Roman Holiday

chapter Twenty-Two

Flowers wreathe the gate and litter the ground in front of St. Michael's Cemetery. Arrangements with 'We Miss You!' and 'Stay Weird!' lean against the tall stone wall and lace across the ground. No one dares to step on them—as if they're in a magical bubble. A crowd of quite possibly, oh, five hundred fans wait in front of the cemetery, most of them wearing pink SAVE HOLIDAY shirts, holding candles. Don't any of them have to go to work? Have a life? Something else to do besides pay tribute to a dead girl?

Maggie parks in bumf*ck nowhere, so we have to hike at least three football fields' worth of cars to get to the cemetery itself. It's a complete pain, and today is stifling hot at that. Heat waves rise up from the asphalt, making the entire walk feel like I'm trudging through a sauna. How Maggie can look so cool in her four-inch heels and A-line skirt is beyond me. I can't even look cool in a parka in sub-zero weather.

Then again, I might be sweating because I'm nervous. I keep touching the memory card in my pocket to make sure it's still there.

Up ahead, Nick Lively—how can you miss him with that tan?—stands beside a black media van, fixing his hair in the driver-side mirror. His eyes stray up to mine, but he doesn't register I'm that girl until I've already ducked behind Maggie again.

"This was such a bad idea, bb," I hiss to her. "Can we leave?"

She loops her arm into mine and squeezes my hand tightly. "Fat chance. We're in this together. Balls to the wall, right, bb?"

"I hate that expression."

The crowd is thick with high schoolers. We elbow our way to the front where a line of Myrtle Beach's finest stand looking bored and tired. But two of them have Holly's trademark peacock feather clipped behind their ear.

"That's so sweet!" Maggie coos. "They're paying homage!"

This isn't exactly how I pictured the vigil. I expected more… I don't know, music? Noise? Girls crying in the streets while their fifteen-year-old boyfriends console them? But no one's crying. There's a solemn, heavy shroud hanging over the crowd, despite the colorful array of peacock feathers poking out of rampant ponytails and fishtail braids, no one can seem to shake. Like everyone is afraid of being too loud. It's silly—I mean they can't exactly wake the dead or anything. Somewhere in the sea of people, a lone radio fades into "My Heart War," and people flick out their phones and light their lighters in honor.

A slice of blue fin cuts through the crowd to my left. I tell Maggie I'll be right back and dive after Boaz. He stops at the outskirts of the crowd, taking a pack of cigarettes out from under his black kilt. It matches his black tuxedo t-shirt. "Boaz," I whisper, and he almost jumps out of his skin.

"Jeez Louise, bro-ho!" He slaps his heart. "You wanna give me a heart defunct? Ever heard of not sneakin' up on the man while he's at a f*ckin' cemetery?"

"Sorry," I apologize earnestly. Making sure no one is close enough to hear, I add, "Where's Roman?"

He puts his lips to the tip of the pack and extracts a cigarette, putting the rest back into his kilt. "Readin' every f*ckin' rag mag in the state, probs."

"I didn't rat."

He snorts, taking out a matchbox, and lights his cigarette. He inhales a lungful, savoring, and blows it out in a ring.

I purse my lips together. "You know I wouldn't."

"Do I?" He doesn't sound bitter, just amused. "My Heart War" crescendos, Roman and Holly's voices combining with the vigil's voices, roaring the lyrics like they're the last words on earth. It's chilling, as if she's here in the weirdest way. Sort of spooky and...and really tragic. "You know," he goes on, "no one even bothered about her side of this. Roman's always been either the martyr or the culprit. Who's Holly? The victim. No one cares if she isn't."

Maybe now's the time to tell him about the pictures on the memory card. It'll clear everything up. I begin to reach for the memory card in my pocket when I pause, my eyebrows furrowing. "What do you mean, if she isn't?"

"Bro-ho, she was in love. Serious love. For-shit love."

I retract my hand. "With Roman?" Was she who the song was meant for? Has he loved her all this time?

He doesn't say yes or no. He sucks another lungful of smoke and blows it out over his head. "A few months before she died she got this tat. Ya'aburnee. It means 'you bury me.'"

The smoke snakes like a gray river into the blue sky.

"Ya'aburnee?" I echo, remembering the article from The Juice. A cold shiver races down my arms, and I quickly cross them over my chest to rub them away. When Dad died, I was mopping the stage of sweat from the rock show the night before. We were thirty minutes to opening, and Dad had been counting the stocks, his pen making sharp checks down his list. I still hear the sound when I'm swabbing the floors, that echoing chhhick, chhhhhick!…

The next thing I knew, he put down his checklist and leaned against the counter. Geoff asked him, "Hey, boss, you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm just a little lightheaded is all. Can you check and see how many dark ales are in the fridge?"

Those were his last words.

He dropped like deadweight to the ground, his pen skittering across the floor, sharp and screeching. I dropped my mop and catapulted off the stage. I think I knew then that I wasn't going to make it in time. I think I knew at that very moment. But knowing didn't stop me from shaking him, yelling at him, trying to keep him alive until the ambulance arrived. My fingers had tightened so hard around his suspenders the paramedics had to wrench me off of him, crying, kicking and screaming, because I thought that if he could hear my voice then he'd come back to life even though his lips were blue and his eyes never looked once at me. They just kept staring, staring, toward something beyond me to nothing at all.

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 shakes his head. "Hols found me out in Vegas. The band had been together a few months, right? I was playin' at this luncheon thing for terminal kids where they served these shitty little shrimp balls and mini-dogs. Terrible grub for cancer kids, lemme tell you. I went to take a piss, right? There was only one bathroom and I had to piss. So, I knocked to see the hold-up and check it—it was Hols. She'd started her red river of doom and 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. "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. Next thing I know, I'm playin' in a f*ckin' pop-rock band."

I can't help but imagine Boaz picking out tampons in the feminine hygiene section of a grocery store. "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."

The crowd continues singing along with "My Heart War." It really isn't that bad of a song, once you listen to the words, but they pale in comparison to the song on his CD. If he ever returned to music, would he make more songs like it? Terrible, bittersweet, perfect songs you knew by heart and lit candles to? Songs you put on every playlist, stopped for on every radio station for?

His first chance at fame turned out for the worse, but everyone deserves a second chance, right? I'm sure Bon Jovi didn't get it all right on the first try—and we all know how the Boss's first marriage went.

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

"Maggie," I introduce, "this is Boaz. Boaz, this is Maggie, my best friend."

"Why, hello." She suddenly strikes her hand around me out for him to shake.

He brings her hand up to his lips instead. "Hey hey, good lookin'."

I've never seen Maggie melt so fast in my entire life. "Marry me?"

He wiggles his eyebrows.

I roll my eyes. "Where's Roman?" I ask again.

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

"Well...he'll totes show up, right?" Maggie says, not really caring as she bats her eyelashes at Boaz.

"Or not," I mutter.

Maggie pulls her hand out of his grip and flips her dreads over her shoulder to glare at me. "Are you kidding? If you died and this was your anniversary, there ain't no mountain high enough that'd stop me from getting here."

"I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be an armed guard at my vigil," I retort. "You'd think she was the Pope with all the police."

A group of teenagers shoot me a scathing look over their shoulders, peacock feathers twined into their blown-out hair, pink SAVE HOLIDAY shirts tied up around their belly buttons. What would Roman think if he saw them? Drool like every other guy is obviously doing, or would he start humming Aerosmith’s "Dude Looks Like a Lady" with that devious cheshire grin?

A hushed sound tickles my ear. I swat it away. One thing about South Carolina, it has the biggest f*cking 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.

"Something up, bb?" Maggie looks in the direction of the woods, 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.

Boaz shifts his eyes between the two of us nervously. "This bro-ha doesn't do coat hangers."

My best friend puts a soothing hand on Boaz's 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, I can see white headstones that look like giant teeth along rolling green hills. The hole is 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 the Band-Aid on my hand is comforting, because the cut is still there, reminding me that there are no lines, and there are no boundaries except for the ones I make.

I don't even hesitate.

I just step through.