The Sound of Us

  Ya’aburnee isn’t the act of burying someone. It’s the empty chair at dinner. It’s when everyone forgets to turn off the freezer light at the bar because Dad always did. It’s checking pants for suspenders even though no one in the house wears them anymore.

  Red suspenders—I remember. Red suspenders like the ones Roman wears.

  Boaz seems to be lost in a memory of his own. He scratches the dark five o’clock shadow on his cheek, and sighs. “Pretty word, right?”

  “Yeah,” I reply softly.

  “She raged about words like that—hell, I don’t even remember half of ‘em. She was the bright bulb in the pack, even after I joined ‘em.”

  I incline my head towards him. It’s easy to forget that Boaz was a latecomer in Roman Holiday. “How did you join them?”

  “I actually—and check it, true story—met them at this luncheon thing for terminal kids. Was hired to play on their baby grand for a few hours for a mouthful of shitty shrimp balls. Bad food for cancer kids, lemme tell you. There was only one bathroom and I had to piss from all the energy drinks I downed right before the gig. So, I knocked to see the hold-up, and it was Hols. Her time of the month came around early and she didn’t have a supply of torpedoes.”

  I’m not sure what’s more shocking, the fact that Boaz just called tampons torpedoes, or that he was ballsy enough to cut in line. Last time I tried, a woman almost shanked me with her stiletto. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. And guess who saved the day? Yeah, that’s right. Yours truly. Got her stoppers and personally delivered ‘em. Crisis averted.” I can’t help but imagine Boaz picking out tampons in the feminine hygiene section of a grocery store. “Next thing I know, I’m playin’ in a pop rock band.”

  I shake my head. “How come these things always start with unmentionables?”

  Boaz grins then and elbows me in the side. “Because, bro-ho, those are always the best stories.”

  Suddenly, an arm slings around my shoulder. Maggie leans over me, vibrating with excitement. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here! I can’t belie—” Her words clog in her throat the second her eyes land on Boaz. “Oh, holy hot sticks, Boaz Alexander? You’re Boaz Alexander? Junie, is that Boaz Alexander?”

  “Maggie,” I introduce, “this is Boaz. Boaz, this is Maggie, my best friend.”

  Un-slinging her arm from around my neck, she pulls her dreads over one shoulder and inclines an eyebrow kind of seductively. “Why, hello.”

  Boaz slides up beside her. “Hey hey, good lookin’.”

  I’ve never seen Maggie melt so fast in my entire life. “Marry me?”

  He wiggles his eyebrows.

  Great. Two of the same species in a one-mile radius. This has to be a natural disaster. I roll my eyes. “Where’s Roman?”

  “No idea,” Boaz supplies, not taking his eyes off of Maggie. She blushes under his gaze.

  “Well...he’ll totes show up, right?” Maggie adds absently.

  “Or not,” I mutter under my breath.

  A hushed sound tickles my ear. I swat it away. One thing about South Carolina, it has the biggest fucking monster gnats known to mankind. So big they eat mice for breakfast.

  But then I hear it again—a soft crinkling sound like footsteps. I glance behind me to the patch of woods beside the cemetery wall, but there’s nothing there. No, wait. The fabric of a dress, the heel of a foot. I retreat a few steps away from Boaz and Maggie to see down the long cement wall against the woods.

  “Something up?” Maggie looks in the direction, too, but she doesn’t see anything. “Raccoon?”

  “I—uh—no, it was nothing.” Because I swear there was someone walking along the wall just a few seconds ago, her hand brushing along the bricks. “Hold my purse.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an idea...if something happens, we go to Plan B.”

  “Plan B,” she deadpans, pulling my purse over her shoulder.

  Plan B was invented by our desperate ninth grade selves. It was juvenile. It was simple. And, thank God, we’ve never had to attempt it. I hope we don’t have to today. “Good luck,” Maggie tells me with a quick hug.

  Turning toward the woods, I curiously—and maybe morbidly—pursue the shadow down the outside of the cemetery wall. I run my hand across the smooth bricks, covered in kudzu and yellow jasmines, following it down until the bricks crumble away into the cemetery. Through it, rows of white headstones look like giant teeth along rolling green hills. The hole is big enough for me to squeeze through.

  It’s trespassing, and it’s illegal. Three days ago, I would have seen the invisible line, and I would have never crossed it.

  But I don’t even hesitate.

  I just step through.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  All cemeteries are the same. Green, wet, freshly cut, and they always smell like newly upturned earth. I hate that about graveyards. Aren’t they supposed to smell like death? Rot and corpses and bones?

  But they never do.

  St. Michael’s Cemetery is no different. Near the back of the cemetery, rows of sprinklers run in unison across the lawn. A gravel lane snakes between the green rolling hills like a broad gray river, and a handful of weeping willows scatter the grounds, hunching over old statues of marble angels and mausoleums.

  The girl I saw earlier is nowhere to be seen, and I shiver a little at the thought. A part of me didn’t expect to find her, anyway.

  From the other side of the gates, echoing like a distant memory, a radio plays “Ever for Always.” I begin down a row of gravestones when my ears perk at the sound of a guitar. At first, I think it’s from the mourners’ radio outside the gates, but the song is too different, and too familiar. The realization hits me so hard I lose my breath.

  He’s here.

  I duck down behind a gravestone and try to listen for where the sound is coming from. I don’t know where Holly is buried, but then my eyes catch a glow of orange hair in the afternoon sunlight. He sits cross-legged on the ground beside the small unassuming grave, a beat-up acoustic guitar cradled to his chest. Beside him is a vase of fresh pink orchids. There is a bittersweet lilt to his voice as he sings to the headstone. He’s wailing on the song, his fingers plucking passionately at the notes.

  I creep closer because he can’t hear me, his entire heart in the song, until her headstone comes into view The name reads, in all caps ‘HOLLY VIRGINIA HUDSON.’

  When the song finally fades, his hands fall away and very quietly I say, “’Only the Good Die Young.’ Billy Joel.”

  He jerks around to face me, taking off his guitar. The stickers are peeling, the finish dull. No, not his guitar. He plays electric. Holly’s guitar, worn and haggard. He narrows his eyes. “You.”

  I steel myself, feeling for the chip in my pocket. I’m here for one thing, remember. I’m just here to give this to him.

  “What are you doing here?” he adds after a moment, but his voice isn’t sharp like I expected. It’s dispassionate, almost. Exhausted.

  I was stupid to think I could just waltz in here, hand him the one piece of evidence that’ll catapult him back into the limelight, and walk away. “I...thought you might need someone,” I finally reply lamely. “What are friends for, right?”

  “Friends?”

  I dart my eyes up to his again, pools of melted emeralds and summer grass, completely unreadable. “I thought....you might need one for a change.”

  He doesn’t smile. His face barely moves. It’s as if he can’t now, or that every other smile and every other grin were just masks to hide something much deeper and broken. He turns back to the gravestone, his elbows on his knees. “What good could you do now? Did you like your fifteen minutes on the tabloids? You’re welcome.”

  I squat down beside him and reach my hand out to his.

  He doesn’t pull away; he just stares at it.

  “I know how you feel.” My voice cracks a little as I gather up the courage to say to him what I haven’t been able to admit in a
very long time. “My dad took the midnight train too early, too.” But he just shakes his head. Then, a little softer, I add, “So I know it’s hard to visit someone who doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too, but it’s going to be okay. Eventually.”

  “Eventually.” He bites his bottom lip and lowers his head, and it’s almost instinctive when I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him into a hug. His face dips into my shoulder and he cries. I hold him, fingering through his orange hair soothingly, letting his tears dampen my shirt. There are no words I could say to make him feel any better, or any fuller, with that sort of emptiness aching inside of him. I have that hole, too. I can pinpoint it, mark it with an arrow, draw dashes to it on a treasure map because it is so familiar to me, like a old, deep scar.

  “Thank you,” he whispers into my hair, even though I did nothing to deserve it.

  It’s not your fault, I want to say, just as Dad’s death wasn’t mine, but that won’t stop the doubt from weaseling into his blood and burrowing into his bones, until he’s nothing more than a body bag of guilt and heartache. No words can.

  “Come on now,” I finally pull away, brushing the tears from his eyes with my thumbs, and press my forehead against his. He sniffles, chewing on his bottom lip. He’s such an ugly crier, but it only makes me love him more than I already do.

  “It was my fault.” He whispers, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to look into mine. His forehead is warm and sticky, like mine, but we don’t pull away. “Did you know she loved me? Holly. That she honest-to-God did? Every moment, I think. Ever since...well, I don’t know. It’s funny, but no matter how hard I tried to be the limelight, everyone loved her. I made all the piss-poor decisions. I drank, I screwed around, and I fucked myself a thousand times over. I should’ve died instead.”

  “Roman…” I mutter helplessly, glad in my own selfish way that he hadn’t died because then I would’ve never met him. Without him, I would be infinitely different, and I am thankful beyond words that I am not.

  “Roman, I—”

  He pulls away and shakes his head, as if dismissing the entire thing, and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. They’re swollen and red, but he doesn’t look about to cry anymore. “How did you get in here anyway?”

  “I, uh, there was a hole in the wall and…” I point behind me, vaguely in the direction of the crumbled wall.

  “Ah.” He doesn’t even look for the hole in the wall as he absently reaches over and plucks the Jeopardy theme on his guitar. “And you’re still sticking to your guns that you didn’t tip him off?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I did,” I offer lamely, because the moment I could’ve told him my heart has disappeared. But what would he do if I did admit it? I’ll never see him again. Balls to the wall, as Maggie put it. “And, Roman?”

  “Mmh?”

  “I—”

  “Fuck.” His eyes go wide, staring off in the direction of the entrance to the cemetery, and he jumps to his feet, pulling the guitar over his head. Then he looks at me, and suddenly I know that there is no way in hell he could ever love me back.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It’s not John this time, but the fine men of the Horry County Police Department. And they are heading straight toward us. Roman scowls, whirling back to me. “You told them! You—”

  “Stop blaming me!” I snap, grabbing him by the forearm and tugging him toward the crack in the wall. I’m having flashbacks to the night we broke into the put-put course, but somehow I think the repercussions of this will be worse.

  “You there! Stop!” One of the policeman calls after us, but his voice only propels my feet to go faster. Under my fingers, Roman practically vibrates with anger.

  “Front page not enough, huh?” he hisses as we dash over a hill of gravestones and cut around the statue of a weeping angel. “A whole fucking year in Super 8 Motels and fuck good that did me. You come along and wham! Oh, look, I’m a household name again!”

  “Oh please,” I snarl, because his temper’s getting old—fast. “You love the attention.”

  “Not as much as you, apparently. You think that hair’s bright enough?”

  “And yours isn’t?” I almost get sideswiped by a knee-high headstone, and I stumble. “And just so you know, I didn’t give him that memory card. Those photos were on the local memory, asshole! Totally not my fault! If anything, it’s yours for taking me with you!”

  He shoots me a glare as we duck under a curtain of weeping willow vines. “You could’ve said no!”

  “I did, back when you wanted to buy me ice cream.”

  We hit the back end of the cemetery, and the hole isn’t here anymore. Did I get turned around? I scan the walls, but it must be hidden behind a willow? Stupid me—did I even come from this side of the cemetery?

  Roman curses and kicks the cement wall. “I hope you and John are happy,” he grumbles. “Tell him your life story. Go on. I’m sure it’ll be a best-seller.”

  “Why the hell would I tell him anything?”

  “Because you hate me!” he roars.

  I purse my lips. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  “You know, this? This here?” He jabs a finger between us, so close I can smell the cinnamon and wet grass on his clothes. “This is the reason I don’t make friends.”

  “Because you just wanted someone you could pull along for a while instead, right? You saw me and I tickled your fancy. I don’t know why. I’m not pretty. I’m mundane. I’m going nowhere—even my fuck-buddy kept me a secret.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” he sneers. “Secrets don’t make friends.”

  I clench my hands into fists so hard, my nails bite into my palms. The police appear over the last crest. Two of them have Tasers out. Neither of us wants to be tased. Where the hell is that hole in the wall?

  But then a flash of magenta catches my eyes, past the policeman. A wash of relief floods through me.

  Maggie.

  She jumps up on one of the thicker headstones and whips her shirt off over her like a flag. A lumpy policeman huffs up the hill after her, and his eyes grow as wide as saucer plates.

  This is it. Plan B.

  Taking the memory chip out of my pocket, I shove it into Roman’s hand. “Look at it when you get a chance. It’s from John—with love. And do me a favor? If she meant so much to you, you should fight for that Madison gig. It’s what she would’ve wanted.”

  His lips curve down into a scowl. “You don’t know anything about her.”

  “You’re right,” I reply, pulling off my shirt and tossing it aside. “But I know what I’d do.” He stares, flustered, as I wiggle out of my shorts. Thank God, I have on matching underwear today. When I pop back up, he’s staring, startled, at my chest. “Yes, they’re real. Don’t get caught, got it, RoMo?”

  “You’re not seriously...” he chokes. But I start running back toward the policemen, waving my hands in the air to flag their attention, before he can finish.

  “HEY!” I shout, jumping up onto a marble bench. I reach back to unclasp my bra. Out of the corner of my eye, Roman gapes. A grin breaks out over my face. “FEAST YOUR EYES...” I sling off my bra and throw it at the nearest policeman as I jump off the bench and dodge through a row of tombstones.

  “BOOB-A-BUNGA!” Maggie howls, slinging her bra up in the air. “LONG LIVE ROMAN HOLIDAY!”

  The policemen turn to follow us, and the second they do, Roman ducks down behind a gravestone, memory card in hand, and disappears. I give the police the middle finger and hurtle over a gravestone, and Maggie slings her double D bra on a weeping angel. We grab each other’s hand and streak through the cemetery screaming Maggie’s favorite song, “Crush on You.”

  Halfway through the crowd, our Roman Holiday underwear go sailing into the air.

  I hope Roman enjoys the irony.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  You know how in every cop drama the police station is
always busy no matter what hour of the day? Yeah, that’s a lie. As we’re processed into the system—mug shots, fingerprints, the whole nine yards—I can count the number of officers in the building on one hand. One hand.

  “It’s a Thursday night,” our police officer, a guy named NESKY with a handlebar mustache, shrugs off. “We got public drunks to apprehend.”

  “It’s six-thirty,” I argue.

  “It’s the beach.”

  Maggie nods in agreement. “He’s got a point. I mean, they probably do more than chase beautiful half-naked women around cemeteries.” She bats her eyelashes at Officer Nesky, who thankfully isn’t swayed in the slightest. He tells Maggie to face the other direction and takes her last photo. “This is my best side, anyway. I’d look better in chartreuse, though. You got any chartreuse shirts back where you pulled these hid-vicious gray things from?”

  The officer rolls his eyes. “No.”

  “Do get a lot of people like us?”

  “Streakers?” he clarifies, filling in the rest of the paperwork, before motioning for us to follow him through the door to the holding cells. “Yeah, we get a few. You’re in luck. There aren’t many felons here yet. Later tonight though, mind your elbows.”

  He opens the cell door for us and takes our handcuffs off as we go inside. I rub my wrists where the metal indented into my skin, hoping it won’t leave any bruises. Officer Nesky nods to the guard on duty by the desk, and I begin to ask him when we’re getting our clothes back when he shuts the door behind him, leaving us with the guard.

  Maggie sits down on one of the benches. “I hope RoMo and Boaz are halfway to China by now.” She gives two men on the opposite side of our cell a sharp glare. She snaps her fingers towards them. “Hey—Hey, my face is up here. Just because I’m free-tittin’ it doesn’t give you an excuse to look. Creeps.”