Doll Bones (4 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING, ZACH PUSHED HIS LIMP CEREAL
around in
a bowl of milk as his mom poured herself a second cup of coffee. Light filtered in through the dirty windowpane to make the scarred wood on the kitchen table show the pale water marks from wet mugs and the greenish smudge where Zach had once drawn a spaceship in permanent marker. He traced the faint outline of it with a finger.

“Your father called the trash company last night,” his mother said.

Zach blinked and looked up at her.

She took another sip of coffee. “He called the dump, too. Asked them if there was any way to get your toys back. He even offered to drive over there and look for them himself—but there was no way. I’m sorry. I know that he did a stupid thing, but he honestly tried to fix it, sweetheart.”

Zach felt weirdly numb, as though everything that happened was on a slight delay. He knew what she was saying was supposed to be important, but somehow he couldn’t make it matter. He felt tired, too, as though he hadn’t slept at all, even though he’d actually slept so deeply that the ringing of his alarm had seemed to bring him up from the bottom of something deep and dark. He’d had to fight through his dreams to wake.

“Okay,” he said, because there was nothing else to say.

“Tonight we’re going to sit down and have a family discussion. Your dad was brought up by a very strict man and, as much as he hates it, he acts like his father sometimes. It’s what he knows, honey.”

Zach shrugged and put a scoop of soggy cereal in his mouth to keep from telling her that he’d rather be hung upside down by his toes over a blazing fire than talk to his father. Still chewing, he grabbed his backpack and started for school.

“We can discuss more later,” his mother said with false cheer, moments before he slammed his way out the door.

The cold air felt like a slap in the face. He was relieved not to see Poppy and Alice on the sidewalk. They all lived close enough that sometimes they ran into each other on the way to school, and they usually walked home together. But this morning he hurried along the side of the street, glad to be alone. He kept his head down as he stalked along, kicking rocks and chunks of loose asphalt into the road. When he saw the school building in the distance, he wondered what would happen if he just kept going, the same way his father had left them three years ago. If he just kept walking until he came to a new place where no one knew him, lied about his age, and got a job delivering newspapers or something . . .

Well, he didn’t know quite what he would do after that.

By the time he made up his mind to go to school, he was late. Mr. Lockwood glowered at him as he slunk into class just after the bell. He sat at his desk and drew nothing in the margins of his notebook. If a story idea came to him, he concentrated on something else until it went away.

At lunch his sandwich tasted like cardboard. He threw out his apple.

After school he told the coach he was too sick to go to practice, but really, it was just that he didn’t want to. He didn’t much want to do anything.

He started walking home, thinking he could sit in front of the television until Mom got home from work, then tell her the same thing he told the coach. A few minutes later Alice caught up with him, the slap of her shoes on the pavement heralding her approach. He felt like an idiot for taking the same old route and not expecting to see any of his friends.

“Zach?” Alice asked, out of breath from running. She was wearing a blue T-shirt with a creature on it that appeared to be half brontosaurus, half kitten. Her braids were pulled back into a headband, and little feather earrings hung from her ears.

He had no idea what to say to her. He wanted to ask her about the day before when she was giggling with her friends—he wanted to know why she hadn’t talked to him. But that seemed forever ago, and so much had happened since. He almost didn’t feel like the same person.

A kid named Leo waved to them, walking in their direction. He had big glasses and was always saying crazy things. He was like a random generator of weirdness. “Hey,” he said. “Poppy wanted me to tell you to walk slow. She’s getting a book from the librarian.”

“Oh,” Zach said, feeling doomed. He knew what would happen next. One by one the mass of kids who walked home together would gather and then peel away into clumps headed in different directions, until it was just Poppy and Alice and him. Then one of them would ask, “Want to play?” like always. And he would have to say
something
.

“You okay?” Alice asked.

“Yeah,” said Leo. “You don’t look so good, Zach. Somebody walk over your grave?”

He blinked a couple of times. At least Leo was acting like his normal crazy self. That was one thing that wasn’t going to change.
“What?”

“That’s what my grandpa always said. You never heard that?”

“No,” Zach said. His foot sent a few leaves spiraling up into the air. Talking about graves made him think about walking home the night before, when he’d thought he heard the wind howling at his heels. He shivered. “So my grave is going to be in front of Thomas Peebles Middle School? That’s so lame.”

“It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be buried
here
.” Alice rolled her eyes. “It’s a saying. It means some
where
some
one
is stepping on the place where you’re going to be buried.”

“So it could be any old place?” Zach asked, shaking his head. “How does that help to know?”

“It’s not supposed to help,” Leo said. “It’s just supposed to be true.”

“What are you guys
talking
about?” Poppy asked, bounding up to them. She had on a black sweater and was bouncing on her blue Chucks, one of the pink laces untied and dragging muddily behind her. Her hair was in coppery pigtails, and her eyeliner looked smudged on one eye, like maybe she’d forgotten it was there and rubbed over it.

“Nothing,” Zach said with a shrug.

Poppy looked over at Alice and raised her eyebrows. “Nothing like
nothing
or nothing like
something
?”

Alice shook her head and smiled, but then turned her smile down at the pavement, like she was embarrassed. Zach had no idea what was going on. He wondered if it had to do with yesterday and the giggling, but couldn’t think of how to ask. Sometimes it seemed to him that girls spoke a different language, but he couldn’t figure out when they’d learned it. He was pretty sure that they used to all speak the same language a year ago.

“We’re talking about superstitions,” said Leo. “Like how stepping where someone’s grave is going to be makes them shudder involuntarily.”

He always talked with big words, like a textbook.
Superstitions. Shudder. Involuntarily.
Some kids said it was because his mother was a part-time teacher over at the college, but Zach thought that was just how Leo was.

“Like stepping on a crack is supposed to break your mother’s back?” Poppy asked. “I tried that when I was really little. I was so mad at Mom, but I don’t even remember why now. Wait, no, I do remember! Nate pushed me in the backyard, and I whipped a branch at him. The branch got him good, right above the eye. He was bleeding like crazy, so even though he started it, I was the one who got in trouble. I stomped on cracks all up and down the block. And the next day, she slipped in the garden and sprained her ankle.”

“No way,”
Leo said. Zach could see him mentally filing that away with all his other oddball stories.

Poppy laughed. “It’s not like she actually broke her back. I mean, it was just a coincidence that she fell. But it scared me at the time. I thought I was some kind of powerful enchanter or something.”

“And you avoided cracks for years after,” Alice said. “Remember that? You would be crazy careful, always putting your feet sideways and going up on your tiptoes and stuff. You swerved around like a Roomba robot ballerina.”

“Roombarina,” Zach said automatically. For some reason, words were funnier smashed together.

“Roombarina,” Alice echoed, spinning on one toe and then stumbling a little. “Exactly.”

“That’s a good portmanteau,” said Leo. Zach nodded, the way he usually did when he had no idea what Leo was talking about.

They passed the old Episcopalian church with the big spire as they headed down Main Street. They walked past the barbershop, the pizza place where Zach had birthday parties when he was little, the bus station next to the post office, and the big old graveyard on the hill. Zach had followed this exact route many times, his fingers curled in his mother’s when he was little and then gripping the handlebars of his bike when he was older, and now on foot to and from school. This was the town he’d grown up in, and even though it was small and a lot of the stores on Main Street were closed, even though windows were boarded up and rentals went unrented, Zach was used to the place.

He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, which was a real stumbling block in imagining running away.

“That stuff is real,” Leo said. “For a while, my parents moved us around a lot, and there was this one apartment we lived in that was haunted. I swear—when the ghost was in the room, the air would get really cold, even in the middle of summer. And there was one spot that was always ice-cold. You could put a space heater on top of it, and it wouldn’t warm up. That’s where somebody died. The landlady even said so.”

“Did you ever actually see the ghost?” Alice asked.

Leo shook his head. “No, but sometimes he would move things. Like my mom’s keys. Mom would yell for the ghost to give them back, and then, nine times out of ten, she’d find them right after. Mom says you have to know how to talk to ghosts or they’ll walk all over you.”

Poppy smiled like she did when she was anticipating revealing something exciting—a twist to a story, a shocking turn, a villain’s big move. Her cheeks were pink from the wind, and her eyes were bright. “Have you ever heard this one? When you drive past a cemetery, you have to hold your breath. If you don’t, the spirits of the newly dead can get in your body through your mouth and then they can
possess
you.”

Zach shivered, the hairs along his neck rising. Without meaning to, he imagined the taste of a ghost, like an acrid mouthful of smoke. He spat in the dirt, trying to untaste the idea.

“Ugh,” Alice said into the silence that followed the end of Poppy’s story. “You made me hold my breath! I was totally just trying not to inhale. Anyway, we already passed the graveyard—shouldn’t you have told us the story before we passed it? Unless you wanted us to get possessed.”

Zach thought again about the night before and the feeling of something right behind him, breathing on his neck, something that was about to reach out and grasp for him with its cold fingers. The story was like that, grabbing hold of him and promising that he’d think about it every time he was near a graveyard.

Poppy kept smiling. She made her eyes really wide and spoke in a flat, affectless tone. “Maybe I’m not Poppy anymore. Maybe I didn’t know not to hold my breath and I learned the hard way. Maybe a spirit possessed me and now it’s warning you, because it’s too late. The spirits are already inside yooOOooouUUuu—”

“Come on,
stop
,” Alice said, shoving Poppy’s shoulder. They both began to laugh.

Leo laughed nervously along with them. “That’s why it’s a scary story. Because you can’t do the one thing that would protect you—you’ll never know if you held your breath long enough or let it out too soon. And you can’t hold your breath forever.”

“The smiling was creepy,” said Zach. “Anyone tell you that you have a creepy smile, Poppy?”

She looked very pleased with herself.

They walked a few blocks more and then came to the place where Leo split off for home. He waved good-bye and headed off, cutting across a big lawn toward a trailer park.

Then it was just Alice and Poppy and Zach walking the few blocks to the development where their houses were clustered, all three nearly identical from the outside. His heart started to speed up again and his legs turned to lead because there was no way to avoid the conversation that was coming, even though he wanted to with all his might.

CHAPTER FOUR