Being Ace, page 9
He squared his shoulders and started walking, hands shaking at his sides, and I gathered up my toiletries. No one ever noticed during funerals but noise carried here.
The cemetery was nestled in a clump of hills. The crests and valleys created the illusion of privacy. Gnarled old trees draped in wisteria loomed at the tops of the hill, silhouettes bowed over the graves like mourners. The crooked first row of mossy headstones was a welcome sight.
“Athy?” I whispered.
Unlike the woods, the cemetery never made me feel uneasy. The dark was open and cool, and the shadows in the corners of my eyes never moved too oddly. I stayed a ways behind Richard as he passed Athy’s grave on his way to Sara’s. Her plot wasn’t too far from Athy’s. I could listen from there under the guise of doing homework.
“Athy,” I said again, suddenly afraid there was a limit to how many times I could speak with the dead. I hadn’t been keeping track.
“Calm down. I’m the one who’s not supposed to breathe.”
I spun, words caught in my throat, and nearly threw myself at him. I’d done it once; fell right through him.
“Took you long enough,” I said, laughing. Smiling and enjoying things still felt so fake. He was dead and his killer free. Happiness was a betrayal. “It’s not like you’re busy.”
Alive, Athy had been one of those always-pale debate kids with a splash of freckles. Death had drained away what little color he had, his ghostly glow leaving him bone white. His floppy curls were dark and fuzzy, as if they were more smoke than hair, and his eyes weren’t the same comforting garden-earth brown they used to be. I could see through them to the cemetery behind him.
“Where else would I want to be?” he asked, smile settling into a concerned frown. “You’ve been busy. You need to sleep more.”
I grinned, finally feeling something, and said, “I’ll sleep when I’m—”
“So help me, I’ll kill you right now.” Athy punched my shoulder, and his fist passed through me with a prickling, dry cold. “This that finance guy?”
“Richard Joseph Vincent,” I said, and tried to keep my distaste for him out of my voice. “Drives a big SUV and was almost too nervous to come. His wife died of cancer complications the day after you were killed. You might have delivered food to them or their neighbors that night, but I’ve got no proof.”
Athy had been a delivery driver for a few restaurants in town, but he delivered enough things for cash that I hadn’t been able to figure out where all he’d been that night. He’d been killed on one of the main roads. There was no telling where he’d been coming from.
“Sara Vincent?” he asked, expression softening. “She died after me?”
I nodded. “The obituary said she died at home in her sleep.”
“I liked her. I used to deliver things to her so much she joked about making me a key. Last thing I picked up for her was a cake to celebrate her being done with chemo,” Athy said, and sighed. “Come on, Haron the Spy. Let’s go figure out if this is the guy without giving you away.”
Richard crested the final hill before his wife’s grave. She’d been cremated, her urn buried in the earth so that its heart-shaped top still showed. She was at the edge of a little family plot circled by a low row of bushes, and Richard hesitated before it. Dragging his feet through the clover covering the hills, he took a deep breath and stepped over the shrubs. Athy faded from my sight but remained a chill against my side. I ducked down behind a headstone, savoring the gooseflesh his presence brought.
“Maybe he’s a serial killer,” whispered Athy. “That’s very finance guy.”
If I didn’t look at the space where Athy should have been, it was like he wasn’t dead.
“I don’t recognize him, but I don’t remember that night at all,” said Athy. “All I remember is waking up here when you called up my ghost that first time.”
I bit my lip to stop my disappointment from showing. Richard started muttering to himself—all about updates on his life since his wife’s death and not about her death—and I sat down behind the headstone. Slowly, I started the process of cleaning the dirt from myself. The woods seemed to stick to everyone who passed through them.
“While he’s hyping himself up, we need to talk.” Athy appeared again and laid a hand on my arm, or would have if he hadn’t been dead. “Don’t get mad, but I think you should take a break from coming here.”
My heart stopped. He knew. He knew, and he didn’t want to talk to me again.
“It’s not because I don’t want to talk to you,” he said quickly, and glared at me. “It’s because you hate coming here, and it’s exhausting you. You’ve got black eyes like a boxer, frown lines at seventeen, and no time to do anything for yourself. You can’t live like this. You’re only human no matter how mythical you pretend to be.”
I did hate the walk—the dark and the damp and the threat of the woods. I didn’t want to spend my nights ferrying folks to find the closure I couldn’t, but I had to do right by Athy and liked that this job made people leave me alone. For now, I needed this job as much as Pinesplit needed me.
“Pinesplit takes myths and gossip seriously.” I nodded in Richard’s direction. “Haven’t you heard? I’m not human like the rest of Pinesplit. I’m like the deadish folks trapped in the woods. Less myth and more monster.”
Athy flickered out of existence, and I squeaked. Before I could move, he reappeared before me with one hand over his mouth. He clenched his other hand into a fist and punched through the dirt. It didn’t even leave a mark on the grass.
“I’m going to haunt them,” hissed Athy. “I’m going to be the first ghost to leave the Pinesplit cemetery, and I’m going to haunt the whole town.”
I didn’t want that, but Athy’s outrage on my behalf did make me feel better.
“You can’t,” I said, and moved so that Athy and I were nearly nose to nose. “It’s a silly rumor, and it’s sillier for me to feel hurt when I basically started it.”
“You didn’t start it! You took advantage of them already thinking it.”
I’d blurted out I was ace to avoid a date—a silly mistake but I was too young to know better. Only three things couldn’t be tempted—plants, robots, and the dead—so the gossipers in town had drawn their own conclusions since we lived near the cemetery.
“I shouldn’t have used it as an excuse. They all assumed it meant I wasn’t interested in dating and sex instead of googling it,” I said, and shrugged. I had known Sam wouldn’t want to date me if he knew I would never be sexually attracted to him, but back then, I hadn’t known how to explain that. I’d simply had a word that felt right. “I was still figuring myself out anyway, and cafeteria rejections don’t leave room for nuance.”
“I know but still.” Athy scoffed. “I hope you didn’t want to date Sam, ace or not.” I groaned, and Athy mimed bumping his forehead against mine. The loss of him hit like a fist. I couldn’t breathe. I focused on the sound of Richard’s voice drifting over the hill instead of the ache in my chest. He was still reciting mottoes and apologies, dredging up some courage. I had a job to do. I had to stay calm.
“It’s not your fault they saw you being ace as a challenge and personal slight,” said Athy softly. “This is exactly what I mean. Coming here hurts you.”
There were so many painful assumptions. Each one was another knife in the back, another revelation about how the town saw me. Worse, Athy was right. People had seen my aceness as a challenge they could overcome.
“Well, at least all their nonsense has been useful,” I said. Better I pull the knife from my back and wield it than leave it in. “I haven’t heard a robot joke since I started this job.”
He narrowed his eyes. It hurt that the only person in town who knew me well enough to figure out I didn’t like this job was dead.
“They’re leaving me alone unless they’re hiring me, so that’s an improvement.” I shrugged. “Better that than them offering to sleep with me so I can be sure I’m ace.”
An ace girl with graveyard dirt under her nails was too weird to touch much less ask out or fuck.
“I would miss you, you know, but I’d rather see you rarely than watch you fall apart,” he mumbled, and brought his knees up to his chest. “I’m just worried.”
I could see the night sky through his mouth when he talked, stars sparking light thoughts in the fog of his head, and all I could think about were the wondrous things he’d wanted to do and now never could.
Athy flicked my knee with a finger. It was like a breeze brushing through a hole in my jeans. “How much you charging now?”
I grinned. “Too much, but what are they going to do? Find another magical ace?”
The GSA club could make a killing, but even though I was using it to my advantage and benefiting from what people assumed, it ate at me. It wasn’t that they assumed I, or anyone else, was powerful; it was that they assumed complete and utter otherness. There were no good assumptions, only temporarily useful ones.
And god, what would they have thought if I weren’t the harmless white girl they’d known since birth? If I were aro? If I were somewhere I wasn’t useful? If they realized I loved and wanted but didn’t want them?
“We got to get you out of here,” Athy said, and curled his fingers around my wrist.
I couldn’t feel it. I needed something to anchor me to the living world, something more than the memory of Athy that remained. If folks thought those things about me and I leaned into them, let myself slowly slip away from the living world, would it come true? Would something in me die and trap me like what happened to Dr. Strand? I wouldn’t be alive or dead. I would be stuck in the unknowable in-between that no one wanted.
I wiped my cheeks, scowling at how much I’d cried without noticing, and shook out my arms. I passed through Athy’s fingers like he wasn’t even there. “This pays better than any other job in Pinesplit I could get, too, and some of us still have to pay for college.”
We were supposed to get out of Pinesplit—together or separately—and now if I left, I wouldn’t be able to see Athy until I came back. He was stuck here forever.
“You look miserable every time you step through the gate,” he said. “I hate seeing you like that.”
I’d made a plan. I’d been doing things. I wasn’t languishing. I was moving through grief instead of letting it move through me, wasn’t I?
Before I could respond, Richard cleared his throat.
“Sara,” Richard called out. “I need to talk to you. Please.”
I shushed Athy and crept to a headstone closer to the couple. Richard was on his knees before her urn, his hands folded in his lap. The air before him twisted and condensed into motes of light, and they swarmed in the air like fireflies. In the glow formed a face, then a body, and then hands cupping Richard’s face. He shuddered.
“I wondered when you would come,” she said, and her fingers tightened, the tips vanishing into his jaw. “You were always one to act first and beg forgiveness later.”
Richard flinched. “Don’t be like that.”
Athy shimmered. I glanced at him, terrified by the fear filling his empty eyes. This wasn’t a reunion between two lovers torn apart. I pressed myself against the headstone. The hair on the back of my neck rose; Athy trying to get my attention. I shook my head.
“I need to hear what they’re saying,” I said.
“But I remember her,” whispered Athy, voice breaking like an old radio. “I saw her.”
Sara laughed, then sobbed. “Don’t be what, Richard? You made sure I couldn’t be anything but dead.”
“I remember her,” said Athy again, rising from the ground to get a better look. “Stuffed mushrooms, emince of veal zurichoise, and two orders of tiramisu. She special ordered it because her husband was working later than the place stayed open.”
I froze, gaze on Athy’s wavering form and ears full of Sara’s crying.
“I couldn’t do it,” Richard said, voice raising. “I couldn’t watch you wither away, like some dying flower growing from the corpse of the woman I loved. You weren’t you anymore!”
“A dying flower on a corpse?” An incomprehensible scream tore from Sara’s throat. “I was me, and I needed you!”
Athy’s form dimmed. I turned and rose to my knees, eyes barely over the headstone.
“How was I supposed to help you?” Richard asked, no longer groveling. “You were dying.”
“I was in remission. I was recovering!” shouted Sara.
“Hardly.” Richard unfurled and towered over her. “You were still sick, and I was still taking care of you. How long was I supposed to wipe up your vomit? Organize your meds? Clean your port?”
“Till death!”
Athy appeared before me, nose to nose, and the mist of his eyes condensed until every flicker of his being was focused on me.
“You have to get out of here,” he whispered. “Now. I saw him. I remember.”
“Two million, Sara,” Richard said. “That’s not a livable amount of debt.”
“She left the door open for me, but he got home first. She didn’t die in her sleep. He injected something into her port, but there wasn’t anything …” Athy blinked and touched his jaw as if he wanted to stop speaking or remembering but couldn’t. “Air. It must have been air.”
Fear clenched my throat. Athy turned his head, hanging like a puppet cut from strings. He stared at Richard with wide, empty eyes, and his ghostly glow brightened. The shadows deepened and darkened, stretching farther across the hills than they should have. They rippled across the grass beneath Richard’s feet, and he looked down. His hands flexed at his sides.
“I remember everything,” said Athy in a voice I didn’t know and tone far hollower than his. “Death protects for a time, but it doesn’t truly forget. It doesn’t forgive.”
Richard went still. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe. Slowly, his head turned from side to side and his eyes rolled to Athy and me. I stepped back, and Athy shook his head, recoiling away from Richard as if he’d just realized what was happening. He braced himself before me as if he could stop Richard.
“You lied. You were friends,” said Richard, drawing a deep breath and tilting his head toward Sara. “Still, you ruin me.”
“What?” The ghastly light that made up Sara’s body spread out, like fog in a breeze, and came back together with a shake of her head. “What are you talking about?”
Her gaze moved to Athy and me, and she flinched. Then, her eyes took on the same dense quality Athy’s had.
“Oh,” she whispered. “You were—”
“Setting me up. Luring me here!” Richard said, spitting angry.
The world shifted, as if I had been observing life through a dirty glass pane and Richard had just opened the window.
“He killed you, and then he killed me.” Athy let out a breathless laugh. “Ran me over and left me to die.”
“Oh,” said Sara, looking at her husband as if he were a stranger.
Oh. Lucky thirty-eight.
Oh. Lucky thirty-eight who’d hit Athy so hard he’d landed twenty feet away and drowned as blood spilled into his lungs.
Oh. Lucky thirty-eight who hadn’t come forward even when Athy’s mom sobbed on the news, offering forgiveness and five thousand dollars for information.
“How could you?” Sara asked, far softer than he deserved. “Was the debt that bad? The insurance that enticing?”
“You don’t get a say!” Richard rounded on Sara. “You nearly ruined me, and for what? Ten extra years of me waiting on you as you waste away? I’m not throwing my life away and wasting the sacrifices I made for some delivery driver, and no Nancy Drew wannabe is taking that from me. I worked too hard for this!”
“Oh, fuck,” I said, and took off running.
I hadn’t planned on confronting Athy’s killer. I was only looking for a confession or evidence, not a fight or revenge. It was laughable. Of course, a killer wouldn’t go quietly. Panic flared in my chest and raced down my legs. I crossed over the hill, glancing back. Richard sprinted after me.
“You have to get out of here,” said Athy, flying on the wind next to me. “I can slow him down, and you can reach the gate before him.”
The path to the woods was at the bottom of the hill. A beaten road curved through the cemetery, leading me there. Richard hollered behind me, and Sara screamed back at him. The flickers of her and Athy filled the corners of my sight. I stumbled toward the woods.
“Come on,” said Athy, and he whooshed past me. “Your phone will work once you get to the parking lot, and you can call for help.”
A hand veined with creeper vines undid the latch of the gate and opened it for me.
“I can’t leave.” I skidded to a stop, looking right and left. “I need to hide. Where should I go?”
“Out!” Athy appeared before me and pointed to the gate. “Those things will never catch you if you run and don’t stop, and they’ll be split between going after you or Richard. Come on!”
He tried to grab my hand and slipped through me.
“No,” I said through chattering teeth. “No, I can’t leave.”
I would never be able to see Athy again.
“What?” His gaze darted behind me. “Get out of here!”
I ran left. I could circle back, the cemetery wasn’t that large, and hope Richard didn’t know the cemetery well enough to keep track of me. I’d made this trek dozens of times and could outrun him all night. He’d tire before me.
Maybe.
“What are you doing?” Athy kept pace next to me.
I looked back—Richard was close, but I’d lose him if I took the next hill fast enough. I could hide behind the larger headstones. I ran for them and collapsed behind one of the larger ones.
“I can’t leave,” I said, and muffled my breathing with a hand. “It’s not dawn yet.”
Athy reared back like I’d hit him, then he vanished.
I had to calm down. I couldn’t hear anything over the rattling of my heart, and there was a stitch between my ribs stabbing me with every inhale. Richard’s thundering footsteps slowed.
“Cass!” The metal gate creaked. “Get back here!”
