Roman Holiday

chapter Twenty-Three

All cemeteries are the same. Green, wet, and freshly-cut. It always smells like freshly upturned earth and flowers. 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 me 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 lithe to his voice as he sings to the headstone. He's wailing on the song, his fingers plucking passionately at the notes.

What an odd song to sing—but then again how fitting. Like this was their song, the one they would've put on each other's mixed CDs and fixed as each other's ringtones. I creep closer because he can't hear me, his entire heart in the song, until her headstone comes into view.

HOLLY VIRGINIA HUDSON.

BELOVED DAUGHTER

STAY WEIRD.

1994-2012

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. It looks like him, worn and haggard, but still somehow existing. He narrows his eyes. "You."

Go ahead, say it. I want him to tell me about all the venom he has in his eyes. I want him to just let it out. It isn't that I'm a glutton for punishment.

"I...thought you needed a hug," I finally say lamely.

"A hug?" he deadpans.

"What are friends for, right?"

"We're friends?"

I dart my eyes up to his again, pools of melted emeralds and summer grass, completely unreadable. "I thought....you might need some 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. "What good could you do now? Did you like your fifteen minutes on the tabloids?"

I squat down beside him and reach my hand out to his. He doesn't pull away; he just stares at my hand atop of his on his knee. "I know how you feel," I say softly, and 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. "He owns that bar of yours, doesn't he?"

"He did, but he died in November. I don't talk much about him...I'm scared that if I do, then it'll...I don't know. I'm scared that if I say it too often, then people will forget about him. So...I know how you feel. 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."

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. He dips his face into my shoulder and cries. I hold him, fingering through his orange hair soothingly, letting his tears dampen my shirt. There is nothing to say. 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 a arrow, draw dashes to it on a treasure map because it is so familiar to me like a old, deep scar.

"Thank you," he says into my hair, even though I did nothing to deserve it.

I wish I could peel the melancholy from his voice, cut it away from his heart, but I'm afraid there would be nothing left. Does he think Holly's death is his fault?

It's not your fault, I want to say, just as Dad's death wasn't mine.

I could show him the pictures; I could tell him it was John's fault for not calling 911. But then, I'm sure his mind would begin to wander along the what-ifs and maybes. It would begin to weasel doubt into his blood, burrow it into his bones, until he was nothing more than a body bag of guilt and heartache. Not even the memory card can cure that.

"Come on now," I say finally, pulling away. I thumb away the tears from his eyes, pressing my forehead against his. He sniffles, chewing on his lip. He's such an ugly crier, but it only makes me love him more than I already do. "It'll be okay. Stuff like this? It'll happen. She's still in your heart and in your head, where you can visit her in your dreams."

"It was my fault." He gathers my hands in his and puts them back into my lap. "We had a fight earlier that night...about another girl. Did you know she loved me? Holly. That she honest-to-God did?" He shakes his head. "A few weeks before, she fell and sprained her ankle. She was a complete pansy about it.” Unconsciously, he rubs his tattooed arm, the tiger and the phoenix. “It’s funny, but no matter how hard I tried to be the limelight, it was her everyone loved. She’ll always be the comet, and I her f*cking tail. I should've died. I made all the piss-poor decisions. I drank, I screwed around, I f*cked myself a thousand times over. I wish I would'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. But I feel dirty for thinking that, and despicable for being glad that he is the one alive, because without him...

Without him, I wouldn't have hated him. Without him, I wouldn't have loved him.

Without him, I would be infinitely different, and I am thankful beyond words that I am not.

"Roman, I—"

He 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 absently 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. And what would he do if I did admit it? Tell me to join the club with millions of other teenage girls? Or tell me very gently that there's someone else, but thanks for the admission? But what would it hurt, in the end? I'll never see him again. Balls to the wall, as Maggie put it. "And, Roman?"

"Mmh?"

"I—"

"F*ck." 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.