Dead Boy Found

By

Christopher Barzak

* * * *

CHRISTOPHER BARZAK HAS PUBLISHED stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Descant and Trampoline. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio. Recently Barzak completed a novel, One for Sorrow, which continues the narrative begun in “Dead Boy Found”.

“I wrote this story during the summer I turned twenty-five,” recalls the author. “At the time several friends had either died suddenly or had some life-damaging event happen to them, and quickly the world became a scary, uncomfortable place for me to live in. I couldn’t help wondering what horrible thing would happen next, and if I would survive it.

“The only other time in my life that I’d felt that way was when I was a kid and a young boy who lived in the next town over was brutally tortured and murdered by two men whom he’d stumbled upon in the woods while walking home from his Boy Scout meeting. His death sent ripples through the surrounding area, and for months I was obsessed with what had happened. I couldn’t comprehend how such a thing could occur. I kept imagining the scene, trying to give his murder some sort of rational coherence, but I always utterly failed.

“When death came crashing too close for comfort once more, I began thinking about that boy again, and what had happened to him. And again I started to try and make sense of these losses we all face.

“I don’t think I ended up making any sense out of the death of that boy from my childhood. Nor do I think I made any sense out of the death and damage that struck my circle of friends when I was twenty-five. The only thing I managed to do was to make this story out of that failure to comprehend their sudden absences.”

* * * *

ALL THIS STARTED WHEN my father told my mother she was a waste. He said, “You are such a waste, Linda,” and she said, “Oh, yeah? You think so? We’ll see about that.” Then she got into her car and pulled out of our driveway, throwing gravel in every direction. She was going to Abel’s, or so she said, where she could have a beer and find herself a real man.

Halfway there, though, she was in a head-on collision with a drunk woman named Lucy, who was on her way home, it happened, from Abel’s. They were both driving around that blind curve on Highway 88, Lucy swerving a little, my mother smoking cigarette after cigarette, not even caring where the ashes fell. When they leaned their cars into the curve, Lucy crossed into my mother’s lane. Bam! Just like that. My mother’s car rolled three times into the ditch and Lucy’s car careened into a guardrail. It was Lucy who called the ambulance on her cellular phone, saying, over and over, “My God, I’ve killed Linda McCormick, I’ve killed that poor girl.”

At that same moment, Gracie Highsmith was becoming famous. While out searching for new additions to her rock collection, she had found the missing boy’s body buried beneath the defunct railroad tracks just a couple of miles from my house. The missing boy had been missing for two weeks. He disappeared on his way home from a Boy Scout meeting. He and Gracie were both in my class. I never really talked to either of them much, but they were all right. You know, quiet types. Weird, some might say. But I’m not the judgmental sort. I keep my own counsel. I go my own way. If Gracie Highsmith wanted to collect rocks and if the missing boy wanted to be a Boy Scout, more power to them.

* * * *

We waited several hours at the hospital before they let us see my mother. Me, my brother Andy, and my father sat in the lobby, reading magazines and drinking coffee. A nurse finally came and got us. She took us up to the seventh floor. She pointed to room number 727 and said we could go on in.

My mother lay in the hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose. One of her eyes had swelled shut and was already black and shining. She breathed with her mouth open, a wheezing noise like snoring. There were bloodstains on her teeth. Also several of her teeth were missing. When she woke, blinking her good eye rapidly, she saw me and said, “Baby, come here and give me a hug.”

I wasn’t a baby, I was fifteen, but I didn’t correct her. I figured she’d been through enough already. A doctor came in and asked my mother how she was feeling. She said she couldn’t feel her legs. He said that he thought that might be a problem, but that it would probably work itself out over time. There was swelling around her spinal cord. “It should be fine after a few weeks,” he told us.

My father started talking right away, saying things like, “We all have to pull together. We’ll get through this. Don’t worry.” Eventually his fast talking added up to mean something. When we brought my mother home, he put her in my bed so she could rest properly, and I had to bunk with Andy. For the next few weeks, he kept saying things like, “Don’t you worry, honey. It’s time for the men to take over.” I started doing the dishes and Andy vacuumed. My father took out the trash on Tuesdays. He brought home pizza or cold cuts for dinner.

* * * *

I wasn’t angry about anything. I want to make that clear right off. I mean, stupid stuff like this just happens. It happens all the time. One day you’re just an average fifteen-year-old with stupid parents and a brother who takes out his aggressions on you because he’s idiotic and his friends think it’s cool to see him belittle you in public, and suddenly something happens to make things worse. Believe me, morbidity is not my specialty. Bad things just happen all at once. My grandma said bad things come in threes. Two bad things had happened: My mother was paralyzed and Gracie Highsmith found the missing boy’s body. If my grandma was still alive, she’d be trying to guess what would happen next.

I mentioned this to my mother while I spooned soup up to her trembling lips. She could feed herself all right, but she seemed to like the attention. “Bad things come in threes,” I said. “Remember Grandma always said that?”

She said, “Your grandma was uneducated.”

I said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

She said, “She didn’t even get past eighth grade, Adam.”

I said, “I knew that already.”

“Well, I’m just reminding you.”

“Okay,” I said, and she took another spoonful of chicken broth.

* * * *

At school everyone talked about the missing boy. “Did you hear about Jamie Marks?” they all said. “Did you hear about Gracie Highsmith?”

I pretended like I hadn’t, even though I’d watched the news all weekend and considered myself an informed viewer. I wanted to hear what other people would say. A lot of rumors were circulating already. Our school being so small made that easy. Seventh through twelfth grade all crammed into the same building, elbow to elbow, breathing each other’s breath.

They said Gracie saw one of his fingers poking out of the gravel, like a zombie trying to crawl out of its grave. They said that after she removed a few stones, one of his blue eyes stared back at her, and that she screamed and threw the gravel back at his eye and ran home. They said, sure enough, when the police came later, they found the railroad ties loose, with the bolts broken off of them. So they removed them, dug up the gravel, shoveling for several minutes, and found Jamie Marks. Someone said a cop walked away to puke.

I sat through Algebra and Biology and History, thinking about cops puking, thinking about the missing boy’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about those two things. I liked the idea of seeing one of those cops who set up speed traps behind bushes puking out his guts, holding his stomach. I wasn’t sure what I thought about Jamie’s dead body rotting beneath railroad ties. And what a piece of work, to have gone to all that trouble to hide the kid in such a place! It didn’t help that at the start of each class all the teachers said they understood if we were disturbed, or anxious, and that we should talk if needed, or else they could recommend a good psychologist to our parents.

I sat at my desk with my chin propped in my hands, chewing an eraser, imagining Jamie Marks under the rails staring at the undersides of trains as they rumbled over him. Those tracks weren’t used anymore, not since the big smash-up with a school bus back in the 1980s, but I imagined trains on them anyway. Jamie inhaled each time a glimpse of sky appeared between boxcars and exhaled when they covered him over. He dreamed when there were no trains rolling over him, when there was no metallic scream on the rails. When he dreamed, he dreamed of trains again, blue sparks flying off the iron railing, and he gasped for breath in his sleep. A ceiling of trains covered him. He almost suffocated, there were so many.

* * * *

After school, my brother Andy said, “We’re going to the place, a bunch of us. Do you want to come?” Andy’s friends were all seniors and they harassed me a lot, so I shook my head and said no. “I have to see a friend and collect five dollars he owes me,” I said, even though I hadn’t loaned out money to anyone in weeks.

I went home and looked through school yearbooks and found Jamie Marks smiling from his square in row two. I cut his photo out with my father’s Exacto knife and stared at it for a while, then turned it over. On the other side was a picture of me. I swallowed and swallowed until my throat hurt. I didn’t like that picture of me anyway, I told myself. It was a bad picture. I had baby fat when it was taken, and looked more like a little kid. I flipped the photo over and over, like a coin, and wondered, If it had been me, would I have escaped? I decided it must have been too difficult to get away from them - I couldn’t help thinking there had to be more than one murderer - and probably I would have died just the same.

I took the picture outside and buried it in my mother’s garden between the rows of sticks that had, just weeks before, marked off the sections of vegetables, keeping carrots carrots and radishes radishes. I patted the dirt softly, inhaled its crisp dirt smell, and whispered, “Don’t you worry. Everything will be all right.”

* * * *

When my mother started using a wheelchair, she was hopeful, even though the doctors had changed their minds and said she’d never walk again. She told us not to worry. She enjoyed not always having to be on her feet. She figured out how to pop wheelies, and would show off in front of guests. “What a burden legs can be!” she told us. Even so, I sometimes found her wheeled into dark corners, her head in her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” sobbing.

That woman, Lucy, kept calling and asking my mother to forgive her, but my mother told us to say she wasn’t home and that she was contacting lawyers and that they’d have Lucy so broke within seconds; they’d make her pay real good. I told Lucy, “She isn’t home,” and Lucy said, “My God, tell that poor woman I’m so sorry. Ask her to please forgive me.”

I told my mother that Lucy was sorry, and the next time Lucy called, my mother decided to hear her out. Their conversation sounded like when my mom talks to her sister, my Aunt Beth, who lives in California near the ocean, a place I’ve never visited. My mother kept shouting, “No way! You too?! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?! Oh Lucy, this is too much.”

Two hours later, Lucy pulled into our driveway, blaring her horn. My mother wheeled herself outside, smiling and laughing. Lucy was tall and wore red lipstick, and her hair was permed real tight. She wore plastic bracelets and hoop earrings, and stretchy hot pink pants. She bent down and hugged my mother, then helped her into the car. They drove off together, laughing, and when they came home several hours later, I smelled smoke and whiskey on their breath.

“What’s most remarkable,” my mother kept slurring, “is that I was on my way to the bar, sober, and Lucy was driving home, drunk.” They’d both had arguments with their husbands that day; they’d both run out to make their husbands jealous. Learning all this, my mother and Lucy felt destiny had brought them together. “A virtual Big Bang,” said my mother.

Lucy said, “A collision of souls.”

The only thing to regret was that their meeting had been so painful. “But great things are born out of pain,” my mother told me, nodding in a knowing way. “If I had to be in an accident with someone,” she said, patting Lucy’s hand, which rested on one of my mother’s wheels, “I’m glad that someone was Lucy.”

* * * *

After I buried Jamie’s and my photo, I walked around for a few days, bumping into things. Walls, lockers, people. It didn’t matter what, I walked into it. I hadn’t known Jamie all that well, even though we were in the same class. We had different friends. Jamie liked computers; I ran track. Not because I like competition, but because I’m a really good runner, and I like to run, even though my mom always freaks because I was born premature, with undersized lungs. But I remembered Jamie: a small kid with stringy, mouse-colored hair and pale skin. He wore very round glasses and kids sometimes called him Moony. He was supposed to be smart, but I didn’t know about that. I asked a few people at lunch, when the topic was still hot, “What kind of grades did he get? Was he an honors student?” But no one answered. All they did was stare like I’d stepped out of a spaceship.

* * * *

My brother Andy and his friends enjoyed a period of extreme popularity. After they went to where Jamie had been hidden, everyone thought they were crazy but somehow brave. Girls asked Andy to take them there, to be their protector, and he’d pick out the pretty ones who wore makeup and tight little skirts. “You should go, Adam,” Andy told me. “You could appreciate it.”

“It’s too much of a spectacle,” I said, as if I were above all that.

Andy narrowed his eyes. He spit at my feet. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that it wasn’t offensive at all, people were just curious, nothing sick or twisted. He asked if I was implying that his going to see the place was sick or twisted. “Cause if that’s what you’re implying, you are dead wrong.”

“No,” I said, “that’s not what I’m implying. I’m not implying anything at all.”

I didn’t stick around to listen to the story of his adventure. There were too many stories filling my head as it was. At any moment Andy would burst into a monologue of detail, one he’d been rehearsing since seeing the place where they’d hidden Jamie, so I turned to go to my room and - bam - walked right into a wall. I put my hand over my aching face and couldn’t stop blinking. Andy snorted and called me a freak. He pushed my shoulder and told me to watch where I was going, or else one day I’d kill myself. I kept leaving, and Andy said, “Hey! Where are you going? I didn’t get to tell you what it was like.”

* * * *

Our town was big on ghost stories, and within weeks people started seeing Jamie Marks. He waited at the railroad crossing on Sodom-Hutchins road, pointing farther down the tracks, toward where he’d been hidden. He walked in tight circles outside of Gracie Highsmith’s house, with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hanging low and serious. In these stories he was always a transparent figure. Things passed through him. Rain was one example; another was leaves falling off the trees, drifting through his body. Kids in school said, “I saw him!” the same eager way they did when they went out to Hatchet Man Road to see the ghost of that killer from the 1970s, who actually never used hatchets but a hunting knife.

Gracie Highsmith hadn’t returned to school yet, and everyone said she’d gone psycho, so no one could verify the story of Jamie’s ghost standing outside her house. The stories grew anyway, without her approval, which just seemed wrong. I thought if Jamie’s ghost was walking outside Gracie’s house, then no one should tell that story but Gracie. It was hers, and anyone else who told it was a thief.

* * * *

One day I finally went to the cemetery to visit him. I’d wanted to go to the funeral, just to stand in the back where no one would notice, but the newspaper said it was family only. If I was angry about anything at all, it was this. I mean, how could they just shut everyone out? The whole town had helped in the search parties, had taken over food to Jamie’s family during the time when he was missing. And then no one but family was allowed to be at the funeral? It just felt a little selfish.

I hardly ever went to the cemetery. Only once or twice before, and that was when my Grandma died, and my dad and Andy and I had to be pallbearers. We went once after my mom came home in her wheelchair. She said she needed to talk to my grandma, so we drove her there on a surprisingly warm autumn day, when the leaves were still swinging on their branches. She sat in front of the headstone, and we backed off to give her some private time. She cried and sniffed, you could hear that. The sunlight reflected on the chrome of her wheelchair. When she was done we loaded her back into the van, and she said, “All right, who wants to rent some videos?”

Now the cemetery looked desolate, as if ready to be filmed for some Hallowe’en movie. Headstones leaned toward one another. Moss grew green over the walls of family mausoleums. I walked along the driveway, gravel crunching beneath my shoes, and looked from side to side at the stone angels and pillars and plain flat slabs decorating the dead, marking out their spaces. I knew a lot of names, or had heard of them, whether they’d been relatives or friends, or friends of relatives, or ancestral family enemies. When you live in a town where you can fit everyone into four churches - two Catholic, two Methodist - you know everyone. Even the dead.

I searched the headstones until I found where Jamie Marks was buried. His grave was still freshly turned earth. No grass had had time to grow there. But people had left little trinkets, tokens or reminders, on the grave, pieces of themselves. A handprint. A piece of rose-colored glass. Two cigarettes standing up like fence posts. A baby rattle. Someone had scrawled a name across the bottom edge of the grave: Gracie Highsmith. A moment later I heard footsteps, and there she was in the flesh, coming toward me.

I was perturbed, but not angry. Besides his family, I thought I’d be the only one to come visit. But here she was, this girl, who’d drawn her name in the dirt with her finger. Her letters looked soft; they curled into each other gently, with little flourishes for decoration. Did she think it mattered if she spelled her name pretty?

I planted my hands on my hips as she approached and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

Gracie blinked as if she’d never seen me before in her life. I could tell she wanted to say, “Excuse me? Who are you?” But what she did say was, “Visiting. I’m visiting. What are you doing here?”

The wind picked up and blew hair across her face. She tucked it back behind her ears real neatly. I dropped my hands from my hips and nudged the ground with my shoe, not knowing how to answer. Gracie turned back to Jamie’s tombstone.

“Visiting,” I said finally, crossing my arms over my chest, annoyed that I couldn’t come up with anything but the same answer she’d given.

Gracie nodded without looking at me. She kept her eyes trained on Jamie’s grave, and I started to think maybe she was going to steal it. The headstone, that is. I mean, the girl collected rocks. A headstone would complete any collection. I wondered if I should call the police, tell them, “Get yourselves to the cemetery, you’ve got a burglary in progress.” I imagined them taking Gracie out in handcuffs, making her duck her head as they tucked her into the back seat of the patrol car. I pinched myself to stop daydreaming, and when I woke back up I found Gracie sobbing over the grave.

I didn’t know how long she’d been crying, but she was going full force. I mean, this girl didn’t care if anyone was around to hear her. She bawled and screamed. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought maybe I should say something to calm her. I finally shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

But Gracie kept crying. She beat her fist in the dirt near her name.

“Hey!” I repeated. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, Don’t do that!”

But she still didn’t listen.

So I started to dance. It was the first idea that came to me.

I kicked my heels in the air and did a two-step. I hummed a tune to keep time. I clasped my hands together behind my back and did a jig, or an imitation of one, and when still none of my clowning distracted her, I started to sing the Hokey Pokey.

I belted it out and kept on dancing. I sung each line like it was poetry. “You put your left foot in/You take your left foot out/You put your left foot in/And you shake it all about/You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around/That’s what it’s all about! Yeehaw!”

As I sang and danced, I moved toward a freshly dug grave just a few plots down from Jamie’s. The headstone was already up, but there hadn’t been a funeral yet. The grave was waiting for Lola Peterson to fill it, but instead, as I shouted out the next verse, I stumbled in.

I fell in the grave, singing, “You put your whole self in—” and about choked on my own tongue when I landed. Even though it was still light out, it was dark in the grave, and muddy. My shoes sunk, and when I tried to pull them out, they made sucking noises. The air smelled stiff and leafy. I started to worry that I’d be stuck in Lola Peterson’s grave all night, because the walls around me were muddy too; I couldn’t get my footing. Finally, though, Gracie’s head appeared over the lip of the grave.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Her hair fell down toward me like coils of rope.

Gracie helped me out by getting a ladder from the cemetery toolshed. She told me I was a fool, but she laughed when she said it. Her eyes were red from crying, and her cheeks looked wind-chapped. I thanked her for helping me out.

I got her talking after that. She talked a little about Jamie and how she found him, but she didn’t say too much. Really, she only seemed to want to talk about rocks. “So you really do collect rocks?” I asked, and Gracie bobbed her head.

“You should see them,” she told me. “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow? My parents will be at marriage counseling. Come around five.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Gracie dipped her head and looked up at me through brown bangs. She turned to go, then stopped a moment later and waved. I waved back.

I waited for her to leave before me. I waited until I heard the squeal and clang of the wrought-iron front gates. Then I knelt down beside Jamie’s grave and wiped Gracie’s name out of the dirt. I wrote my name in place of it, etching into the dirt deeply.

My letters were straight and fierce.

* * * *

I went home to find that I’d missed dinner. My father was already in the living room, watching TV, the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours, listening to the muzak play over and over. He watched it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I would start groaning for a channel switch. He’d change the channel but never acknowledge us. Usually he never had much to say anyway.

When I got home, though, he wanted to talk. It took him only a few minutes after I sat down with a plate of meatloaf before he changed the channel, and I about choked. There was a news brief on about the search for Jamie’s murderers. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie’s murderers”, the same way you might say, “Jamie’s dogs” or “Jamie’s Boy Scout honors”. My dad stretched out on his reclining chair and started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy.

I stopped eating, set my fork down on my plate.

“What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”

My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those bastard’s armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas, slowly, to let the little suckers have at their flesh.”

He looked back at the TV.

“But what if the police got them first?” I said. “What would you do then?”

Dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards up there on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their God-damned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands into a gun shape, pointing it at me. He pulled the fake trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam!

I nodded with approval. I felt really loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I ate up all this great attention and kept asking, “What if?” again and again, making up different situations. He was so cool, the best dad in the world. I wanted to buy him a hat: Best Dad in the World! printed on it. We were really close, I felt, for the first time in a long time.

* * * *

Gracie Highsmith’s house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where she found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal and nickel, when she found him. All of this she told me in her bedroom, on the second floor of her house. She held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black speckles embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. Gracie said she’d found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine. I said, “It’s something special all right,” and she beamed like someone’s mother.

“That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.” She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she’d found, mysteriously, in the woods behind her house, nowhere near water; and a flat rock with a skeletal fish fossil imprinted on it. I was excited to see them all, I hadn’t realized how beautiful rocks could be. It made me want to collect rocks too, but it was already Gracie’s territory. I’d have to find something of my own.

We sat on her bed and listened to music by some group from Cleveland that I’d never heard of, but who Gracie obviously loved because she set the CD player to replay the same song over and over. It sounded real punk. They sang about growing up angry and how they would take over the world and make people pay for being stupid idiots. Gracie nodded and gritted her teeth as she listened.

I liked being alone in the house with her, listening to music and looking at rocks. I felt eccentric and mature. I told Gracie this, and she knew what I meant. “They all think we’re children,” she said. “They don’t know a God-damned thing, do they?”

We talked about growing old for a while, imagining ourselves in college, then in mid-life careers, then when we were so old that we couldn’t walk without a walker. Pretty soon we were so old we both clutched our chests like we were having heart attacks, fell back on the bed, and choked on our own laughter.

“What sort of funeral will you have?” she wondered.

“I don’t know, what about you? Aren’t they all the same?”

“Funerals are all different,” she said. “For instance, Mexican cemeteries have all these bright, beautifully colored decorations for their dead; they’re not all serious like ours.” I asked her where she had learned that. She said, “Social Studies. Last year.”

“Social Studies?” I asked. “Last year?” I repeated. “I don’t remember reading about funerals or cemeteries last year in Social Studies.” Last year I hadn’t cared about funerals. I was fourteen and watched TV and played video games a lot. What else had I missed while lost in the fog of sitcoms and fantasy adventures?

I bet Mexicans never would have had a private funeral. Too bad Jamie wasn’t Mexican.

“I see graves all the time now,” Gracie told me. She lay flat on her back, head on her pillow, and stared at the ceiling. “They’re everywhere,” Gracie said. “Ever since—”

She stopped and sighed, as if it was some huge confession she’d just told me. I worried that she might expect something in return, a confession of my own. I murmured a little noise I hoped sounded supportive.

“They’re everywhere,” she repeated. “The town cemetery, the Wilkinson family plot, that old place out by the ravine, where Fuck-You Francis is supposed to be buried. And now the railroad tracks. I mean, where does it end?”

I said, “Beds are like graves, too,” and she turned to me with this puzzled look. “No,” I said, “really.” And I told her about the time when my grandmother came to live with us, after my grandfather’s death. And how, one morning my mother sent me into her room to wake her for breakfast - I remember, because I smelled bacon frying when I woke up - and so I went into my grandma’s room and told her to wake up. She didn’t, so I repeated myself. But she still didn’t wake up. Finally I shook her shoulders, and her head lolled on her neck. I grabbed one of her hands, and it was cold to touch.

“Oh,” said Gracie. “I see what you mean.” She stared at me hard, her eyes glistening. Gracie rolled on top of me, pinning her knees on both sides of my hips. Her hair fell around my face, and the room grew dimmer as her hair brushed over my eyes, shutting out the light.

She kissed me on my lips, and she kissed me on my neck. She started rocking against my penis, so I rocked back. The coils in her bed creaked. “You’re so cold, Adam,” Gracie whispered, over and over. “You’re so cold, you’re so cold.” She smelled like clay and dust. As she rocked on me, she looked up at the ceiling and bared the hollow of her throat. After a while, she let out several little gasps, then collapsed on my chest. I kept rubbing against her, but stopped when I realized she wasn’t going to get back into it.

Gracie slid off me. She knelt in front of her window, looking out at something.

“Are you angry?” I asked.

“No, Adam. I’m not angry. Why would I be angry?”

“Just asking,” I said. “What are you doing now?” I said.

“He’s down there again,” she whispered. I heard the tears in her voice already and went to her. I didn’t look out the window. I wrapped my arms around her, my hands meeting under her breasts, and hugged her. I didn’t look out the window.

“Why won’t he go away?” she said. “I found him, yeah. So fucking what? He doesn’t need to fucking follow me around forever.”

“Tell him to leave,” I told her.

She didn’t respond.

“Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore,” I told her.

She moved my hands off her and turned her face to mine. She leaned in and kissed me, her tongue searching out mine. When she pulled back, she said, “I can’t. I hate him, but 1 love him, too. He seems to, I don’t know, understand me, maybe. We’re on the same wavelength, you know? As much as he annoys me, I love him. He should have been loved, you know. He never got that. Not how everyone deserves.”

“Just give him up,” I said.

Gracie wrinkled her nose. She stood and paced to her doorway, opened the door, said, “I think you should go now. My parents will be home soon.”

I craned my neck to glance out the window, but her voice cracked like a whip.

“Leave, Adam.”

I shrugged into my coat and elbowed past her.

“You don’t deserve him,” I said on my way out.

* * * *

I walked home through wind, and soon rain started up. It landed on my face cold and trickled down my cheeks into my collar. Jamie hadn’t been outside when I left Gracie’s house, and I began to suspect she’d been making him up, like the rest of them, to make me jealous. Bitch, I thought. I thought she was different.

At home I walked in through the kitchen, and my mother was waiting by the doorway. She said, “Where have you been? Two nights in a row. You’re acting all secretive. Where have you been, Adam?”

Lucy sat at the dinner table, smoking a cigarette. When I looked at her, she looked away. Smoke curled up into the lamp above her.

“What is this?” I said. “An inquisition?”

“We’re just worried, is all,” said my mother.

“Don’t worry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Your mother loves you very much,” said Lucy.

“Stay out of this, paralyzer.”

Both of them gasped.

“Adam!” My mother sounded shocked. “That’s not nice. You know Lucy didn’t mean that to happen. Apologize right now.”

I mumbled an apology.

My mother started wheeling around the kitchen. She reached up to cupboards and pulled out cans of tomatoes and kidney beans. She opened the freezer and pulled out ground beef. “Chili,” she said, just that. “It’s chilly outside, so you need some warm chili for your stomach. Chili will warm you up.” She sounded like a commercial.

Then she started in again. “My miracle child,” she said, pretending to talk to herself. “My baby boy, my gift. Did you know, Lucy, that Adam was born premature, with underdeveloped lungs and a murmur in his heart?”

“No, dear,” said Lucy. “How terrible!”

“He was a fighter, though,” said my mother. “He always fought. He wanted to live so much. Oh, Adam,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been? Your running coach said you’ve been missing practice a lot.”

“I haven’t been anywhere,” I said. “Give it a rest.”

“It’s everything happening at once, isn’t it?” Lucy asked. “Poor kid. You should send him to see Dr Phelps, Linda. Stuff like what happened to the Marks boy is hard on kids.”

“That’s an idea,” said my mother.

“Would you stop talking about me in front of me?” I said. “God, you two are ridiculous. You don’t have a God-damned clue about anything.”

My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the racket?”

I said, “Why don’t you just go kill someone!” and ran outside again.

* * * *

At first I didn’t know where I was going, but by the time I reached the edge of the woods, I figured it out. The rain still fell steadily, and the wind crooned through the branches of trees. Leaves shook and fell around me. It was dusk, and I pushed my way through the brambles and roots back to the old railroad tracks.

His breath was on my neck before I even reached the spot, though. I knew he was behind me before he even said a thing. I felt his breath on my neck, and then he placed his arms around my stomach, just like I had with Gracie. “Keep going,” he said. And I did. He held onto me, and I carried him on my back all the way to the place where Gracie had found him.

That section of the railroad had been marked out in yellow police tape. But something was wrong. Something didn’t match up with what I expected. The railroad ties - they hadn’t been pulled up. And the hole where Jamie had been buried - it was there all right, but next to the railroad tracks. He’d never been under those railroad tracks, I realized. Something dropped in my stomach. A pang of disappointment.

Stories change. They change too easily and too often.

“What are you waiting for?” Jamie asked, sliding off my back. I stood at the edge of the hole and he said, “Go on. Try it on.”

I turned around and there he was, naked, with mud smudged on his pale white skin. His hair was all messed up, and one lens of his glasses was shattered. He smiled. His teeth were filled with grit.

I stepped backward into the hole. It wasn’t very deep, not like Lola Peterson’s grave in the cemetery. Just a few feet down. I stood at eye level with Jamie’s crotch. He reached down and touched himself.

“Take off your clothes,” he told me.

I took them off.

“Lay down,” he told me.

I lay down.

He climbed in on top of me, and he was so cold, so cold. He said there was room for two of us in here and that I should call him Moony.

I said, “I never liked that name.”

He said, “Neither did I.”

“Then I won’t call you that.”

“Thank you,” he said, and hugged me. I let him. He said she never let him hug her. She didn’t understand him. I told him I knew. She was being selfish.

I said, “Don’t worry. I’ve found you now. You don’t have to worry. I understand. I found you.”

“I found you” he said. “Remember?”

“Let’s not argue,” I said.

He rested his cheek against my chest, and the rain washed over us. After a while I heard voices, faraway but growing closer. I stood up and saw the swathes of light from their flashlights getting bigger. My dad and Andy and Lucy. All of them moved toward me. I imagined my mother wheeling in worried circles back in the kitchen.

“Adam!” my father shouted through the rain.

I didn’t move. Not even when they came right up to me, their faces white and pale as Jamie’s dead body. Andy said, “I told you he’d be here. The little freak.”

Lucy said, “My Lord, your poor mother,” and her hand flew to her mouth.

My father said, “Adam, come out of there. Come out of that place right now.”

He held his hand out to me, curling his fingers for me to take it.

“Come on, boy,” he said. “Get on out of there now.” He flexed his fingers for emphasis.

I grabbed hold of his hand, and he hauled me out onto the gravel around the hole and I lay there, naked, like a newborn. They stood around me, staring. My father took off his coat and put it on me. He told me to come on, to just come on back to the house. He put his arm around me, and we started walking down the tracks.

* * * *

I decided right then that’s I wasn’t a freak, not really. I took my father’s hand, sure, but not because of anything remotely like defeat. I hadn’t “come to my senses”. I hadn’t “realized I needed help.” I took it to make them feel better about themselves and to get them off my back.

What I was thinking as they walked me home was: You silly people, I’m already finished. I’m already dead and gone. All you have is some mess of a zombie shambling through your kitchens and your living rooms, turning on your showers and kissing you goodnight. All you have is a dead boy, only it’s hard to tell, because I won’t rot. I’ll be like one of those bodies that people in South America pry out of old coffins, the ones whose hair and fingernails continue to grow in death. The ones who smell of rose petals, whose skin remains smooth and lily white. They call those corpses saints, but I won’t aspire to anything so heavenly. I’ll wash the dishes and do my homework and wheel my mother around in her chair. I’ll do all of these things, and no one will notice that there’s no light behind my eyes and no heat in my step. They’ll clothe me and feed me and tell me what good grades I get. They’ll give me things to make me happy, when all I’ll be wanting is a cold grave to step into. I’ll grow up and go to college, marry a beautiful woman and have three kids. I’ll make a lot of money and age gracefully, no pot belly. I’ll look youthful when I’m fifty-eight.

What I knew right then was that everyone I’d ever know from here on out would talk about me and say, He’s so lucky. He has everything a person could want.