Shallow Graves (5 page)

EVERY YEAR SINCE
first grade, Diane Fordham invited a group of us over for her birthday party at the end of the summer, and every year I went to her big white house with a gift in hand. The inside of the house was just as white as the outside: white sofas, white carpet, white walls, white artwork in white frames. The only thing in the living room that wasn't white was the cross on the wall, about six inches long, plain polished wood hanging above the white fireplace.

I hated walking through that living room to the stairs. I worried I would leave tracks on the carpet and Diane's mother and father—a tall stern couple who worked for an investment firm—would look down their thin noses and scold me for bringing dirt into their
home. It felt like a test, crossing that white living room, and I never exhaled until I reached the stairs and the relative safety of Diane's second floor family room. All through the night we would make excursions to the kitchen for snacks and soda, to the front door when we ordered pizza, but we were always quick, always careful, and every single time Diane said, “Don't spill anything.” Every time. She had been hearing it her entire life; she blurted it out without thinking.

It was fun when we were little, that yearly sleepover with so little supervision, but Diane and I grew apart as we grew older, and her birthday party became a tiresome obligation. The rest of us changed, started caring more about sports and boys and music and college and the future, but Diane was still Diane, with her bedroom of girly ruffles and lace in that albino mausoleum of a house.

The August before our sophomore year of high school, the invitation came like it always had: a pink card in a square pink envelope, my name and address written in Diane's curling cursive. My mother had left it on my bed with a copy of
Scientific American
and another letter in a regular white envelope. I recognized the handwriting on that one too. I set it aside without opening it. I already had a collection of Ricky Benning's awkward notes and terrible poetry in my desk drawer. Melanie thought it was hilarious, and at first I had agreed, secretly pleased to be the object of somebody's attention, even a loser like Ricky Benning, but now it was only embarrassing.

I opened Diane's invitation and called Melanie.

“I can't believe she invited you,” Melanie said, laughing. “I
thought for sure you'd be off the list this year. You have a reputation now.”

I was lying on my bed in my basement bedroom. The day was hot and sticky, but the basement was always cool, even through the long summer afternoons. The glow-in-the-dark sticker stars on my ceiling were faint yellow smudges against the off-white paint. Melanie's words stung, but I wasn't about to let her know. I remembered my aunt Colleen giving me a warning a few years before, as we were fixing Thanksgiving dinner. Colleen had said, “You have to be careful, Breezy. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal now, but nobody ever cares about having a reputation until they've got a bad one.”

Melanie loved that I had a bad reputation now, but she hated it too. She hated that there were things I had done before her, without her help, without her input. Her jealousy was petty, needlelike, deployed at unpredictable moments. I didn't have any defenses against it. Not against Melanie. Not against my best friend. All I had was the naive hope that after three months of summer nobody would care any more about the rumors that had raced around before the end of the school year. Mostly true, but not completely: I did have sex with Michael Chaffert, my first time and he knew it, but I didn't know he had a girlfriend at the time, and I definitely didn't beg him to introduce me to all his friends for a whole summer of repeat performances. I don't think anybody even believed that last part; everybody knew Michael couldn't tell the truth about girls or sex if his life depended on it. But what they believed and what they laughed about were two different things.

After a few weeks I had realized that denying Michael's version
of events wasn't making any difference, so I chose another tactic. I told anybody who mentioned it that fucking Michael had been the dullest three minutes of my life and I couldn't even be sure it had happened at all, that's how little I felt, emphasis on the
little
. Maybe it wasn't in line with Aunt Colleen's well-meaning advice, but I had decided, as soon as ninth grade ended, that it was better to be scornful than shamed.

It didn't matter anyway, not after Cherie Kostova turned up drunk on the first day of school and wrecked her car on the third, and not after a junior named Samantha French announced that he was now Samuel French and the teachers and counselors scrambled to put together sensitivity groups and stumbled over pronouns, not after Lindy Oliver went off her meds and threw a chair across the room during Mr. Park's class discussion about
Ethan Frome
. There was always somebody doing something more shocking, more outrageous, more interesting. I was completely irrelevant by the time our sophomore year began.

But I didn't know that yet, during the last week of summer, and I was tired of not knowing how much to care.

I put my feet up on my windowsill and dropped Diane's invitation on the bed beside me.

“Well, she did,” I said. “Are you going?”

Melanie laughed again. “No way. Don't you think we're a little old for pizza and stupid horror movies now?”

I did, but I went to Diane's birthday party anyway, mostly because I was angry at Melanie for deciding who among our acquaintances would still want me around and who wouldn't. I
wrapped up a present in gold and white paper, rang the doorbell, smiled when Diane's mother answered.

Mrs. Fordham's expression was distant and cool. “Diane and the others are upstairs. I'm so glad you could make it.”

She didn't greet me by my name; I wasn't sure she even knew it. After the party the year before, as I had been rolling up my sleeping bag and shoving my clothes into my backpack, I had heard Mrs. Fordham saying to her daughter, “Why don't you ask that nice Oriental girl to help you study? They're very good at school, you know. It's part of their culture.” I didn't hear Diane's answer, but she never did ask me to help her study.

I hurried through the white living room, conscious of my shoes on the carpet, of Mrs. Fordham's eyes on my back. I gave her a quick smile before running up the steps. Diane was there, of course, and her two best friends Courtney and Julie, but so were Maria and Tatiana. I was relieved to have at least two real friends for the night.

Diane unfolded herself from her corner of the sofa and stood to take the present from me.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly. “I didn't want to invite you, you know.”

I was surprised by her directness. I knew Diane didn't like me very much and inviting me to her birthday party was more habit than anything else, but we usually pretended. We were pretty good at pretending.

“But my mom would wonder where you were if I didn't,” Diane went on. “She doesn't know what a slut you are. I wasn't going to tell her.”

“Jeez, Diane,” Maria said. “You don't have to be a bitch about it.”

But she laughed, because Maria laughed at everything, and I had to laugh too. Melanie would love to know she had been right. I had managed to get dirt all over Diane's pretty white house even without spilling a thing.

Diane ignored me for the rest of the night. We watched a movie about college kids getting murdered by a professor possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, and when it was done Diane ordered pizza and dragged Courtney downstairs to fetch soda and chips. When they came back, Diane had a DVD case in her hands. It was plain on the outside, printed words and no pictures; she tucked it between the arm and cushion of the chair before we could see it. Tatiana asked her if she had any alcohol, just to see how she would react, and Diane informed us that nobody in her family would
ever
drink.

The pizza arrived, we scattered paper plates and napkins all over the room, and Maria launched into a story about her cousin in Mexico who had decided to hitchhike through Central and South America, all the way down to the tip of the continent, and the trouble he was getting into, the people he was meeting, the mornings he woke up confused and disoriented after partying with strangers. It sounded equal parts fun and terrifying, and when Maria was finished, Julie said she would like to do something like that, something brave and adventurous, maybe after graduation. The rest of us agreed in the way of girls who had three long years before
after graduation
meant anything, a safe distance from which all wild ideas were possible.

But not Diane. Diane only said, “That's awful. He's going to get himself killed.” Then she carried the DVD over to the player, put it in before any of us could get a look at it. “We're watching this next.”

“What is it?” Courtney asked.

“My youth pastor gave it to me,” Diane said. Courtney groaned and rolled her eyes; Diane glared at her. “It's not like
that.
It's not a church thing. It's better than a horror movie, because it's real.”

“It better not be a church thing,” Courtney said.

Julie asked, “Is this the hot youth pastor you told us about?”

Diane blushed. “He's married,” she said, and we all laughed, almost like we were friends again.

She turned off the lights again, took the remote, and pressed play. The first minute or so was completely black, no title or credits or anything, then the film began. It was low quality, like it came from a cheap old camcorder, or a found-footage movie made to look like it did. There was a plain bedroom with a twin bed, nightstands on either side, a single lamp, and dull beige walls. The camera was at the foot of the bed.

There was a girl sitting on the bed. She was maybe seven or eight years old. She was wearing blue flannel pajamas and playing with a stuffed rabbit, making it hop across the bed to one side and back again, narrating its progress in her little girl voice. She called him Mr. Rabbit. Her red hair was messy, her smile sweet. If she knew she was being filmed, she didn't show it.

“What is this?” Maria asked.

“Shhh,” Diane hissed. She was staring at the screen, rapt.

Footsteps sounded and a man passed in front of the camera,
and another approached the bed from the side. The one on the left held a Bible and wore a priest's collar. The one on the right said, “Hey, sweetie, you remember Father Matt?”

The little girl smiled at the priest. She looked happy right up until her father took the rabbit out of her hands, then she began shaking her head and squirming. The men grabbed her arms and legs to hold her still, but she didn't make a sound.

“Oh, you've got to be kidding me,” Maria said. “Come on, Diane. This is dumb.”

Diane ignored her and turned the volume louder.

“I have like thirty Catholic aunts and uncles and cousins, and all of them know stuff like this is bullshit,” Maria said. “We should be watching
The Exorcist
instead. At least that's not boring.”

“If this is real, it's child abuse,” Julie said. She looked sick to her stomach.

“They're helping her,” Diane said.

A second later one of the men on the screen said, “We're helping you.”

“It's not real,” Maria said. She didn't sound like she doubted it, but she was still watching.

The two men held the girl long enough to tie her down. They used cloth straps on her wrists and ankles. A woman's voice was speaking off camera, saying over and over again, “Don't hurt her, don't hurt her, don't hurt her,” stuck between a plea and a prayer. I wanted the camera to rotate. I wanted to see what kind of mother would let men do that to her daughter.

Even if it was fake. Diane's youth pastor had to be seriously
messed up to give that to a fourteen-year-old girl and tell her it was real.

Courtney said, “Definitely fake. It's some kind of stupid viral marketing thing.”

And Julie said, “Nobody even thinks movies like this are good anymore.”

The man on the left picked up the Bible. He didn't open it, just held one hand over the cover, and he began to speak. He had a weak voice, too quiet for the camera, and most of what he was saying was monotonous and dull. After he had been listing names of saints for a while, Maria and I began talking about something else, and when Diane shushed us, we settled for folding her discarded gift wrap into paper planes and chucking them at each other. On the recording, the girl struggled a little against the bindings, more annoyed than pained. A few times she looked beseechingly toward her father and the woman offscreen, but still she did not speak. Her lips were pressed together so tight they were a thin white line.

The priest hesitated in a few places, watching the girl warily. He made it through addressing the unclean spirit, ancient serpent, impious one, et cetera, finally landed a firm
amen
and fell quiet. His face was red, as though the recitation had exhausted him. He touched his hand briefly to his chest and winced.

The other man said, “Try again.”

So he did, from the beginning. But the girl had had enough. She began to whine and whimper, tugging at her bonds with restless impatience. The priest stuttered, and he reached out to touch her head. The girl jerked away and shrieked.

It wasn't an expelling-demons-from-her-soul shriek, more like a tantrum-in-the-grocery-store shriek, but the adults reacted like she had started screaming bloody murder. The girl's father flung himself at her, clapped his hand over her mouth with an audible slap, and in the background the mother was saying, “Oh, no, no, honey, you know you have to be quiet!”

The girl twisted away from her father's hand and shrieked again. “I don't want to!”

The words were so much louder than they had any right to be. Each one landed like a stab in the ear, piercing and sharp. Julie grabbed the remote control from Diane and turned the volume down. Diane didn't look away from the screen. The girl shrieked again. The girl's father clasped his hands to his ears.