by Vicki Grove
The only person Trey added and left on the hologram list was his brother, Aidan.
“Did you . . .” I stopped and swallowed. “Aidan, did you give Trey your ID?”
Aidan was looking up and down the hallway. “This place is exactly the same as three years ago.” He snorted and shook his head, then looked at me. “When? Give him my ID when, last weekend?”
I shook my head. “I know he used it nearly every weekend, I just wondered, did you always give it to him, or was he sneaking it out of your wallet without your permission.”
Aidan looked insulted. “Hey, you think I’m so stupid he could sneak it out of my wallet? Sure I gave it to him.” He narrowed his eyes and stared at me. “Wait, you trying to say I should feel guilty or something? Because I’m not the one pleading with ghosts, saying they’d give their life in a second if they could just try again to . . . whatever. What exactly is eating you, dude? Because that’s it, you look eaten alive from inside.” We were both startled by the clatter of the first bell, followed immediately by the usual raucous morning stampede of juniors on their relentless way to our locker hallway.
Aidan grabbed me in a headlock, then released me and hustled away. “You get your act together before you hurt yourself!” he called cheerfully back over his shoulder.
I stood swaying, dizzy, wondering what I had been about to confess to Trey’s ghost.
VIII
I got my stuff from my own locker then and followed my throbbing legs to my classes. Or maybe I just kept wandering around the school like before. Or maybe I chatted with the aliens in the basement, the crew of the secret spaceship the school actually was. Maybe I spent the day in the library. Or in the gym, running laps. No, not that, not with my legs burning up a storm like they were.
I can’t honestly remember much about that day except that I had a vague impression of people avoiding me. This would be partly because of what happened at the funeral and mostly because of Aimee’s subsequent interpretation of those events, which was probably everybody’s interpretation by now.
Also maybe my hygiene, my unwashed hair, those rank jeans. Anyhow, it’s all hazy, except for last period, which was Mrs. Beetlebaum’s class, Ancient History.
Mrs. Beetlebaum’s room is a world unto itself. It smells like very old papery dust. There are probably more books in her history room than in the school library, floor-to-ceiling books, all of them belonging to Mrs. Beetlebaum herself.
Mrs. Beetlebaum is probably nearly as old as Bud, much older than the other teachers. She wears black old lady shoes and she stands in front of her classes each day with her heels together and her toes pointed out. She always folds her blueveined hands on her stomach when she gets ready to tell a story, and telling stories from the ancient past is a thing she does a lot. She would be easy to mock, but nobody much does. The stories are exciting and she tells them very well.
We were studying ancient Greece. She’d been telling us stories from the Trojan War complete with lots of gory details, whose lifeless bodies were drug by horses around the Trojan city walls, what wild predictions this out-of-control girl named Cassandra kept making, that kind of thing.
But that day, Mrs. Beetlebaum took her place at the front of the room wearing the black shawl she usually has hanging over the back of her desk chair. She had released her long gray hair from its usual tight bun at the nape of her neck, a thing we’d never seen her do before. And everybody instantly quieted down as she slowly raised the shawl from her shoulders, shook back her hair, then covered it completely with that shawl, an ancient sign of mourning we’d studied in this very class.
She was obviously about to begin some sad story or poem in tribute to Trey and Steve and Zero. A couple of girls sniffled ostentatiously, probably wishing they’d thought of something as dramatic as that when the funeral-look plans were being made.
And then Mrs. Beetlebaum began reading us this long Greek poem about death and stuff. In it, this supernatural guy, some sort of god or something, was steering a boatload of dead guys across the river Acheron to the realm of Hades, god of the underworld. That was this guy’s job, to ferry people from the land of the living to the land of the dead. This particular trip, the one in the poem, this ferryman guy was taking these young dead war heroes to the best of places, kind of the country club of the underworld, a place called the Elysian fields, where they’d always be young and cool and strong, et cetera.
I could have listened to that poem forever, it was that soothing. Not because Steve and Zero and Trey were heroes. But because it was so natural to think of them in a boat like that. The four of us used to borrow Zero’s uncle’s speedboat sometimes or rent Jet Skis for the afternoon to use on the lake. The poem said the boat was black, which seemed like a huge coincidence since Zero’s uncle’s boat had also been black.
When she’d finished reading, Mrs. Beetlebaum propped the open book against the bulletin board and took a strange coin from the pocket of her skirt.
“An obolus,” she told us, displaying it between her thumb and index finger. “A coin placed in the mouth of the newly dead. It was the price of passage from the land of the living to the land of the dead, payment for the ferryman across the river Acheron.”
I couldn’t get that boat out of my mind. The book she’d been reading from was illustrated, and by leaning far forward I could make out some details of the pictures. The ferryman from the poem was black-bearded and very ugly, but his boat was pretty cool and looked in some additional ways like Zero’s uncle’s speedboat. Both were simple but sleek and shiny. You could see a slight resemblance to Steve in the hero in the far back of the boat, something about the moony longing in his eyes, like he felt homesick. You could also see a little of the shore where the boat would soon dock, and . . .
My blood suddenly felt all sharp and icy in my veins. When the bell rang, everybody stampeded, but I stayed where I was until Mrs. Beetlebaum and I were alone in the room. She watched me, slowly shaking her head.
“You look absolutely dreadful,” she told me solemnly. “But then I suppose you should. Those three boys were your great friends, am I right?”
I pushed myself up from my desk and walked stiffly to her book. “Mrs. Beetlebaum? Is . . . is that a dog in the picture there?”
She turned to the bulletin board. “Cerberus,” she told me, picking up the book and holding it open between us. “Guardian of Hades, charged with letting no spirit escape the underworld.”
I stared at that large black dog. “But it . . . has three heads.”
“Yes, Cerberus is usually depicted with three heads.” She shut the book and put it down on her desk, then opened a drawer and took out a small framed photograph. She sighed, then handed it to me. “My husband, taken the summer before he died.”
The picture was old, black and white. The man in it was pretty young, probably in his thirties or early forties. About Janet’s age, I would guess. He was in his swimming trunks, standing on a sandy beach, the kind they have in Florida or California, with palm trees in the background. Something about the way he was grinning made me think Mrs. Beetlebaum as her much younger self must have taken the picture.
I handed it back to her. Since I had no idea what to say, I said nothing.
“It was a mere five weeks from the diagnosis of cancer to his death. I wanted to follow him. I thought if I was stalwart enough to follow him, I could take his hand and bring him back up to the light with me. Others, overwhelmed by death’s finality, have tried in one way or another to do the same thing. There are stories of Greek heroes who braved the underworld, seeking a lost father or wife or friend. But not a single one of them, not Aeneas or Orpheus or even Odysseus, was able to clutch a hand long enough to lead a loved one back to the world of the living. It’s just a . . . a dream, really.”
She put the photo back into the drawer, then she lifted my hand and put the strange coin she’d showed the class onto my palm. She closed my fingers over it.
“Take it. Keep it in your pocket.�
�� She looked me in the eye with the most amazing sorrow on her face. “Tucker, do you understand me? I have stood where you stand now. I won’t try to explain, not right now, but there may soon come a time when you’ll want with all your heart to give it up. The coin, that is. But don’t. Remember what I’m telling you right here, right now, and . . . don’t.”
Take it. Don’t give it up. Take, give, give, take.
My ears were ringing. I concentrated on the red pain in my legs.
“Okay, thanks, Mrs. Beetlebaum.” I let my legs move me toward the door.
“Tucker, that coin is still in your hand! Put it in your pocket and keep it there!”
“Right. Sorry.” I put the coin into my pocket, where I felt it bump against Trey’s cheap green lighter. I moved it to my back pocket, gave it a space of its own.
I turned once more to Mrs. Beetlebaum and she gave me a grim nod.
My legs led me down the hall. When I got to Trey’s locker, I sagged forward and pushed my forehead hard against the three sharp air vents at the top. I closed my eyes.
Take, give. I took a beer, took another beer, Zero gave me a third, but I was the one to take it. Yeah, man, take the wheel so I can do this thing . . . take, take, take the wheel. . . .
I pushed back, then bounced my forehead once, hard, against Trey’s vents, so hard that bright pain bloomed across my bones up there and I felt something begin a slow slide down both sides of my nose. I put my hand to my face and my fingers came away smeared red. I wiped my forehead and found a bigger smear of red on my palm.
I stood there with my bloody hand held out like an artist’s tool, staring at the green slate of the locker. What could I say, what message to Trey? Later, man, I finally wrote. Most of the letters were already dripping out of recognition as I followed my legs out of the building, along the sidewalk, et cetera, et cetera, until I reached our neighborhood.
Our house looked strange when I got close. At first I couldn’t figure out why, and then I realized that the garage door was open for the first time I could remember. It made a dark square, like a missing tooth, and Bud’s old car was gone from inside it.
I quit walking and stood there squinting, trying to focus, trying to figure out what that empty garage meant. A feeling of dread had started in my stomach and was working its way through me, but still, I didn’t understand what was going on, why the car was gone.
“Tucker! Over here, Tuck! We need to talk to you!” I wheeled and saw Mrs. Brandywine giving me wide-armed waves from across the street and down the block a few houses. Mr. Brandywine was with her, squatting to look closely at something on the ground in their yard.
When I reached them, Mrs. Brandywine put her hands to her face and whispered, “Oh, Tuck, have you been in a fight at school? Or an accident? Oh, you poor thing!”
My face, the blood. “It’s nothing. Just fell in some gravel at track today.” I didn’t meet her eyes, just kept my own eyes on the muddy furrow Mr. Brandywine was inspecting. A strip of orange flowers had been pulverized by a gigantic tire. Bright bits of flower decorated the deep and muddy tire track like rhinestones.
“Tucker, I was gardening and your grandfather, well, he drove over some of our nasturtiums,” Mrs. Brandywine explained. “Is he supposed to be, well . . . driving?”
There was a black mark on their curb near the driveway and another mark on the curb maybe twenty feet along where Bud had finally bounced the big Olds out of their yard and back to the street.
“At the corner he turned right onto Maple,” Mr. Brandywine said, still glaring at the mess that had been their flowers. He stood up and shook his head, muttering, “There’re kids playing in their yards this time of day.” He looked at me over the tops of his glasses as seriously as anybody has ever looked at me, so seriously that it cut through most of the sludge clogging my brain. “You better find the old guy before he kills somebody.”
I took off at a run. By the time I reached Maple and turned right, the throbbing in my legs had become synchronized to my pace. It made sense that Bud would turn right onto Maple because it was the way to the driver’s license office, the place he’d wanted me to take him so he could retake his eye test. And it turned out he’d left a sort of trail I could follow. In the first block I saw that two aluminum trash cans were off their concrete pads and rolling around in the culvert. A mailbox on the next block had been given a passing blow and was bent forward with its door hanging down like a tongue.
And then I came to this yellow-shingled house that’s sort of a landmark in town because it has three life-sized plastic deer grazing in the yard. There were tire tracks up over the curb and through the grass, like at the Brandywines’, and all three of those deer were on their backs with their plastic legs sticking straight up into the air.
“Oh man, Bud, those deer were a good six feet off the road!” I whispered.
I guess that’s when Mr. Brandywine’s horrifying comment became completely real to me. If Bud could take out three fake deer, couldn’t he just as easily run into a person? Especially a small person or group of people too flaky to pay attention to traffic?
In a couple more blocks there was a place in the road where these wild little kids always have an afternoon game of street soccer going. I pushed my run to an all-out sprint, hoping against hope those kids had been called inside, like because one of them was having an inside birthday party or like because there had been some satellite malfunction that canceled the soap operas Janet said their parents watched all afternoon and the kids had therefore been let into their houses earlier than usual and forced to clean their rooms or something.
But all that hoping didn’t work, and just as I reached that block, a pack of those soccer kids came scrambling right toward me, huge-eyed and scared-looking.
“What happened?” I called to them, panic cracking my voice.
“We need a grown-up!” one of them yelled as they surrounded me, grabbing my hands and my belt loops and pulling me back the way they’d come. “A car is in a yard!”
“Don’t tell my mom!” one of them added, I guess to be on the safe side.
“Was anybody hurt, any of you kids?” I asked as I ran with them.
“We never get hurt!” one of them called up to me while a couple of his friends slugged the air belligerently to demonstrate.
I felt a surge of relief so powerful I nearly tripped over my own feet.
Then one of the others added, “The guy inside the car looks probably dead, though.”
The huge boat of an Oldsmobile turned out to be parked in the middle of someone’s weirdly landscaped rock garden. The car’s front fender had actually come to rest on the pointed heads of a dozen or so concrete trolls. For a few crazy seconds I thought Snow White’s dwarfs were trying to steal Bud’s tires.
“We got a grown-up!” one of the kids with me yelled, and the other soccer kids popped up from where they’d been sitting clumped under a basketball hoop hung over a garage door across the street.
“That car shouldn’t be in Jeremy’s yard!” one of the girls yelled fiercely over to me, stomping her foot. “You can’t drive inside grass, you know! It’s against all the laws!”
“You go to prison for life!” some other little kid yelled in support.
“Go over with the others and tell them not to move while I check this out,” I whispered gruffly to my escorts, hoping to bluff them into thinking I knew what I was doing. To my surprise, they took off at a run, obeying me.
Bud must have been heading back from the driver’s license place because the car was facing toward home. He was slumped, his forehead against the steering wheel. I threw my pack into the backseat, then jerked open the front door. Bud began drooping toward me so fast I barely bent in time to shoulder him back up. His eyes were closed and he was chalk white and covered in sweat, but at least he was breathing, taking harsh gulps of air through his mouth. Relief rushed through me, mixed with a queasy sense of urgency. I had to get him help, and fast, so I body-slammed him, grun
ting with the effort as I shoved him with my right hip and shoulder far enough along the wide bench seat to fit myself behind the wheel. He slumped sideways again with his head on my shoulder, exactly like we were on a date.
I grabbed the key and turned it left, then right, hoping the big car’s engine wasn’t flooded with gas.
The engine caught and vroomed into life. I looked to be sure the crazy little soccer kids were still across the street. “Stay out of the way!” I yelled out the window as I slammed the gearshift into reverse. The trolls were still wobbling as I bumped back down over the curb and headed in the direction of the highway.
Caspian County General Hospital was east of town. I remembered that much but couldn’t picture the rest. Think, think. Okay, yes, it was east quite a few miles outside of town, still in Oklahoma but just this side of the Missouri state line.
“Bud?” I kept yelling, elbowing him hard. “Bud, wake up! Bud!”
No answer, but still that harsh breathing, the best sign I was going to get.
“Hang in, Bud, we’re almost there, we’re almost there.” I had the Olds going eighty once we were on the highway, but still it felt like we were moving in slow motion.
Then finally I spotted the hospital, a brick building low to the ground. I was so shook up that I overshot the highway exit and had to backtrack, and when I finally got into the confusing parking lot, I couldn’t see the entrance lane to the emergency room.
I was craning my neck, inching the car forward and looking desperately around, when Bud suddenly gave a rumbly series of snorts, then jerked his shoulders a couple of times and sat up straight.
“Where’re we at, huh?” He lifted both hands and began smoothing his few white hairs flat against his scalp like some kind of fashionista. “Whassappening here, anyhow?”
Before I could say anything, he reached over and pulled the emergency brake handle. The car stopped with a jolt and died.
“Bud, you had a heart attack!” That came out way too loud, like an accusation, like I was angry. I wasn’t, but I was pretty hysterical, I guess. “I’m trying to get you to the emergency room, Bud, before you . . . before you totally zone out and . . . and, like, crash!”
