BY MAYA CRANDALL
COMMUNICATIONS EDITOR
Charlotte Flannery stuck out her tongue and tasted the damp, musty night air of Boulder Creek Memorial Park, the cemetery where her grandmother was buried.
Buried, yes…But not dead. Not in Charlotte’s eyes.
Her fingers brushed against the cool gravestone, the words CARMEN FLANNERY, BELOVED carved deep into the marbled rock.
“Hello,” Charlotte whispered.
Nothing but the wind answered, a sighing breath against her sweat-slicked neck. She was early, so Charlotte was not expecting an answer. Instead, she slid down the gravestone and onto the mossy ground and pulled out a sketchbook from her worn faux-leather bag—the one with the strap hanging on only by a thread.
Hanging, hanging, hanging until it would snap, snap, snap. Like wood crackling in a fire, or twigs crunching under a boot.
Charlotte grabbed her charcoals as well and flipped through the pages. Her eyes caught on black blurs and glimpses of long-forgotten faces she’d drawn too long ago to remember. She flipped and flipped until—she was at the last two blank pages. Her grip tightened around the charcoals. No, how could that be? She couldn’t have filled eighteen pages so quickly. Sure, she fell into a scribbled frenzy as soon as the charcoal hit the page, but—
The charcoals went smashing into an adjacent grave before she realized what, exactly, she had done. In fact, it wasn’t until she saw her extended arm in front of her like a phantom limb that she knew she had chucked them.
She laughed at the explosion of black dust on the gravestone of TAYLOR BASSETT.
What a pity, she thought. What a dreadful, dreadful, shame.
She crawled towards it, not at all worried about the stains of moss and dirt now adorning her baggy white jeans. “To honor you,” she said, kissing Taylor Bassett’s gravestone before rubbing her fingers in the shattered charcoal remnants.
And with said charcoal dust Charlotte Flannery drew a masterpiece. She hummed a tune under her breath, rocking back and forth on her knees in excitement as she crafted something truly dark and deadly on the second to last page in her sketchbook. A replica of the angel statue above Taylor Bassett’s grave, but its wings were shredded and bleeding, it’s mouth curved into a wicked grin instead of a reverent, holy smile. As she drew in the last details of his smile, she could have sworn it moved—just a twitch of one wing. Then the other, back and forth, back and forth until it was taking flight. Charlotte watched as it struggled to fly off the page with broken wings before it swarmed around the angel statue and tapped its shoulder. The statue screamed before shattering into pieces. Charlotte laughed with wicked delight as her dark, broken creation took its place.
She was so entranced that she didn’t notice the eyes.
The eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Watching, waiting. Waiting, watching.
Someone was behind her.
And it was not her grandmother.
—
He knew he came to the wrong place at the wrong time when he saw the girl performing what looked like some sort of…ritual.
Oh, no, no, no. There was a reason no one went to cemeteries at midnight during October. Or ever.
Still, Mason Tuscan couldn’t help himself from creeping the slightest bit closer as the girl scribbled in a sketchbook, her dark brow furrowed and sweat-slicked in concentration. She was humming a song he’d heard before—on the radio, perhaps—but she slowed it down a bit. Made it minor instead of major. She transformed it from upbeat to depressing; exciting to…eerie.
Yes, he should have definitely left by then. His stomach flipped as a manic laugh burst from her lips. But—she was just a kid. His age by the looks of it; no more than seventeen or eighteen. And he could have sworn he had seen her around school before. Her name was…Charlie? Charlotte? He couldn’t recall, but he remembered she was the TA in his Algebra One class last year—remembered the lilt of her handwriting as she wrote D, F, or, if he was lucky, the occasional C on his tests in purple pen.
She was so different now. Then, she’d been what everyone would call the “popular smart girl.” The one who always took the lead in group projects or sent the homework answers to the entire class in a group chat, no questions asked. Her hair was always shoulder-length and curled, and she used to dye the ends a striking red color. She was at the top of the unique-fashion food chain (Mason knew all this because his best friend at the time had such a huge crush on her, he was borderline stalkerish). But looking at her now…Her mousy brown hair was unkempt and stringing down her back, and she was drowning in her oversized sweater and baggy jeans.
Mason still thought she was undeniably pretty but…what had happened?
He leaned closer from behind a gravestone, hoping to see more of what she was drawing when—Her head whipped towards him. Mason fell back as he finally saw her entire face. Charcoal smudged her cheek, her eyes wide as she took him in. The dazed smile stretching across her face instantly vanished.
“What are you doing here?” the girl breathed, chest heaving.
“Nothing, I—I—”
“What’s wrong with your face?”
Mason adjusted the boxy frames resting on his nose. “Nothing.”
“You have a black eye.” The girl tilted her head, touching her own eye.
“N-no I don’t,” he said. “It’s just the shadows.”
You and I both know that Mason was, indeed, lying. And he was doing a trash job of it.
“I’m Charlotte,” she said, holding out a hand. “You’re Mason, right?”
She remembered him? Mason nodded blankly. “Yep.”
“Neato.”
He grabbed her hand to shake it, but she pulled away instantly and wrapped her arms around herself.
“Th-that’s a cool drawing,” Mason started, gesturing to the discarded sketchbook beside her. It was—a demonic angel with a fanged smile. Fitting.
Charlotte shrugged, mindlessly rubbing her charcoal-coated hands on her thighs. “Why do your glasses not have a prescription?”
How did she know this stuff? He almost asked her those exact words, but from the gleamed look in her eyes, he didn’t dare test her. He shrugged. “I like the way they look.”
Again, lies. He thought back to the real reason he wore them.
His uncle. A slap to the face. A little more than a slap to the face.
His parents had died when he was four. He’d been staying with his father’s brother and sister-in-law ever since, and his life hadn’t been…perfect with them, but it was happy. Until the accident that took his aunt’s life. That was when his uncle lost his job, and he started drinking more than just a couple sips, and…it all went downhill from there.
“Where’ve you been, boy?” His uncle had slurred when he returned home earlier that night.
Mason adjusted the strap of his backpack. “Friends house. Working on music stuff.”
“I says that you—“ his uncle hiccuped, patting his stomach—“you needs be home by nine.”
He had not said that. In fact, Mason had only seen him passed out that morning on the couch before heading off to school.
“Sir, I—“
But he never got a chance to finish. He had been blinded by swinging fists, deafened by roars of anger and his own heart throbbing in his ears.
Thus why he wore the glasses—to blame the bruising on the shadows caused by the frames. And why he let his wild, dark curls tumble haphazardly across his forehead. Mason shook his head, willing away the memories. “So why are you here, Charlotte?”
She smirked as she patted the gravestone beside her. “I am waiting for someone.”
“In a graveyard?”
“Of course. Where else?”
TO BE CONTINUED…