The walls and ceiling were painted black and covered in neon-white handwritten death-poetry quotes. Colby had always heavily favored Tennyson, while Luci adored the words of Browning and Keats. She’d read something into that, once — something that was obviously just whimsy on her part, because reality was so pained and dark now.
She moved past the bureau. The black paint on the antique was already flaking off. Colby had said that one side had gotten scraped when his family moved from back east. She ran her fingers across and along the books that lined the top shelf of the bookcase as she approached the bed. Colby had mixed the King James Bible, a satanic bible, and the Koran in with books on witchcraft, mythology, and — oddly — Darwin. She didn’t understand his filing system. The entire second shelf was occupied by Victorian poetry, along with a number of secondhand books she’d bought him.
Colby’s bed wasn’t made. The sheets were black, but the duvet was an old Star Wars print — from the first movie, obviously. He’d thought it ironic, given his carefully constructed outward persona, but it wasn’t. The bedside lamp was still on. Luci knew that no one else had been in the room since Colby’s death, otherwise the bed would have been straightened and the clothes hung. It was rude for him to have left the light on like that, when he knew he wasn’t coming back from the bathroom. Of course, it was rude to kill himself in the tub and have his sister find him, so the lamp didn’t really matter at all.
Luci knelt beside the bed, flipped back the messy sheets, and pulled a carved wooden box out from underneath the frame. She thought the carvings might be Celtic, but it was what Colby kept in the box, not the box itself that mattered.
Still kneeling, she placed the box on the edge of the bed and flipped open the lid. She tossed a bottle of black nail polish, a couple of chewed black pens, and a condom onto the mattress.
Then she gathered Colby’s collection of rubber-band-wrapped poetry-and-love-note-filled register rolls into her hands. She carefully dug through past school awards, action figures, and old pennies to make sure she had every last one. These were her and Colby’s words. No one else ever needed to read them.
She stuffed the love notes into her book bag, stood, swiftly crossed to the lamp before she could think about it further, and clicked off the light.
*
Luci dodged various faceless adults who patted her on the shoulder and murmured condolences as she passed through the living room. She noted that her friends were huddled together as a group by the cookies and pastries in the dining room, so she’d chosen to loop to the kitchen by way of this route. The adults were still annoying.
She had a plan, and she didn’t need to get distracted now.
The caterers had taken over the kitchen. Luci imagined it hadn’t seen this much activity since Colby’s family moved in. She dodged one guy carrying a tray of food, as she pretended to need something from the fridge. The second caterer finished plating her tray of cookies and left.
Luci darted over to the knife rack, grabbed a large chef’s knife, and placed it in her book bag.
She then hustled over to the back door that led to the yard, the pool, and the garage. After glancing over her shoulder to determine that she hadn’t drawn any attention, she slipped out of the house.
Outside, a boy’s bike was carelessly propped against a neat pile of firewood. Candace had actually tripped over this bike two weeks ago while carrying groceries in from the garage. Colby had been grounded for a week.
Perfect.
*
The sun was setting. Not that Luci could see it from the low vantage point where she now sat, but the gray day had gotten darker and darker as she’d biked to the graveyard.
She’d walked the bike along the path as far as she could, then propped it neatly off to the side as she continued across the grass the few steps to the fresh grave. Her uncle — her mom’s brother — was buried somewhere in this cemetery. It was pretty, but all the headstones were flat mounted, so she wasn’t a true fan. It was too tidy, too understated for something as dramatic as death.
Luci sat cross-legged on the grass at the foot of the freshly filled grave. This would hopefully ruin her hated black dress. She’d turned off her phone before she’d even climbed onto the bike. She wished she’d grabbed her jacket, but that would have telegraphed her intentions far too much.
This was something only she could do. Why, she didn’t know, except that no one else would understand.
She pulled the rolls of love notes out of her bag, which she’d slung across her chest while biking and didn’t bother to remove now. Again, she made sure that she had retrieved every last one.
One at a time — taking a brief moment to read a snippet of each — she unrolled note after note until she was surrounded by waves of red-streaked white paper. Each rolled note was covered in two alternating handwritings — Colby wrote in black ink and she wrote back in pencil. She and Colby had discussed love and death in Victorian poetry for the last four months, ever since Luci had turned around in English lit class and scrawled her first note across Colby’s test paper.
Luci had thought her arguments and love poem quotes were slowly wooing Colby.
She’d obviously been wrong.
She folded her hands in her lap and tried to ignore the chilly spring evening. She tried to be peaceful, to think of nothing at all now. There were no more arguments to make.
The ground of the grave began to shift and move.
Luci didn’t bother screaming. Even though she’d been hoping it was a prank or a joke. And when it wasn’t, and when he was actually dead, she hadn’t known whether to hope his claims were real or pray they weren’t.
Two pale hands appeared in the loose dirt. Hands she’d once wished he’d use more … once wished he’d been more adventurous with his caresses …