Dead Romantic (18 page)

I scowled. ‘Why don't you dump her then, if she's such a bad girlfriend?'

‘Oh she passes the time.' He went to pet Pee Wee, who
immediately started gnashing his teeth at him again. ‘I've had enough of this, I'm going down the pub. You coming, Mario? Princess Peach, can I tempt you?'

I shook my head as Damian's phone started ringing in his jacket pocket.

‘Yeah, I'll meet you there,' said Louis as Damian grabbed his torn jacket, answered his phone and swaggered off down the path.

I turned to him. ‘Go on then, I'm not stopping you,' I sniffed, well and truly on my high horse now.

Louis did that boy thing of adjusting his pants, the thing our Sociology teacher Mr Atwill used to do in class all the time, possibly because he wore trousers made of that really itchy stuff that sacks are made out of. ‘You can tell me what Zoe's making you do,' he said. I can stand up to her if you don't want to. If you're . . . in trouble or anything like that.'

I kind of wanted to tell him then, but I knew I couldn't. I knew it would get me in trouble. Apart from anything else, we were doing this whole grave-robbing thing for my benefit. To find
me
a boyfriend. So I just snipped, ‘It's none of your business!'

‘Well, it kind of
is
my business, cos you were breaking into
my dad's
business,' he said. ‘Trying to steal . . . I don't know what.'

‘I can't tell you anything. I just can't. But no one is being hurt and I'm fine. That's all you need to know.'

‘Damian said you wouldn't let on what you were doing,' he sighed.

‘What does Damian know?' I cried.

‘Only as much as I do. Which isn't much. He said if . . . if we could prove you two were doing something criminal or just something kinky you didn't want people knowing about, he could blackmail Zoe into going out with him.'

‘What? Why?'

Louis shrugged. ‘He really fancies her.'

‘Damian fancies everyone,' I said. Pee Wee wanted to get down so I let him and he scampered off. ‘Why do you have to be drunk at all hours of the day?'

‘I don't. And stop changing the subject . . .'

‘Then why are you always drinking? You're drinking now,' I said, looking down at the can in his hand. ‘Is it to make you look cool? Because if so it really doesn't.' A fly flew into my open mouth and I coughed.

‘I'm not drunk,' he said. ‘This is just an energy drink.'

‘Yeah, right,' I said.

‘I'm not.'

‘You were that night on the Pier when you . . .'

‘Yeah maybe I'd had a couple then but . . .'

‘So why do you do it?'

‘Why does anyone drink?' he said. ‘To feel better about themselves. To have the courage to do or say things they wouldn't normally.'

‘What, act like a total idiot?' I snorted.

‘None of that matters anyway,' he said. ‘So are you going to tell me what you've been doing with Zoe Lutwyche or not?'

Pee Wee was going nuts, trying to dig up one of the graves. Behind him, near the top of the churchyard, I saw
lights. Coloured lights, beaming up into the sky.

‘What's that?' I said, pointing to the haze of pinks and greens and blues.

‘What's what?' he sighed, looking to where my finger was pointing. I ran up the path towards it, stopping when I came to the kissing gate. And all at once I saw the most beautiful sight: lots of graves literally glowing in the dark.

‘Oh my goodness! This is amazing!' I cried, squeezing through the kissing gate to get a closer look at them.

There was a metal squeaking behind me as Louis followed me through the gate, closely followed by Pee Wee.

‘Yeah, pretty weird, isn't it?' he said. ‘Glow-in-the-dark graves. It's one of our new lines at the funeral parlour. It's these stones.' He bent down and picked up a handful of yellow ones from a plot. ‘People buy them thinking they're magical. That somehow they are the person's soul going up to heaven. Stupid really.'

‘I think that's a nice thing to believe,' I said.

‘You do?'

We walked further up the path. It was a bit like that scene in that film about the blue things when the girl blue thing is walking with the boy blue thing through that little glow-in-the-dark forest and all those little jellyfish things are coming down and it all looks so pretty. We didn't have little jellyfish things around us, we just had lighty-up graves but it was still quite pretty to walk through.

Louis binned his so-not-an energy drink as we passed a bin. ‘It's a cynical money-making scheme if you ask me. My dad jumps on every afterlife bandwagon. He's now
thinking about selling these phones which you can bury your loved one with. They're programmed to text you from beyond the grave, with things like
Wish you were here
or
Happy birthday, son
. How sick is that?'

‘Yeah, that's creepy,' I said. ‘I like the stones though. They make the churchyard look pretty.'

‘They're warm too,' said Louis. ‘Lie down on some.'

‘What?'

‘Lie down on some. They soak up the sun during the day, which makes them glow at night and when they glow, they're warm. I always lie on Edward Kendall Sheridan. You can lie on his wife, Edwina.'

‘Isn't that a bit disrespectful?' I was one to talk about disrespect, especially since a few days ago I'd been to a dead boy's foot chopping ceremony.

‘Not really,' said Louis. ‘They've been dead about five years. I remember when Dad did the funerals. They died within hours of each other. She had a heart attack. And Dad said his heart just broke. They'd been together for like sixty years. Isn't that amazing?'

My own heart did a little pulse thing when I heard that. ‘Aw yeah. Like in that film where they're in the nursing home and the man's telling his wife the story of their life together but she keeps forgetting and he says he'll never leave her and then they die in each other's arms.'

‘Well, it wasn't quite like that but yeah, they'd been together for a long time.'

‘You talk more when Damian's not around,' I said. ‘You're different, actually.'

‘Am I?' he said, sitting down first on Edward. I followed
him, lying on Edwina. The stones
were
warm, just like he'd said they would be.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘You don't talk in History either.'

He sort of laughed and lay back. ‘The glow only lasts a couple of years. Some relatives have paid us to come up here and refresh them every now and again, so they always glow.'

Louis was so nice without Damian around. We were having a nice time, even though we were lying on graves, talking about old people dying of broken hearts and his dad making money out of the bereaved. I liked him. I really liked him.

‘Do you know what you're going to do after college?' I asked the stars.

Louis answered me. ‘Nope. I thought about doing something with fish. Or basketball. Or maybe I could write horror movies or something. I'll probably end up just staying at the funeral parlour until I know. You?'

‘No,' I replied. ‘I thought I was the only one who didn't know. Like, everyone else I know knows, you know?'

‘I know,' he said, scratching his wrist beneath his friendship bracelets and then putting his arms behind his head. I couldn't help noticing how soft his armpit hair looked. ‘Damian wants to direct porn films and race Ferraris. He's wanted to do that since he was about twelve.'

‘You'd be better off without Damian,' I said. ‘He's a bad influence.'

‘He's my mate. I'd rather him than that psychopath you hang out with,' he scoffed.

‘Don't call her that,' I said. ‘Zoe's my friend.'

‘She's a psycho.'

I harrumphed. ‘And what evidence are you basing your opinion on?'

‘On her face?' Louis sniggered. ‘That and the stories.' He turned on his grave and leant his head on his hand to look at me. ‘That's why I need to know what Zoe's up to. Why she's got you stealing medical equipment, cos if she's doing what her dad used to do . . . you must have heard about her dad.'

‘I've heard things. But they're just stories.'

His eyebrows rose. ‘You heard how he died?'

‘He's not dead. He's in some asylum somewhere, being looked after. Or . . . possibly living in the woods by their house.'

‘No, he's definitely dead,' said Louis. ‘We did his funeral. It was just before college started. She's supposed to be organising a headstone.'

‘Prof Lutwyche . . . died? In the asylum?' I asked him. ‘Are you sure?'

‘My dad picked up the body. I didn't see it but I've heard all sorts.'

‘Yeah, so have I.'

‘He was only there a few weeks. Do you want to see where he's buried?'

I nodded and we both stood up. He started walking across the glowing blue red green and yellow churchyard, and led me to the exact spot under the willow tree where I'd seen Zoe digging on freshers' night. When she was just Digging Girl.

There was the mound she had been digging. The long,
body-shaped mound of earth, stamped down flat.

‘Right here,' said Louis. ‘There's no headstone because the council were afraid of people coming to the site to chip pieces off it. People do that, you know, when someone infamous has died.'

Why hadn't Zoe told me her dad had died? And so recently?

‘Professor Lutwyche is buried here? Right on this spot?' I said.

‘Professor Lunatic, more like,' said Louis, folding his arms. ‘I've heard some truly nuts stuff about him. Running around the hills naked and cutting off his own head and, yeah, major lunatic.'

I didn't like hearing him talk about Zoe's dad like that. ‘You don't know if any of that stuff's true. And lunatics don't invent stuff that brings animals back to life, do they? That's what he did though. You inject a dead thing with this blue stuff and then you electrocute it and it comes back to life.'

‘No, it's all lies. That didn't happen.'

‘It did happen!' I shouted. Pee Wee trotted over from the pet cemetery with a little pink plastic poodle ornament dangling from his jaws. ‘I've seen it, Louis! I watched fifteen dead hamsters come back to life. Fifteen hamsters that had been gutted ten minutes earlier! Zoe did it, with the serum. The serum that
he
invented.'

Louis shook his head. ‘Your teacher didn't chloroform them properly,' he said. ‘That's what our Geography teacher said. Dead things can't come back to life.'

‘But Zoe
can
do it. I've seen it! I'm telling you the
truth about this. Where do you think Pee Wee came from?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't know. I thought he was yours.'

‘No, Zoe reanimated him. He was cut in two pieces last week and now look at him. You wouldn't have known any different, would you?'

Pee Wee sat down between us, chewing his poodle.

‘Camille, I've seen hundreds of dead bodies. Hundreds. There is no life in them whatsoever. No chance of it. Dead is dead, trust me.'

‘Do you know for a fact that Professor Lutwyche cut off his own head? Or that he lived in the woods or have you
seen
any of his reanimations?'

‘No, but . . .'

‘Right, well I know one thing for sure. I
saw
Pee Wee come back to life. I saw Zoe inject the serum into his veins. And now she's going to do it on a . . . bigger animal and I'm going to help her.'

His eyes went starey, like Michael Jackson's in the
Thriller
video. ‘What do you mean, a bigger animal? What is she doing?'

‘A . . . sheep. She's going to do it on a sheep. And I'm going to help her.'

‘A sheep?' he said. I could see he wasn't convinced. ‘I don't buy it.'

‘Well, it's true' I said.

‘If I were you I'd steer well clear of Zoe Lutwyche,' he warned me.

‘No, I won't,' I told him. ‘And do you know why I'm not going to steer clear of her? Cos she's the only friend I've
got, so excuse me if I completely ignore you.'

I walked off. ‘Pee Wee!' I called back and within seconds I felt him by my side. Pee Wee that is, not Louis. Louis was still in the same spot as when I'd left him, probably laughing at me, like everyone else did.

Everyone but Zoe.

 

 

 

 

I
was way too antsy and emotional and sleep-deprived to go into college the next day and I really didn't want to see Louis in double History so I got my dad to call in sick for me. I tried to ignore what Louis had said, I really did. But somehow it had gotten into my brain, like a little worm, and met up with the little worm of doubt I had put there myself and they had made lots of babies and filled my head with worry worms.

She's a psycho. Zoe is a psycho
.