Going Underground (5 page)

Always Never Lasts Forever

(“Use Somebody”—Kings of Leon. Great name. If I had a band, I'd call it Gravehound. Or maybe Eighteen Inches.)

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to request permission to apply to Mission Heights Community College. I have a felony conviction that occurred when I was fourteen years old, but I am almost eighteen now, and much has changed in my life …

Dear Ann Smith:

I am writing to you in your capacity as Director of Admissions of Blue Sky Community College to request permission to apply. Per your brochure, people with felony convictions may offer an application with permission from you and your board, following a comprehensive letter of explanation …

Dear Dean Johnson:

I would like to request permission to submit an application to West Mountain Community College. Enclosed, please find the required letter of explanation concerning my felony conviction, along with a recommendation statement from my probation officer …

Now, really, how bad do my letters suck?

Go on. You can say it. They totally blow.

If you were a Sir or a Madam or a Director of Admissions or a Dean of Admissions, would you bother to give me a chance?

No.

Really puts weight on that
What's the point?
question.

But Branson has his requirements and his deadlines, and the big clock of the universe is ticking away toward my birthday next August, so I keep writing and getting turned down or ignored. The rest of the time I bust my ass at school, then out here at Rock Hill. And I've been trying hard not to spy on Fairy Girl.

Trying.

Not … always succeeding.

Maybe Rock Hill's not the best place to spend my time, but other than home, Rock Hill is my only place. I learn a lot just by being here. For example, I've learned this: four kinds of people come to cemeteries.

First, obviously, there's the dead kind.

Second, there's people like Harper and me and the funeral home reps and the headstone carvers and setters who work in graveyards for a living. We're supposed to be there. We've got important stuff to do, and respect for the environment we're supposed to do it in, and even though we're sort of wrapped up in a fog of everybody else's sadness, we keep seeing clearly, and we get our jobs done.

Next, you've got the people who are burying loved ones and visiting loved ones and grieving loved ones—like Fairy Girl. They've got important stuff to do, too. They stand or sit, they cross arms and clench fists or touch gravestones, they keep stone faces or cry, and sometimes, they talk with Harper and me when we're digging or covering graves or doing other duties around Rock Hill.

So, dead people, working people, and grieving people aren't really an issue, because we're all supposed to be in the cemetery. It's the fourth kind of people found in graveyards who cause problems. Freaks and weirdos. These are the assholes who graffiti headstones; the jerk-offs who sit in groups with candles and tell ghost stories and leave beer bottles and roaches tossed everywhere; the nut jobs who think graves are special places to make out with their girlfriends; and the morbid goofballs who think they're vampires, or going to find vampires, or just want to think about death and be around death all the time.

Cherie Blankenship, the one and only younger sister of Jonas the pinhead football player who hits Marvin for a hobby, the girl who cannot comprehend simple phrases like
no
or
hell no
or
blow off
, the girl who redefines
oblivion
on a daily basis, has morbid goofball written all over her. When she's out of school, she wears Goth clothes and makeup, but not because she understands the Goth philosophy or feels it or believes it. She thinks all the black looks good. She likes that the trippy makeup upsets her parents and bugs the pinhead. She thinks maybe I'll find her mysterious or irresistible or some shit, so she slathers on the persona and shows up graveside to irritate the hell out of me at least once a week.

“Fifteen'll get you twenty,” Harper tells me like he always does when he sees Vampirella pulling up in her little green hybrid that her parents got her for her birthday.

I grunt like I always do when he says that, then remember the song where the line came from—Jimmy Buffett's “Livingston Saturday Night.” Marvin gave me my entire Buffett collection the week I got home from Juvenile.

Music to chill by
, he called it.

Cherie, who is probably constitutionally incapable of chilling, is actually sixteen and a year behind me in school. She's driving slow on the main road through Rock Hill, and I know she's looking for me.

Great.

It's Wednesday night and Harper's foggy breath smells like beer and the fresh peanut butter Marvin dropped off before he split. We're hollowing out a larger-than-usual grave for an extra-large casket coming from two counties over for a burial Thursday morning. What's left of Harper's six-pack is in the grave behind us, but I never touch the stuff. Drinking would screw my probation big-time, and besides, I have an aversion to drinking anything that smells that much like cow piss. Marvin's at work at Duke's Ridge Mall, which hopefully doesn't smell like cow piss, but you never know. He's selling cookies. (“Great way to meet chicks, you should try it—chocolate, man. Gets 'em every time.…”)

In her travel cage next to the dirt pile, Fred quits playing in her water dish, poofs out her feathers, and makes an ear-splitting smoke-detector screech in Cherie's direction.

Harper runs a sun-spotted, knotty hand through his sweaty gray hair and glares over the edge of the grave we're standing inside, propped on our shovels as Cherie swoops down on our location. He's about an inch shorter than me, so I've got a better view of Cherie's long black skirt and lacey long-sleeved black shirt. She's got her dyed-black hair pulled back and fixed with some kind of chopstick-looking things, and her eye-shadow and lipstick, freshly applied because no black makeup is allowed at school, glisten in the late afternoon sun.

She's not ugly—don't get me wrong on that point. The girl is fine. Some people would consider her beautiful, even in the Halloween getup with all the dangling metal jewelry. It's not that I don't notice her, or care about her a little, even, like a big brother might care about a kid sister. It's just that I don't know her, like I keep trying to tell her, and she doesn't know me.

Because she's not real.

And I'm not real.

I mean, I'm not what she thinks I am, this tortured and dangerous dark prince who can save her from the boredom that hangs around her like a shroud. She doesn't see me. She just sees the character she wants me to play. I can't explain it any better than that. Marvin doesn't quite get it when I try to tell him how I feel about Cherie, but even he thinks she's too far gone from normal to rehabilitate.

“Hello, little birdie,” Cherie says to Fred, who gives her another ear popper of a smoke-detector screech. That's a special noise for Fred. She only makes it when she's scared, in real trouble, or face-to-face with somebody she really despises. Cherie sits down next to Fred's cage, anyway, and Fred plasters her little gray parrot body against the bars, doing her best to snap through the metal and get out to assault Cherie's big black clodhoppers, or maybe tear into all that lace and black cotton.

As usual, Cherie doesn't notice Fred's less than favorable response to her. “So who is this grave for?”

“He's not from around here,” I say, because Harper's scowling too much to talk. He hates digging oversized graves, anyway, and adding Cherie to the equation means he's jabbing his shovel with a lot of extra force.

“Pretty big guy, huh?” Cherie's eyes go wide and bright as she mentally measures the hole we're working on. She knows the drill—and all the usual dimensions. “Wonder if he had a heart attack, or maybe a stroke?” She teases out the ends of her long curly hair with black-tipped nails she has to take on and off, because black nail polish isn't allowed at our school, either. “Obesity is a big risk factor for all kinds of diseases.”

I don't say a word, and neither does Harper. The man we're digging a grave for died in a car wreck, but if we say that, Cherie will want details that will make us both sick.

“How was your day?” she asks me, more or less ignoring Harper, which is fine, because he strains brain muscles ignoring her, too.

“Busy.” I'm smiling, but Cherie's never figured out that's bad. “Had tests in first and second period.”

She blinks her too-thick mascara at me and gives me a little pout. “I didn't see you at lunch today. Again.”

Because I saw you first.
Out loud, my answer is, “Yeah. Marvin and I had stuff to do for Advanced Math.”

“Advanced Math, AP English, Physics—I don't know why you wear yourself out with such hard classes.” She laughs and it sounds real instead of all fakey, at least. “Is it just because Marvin does? It's not like you can go to Notre Dame with him, right? They're way too Catholic for you. My dad says sex offenders can't go to college at all.”

I wish she'd go away. Anywhere but here would be just fine.

“It's your senior year,” she goes on, just like she'd go on even if I told her to shut up. “Have some fun. I plan to party next year, only you won't be there.”

Marvin's a witness, and so is Harper, and so are you. I really have tried being direct with Cherie, in addition to lying to her. Besides what we told her earlier today, I've said I'm not interested, that she's sweet but not my type—all of that. She doesn't care. She says I need friends, especially girl friends (who could turn into girlfriends). So, I revert to the standards.

Got to work.

Have to study.

It's against my probation and I'll go to prison.

Not everybody has that last excuse. Cherie is a special person, to make a guy glad he's got
that
shit hanging over his head.

Fred abandons her plan to eat through her travel cage to destroy Cherie, lowers her parrot head, and buzzes her wings in menacing I-will-obliterate-you fashion.

Cherie asks, “Want to go to the game next Friday?”

I cram my shovel into the deepening grave. “Thanks, but I don't go to games.”

“Why? Are football games against your probation like everything else?”

I go tongue-tied, but Harper steps up for me. “Crowds.” He shrugs and spits, pulls a toothpick out of his dirty shirt pocket, and crams it between his teeth. “Underage kids. And besides, the game would run past his legal curfew.”

This turns down the chatter, and there's nothing but the sound of our digging, the plop of dirt, and the bumblebee buzzing of Fred's wings. The grave's smelling more and more like moldy water and beer. I'm hot from digging despite the cool air, so that makes me want to retch.

Cherie leans back against the grave dirt, then stretches out on it and folds her hands over her belly like she's a vampire princess taking her daytime respite. To the sky, she says, “Are you allowed to be here in the graveyard after curfew? If you're working, I mean?”

“Yes,” I say at the same time Harper says, “No.”

We look at each other, and then go back to digging, fast. I'm allowed to be on school property for designated functions even after curfew, because the judge decided that when my parents sued to get me allowed back in school. I'm also allowed to be at work if Harper's here to supervise me. Harper's trying to protect me from Cherie, and I'm doing my level damnedest to screw it up.

Think fast.

“What Harper means is, I have to get prior approval from Branson, and he'd probably check up on me.”

“Your life is so hard, Del. I don't know how you stand it.”

Harper quits digging, leans his shovel against the grave wall, and gives me a look like he'd offer me a beer if I were twenty-one. I give him a look like, I'd take it if I were overage and Cherie was here and wouldn't go away. He pops a metal top and sucks down about half of the can, then lodges it in the farthest grave wall and goes back to digging.

A few minutes later, as it finally starts getting dark, headlights sweep over Vampirella as she rests atop her grave dirt, driving my parrot beyond the boundaries of sanity.

“My folks are here,” I tell Harper, and he nods that it's okay for me to leave, that he can get the site finished before tomorrow's funeral, especially since my leaving means he'll get rid of Cherie, too.

I think about telling him to go easy on the beer, but it won't do any good, so I don't. I just climb out of the grave on the opposite side from Cherie, slip around and collect Fred, and say, “Bye.”

“Bye, Del.” Cherie gives a dramatic wave. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Not if I see you first.

“Okay.”

I brush off dirt with one hand and carry Fred and her cage in the other. When I get to my parents' car, another hybrid, blue, older than Cherie's, I slip Fred into the backseat before I climb in beside her.

My parents look alike. They're tall and kind of scrawny like me. They both have brown eyes and brown hair like me, though Mom's is a little on the red side. They both wear jeans and Humane Society T-shirts when they're not at work. (They both work in patient accounts at Duke's Ridge Hospital.) Dad's voice is way deeper than Mom's, though, and it's his baritone I hear as I shut the door behind me and the car starts rolling down Rock Hill's main road.

“Dear God. What
is
that girl's damage?”

“Jonas Blankenship is her brother,” I say. “That's enough to make anybody soft in the head.”

“I thought you told her you weren't interested.” Mom adjusts the small blue animal carrier in her lap. She switches on the dome light in the car to check whatever she's got inside it.