She moved my hands off her and turned her face to mine. She leaned in and kissed me, her tongue searching out mine. When she pulled back, she said, “I can’t. I hate him, but 1 love him, too. He seems to, I don’t know, understand me, maybe. We’re on the same wavelength, you know? As much as he annoys me, I love him. He should have been loved, you know. He never got that. Not how everyone deserves.”
“Just give him up,” I said.
Gracie wrinkled her nose. She stood and paced to her doorway, opened the door, said, “I think you should go now. My parents will be home soon.”
I craned my neck to glance out the window, but her voice cracked like a whip.
“Leave, Adam.”
I shrugged into my coat and elbowed past her.
“You don’t deserve him,” I said on my way out.
I walked home through wind, and soon rain started up. It landed on my face cold and trickled down my cheeks into my collar. Jamie hadn’t been outside when I left Gracie’s house, and I began to suspect she’d been making him up, like the rest of them, to make me jealous. Bitch, I thought. I thought she was different.
At home I walked in through the kitchen, and my mother was waiting by the doorway. She said, “Where have you been? Two nights in a row. You’re acting all secretive. Where have you been, Adam?”
Lucy sat at the dinner table, smoking a cigarette. When I looked at her, she looked away. Smoke curled up into the lamp above her.
“What is this?” I said. “An inquisition?”
“We’re just worried, is all,” said my mother.
“Don’t worry.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Your mother loves you very much,” said Lucy.
“Stay out of this, paralyzer.”
Both of them gasped.
“Adam!” My mother sounded shocked. “That’s not nice. You know Lucy didn’t mean that to happen. Apologize right now.”
I mumbled an apology.
My mother started wheeling around the kitchen. She reached up to cupboards and pulled out cans of tomatoes and kidney beans. She opened the freezer and pulled out ground beef. “Chili,” she said, just that. “It’s chilly outside, so you need some warm chili for your stomach. Chili will warm you up.” She sounded like a commercial.
Then she started in again. “My miracle child,” she said, pretending to talk to herself. “My baby boy, my gift. Did you know, Lucy, that Adam was born premature, with underdeveloped lungs and a murmur in his heart?”
“No, dear,” said Lucy. “How terrible!”
“He was a fighter, though,” said my mother. “He always fought. He wanted to live so much. Oh, Adam,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been? Your running coach said you’ve been missing practice a lot.”
“I haven’t been anywhere,” I said. “Give it a rest.”
“It’s everything happening at once, isn’t it?” Lucy asked. “Poor kid. You should send him to see Dr Phelps, Linda. Stuff like what happened to the Marks boy is hard on kids.”
“That’s an idea,” said my mother.
“Would you stop talking about me in front of me?” I said. “God, you two are ridiculous. You don’t have a God-damned clue about anything.”
My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the racket?”
I said, “Why don’t you just go kill someone!” and ran outside again.
At first I didn’t know where I was going, but by the time I reached the edge of the woods, I figured it out. The rain still fell steadily, and the wind crooned through the branches of trees. Leaves shook and fell around me. It was dusk, and I pushed my way through the brambles and roots back to the old railroad tracks.
His breath was on my neck before I even reached the spot, though. I knew he was behind me before he even said a thing. I felt his breath on my neck, and then he placed his arms around my stomach, just like I had with Gracie. “Keep going,” he said. And I did. He held onto me, and I carried him on my back all the way to the place where Gracie had found him.
That section of the railroad had been marked out in yellow police tape. But something was wrong. Something didn’t match up with what I expected. The railroad ties — they hadn’t been pulled up. And the hole where Jamie had been buried — it was there all right, but next to the railroad tracks. He’d never been under those railroad tracks, I realized. Something dropped in my stomach. A pang of disappointment.
Stories change. They change too easily and too often.
“What are you waiting for?” Jamie asked, sliding off my back. I stood at the edge of the hole and he said, “Go on. Try it on.”
I turned around and there he was, naked, with mud smudged on his pale white skin. His hair was all messed up, and one lens of his glasses was shattered. He smiled. His teeth were filled with grit.
I stepped backward into the hole. It wasn’t very deep, not like Lola Peterson’s grave in the cemetery. Just a few feet down. I stood at eye level with Jamie’s crotch. He reached down and touched himself.
“Take off your clothes,” he told me.
I took them off.
“Lay down,” he told me.
I lay down.
He climbed in on top of me, and he was so cold, so cold. He said there was room for two of us in here and that I should call him Moony.
I said, “I never liked that name.”
He said, “Neither did I.”
“Then I won’t call you that.”
“Thank you,” he said, and hugged me. I let him. He said she never let him hug her. She didn’t understand him. I told him I knew. She was being selfish.
I said, “Don’t worry. I’ve found you now. You don’t have to worry. I understand. I found you.”
“I found you” he said. “Remember?”
“Let’s not argue,” I said.
He rested his cheek against my chest, and the rain washed over us. After a while I heard voices, faraway but growing closer. I stood up and saw the swathes of light from their flashlights getting bigger. My dad and Andy and Lucy. All of them moved toward me. I imagined my mother wheeling in worried circles back in the kitchen.
“Adam!” my father shouted through the rain.
I didn’t move. Not even when they came right up to me, their faces white and pale as Jamie’s dead body. Andy said, “I told you he’d be here. The little freak.”
Lucy said, “My Lord, your poor mother,” and her hand flew to her mouth.
My father said, “Adam, come out of there. Come out of that place right now.”
He held his hand out to me, curling his fingers for me to take it.
“Come on, boy,” he said. “Get on out of there now.” He flexed his fingers for emphasis.
I grabbed hold of his hand, and he hauled me out onto the gravel around the hole and I lay there, naked, like a newborn. They stood around me, staring. My father took off his coat and put it on me. He told me to come on, to just come on back to the house. He put his arm around me, and we started walking down the tracks.
I decided right then that’s I wasn’t a freak, not really. I took my father’s hand, sure, but not because of anything remotely like defeat. I hadn’t “come to my senses”. I hadn’t “realized I needed help.” I took it to make them feel better about themselves and to get them off my back.
What I was thinking as they walked me home was: You silly people, I’m already finished. I’m already dead and gone. All you have is some mess of a zombie shambling through your kitchens and your living rooms, turning on your showers and kissing you goodnight. All you have is a dead boy, only it’s hard to tell, because I won’t rot. I’ll be like one of those bodies that people in South America pry out of old coffins, the ones whose hair and fingernails continue to grow in death. The ones who smell of rose petals, whose skin remains smooth and lily white. They call those corpses saints, but I won’t aspire to anything so heavenly. I’ll wash the dishes and do my homework and wheel my mother around in her chair. I’ll do all of these things, and no one will notice that there’s no light behind my eyes and no heat in my step. They’ll clothe me and feed me and tell me what good grades I get. They’ll give me things to make me happy, when all I’ll be wanting is a cold grave to step into. I’ll grow up and go to college, marry a beautiful woman and have three kids. I’ll make a lot of money and age gracefully, no pot belly. I’ll look youthful when I’m fifty-eight.