Chapter One
James Sutton watched as his classmates jostled their way out of Room D, the bell ringing loudly in the halls. He smiled; it was his last day of Grade 8. He lingered at his desk, absently packed up his bag and slung it over his right shoulder.
Ms. Fielder stood by the door saying rushed goodbyes, good-lucks, and so forth. James heard none of this. His eyes kept flipping between her wide smile, her hair tucked behind her right ear and the way her legs shuffled in her skirt. The grey cotton one that danced below her knees. The one that always 3 bunched up when she sat down and stayed bunched for a few brief, beautiful moments as she stood up.
James meandered to the door, his heart rate rising, his cheeks flushing a little.
He stuck out his hand after wiping it five times on his jeans.
“Thanks for everything, Ms. Fielder,” he said.
She brushed his hand aside and gave him a hug. One tight squeeze and then she stepped back.
“Be good, Jimmy,” she said.
James had to fight his face from reddening further but was sure he had failed. His name spoken in her voice was the sweetest thing he had ever heard.
“I will. Take it easy.”
“You, too.”
James walked into the common area shared by the Grade 7’s and 8’s, between Room A, B, C and D. The rooms were separated by a makeshift computer lab comprised of six iMacs from 2005, the school’s last big purchase. James looked at the chaos surrounding him. Everything was covered in paper: coloured worksheets, lined pages, and tests with red, now meaningless, marks.
The air was full. Kids were rushing out and whipping everything they had to the ceiling before hugging their friends from different classrooms.
James turned back and made eye contact with Ms. Fielder, who laughed safely behind her closed door.
“Only pages, Mr. Shore!” Mr. Byram yelled. “Hey—Thomas!”
James turned to see one of his best friends, Thomas Shore, throw a math textbook across the space, missing Madison Green’s head by inches as she ducked. It smacked against the wall. A few screams joined the noise.
“What’s wrong with you, Tommy?” Madison yelled.
Tommy covered his mouth, trying to hide his laughter, his eyes wide.
“Fuck, Maddie. I’m sorry! I meant to just toss it!” he said.
“Mr. Shore, why would you ever think that was a good idea?” Mr. Byram asked.
James couldn’t hold back his laughter. “Tommy, you’re messed, man.”
Mr. Byram’s and Tommy’s eyes flew over to James. Tommy pointed at him and laughed even harder.
“You see that? I almost smoked her.”
Mr. Byram tried to hold Tommy’s attention. James watched as defeat consumed his body. His entire back rounded and he waved his hand in the air before waddling back to Room C and slamming the door.
Pages continued to rise and fall as Tommy waltzed through the middle of the common area. He blew a kiss at Maddie who returned the middle finger, although she was trying her best to hide a smile. Tommy dapped up James. They turned and watched Michael Martin walk out of Room B. He glanced around nervously before throwing his pages in the air as well. His eyes flitted over the scene before stopping on James and Tommy. A huge smile lit his face.
“Nice toss, Mikey,” Tommy said as Mike reached them.
“Did you throw a textbook, dude?” Mike asked.
“Yep, sure did.”
The only one missing from their group of friends was Owen Kettman, which was no surprise. They had heard through the middle school grapevine that he had been sent to the office earlier. For what exactly was still a mystery.
“Actually, I’m not sure why I did that,” Tommy said with a puzzled expression.
More screams. Someone was yelling to their left. A locker door slammed.
“I’m going to miss Emma,” James said.
“Emma?” Mike asked.
“What do you mean Emma? Only the love of my fucking life, Mike.”
Tommy was throwing pencils into the middle of the room. One struck a Grade 7 named Sam in the head. Sam let out a howl before dropping to the ground as though he’d been shot. “Heads up, Sammy. Heads up!” Tommy called.
“Emma… hmm… Oh, Ms. Fielder,” Mike said, nodding. “She was looking so fine today, my God.”
“Have some decency,” James said.
“I mean, did you see her ass in that skirt? Have mercy,” Tommy said.
“I’m only here for her soul,” James said.
“Okay, boys,” Ms. Fielder said.
The three of them turned, their eyes popping out of their skulls.
“Go home, all right?”
“Yes, Ms. Fielder,” Mike said.
“Jim is gonna miss you, Ms. Fielder,” Tommy said before he ran away, with Mike following close behind.
“Sorry about them… you know how they are. Have a great summer,” James said.
He sprinted after them.
Tommy and Mike burst out of the school through the side door.
James stopped in the hall. He spotted Owen by the office in a screaming match with the principal, Mr. Doyle. James watched for another moment before following his friends into the sweltering late afternoon.
The soccer field and playground were full of younger kids with their parents. The parking lot swam under waves of heat.
James turned to Tommy who was trying to catch his breath.
“I had to, man… you gotta know that. Honestly, I probably just did you a favour.”
“Fuck off,” James said, laughing.
The three of them walked to the front of the school, toward the bike rack and the office.
“I just saw Owen freaking at Mr. Doyle,” James said.
“He’s always pissed,” Mike said.
“This was different—” James stopped talking as Owen came bursting out the front door.
Owen stripped off his shirt, which was already mightily ripped, and whipped it at the closing automatic door just as Mr. Doyle walked out. Mr. Doyle started speaking, turned in the three boys’ direction, stopped, and watched as Tommy took his own shirt off and waved it above his head.
“Free my boy, Doyle!”
James tried his best to figure out Owen’s expression. He thought he could see a wave of relief flood across his angry face. He also saw him take a deep breath before smiling, as if preparing himself to do so. James noticed Mike had taken his shirt off as well. By now Owen was laughing. James figured he wasn’t going to be the odd one out, so off came James’s shirt.
Mr. Doyle adopted the same look as Mr. Byram.
“I’ll talk to you this summer, Owen,” he said before walking inside.
The door closed behind him.
“You guys are fucked,” Owen said as they got to the bike rack.
“Nice abs, Tommy!” Carissa Heath yelled from the sidewalk.
A group of five girls around her giggled.
“Hey, listen, this isn’t a free show, ladies,” Tommy said.
“What about mine, Riss?” Owen said, flexing.
“She said abs, Owen, not bones,” Emily Iley shot back.
This brought on another fit of laughter.
“Ruthless,” Owen said.
“She’s got a point, man,” James said, gesturing to Owen’s body. “I mean c’mon.”
Owen was about five-nine and maybe weighed 100 pounds.
“You too, Jimmy? Damn.”
“What was that all about?” Mike asked. “I mean, why do I have my shirt off?”
“Just regular shit,” Owen said. “I never have to see him again, so fuck it.”
“True.”
“Why do you have your shirt off, Mike?” Owen asked, elbowing him in his slightly pouchy midsection. “I mean there are kids here—put that away.”
“I really wouldn’t be talking. You are haunting.”
“Fuck yourself. You see Emma today?” Owen said and whistled loudly.
“None of you are my friends,” James said.
With everything sorted, the four of them mounted their bikes and took off down Clifton Street, away from the only middle school in Arlya and toward Cemetery Hill.
James pedalled ahead. His father’s road bike always put him in the lead if he set his mind to it. His legs pumped and he relished the burn growing in his quads. His dirty blond hair flew behind him, leaking out from underneath his Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap and down to the middle of his neck.
Mike tried his best to keep up, telling James one of these days he would beat him to the corner, taking a left onto Wilson Street.
If they were to take a right coming from the school, Wilson Street led out of town through expansive farm fields, heavy woods and drifting ponds toward Highton, the closest city to Arlya. To the left, Wilson Street wove down the hill, which lifted Arlya’s biggest suburb and Clifton Street Public School above the rest of the town, and ended at Main Street.
James rounded the corner left. The asphalt had been freshly paved last week. It was dried up and baking in the summer sun.
If they were to take a left on Main, the road sloped away from the bottom of Cemetery Hill to the downtown area. In this direction, Main was lined with a laundromat, The King’s Pub, two pizza joints, a dollar store, a grocery store about the same size as the pub, a hair salon, a mall with a GP, dentist and law office, and around twenty-five houses.
Past downtown, Main was only broken up by a set of train tracks which split Arlya neatly in two. The tracks were rarely used but every now and then you would hear a train rumble in the distance.
Tina Brell’s brother had killed himself on those tracks two years ago. He had lain there all night waiting for one to roll through. A couple of days later, James had heard a muffled conversation through his parents’ bedroom door: his mom had been telling his dad that they’d only been able to identify him because of his winter coat.
On the other side of the tracks, Main Street meandered out of town, fizzling into Highway 8, a dirt road primarily used by farmers.
At the bottom of Cemetery Hill, to the right, Main ran over a one-lane bridge beside a pond filled with dead trees and families of ducks, before splitting onto Calhoun Road and eventually ending at Lowell Street.
James’s house stood guard between the corner of Lowell, Main, and Elliot Reese’s farm, which lay behind it. James’s parents had moved into 56 Lowell Street, a modest-sized yellow-sided home with a wraparound porch, shortly after they were married in 1992. His mom had painted the front door purple last week, bright red being the eighth colour to be covered up since they moved in.
A block down from the Suttons, Collins Street split off Lowell and jutted back parallel to Main.
Past Collins, Lowell Street ran for another five hundred metres or so until a dead end. It was lined with one-story buildings with little windows—one a spring factory; one a meat factory, which leaked awful noises at all hours of the day; C Con, which produced concrete piping; and a corn processor. The only outliers on the street were three massive silos which held all the grain for the processor.
The boys had tried to climb a silo once but were screamed at by one of the workers. They learned from him that eight-year-old David Freeman had died doing the same thing. He had climbed to the top and fallen in, subsequently drowning in thousands and thousands of tiny dusty pellets.
Tommy lived at 89 Collins, a red brick home with white-trimmed windows and a garage set about fifty feet back from the main house.
Collins Street ended at Calhoun, which met back with Main Street one way, and across the tracks the other.
Calhoun, on James and Tommy’s side of the tracks, was where Arlya Public School sat. It was the only other school in Arlya and went from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 6. The white-bricked building was built in 1817 and had three floors. Anyone who lived within walking distance of A.P.S. went there; everyone else went to go to Clifton Street, the school up the hill. Students who graduated from A.P.S would go up the hill for the last two years before high school.
On the other side of the tracks, Calhoun’s right side was comprised of two churches and a road leading back to a parking lot and a hockey arena. The churches were spaced evenly between a collection of four homes. On the left, Calhoun Street broke off into other nestled communities, where Mike and Owen’s houses were hidden inside.
Arlya Cemetery whipped by James on his left-hand side. He gave up his attempt at keeping up with the tires and stopped pedalling. They were flying down Cemetery Hill now. James stood up and leaned his head back.
Towering pine trees ran along the outskirts of the graveyard on all sides. The tombstones chased James down the road; even the dead felt the effects of gravity.
The manufactured terraces were slowly eroding, relentlessly being pulled down. Between the huge population of headstones were statues with crypts underneath.
James had always wondered why the hell someone would put a door on a crypt. Why would you give whatever lay in the dusty concrete a chance to get out? Or for something to get in?
The trees were evenly spaced and made it as though James was watching a collection of pictures roll out in rapid succession. He watched them roll along and remembered.
One Friday night last summer, the four of them had left James’s house after his parents had gone to bed. They had biked around in the dark, briefly illuminated by the sparse streetlights looming over the side streets. Fog had drifted across the side roads; houses were barely visible through their covered lawns. Somehow, they wound their way to the bottom of Cemetery Hill.
“My grandpa is in there,” Tommy had said quietly.
They had looked out at the long blackness which rose menacingly above them. The trees at the top of the hill had been reaching toward the starry sky.
James had wanted to bike back. If he had left, the others would have surely followed suit. Mike had glanced at James waiting for his decision.
“My dad was supposed to be buried here,” Owen had said, his voice cracking, devoid of moisture.
The fog had continued to thicken around the four of them standing stagnant in the road, straddling their bikes.
Owen’s dad had passed away when Owen was eight.
James had looked over at his friend who had gotten closer to the graveyard.
“He said he wanted to be buried here. He told me, after I asked how long he’d lived here,” Owen had said. “Told me he grew up here and wanted to be here forever. Said he biked down this hill every day same as I would when I was older.”
The tree branches had been swishing in chaotic rhythm overhead. “He got cremated. My mom said that’s what he wanted. Said that he wanted his ashes spread at Niagara Falls.”
James had set his bike on the sidewalk and walked to the edge of the grass beside his friend.
“We went to the Falls once as a family—my mom and dad went on their honeymoon. He never even liked it there; she did.”
“Did you go when they spread his ashes?” Mike had asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was it weird?” Tommy had added.
“Yeah… I didn’t cry then. I was pissed at my mom. I told her a billion times he wanted a spot right here. She said if he wanted that he woulda paid for it.”
“Fuck,” James had said.
“She got so drunk at the Falls the night before we went to spread him around. She was throwing up the next day and just yelled at me and Bella.”
Owen’s voice had become more confident. It was rare for him to talk about his family, or anything really, and the three of them had been attentive around him.
“Bella cried all day and I just sorta sat there.”
James remembered the utter silence around them at that moment.
“I’m not like my dad, man. I don’t wanna be here forever.”
James had nodded, and they had walked through the graveyard. A lone grave covered with thick weeds stood a few spots back from the rest, and James had stopped. He could have sworn he read Kettman before Owen had said, “Anyways, fuck it. There’s a crypt Joey told me about that’s cracked open. Wanna go see a dead guy?”
