by Susan Hatler
“He told me you’d barge into his room and steal his CDs. And that you’d take his shirts without asking, wear them, then return them reeking of perfume.”
Her eyes lit up. “He hated when I wore his clothes.”
Hated. Past tense. Listening to their conversation made me think of my little brother. I pictured his cute little face and two missing front teeth. He drove me nuts popping in my room unexpectedly all of the time, and he snagged all of the attention in our house, but my heart squeezed at the thought of losing him.
I glanced up at Jonathan and he was smiling wistfully, as if remembering all of the annoying—yet oddly endearing—ways his sibling had driven him crazy.
He twiddled his thumbs, as if he were nervous. “Jonathan told me you were all right, though. Said you had a thick skull, but that . . .” His voice trailed off and he turned his head a moment, pausing before meeting her eyes. “He said he couldn’t have asked for a better sister.”
“Are you sure he said that?” A choking sob escaped her, then a tear spilled down her cheek. She put a hand over her mouth and it was obvious she was trying to control her emotions. “They turned off the machines before I got to say good-bye. Before I could tell him . . .”
“He knew.” He brushed her cheek, the muscles on his temples pulsing. “He told me about your family. How your dad hid in his office, working twenty-four seven so you guys hardly ever saw him. That your mom could make anything, even a trip to her manicurist, into a crisis and that you all always had to calm her down to keep her happy. But he said you were different, that you both were always there for each other.”
“You guys must have been close.” She sniffed, then leaned back, propping her hands on the ground behind her for support. “He’d complain about our mom sometimes, but he never talked about our dad to anyone but me. And I guess you. . . Where did you guys meet?”
He took a deep breath. “It’s a long story.”
She nodded like she got that response all the time and that he didn’t need to explain. She lifted a hand and dabbed the corners of her eyes with her knuckle, then glanced my way. Her expression seemed shocked that I was still here, as if she didn’t really like that fact.
I pressed lips together and raised my brows.
Her gaze shifted back to Jonathan. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“No.” His voice rose an octave and he shook his head with a little more force than was polite, in my opinion. Then he flicked a piece of dirt off the bottom of his pant leg. “Just a girl I know. That’s all.”
I wrinkled my nose, offended that he’d felt the need declare our platonic status so adamantly. I mean, plenty of guys liked me. Alex. Even Owen, sort of. Jonathan could certainly do a lot worse than me. But, whatever.
“It’s been nice talking to you about my brother.” She turned back to Jonathan. “Maybe we could keep in touch?” She reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out a cell phone.
He looked startled. “I, uh, don’t remember my phone number.”
She shrugged. “Well, just use your phone to call me then I’ll have it.”
His eyes went even more blank and he fumbled on his words.
I decided to step in and rescue him. “It’s in your back pocket. I saw it earlier.”
“Oh, uh, yeah.” A faint blush spread across his cheeks. “Now I remember.”
I watched as they awkwardly exchanged numbers. She seemed a little too enthused to be getting Owen’s number. Glad Brynne wasn’t around to see this.
Their conversation seemed to have wrapped up, but we still hadn’t made progress on Jonathan’s body status, and it was starting to get dark. I’d already missed detention today, I didn’t need to get grounded on top of everything else.
“Since you’re Jonathan’s sister, I have a question.” I clasped my hands together, ignoring the death glare she was shooting me and focusing on the fact that we needed to get Jonathan back his body. “Do you happen to know if Jonathan’s casket has a lock on it?”
Danielle grasped her stomach with one arm. “What kind of sick question is that?”
Okay, maybe I’d been too blunt. But the sun was dropping fast, I didn’t have a shovel yet, and I really wanted Jonathan out of Owen’s body since the poor UFO geek had been banished to the zhost zone for hours now. “Look, girl, just answer the—”
“Amy’s working on a . . . project from school.” Jonathan slipped an arm around her, seemingly disassociating himself from me. “If you don’t know, that’s fine.”
Uh, no. Not fine. Getting a locksmith out here would definitely prove troublesome.
“I do know.” Danielle sniffed, leaning into him. She gazed up into his face, her bright green eyes shimmering. “There’s no casket. They cremated him.”
Every nerve in my body froze. “W-What?”
Jonathan’s eyes flicked to mine and held. An electric current ran between us, then the light in his eyes fizzled out. He bowed his head, pressed his hand against the freshly packet earth, and gripped a clump of dirt between his fingers.
“Yeah.” Danielle shook her head, unaware that my chest hand gone hollow and I felt like I might hurl. “The doctors said he wasn’t responding to their tests and my mom is strongly against artificially prolonging life. So, she made my dad instruct the doctor to pull the plug on the machines that were keeping him alive. My dad said they cremated him the next day.”
“No.” I scrambled over to Danielle, grasping her hands in desperation. “You must be mistaken. Your grandparents were buried. Your parents’ will states they want to be buried. They wouldn’t cremate Jonathan. They just wouldn’t.”
“How do you know all of that?” She wrenched herself from my grasp, and gaped at me. Then she stood, clenching her fists. “That’s our private family business.”
“Jonathan told me,” I shrieked, then jumped to my feet, meeting her eyes. “They had to have buried him. You’re wrong.”
“My mom’s horrified that my dad burned Jonathan’s body, because she wanted an open casket for him,” she spat out, taking a step back away from me, her fists balled. “She said she wants to divorce my dad now. You think I’d get that wrong? My brother’s dead, my life sucks, and you’re making everything worse!”
“I’m sorry.” My legs went weak, so I crouched down, and grabbed onto Jonathan’s headstone for support.
He stood and reached for his sister. “Danielle—”
“Just leave me alone.” She shook him off, then ran away, her black hood bouncing behind her as she crossed to another section then disappeared out of our sight and into the darkness.
“I’m dead,” he said, turning to face me. He dropped to his knees, his jaw muscles twitching as he raked his fingers through the dirt in front of him, then threw a handful of dirt aside. “All that’s left of me is ashes.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing left to say.
He was right.
He was dead.
They’d cremated him.
My eyes burned as I pictured his emerald green eyes staring back at me. The way his dark hair fell across his forehead. His dimpled, confident smile. He looked alive.
Then the image evaporated, exploding into thousands of flakes of ash.
My chest tightened so fast I lost my breath. A boulder formed in my throat.
My gaze darted to where Jonathan sat, stunned, his head in his hands. Only a few feet of space separated us, but I felt desperate to reach him. Now. I crawled toward him, my knees sinking into the dirt as I hurried on all fours. The seconds felt like hours.
Then I threw my arms around his neck, crushing him against me as hard as I could. His arms tightened around me until it felt like we were one.
I buried my face buried in his neck and cried.
****
It was dark at the cemetery now. I didn’t know how long I had been this way, clutching Jonathan desperately, but suddenly I felt his back go rigid. Feeling embarrassed, I untangled myself from him. Although my eyes we
re dry, they still burned, so I blinked as I gazed up at him. His face had gone pale, his features were blank, and his eyes were vacant.
I reached for his hand. “I know you must be devastated right now, but—”
“We should get going.” He pulled his hand from mine, stood, then walked away.
“Wait.” I scrambled to my feet, hurrying after him as he took long strides toward the truck. “Can you slow down? We need to make a new plan.”
“I’m taking you home.” His voice was cold, and he kept his gaze straight ahead as he marched along. “It’s over.”
The flatness in his tone made my chest go hollow. “Look, I understand that you’re upset. Of course you are, but I don’t think you should drop me off until we’ve figured out what to do next. Let’s go get something to eat and—”
“I’m a pile of ashes, Amy.” He bit the words out as if spitting venom. “There’s nothing left to do except drop you off, then go into what’s left of my body and die like I was supposed to.”
I gasped at his words. “Don’t even think that, let alone say it.”
“It’s true.” He pulled the keys out of his pocket as we approached the truck. “I’m dead.”
Those two word sliced like daggers to my heart. I couldn’t believe how cold he was being. Okay, finding out his body had been cremated was kind of a major setback. But that didn’t mean we should just give up. There had to be another way.
“You’re not dead.” I gritted my teeth. “Would you freaking stop so we can talk this out?”
“There’s no point.” He singled out the car key on the keychain, as he plowed forward. “Now get in so I can take you home.”
“No,” I said, refusing to accept his horrifying agenda. Maybe he and I had met in kind of an unconventional way, but I was so not going to lose him. I finally felt like someone could see me. And I could see him. He was hurting and I got that, but he needed to know he wasn’t alone. “I’m not going to leave you.”
“You already did,” he said, inserting his key into the lock. “I’m buried right over there under a pile of dirt. You saw the name on the headstone.”
“That’s not you,” I said, shaking my head. Then I pushed in front of him, blocking his entry, and placed my hands on his chest. “You’re right here, Jonathan.”
“Does this look like me?” He stepped back and gestured toward his chest. “This is Owen’s body. He’s the one who’s alive. Not me. Now I need to take you home and move on.”
“Jonathan—” I reached for him again, but he brushed me off. The pain of his rejection stung and I considered walking away. Emptiness surrounded me as soon as I thought of a life without him in it—like the chilling emptiness of the zombie zone. Where you can think and feel, but nobody notices you’re there. Nobody sees you. I swallowed my fear. “There’s a reason you’re still here. We just don’t know what it is yet,” I said, firmly.
A flicker of pain crossed his face, but it was better than the blank expression he’d previously had. “Maybe there’s a reason my dad cremated my body when that was never his plan to begin with. Maybe he knew it was my time to go. I have to accept that.”
“I’ll be the first to admit that parents do things we don’t understand.” I hugged myself, thinking that, just last Friday night, my mom had grilled Alex about our date when we were only going to the movies. Wait a minute. Something occurred to me, and I glanced up at Jonathan. “Why did you follow me?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, softly.
“Friday night.” My chin wobbled, but I managed to look up at him. “You followed me on my date with Alex.”
His cheeks flushed. “Um . . .”
“I felt you. You know I did.” I stepped toward him and he shifted his feet. “When Alex forgot to open the door for me, when he ordered his food before me at the restaurant, and when he went to kiss me goodnight and tripped over the step on my front porch and fell.”
Something sparked in his eyes. “You don’t have a step on your front porch.”
“I know.” I took another step toward him. “But that was you there tripping him, wasn’t it? Not your body. Not a box of ashes. Just the part that is really you.”
“Maybe.” He glanced down at the keys in his hand, fiddling with them, before he looked up at me and for a moment I thought I might be getting through to him. “But I can’t exist without a body.”
“You’re existing now.” I gestured to Owen’s body. “Believe me, Owen and I can both attest that you are real. Well, Owen can once he’s back from the zombie zone.”
“My point exactly.” He leaned back against the truck, shook his head, and drew in a breath. “And when he gets back, I’ll be gone. I don’t have a family. I don’t have a body. I don’t have anything.”
“You have me.” I leaned into him, brushed my fingers against his cheek, then pressed my lips to his. I could hard believe I’d gotten up the nerve to kiss him, but my tummy must have been very happy because it did a little flip. I gazed up into his eyes and maybe I was hallucinating, but all I could see was emerald-green. “You’re still here, Jonathan. Don’t you feel it?”
“Only when I’m with you,” he whispered.
“Then stay with me, just like you did Friday night.” I lay my hand against his cheek, gazing into those amazing green eyes, unable to relax until I had his word that he wouldn’t do anything stupid. “And promise me we’ll figure this out together.”
He stared back at me, a million different emotions flowing through that one look. “Why would you want to stick around when all I do is cause you problems?”
I bit my lip, knowing the answer, of course, and, ironically, my instinct was to keep it to myself. But if I was asking him to trust me with his life, then it was only fair for me to open up and trust him too. “You told me I was strong and that you admired when I keep trying even when the odds seem hopeless. Remember?”
He nodded.
“Well, I’m not actually that person you see.” I shook my head, thinking about the entry form for Jacob Miller’s comic strip contest that I’ve been carrying around because I haven’t had the guts to name the freaking series and mail the form. So lame. “But I want to be her. I also want to be like that baseball player from the article you looked up on the Internet. His strength and confidence was obvious from his photo. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d give up either.”
“He’s not.” His facial features softened and he dropped his forehead to mine. “I think he just forgot for awhile.”
At his words, the knot in my stomach loosened. “So we’ll work this out together?”
“I promise,” he said, lifting my chin.
Then he kissed me again and again.
Chapter Seven
After our evening at the cemetery, I’d learned several things. One, Jonathan had been cremated. Yeah, total bummer. Still needed to figure that one out. Two, Danielle seemed kind of keen on Owen and I wondered if Brynne had new competition. And three, zhostly status or not, Jonathan was an amazing kisser. Probably not something I should be focusing on right now, but I was going to have a hard time getting those kisses out of my mind any time soon. Wow.
Now Jonathan and I were on our way back to San Felipe High. Unfortunately, my car had been left in the school parking lot when Brynne had driven my zombied body home earlier. Yep, it had been a long day. We drove in silence and something odd kept circling my brain.
Deciding to just get it off my chest, I swiveled in my seat to face him. “Why did you say you didn’t know who Danielle was when we first saw her at the cemetery?”
His head jerked a little as if I’d pulled him out of whatever he’d been thinking about. “She looked different.” His voice was low as he made a left turn, heading up the freeway onramp. “She’s always been the type of girl who won’t leave the house until every hair on her head is styled the way she wants it. Make-up, hairspray, preppy outfits, the whole nine yards. Seeing her disheveled like that, even smoking . . . it was so not he
r.”
Now I felt even worse for the sassy girl. “I’m sure she’ll go back to the way she was once she realizes you’re all right. Maybe we should tell her what’s going on.”
“No, she’s too fragile to handle this. She shouldn’t be at the cemetery by herself, either.” His jaw tensed and he made a right turn and got on the freeway. “That’s how it’s always been with us, though. My mom was too busy with her social clubs and my dad kept himself locked in his office.” His grip on the steering wheel tightened so much his knuckles turned white. “Not even my death could get that guy’s attention away from his precious comic strip.”
I blinked at the hurt in his tone, then thought about my own comic series. When I sit down to sketch, everything falls away except the world of my characters, and nothing else exists for me. Hours and weekends flew by in what seemed like minutes. I wondered if it was that same for Jacob Miller.
I’d been reading Maisy’s Meow for years. The series was so warm and funny that I would’ve thought the creator’s home life would’ve been that way, too.
Maisy was this hilarious high maintenance kitty, who had a new crisis every week. Her hubby always fixed the problems for her, making her meow happily by the end. That was the hubby’s goal in each and every strip: hearing Maisy’s meow. All of the hardback covers for the Maisy’s Meow anthologies were variations of Maisy donned in her best diamond collar, with her hubby in the background staring wistfully at the untouched scratching post she’d given him on their wedding day. Hilarious.
Uh, or so I’d always thought. . . .
My eyes bulged. Hadn’t Jonathan said something about his mom always being in a crisis? Hadn’t I mimicked my comic strip after my own world? Could the Maisy’s Meow comics be variations of Jacob Miller’s real life? That he was constantly trying to please an impossible-to-please wife?
It seemed like a definite possibility.
I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. “Nobody knows this, but I’ve been writing my own comic series.”
