10. The dead will take whatever you give them.
11. The dead will take whatever they want, even if you don’t give them permission.
12. When you run a lot, you don’t get into trouble because you’re always in motion. And if you’re fast enough, when you do fuck up, no one can catch you.
After the last bell rang, I walked to my locker, pulled out my jacket and left. Outside Andy was already in his car, music pounding. I got in but we didn’t look at each other, as usual. I concentrated on breathing instead. Ice, rock, air, breathe, I told myself. Ice, rock, air, breathe.
The next thing I knew we were pulling into our driveway and after he turned the car off I opened my door, threw my backpack on the ground and ran toward him as he climbed out his side. I flung myself at him like a wrestler and then it was the two of us in a tangle of limbs, bloody lips blooming, voices rising higher and higher: “You motherfucker, you motherfucker! You told everyone! How could you? I’m your brother! I hate you! I hate you!”
Then my mother shouting from the front door, “Stop it! You boys stop fighting this instant!”
Behind my mother, Lucy appeared. “Boys! Boys!” she shouted. “I’m calling the police! I’m calling the police on the both of you this very instant!” She actually shook her index finger at us and her plastic bracelets rattled against each other.
Andy was on top of me, pounding my face in, spitting, “I’m going to kill you, you fucking faggot. I’m going to fucking kill you!”
My mother wheeled down her ramp, her face full of fury. I kneed Andy in the crotch and his eyes twisted inward. “Fuck you, Frances!” I shouted. “How you like that?”
My mother shrieked, “Do not dishonor your grandfather’s name, you little sons of bitches!”
Then my dad pulled into the driveway behind us, home from a long shift at the construction site. Andy and I got a few more punches in, and then my father was in the mix with both of us. He pulled Andy off and said, “That’s the end! That’s it! Finito!”
“Adam started it!” Andy yelled. “He came at me out of nowhere!”
I lay on the ground, burning. Inside me a dead language roiled like molten lava. If I opened my mouth, the dead language would wipe this house, these people, their shadows, right out of existence.
My father said, “Is that true, Adam? Did you start this?” He kept his eyes on Andy. I waited to see if he’d look at me, but he didn’t.
“Answer your father right this minute,” said my mother.
A group of crows landed in the field across the road, their heads cocked, cawing curses, staring greedily, like I was their next meal.
I pulled myself up, my face dripping with blood, speckled with bits of gravel. They have two days, I was thinking. Maybe three. In a week, I thought, Thanksgiving will be here. But not me.
“That’s right, little one,” said Lucy’s shadow. “Go ahead and say what you’re thinking. You know you want to.”
But I didn’t. I decided words were no longer necessary with these people. I turned away, ran past my mother and into the house, where I locked myself in my bedroom.
Jamie was on my bed. He sat up and said, “Are you ready?”
I nodded. “But we have to wait until they’re not paying attention.”
“They never pay me attention,” said Jamie.
“They’ll wish they had now,” I said.
“Why are you angry, Adam?”
“Don’t go sounding like fucking Dr. Phelps,” I shouted.
A tear collected in the corner of his eye, trembled, then evaporated before it could even leave a watery trail behind.
I looked down and said I was sorry. “It’s not you. It’s them. Me and you are okay. Okay?” I went over to sit beside him. “Hey,” I said. “Everything is going to be all right. I just have to get out of here somehow for that to happen.”
He turned to face me. I held my hands in front of me, between my knees, and stared at him.
“You’re right,” he said. “You have to get out. And I know a place you can go.”
“Where?”
“The Wilkinson farm. Frances will let us stay there for a while.”
“Frances?” I said.
“Yeah. You know. Frances.”
“You mean Fuck You Frances?”
“Yeah,” said Jamie. “She’ll put us up, no problem. It’ll be perfect.”
“Perfect,” I repeated, spitting the word into my cupped hands, where it rolled around like a marble. Going nowhere fast. Going nowhere at all.
DEAD IS DEAD IS DEAD
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, WHILE I WAITED FOR JAMIE to return from the Wilkinson farm, I went to school like everything was normal. Now I rode on the bus, though, instead of with my brother. My father had declared us off limits to each other, which was fine by me, although I’m sure it annoyed Andy that he couldn’t torture me one-on-one any longer. Not that he needed me to be around in order to torture me. He’d managed to do a good job of that in my absence.
The one difference between that first day back and the next ones, though, was that things weren’t as difficult. Word spread fast that I’d slammed Matt Hardin’s head into a locker until the coach pulled me off him, and also the school bus had passed our house while Andy and I were beating the hell out of each other in our driveway. Now when I looked at people who’d been saying things about me the day before, I could see their bones turn to jelly inside them.
Gracie still hadn’t come back to school and because everyone was afraid of me I couldn’t ask anyone what happened to her. I finally asked the principal’s secretary if she was sick, and the secretary told me she no longer attended. She’d been pulled out by her parents.
When the bus dropped me off at home later, I went straight to my room and dialed her number. Only this time I didn’t hang up. I had questions to ask. Gracie was an expert on all things local, so once we got past the initial: “Hey, it’s me. Adam.”
And her: “Hey. What’s up?” Very noncommittal.
Once we got past all that awkward starting-to-talk-again phase, I asked her the question that had been nagging me since Jamie said we’d be staying with Fuck You Frances.
“Do you know anything about her?”
“You mean Frances Wilkinson?”
“Yeah. What do you know?”
“The same thing everyone knows. Is this why you called, Adam? To find out about a ghost?”
“No. I was just curious.”
“I know the story, sure. You’ve really never heard it?”
“Never,” I said. That was a lie, but I wanted to get as much information as possible, and also I wanted to hear Gracie talk. I liked listening to the crazy stuff she’d say without thinking. I wished I could talk like that, but I wasn’t good at it. “I guess I’m out of the loop,” I said as an excuse.
“You’re always out of the loop,” said Gracie. “You’re in outer space most of the time. But that’s okay. I like that. Anyway. Here’s what I know. So listen up.
“There was this girl named Frances Wilkinson, and like most kids she lived with her parents. This was sometime around the 1930s or ’40s, I think, and Frances was thirteen or fourteen when all of this happened.
“The Wilkinsons lived in that gray clapboard house on the hill that slopes down into Marrow’s Ravine. I don’t think anyone’s lived there for at least twenty or thirty years now, but people say they’ve sometimes seen a little girl go past the front window as they drive by.”
“Spooky,” I said, and Gracie said:
“Wait. It gets better. Next to the house, the Wilkinsons had a family cemetery. It’s still there even now. There are five headstones: one for the mother, two for her stillborn babies, one for Frances’s father, and then the one for Frances herself. There used to be a wrought-iron fence around the place, but it’s mostly falling down now.
“From what I’ve heard, Frances Wilkinson was crazy. They say you could see that in her even as a child. She frowned a lot and wouldn’t try to be friend
s with anyone at school, and was constantly trying to run away. And when they’d find her and bring her back home again, she’d look even worse than when she’d left.
“I found some pictures of her once. You know, all those old newspapers they keep in the library. She didn’t look much like her parents, that’s for sure. Mr. Wilkinson was tall with a beard and mustache. Mrs. Wilkinson wore these floral print dresses, and in the two pictures I saw, she’s wearing an apron, hands folded at her waist. In the same pictures Frances is frowning, her face turned down but her eyes turned up to stare at the camera. She looks kind of devil-child freaky, really. She has the same dress on in both pictures too, a copy of her mother’s, but tied at the waist with a sash instead of an apron. They weren’t well-off, you can tell, but apparently they were hard workers and attended church every Sunday. They look like any family from back then, really, just even more country. So when Frances suddenly murdered her parents, everyone around here was super freaked out.
“Supposedly she used her mother’s butcher knife. First she did in her father while he slept, then her mother while she was taking a bath. Then she stabbed herself in the stomach on the front porch.
“This was on a Sunday before church started, and later that day their pastor drove out to find out why they hadn’t been to services that morning. A massacre, he reported. And the whole town couldn’t believe it. Just like nowadays. Something bad happens and there’s a collective gasp. I don’t know why people here are like that, always trying to pretend like they don’t know bad shit happens in the world.
“I heard about Frances one Halloween from a friend of my dad’s, but he didn’t have details so I went to the library and looked her up on my own. Then I started to get it, how some people are just crazy, you know. Why even now people know her story and why my mom always shakes her head when we pass by that rotten shack with the family cemetery next to it. I started to get why people still go out there.
“What’s supposed to happen when you go there is, you gather around Frances’s grave and all in time together call out, Fuck you, Frances! Fuck you, Frances! Fuck you, Frances! to call her up. Afterward nothing will seem too different, but when you try to leave you’ll feel a strange force keeping you. When you turn back around she’ll be there, wearing her raggedy dress and tattered shoes. Her face is dirty from the grave and her red hair blows around like Medusa snakes. And her eyes. Her eyes will be pinched, half-shut, like she’s judging you. She forces you to lower your head then, while she spits on you for defiling her grave. And it’s only after she’s finished that she finally lets you leave the place.”
Gracie took a deep breath after she finished. “That’s about it,” she said. “I’ve touched it up a little.”
“Of course,” I said, very civilized, even though her way of telling it was a trademark flourish, like the curly letters she used to spell her name on Jamie’s grave. I asked her my other question after a moment of silence where it felt like we were both thinking about everything Gracie had said. “Hey,” I said. “Are you still angry at me?”
Gracie snorted. “I’m not mad at you, Adam. God, you are so spastic! Get a grip. Better yet, come over. I don’t like talking on the phone.”
“Why?”
“I think my parents bugged the line.”
“Why would they bug the line?”
“Because they don’t trust me. They’re homeschooling me now, you know. I won’t ever be in school again. They blame my finding Jamie’s body on the dangers of public school systems.”
“What does public school have to do with it?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t say they made sense.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah,” said Gracie. Then, “So what are you doing right now?”
I was on my bed looking at the ceiling, turning Gracie’s rose quartz heart over and over in my hand, imagining Gracie doing the same thing, turning a rock end over end with her fingers. I didn’t tell her I had her heart-shaped rock. I said I was at my computer playing Solitaire.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. A lull crashed into our conversation for a while and the phone grew hot against my ear. Finally Gracie sighed and said, “Are you coming over or what?”
“Sure,” I said, and left straightaway, slipping out while my mother and Lucy watched TV, pedaling the six miles on my ten-speed as fast as I could go.
When I got to the Highsmith house, I leaned my bike against the maple tree out front and before I even knocked Gracie opened the front door, took my hand and led me up to her bedroom. Her parents weren’t home again, and before we said anything she was on the white quilted bed, motioning for me to follow.
Then we were kissing, my bruised lips meeting her chapped ones, her hands slipping under my shirt. I shivered when her fingers touched my stomach and she flicked her tongue in my mouth like a snake. She rolled me over on my back, got on top of me and started to unzip her pants. She was already rocking, but I said, “Wait.” She made a puzzled face, eyes scrunched up like she was going to say she didn’t wait for anyone. She stopped, though, and I said, “Let me do that.”
She smiled when I took the tab of her zipper and pulled down on it like we were in a movie. I rolled her off me and onto her back, grabbed her jeans at the cuffs and pulled while she pushed them down at the waist. I was thinking, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. But in a good way. I hoped I was doing everything right.
Once her pants were off, she started to pull my shirt over my head. I got lost in the neck but she tugged and it slipped over my head like a magic trick. Then we were like a centaur and a mermaid: half of our bodies bare, the other half covered.
“Do you have a condom?” she asked.
“A condom?” I said. “Why would I have a condom?”
She made a face like I was stupid. “So I don’t get pregnant, stupid.”
“Pregnant!” I said. “Come on! I don’t have a condom!”
“Well, then,” she said. “We’ll just have to keep this strictly no penetration.”
I thought about this for a moment. I wasn’t sure if I knew what she meant, but I said, “Sure. That’ll be great.”
She smelled like sunflowers. I didn’t actually know what sunflowers smelled like, but she smelled like that word.
If Gracie was nervous, I couldn’t tell. I mean, I’d never been touched like this by anyone, but she seemed to know what she was doing. She worked briskly, and I thought maybe she was doing everything without hesitation because she was used to seeing scenes like this in movies and books, used to hearing about it from other kids at school maybe. Whatever the reason, she knew how to touch me like she knew how to talk to me: without making things weird.
She unbuttoned my pants and unzipped them like I’d unzipped hers. Then it was my turn to shimmy out of my jeans while she pulled them the rest of the way off. She lifted her shirt over her head and she wasn’t wearing a bra, so her breasts were right there suddenly. I sat in my boxers with my penis pressed tight against the front. Gracie pulled those off too. “Pretty,” she said, lowering her head toward it. “You have a pretty penis, Adam,” she said.
I didn’t really know how to answer, so I said thanks and that her breasts looked really creamy.
“Creamy?” she said, giggling.
“Yeah. Creamy. Like white chocolate.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. Then her mouth covered my penis, hot and wet. My breath shuddered in my throat as her lips went down, down, down the length of it and suddenly I couldn’t feel the rest of my body. I was dick. Just dick. Everything else disappeared.
“Oh my God,” I said, but it came out a whisper. I said it a few more times over the next few minutes. My eyes rolled back and I watched the blades of the ceiling fan standing still above us and then there was this blinding, bright light for a second, then my body returned, quivering like a plucked harp string.
Gracie pulled a tissue from a box on her nightstand and spit into it. After throwing the tissue in the wastebasket, she said,
“God has nothing to do with it.”
She stretched out next to me, curling into my side. I could tell it was my turn to do something, so I reached down and slipped my finger inside her. She moaned a little, closing her eyes while I searched around. She was wet and warm, her hair soft and brown. After a while she opened her eyes and said, “Will you kiss me?”
I said, “Sure, I’ll kiss you!” and leaned in to kiss her while I touched her down there.
After we finished kissing she said, “That’s sweet, Adam, but will you kiss me down there?”
I was stunned. Even though she’d done that for me, it hadn’t occurred to me to do it back. But it didn’t seem like it’d be a big deal so I said, “Yeah! Sure, I’ll kiss you down there!”
So I moved down the length of her body until I reached the place. Closing my eyes, I slipped my tongue inside a little and her back arched. She moaned a bit too and that made me hard all over again. Just a sound from her and I was ready.
I pressed my face closer, searching with the tip of my tongue, the flat of it, flicking and pressing like I’d heard you were supposed to do. And after a while of this, she shuddered like I had, quivering until it was all done and over. When she settled, she released a long breath and said, “Come up here and hug me.”
We stayed in bed for a while, listening to our breathing, not sure of what we’d done or if we should have done it, but also it wasn’t like we had done everything possible so I didn’t feel all that worried. I was thinking about the word sunflower and how it had to smell like sunflowers, like Gracie, because that word kept coming into my head. Not the sound of the word but the image, the word itself: sunflower. I saw the rocks lining the shelves of Gracie’s room and remembered the pink quartz heart I’d stolen. I decided I should give it back, but not right away. I’d wait and see how things developed. There were plenty of other things I could collect without stealing. Words even. Those would be good. No one else wanted them, so I’d collect them. My first word would be ad infinitum, I decided. And my second would be sunflower.