The Sound of Us (16 page)

We ride the rest of the way in silence.

Flowers ring the gate and litter the ground in front of St. Michael’s Cemetery. Arrangements with ‘We Miss You!’ and ‘Stay Weird!’ lean against the tall stone wall and lace across the ground. No one dares to step on them—as if they’re in a magical bubble. A crowd of quite possibly, oh,
five hundred
fans wait in front of the cemetery, most of them wearing pink SAVE HOLIDAY shirts, holding candles. Don’t any of them have to go to work? Have a life? Something else to do besides pay tribute to a dead girl?

Maggie parks in bumfuck nowhere, so we have to hike at least three football fields’ worth of cars to get to the cemetery itself. It’s a complete pain, and today is stifling hot at that. Heat waves rise up from the asphalt, making the entire walk feel like I’m trudging through a sauna. How Maggie can look so cool in her four-inch heels and A-line skirt is beyond me. I can’t even look cool in a parka in sub-zero weather.

Then again, I might be sweating because I’m nervous. I keep touching the memory card in my pocket to make sure it’s still there.

Up ahead, Nick Lively stands beside a black media van, fixing his hair in the driver-side mirror. His eyes stray up to mine, but he doesn’t register I’m
that girl
until I’ve already ducked behind Maggie again.

“This was such a bad idea,” I hiss to her. “Can we leave yet?”

She loops her arm into mine and squeezes my hand tightly. “Fat chance. We’re in this together. Balls to the wall!”

“I hate that expression.”

The crowd is thick with high schoolers. We elbow our way to the front where a line of Myrtle Beach’s finest stand looking bored and tired. But two of them have Holly’s trademark peacock feather clipped behind their ear.

This isn’t exactly how I pictured the memorial. I expected more…I don’t know, music? Noise? Girls crying in the streets while their fifteen-year-old boyfriends console them? But no one’s crying. There’s a solemn, heavy shroud hanging over the crowd no one can seem to shake, despite the colorful array of peacock feathers poking out of rampant ponytails and braids. Somewhere in the sea of people, a lone radio fades into “My Heart War,” and people flick out their phones and light their lighters in honor.

A slice of blue hair cuts through the crowd to my left. I tell Maggie I’ll be right back and dive after Boaz. He stops at the outskirts of the crowd, taking a pack of cigarettes out from under his black kilt. It matches his black tuxedo t-shirt. “Boaz,” I whisper, and he almost jumps out of his skin.

“Jeez Louise, bro-ho!” He slaps his heart. “Ever heard of not sneakin’ up on the man while he’s at a fuckin’
cemetery
?”

“Sorry,” I apologize earnestly. Making sure no one is close enough to hear, I add, “Where’s Roman?”

He puts his lips to the tip of the pack and extracts a cigarette, putting the rest back into his kilt. “Readin’ every rag mag in the state, probs.”

“I didn’t rat, you have to believe me.”

He snorts, taking out a matchbox, and lights his cigarette. He inhales a lungful, savoring, and blows it out in a ring.

I purse my lips together. “You know I wouldn’t.”

“Do I?” He doesn’t sound bitter, just amused. “My Heart War”
crescendos, Roman and Holly’s voices combining with the memorial’s voices, roaring the lyrics like they’re the last words on earth. It’s chilling, as if she’s here in the weirdest way. Sort of spooky and...and really tragic. “You know,” he goes on, “no one even bothered about her side of this. Roman’s always been either the martyr or the culprit. Who’s Holly? The victim. No one cares if that isn’t exactly true.”

Maybe now’s the time to tell him about the pictures on the memory card. It’ll clear everything up. I begin to reach for the memory card in my pocket when I pause, my eyebrows furrowing. “What do you mean,
if that’s isn’t exactly true
?”

But he doesn’t answer my question. “Bro-ho, she was in
love
. Serious love. For-shit love. You do stupid shit when you’re in it.”

I retract my hand. “With Roman?” Has he loved her all this time?

He sucks another lungful of smoke and blows it out over his head. “A few months before she died she got this tat.
Ya’aburnee
. It means ‘
you bury me
.’”

The smoke snakes like a gray river into the blue sky.

“Ya’aburnee?” I echo, remembering the article from
The Juice
. A cold shiver races down my arms, and I quickly cross them over my chest to rub them away. The word feels heavy in my mouth, like it’s full of memories.

You bury me.

It was a dull afternoon the when Dad passed away, one of those days when nothing ever seemed to happen. I’d been bitching about mopping the stage because Geoff was supposed to do it after the rock show the night before. We were thirty minutes to opening, and Dad had been counting the stocks, his pen making sharp checks down his list.

I can still hear the sound when I’m swabbing the floors, that echoing
chhhick, chhhhhick!…

The next thing I knew, he put down his checklist and leaned against the counter. Geoff asked him, “Hey, boss, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just a little lightheaded. Can you check and see how many dark ales are in the fridge?”

Those were his last words.

He dropped like deadweight, his pen skittering across the floor, sharp and screeching. I think I knew from the moment I dropped the mop that this was it, that he wasn’t going to make it. But knowing didn’t stop me from shaking him, yelling at him, trying to keep him alive until the ambulance arrived. My fingers had tightened so hard around his suspenders the paramedics had to wrench me off of him, crying, kicking and screaming, because I thought that if he could hear my voice then he’d come back to life even though his lips were blue and his eyes never looked once at me. They just kept staring, staring, toward something beyond me to nothing at all.

Ya’aburnee
isn’t the act of burying someone. It’s the empty chair at dinner. It’s when everyone forgets to turn off the freezer light at the bar because Dad always did. It’s checking pants for suspenders even though no one in the house wears them anymore.

Red suspenders—I remember. Red suspenders like the ones Roman wears.

Boaz seems to be lost in a memory of his own. He scratches the dark five o’clock shadow on his cheek, and sighs. “Pretty word, right?”

“Yeah,” I reply softly.

“She raged about words like that—hell, I don’t even remember half of ‘em. She was the bright bulb in the pack, even after I joined ‘em.”

I incline my head towards him. It’s easy to forget that Boaz was a latecomer in Roman Holiday. “How
did
you join them?”

“I actually—and check it,
true story
—met them at this luncheon thing for terminal kids. Was hired to play on their baby grand for a few hours for a mouthful of shitty shrimp balls. Bad food for cancer kids, lemme tell you. There was only one bathroom and I had to piss from all the energy drinks I downed right before the gig. So, I knocked to see the hold-up, and it was Hols. Her time of the month came around early and she didn’t have a supply of torpedoes.”

I’m not sure what’s more shocking, the fact that Boaz just called tampons torpedoes, or that he was ballsy enough to cut in line. Last time I tried, a woman almost shanked me with her stiletto. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. And guess who saved the day? Yeah, that’s right. Yours truly. Got her stoppers and personally delivered ‘em. Crisis averted.” I can’t help but imagine Boaz picking out tampons in the feminine hygiene section of a grocery store. “Next thing I know, I’m playin’ in a pop rock band.”

I shake my head. “How come these things always start with unmentionables?”

Boaz grins then and elbows me in the side. “Because, bro-ho, those are always the best stories.”

Suddenly, an arm slings around my shoulder. Maggie leans over me, vibrating with excitement. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here! I can’t belie—” Her words clog in her throat the second her eyes land on Boaz. “Oh, holy hot sticks, Boaz Alexander? You’re
Boaz Alexander
? Junie, is that Boaz Alexander?”

“Maggie,” I introduce, “this is Boaz. Boaz, this is Maggie, my best friend.”

Un-slinging her arm from around my neck, she pulls her dreads over one shoulder and inclines an eyebrow kind of seductively. “Why,
hello
.”

Boaz slides up beside her. “Hey hey, good lookin’.”

I’ve never seen Maggie melt so fast in my entire life. “Marry me?”

He wiggles his eyebrows.

Great. Two of the same species in a one-mile radius. This has to be a natural disaster. I roll my eyes. “Where’s Roman?”

“No idea,” Boaz supplies, not taking his eyes off of Maggie. She blushes under his gaze.

“Well...he’ll totes show up, right?” Maggie adds absently.

“Or not,” I mutter under my breath.

A hushed sound tickles my ear. I swat it away. One thing about South Carolina, it has the biggest fucking monster gnats known to mankind. So big they eat mice for breakfast.

But then I hear it again—a soft crinkling sound like footsteps. I glance behind me to the patch of woods beside the cemetery wall, but there’s nothing there.
No, wait.
The fabric of a dress, the heel of a foot. I retreat a few steps away from Boaz and Maggie to see down the long cement wall against the woods.

“Something up?” Maggie looks in the direction, too, but she doesn’t see anything. “Raccoon?”

“I—uh—no, it was nothing.” Because I swear there was someone walking along the wall just a few seconds ago, her hand brushing along the bricks. “Hold my purse.”

“Why?”

“I have an idea...if something happens, we go to Plan B.”

“Plan B,” she deadpans, pulling my purse over her shoulder.

Plan B was invented by our desperate ninth grade selves. It was juvenile. It was simple. And, thank God, we’ve never had to attempt it. I hope we don’t have to today. “Good luck,” Maggie tells me with a quick hug.

Turning toward the woods, I curiously—and maybe morbidly—pursue the shadow down the outside of the cemetery wall. I run my hand across the smooth bricks, covered in kudzu and yellow jasmines, following it down until the bricks crumble away into the cemetery. Through it, rows of white headstones look like giant teeth along rolling green hills. The hole is big enough for me to squeeze through.

It’s trespassing, and it’s illegal. Three days ago, I would have seen the invisible line, and I would have never crossed it.

But I don’t even hesitate.

I just step through.

All cemeteries are the same. Green, wet, freshly cut, and they always smell like newly upturned earth. I hate that about graveyards. Aren’t they supposed to smell like death? Rot and corpses and bones?

But they never do.

St. Michael’s Cemetery is no different. Near the back of the cemetery, rows of sprinklers run in unison across the lawn. A gravel lane snakes between the green rolling hills like a broad gray river, and a handful of weeping willows scatter the grounds, hunching over old statues of marble angels and mausoleums.

The girl I saw earlier is nowhere to be seen, and I shiver a little at the thought. A part of me didn’t expect to find her, anyway.

From the other side of the gates, echoing like a distant memory, a radio plays “Ever for Always.” I begin down a row of gravestones when my ears perk at the sound of a guitar. At first, I think it’s from the mourners’ radio outside the gates, but the song is too different, and too familiar. The realization hits me so hard I lose my breath.

He’s here.

I duck down behind a gravestone and try to listen for where the sound is coming from. I don’t know where Holly is buried, but then my eyes catch a glow of orange hair in the afternoon sunlight. He sits cross-legged on the ground beside the small unassuming grave, a beat-up acoustic guitar cradled to his chest. Beside him is a vase of fresh pink orchids. There is a bittersweet lilt to his voice as he sings to the headstone. He’s wailing on the song, his fingers plucking passionately at the notes.

I creep closer because he can’t hear me, his entire heart in the song, until her headstone comes into view The name reads, in all caps ‘HOLLY VIRGINIA HUDSON.’

When the song finally fades, his hands fall away and very quietly I say, “’Only the Good Die Young.’ Billy Joel.”

He jerks around to face me, taking off his guitar. The stickers are peeling, the finish dull. No, not his guitar. He plays electric.
Holly’s guitar,
worn and haggard. He narrows his eyes. “
You
.”

I steel myself, feeling for the chip in my pocket. I’m here for one thing, remember. I’m just here to give this to him.

“What are you doing here?” he adds after a moment, but his voice isn’t sharp like I expected. It’s dispassionate, almost. Exhausted.

I was stupid to think I could just waltz in here, hand him the one piece of evidence that’ll catapult him back into the limelight, and walk away. “I...thought you might need someone,” I finally reply lamely. “What are friends for, right?”

“Friends?”

I dart my eyes up to his again, pools of melted emeralds and summer grass, completely unreadable. “I thought....you might need one for a change.”

He doesn’t smile. His face barely moves. It’s as if he can’t now, or that every other smile and every other grin were just masks to hide something much deeper and broken. He turns back to the gravestone, his elbows on his knees. “What good could you do now? Did you like your fifteen minutes on the tabloids? You’re welcome.”

I squat down beside him and reach my hand out to his.

He doesn’t pull away; he just stares at it.

“I know how you feel.” My voice cracks a little as I gather up the courage to say to him what I haven’t been able to admit in a very long time. “My dad took the midnight train too early, too.” But he just shakes his head. Then, a little softer, I add, “So I know it’s hard to visit someone who doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too, but it’s going to be okay. Eventually.”