Graveyard Games (18 page)

The pond, across Jarvis and through the
woods, had waited for summer, as well, when it could be filled with
the shouts of warm bodies. It shimmered like glass in the heat, and
Dusty paused at its edge to look at it.

They used the pond in the winter too, for
hockey and ice skating. Nick, James Thomas and Danny Clark were
their best hockey players. She liked the pond in winter, when their
skates sliced and dug into its frigid surface, but it seemed almost
dangerous then, as cold and dead and humorless as the season
itself. After the long layover from spring, when it was warm enough
to swim again, the pond was ready to accept them again with open
arms.

The pond’s sandy shores were sun-filled,
except a stretch of sand covered by the shade of a big elm. There
was a platform about ten or twelve feet up, where they sat on hot
days, days when even the water was too warm to swim in comfortably
and it was cooler up high in the shade of the elm's leaves.

Dusty stepped up to the water's edge, taking
off her tennis shoes. She waded a little ways out, up to her shins.
The water was unbelievably cool under the hot sun. Dusty hopped
back to shore, pulling her shorts down over her hips and scanning
the woods for a sign of her brother. He would show up soon, with
Annie and James and probably Suzanne. There would be others, after
everyone had gone home from school, changed, and either walked or
caught rides out. Living right across from the pond had its
advantages.

Dusty stepped lightly out of her shorts and
tossed them aside. That was when she heard the screams behind her.
She whirled around but couldn’t see anything—just trees and
underbrush, rustling gently in the breeze, too thick to really see
through.

There it was again, and she heard the
distinct crackling and breaking of twigs under feet.

And a growl.

She watched wide-eyed, helpless, unable to
see anything but the gentle swaying of trees.

"Help! Heeelp!" The words were
distinguishable now, and Dusty's eyes moved across the thick
covering, searching for signs of life. It grew louder, louder, the
strangled cry and the growling sound. Dusty picked her shorts up,
ready to retreat.

Something broke out of the underbrush and
flew through the air. It took a moment for it to click in her mind,
and by then he had slid through the sand next to her, face down,
wearing Levis, a t-shirt and tennis shoes. The Doberman sprang
next, and Dusty watched it fly, streaking through the air,
snarling. It landed in the space the boy had just vacated.

Dusty managed to move then, the dog turning
toward her. Acting instinctively, Dusty shoved her shorts over its
head, inside out. The boy, lying panting on the ground, watched her
with wide eyes.

Dusty started to run.
"Come
on
!"
she urged. But the kid was frozen, watching the
Doberman shake its head from side to side, struggling with the
cut-offs. Dusty had managed to get its snout through one of the leg
holes, so it was temporarily stuck. Dusty was almost to safety. All
she had to do was climb the boards nailed to the trunk of the elm
and crawl onto the platform.

The Doberman, snarling and
whining, was winning its battle with the cut-offs. The kid sat
there, dumbfounded, not hearing Dusty's hoarse plea to
run!

Dusty hesitated, her bare foot paused on the
lowest board. Then she began to run back, making her way past the
dog. Grabbing onto the kid's arm, she pulled, yelling in his ear,
"Get up! Come on!"

The kid, startled and dazed-looking, stood
up obediently. The dog, getting its front paws over the tops of the
shorts, was wiggling out of them and it didn’t sound happy.

"Run!" Dusty screamed, pulling hard at his
arm. He stumbled for a moment, but Dusty didn’t let go. He regained
his balance and ran behind her. The distance to the tree had grown
to the length of a football field while their backs were turned.
Dusty's bare feet sank into the sand, slowing her down, and the dog
was now free.

She heard it behind her as
she ran, faster than they were on the sand.
Sand's not slippery,
she
thought.
Why am I slipping?
The kid, panting in her ear, was almost past her
now.

"Up the tree," she managed to say. He flew
up the elm, his feet hardly touching the boards. Behind her, the
dog's jaws snapped, and she felt its breath, hot and heavy, near
her thigh. She kicked back blindly with one foot, reaching up for a
handhold. Her foot made contact with the dog and it yelped. In that
instant, her hands found one of the rough boards and she pulled up.
She scrambled the rest of the way up the tree until she lay
panting, safely on the platform.

She lay there for a moment, eyes closed,
sweat rolling off her back and down her sides, face pressed against
the cool wood. The dog, cheated out of its fun, barked from below.
Dusty rolled over onto her back with a sigh. The kid, sitting
cross-legged, was looking at her with a mixture of admiration and
embarrassment.

"Are you okay?" she gasped, still out of
breath. He nodded. Below them, the dog began to whine. She sat up,
looking him over. Dirt streaked his face and white t-shirt.

"I'm Dusty," she told him. "Who're you?"

"Shane," he told her, starting to wipe the
dirt off his shirt and pants. Dusty's eyes widened for a moment and
her breath caught somewhere inside. She had never met Shane Curtis
but he was a legend of sorts at school.

His older brother, Buddy, had nearly killed
a teacher at the junior high school by tossing an M-80 into the
wastepaper basket by her desk. Rumor had it this teacher, Mrs.
Lowe, hated it when kids played "basketball" with paper and the
wastebasket. When a kid used the basket as a hoop for a scrunched
up piece of paper, she would take the piece of paper out and make
him eat it. Dusty didn’t know if that was true. She had doubts a
teacher would do anything like that. Buddy had tossed the M-80,
hidden in a paper bag, into her trash just before lunch, and when
Mrs. Lowe went to fish out, she received, in Buddy's own words, a
"little surprise."

Shane, last year, had gotten suspended for
having a copy of Playboy in his desk, and although he’d never done
anything really bad, like Buddy, who was now doing time in the
reformatory and would probably be in institutions similar for the
rest of his life, Shane was expected to be as bad.

"Is it gone?" Shane asked.

Dusty peeked over the side. It was quiet.
The dog, either bored or distracted by something, had disappeared.
It was, she knew, Casey Reardon's dog. He kept it penned up because
it was so mean. It had gotten out while Shane was in the process of
running a stick along the fence, Dusty found out later.

"Gone," she reported. "You've still got dirt
on your face."

He smiled, his eyes dipping downward from
hers. "You're dirty, too.”

She looked down and saw sand and dirt
streaked across her suit and her bare stomach. She blushed, aware
of his eyes on her. She became conscious of how she looked—tall,
long-legged, the bathing suit too tight on her growing body. She
crossed her arms self-consciously across her breasts, small buds
just beginning to show.

"We can get down now,” she said, keeping her
eyes averted. "You go first."

"Are you Nick Chandler's sister?" He moved
so he was sitting beside her, their feet dangling from the
platform.

"Yeah," she answered, looking at him. His
blonde hair, a little too long, shone in the light seeping through
the leaves above them. His blue eyes were making her tingle
with...something...when he looked at her. The feel of his jeans,
chafing against her bare thigh as he swung his feet, sent strange
but exciting tremors through her body.

"He's cool, your brother," Shane said her,
eyeing her. "You look a lot like him... but you're cuter." He
smiled at her and Dusty bit her lip. She had been around boys
before, and had even played spin-the-bottle with guys in the
neighborhood at parties when parents left the "kids" alone in the
basement. She had kissed boys before, and she knew about sex, but
the way Shane looked at her made her feel inexperienced, shy, and
excited all at the same time.

"We're twins," Dusty informed him. "My
brother should be here any minute. We're going swimming."

"I figured," Shane said, his eyes on her
suit. Dusty swung her legs, turning herself over, finding the first
board with her feet. She began to descend. Shane started after
her.

When Shane hopped to the ground, brushing
his hands on his jeans, the voices were just coming to the end of
the path. Dusty headed toward them, and Nick, his towel slung
casually over his shoulder, led the group toward the edge of the
water.

"Hey, you guys!" Dusty called, padding
toward them. Sarah, Annie, Suzanne, Tommy, James, Josh and Danny
were crowded behind him.

"Hey, Dusty," Tommy called with a smile. His
eyes went from hers to look behind her and his smile faded.
Everyone was looking at her now. Nick waved, and his smile wavered
only slightly.

"Hi, Shane," Nick said as they advanced.
Dusty was only a step ahead of Shane. She stopped, and Shane stood
a little behind her, his arm brushing hers.

"Have a good time?" Tommy asked coolly,
picking up Dusty's sandy cut-offs. Dusty felt cold and exposed.

"Nice place you have up there," Shane said.
"Dusty was nice enough to give me a guided tour."

She turned to look at him and he winked at
her. "Real private."

She opened her mouth to deny it, to deny
anything and everything he could be implying, but nothing came out.
All she could remember was the strange tightening feeling in her
stomach, and the tingling farther down, when Shane was sitting next
to her.

"I bet." Tommy tossed Dusty's shorts to her.
"I think these are yours."

She couldn’t say anything as she bent to
pick them up. Nick was watching her with, it seemed, a cold
expression. She knew his face as well as she knew her own, maybe
better. He was angry and something else—disappointed maybe.

"Quite a sister you have, Nick," Shane said
with a small laugh, tossing his arm around Dusty's shoulders. She
shrank away, pleading with her eyes.

Rescue me, Nick! Tell them you believe me!
Shane's a liar, tell them!

"Anyone for a swim? I'm roasting." Nick
stepped back and looked away from her. "Shane?"

That was too much. Nick had chosen Shane
over her, believed him over her. She let her shorts drop and began
to run, hating them all, but hating herself more. She hadn’t said a
word, and she could have, easily. Nick would have believed her in
an instant. Instead, she had kept quiet, unable to get that
tingling sensation Shane's touch left out of her mind.

Later that night, Nick had come into her
room and had left her shorts and shoes at the end of her bed. She
had never worn them again.

* * * *

The moon shifted, darkened, and then was
gone. Dusty looked at the space it had vacated in the sky. Clouds
were there, moving in the darkness.

Shane's voice, low and
pleading, saying, "I'm sorry."
Too
late.
So he was sorry. Nick was gone, and
it didn’t matter much if Shane was sorry. She’d often thought it
had been then, in that single moment in time, things had been
decided. There, in the bright June sunshine, their fates had been
sealed. Shane was destined to become his brother all over, and
Dusty was destined to live her life looking for her brother’s
approval.

Things had never been the same after that
day A bond had been broken, and one had been formed. It happened in
an instant, a blink, a heartbeat.

We grew up,
she thought sleepily.
We
grew up and we grew apart. It was going to happen anyway. You
weren’t going to stay a tomboy forever. There are just some things
you don’t tell your brother or your sister, no matter how close you
are. It was going to happen anyway, Shane or no Shane. All Shane
did was act as a catalyst. It was—
SNIP!

She almost physically tore the thought from
her mind.

It was an impossible
thought, an
unthinkable
thought. It
was
Shane's fault Nick had begun to exclude her, in
little ways, and then in bigger ones.

"I'm sorry." Shane's voice echoed in her
head. "Cross my heart and hope to die."

She shivered, pulling the
blankets up. She’d wished him dead so often. She’d wished he would
disappear, be swallowed up, something, anything, she just wished
that he would
go away!
She’d wished she’d let that stupid Doberman tear his heart
out, tear him apart like he had torn her and Nick apart.

She had spent the rest of her adolescence
trying to live that moment down, trying to be the good girl, to do
the right thing, always. Her choice of profession had been no
accident—she’d wanted to find a sense of justice in the world, to
be a part of creating that somehow. She knew it was also no
accident that she’d found herself working in vice, playing the
whore. Had she been punishing Shane, she wondered, every time she
brought down another John? Probably, she admitted, flushing in the
darkness at the self-realization.

And yet here she was, her ties severed, the
world she believed in turned upside down. Everything was corrupt.
Nothing was as it seemed. And there was, it turned out, no justice
in the world after all.

I'm
sorry
—she shut her eyes tightly against
it. Sorry... what did that mean? Words, just words, after years and
years. Where was the justice in that?