The Datsun’s engine was now running, and with the heat geysering through the vents and me still in my stupid blazer and my top shirt button buttoned and tie fat-knotted and pressed against my Adam’s apple I roasted in my own juices. Slumped and melted into my seat, I couldn’t breathe, and purple splotches did their you’re-about-to-pass-out amoeba dance at the edges of my vision. I clumsily pawed at the window handle.

Mercy said, “Keep the window up. I don’t want anyone to hear us.”

“I’m so hot I’m gonna die.” I rolled down the glass, then stuck my head out the window like a panting dog.

“You’re not going to die now. Maybe later. You never know.”

Mercy shifted into gear and crawled us away from the gravesite. I got one more look at the grandson as he walked to his car. And he got one more look at me. I wanted to warn him about what might happen, to any of us, to all of us, but I didn’t have the words. I still don’t.

“Do you want to know what you and I are doing tonight, my sweaty friend?”

Ooh, cliffhanger!

* * *

I asked for the tenth time, “So what are we going to do between now and later?”

Now: late afternoon, parked at Hospital Point and sitting on a waist-high rock wall, overlooking the ocean, the ocean breeze in my face while I methodically worked through a pack of Nerds candy.

Later: roughly between ten P.M. and midnight depending on my curfew, we were going to return to the cemetery and observe the grandmother’s grave and watch for more blue orbs/blobs (I preferred blob to orb) and other signs.

“Ugh. What do you want to do?” Mercy looked across the bay to Salem and held out a gimme hand. I dotted her palm with grape-flavored sugar rocks. I didn’t give her any watermelon from the other compartment of the box, even though she had bought me the pack. I was a hopeless Nerds miser and a bad friend.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said.

“Nope. You make the choice for once. What do you want to do?”

We were both cranky and on edge without being able to explain why. It was as though we were splitting a pizza of our bad moods.

“Okay. I want to go home and change my clothes,” I said. “Then, I don’t know, maybe get food and go to the movies, see Amityville part whatever.”

She hopped off the rock wall. “If you don’t want to go tonight, that’s fine, my feelings won’t be hurt, you just have to tell me …” She was agitated, but for a change I didn’t think she was agitated with me. She wanted to back out of the cemetery trip, yet couldn’t admit it to me, or to herself.