The story itself turned out to be only ten percent creepy, but forty percent racist and fifty percent boring, and the boring factor apparently won out because I fell asleep on the couch before I finished it, and woke up with the corner of the cover digging into my neck.
I was on edge immediately—tired from not sleeping much but agitated, and I rushed out of the house to walk around. Again, I found myself in the cemetery, only this time instead of stories of the Ramones, I was thinking of the headless horseman and Ichabod Crane.
The snap of a twig had me whirling around, but nothing was there. I kept walking and felt like I was being watched. There was a couple strolling in the distance, but they weren’t looking at me. The feeling got stronger and stronger, but when I turned all I saw was a plump squirrel that froze, then chittered at me and bounded away into the trees.
“You’re fucking losing it, Argento,” I muttered and shoved my hands in my pockets so I’d stop biting my nails, a habit I thought I’d quit years before but that had made a reappearance lately, almost without my noticing it.
The ring of my phone made me startle and clutch at my chest like someone’s grandfather.
“Practically gave me a heart attack,” I said to Grin when I answered.
“Good, then we’re even, cuz you freak me out when you don’t answer.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. It wasn’t often that Grin would admit to being freaked out. “I’m in a cemetery,” I added, like the context might help.
“Aw, Matty, you having another goth moment?”
“Shaddup, I was fifteen and it was for, like, a week.” I’d had an unfortunate encounter with an abandoned black eyeliner at St. Jerome’s that had haunted me for years. “You read ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’?”
“Nah. Saw the movie with Johnny Depp and that white girl who looks like a skull, though. Why?”
“Nothing. I read it last night. Rhys had the book. It’s weird to live somewhere that’s in a ghost story.”
“New York is probably in like five million ghost stories.”
“Oh. That’s true. I guess I just don’t know any.”
Silence stretched between us, and I walked the paths on the west side of the cemetery. Imagined what would happen if a black cloaked hessian bore down on me on horseback from around the bend. Admitted to myself that I had no idea what a hessian was.
“I think maybe you shouldn’t look around for her no more,” Grin said.
“What? Why?”
“Cuz you ain’t gonna randomly find Sid on the street in her hood, Matty. And cuz it’s no good for you to be back in yours. Month after St. J’s? You weren’t in a good place, bro. You were a stranger there then and you’re even more now and that’s how it fuckin’ should be because you don’t live there no more. You want a damn New York ghost story? There it is.”
The month after we left St. Jerome’s, when I’d returned to my old neighborhood again and again like a sleepwalker, it had been Grin who found me. We were living together in Chinatown then, him and me, two awful brothers who talked constantly, and a fifth guy who never talked.
Grin had followed me one night. Followed me onto the subway, then as I walked, and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed anything. When he found me I was sitting on my old stoop wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now. We’d all dreamed our plans to each other over the years. What we’d do when we got out of St. Jerome’s, talking as if it were prison or high school rather than where we lived. But its walls felt so definitive, our presence there so determined, that it was as if we all knew our lives couldn’t begin until our time there ended.
From sports stardom and fancy cars to mansions and beach idylls, we dreamed it all. What no one ever told us was the way St. Jerome’s provided a negative against which to dream the positive. The way once we didn’t have it anymore, we were just in the regular world. And the regular world wasn’t conducive to dreaming.
The night Grin followed me was the night we made the pact. He’d done it for me, because I scared him, but we’d both held fast to it over the years. It was simple: Stay alive. Stay out of prison. Don’t be a fuckup abandoner asshole like all the grown-ups we know. Get happy-ish. We’d added the “ish” when the pact seemed too overwhelming.
When Grin moved down to Florida a year later, he’d still texted me sometimes in the middle of the night. You’re not there r u? And he’d keep texting until I answered. I hadn’t realized quite how freaked out he’d been until then. Until he was a thousand miles away and still worrying whether I was on that damn stoop.