“Chloe! Aren’t you coming?” That was London, shouting from across the road.
More of London’s friends were there, climbing the hill. Asha and Cate. Vanessa and Damien. Some boy whose name I hadn’t caught. And then Owen, here though London hadn’t said he would be, here and not having spoken a word to me yet.
“Chloe?” London called, and then she turned and started climbing without me, so I crossed the road and headed up the hill before I lost sight of her.
This old cemetery was the one without a gate to mark its boundaries, with the stones so weathered, they sunk at odd angles back into the earth like they didn’t want you remembering them after all. Anyway, making it so you couldn’t even try.
Also, it was more private than the newer cemetery across the road. There was a raised mausoleum facing away from the sidewalk, and back there were two stone benches and a long-dead fountain, so you could fit a whole group of kids—five, six, seven, with me there, eight—and do whatever you wanted, having full confidence the town’s lackluster cops or occasional lurking perv wouldn’t be able to see. It was also a fantastic place to hook up with your boyfriend, or so I’d heard.
The mausoleum was gray stone, pitted and murky like it had been left at the bottom of a pond for a thousand years and then dredged up for some sun. I’d been here before. Ruby used to let me color with crayons over the engraved, locked door.
Before the private perch of the mausoleum there was a rising hill littered with the cracked and withered headstones of the people who didn’t matter enough to have their own house in which to spend their eternities. These people were so long gone, none of their relatives even lived in our town anymore. No one left flowers or came to have picnics atop their dirt beds on passing birthdays. No one tended the weeds here, so the hill was really all weeds now, far more weeds than stones.
The gravestones themselves were thin and plain. Many were chipped and blackened with mold, some growing mushrooms. Even now, one of the boys, Laurence—I heard someone call him by that name—did a running leap and knocked over a thin, tall stone under which no one we knew still lies, and he didn’t even go back to pick it up.
Laurence and Asha and Cate and the rest of them weren’t thinking of dying, not while they were racing up this hill. They didn’t know how close one of them had come. The taste in her mouth when it happened, the last sight of the stars overhead seared on the backs of her eyes.
Maybe London herself remembered—though how could she? The mind stops printing new memories once they’ve been flatlined away.
Before that night at the reservoir, Ruby and I used to talk about dying—about how it might happen, what we’d do if it did. She had a whole plan for her afterlife, which involved haunting certain blood relatives, playing poltergeist on former landlords and schoolteachers, and playing chicken with cars. She’d have a road in town named for her, or better yet a bridge, and leave me every last thing she owned in her will. She acted like she would stay forever the way she was, never marrying and never having kids, and surely never leaving our small mountain town, and that I’d be the only one left to remember her, though really everyone would, I told her, especially if she got her name on a bridge.
Ruby wanted me to know that her headstone should be pink granite, even if it cost extra. Pink or no headstone at all. And she’d already written out the inscription, handed over to me a long time ago for safekeeping:
Ruby
Beloved Sister of Chloe
Gas Station Attendant
Phenomenal Kisser
(ask anyone)
Lies Here
For those leaving flowers, she wanted a small directive added at the bottom, to show her preference:
Poppies Only, Please