Laughter at the Academy Read online

  Walking between the rows of graves is like something out of a nightmare or a dream—a bad dream, the kind that escapes nightmare territory by dancing on the razor’s edge between surrealism and insanity. The kind where the walls bleed lobsters and the sky catches fire when it touches the horizon. But the flowers I’ve brought to place on Jenny’s grave are just flowers. They don’t sing or whisper prophecy or turn into butterflies and fly away. When I finally find her tombstone—a simple granite rectangle that can’t possibly summarize everything she was and should have been—and lay them down beneath the line that lists her date of birth and death, they don’t bring Jenny back to me.

  “God, Jenny,” I say, sinking to my knees in the grass. “This is like some sick joke, only no one’s telling me the punch line, and nobody’s laughing. I’d take it back if I could. I’d take it all back if it would bring you home.”

  Jenny doesn’t answer me. Jenny’s never going to answer me again.

  I stay where I am for what feels like an hour or more, the rain running down the back of my jacket and soaking my hair as I bow my head and cry. This can’t be true. This can’t be my life. It feels like just yesterday that I was picking her up for homecoming. She wore that dress the color of moonlight on the snow, and she fit in my arms like the missing piece of a puzzle. She’s not fitting into anyone’s arms now. She’s dead and gone and she’s not coming back to me.

  They lock the cemetery gates at sunset. I don’t want to spend the night here, among the graves, and so when the light starts to fade I force myself to move, wiping my tears away and leaning forward to press a kiss against the cold granite of Jenny’s headstone.

  “I love you,” I say. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Then I stand, wet clothes sloshing with every step, and start toward the distant gates. The rain is slacking off a bit, which is good, since the setting sun is making it hard to see, and I’m starting to feel like a teenage emo cliché: sad lesbian in the graveyard in the rain. Jenny wouldn’t like seeing me like this.

  Maybe that’s not the best train of thought, because Jenny’s never going to see me again, not like this, and not like anything else.

  I’m crying again by the time I reach my car, a 1978 Volvo Bertone I inherited from my father when I turned sixteen and Mom made him dig it out of the garage. It handles like a tank and guzzles gas like nobody’s business, but the collision that killed Jenny and put me in the hospital didn’t even bend its frame. Jenny would have been fine if she’d been wearing her seatbelt, instead of twisted around rummaging through the back seat. I guess I should hate the car for taking her away from me, but I like being able to get to school, and Jenny always loved the Bertone. She said it was just the right combination of old fashioned and ugly as hell, and she appreciated the contrast.

  “That’s my girl,” I said, putting a hand gently on the door. That’s when I see the ticket fluttering against the windshield like a trapped bird in the process of beating itself to death. It hasn’t been there long: it’s not even soaked through. I grimace. “Fucking cops,” I mutter, and reach for it, only to freeze when another hand snatches it up before I can get there. A hand with long, slender fingers, the nails painted a shade of perfect moonlight gold that didn’t come out of any bottle. Jenny always mixed her own nail polish. She said wearing anything off-the-rack, from clothes to cosmetics, showed a lack of commitment.

  I lift my head. Jenny is standing next to the car in her moonlight dress, her homecoming corsage still tied around her wrist. She smiles, and she looks so sad that it makes me want to die, even though the sight of her is making me want to live like nothing has in weeks.

  “Hi, Leigh,” she says, and oh, God, her voice is the same as it always was. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. “Can I get a ride home?”

  What is there for me to say?

  “Yes,” I say, and unlock the car.

  But she doesn’t get in. Jenny doesn’t get in. She just looks at me, her smile fading away a little bit at a time, until she finally says, “There are rules.”

  “Rules,” I echo dumbly. My dead girlfriend is standing in front of me, and she’s telling me there are rules. I don’t understand why there should be, since I’m clearly losing my mind.

  “You have to drive me straight home,” she says. “No stops—we’re not going to the movies or going to Taco Bell or anything like that. You can’t ask me why I’m here. And you can’t give me a kiss goodnight.”

  It’s an odd set of restrictions to get from a hallucination. I frown at her for a moment, trying to figure out what my subconscious is telling me—and then I decide I honestly don’t care. Jenny’s here. Whether she’s a hallucination or a ghost (and the fact that she’s still holding the parking ticket is a vote for “ghost,” unless I’m hallucinating that, too) doesn’t matter. All that really matters now is driving Jenny home.

  “Okay,” I say, and we both get in the car, and I drive us away from the cemetery, and everything’s okay again, if only for a little while.

  DECEMBER

  Jenny was gone when I turned onto her street, disappearing in the moments between checking my mirror and looking back at her. She left the parking ticket in the seat where she had been. She was always thoughtful that way.

  That was a month ago. The ticket’s been paid, and the shock waves have mostly finished washing through our school. I’m off the cheerleading squad, of course—even if the rest of the girls had sort of known about Jenny and me back when I was a base and she was a flyer, even though they’d been cool about the fact that we were lesbians, I was responsible for the death of one of our own. They couldn’t look at me without seeing her, and I couldn’t look at them without seeing her, and we were all tired of being haunted. So I quit the squad, and now no one’s trying to use Jenny to define me. They’re too busy using her to define everything else.

  Jenny’s dress at homecoming was moonlight satin? Fine, then, the theme for prom is going to be “Love Under the Moon,” and everyone already knows Jenny will be awarded the coveted crown—the other girls who should be talking about campaigning by this point lower their eyes and murmur her name whenever the position of Prom Queen is mentioned, like wanting it would mean wanting what Jenny got: a brutal death and an early grave. They’re canonizing her with memory, wearing away her hard edges bit by bit until all that’s left is something perfect they can tell their own children about, someday, when they’re telling them not to drink and drive.

  Jenny hadn’t been drinking. Neither had I. Tyler did the drinking for both of us, the big muscle-headed football asshole who thought he was so great, and thought Jenny was his for the taking, and learned he was so beneath her notice when he saw us dancing together on the far side of the gymnasium—the fat girl in the tuxedo pressed up against the high school fantasy.

  We were both cheerleaders, but she was the one everyone remembered. I was just the one who made sure she didn’t fall. I had one job. I couldn’t even accomplish that.

  But God, she was so beautiful that night, like the goddess of the moon come down to hold hands with a mortal girl until the sun came up and the fantasy burned to ash. She was a fairy tale, she was a fiction, and I felt like I still had mud under my fingernails from grounding the pyramid, despite the hours I’d spent scrubbing them clean. I guess that’s why I let Tyler and his dumb jock friends get to me when they cornered me by the punchbowl. “Be the bigger person” and “just ignore them” is all well and good for people whose own high school days are fading in the rearview mirror of adulthood, but in the moment, when you’re wearing teenage skin…

  I didn’t throw the first punch. I didn’t throw the last one, either. I would probably have been beaten to a pulp if Jenny hadn’t thrown herself into the middle of things, shouting at Tyler for being a Neanderthal idiot and shouting at me for letting myself be baited. I said I was sorry. I said I was stupid. I said I wouldn’t let it happen again.

  She said “Take me home.”

  I drove home angry. That’
s the worst part: that’s the part I’m never going to forgive myself for. Jenny wasn’t speaking to me, just flipping through the radio and sulking—right up until she decided she was cold and undid her belt so she could rummage through the backseat for my discarded tuxedo jacket. That was when Tyler came around the corner, drunk and angry and driving a Prius that didn’t stand a chance against my ancient bruiser of a Volvo. He slammed into my bumper, crumpling his car like a tin can and putting Jenny through the windshield.

  The impact was enough to knock me out, even though I was wearing my seatbelt. By the time I woke up, it was too late. Jenny was gone.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  It’s been two months since Jenny died and a month since I saw her. I’ve parked next to the cemetery gates every goddamn day since then, listening to a playlist of her favorite songs—too much country, too many teenage death ballads from the 1950s, and not nearly enough good old-fashioned rock and roll. Even if it’s just a glimpse, I need to see her again, to that I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw her before, and most of all, to know I’m not losing my mind.

  But the sun is going down, and there’s no sign of Jenny. The grassy lawn is empty; the cemetery gates are closed and locked, as impassable as the wall to some forbidden city. I sigh. She’s not coming. I’m losing my mind. I’ve had a month to think about what happened here, what I heard and saw and smelled. There’s no way that it was real; things like that don’t happen. I close my eyes and lean back in my seat, breathing in through my nose and out from my mouth, and wait for the urge to wait for her to pass away.

  It doesn’t pass.

  But someone’s knocking on the window.

  The sound is enough to make me yelp, twisting in my seat…and there’s Jenny in her dress like moonlight, with her hair pinned up just so, long golden curls anchored in an elaborate updo by little pins with glittering silver stars on them. My fingers itch to plunge into that hair and unwind it strand by strand, until the smell of her shampoo fills the world. I don’t move. I can’t move. Jenny frowns and knocks on the glass again.

  I don’t answer. Instead, I open the car door and get out, my eyes fixed on her face the whole time. I can see her—fine, the mind plays tricks. I can hear her, I can smell her, and that doesn’t prove anything, that doesn’t prove anything except that I miss her so badly I can taste it, and every day that I wake up and Jenny’s not there is like another needle in my heart. I keep thinking it’ll run out of room, and then the morning comes and proves me wrong. She’s not real, she can’t be real, and I’m going to prove it to myself here and now. I’m going to—

  My hand catches her wrist. Her skin is cool, like she’s been standing outside without a coat for too long, but it’s still her skin, soft and familiar and real. My breath catches in my throat. I try to speak. Nothing happens, and Jenny daintily pulls herself free.

  “You haven’t answered,” she says.

  “Jenny, God, what is going on here?” I grab for her again, but she’s too quick for me—she steps back and out of the range of my questing fingers, leaving them to close on empty air. “Why are you doing this? Do your parents know that you’re not dead? Why are you hiding?”

  “Because all I’m doing is asking for a ride home, and I’m only doing it because you keep coming here and wanting me to,” she replies. She looks at me, eyes wide and sad and pleading, and I know the truth. There’s no other explanation. “I died, Leigh. I died, and you didn’t get me home. Even though you promised. You didn’t get me home.”

  “I’ll get you home, I promise.” I’m making promises I can’t keep—I’m making promises to a dead girl, and I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that this is a terrible idea, but fuck, what do I care? A week ago I was thinking about killing myself. At least this way I’ll do something useful with what’s left of my life. Any promise in the world is worth making, if I’m making it to Jenny.

  “You can try,” she says, and disappears, leaving the scent of vanilla in her wake. Vanilla, and something darker, something wet and green and old, like the moss that grows on gravestones.

  Somehow, I’m not surprised when I turn around and find her sitting in the car, belt already buckled, hands folded primly in her lap. This is a dream, I think, and I’m opening the car door, I’m sliding back into my seat, and Jenny is there, Jenny with her corsage on her wrist and a sad, distant look on her face. This is a dream, and I never want to wake up again.

  “Drive, Leigh,” she says, and there’s a sudden tension in her voice, like she wants to say so much more, but she doesn’t know how. “You have to drive, or I can’t stay.”

  “What?”

  “Drive.”

  There’s no denying the urgency in the word, and so I start the engine and hit the gas, and we’re rolling, moving away from the cemetery and starting on the long road back to Jenny’s house. She lives—she lived, she’s dead, and I can’t let myself forget that, not even with her sitting next to me, the smell of her vanilla perfume rolling through the cab like a storm front—on the other side of town. We have twenty miles to go, and that’s if I take the short way.

  She never said I had to do that. I turn left when I should have turned right, going for the route we always used to take when we were thinking that maybe a brief stop by the side of a wooded road would be a good way to spend a little of the afternoon.

  Jenny is silent for the first part of the drive. I glance her way, but her attention is on the window, watching as the housing developments that ring the town like mushrooms melt away into forest, the semi-untouched wood that still owns this part of the state. If it weren’t for her perfume, I’d think I was hallucinating her. Maybe I could still be hallucinating her. Do hallucinations have a scent?

  I’m mulling that over when Jenny says, in a small, wounded voice, “You were supposed to drive me home. That was the deal, when my parents said that I could go to the dance with you. You told my father you would get me home by midnight. Remember? You promised.”

  I glance at her, startled, and startle myself all over again when she fills my field of vision, Jenny in her moonlight dress, Jenny with her golden hair, Jenny not under the ground and filling the bellies of a million worms. “I didn’t mean to have an accident. You should have been wearing your belt,” I say. The words are mulish, sullen: they fall into the space between us like clots of earth onto her grave.

  “It scared me when I saw Tyler hitting you,” she says, and turns away from me, looking out the window. “He was so much bigger than you were, and he’d been drinking, and I just wanted to get away before somebody got hurt. I knew it would piss him off, seeing us there, and I didn’t care, because I loved you. I should have cared. All-American boys get the All-American girls, right? That’s what the Founding Fathers died for.” Scorn drips from her voice. I flinch from it. I can’t help myself. “I knew it was stupid. I knew I should yell for one of the chaperones and tell them that we wanted to stay, and that he needed to go. But I was so mad. You made me so mad, Leigh. Why couldn’t you keep your temper for just one night? It was supposed to be our night.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and it’s small, and it’s stupid, and it’s not enough.

  “So am I,” says Jenny.

  She doesn’t say another word during the drive. I have to look away from her when I turn onto her street—it’s an unprotected left, if I watched my dead girlfriend, I’d be joining her in the ground—and when I look back, Jenny’s gone, leaving only the faint scent of vanilla and the feeling that I’ve lost her all over again.

  I drive by her house without slowing down. There’s nothing for me there.

  Nothing at all.

  JANUARY

  It’s apparently been long enough since the funeral for public opinion to have shifted: I come back from Christmas break and the shrines to Jenny are gone, and the plans for the prom theme to match her homecoming dress have all been forgotten, replaced by something cliché about Greek gods and the beauty of Olympus. I should be happy. I’m no
t being reminded of Jenny every time I turn a corner or go into the school office. Instead, rage paces and snarls under my sternum like a captive animal. How dare they forget about her? How dare they go on with their lives like nothing has changed? Jenny is dead. She’s not coming back to school tomorrow, or the next day, or ever, and it’s not right for them to let go of her like this.

  The school counselor says this is healthy. Says they’re “moving on” and “coming to terms” and that maybe it’s time my parents start paying for some independent counseling services for me, since it’s pretty clear she’s not going to be able to help me properly through my grief—not with me refusing to let go of Jenny’s memory. I call her a bitch and get thrown out of her office, with a week’s detention and a letter to take home to my mother. I should probably feel bad about that. I can’t find the energy. I’m walking through a school that was haunted by Jenny only a few weeks ago, and now seems content to go on as if she’d never existed.

  Three months. That’s apparently the lifespan of teenage grief. That’s how long our fickle hearts are meant to hold on to someone who’s not there anymore. Anything more than that is cause for concern.

  Poor, absent Tyler is the new darling of the student body. Tyler, the football hero who may never play again; Tyler, who was just trying to have a good time when he got drunk and crashed into my car, killing my girlfriend almost instantly; Tyler, who was the sort of guy every one of us should aspire to be.

  I’m starting to think about murder.

  I’m thinking about murder when I park at the curb in front of the cemetery, my hands resting lightly on the wheel and my eyes fixed on the middle distance, visions of Tyler’s tortured face dancing like sugarplums through my daydreams. There’s no rap on the window, but there’s the smell of vanilla, and the sudden, definite feeling that I am not alone in the car. I start the engine before I turn to flash a smile at Jenny, and say, “I’m happy to give you a ride home.”