I walked until I got to this stone wall, and I went up some stairs. I saw the cars parked in a long line on a gravel road winding through the grass. I saw Laura’s car. They were already there.
I stood back for a while, watching. The graveyard was huge, that old famous one on Greenmount Avenue; it’s got this big stone church with a really high black steeple. The trees were thick in places, and very green. The grass was very green too. Everything was really quiet and still; all I heard was the traffic away in the street and crows cawing.
I walked from tree to tree. The tombstones slid past me, the old marble like dirty chalk, the names and dates filled with soot. I didn’t read them. I watched the burial, coming closer and closer to it.
I came up behind the crowd. They all wore pretty fancy clothes. But then again there were guys like Jack in just jeans and a button-down. I was dressed okay. Nobody noticed me. I didn’t bump anybody.
I slid ahead until I was standing two feet behind Laura. I knew it was her, even though she was wearing a veil. I thought only married women were supposed to do that. I mean widows. But she wore one. Her shoulders were beautiful, bare under the straps of her dress and below the veil. I smelled the freshness of her hair. She was sobbing horribly, and shaking.
Her mom and Jack and a few other people were standing around her. Her mom didn’t seem to know what to do; if anything, she looked embarrassed, her face sort of stricken, and her eyes, too. I could see that from the side of her face as she nervously looked around. But Jack at least patted Laura’s back.
I wanted to touch her.
I wanted to reach out and put my hand on her arm and tell her I was there.
But I didn’t.
What good would it have done?
She didn’t love me anymore, she’d told me. Nothing I did would make her feel any better.
I started walking backwards, slowly. I’d seen her. That was enough. I didn’t know why she was crying. Maybe it was a boy I didn’t know about. She’d never told me much about her other friends. Maybe she loved him. I didn’t mind. He was dead. I felt bad for her.
I walked backwards until I was out of the crowd. Somebody was saying a few words, but I didn’t listen—it was just a man’s voice, sharp in the stillness.
They were lowering the coffin into the grave when I turned and walked out of the cemetery.
Nobody had seen me. They’d have needed a picture to know I was there.
Now, that’s hiding. Real hiding.
Chapter
Two
I can’t tell you what this is all about.
I mean what started with the thing with my elbow.
I mean not yet.
Really, what I want to do here, if you haven’t already guessed, is tell you about my all-time greatest job of hiding, but I can’t just come right out and say where I was when I hid or exactly why I was hiding.
First, it has to do with a lot of things—I mean there were a number of different reasons why I hid—and if I just jump ahead and tell you all about it, and especially about what finally happened, you’ll think I’m really weird or I’m just making it all up.
Well, maybe I am a little weird.
But I’m not making anything up, so please don’t start thinking that. Not because my story is in any way unbelievable, but even I’ll agree that things like what I’m about to say just don’t happen to people like me.
You see, I’m one of those unique people to whom nothing really big ever happened.
I’m not feeling sorry for myself. Please don’t think that, either. But it’s just true that nothing big ever happened to me. I’ve never won a trophy or a prize or anything, or even had my number come up in a raffle. I’ve never even been on a real vacation; we could never afford it. I know kids who ski and scuba dive and go all over the place; my neighborhood is full of them. But I haven’t.
Maybe one day I will. I was talking to a girl I know and I said I think my life will start when maybe I’m twenty-five. She thought that was depressing, but not me. I hoped it would. I mean, I hated thinking I might have to wait until I was thirty-five.
What I can tell you right now is what was happening when it all started, but even for that you need to go back a few months, when I think about it.
Three months ago the big event in my life was that Laura dumped me. I can honestly say it was the biggest event that had ever happened to me in my whole life. She was my first girlfriend, and I’m sixteen, so you know how that is.
If you don’t, I’ll tell you.
I worshiped her.
That’s what wrecked everything.
You see, I have some perspective on it now. I can see things a lot clearer. At the time—I mean when we were actually going out, which we really hardly ever did, I mean on real dates; we mainly just met up a bunch of times at my house or a park or the house where she baby-sat—I couldn’t see anything clearly at all.
All I could see was her.
I never wanted to see anything else.
I couldn’t see anything else.
That was the bliss of it. I
