Shallow Graves (24 page)

Like being lost in a haunted house. Like throwing up on a carnival ride. Like kicking toward the shimmering light above when
you're turned around under water, like digging your feet through the hot outer surface of sand to the cool damp layer beneath, like skimming your fingers over a boy's bare chest and feeling his heart stutter. Like riding a skateboard on the smoothest road you can imagine, faster than you've ever dared, wind in your hair and on your face, sun baking the asphalt below you, grass and trees and barbed wire passing so quickly they smear into a blur of color.

“It feels like being alive,” I said.

WHEN JAKE RETURNED
he didn't say anything except, “Get in.”

Several minutes passed before he spoke again. He drove with one hand tight on the wheel, the other on the gear shift. I was sitting in the middle; I could feel how tense he was. The dirt road took us down off the ridge and into a canyon. The windows were down and night air flowed in from both sides, cool and crisp, smelling of pines.

“Did you do that to him?” Jake asked.

“I don't have claws.” I didn't need to tear out a man's insides to end his life. My rage didn't look anything like that. “Did you go to the mine?”

“No,” he said. “But I could feel it.”

“Her. You could feel her. She's not an
it
.”

“What is she?”

Hooves, eyes, handmade claws. She was ancient and terrible and angry. I could feel her laughter underneath my skin. I wondered how long she would laugh before she realized nobody was coming to feed her anymore.

“I don't know. I don't—I don't have any idea. He thought she was the only one.”

“Can she get out?” Jake asked.

“I don't think so.”

Jake glanced at me.

“No. She can't.”

The dirt road led to a paved road that spilled us out of the canyon and onto Boulder's quiet early morning streets. Dawn was approaching as a faint light in the east, shades of yellow and pink climbing into dark blue. There were a few cars on the road, joggers and cyclists out for their morning exercise. I listened with every turn, but I didn't hear anything heavy rolling in the back of the truck.

It was still dark when we pulled up to their house. Jake backed the truck into the driveway, and Zeke got out to open the garage. They had done this before. I looked away and tried not to think about what they were unloading. When they went inside I followed because I didn't know what else to do. They carried the body into the bathroom. He was wrapped in plastic, his face hidden. He didn't look like a person at all.

“You do that in the same place where you shower?” I said.

Jake looked at me over his shoulder. “You have a better idea?”

I didn't know how people normally went about butchering bodies in the privacy of their own homes, and the moment I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop.

They were going to
eat
him. He had been a person yesterday, and now he was a piece of meat. A dead thing. A
meal
. I had killed him, with Lyle, and now he was food. There were going to be knives and freezer bags and teeth and a lot of blood. They weren't taking their time. They were impatient. They were hungry.

Knowing what they were was one thing. Seeing it was different.

Jake took pity on me. “Come back in an hour or two,” he said.

I grabbed my skateboard and slammed the door behind me.

JAKE GAVE ME
some money before I left Boulder.

“Take a bus,” he said. “Less chance of getting kidnapped by a crazy human.”

“And one hundred percent more chance of getting propositioned by a fifty-year-old recent parolee. No thanks.” I waved the cash away. They didn't have a lot. They needed it more than I did.

Jake rolled his eyes and tucked the folded bills into the front of my backpack.

“Are you going home?” he asked.

“No.”

Not like that. Not to stay. Not to see my family. Not to watch
my sisters through their bedroom windows like a creep in the yard. Not to see Mom pull the car out of the driveway in the morning, Dad clutching his travel mug of coffee in the passenger seat. Mom always joked that Dad was just as likely to fall asleep during his morning lectures as his students.

I wasn't going back to hide where they might see me and tell myself it was up to them whether they looked or not. To let them decide for themselves if their daughter still existed.

“What could I even say?” I said. “‘Hi, Mom and Dad, I got murdered but I'm better now and I kill people but only the bad ones and I kind of like it'? I can't—I can't do that to them.”

Jake leaned against the counter and looked at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. The bathroom door was closed and he had changed his shirt. There was no blood, no mess, no sign of what they had been doing—no sign except the basement door, standing open just wide enough for me to see a single dark eye through the gap. Steve was waiting to get to work on the bathroom with its toothbrush and bleach.

Jake started to say something, changed his mind and stopped.

“What?” I said.

“It won't matter what you say to them,” he said. “They won't care.”

I closed my backpack and played with the zipper. I didn't look at him.

“They won't, Breezy. You could tell them anything and they'll just be happy to have—”

“Really? I can tell them what I am now? You think they won't
care about that? You think they'll be
happy?
”

“They—”

“Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about.” I hooked the backpack straps over my shoulders and picked up my skateboard. “You've never been human.”

I meant it as an insult, but Jake didn't take it that way. “No. You're right. I haven't. Okay. Don't do anything stupid.” He smiled crookedly when he said it, like it was something he said a lot but never expected anybody to listen. Then he said “See you later” instead of good-bye.

Zeke was waiting outside. He walked with me to the end of the driveway.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I haven't decided yet,” I said. It was a lie, but I didn't care if he believed me. “I'm not going on a murderous rampage like Ingrid said I would. I promise.”

Zeke nodded. He was looking down the street, not at me. “Yeah, well. That's probably smart.”

I dropped the skateboard to the ground, put one foot on, but I didn't kick away yet. “I remembered it wrong, what I told you last night. About
Challenger.
”

“Okay?”

“I mean, not about
Challenger
itself. That was right. But I remembered the wrong person. Maybe there are worms in the memory part of my brain too. It was my sister Meadow who made fun of me for knowing that about their last words. And she didn't
tell me it was morbid, she just told me I was a giant nerd and she was embarrassed to be related to me. But there was this other time, I don't know, a while ago. I was sleeping over at my best friend's house.”

For a few years we did that every week: me at Melanie's house, or her at mine, a routine our parents accepted and encouraged. Melanie's parents planned their date nights around it; my parents referred to our air mattress and spare comforter as Melanie's bed.

“I had just read about
Apollo 1
for the first time,” I said. “Most space books for kids kind of gloss over
Apollo 1
. I guess it's not kid friendly to say, ‘And then they all died horribly in a fire right there on the launch pad.' But I read about it, the real story, and I looked it up, and there's a recording of it. An audio recording. I don't know if it's real.” I rolled the skateboard back and forth a few times. “The astronauts, they're—one of them is complaining about how the radios aren't working, saying they'll never get to the moon if they can't even make things work on the ground, and then another one starts shouting about fire in the cabin. And that's it. They're dead. I made Melanie listen to it. She wanted to watch a movie or call our friends, and I made her listen to people dying in a fire. That's when she told me I was morbid. It was one of our vocabulary words from school. She was using it all the time.”

“She was right,” Zeke said. I couldn't tell if he was teasing or serious. They looked pretty much the same on him.

“I know. I'd never heard anybody die before. I'd never thought about how awful it would be to die like that.”

I tucked my thumbs into the straps of my backpack. There was no fire on the list in my NASA notebook. I had considered it, tried to work out the logistics. There was too much risk of hurting somebody else. It wouldn't work anyway.

“It wasn't even a real launch, that day of the fire,” I said. “It was a practice countdown. They went to work that morning, thinking they were running a test. Is that how it always is? When people die?”

“Most people aren't around afterward to think about it.”

“Lucky me. I'm the one who gets to stay.”

“You'd rather be gone?” he asked. His tone was flat, but the question was earnest.

What I wanted was to go back to the night I died and change it. Don't go to the party. Don't fight with Melanie. Don't leave by myself. I hadn't done anything wrong, not one single thing, but still I wanted to do it all differently. I wanted to not die that night. I wanted to not wake up a year later and stagger home to an empty house and an unfamiliar world. Not become something else, something strange and monstrous, but still human enough to fall for a dangerous promise and impossible hope.

Give me your rotten little heart, she had said. You won't miss it a bit.

“What I want is for none of this to have happened,” I said. “But that's not an option, is it?”

I couldn't bear to talk to him anymore. I couldn't stand there on that quiet Boulder street, outside a house with a blood-splattered
bathroom and a homicidal house elf in the basement, pretending everything would be fine.

“I'm leaving now,” I said.

“Don't get yourself killed for real,” Zeke said.

I kicked off, and I waved as I rode away.

IT TOOK ME
four days and five different rides to get back to Chicago. I could have made the trip faster if I had tried, but I didn't, and I didn't think much about my reasons for taking my time. I hitchhiked from Boulder up to Cheyenne with a couple of engineering students on their way to Montana for a camping trip, turned east at Cheyenne with a trucker named Joe who spent the entire time telling me about his daughter who traveled around the country just like me, relying on the kindness of strangers, sometimes on the highways and sometimes on the trains.

“Sure I worry,” said Joe, in response to a question I wasn't going to ask. “But she's a smart girl. She can take care of herself.”

Joe and I parted ways in Kansas City, and from there I rode to St. Louis with two college lacrosse players with identical blond ponytails who spent half the trip arguing about how Taylor Swift had become a feminist icon, then up to Bloomington with a cheerful, chatty woman named Sandra who was road-tripping after her divorce, and the final stretch into Chicago with a Northwestern journalism student named Laurie who was thinking about giving up the news entirely to go learn yoga at an ashram in India.

“It's just so hard to care when nobody else cares,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear about anything that matters anymore.”

But her car radio was tuned to NPR and she turned it up for the international updates, shaking her head and offering out-of-context commentary I pretended to understand. She was dismayed to learn that I didn't have an opinion on the situation in Gaza. I didn't try to explain that I had spent an entire year underground and missed a lot of important world events.

None of them were killers, the people I rode with, and if they were monsters, they hid it well. The only shadows they dragged behind them were the ordinary kind, the kind that everybody collects going through life, waking up every day to make a series of good and bad decisions, going to bed with the consequences, doing it all over again in the morning.

I didn't approach any old women. Sometimes when I closed my eyes I felt her claws on my wrist and heard the whisper of living sand, but when I opened them again there was only the car, the country, the driver who was kind enough to help a stranger.

Laurie would have taken me into Evanston if I asked, but I
wasn't ready for that yet. After she dropped me off, I used some of Jake's money to head downtown. I used a little more cash to buy a phone, because tucked in with the bills was a note with their phone numbers and the admonishment to let them know I was okay. It made me roll my eyes, but it also made me smile. It felt odd to have a phone in my pocket again and somebody to call, like the earth's gravity had increased and every step I took carried a bit more weight.

I spent the rest of the day at the Field Museum, which was probably not what Jake had given me the money for, but rooms full of dead dinosaurs and noisy school kids were soothing after days on the road. I wandered around, reading displays and staring at skeletons, and nobody noticed, nobody cared, nobody wondered if I belonged.

I stayed with Sue the T. rex and all of her dinosaur friends until the museum closed, then I took the train to Evanston.

I WISH I HAD
a better story to tell about the night I died.

That should be part of the deal. Die young, come back to tell about it, at the very least it should be an exciting death.

But nothing about that day was unusual. There was only one more week of school before summer. I went over to Melanie's house in the afternoon before Nate's party. Her parents were more easygoing than mine. Not that Mom and Dad were ever very strict, but Alan and Lillian—they insisted I call them by their first names—let Melanie take the car every time she asked, never enforced a curfew, only laughed when Melanie's little brother, Ryan, tried to tattle on us for breaking the rules. We were good girls, mostly. We never gave
them much reason to worry.

Melanie had been dating a senior since January. His name was Lawrence but everybody called him Lucky. He even called himself Lucky, because he was the kind of guy who sometimes talked about himself in the third person. He was going to William & Mary in the fall to study English literature, and he had been trying to convince Melanie to apply to the same school, casually at first, almost a joke, but more and more insistently as graduation drew closer.

“I mean, I like him,” Melanie said. She was always careful not to say
love
when she didn't mean it. “But every time he brings it up I just want to stab myself. Seriously, who wants to go to college in Virginia?”

I was lying on her bed, flipping halfheartedly through my World History notes, glancing over names and dates but not absorbing much. I never had to study much for math or science exams, but anything involving people required work. Melanie was sitting at her computer, playing music from indie bands Lucky wanted her to like. Melanie started each song, listened for a few seconds, clicked to the next.

“Where do you want to go instead?” I asked.

“Somewhere besides Virginia,” Melanie said with a laugh. “New York, I think. I'd love to live in New York. Maybe Boston, since you'll be at MIT.” She played another song, made a face at the vocalist's reedy voice, moved on. “I don't know. Why do I have to decide now? Lucky's acting like I should know everything I want already or I'm going to end up taking accounting classes at community college. Does he really think anybody our age has everything
figured out?” She spun around in her chair. “Except for you. But you're not exactly normal.”

I could remember when Melanie had wanted something as much as I wanted to be an astronaut. For her it was medicine. She wanted to be a doctor, a pediatrician. Not the vaccines-and-lollipops kind of pediatrician, but the kind who took care of kids with cancer, with genetic disorders or degenerative diseases, the kind of pediatrician whose patients were too sick to play or go to school or have a normal life. When most of us were signing up for community service to fulfill the National Honor Society requirements and add another accomplishment to our college applications, Melanie was already volunteering at the children's hospital. She read to the kids and talked to their parents, commiserated with the nurses and shadowed the doctors. I hadn't realized until that afternoon it wasn't her dream anymore.

Melanie did end up going to New York. I looked her up eventually, when it didn't hurt so much. She was studying film at NYU. I found a picture of her with her freshman roommate at a Halloween party. They were dressed up like starlets from 1940s Hollywood, with clinging dresses and curled hair. Red plastic cups in hand, bright matching smiles, skin shiny in the camera flash, they looked happy. “Me and my bestie!!!!!” Melanie had always used too much punctuation. It looked like a night on another planet, in another universe, one I could barely imagine anymore.

But that was later. That afternoon, the last day of my human life, I didn't ask when Melanie had stopped dreaming about helping sick kids, and she didn't notice my silence.

“You think Devon will be there tonight?” Melanie said, and I understood that there were things she had missed too. Devon was a guy I had hooked up with a few times in the winter, but not since March, when his ex-girlfriend in Portland had called up to say she wanted to try the long-distance thing for real. We had never been into each other that much anyway. The full extent of our relationship, if that was the word for it, was to head over to his house after school, do our calculus homework, have sex, and play video games until his parents got home. It was fun, for a while, but two months later I didn't think about him much anymore.

Later, after I disappeared and the police interviewed everybody I knew, Devon had only nice things to say about me. I appreciated that. Everybody else in school was getting a lot of mileage out of sharing every sordid story they could remember or make up about me, but all Devon said was that I was a friend who was good at math but terrible at
Call of Duty
.

“I don't know,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe.”

“Everybody will be there,” Melanie said, and she moved on to talking about our friend Tatiana's car, an old Firebird she and her stepmother were rebuilding in their garage. They were taking classes, buying books, peppering every employee at every auto parts shop in town with questions. It was all Tatiana talked about anymore. We were already planning a road trip for after graduation.

There should have been something significant about that day. Something ominous. A sign, in retrospect, that it was the last day of my life. But there wasn't. It was an ordinary day.

For dinner we had Indian takeout with Melanie's family. Ryan
was going through a phase where he claimed to be training himself to eat the hottest foods he could find. He spent the meal teary and red-faced, gulping water between bouts of laughter. We cleaned up the dishes. We got ready for the night. Melanie promised not to drink and drive; I promised not to let her. We went to Nate's party.

I had a few drinks. I danced. I hugged my graduating senior friends. I kissed my best friend and her lips were warm, sticky with mint-flavored gloss. She said, “What the hell?” and she slapped me. It was no secret I was bisexual, and Melanie had never cared, but she cared about that. I wasn't even sure why I kissed her. I had never wanted to before, and probably wouldn't have again, if I had lived. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I locked myself in Nate Havers's upstairs bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Melanie's hand had left a red smudge on my cheek. Somebody pounded on the door and shouted that he was going to piss in the hallway if I didn't let him in. I wanted to go home. My dad always said I could call if I needed a ride when I was out with my friends, for any reason, even if I had been drinking, even if I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be. I wouldn't get into trouble, he said, that was a promise.

I didn't call my father. The police found my phone in the bathroom at Nate's house. I don't remember leaving it there.

I decided to walk. I stopped on Nate's front steps to take off my uncomfortable sandals, and a girl I recognized but couldn't name said, “Awesome shoes!” She lifted her Corona in a toast. I stared at her, didn't even remember to smile, and she was gone, dragged laughing into the house by a friend.

Nobody noticed me leaving. That's what they all said later.

The grass on Nate's front lawn was cool beneath my bare feet, a soft tickle on my ankles. I wanted to walk in the grass all the way home, cutting through yards, over hedges and fences, staying in the shadows.

I was standing there at the edge of the grass, trying to decide if I could jump the flower bed into the next yard over, when I heard my name.

“Breezy. Hey, Breezy. Hey, are you okay?”

I turned around and I thought: God, it's that kid, what is he even doing here?

And: What's his name, what's his name, he's always saying hi to me in the halls, what is his name?

And I thought about the stupid letters he used to send to me, his messy handwriting on the envelopes and torn-out notebook paper. I had a whole stack of them from middle school, from freshman year. Melanie and my other friends used to laugh, told me I should be flattered, maybe he was a nice boy beneath all the shyness, maybe I shouldn't be so mean to him. I stopped telling them, eventually, when it wasn't funny anymore. I wondered how he had even known there was a party at Nate's house. He wasn't friends with Nate. He was on the track team; he hung out with a different crowd.

“Hi, Ricky,” I said.

“Are you leaving?” Ricky said. “Do you need a ride?”

“No. I'm fine.”

“Are you sure? I can give you a ride.”

“I'm sure.”

“Come on, Breezy, I just want to talk.”

I said no. I said I was fine. I kept walking.

And he followed me. Nobody saw him. Nobody was watching.

The cops never talked to Ricky Benning.

I don't remember dying.

I remember telling him to leave me alone. I remember that he grabbed my arm. I remember that he shoved me and I stumbled into a car and hit my head on the window. I remember shouting for help, or trying to, dazed and dizzy and nauseous, and the pressure of his hand on my mouth, his fingers on my neck, his babbling, panicked plea for me to be quiet, be quiet, please shut up, shut up,
shut up
, somebody might hear. I don't remember the snap of my hyoid bone. I don't remember my trachea collapsing under the pressure of his hands. He shouldn't have been strong enough, but he was angry and scared. I don't remember the blood vessels in my eyes rupturing.

It only takes a few seconds for a person to lose consciousness from strangulation. I don't remember anything after that.