Chris rattled his cigarette pack and placed it on the bar next to his Droid. He considered the cost of another cold beer and the cost of a fresh pack of smokes. He remembered pulling loosies out of a candy jar for a quarter each. Now it was hard to find loosies anywhere, and a pack of smokes in Brooklyn cost thirteen bucks. Even happy hour drinks at this old-school joint were expensive . . .
I heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up. It wasn’t the librarian . . .
It was a Friday night when it all began. I was sitting in my living room enjoying a tall Bud Light and listening to music playing on my laptop. I’d only been in IB—Imperial Beach for the nonnatives—for three weeks, but Cali was a taste of freedom I never wanted to let go of. I had moved into a house only fifty feet from the beach and found a job in Coronado that people would envy me for. It felt too damn good to be true. Turns out it was . . .
Darryl was already gone when I opened my eyes in the bright bitterness of morning . . .
Parker had stolen half a million dollars from the men Mulligan and Harriman worked for . . .
The blood’s flowing so loud through my temples I’m worried they can hear it on the other side of the door . . .
They say she was buried alive. Rufina Cambaceres was a great beauty on the eve of her nineteenth birthday when a friend whispered in her ear a terrible secret: Rufina’s beloved fiancé was having an affair with Rufina’s own mother. Rufina collapsed to the floor. Three doctors declared her dead; they did not know her heart still beat, however slowly.
She was interred until a few days later, when workers heard her scream. When they unburied her there were scratches on her face and on the coffin lid from her attempts to escape. They were too late to save her. Her mother then had her laid above ground in a white marble mausoleum, her coffin behind a glass wall so that if the lid should ever rise again, everyone could see . . .
“Mum! What did you do with my curling iron?”
Trinh’s voice tumbles down the staircase. There is an uncomfortable silence at the table as Leah avoids the glances of her friends . . .