by Greg Herren
I didn’t even get to see him before we left for Sanibel. He was supposed to come over the night before we left, but he texted me that, once again, he was too tired—and he’d see me when I got back. I miss you so much, I typed out…but deleted it instead of sending it.
We’re not even friends anymore, I thought, burying my face in my pillows, not bothering to respond to his text. The job was worse than any girlfriend. Feeling like an idiot for crying over someone who didn’t feel the same way about me that I felt about him, I vowed to myself that when I got back from Sanibel I was moving on.
I’d find a boyfriend if it killed me.
But the night we got back from Sanibel, I was in my room unpacking. I’d gone completely incommunicado there—I didn’t even take my phone with me on the trip, so I avoided Facebook and e-mails and everything. I figured it was better not to be tempted to send him desperate texts, to pour all my feelings for him out in an e-mail, or whatever. I was miserable, of course, the whole time we were in Florida, but nobody seemed to notice because I’d gotten really good at pretending to be happy when I was miserable—just like I’d gotten really good at pretending to not be gay, or pretending Marc was just my best friend. On the flight back to Chicago, I decided I was tired of pretending. About everything.
It was on the plane I decided I was going to tell my parents I was gay. I was going to tell everyone, and I didn’t care if it cost me friends or if kids picked on me at school or said nasty things to me on Facebook or Twitter. No matter how bad it got, it couldn’t be any worse than lying to everyone, including myself.
I was putting my duffel bag away in my closet when I heard knuckles rapping on my doorframe. “Come in!” I’d called without turning around, figuring it was one of my parents.
“Did you have fun in Florida?”
I spun around. Marc was standing in my doorway, and my heart melted at the sight of him. He was wearing a white ribbed tank top with the big red cross on the front with Lifeguard written underneath in red block letters and his loose red board shorts. His hair was almost white from sun bleaching, and his skin was the darkest reddish-gold I’d ever seen. There were places on his shoulders where the skin was flaking away, the aftermath of a burn. He was looking down at the floor.
All my good intentions about putting distance between us went right out of my head at the sight of him. I loved him even more than I had before I’d left, if that was even possible. “Yeah,” I mumbled uncomfortably. “You?”
“You never answered any of my texts or called me back.” He moved into the room, still not looking up from the floor
His voice sounded so despondent, miserable, and sad I wanted to just put my arms around him and hold him, comfort him.
“I didn’t take my phone with me,” I replied, amazed my voice wasn’t shaky. “I forgot it and didn’t even realize it until we were halfway there.” So much for being honest with everyone—I hadn’t even been home for an hour and I was already lying again.
“You could have e-mailed me and let me know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
“Are you mad at me?” This time he looked up, and his beautiful blue eyes were swimming in tears. “What did I do, Scotty? Whatever it is, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything.” I stepped past him and closed my door. I could hear Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen. I have to tell him the truth, even if it means he turns away from me in disgust. I bit my lip. “Sit down.” He sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the floor. I sat down in my desk chair. “It’s not you, it’s me.” I swallowed, searching for the right words to say, and finally decided to just say it. “I—I don’t think I can be friends with you anymore, Marc. It’s too hard for me.”
He looked at me, and the naked pain in his face broke my heart into about a million pieces, but I couldn’t worry about his feelings anymore. I had to do what was best for me.
The words started coming out of me in a rush.
“I’m gay, Marc, and always have been and I’m in love with you but I know you’re not in love with me you’re not gay but it’s hard you’re my best friend and I don’t want to put you in an awkward place and it’s so hard to be so close to you and not be able to tell you how I feel and I’ve missed you so much this summer and—”
He stopped me by leaning forward and putting his hand over my mouth. He licked his lips. “You’re in love with me?”
I nodded.
His face lit up with a huge smile, the one that always made my knees weak. “But Scotty, I love you, too.” A tear dropped out of his right eye. “I didn’t think…I never dreamed—”
I didn’t let him finish. I leaned over and kissed him.
And it was better than I ever had imagined it could be.
“Looks like no one’s here.” Logan’s voice cut into my reverie, startling me back into the present as he pulled into a parking spot at the lodge. “I guess they went back to the cabins.” He didn’t shut the car off, but turned around and looked at us in the backseat. “Maybe I should just drop everyone off. What do you guys want to do?” He frowned. “I can’t believe they just bailed on us like that.”
Carson opened his door. “You can drop us off later.” He got out of the car and stood there impatiently, tapping his foot in the gravel. “We need to write down our impressions of what happened at the graveyard while it’s still fresh in our minds and listen to the recording to see if any ghosts tried to communicate with us.” When no one responded or moved, he grew more impatient. “Come on, you guys. I know you don’t take any of this seriously, okay, but I do.” His voice took on a whiny pleading note. “Come on, you all heard that growling sound. And what about what happened with Scotty? You think that was nothing?”
Rachel blew out her breath and opened her door. “We might as well humor him, guys,” she said, sliding down to the ground, “or we’ll never hear the end of it.” She gave me another weird look and shut the door.
What’s wrong with her? I wondered, sliding across the seat to follow Teresa out the other side. Logan shut off the engine and turned off the lights. Now the only light was the naked bulb by the screen door leading into the lodge.
The air was thick, warm and heavy, almost syrupy. Beads of sweat popped out on my arms as I walked across the parking lot to the sidewalk to the entryway. It is humid and muggy, I thought as I opened the screen door and went inside. So what was all that cold down at the graveyard?
The big front room of the lodge seemed much creepier when empty than it had earlier. It was a long room, with couches and chairs scattered around a massive fireplace. The animal heads stuffed and mounted on the rough-hewn walls had seemed almost funny in their tackiness in the daylight, but with all the windows big squares of darkness, they seemed scarier and more menacing. I swallowed and sat down on one of the couches in front of the fireplace. Rachel plopped down next to me and patted my shoulder. She just smiled when I looked over at her. “How do you feel?” she asked me in a low voice.
“Fine,” I replied. What the hell is she talking about?
“Anyone want a soda?” Logan asked as he walked over to the big red Coke cooler in the far corner of the room. He lifted the lid and some fog escaped. He came back to where we were sitting, passing out Cokes and Diet Cokes.
I popped the top of mine and took a long drink, smothering a belch as Carson started passing around our iPads. “I can’t believe they went back to the cabins and just left our iPads lying around in the game room,” he said with a scowl.
Logan rolled his eyes as he flipped open the case to his. “It was probably our parents’ idea.” He mimicked his mother’s voice. “If someone steals their iPads it will teach them a lesson about running off and leaving them out.”
“Yeah, yeah, sounds like my mom, too.” Carson rolled his eyes as he sat down in a wooden rocking chair and opened the cover of his iPad. “Everyone write down your impressions of the graveyard and what you saw,” he ordered. “Everything,
no matter how unimportant it may have seemed, because you never know—coupled with something someone else saw, it could be something important.” He looked around at all of us. “Please take this seriously, guys.”
Teresa winked at me as she sat in a chair beside him, and I hid a grin. I sat down and opened the Notes app and started typing with two fingers, feeling kind of crazy and stupid.
Away from the cemetery, in the big well-lit room with the staring bears and wolf heads on the walls, I didn’t really know what to type. In the cemetery, the coldness, the sadness and the weird flag thing had seemed like proof there was such a thing as ghosts. Now, it seemed unreal, like all of our imaginations had been working overtime or something down there. But I started writing because I knew Carson was going to want us to compare notes when we were all finished.
But I didn’t mention Albert’s grave as I touched the letters on the screen.
That seemed private to me, like it wasn’t any of their business.
It didn’t even seem weird that I felt that way.
So I just wrote about the weird solitary flag waving, and the weird sensation of cold on my back and my arms. I didn’t mention the sadness—I was the only person who’d felt that.
I had just finished when Rachel sighed. “Okay, finished. What do we do now, Scooby-Doo?”
Carson gave her a dirty look. “You know, I don’t make fun of your bullshit interests, do I?”
“All right, I’m sorry.” She stuck her tongue out at him.
“Is everyone finished?” Carson asked. When everyone nodded, he had us each read out loud what we’d written down.
I went first, rushing through it as quickly as I could and putting my iPad down. I didn’t listen to any of the others, letting my mind wander back to saying good-bye to Marc last night.
Marc hadn’t gotten a job as a lifeguard this summer—we’d both gotten jobs working as stock boys at the Jewel-Osco. We’d even convinced the manager to let us work the same shifts, so I could give Marc rides to and from work, since he didn’t have a car and Mom let me take hers. It was perfect. The job itself was meaningless—all we had to do was restock the store and make sure everything was nice and neat and organized looking. It paid much better than lifeguarding, and we got to spend almost all of our time together.
It had been the opposite of last summer. This one had been almost too perfect to be true.
“I wish you weren’t going away,” Marc said as we lay side by side on my bed. “And I’m sorry we can’t…you know.” He was always apologetic about his fear of coming out, like I somehow didn’t understand why he felt that way. All it took was listening to his father rant just once about the goddamned homosexuals for me to know Marc was much worse off than I was. No, I knew too well Marc wasn’t ever going to be able to do anything about coming out until he was no longer under his father’s roof.
We hadn’t really thought that far ahead, of course, but I just figured we’d go off to college together, maybe share an apartment. I was looking at the University of Illinois—I really wanted to go to Northwestern, but it was too expensive, and there was no way I was going to get a scholarship. My grades were good but they weren’t that good.
“It’s only for a week,” I replied, trying to be brave. He squeezed my hand so hard I almost cried out.
“It’ll seem like forever,” he replied gloomily. “You better answer my texts this year.”
“I will,” I’d replied, not knowing then there’d be no cell service and limited Wi-Fi on the mountain. I squeezed his hand back and lifted it to my mouth and kissed it. “You know I’ll be thinking of you every second I’m there, and missing you so bad I won’t be hardly able to stand it.”
I’d walked him home—we’d kissed good-bye in the privacy of my bedroom—and he’d looked back to where I stood on the sidewalk one last time before he went into the house.
It felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest.
“Interesting,” Carson was saying as I focused on the present again. “No one else experienced the cold the way Scotty did—and neither Scotty nor Rachel heard the growling sound the rest of us did.”
“What do you think it means?” Teresa asked. She looked interested, as did Logan, while Rachel looked like she wanted to start playing with her phone again.
“It means there was a dog or something—maybe a wolf—in the woods,” Rachel said with a big yawn before Carson could say anything. “And it took off while you were on your way down to the fence. As for the cold?” She shrugged. “That I can’t explain. But it was really weird, I’ll say that, especially the way Scotty kept getting the goose bumps.” She started playing with her iPad again, and I could see the Rio version of Angry Birds loading on the screen. “That was pretty freaky.”
“You didn’t feel anything but the cold, Scotty?” All of them except Rachel were looking at me now, expectation on their faces.
Tell them, what can it hurt? I took a deep breath. “I just felt really sad.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I felt really sad.” I swallowed. “I felt like I was going to cry, honestly. Now, it just seems weird. I don’t know.”
“And that’s all?” Teresa’s eyebrows came together. She was watching me closely, and I realized Rachel was, too. It was odd.
“Like I said, I felt like I was going to start crying.” I shook my head. “I can’t explain it any better than that—I’m sorry if it doesn’t make any more sense to you than it does to me. I just felt really sad. I even started remembering my dog Skipper, you know, the day we had him put to sleep. It was like every sad memory I ever had came back to me, and that made it even worse.”
“Ghosts—and hauntings—usually have the cold associated with them,” Carson said, more like he was just thinking out loud. “Haunted houses have cold spots in them, and people who see or experience ghosts always say it got colder right before…but it was just your back?”
I nodded.
“There was a case”—Carson burst out—“I remember reading about it—sometimes ghosts hug you from behind, and you go back…I swear to God, I remember reading something like that earlier this summer, but I can’t remember where.”
He went on, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I closed my eyes.
A ghost had hugged me? From behind? And then just held on to me?
I really didn’t like the sound of that—but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Albert.
Carson got his recording device out and turned the volume all the way up before hitting play.
There was nothing but the sound of us walking around and whispering.
And then I heard it clearly—the growling sound. It was faint, like it was far away from where Carson was talking softly.
Carson switched the recorder off quickly. “Did you hear that?”
Even Rachel had looked up from her iPad. “That didn’t sound like either a dog or a wolf,” she said slowly, her face draining of color.
“It was human,” Logan said, swallowing. “Play it again, Carson.”
Carson fiddled with it for a moment, and then I could hear the growling again.
Rachel was right. It didn’t sound like an animal.
“Who the hell was that?” Teresa whispered.
The recording kept playing, now with the sounds of the three of them whispering to each other as they ran down the road to the fence.
“There’s nothing here,” Logan said clearly on the recording.
“We should have brought flashlights. If we come down here again, we will,” Carson answered him.
The quality of the recording was remarkable—not like every other time I’d heard a recording from a handheld before, where the voices sounded hollow and tinny. We heard them talk some more, and then, not hearing the growling or any other sounds, they headed back up to where Rachel and I had been standing.
“He’s cold, feel his back.” Carson’s voice.
And then, clearly, we heard another voice say, “Scotty.”
“Oh. My. God.” Carson dropped the recorder. “Did you hear that? It said Scotty’s name.”
We all stared at each other.
“Who said that?” Teresa stared at me. “That didn’t sound like any of us.”
“None of us said his name, I’d swear to it,” Logan replied, his voice shaky.
“Get real, it had to be one of us.” Rachel reached down and picked up the recorder. She fiddled with it for a moment and hit play again.
“He’s cold, feel his back.”
And the voice said my name again.
It wasn’t any of us.
I closed my eyes and remembered the sadness, the way the cold had started on the back of my head and traveled down my back, the way the hairs on my arms had stood up.
It was Albert.
Who else could it have been?
Chapter Five
Since our cabin was the closest to the lodge, they dropped me off first.
Both Rachel and Teresa hugged me before I went inside, Rachel holding on a little longer than was necessary. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she whispered as she let go and stepped back away from me, her big blue eyes round and staring at mine.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I replied, trying to laugh off how uncomfortable she was making me feel. “Really. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
I waved after I unlocked the door to the cabin, and Logan turned the SUV around and drove out onto the road. I shut the door behind me and locked it. The door to my parents’ room was closed, but I could still hear my dad snoring anyway. I smiled.
The cabin had a big living room with a little kitchenette tucked away in a corner, with two bedrooms on either side. My parents had taken the large bedroom on the right. The place was decorated in what my mother had rather snottily described as “early American lumberjack” when we’d arrived—the cushions on the big couch and the chairs were in a matching red, black, and white flannel, and over the fireplace a deer’s head was mounted, and its big glassy black eyes seemed to always be looking right at me wherever I stood in the room. There was dark shag carpeting, and the walls were paneled in a faux-wood style that seemed right out of reruns of The Brady Bunch. I opened the door to the bedroom on the left and flicked the switch that turned on my bedside lamp before turning off the lights in the living room.
