Synastry

T
here was no reason for Fancy to hate John, Cameron’s bus-driver boyfriend, but a hate had centralized in her gut like an unplanned pregnancy: a hate with a temper and a roaming mind. She hated him with her gut, and a gut feeling was as incontestable as the road beneath them, even if it was something she would never confront. It sat as a stone at the bottom of her friend group soup. What was there to deal with, even? Maybe she was looking for the root of the negativity in all the wrong places. John did have a bus—drove one for the high school and owned one, a separate one, decommissioned. He had been plenty nice to her. The bus was great, except for the odd dog smell. It was what they were speeding in now, deep-purple day-glowed and sloppily renovated with a mattress in the back and the sofa up front she was sitting on. Red lights waved around the ceiling, and two poorly-taped battery packs smacked against the metal roof when they jolted, started or stopped. It was the sound of the battery pack, tin roof fight that really annoyed Fancy; or the actual Deep Purple CD on the speakers; or the way John had to keep the beat of any song by flicking a BIC in time with the music—‘Ah, who the fuck am I kidding,’ said Fancy’s gut—it had nothing to do with anything she saw or heard. The wrong feeling was physical, a real threat, and could not be dispelled by observing it away.
Or it was all a bad high. Cameron emerged on her back from the nearest seat, her body suspended over the aisle. The sheen of her pearl earrings was synonymous with sound, like bells. “Take it,” she said, upside down, handing Fancy the joint. “Dead air, Fran.” Cam demanded a constant blab. Why did Fancy have to talk? She could nurse a joint or quip; not both. Besides, Agot and Opie were there and were just as dumbfounded.
The weed smelled like both of their hairspray. Hands free, Cam perched up on her bench—her bench, the whole seat bearing her John Hancock in his handwriting—squealing, losing her balance as John trundled down a fat hill, then uprighting herself, searching all of space for her handbag. 
“There it is—Johnny, volume. I wanna read Fran’s birth chart.”
“Do mine first.”
“Only if you stop singing.” She turned to Fancy. Aries, she mouthed. Nobody wanted Deep Purple ever, but it was all John and his brothers played, Cam told Fancy to warn her a few weeks before; he insisted on it, didn’t let anybody else pick a CD until a full one ran through, because the band wasn’t in the fucking Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, goddammit, and if the Connolly boys played a full album unskipped every time they went for a drive, their combined faith would collect as potential energy, would top a meter, would push the universe to function democratically. It was an innocent, groping prayer—it was the first thing he’d told her about his life that made her blush. “Every boy I’ve been with has had a cute superstition,” Cam had said. 
“Aries is like the baby of the chart,” said Opie, drawling with liquor—since when did he know everything? “Which makes me the grandpappy. The patriarch. The saint.”
“Pisces?”
“Yes ma’am. The opposite end. The last age.”
“You drunk little weirdo. You’re the foot.”
“‘Scuse?”
“Each sign also rules, or is associated with, a specific body part,” said Cameron. She pulled a blue-gold notebook from her bag. “Pisces is the lymph nodes… but mainly the feet. Or the lymph drainage that goes to your feet.” Cam was going away to study actuarial science in the fall, not anatomy. She pointed to the book. “An ephemeris. Used to calculate the positions of astronomical objects at the time of your birth. Downtown witch store. I just got it today.”
Agot had lived with Cam’s family the last two years of high school until she was kicked out for stealing things—things that Cam told her to steal, but that was irrelevant to Cam’s parents. Cam had a list of hypothetical free things that would benefit them to own, and Agot had a magic sense of rhythm with working out when the world was not paying attention to her, giving her an invisible hand. Agot would also have visions, and one day, she got one. “The universe is telling me we should skip school every other first Friday of the month,” she said, “to keep the overall yin and yang intact.” On those days, the girls got into the habit of dressing down to raid the downtown witch store and similar buildings. A leather corset under a huge hoodie did wonders for keeping bottles of perfume and essential oils strapped to one’s ribs. In her trench coat, Agot could bend down to tie her laces, slipping a low-shelved book into a fat pocket sewn in the inner lining. She had done this very thing hours before with the ephemeris, Fancy knew without having to ask. 
In late May a day after graduation, Cameron’s parents had sat the girls down at the table, Cam's dad holding a whole desk drawer of stolen junk: expensive body sprays, huge crystals, and deckle-edged books on cosmogony. Neither of the girls had jobs to substantiate the massive haul. At the time, Cam had told Fancy that her dad had quoted the Ten Commandments to them, told Agot he ‘was close friends with the deputy chief,’ gave her a day to pack up her stuff, and that was that. Agot was eight hours away in Reno with her weird older brother. Now she was only back for a weekend because Cam’s parents had flown all the way to Rome, or Oz, or wherever—far, far away from here. 
There was nothing to truly offset the inertia of the habit from high school, and now that Agot had come home to party, there was a holiday reason to make tricks and treat themselves. It felt wonderful for Agot to steal again, and Cam took delight in collecting the cosmic feeling of things colliding now that her friend was back. Until they had started on beer instead of crystal skull tequila, the night had felt born of the cosmos—the whole reunited group stirring under one bus roof, plus John. 
“If you really wanna get specific about it, we’re all living in the age of Pisces right now. Every two-thousand years or so the Earth appears to be under a certain constellation during the Equinox. Muhammad and Jesus and Nero and Me have all been under Pisces.”
“Us all under you. You wish.”
“What about that song? The Age of Aquarius?”
“We won’t live to see it.”
“Foot drain,” said Agot. She was the only one still quietly hopeful they were making it some place louder. John never took them where they said they were going at the beginning of the night. It was the weekend of Halloween in July and there were plenty of perfectly good parties in the county. It made her miss Cam’s string of pandering boytoys from high school who would listen to her out of fear. She had forced one to only refer to her as ma’am when they were all fifteen. Cameron had only been with John for four months, tops—where did she even meet him? Taking her parent’s poodle to doggie daycare? She fixed her makeup mirrorless, only placing brush to eye in potholes on purpose. 
“Fran—grab my Atlas from under you.” She had not clocked the massive book. It was unbearably heavy and didn’t hurt to be left as a footrest. She picked it up and reached across the aisle single-handed right as John pumped the gas through a dank puddle, the book catapulting and hot ash tipping onto her tights. Cam caught papers in mid-air. She was going to sit down on the dark bus floor right now and churn out something more reminiscent of homework than a short-form party trick.
“Atlas? Hey—anybody got a clue about where we’re going tonight? In real life?” Fancy certainly had forgotten—that they were moving through space, even. 
“I’m doing Fran’s chart first.”
“Where are we? Are these windows tinted?” said Agot. When Agot did her makeup, she thought the colors she chose literally changed or emboldened her vision. The new Rorschach test on her face seemed to blacken the rest of the world. 
“Tinted, smokey, foggy,” said John. “We’re going up a big fucking hill, that’s for sure. Ain’t my father’s father buried up here?” 
“Baby, why’d we know that?” She raised an eyebrow with the sense that her boyfriend’s question was rhetorical. His tone of voice said he knew exactly where he was taking them, and he could be a strange encyclopedia for family history. He had an odd fascination with his grandpa, she now remembered. Even Cam could write an essay about the man’s life if she had a gun to her head, and she only knew a single conversation’s worth of information. He had faced a lot of hardship in his childhood after contracting some sort of dental illness, and the family didn’t have the money to salvage his teeth. An ‘all of them removed sort of thing,’ John had said. It led him to be ostracized until his early teen years, when he dropped out and started a Hollywood career in early silent films. He had five years of massive success until talkies were popularized, and then he seemed to loiter in a soured career after that. At eighteen he married another film star, John’s grandmother, who was famous for her lazy eye and loved him as a fellow performer ogled for her distinctive looks. After children, John’s grandfather started to cheat freely, he’d told her, most frequently with a roster of circus performers that toured L.A.—while his wife, plagued by a series of degenerative vision loss diseases and other disorders, raised their several kids off their collective movie money at home. Grandma became a recluse, though was otherwise immune to the family’s issues—she was fiercely Catholic, too—but John’s mother and all her siblings were aware of the promiscuity as young adults and made Wayne aware none of his children wanted anything to do with him. The last time John’s mom saw her dad after the falling out was only a few years later, on his deathbed. The man had a lot of odd beliefs. He told John’s mom he’d known for a fact he’d been cursed his entire life, right from his very first memory, and that his life, the teeth and the circus women and the bad deeds, had been a series of events confirming that initial notion for him.
“To the grave,” said Agot. “Right, grandpappy?”
“Don’t look me in the eye. I’ll get scared,” Opie said. He jumped over Fancy’s rat nest head to quip with John. Fran was biting her nails, eating black paint chips, entranced by the red filter over Cam’s ephemeris. She would like to name a baby after that. The glittery book looked too big to fit in her handbag, boasting a sprawling chart of astrological symbols on each page, a spattering of table holes for Cam to mathematicise into. 
“Okay. Gimme your birth time and town—Hold still. There’s a trickle of Miller in your hair, Fance.”
“Oh—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“January 19th, 1983, 8:02 p.m., Long Beach Community Hospital.”
“Good girl.”
“What do you think, Dopey-Opie?”
“I wouldn’t mind a drive through the cemetery.”
Cam’s eyes lit up. “Shut up, Fran. Why didn’t I know?”
“You didn’t know my birthday? You’re infamously bad at birthdays.”
Agot snorted.
“Your cusp. Your cuspage.” Cam sat next to Fancy on the couch, pointing to a diagram of geometric winkings. “You’re a Capricorn-Aquarius.”
“I didn’t know you could be in-between. Is that rare? That doesn’t seem right.”
“A lust for rarity; Aquarian isolation and freedom meets a lust for rightness; Capricorn caution and rigidity. Like a… mountain goat ascending step by step over windy water. That’s it, baby! That’s in your words. Would you say you feel like a conflicted soul?”
Fancy snorted. “Endlessly conflicted. Where does the Year of the Pig fit in? What makes me a pig-goat?”
Cameron didn’t hear. “Of course, from here I can calculate where the moon was at the time of your birth, and Venus, and Mars, all the way to Pluto. After I get good I’ll be able to note the angles of Ceres, Juno, Eros… You’re endlessly complex, Fance.”
“More like the stars are.”
The fire was thankfully out now that John was pumping the gas through a left turn into a graveyard. “Real stars,” he yelled, “Outside. You forget?” 
“Everybody forgot it’s fucking Halloween!”
“Never me, Agot. Here, open that for me.” 
She rustled around in the glovebox and pulled out a neon-green, Halloween mask of a witch with matted hair. Agot’s face melted in the blood-misted luster. 
“Uh oh,” John was saying, pulling the mask over him, whipping the wheel. “I can’t fucking see!” 
Opie cackled, throwing a fresh bottle cap. The bus swung and Fancy looked up. This was another thing Cam had mentioned—that ‘John loved to drive blind’—her words, endlessly amusing to her. She couldn’t open her giggling eyes telling Fancy how he’d driven them drunk down the 1 on their second date, all the way from Ventura to San Diego. Fucking somehow. He’d been a popular theater kid in high school—The Beast, Seymour Krelborn—and owned a lot of stupid masks. He was four years older than them, so it wasn’t like they’d remember his performances. He also had too many brothers; liked tricks over treats and jumping out at strangers. He was the youngest of five boys. He was supposed to have an older sister, number four, but she had died as a baby by choking on a grape.
“Should I be doing math right now?” Cam said, breaking her focus, but Fancy wanted nothing more than for her to continue. 
“W-w-wait. I thought I was a conflicted soul. I was starting to get interested.”
Cam snorted. “I just didn’t realize how long this would take.” Most of the huge table was empty, and there was chicken-scratched arithmetic already trailing up Cam’s arm. She looked at her captain boyfriend, toward the spiral of headstones in the headlights of the cyclops bus. “I can do the math, but it’s all math. Hours of math, probably. Every celestial body was at an exact angle in the sky at the exact second you were born, Fance. You’re complex enough by the Sun’s standards, but the complexities are like pi. It doesn’t end. The planets are always moving and the bodies are endless, and our lives are all bouncing around under the gravity of those angles. And that’s…” she looked up at Fran. “At this moment, I guess I don’t have the time made up to figure it out right now.”
“Would you show me at your house tomorrow?”
“Obv. But it’ll be super boring, watching me work out your whole personality and listening to me talk. We’ll go out and rent some movies.” Cam braced the wall; they were doing wide circles around the acres of cemetery rows. “I mean, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s not too hard. I did some of John and I’s compatibility already.”
“I thought you said you didn’t get to mine!”
“I didn’t say that. I meant I haven’t done your full chart. Not in the ephemeris.”
Once they swung behind a half-sheared hedge angel the bus braked hard. Beer doused the windshield and gave way to fat splashes on Agot’s face. She came up for air with a big laugh because Opie was sprawled out on the floor with a beer stain in his lap. Fancy was shaking with adrenaline.
“It’s not piss. Nobody say it’s piss.”
“Let me out of this fucking bus or I’ll piss my goddamn self laughing.”
“Fuck, you okay, Agot? I’m sorry.”
“She’s fine. She’s laughing,” said John, waving a hand. “I’m working on getting a urinal installed.” The doors opened. “Be free…if you’re not afraid, that is.” He cackled a witch’s cackle.
Agot thought for a second. “Fork over your backup mask. If I’m going to be photographed pissing in the cemetery…I don’t want anyone recognizing my makeup.” He smirked and threw her a rubber zombie head. Its neon eyes bulged like porno parts when she stretched it over her smeared face with both hands.
“For the road.”
“Baby, don’t brake that hard ever again. I thought I was gonna swallow my teeth,” Cam said, but the meaning of her words was lost as she spun over to John in a bundle of laughs. “Now I can sit in your lap.”
“I braked ‘cause I realized you’d told me you’d do my chart first, and then…aw, what am I saying?”
“It really means that much to you?” 
“Baby…All of a sudden I just got this itch to know everything about us. My Aries…your Libra…it must all mean something about how we connect.”
“It’s called synastry,” she said. Fran’s gut gagged. It meant something for John to be first, end of sentence; not be first for anything in particular. “That’s what you get for climbing up on that pole,” she said to Opie instead.
He was trying to wring his jeans out while they were still on from the floor. It made about as much sense as anything else. “It was my funerary dance,” he said.
ᐧᐧᐧ
Fancy watched the masked Agot skip away toward the opposite tree line, the image of her flesh almost clipping through the hedge. A new anxiety: even if it was a twentieth-century fear from the movies, it was still damnable to separate from your friends in a cemetery. It would always draw the death up.
“I was going to stop around here anyway,” said John.
“Is it okay to just leave it like this?” Cam whispered to him. “At least remember to lock it.” Her real concern snapped Fran back to reality. She had been to this graveyard several times throughout her life, day and night, to drive the cemetery streets and think. They were only about five miles from her grandmother’s. It was very rare to see another soul at night, especially this far back from the main road. The black of the wrought iron fence bled up from the horizon, cresting the top of the hill, so that from this corner of the plateau there was an illusion of being on the top of the world, of having climbed a peak near the stars, without the eye to see anything below their elevation. 
“It’s fine. My gramps protects it. One hundred percent.”
“Cute. Are we gonna ring him on the Ouija?”
“You’re joking, but he’s here.” He looked a little bruised. “Who wants to see him? Who wants to talk to grandpappy? Wayne Jason Connolly: born 1912, died 1959.” he sniffed the air. 
Cam frowned. “You know what his date of birth was?”
He didn’t hear her. “I’ll tell you what…whoever finds his grave first…” He sniffed the air again. “Whoever finds it first, his ghost will appear to you.”
She pushed him. “Don’t say scary shit like that! Not in that tone of voice.”
“I’m not joking, baby,” he said. It made Fancy want to slug him, not being able to see his shit-eating grin under the mask. “I mean, I have no fucking idea where he’s buried. I haven’t been here since I was ten. But I can smell him.”
Opie wanted to walk anywhere; he was doing cartwheels in the grass. “It’s Halloween! The veil is thin. The ghosts are gonna talk. The ghosts are gonna talk…to meee…”
“Okay. So we’re all on board, then.” 
Cameron looked actually frightened. Fancy knew that Cam knew that John had seen ghosts his whole life. Seeing a ghost, from the little that Fancy had heard, held a lot of weight in dread to John, and as a result made both their hearts twinge. He joked about the dead, but he joked about everything, and this was serious for him. Even Fancy’s gut knew that John knew ghosts. It was a fear more tangible than leaving the bus unlocked, the keys in the ignition. 
That shit-eating grin again. “3, 2, 1…Go.” 
Both boys laughed like kids and ran off in opposite directions: Opie leaping down the road the way they came, John galivanting through the rows, leaping over grassy moguls like some drunk imitation of the Headless Horseman’s stallion. Cam shivered and cast a knowing eye over to Franny.
“Well…do we wait for Agot, or do we go after them?”
“Flip a coin,” Fancy said, but there wasn’t a quarter between them. Everyone had been so sure where to run; had dashed away from them in an exact line. Fancy and Cam meandered down the road, feeling no freedom in running. Their legs simply moved from under them. The half moon rose and rose.
“Tell me about synastry.”
“Well…it’s like, classic astrology. Like the Love Tester at the arcade. That’s actually why I give a shit about astrology, is the synastry. I mean, think about it! All these fucking boys…if you know where a boy was born and when and what his Moon and Venus and Mars signs are, that’s you studying how his brain, heart, and dick work. It all adds up, piece by piece, into a cosmic fingerprint.”
“Like Frankenstein.”
“Not like building a boy. Like studying between the stitches of a boy that’s already been rebuilt.”
“I only think you’re a little bit crazy.”
“I know.”
“So you started studying astrology before to see if you’d be a good match? Or did you look into it after you started dating because you wanted to figure out why he is the way he is?”
“I don’t know…both, I guess? Why?”
Fancy blurted. “...I guess I have no idea what you see in him?”
Cameron stopped and looked at her. There was confusion but not hurt in her eyes. Fran tended to give people the benefit of the doubt, even immature boys, so the question of why John was wrong for Fran hung strangely in the air for both of them.
“Is it his age? I can tell him to never drive drunk again if it makes you uncomfortable—”
“It’s not—here, let’s keep walking. I just wanna know what you honestly see in him. For you.”
“Yeah?”
“Or what the planets see in him.”
Cameron smiled. “My sun is in Libra and my Venus is in Gemini. His sun is in Aries and his Venus is in Leo. The sun is your primary identity, and Libra and Aries are sister signs—signs on opposite ends of the astrological wheel, and opposites attract. It’s natural magnetism: opposing ions collide. I know there are a couple planets and whatnot in-between, but the Venusian calculation is the only one I’ve made up so far. That’s what makes sense to look at first: love, romance, family. Stability. Right?”
Fancy’s gut ground its teeth. “And that means?”
“I bring a lot of air energy to the table and he brings a lot of fire. Gemini Venus is like…rollercoaster love. A variety show. Fun and flirty and curious.”
“Mmhm.” She had to nod; having known Cam for so long, it was the truth. But she found it funny how easily Cam could coalesce her thoughts through this newfound interest; it reminded her of Cameron’s mother and father, who raised her (and frankly Fran) to say grace before every sleepover meal, connecting the dots directly from God to their daily bread. Just like that, Cameron could confirm her relationship à la the stars. It was funny because Fran thought often of her first memory: Cam’s baptism when they were both two, a wailing toddler, witchy then in a wet white gown. 
“So I’m the love tunnel rollercoaster. I’m a good time! And he’s this…he’s this lion.” She watched Fancy’s face. “Or he has a lion element to him! Don’t look at me like that. His Venus is playful and loud; potentially melodramatic if not given the most meat in the kill. Downsides…in my opinion, not many. He might get jealous of my flighty nature with that sense of royalty he has in his heart. I’ve had a lot of boyfriends.”
“But what’s wrong with him? There are downsides.”
“Oh, if we’re keeping with a lion theme…territorial. Even more attention-seeking than a basic Aries. A Gemini heart has twin chambers. A royally lionhearted man might feel insecure. He might chop off her head.”
“A lion tag teaming a twin rollercoaster.”
“Hey!” she yelped and shoved her into the grass. Fran tripped with a laugh. “What! I’m just using your lingo,” she said, but Cam was also laughing because Cam was always laughing, too. They both sank to the Earth with drunk stomachs, off kilter above the resounding dead.
“I have to pee now,” said Fran. “Maybe I’ll find Agot if I go.”
Cam looked behind her. It was just a hedge. “Me too. But a walk in the dark woods is barfworthy. And I’m not wiggling out of this skirt.”
“It’ll be less scary if we go together. And I’m sure we’ll run into Agot,” she said. “Girls go to the bathroom together. Even when the bathroom is in the wild. I bet we’ll have a sense of where she went.”
“We’re not dogs,” said Cam. “And the wild isn’t Orange county.” Her vision was spinning. “I might lay down for a second if you have to go. Just come collect me when you get back.”
“You still not interested in racing to find the grave like Opie?”
“Oh Jesus. Opie…” she said. “God, no. I don’t want anything to do with it.” Her frown was comical. Fancy snorted.
“You’re really still scared, aren’t you? We’ve been walking around the cemetery for twenty minutes. You can’t let his stories get to you—” 
“No, Fancy.” She grabbed both of Fran’s hands. “Not normal fear. Not ghost stories. I’ve been having this… feeling.”
Fancy held her hands back. She read Cam’s nauseous eyes with her gut. That wholly serious feeling—that dread—it had peaked her senses, too, back in the bus. She felt responsible for Cam’s sense of dread now, almost as if Fancy had burdened her friend with the emotion by the simple touch of their flesh.
“I know what you mean.”
“I’m not scared scared. I’m okay here. I just won’t go any closer to the actual cemetery.”
“I’ll be right back. Promise.” She walked and ducked around the corner of the outer hedge. About ten rows to her right just through the shrubbery barrier was a gorgeous stone mausoleum that seemed like a great rock to bury a drunk piss behind. She peeked back over the boundary to look at her friend.
“I won’t even be a minute,” she said. “Plan B.”
Fancy didn’t give her time to respond; she had no mask like Agot and wanted to make this quick. She was over the rows in a second and suddenly blurry-eyed in a forgotten corner of an endless graveyard, about to place her bare ass against cold marble. Just on the other side of the hedge was the spot where the two girls had just fallen in the grass. “Cameron,” she tried to whisper, but the outer hedge was too dense to see or hear through.
She peeked around the back wall of the crypt to make sure there were no one watching her from the dark.
ᐧᐧᐧ
Agot was drunk for the first time in what felt like forever, and was running in the whole air of a nourishing summer that had become her. She had only heard the faint echoes of John’s proposition to the group, no real words, and yet she had the need to run from everyone like no other hour. She felt boozy, and her head was stumbling better than her feet. There was a twinge of anger in her breath over how she wanted to be alone—alone on a California weekend, not in Reno, which was infinitely sadder. Sadness from feeling like a dumb child for wanting a slightly better series of events. Bringing those feelings into the drunkenness was dangerous. It made her scratch at her arms when she wanted to itch her sweaty head—she was still wearing the zombie mask, and the hair on her lip smelled like Opie’s spilled beer. She was mad at Cameron for not paying nearly enough attention to her, but that notion made her feel childish. She was really only mad at herself for laughing at the incident, she thought, because she had always been forced to laugh with the world when it spilled itself on her. John’s words had brought that up, not that she would ever confront it: his casual waving away of her potential pain. Stupid. So stupid, she thought, because Cam had been a haven for Agot for years, and Agot was only made safe whenever Cam’s orbiting boys were under lock and key. 
She sat down on the back of a random gravestone and raised the mask over her nose and mouth. She had thought about finding a spot off in the woods to piss, but the thought was brief—instead a corner of her brain turned to one name in a roundelay, Jason, the name of the ex of Cam’s who referred to Agot as ma’am in high school. She couldn’t believe her ability to remember it. She thought of many of the ex-boys by their cars more than their names—dented Chevy pickup, Honda Accord, 1992 BMW. Jason was the last boy Cam dated sophomore year, and the BMW was nearly Agot’s in practice. Once Cam lucked out with a true pushover chauffeur, Agot’s backseat driving was adamant; part of the friend group culture. There was one night when Agot convinced him to let the girls take his car without him. “The stars are telling me that this is a opportunity we have to take full advantage of,” she had said to Cam. They had sped the pansy’s car all the way to Vegas and were late getting the car back the next morning. Everything had turned out fine—she couldn’t even remember a reaction on his face taking the keys from her. That was before the luck of the draw flipped on her again after graduation. Now her friends were parading away in the cemetery dark—maybe already on the bus to Vegas without her—and in her heart she felt there wasn’t a soul around, alive or dead, who wanted to deal her a hand. Wasn’t it a special weekend to anyone else?
“You found it.”
Agot swirled around and shrieked. It was the witch. 
John chuckled. “Undead bitch scared of a little mask.”
Agot spat black makeup. “Fucking found what?”
“I thought you ran off and didn’t hear me earlier. I promised everyone whoever could find my grandfather’s grave first would see his ghost. They’re all running around trying to find it. But you—”
Agot faced the front of the grave. Her jaw dropped. Wayne Connolly / July 23, 1912 - July 1, 1959 / Loving Father / and Husband, it read. Not only had she leaned up against the right grave without knowing, but it was a week before the dead man’s birthday—a birthday that she shared. 
“John,” she said. “Trust me, I had no fucking idea. That’s a batshit coincidence.” Her breath was taken away. She felt the eerie sense of the absoluteness of patterns in her nerves, like the fractals of her body bloomed in reaction to the pulses of light from stars.
“More than a coincidence. You didn’t hear anything?”
“It was all random,” she exclaimed. “You don’t understand—” she was tripping under the moon, the softness of the everlasting grass almost through her boots.
He grabbed her arm. “I forgot his birthday was so soon, too. That’s a week away. Do you think he’s closer to us at that time? You like ghosts, don’t you—”
“I said you don’t fucking understand, John!” she grabbed him back. “This random fucking headstone—that’s my birthday. Your grandfather’s birthday is my birthday, too. Isn’t that crazy? Is that not fucking crazy?” 
“My grandfather—”
“You stupid fucktard. Not your grandfather’s. Mine.”
3, 2, 1, go. Agot used her other hand to lift his mask halfway like hers, pressing her pelvis into his and tilting them both over onto the side of the headstone. It was a quick kiss, but one that used all her energy, and he lingered for a moment savoring the softness of licorice on his tongue. 
Agot was silent, rarely making a mess of things when focused, but as Fancy peeked out from her place behind the mausoleum she saw the rare moment; a peek behind the curtain of coincidence as a prize for winning the lottery of cosmic democracy. The universe was drunk and dancing, and for the first time, it had allowed her to see its parliament. Fancy, a sole chosen representative for the human race, on her knees in the dark, had been handed the intimate knowledge of the nutritional information of her friend group soup. She might as well have been granted a superpower.
John and Agot, she thought, and the gut feeling rumbled away and upward. Franny thought her heart might explode. She pulled down her shorts, pissed, and vomited the sight away quietly through her fingers.
ᐧᐧᐧ
John’s view of himself in the third person was so shifted, he thought the tongue he felt himself moving could very well be the witch’s, not his own. That felt more likely—it would align with the present happiness he felt. What was clear to him was taste, and the ions colliding underneath. True clarity was elsewhere, perceived by someone or something burdened in order to rebalance the point of duality lost by the action. This fact was lost on him. Birthdays were so special. His mother had been so defeated by loss in his childhood that she’d tried to shove the celebration of life in the faces of her sons at every opportunity. The word birthday reminded him of his mother, whose face only lit up at the potential for extravagance—birthday was her word. The Connolly boys could have used birthday party punch cards to Disneyland growing up. His skin rubbed against her matte lipstick like soft fingertips on balloons. Birthday, he thought, and kissed her for the last time, biting her tongue softly and bringing her lips into his with the pull of his teeth.
“Congrats on winning the challenge,” he said. He looked around as if something might really appear. “And, uh, happy birthday. I’m sorry a ghost is all I have to offer.”
Something had left Agot. She was sheepish. “It’s not really my birthday, anyway.”
“It’s as much your birthday as it is his.”
Agot could foresee it was time for her to leave. “I still have to piss,” she said. 
“Ah, that’s why you won so fast. Go. I’ll… wait here and see if Opie shows, I guess.”
She turned away from the point of fiery nerves and reprehension, away from sin and taste, and walked stiffly, self consciously, toward the tree line. She desperately wanted to sprint from sight, but did not want him to feel the fear that she was feeling, no matter his involvement. This was her own. All she could do was return the mask over her mouth.
ᐧᐧᐧ
Fancy walked briskly, her brain static. There was Cameron.
“Cameron,” she began. She had a remarkably perceptive palette—she had known all along that there was something, someone, in the soup that she was allergic to. She had only had a taste. Half of her felt triumphant that she’d been right, but then—there was Agot. Agot was most of the shock; the static. The three girls had been friends since high school, and there was nothing pointing to Agot ever stabbing Cameron in the back like that. It was a hefty burden, but the soup would be a lot lighter in a few minutes, and a lot healthier. One brain cell buzzed about logistics: if Cam’s boyfriend was a cheat and her good friend was a backstabber, then how were they all getting home? They had no phone, no ride, and weren’t about to walk in the dark to her grandmother’s house. The witch was their ticket out. But the soup—there were better things for them to eat in the future. She had to just spit it out.
“Cameron,” she said. “I—”
“Baby!” said Cam. 
“Huh?” It was John, mask off, a few feet behind Fran. Cam ran over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“C’mon,” he said, kissing the nape of her neck. “I wanna show you something.”
Fancy saw black. The pulp in her throat was all black. She had missed her chance, if there was one. She looked over her shoulder, hoping to catch a glance at Opie, her saving grace, but he was nowhere to be found. Cameron’s dread had left her so suddenly, and she was bubbly again in the face of more eyes, skipping across the breezy grass with her arms toward the stars. John was laughing like a wolf, jogging against the grain to catch her. She did a little twirl and resumed her frolic, beelining unaware toward a familiar sight. Fancy kept her distance from them.
“Stop!” he said. “Right there.”
“What?” she slipped a tad. 
“To your left. You won the race.” 
It was the grave. “Oh!” she yelped like a game show winner, but felt a shiver run up her spine.
“I knew you’d find it first.” 
She giggled. He grasped her lower back and pulled her into him, just for a moment, breathing her in. Fancy was listening with a strong ear, but she had to look away. She would puke at the sight of them close to each other, and her stomach was empty. She scanned the faraway rows for Opie while John got down on one knee.
“A promise ring,” he said. “I had this…plan. This is one of my grandmother’s rings that my mom kept from her personal collection. You’ve been talking so much about our—what was the word?—synastry. I thought it made sense for you to have it.”
“Oh, Christ! Thank you so much, baby,” Cameron squealed. Fancy looked over her shoulder and clocked the glinting sapphire pinched between the boy’s two fingers. He caught Fancy’s protruding eyes and smiled.
“It’s just a promise ring. Don’t freak.”
“Fance. Oh, Jesus. You’ve got to come look at this.” Fancy came over and examined Cam’s extended hand. It was a nice piece of rock, in theory. Expensive no matter what. The girls would pawn it tomorrow, Fancy thought. 
“It’s gorgeous on you,” he said. “It’s just like I envisioned.”
“The only problem is that it feels almost double my ring size,” she said. “What big hands you have, Grandma.”
He had a bruised look. “I can get it downsized next weekend at the mall,” he said.
“Perfect. I just don’t want it to slip off.” She kissed the tip of his nose. “Here…Mr. Big Hands. Would you wear it and keep it safe for me until we get back in the bus?” 
“Sure, baby.” He slipped it on. The sapphire ring fit perfectly on his middle finger. 
ᐧᐧᐧ
Agot was zipping up her shorts when she spotted the man scouting the unbroken field to her immediate right. What caught her off guard wasn’t that there was someone else in the cemetery; it was that she recognized him. She had seen him over at Cam’s house once or twice while she had been living there. He had been a friend of her parents somehow, a regular dinner party attendee, but not someone from their church. He was middle-aged and hairy, stocky but muscular, sporting unhooked dark coveralls and a bald head. He was carrying a flashlight and a trove of other items on his belt. When he clicked it on and the light flooded from behind her tree she remembered his occupation, but not his name. The words came back to her in the voice of Cam’s dad—words she had heard for weeks every time she fell asleep. He was the deputy chief.
He was Deputy Chief Reggie Banks of the Long Beach Police Department. A full-time deputy, part-time gravedigger, that is. Both jobs he viewed more as vocations than as responsibilities; dedications he jumbled up his whole identity with, and proudly. When he was off from the station, he threw his whole heart into tending to the dead of Long Beach. He was also a proud and loyal friend, and kept a close circle—one of those close friends being Angus Reid, Cameron’s father. When Angus and Marie were showing him the slideshow of photos from their last trip to Rome, they drunkenly spoke of being afraid of their daughter—her potential to cause trouble when left alone. ‘You don’t do private eye work anymore?’ Angus had asked him, and he didn’t—not since the early seventies—but he promised to keep an eye out. ‘Not privately,’ he had joked, but he’d keep an eye out. Now that conversation had been resurrected by complete coincidence. He had not had to look far to find the trouble. Not five minutes before he had received a report of a 10851 all the way from San Diego on his walkie while checking out a bright pair of headlights illuminating an unfinished, angel-shaped hedge. Now he was approaching a visage he instantly recognized as one of Cameron’s entourage. He stopped a few yards from the tree line.
“Come on out,” Deputy Banks said. “I just want to talk.”
Agot’s knees were shaking. Her body and mind did not react well to authority. But as long as she had the mask on, she thought, there was no way she could be identified. Thank God for the fucking mask. He had seen her, but she was stuck breathing with the tree, her back to flooding light, and all she could see from the rubber eyeholes was the splattered darkness of the forest. 
It was the tiniest whisper from a diagonal tree. “Agot,” it said. Her blood spiked. 
“Fucking Opie!”
“He’s seen me, not you.” 
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m gonna make a run for it. He’ll chase me and you can collect the others and sprint for the bus.”
“Just fucking talk to him, you crazy fuck! Are you high? We haven’t done anything wrong except underage drinking. You know how to worm your way out of that one.”
“Wrong. John let me know something on the bus. Something we should run for.” Opie exhaled. “He told me he would never get caught.”
“You’re scaring me now.”
“Listen to me carefully. John doesn’t own a bus. Cam just thinks that. The only bus he drives is for the doggie daycare. He joyrides.”
Agot clutched her zombie forehead. “It’s stolen.” 
“It’s stolen.”
“Christ.”
“So let me take care of it, Agot.”
“Opie, don’t you dare,” she said rather half-heartedly, which he took as a yes. He hucked a loogie in the dirt and let the flashlight hit him. 
“Come out with your hands where I can see them,” said the beam of light. Opie ran full speed with both arms extended, a loping maskless zombie’s gait at full sprint, screaming through his charge like a drunken soldier. The cop sprung back in surprise, dropping the light and clambering for his belt. “Hey!” he yelled with all the ferocity that Opie’s cry lacked, and he ran after the darting fool. Fancy, Cam, and John heard the commotion from the other end of the lot.
“Is that Opie? Look who’s coming for another drink,” John said.
“There’s someone behind him,” Fancy said. The shadow wasn’t Agot, and it was drawing close behind him.
Agot ran out from the tree line, watching her feet for bad roots. The bad luck was groping up from the earth. She eyed a dull batch of light in the grass and in an instant her hands were around the thick flashlight—not from a coherent thought, but from an impulse, a learned history of taking unwatched objects. There was the chase happening straight out, not thirty feet in front of her. It was a straight shot. The flashlight was in the air and then it was colliding with the back of his head in a cataclysmic bruise. The man fell with a yell, taking Opie down with him in a mass of flailing limbs. Agot was already gone and running. She went in an arc, trying to locate the Connolly grave. It was a second before the three figures appeared out of the dark like the night had been misted, and while the girls tried to soothe her breath and asked what was going on, John pulled the reality from the situation immediately. “It’s the cops,” he said. “Fucking run now.”
 Agot looked behind her. Far away, two shadows were stumbling to their feet again. But there was no time to think or act, and everyone was running in complete fear behind John. They were out of the hedges and up the road, trailing the forgotten headlights. There was a lucky benefit to John running the bus’s battery, as they all felt there was a lighted goal they were aiming toward. “Hey!” the voice of Opie yelled in the distance, and a reinvigorated sense of danger sprung up inside all of them and the pace was made faster. 
John reached the bus door first, gold key against glinting sapphire. The key slid in with ease and he was firing at the control panel. The bus chugged alive, and the doors swung shut and open and shut again like a clenching jaw. 
“Fuck!” John yelled from inside the closed doors. The three girls were swearing outside. He was flicking a lame switch over and over, red-faced. “Fucking door gets stuck sometimes,” he said, and thinking quick, jammed his sneaker sideways through the rubber of the door and pried it open manually with his fingers.
The three girls bowed down and filed in. John peeked out one last time behind the bus. Coming out from the hedge was the beefy cop, sprinting more powerfully than desired. His nerves spiked. “Start the fucking bus NOW,” John yelled to his girlfriend. The key was already in the ignition. Cam’s first thought was it’s time, in reference to years of watching Star Wars with her dad and wanting to throw a starship into warp speed since she was a young girl. She leaped into the seat and turned the key. The bus blared the same Deep Purple CD and the faulty switch caused the door to swing open and shut again fast on John’s ringed finger. “Fuck!” he screamed, but the music had the girls’ hands over their ears. Cameron swung the bus around toward the exit. The bruised cop was raging from the grass, and she was watching him from the side mirror. “Cocksucker,” John yelled, having no faith in his girlfriend or the bus’s ability to get the door open again. He tried to pry with his other fingers, which had become unreasonably sweaty, and in a brutish effort to dislodge his finger from the outside air whipping his skin he pulled quick with all his might—first against the rubber lips, then against the scraping black metal of the real door. 
The red lights had died, but there was blood—in the air, on the door, on the couch. Fancy screamed at top volume and Cam twisted the volume to off and glanced over and screamed and pumped the brake. Now everyone was yelling not because of bloodloss but because Opie had swung around to the other hedge exit, the one directly in their line of sight, and Cameron was desperately trying to bring the huge vehicle from sixty to zero in ten seconds so not to bulldoze him. Opie had been running for the bus, thinking the driver would see him and stop a hell of a lot sooner, but there was a lot of blood on the windshield and he did a dive to the shoulder of the road as the bus seethed to a halt.
The doors opened with a breeze. John was staring at his middle finger, trying to squeeze the spurting blood back under the skin with his fingers. The right middle finger had been degloved. A bloom of skin and fat had been pushed upward off the bone, avulsed by the ring like teeth sucking away a chicken wing. The exposed bone was slick, like an early baby breathing air for the first time, and unforeseen meaty colors were bulging from the wound. Blood, blood, and more blood spurted from the bisected finger, the copper reek penetrating the gold of the band. Cameron was holding John, wildly trying to contain the situation, both of them speaking in falsetto tones—“baby, baby, tie this around it, oh my god, hold me, babe, baby”—and Agot was in the driver’s seat and Fancy was off the bus and running to Opie on the pavement. 
“We didn’t forget, you, Opie. We weren’t gonna leave you,” she said, and she grasped his shoulder and flipped her slouched friend around. Blood was pooling from his grin, and he spit the mess and pieces of teeth in the grass. He had hit the ground hard with his face and Fran could see without the red the way his cuspid teeth had been removed; how the ground had turned his bicuspids to cuspids and created cuspids bisected.
“I know you wouldn’t leave me, Fran,” he said. She was tearing up. She wiped his mouth with her sleeve. 
“Come on or they’ll leave both of us.”
“He’s coming!” Agot yelled. Everyone was back on the bus and for the first thirty seconds they sped away from the cemetery with the door half ajar until the jaw decided to clench again on its own. 
Agot was trundling down the hill. The group was huddled at the front of the bus, stone silent except for John’s deep breaths and Cam’s snivels and streams of tears. Her face was pressed into his shoulder, staring to make sure the tourniquet was holding, while his eyes were squeezed shut to focus on his breath. 
“Oh, God, Johnny. I feel horrible. It feels like it’s all my fault. If I had just worn the ring none of this would have happened.”
“Don’t say that, baby. Never, ever say that.”
Fancy looked into Cameron’s quivering eyes, and though she felt there was no guilt to be placed on her friend, she recognized that the feeling of guilt was there for her; had been made irreparable in her mind by speaking it into the air. What could have happened in the past was Cam’s truth, and she saw this all with her eyes. In the tunneling light coming from the windshield she looked like a shadowed Madonna cradling a freshly delivered son of God or Satan, slick with fluids and rich with responsibility. This was a vulnerable side of John she had never seen. Fancy couldn’t bear the bitter taste of the future that was undeniable in those words. I feel like I owe you, Cam’s words said. We will help each other heal through a tragedy that was completely unpredictable. 
Her gut again. She was sitting with Opie, who had his mouth stuffed with a napkin and was laying his head against the cool window. They would be at a hospital soon, though every second that passed by with Agot driving them made Fancy’s pulse raise. She felt a fire of guilt herself—she knew Opie would feel as if they had all forgotten him for a while, and knew there was no easy way to tell Cameron what she had seen. Now was a hellish time, being transported in a bus between secure delusion and dreadful reality by the soon-to-be ghosts of her life. This was the last time she’d talk to Agot, she thought. She wanted a last look at her fallen friend instead of focusing on the things that were currently left unsaid.
In the reflection of the rear view mirror was Agot staring back into her eyes. She had been trying to catch a glance at John and Cameron while the bus was cruising down a straightaway, but caught the lock of Fancy’s eyes instead. She thought her secret of the night was safe, though the sensation it was having on her nervous system was pure dread, and when she caught the pulse of their shared glare she saw that Fran’s head was blaring the same terrible alarm. A side of fear had been added for her by knowing John had implicated all of them in a crime, but there was a specific look in Fancy’s eyes that could not be dispelled in her memory.
The bus hit a pothole and its blood began to blot. The sensation and the scent of drying blood was what made Agot’s gut leap.