WE’RE JUNIORS AND IT’S MID-OCTOBER and we’re in the north suburbs because we heard about a party where a kid we went to school with was planning on raising the dead in his backyard.
Eddie Carlo’s dog died three days ago and, after a series of Dark Web rabbit holes, he’s convinced he can say the right combination of words in the right combination of languages to bring Bluebeard back to this world, and return to his mortal dog coil.
If there’s one thing Charlie and I know about, it’s defying the void.
Eddie Carlo is and always has been the nicest kid you could hope to meet, so Charlie doesn’t have a hard time convincing me that Eddie should have friends around when his dog doesn’t come back from the grave, and plus, Eddie Carlo has a pool and his parents are out of town.
And everything is good, aside from Eddie’s dog’s untimely fate. The air is warm for October and the sun sets early so it’s warm and dark and the strands of Edison lights in Eddie’s backyard make everything look like the World’s Fair, even when we gather around Eddie and the circle of stones he’s placed around Bluebeard’s grave in his backyard.
But mid-ritual, while Eddie’s stuttering through a Latin incantation and trying not to cry, I realize that I’ve lost Charlie. And the more I look around, the more I realize that I’ve lost most everybody else.
It’s just me and Eddie Carlo and two people making out on a bench in the garden, because everybody else who showed up is jumping in the pool and drinking shitty beer.
But not Charlie.
Charlie is gone.
Charlie has taken the car and bailed because Al Stinson told him he could score some weed.
So I stay, and the dog stays dead, and Charlie never comes back or answers his phone, and it doesn’t take the whole of the six miles walking home to realize that a sizeable part of you hates—at least in part—someone you’re supposed to love.
It takes a whole lot less than six.