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.