Violet didn’t doubt it, not that she thought a little fresh air could cure what ailed her. But she knew how she must look, standing there in the kitchen wearing her rumpled pajamas, her hair unbrushed in a tangled halo around her head. The pills had worked, maybe a little too well, because now Violet felt as if she were squinting out through a dense fog that clung to her—following her like a second skin and trying to dampen her mood.
She glanced down, scowling at the empty mug in her hand, suddenly remembering what she’d been planning to do with it when her mom had sidetracked her. She turned to the coffeemaker, thinking, Caffeine. I just need caffeine to clear my head, as she grumbled, “No thanks. I have stuff to do today.”
“Like getting ready for school?” her mom inquired, still sounding skeptical.
“No, Mom, like stuff. Just stuff.”
Her mom made a sound that might have been meant as a laugh, but by the time it reached her lips it came out sounding more like a strangled sigh instead. “Suit yourself, Vi. But I’m not wasting another minute of this glorious day.” Violet watched as her mom gathered up her heavy canvas bag that was overflowing with brushes and charcoals, a sketchbook, and a small stretched canvas, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether she’d be drawing or painting today. She wondered if there was clay in there too, in case the urge to sculpt struck her while she was on this little field trip of hers.
“Have fun with that,” Violet quipped sullenly.
Pausing at the door, her mom met her gaze. “I can stay if you want me to. . . .”
Violet lifted her hand in a half wave, a puny effort to appease her mom since it wasn’t her fault that Violet’s head pounded or that she’d used up the last of her pills. “I’m fine. Go . . . enjoy your fresh air.”
Violet leaned back and ran her hands over the top of the cool grass beneath her as she stared out at the chicken wire that ran around a small patch of earth in her backyard. Shady Acres. Such a strange name, she thought, considering that she and Jay had been kids when they’d come up with it. She couldn’t remember why they’d decided to call it that in the first place, what exactly had inspired the cryptic name, but she remembered that when she’d heard it—whichever of them, she or Jay, had said it first—she’d known it was perfect. That it fit.
It was a good name for an animal graveyard.
It didn’t look like much, really. Just a mismatched collection of sticks and rocks and clumps of dirt—some with grass growing over them, and some not—in long, irregular rows. All surrounded by the chicken wire her dad had helped her construct to keep the live animals outside from digging up the dead ones inside. To anyone else it was a mess, the remains of what might have once been a garden or a compost pile or just a dead patch of lawn.
Violet could remember a time, when she was in the sixth or seventh grade, when she’d worried that one of her friends— Chelsea or Jules or Claire—might figure out what it really was, that they might discover her darkest secret. She’d been so bothered by the idea, so tortured by the thought, that she’d saved her allowance to buy seed packets from the store and she’d carefully mounted them on old Popsicle sticks, setting them up in perfect lines in the graveyard, making it look like it was a garden. Making it look like something might actually spring up from the ground at any minute.
Like it was a place of life, rather than of death.
She probably shouldn’t have worried; none of her friends had ever mentioned the place in her yard with the chicken-wire fence. None of them had ever seemed to notice its existence, except for Jay.
This had always been her place. Even now, sitting here and listening to it . . . feeling its staticky echoes reach for her, enfolding her, she felt at peace. She could almost forget she had an imprint of her own. As if those animals in there were offering her a brief moment of amnesty, repaying her kindness for giving them the peace they craved by covering her imprint.
Almost . . .
“Remember when you told your parents you wanted to be buried in there?” Jay’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and a small smile tugged at her lips.
“I remember my dad spent like three hours explaining why I had to be buried in a real graveyard,” she said, doing her best to mimic her dad’s pragmatic tone. “And why ‘proper channels’ had to be followed when someone died. He told me that people can’t just be buried in their own backyards. He even explained what embalming was, which totally grossed me out. I mean, I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, I think.
“And then my mom came home and I told her my idea about being buried in the backyard, and I think she said something like, ‘What a lovely idea, Vi. Then you could be with your animals forever.’” Violet giggled. “My poor dad. I thought he was gonna lose it for sure. Sometimes I wonder how him and my mom ever hooked up in the first place.”
Jay sat down in the grass next to her, their shoulders brushing. “And then you told me about ‘em-bombing.’ Remember?” He raised his eyebrows when he said the word the way Violet had said it to him all those years ago. “You told me all about how they stick hoses inside your body and drain out all the blood, and then fill you back up with chemicals that keep your body from rotting. I think you actually said the word rotting too. And we made a pact that we didn’t want anything to do with it. That we wanted to be cremated so we could have our ashes spread over the playground at school.”