The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(47)

“I don’t think—”

“I don’t care.”

Dino mumbles under his breath.

“What?”

Dino holds up his hands. Band-Aids cover the blisters. “I dug up your body, I’m in pain, I haven’t slept in two days,” he says. “And I’m having a rough morning. Where’s the sympathy?”

For a second, I feel bad for him, but it passes. “When your mom sews your butt shut, then I’ll feel sorry for you. Until then, you’ll have to deal with it like the rest of us.”

A whole range of emotions scrolls across Dino’s face, and I can’t decide whether he’s wishing he could set me on fire or chop my pretty corpse into a hundred pieces and scatter them across Palm Shores. Good thing I didn’t tell him about the vultures.

“Anyway,” he says. “If we assume you’re the cause of the miracle, what are we going to do about it?”

“Got me. I did my bit. Went into the freezer, had a funeral, got buried.”

“How was that, by the way?” he asks.

“Which part?”

“The funeral.” He’s pursing his lips in that serious way of his.

I shut the laptop to give him my full attention. “It was okay, I guess. That priest was boring, but the music was nice.” I stare down my nose at Dino. “Though I noticed a certain someone didn’t bother eulogizing my magnificence.”

Dino bows his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Too overcome with grief?”

“You’re not-dead!”

“That’s a terrible excuse.”

Dino sets his mostly-empty glass of juice on his nightstand. “You always do this.”

“Do what?”

“Change the subject. Every time I bring up a topic you don’t want to talk about, you turn it into a joke or a fight or you storm off to 7-Eleven and almost get arrested.”

“Oh my God,” I say. “That happened once. Get over it.”

“Two nights ago!” He growls. “See? You’re doing it again.”

I clench my fists. “What do you want from me, Dino? You want me to tell you it was torture lying in that coffin, listening to Momma and Daddy crying, to Jo thanking people for coming to watch me get buried, thinking the whole time that I could sit up and take away their pain, but that if I did so I might only be setting them up to get hurt later?”

“I want to know how you feel,” Dino says. “To know that you can feel.”

“Of course I feel. I feel everything since I woke up staring at your ugly face. Some of the time I’m terrified that I’m going to be stuck this way forever. That I’m going to bloat and rot and then that my skin and insides will wither until I’m a husk, but that I still won’t die. That a thousand years from now, future humans will be zipping through the sky in flying cars with their cloned dinosaur pets, taking vacations on the moon, and I still won’t be dead, but that I won’t be alive either.”

Dino clears his throat. “They won’t have cloned dinosaurs. There isn’t enough DNA for—”

I cut him off with a single sharp glance. “But most of the time I’m scared about my folks and Jo. Not that they won’t be okay without me—they will be, I know they will—but that they’re going to move on and forget me.”

“You know they won’t,” Dino says.

“Maybe not completely,” I say. “But Jo?lle’s their only daughter now. She’s the one they’ll watch graduate, the one they’ll walk down the aisle, the one they’ll worry over and fuss about and show pictures of to their friends. Jo is the future, full of potential. I’m nothing but the past. Painful memories they can visit if they want to. But why would they look back when Jo’s giving them so much to look forward to?”

Dino folds his hands and avoids looking at me. “July . . .”

“And you know what the worst part is? I can’t even cry about it. I can’t squeeze out one single tear for the life I’m leaving behind or the shitshow I’ve got to look forward to.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you felt like this before?”

I laugh bitterly. “I wanted to tell my best friend, but we haven’t been that to each other in a long time.”





DINO

“I NEED A SHOWER,” I say. “When I’m done, we’ll figure out what to do next.” I barely make it to the bathroom, shut the door behind me, and crank on the water before I lose it. My whole body shakes. I sit on the floor with my knees pulled to my chest and tremble uncontrollably like I have a fever. My stomach roils and the pressure in my head is unbearable. It’s too much. July dying and then coming back and then fake re-dying and making me dig her up; Rafi telling me he loves me, and me dumping him and not knowing whether I did the right thing. My sister’s impending wedding and the stress of my parents’ expectations for the future. I can’t handle any of it. I feel like someone’s torn me in half and is trying to jam the pieces together, but they don’t fit anymore, so I’m just broken forever.

And then it passes. The shaking stops, the headache eases. Steam has filled the bathroom by the time the aftershocks subside. I climb into the shower on autopilot. I showered when I got home from digging up July, but I don’t think it’s possible to fully wash the stink of grave robbing away. It’s only when I grab the bar of soap that I realize I’m still wearing my boxers and socks. I peel them off and wring them out and toss them on the bath mat.