We quieted down then, but after the first forty minutes we’d had enough, and left.
“Any more ideas?” I asked Keeno as we settled for a basket of buffalo wings and fries next door. Pamela and Liz were going to sleep over when we got home, but I wanted my big evening in a parentless house to be a bit more memorable than this. Keeno and Mark, I knew, would probably be content just to cruise around in the old Chevy Mark had bought from his dad and had spent so much time and work fixing up.
“What? You want more?” Keeno asked, in mock pain. “All right.” He slammed one palm down flat on the table. “Cemetery Tag.”
“What?” asked Liz.
Mark took the last of the buffalo wings while Keeno looked thoughtful. “Where’s the nearest cemetery?” Keeno asked.
And we were off. Pamela, Liz, and I sat in the backseat, singing a song we’d all sung back in grade school. I mostly recited the words while the others sang:
Did you ever dream when the hearse goes by
That one of these days you’re going to die?
They wrap you up in a long white shirt,
And cover you over with six feet of dirt… .
Keeno seemed not to know it, because he turned around in the passenger seat to watch us, so we put even more drama into our performance:
All goes well for a couple of weeks,
And then your coffin begins to leak… .
At this point Mark remembered the words and joined in the last part:
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout,
The pus runs out, as thick as cream,
And then you’re as green as a lima bean.
And when they get through with you,
There’s nothing left of you
but a mem-o-ry.
“And you guys were complaining about the movie?” Keeno said.
Funny how you can sing the song when you’re in third grade and it’s so unreal, it doesn’t even give you pause.
The traffic had thinned out some since we began the evening, but there were still a lot of cars on Colesville Road. When we stopped for the next light, Keeno yelled suddenly, “First-Grade Fire Drill!”
Mark yanked the emergency brake, and both he and Keeno opened their doors and leaped out at the same time.
“Get out! Get out!” Mark yelled.
“What?” we cried, but—afraid the car was on fire or something—Pamela and I both shoved our doors open and spilled out onto the concrete, Liz behind me.
“Run around the car! Change places!” Keeno yelled, now over on the driver’s side.
I had no idea what was going on, but I tore around the car, Liz at my heels. While Pamela climbed in our side, we climbed in hers, the light changed, and Keeno was at the wheel.
“What was that all about?” I gasped, fumbling for the seat belt.
Mark was laughing. “Haven’t played First-Grade Fire Drill before?” he said. “The driver calls it. And when he does, you all have to change places.”
“We’re out with a couple of wackos,” I told the girls, but two stoplights later, they did it again, and I realized that half the fun was looking at the astonished faces of adults in the cars beside us at the light.
“Okay,” said Mark, after we’d driven fifteen minutes and were halfway to Rockville. He turned off onto a side road. “Here’s one.”
It was a large cemetery with only an iron gate in front, for effect. No fence along the sides. We opened the car doors and piled out.
3
Cemetery Tag
“This is crazy, Keeno,” I told him.
Across the road from the cemetery, cornfields separated the few small houses in the area. There was an almost full moon, and the gravestones stood out white against the dark of the grass. Crickets and katydids chorused off and on as we ambled around.
“Now what?” asked Pamela.
“Here’s the deal,” said Keeno. “You can’t touch a gravestone, can’t step on a grave. And as soon as you’re tagged, you have to howl at the moon so we’ll know who’s It.” He reached out suddenly and slapped Elizabeth’s arm. “Gotcha.”
We scattered in all directions as Liz gave a feeble howl and came after us. We ran into each other making right-angle turns to avoid the graves. When Mark was tagged, he imitated a werewolf’s howl, and we yelped at him to be quieter as we spread out farther still. The cemetery was longer than it was wide and ended far back at a ditch.
Liz, on the track team at school, was better at chasing down the guys than Pamela and I, and could outrun both Mark and Keeno. But when Pamela or I was tagged, the guys made the mistake of hanging around to taunt us, and sometimes we caught them then.
A car drove slowly by on the side road, so we quieted down and took a break, watching as its taillights disappeared out on the highway.
We played for another ten minutes, and then Keeno said, “This is too easy. Let’s have a race. The Tombstone Trot.”
“What were you in your previous life, Keeno? A playground supervisor?” I asked.
“Yeah, they still have recess at St. John’s?” asked Pamela.
“You wanted action, didn’t you?” said Keeno. “Stop your bitchin’. Everybody move back to the ditch.”
We obeyed, and Keeno put us all in a row. He pointed to the gravestones closest to us. “Pick a stone, any stone,” he said, “and when I say go, head back to the entrance, jumping over every tombstone in your path. The one who jumps over the most in the shortest time wins.”
“Wins what?” asked Mark.
“Uh … the ski cap my aunt gave me for Christmas?” Keeno said. We laughed.
If I was going to play this silly game, I’d better choose a short stone, I decided, but of course I couldn’t see all the stones ahead of me. The other kids spread out down the line.
“On your mark, get set … ,” Keeno said. “Go!”
With shrieks and grunts, we each leaped over the gravestone we had chosen and ran to the next. The tombstones, of course, weren’t quite in the neat rows Keeno imagined, and every so often we collided with each other or tried to jump over the same stone.
We went galloping on down the cemetery, where the ground dipped into a slight gulley, and had just started up the slope ahead of us when we saw the beams of two flashlights and, behind the flashlights, two police officers.
“Oh, crap!” Mark said under his breath.
I came to a stop so suddenly, I almost went sprawling, but managed to grasp the large wing of a stone angel.
“Oh, God!” Elizabeth whispered.
“Good evening,” one of the officers said sarcastically, and both men moved forward.
This was the second time in a year that I was involved in something that brought the police, the first being when Pam and Liz and Gwen and Yolanda and I were decorating Lester’s car for Valentine’s Day.
We squinted in the flashlight beams as the officers scanned each of our faces in turn, then the area around us to see who else was there.
“Just the five of you? Anyone missing?” the second officer said.
“Just five,” said Keeno. “And it was my idea.” That put him two points up in my book.
“What exactly was your idea?” asked the policeman.
“Cemetery Tag,” said Keeno.
“Tag?”
“Well, and a race. We were jumping over tombstones to get back to the car.”
It sounded even more stupid than it was.
“Whose car?” the first officer asked, pointing the flashlight toward Mark’s car, then back again.
“Mine,” said Mark.
“Would you open the trunk, please? The rest of you stay where you are.”
I glanced at Keeno. I had no idea what the police were looking for or what they’d find in the trunk.
“What do they suspect we were doing?” I whispered to Pamela.
“Probably drugs. Shhhh,” she said. I glanced at my watch and tried to read the dial. It was about
a quarter of one.
We watched as Mark went over to his car, fished the keys from his pocket, and opened the trunk. The policeman shone the light around inside, moving things, checking under the spare.
“License?” the policeman said.
Mark handed it over. “Want to check inside the car?” he asked the officer.
“We already have,” the policeman said, and motioned Mark back to where the rest of us were standing. “Clean,” he murmured to the other man, and I was double-triple grateful that Brian wasn’t along. I wouldn’t swear to anything in the car if Brian had been in it.
The policemen faced us again, and this time they turned off their flashlights. “We’ve had two episodes of vandalism in this cemetery in the last five months, and the neighbors are pretty watchful. Any of you been here before?”
We told them no.
“We’d just been to a movie and were letting off steam,” Mark said. I was glad Liz didn’t pipe up and tell them we’d also been playing First-Grade Fire Drill. Were we seniors or not?
“Going right home?” they asked us.
“We are now,” I said. “I was due home at one.”
“Okay. Don’t show up here again,” the officer instructed.
We trooped back to the car.
“Oh, man, lucky they didn’t find the crack under the seat,” Keeno murmured after he’d closed the door.
“What?” I cried.
“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” he said.
“Well, don’t!” Liz told him.
Mark turned the car around, and we went back to the main road, heading for Silver Spring.
“Jeez!” Mark said after a minute or two. “They’re right behind us.”
And they were. Mark obeyed every speed limit, every stop sign, every light. When he made a turn, they turned. And when we finally pulled up in front of my house, so did they.
Liz gave a little cry. “I sure hope Mom and Dad aren’t watching out the window,” she said, glancing at the big white house across the street. But all the windows over there were dark. As we got out of the car, however, I saw the front door of my house open, and Lester appeared in the doorway, one arm resting against the frame.
“I’m dead,” I said.
“G’night,” we told the guys.
“Call us if you need bail,” said Pamela.
Mark’s car moved slowly up the street, the cruiser tailing it. I started up the walk to the house.
“It’s after one, Al,” Les said when we reached the porch. “Thirty minutes after, to be exact.”
“I know,” I told him.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I thought maybe you’d be asleep.”
“You know better than this. What have you been doing?” he asked.
“You’re worse than Dad!” I said.
“Why the police escort?”
“You’re not going to believe this, Lester,” Pamela told him, “but we were playing tag.”
“In a cemetery,” added Liz.
“Playing tag in a cemetery and the police brought you home? What, you have all your clothes off or something?”
“Don’t you wish!” said Pamela, who’s always had a crush on Les, but he ignored her.
“It was just another one of Keeno’s crazy ideas,” I told him. “We couldn’t get in the movie we wanted to see, the movie we did see was awful, Keeno tried to think of something to salvage the evening, and Mark drove us to a cemetery to play tag. You jump over tombstones and stuff. That’s when the police showed up because they’d had some vandalism there.”
“So what happened?” asked Les. I don’t think he believed us.
“They gave us the third degree and searched Mark’s car, I don’t know why.”
“Probably looking for shovels and crowbars,” Lester said. “Nice of them to see that you got home safely. I should have gone out and thanked them.”
“Lester, listen to you! You’ve metamorphosed into Dad!” I cried. Was this really my brother—the guy who had given a girl a fur bikini last Christmas? I almost said that out loud, but caught myself in time. If I gave away his secrets, I’d never find out any more.
“Anyway, you’re home, and I’m going back upstairs,” Les said. “And, Al, I’d like to get up early tomorrow and go hiking with a couple guys. Could you please not do anything that’ll involve the police for a few hours on Sunday morning?”
“Am I allowed to go to Mass?” Liz joked.
“Am I allowed to stay home?” asked Pamela.
“Am I allowed to sleep in?” I added in a whiny voice.
Les gave us a half smile. “Sleep tight,” he said. “If the cops come back for any reason at all, you guys are toast.”
I gave him a military salute and he went upstairs.
We took over the family room, spreading our sleeping bags into one giant mattress. Sylvia had put a large wrought-iron candelabra in the fireplace opening for the summer, so I lit all thirteen candles. The slight draft that came down the chimney, even with the flue closed, kept them flickering.
We rehashed the evening, and it was even funnier in the telling. But then they asked about Patrick.
“Have you called him yet?” Pamela asked.
“Yep. He knows I’m coming.”
“Overnight?” asked Liz.
“Yes.”
“And … ?”
“He said he’d work something out.”
Pamela settled back in a chair as though she were about to enjoy a delicious dessert. “O-kay!” she said. “That probably means he’ll get rid of his roommate.”
“How? Just ask him to leave?”
Pamela shrugged. “Ask him to go sleep somewhere else, probably.”
“For the whole night?”
“Patrick would do the same for him, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe the roommate could just stay and pull the covers up over his head,” said Liz.
We stared at her.
“That’s what girls do sometimes, I heard. If your roommate brings a guy in after you’ve gone to bed and you hear them making out, you’re supposed to pull the covers over your head.”
“Liz, you can be my roommate any time!” Pamela said, laughing.
“I can’t even imagine doing it with someone else in the room,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t tell him I was coming to sleep with him. I just said visit.”
“Yeah, like maybe you wanted to apply for admission?” said Liz.
“No. Like I just wanted to see my boyfriend.”
“You’ve already seen him, Alice! You’ve been looking at him since sixth grade,” said Pamela. Then she grew quiet all of a sudden and slowly examined one fingernail. “Just don’t forget to use protection. I don’t ever want you guys to go through what I did last spring.”
“What’s a girl supposed to do? Carry a condom around in her purse? Like she carries tampons, just in case?” Liz asked.
“Technically, the guy’s supposed to do it,” I said.
“Technically, the guy’s not the one who gets pregnant,” said Pamela. “My motto is: Be prepared.”
Liz leaned back and closed her eyes. “I almost wish we were in sixth grade again. Life seemed so much simpler then.”
“Yeah, no makeup to worry about,” said Pamela.
“No periods,” said Liz.
“No breasts,” I added.
My cell phone rang, and I answered. It was Mark.
“What happened?” I asked him. “Did the police follow you home?”
“Yeah. I figured that when Keeno got out and climbed in his car, they’d follow, but they drove off after that,” Mark said. “Guess they figured we weren’t vandals after all. You get any grief?”
“Not much. Lester’s here for the weekend, and he’s playing daddy. Thanks anyway for driving tonight,” I told him.
“See you around,” said Mark.
After the girls went home on Sunday, I realized just how lucky I was that Dad and Sylvia weren’t here to see the police escort.
Les could always squeal on me, of course, but I didn’t think he would. Still, I had to be really careful. I had to be completely mature and reliable between now and July eleventh. If there was any hint that I couldn’t be responsible, Dad would veto my overnight with Patrick.
I straightened up the family room, picked up the pages of the Sunday paper, baked some cookies, and made a cold salad of tomatoes, onion, macaroni, and hard-boiled eggs. I picked some flowers and made an arrangement for the coffee table. I watered the azalea bushes at the side of the house, did the laundry, and drove Les back to his apartment in Takoma Park. I had just made a pitcher of iced tea when Dad and Sylvia came home about seven.
“Oh, the place looks beautiful, and you even made a bouquet, Alice! What a nice welcome!” Sylvia said.
Dad beamed and gave me a hug.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked.
“The best!” said Sylvia. “The play closes next week, so we were lucky to get tickets. How did things go here?”
“Fine,” I said. “Les and I ate together on Friday and just spent the evening talking and hanging out. His car was in the shop—George brought him over, so I drove him home a little while ago.” They didn’t ask about Saturday night, so I didn’t tell.
“Well, it’s good to know that Sylvia and I can get away now and then and that everything’s under control back here at the house,” said Dad.
“Totally,” I said.
“We went to the Metropolitan Museum; we took a Circle Line cruise,” Sylvia went on. “I can’t believe we squeezed so much into one weekend, but we had such good weather. The last time we were in Central Park, everyone was riding bikes or scooters. Now, it seems, everyone’s on Rollerblades.”
“You both certainly look relaxed,” I told them.
“Next stop, Chicago!” Dad said. “I’m feeling very good about the fellow Carol’s going to marry.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said, and wanted to change the subject as soon as possible. I didn’t want any more talk about Chicago and my visiting Patrick until we were there and it seemed like a done deal, too late for Dad to change his mind. “There’s a pasta salad in the fridge,” I said, “and I made some cookies.”
“Perfect,” said Sylvia, and wandered out to the kitchen.