Letters From The Dead

Chapter 8

When I got home, I sat there pretending that nothing had gone wrong. I wondered if my parents would notice that I was faking it before remembering that that would be stupid. My parents didn’t notice shit. Not anymore. I dragged out my long unused laptop from under my bed and clicked on iTunes so that I could at least have something to listen to for the last three days of break. Ditching my phone was fine. I just hoped that Tyler wouldn’t try to give it back. I doubted I’d be able to face him. Years of not telling anyone anything and it was all ruined just because I was angry.

There was a sick sort of satisfaction swirling deep inside me though. Telling someone who obviously hadn’t expected it at all. Just the surprised look on his face when I’d went off on him was enough to make me feel inexplicably smug. No one really knew what I got up to outside of school.

My computer beeped and I knew that it was Eric trying to get into contact with me. I had, true to my word, passed on Tammy’s party, and the five other that had happened over the length of the two weeks we’d been to school.

Haven’t heard much from you, he IM’ed me and I scoffed at his polite way of asking why the fuck I’d been ignoring his texts.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the cemetery, I wrote back, my fingers clicking into the keys with a familiar calming noise. I could practically feel Eric’s bewilderment through the computer at his pause before the IM told me that he was typing.

Er…why?

I could feel my fingers itching to type the words and I wondered well why not? It wasn’t like Eric would make fun or anything. He’d known Deidre as well. He actually might be mad at me. Mad enough to yell, I hoped. I needed to yell at someone. Tyler didn’t count. He’d been far to bewildered to be of any real stress-reliever.

That’s where Deidre is buried. I wrote, hoping that I was doing the right thing. Deidre had told me to tell people after all. There I was, telling people.

There was another pause and then:

What?

I almost laughed but choked on my amusement when the next words popped up.

I’m calling you.

I dropped the book I’d been fingering through and hastily typed out a response, half desperate to get the words sent before he actually carried out that idea. That horrible, terrible idea.

Don’t!  I wrote and, stabbing my finger into the enter key, I crossed everything I had in hopes that he hadn’t done it already. I shifted my hand and brought up the video chat, disregarding the fact that I probably looked like a drowned cat (not because I was wet, or anything, just because I always looked like shit after I ran or stressed and I’d just done both).

“Don’t call me, E,” I hissed, but when his face finally rendered on my screen, his phone was already pressed to his ear. He looked very confused.

“Who is this?” Eric asked his phone and I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. Obviously Tyler would answer my phone. Never mind the common courtesy of just ignoring calls for privacy.

“And, uh, why do you have Hal’s phone?” Eric continued and I flipped him off, watching his expression morph from bewildered to horrified.

“She wasn’t lying?” Eric demanded of Tyler and I rolled my eyes. Why not ask me, the one with the full story, instead of Tyler?

“I’ve got to go,” Eric said flatly, “I’m video-chatting with her.” There was a pause and then Eric smirked right at me, though the horror didn’t really leave his eyes. “Two thousand, three hundred eighty four. Thirty one slash five slash nineteen.”

I sucked in a huge outraged breath of air when I realized exactly what Eric had just given Tyler –my locker information, combination and all—and glared venomously at my friend through my web cam as he hung up and watched me pensively, his fingers pressing against his jaw as he sat in apparent thought.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he finally asked and I faltered. There were a few reasons, some of which were very stupid, and some of which were very selfish. None of them were very good.

Eric made a noise to remind me that he was still waiting for an answer and I leaned back, clutching my pillow like a life-line. My words were raspy as I whispered them, but if he was having trouble hearing, he didn’t say anything about it.

“I thought that if I was the only one who knew, it wouldn’t be true.”