The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(45)

“I tried. I really did.”

“Not hard enough,” I mutter. Thankfully, filling a grave isn’t nearly as exhausting as digging one, but it’s still more manual labor than I’m used to, and there isn’t a single muscle of mine that’s not screaming in agony.

July ignores me. “It took me a while to work up the nerve, but I finally got on the gurney and went into the freezer.”

“Weren’t you cold?”

“No,” she says, and there’s a trace of sadness in her voice. “I shut my eyes and counted backward from one thousand. My body is dead, so I had this idea that the only thing keeping me animated was my mind, and that if I could let go, I’d die for real. It didn’t work the way I planned.”

“How so?” My questions are short because of the exertion of shoveling dirt.

July leans against a nearby headstone. “You know how you get when you can’t stop thinking and your mind churns out scenarios? You finally come up with the perfect comeback to every insult flung at you since the dawn of time, and you go over every argument you’ve ever had or will ever have in the future? That’s what happened to me.”

“So you were awake for everything?” I ask. “My mom dressing you, the church service, the burial?”

“The whole sordid adventure.”

“How did you not move?”

July chuckles. “Well, I may not have been able to fall asleep, but if I close my eyes and focus on my thoughts, I can blur out what’s happening around me. I don’t breathe and I don’t feel much, so to an outsider I look completely dead. I did okay until Aunt Franny was standing over me, and she was making this big fuss—”

“I remember,” I say. “?‘Blubbering’ is a word that comes to mind.”

“Franny never liked me, and I thought it was so hilarious that she was putting on such a show that I laughed. Barely. It was hardly even a snort.”

“That’s what happened! No one could figure out why she screamed and then took off.”

July grins, looking pretty proud of herself. “After that, I was a lot more careful.”

“But why?” I ask. “If you weren’t dead, why didn’t you call me? And you still haven’t told me where you got a phone from.”

“The phone’s easy,” July says. “It’s mine. I stole it from my room when I snuck into my house.” She holds the phone up so I can see it. “I would’ve called after my stupid plan failed, but I knew it would’ve caused a whole scandal if my body disappeared, so I decided to let the funeral happen. Plus, my battery died after I sent the selfies.”

An involuntary shiver runs through me. “You let yourself be buried alive.”

“Whatever. It wasn’t so bad.”

It’s actually kind of sweet. July could have slipped away in the middle of the night and lived out the rest of her not-life somewhere else, but it would have been a disaster for my family. That she stayed means a lot to me.

I stop digging and lean against the shovel. “So what do we do now?”

“I honestly have no idea,” July says. “But what’s going on is bigger than me.”

It takes me a couple of hours to fill the hole, and I’m exhausted by the time I pat down the last of the dirt. It doesn’t look like it did when I got here, but I doubt anyone will suspect someone sneaked into the cemetery to dig up July. I hope.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to my house. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”

July carries the shovel while I take the ladder. “Hey,” she says. “At least I don’t smell anymore.”

“You still smell, July.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“God, I wish you’d stay dead.”

July nudges me with her shoulder and says, “Thanks for not leaving me down there.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I definitely considered it.”

“Liar.”

“And I’m already regretting it.”

“Yeah,” July says. “Me too.”





JULY

DINO MUMBLES IN HIS SLEEP. Giggles too. It’s not cute. When he does it, he sounds and looks like he’s about to disembowel a room full of puppies. Creeped me out the first time he spent the night at my house. Momma had always known Dino was gay. She never said so, but that’s the only reason that explains why she let a boy and girl have sleepovers together well into high school. That should have clued me in that Dino was different, but I didn’t see it. I wasn’t in love with him or anything like that. Dino was my partner in crime; the one person in the world I wanted to spend my life with. Sure, we could both get married and have kids and whatever, but at the end of our lives, I wanted it to be us and no one else. I guess I didn’t expect our ends to happen so far apart.

After my unburial, I made Dino take me to the beach so I could set fire to the blue dress. It meant riding to his house and sneaking into his room in my skivvies, but it was so worth it. Thankfully, he kept the clothes I wore last night. I tried to convince Dino to stay awake with me, but he grumbled about four hours of sleep and crashed into his bed the second we got into his room.

During midterms and finals, I used to think it’d be great if I never had to sleep. I’d daydream about those extra hours I could have and all that I could do with them while the rest of the lazy world lay in their beds. The reality is that being awake while everyone else is asleep sucks. I kill time playing video games, and then I get this idea to research burial rituals to see if I can find information that might help me understand why I’m still not-dead and how to fix it. Some cultures used to eat their dead. I doubt Dino would be into that. The Malagasy people of Madagascar dig up the dead once every seven years, wrap the corpses in cloth, and dance with them. The practice sounds interesting, but I’m glad Dino didn’t leave me buried for seven years. And the Zoroastrians had a complicated set of rites that involve bull urine, a holy dog, a tower, and vultures. I’m not even sure where I’d get bull pee. Even though none of this is offering me any solutions for my problem, I get lost in a clickhole until I stumble on a story from a news website.