my shoulder as we walked to where the others were standing. There wasn’t anything there but a tombstone—but the sadness kept fading the farther I got from Albert’s grave.
I turned my head back around when I heard Carson whispering urgently.
“Spirit, whoever you are, don’t be afraid of us. We aren’t here to harm you in any way. We’re here to help you cross from this plane to the next. Don’t you want our help?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rachel make a face and shake her head. Logan was trying really hard not to smile, but I could see it on his face, the way the corners of his mouth were twitching. Teresa’s arms were crossed in front of her, and she looked bored, like she’d had enough and was ready to go.
My teeth started chattering from the cold, and I took a few steps back and away from Rachel. It’s amazing how fast it can get cold here in the mountains, I thought again, rubbing my arms to try to get blood flowing through them and warm up. It bothered me they weren’t taking Carson’s ghost hunting seriously. Carson obviously believed, so the mocking was kind of mean.
They probably mock me behind my back.
I shivered again.
“Can you communicate with us? Can you say something, so we know you’re there?”
The flag was still waving.
“Sometimes they speak in a tone we can’t hear,” Carson said softly. “That’s why I have this digital recorder—it can pick up tones humans can’t hear.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could get the words out, Carson, Teresa, and Logan all whipped their heads around in the direction of the end of the road, where the graveyard ended in a fog-wreathed fence.
“What was that?” Logan asked, his eyes round.
“I didn’t hear anything,” I said, and Rachel nodded agreement. “What was it?”
“I heard someone—or something—growling,” Teresa said. “You didn’t hear it?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Rachel said.
“I heard it too—a growling, and it sounded like it was coming from over there,” Carson said decisively. “By the fence, right? Come on, let’s go see what it was.”
He started walking quickly down the dirt road, with Logan and Teresa right behind him.
“No, thanks,” Rachel said with a slight shudder. “I didn’t hear it, and even if I did, something growling?” She winked at me. “It’s probably just a dog or something, you know, no matter how bad Carson wants it to be a ghost.”
“Yeah.” I smiled back at her. “But, you have to admit, the flag is weird.” I pointed to it.
And as soon as I did, it stopped moving.
“That’s weird.” Rachel frowned, moving closer to me. “I wish they’d come back so we could get out of here.”
The other three were no longer in the light cast by the headlights of the SUV, but it looked like they were using the faint glow of their cell phones to see.
“I don’t like cemeteries,” Rachel went on. “This isn’t a place where people are supposed to be, you know, after dark.” She shrugged off her light sweatshirt and tied it around her waist.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked, surprised.
“Cold?” She gave me a funny look. “What do you mean, cold? I’m sweating. It’s so muggy up here.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and said, “Feel my back.”
Rachel reached over and placed her hand flat against my back. Her eyes widened. “Your back is cold.” She breathed out, pulling her hand away. “I—I don’t understand. How is that possible?”
I bit my lower lip. “It’s not cold out?”
“Scotty, it’s warm and muggy.” She grabbed my hand with both of hers, and I could feel how warm they were. “Are you feeling all right?” She put a hand to my forehead. “You’re cold as ice!”
I looked back over my shoulder at the headstone. “I feel fine, I’m just a little cold.”
It wasn’t true, though—I still felt that weird, overwhelming sense of sadness. I walked away from Rachel and knelt next to the headstone yet again.
“How did you die, Albert?” I whispered as the sadness overwhelmed me yet again, my eyes filling with tears that I quickly wiped away before she could see them.
“Scotty?” Rachel said from behind me, placing her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, wishing she would just go away and leave me alone. I wanted to ask her to leave, to walk away, but I knew she would think it was weird, and that would make her only want to stay there all the more.
She’d always been my favorite when we were younger, and when she’d morphed from the girl with the braids who hung on my every word and whose face always lit up with joy whenever she saw me to the bored teenaged girl fascinated by makeup, clothes, and the latest teen idol, I’d been more than a little sad. Every summer I hoped she’d be excited to see me, the way she’d been when we were younger, but this year, like the past four or five, she’d just nodded at me after my parents hugged her and went back to playing with her phone, twirling a lock of her hair around her index finger.
So, of course, now that I wanted to be left alone, she couldn’t catch a clue.
I heard her gasp. “He was so young!”
Go away, I thought, closing my eyes and willing her to go join the others.
I sensed her kneel down beside me. “Oh my God, he has the same birthday as you…he was the same age as you.” She inhaled sharply. “That’s just weird.”
I resisted the urge to tell her to go away, to leave me alone the way she had for the last five years. We aren’t friends anymore, you’ve made that clear, I wanted to say, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
The cold got worse on my back, it was like—it was almost like someone had opened a freezer door directly behind me, and all that foggy cold air was brushing against my back. All the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up again—I could see the goose bumps rising on my forearms, and the back of my head was cold.
“Oh my God, look at your arms.” Rachel grabbed hold of my left arm, and her hand felt warm and damp on my skin. “Goose bumps! And you’re freezing!” There was a catch in her voice I recognized as fear. I turned my head to look at her, and in the faint light where we were kneeling, I could see her face had drained of color.
She’s really afraid, I thought in wonder, so why aren’t I?
The only thing I’d felt was the sadness, and I realized as the cold on my back was getting more intense that the sadness was starting to fade away…it was still there, I was aware of it, but there was something more there…
But I couldn’t experience whatever it was as long as she was there.
I had to make her leave.
And as soon as I thought it, a sound from the far end of the cemetery startled us both.
Rachel stood up. “I better go see what they’re doing. If Carson kills himself I’ll get the blame.” She smiled hesitantly down at me. “Maybe you should go wait for us in the car.”
“I’ll be fine.” Just go already! I stood up to reassure her, and she looked up into my eyes quizzically, touching my arms again.
“It’s so weird, how cold your arms are.” She shook her head again, like she was trying to figure it out for a moment before giving it up.
I watched her go, and the sadness began to turn to elation.
Yes! I exulted, joy and excitement rushing through me quickly, electricity that made the tips of my fingers and toes tingle—
—and just as quickly, it was gone.
The others were coming back up the road now, t
alking excitedly amongst themselves in low voices. Carson grinned. “You should have come down with us, bud! It was exciting!” He pushed his glasses back up his nose as he reached out and grabbed my arms. “Rachel said you had an experience up here, though.” Carson’s eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head sideways as he peered at me. “Your arms are cold…” He looked down at the headstone. “Interesting. Do you still feel the cold?”
“Not as much,” I admitted, and it was true. It was like that freezer door behind me had been closed.
And as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I felt it again—a horribly sad coldness spreading from the back of my head down my back to my legs, and all of my arm hair stood up.
“Wow.” Carson goggled at me, fumbling in his pocket for his phone. He touched my back and his eyes widened. “You’re really cold.”
But before he could take a picture of my arms with his phone, it was gone.
“Can we just get out of here?” Rachel whined. “I’m scared and don’t want to be here anymore, okay? This place is creeping me out.”
“Yeah,” Teresa chimed in. “We can talk about it more up at the lodge—and listen to your recordings, Carson.”
“Okay”—he nodded—“but first I need to say a prayer. Everyone close your eyes.”
I closed mine, and after a few moments, Carson started speaking in a low voice. “Spirits of the cemetery, we thank you for the welcome and apologize for disturbing your rest. We are going to leave now and would like to remind you that no matter how much you want to come with us, this is where you belong now, and you cannot come back with us. Please, continue to rest in peace, and may God bless you all. Amen.”
Everyone muttered amen, and we walked back to the SUV in silence.
As I opened the back door, I looked back over my shoulder at Albert’s headstone.
Good-bye, I thought sadly as I climbed into the backseat.
Chapter Four
No one spoke as Logan started the SUV, and Nicki Minaj started rapping loudly through the speakers again. Carson leaned over and turned the volume down; maybe it seemed as inappropriate to him as it did to me.
I buckled my seat belt as he put the car into reverse and started backing out of the cemetery. Just like on the way down, I was sitting in between Rachel and Teresa. Neither spoke. Teresa just stared out the window, but Rachel took my hand in hers and squeezed. Her small, warm hand was trembling just a little bit, and I wondered what had made her so upset. I looked at her, and she gave me a strange looking smile that didn’t quite make it to her eyes.
I looked away from her, past Teresa and out the window, as the SUV slowly backed out of the cemetery.
I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here and find out—
Find out what? I wondered, even though the thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come to me. But I didn’t want to leave with them. I had an urge to crawl over Teresa, open the door, and leap out. I wasn’t supposed to leave, I was supposed to stay behind in the cemetery…
Rachel squeezed my hand really hard, and her well-manicured nails dug into my palm. I winced and pulled my hand away.
“Sorry,” she whispered, but she still had that weird look on her face. With her other hand she smacked Logan’s headrest. “Will you hurry up and get us the hell out of here?” she snapped.
“Chill, all right? I can hardly see anything behind us and I don’t want to drive into a ditch,” he snapped back at her. “Anytime you think you can drive better—”
“Just get us out of here,” Teresa said, still looking out her window. “The sooner the better.”
What’s gotten into everyone? I looked over at Teresa. Her face looked pale in the dim light inside the car, and even Logan frowned in concentration as he stared out the back windows. Finally, he started turning the wheel as he backed out onto the pavement of Cemetery Road. A huge cloud of dust, churned up by the tires, followed us out as he shifted into drive and headed for Thirteenth Lake Road.
The weird feeling that I didn’t want to leave, that I wasn’t supposed to, that I should somehow stay behind got stronger as Logan drove slowly along the winding road. It was surreal, this sense that something was off and wrong, all the while Nicki Minaj kept rapping through the speakers. I felt a lump in my throat and tears coming to my eyes again, like I was going to start sobbing uncontrollably at any moment. I knew it was crazy, not normal, irrational—but I couldn’t seem to control my emotions.
I felt like I was saying good-bye to Marc last night all over again, that he was walking down my front steps and down the driveway and I was never going to see him again.
But that doesn’t make sense. I’m only going to be here for a week, we’re flying home next Sunday and I’ll see him that night, he’s already said he’d come over and we’re going to order pizza…
But I couldn’t shake the feeling.
We came around a curve in the road and the headlights shone on the stop sign and the trees on the other side of Thirteenth Lake Road.
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back. Think about something happy, forget this sad stuff, you don’t want to start bawling your stupid head off in front of everyone. Something happy. Like—how it was about a year ago that Marc first kissed me.
Just the thought made me smile.
Our first kiss had happened last summer, right after we got back from the Sanibel Island trip.
By then I’d long given up on anything developing between the two of us. No matter how much I wished and hoped and prayed for it to happen, no matter how badly I wanted Marc to be gay—it just wasn’t in the cards. He was a straight boy, and that was the end of that. Other guys I talked with on the gay teen message boards kept warning me to forget about him—but that was easy for them to say. How could I forget about him when I saw him every day, spent every possible second of every day with him? Every night when I got in my bed and under the covers, the last thing I did before drifting off to sleep was replay the day. What did he mean when he said this? What did he mean when he said that? Reliving moments when our bodies brushed against each other, or when our arms bumped together, the way his muscles felt, how firm yet strangely soft his skin was. Glimpses of his body when he’d yawn and his shirt would ride up, or changing in the locker room for gym class, or the way his butt moved in his tight jeans as he walked away from me in the hall at school.
Yeah, the kids from other parts of the country I’d met online were probably right—we were never going to be together, and I was coming to terms with that—but I could dream about him all I wanted to, couldn’t I? I could imagine what it would feel like to have his arms around me and his lips pressed up against mine all I wanted to, but that wasn’t going to make it happen. No matter how much alike we were, no matter how much we made each other laugh, even though we finished each other’s sentences and then would laugh till we cried and our sides hurt, it just wasn’t meant to be. It broke my heart to see him going steady with girls, even though we never ever talked about girls when we were alone. I hated every one of his girlfriends, smiling and being friendly and polite while I really wanted to stab them all in the heart, shove them in front of a moving car, anything to get rid of them.
And I hated myself for feeling that way. I just couldn’t stand anyone who would take him away from me.
And, last summer, I’d finally accepted it, once and for all.
Marc had gotten a job as a lifeguard at the town pool. He didn’t want to work at the pool, he’d explained to me after he got the job. His dad was making him work for the summer “to teach him the meaning of hard work and the value of a dollar.” I resisted the urge to point out that his rotten father hadn’t worked since they’d moved to Farmington—Marc knew it as well as I did, after all, and what good would it do to point out that his dad was a big loser?
It was going to be the worst, most boring summer of my life.
The one good thing was he’d broken up with his latest girlfriend—that empty-headed cheerleader Tori Crawford—on the last da
y of school, so she was out of the picture. I’d tried really hard to like Tori, but she made it impossible. She was one of those girls whose whole life revolved around their boyfriend, and she always spoke in some kind of baby talk to him that was supposed to be cute but was really just annoying. I didn’t understand what he saw in her, but she was pretty enough and had a nice enough body, if you were into girls. So at least I didn’t have to worry about sharing his free time with her.
But the summer turned out to be even worse than I could have dreamed. He had to be at work every day from ten in the morning until the pool closed at eight. By the time he punched the time clock and walked the two miles home, he was exhausted and just wanted to go to bed. He was off on Wednesdays and Sundays, but his dad kept him busy doing yard work and chores around their house. Every time I saw him, he was so tired and worn out he could barely speak in anything more than words of one syllable and grunts.
I tried hanging out at the pool, and managed to get really tanned, but it was so boring. He had to sit in his lifeguard tower, so high up we had to shout at each other to be heard. We could talk when he had his lunch break, but that was about it. And all the little kids running and yelling and splashing while their mothers talked to each other and ignored them drove me crazy. I read a lot of books while my skin got darker, headphones firmly in place trying to drown out the screaming of the kids—how Marc stood all the noise was beyond me—and tried to sneak glances at him, up on the tower behind his dark sunglasses, as his skin turned golden and the sun bleached out the hair on his legs.
And that had to be enough for me. To see the sun glinting on his muscles as I watched the girls in their bikinis flirting with him, my heart aching as I rode my bike home when I couldn’t stand to be out in the sun anymore, hoping that he wouldn’t be too tired to stop by and hang out for a while.
He rarely wasn’t, as June turned into July, and next thing I knew it was August and time for the annual family vacation.
Pretty much our only contact all summer long had been through text messages and posts on Facebook.
It was the worst summer of my life, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. At least when we were in school, we saw each other all the time—we were both in the college-prep program and always took as many classes together as we could manage.
