THE UPPER PORTION OF THE coffin flips open, and July sits up and goes, “Ta-da!” while giving me actual jazz hands.
I lean the shovel against the dirt wall of the grave and help July out of the coffin.
“Why the hell are you still alive?”
July shrugs. “Insomnia?”
I have so many questions, but I’m standing at the bottom of a grave, dirty with sweat streaking my arms and legs, and I want to fill the hole and get the hell out of the cemetery as quickly as possible.
“Your mom sewed my butt shut!” July yells. “Did you know she was gonna to do that?”
I grimace. “Kind of?”
“I’m not even going to tell you where she stuffed cotton. You said they weren’t going to do any of that stuff.”
“I said they weren’t going to embalm you. But there’s still the chance of leakage, and your parents wanted an open casket, so . . .”
“You have no idea how humiliating that was.”
“Can we . . . ?” I motion at the ladder. July climbs out and I follow, but as soon as I’m up, I round on her and say, “Why aren’t you dead? What’re we going to do now? And how did you get a phone?”
July scans the cemetery. There’s plenty of moonlight, but I was too scared to bring a flashlight, so everything looks a little spooky. “You want to have this talk here? Now?”
“No, but we can’t leave this giant hole here, and you might as well explain while we work.”
July looks at me, then the shovel. “We?”
“Are you seriously not going to help?”
“Come on, Dino. A good friend will bury your body, but only a best friend will dig you back up and not make you help fill in the hole.” She bats her eyelashes at me, and it’s infuriating. But since I already have the blisters, I don’t see any point in arguing. I pull the ladder out of the grave and begin shoveling dirt into it while July tells me what happened.
“I tried. I really did.”
“Not hard enough,” I mutter. Thankfully, filling a grave isn’t nearly as exhausting as digging one, but it’s still more manual labor than I’m used to, and there isn’t a single muscle of mine that’s not screaming in agony.
July ignores me. “It took me a while to work up the nerve, but I finally got on the gurney and went into the freezer.”
“No,” she says, and there’s a trace of sadness in her voice. “I shut my eyes and counted backward from one thousand. My body is dead, so I had this idea that the only thing keeping me animated was my mind, and that if I could let go, I’d die for real. It didn’t work the way I planned.”
“How so?” My questions are short because of the exertion of shoveling dirt.
July leans against a nearby headstone. “You know how you get when you can’t stop thinking and your mind churns out scenarios? You finally come up with the perfect comeback to every insult flung at you since the dawn of time, and you go over every argument you’ve ever had or will ever have in the future? That’s what happened to me.”
“So you were awake for everything?” I ask. “My mom dressing you, the church service, the burial?”
“The whole sordid adventure.”
“How did you not move?”
July chuckles. “Well, I may not have been able to fall asleep, but if I close my eyes and focus on my thoughts, I can blur out what’s happening around me. I don’t breathe and I don’t feel much, so to an outsider I look completely dead. I did okay until Aunt Franny was standing over me, and she was making this big fuss—”
“I remember,” I say. “ ‘Blubbering’ is a word that comes to mind.”
“Franny never liked me, and I thought it was so hilarious that she was putting on such a show that I laughed. Barely. It was hardly even a snort.”
“That’s what happened! No one could figure out why she screamed and then took off.”
July grins, looking pretty proud of herself. “After that, I was a lot more careful.”
“But why?” I ask. “If you weren’t dead, why didn’t you call me? And you still haven’t told me where you got a phone from.”
“The phone’s easy,” July says. “It’s mine. I stole it from my room when I snuck into my house.” She holds the phone up so I can see it. “I would’ve called after my stupid plan failed, but I knew it would’ve caused a whole scandal if my body disappeared, so I decided to let the funeral happen. Plus, my battery died after I sent the selfies.”
An involuntary shiver runs through me. “You let yourself be buried alive.”
“Whatever. It wasn’t so bad.”
It’s actually kind of sweet. July could have slipped away in the middle of the night and lived out the rest of her not-life somewhere else, but it would have been a disaster for my family. That she stayed means a lot to me.
I stop digging and lean against the shovel. “So what do we do now?”
“I honestly have no idea,” July says. “But what’s going on is bigger than me.”
It takes me a couple of hours to fill the hole, and I’m exhausted by the time I pat down the last of the dirt. It doesn’t look like it did when I got here, but I doubt anyone will suspect someone sneaked into the cemetery to dig up July. I hope.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to my house. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”
July carries the shovel while I take the ladder. “Hey,” she says. “At least I don’t smell anymore.”
“You still smell, July.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“God, I wish you’d stay dead.”
July nudges me with her shoulder and says, “Thanks for not leaving me down there.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I definitely considered it.”
“Liar.”
“And I’m already regretting it.”
“Yeah,” July says. “Me too.”