After the People Lights Have Gone Off Read Free Page A

marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place, the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.
    Grace was crying right along with her.
    From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.
    When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped, and started coughing like she was going to throw up.
    She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.
    And that was it.
    My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.
    “Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different things, and I nodded just to shut him up.
    Two weeks later it was Halloween.
    Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course. And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.
    The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.
    Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some light bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first- and second-grader trick-or-treating.
    Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent. Of course.
    I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.
    “Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how your heart can swell when you’re in eighth grade.
    I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked one at a time all week.
    The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them, or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town, spread out before us.
    Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here. And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got condemned and haunted.
    According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.
    We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her candle going out right when she got close to us.
    So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was. Like we’d even really known him.
    We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some tragedy.
    We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.
    Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just