Free Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares Page A

and turned around.
    Darius, the good-looking Middle Easterner, turned out not to be Turkish, but Iranian by way of San Diego. He was also in mortuary, and at this moment he was pointing to a wall of dirt.
    She moved in. She put down her usual pointy trowel in favor of finer instruments. In a little over a week she had already earned a reputation for fearlessness. In the face of moldering bones, snakes, worms, rodents, spiders, and bugs, no matter how big, she was unperturbed. Not even the stench of the latrines got to her. Though in truth she almost never peed inside.
    At five-thirty in the evening, her dirty, sweaty colleagues were wandering toward camp, but she was still working on the piece of bone. It was actually quite a large piece. It was painstaking work. You couldn’t just dig it out. Every bit of soil had to be cleared and screened with care. Every bit of bone, every fragment of clay or stone had to be sent to the lab. Everything had to be recorded in context by means of a large three-dimensional grid. She had to photograph each thing with a digital camera and number it by basket and lot.
    “The difference between looting and archaeology is preserving context,” Peter had told her. “The object itself, whatever its worth, represents a small fraction of its value to us.”
    By six-thirty, only Peter was still there with her. “You can go,” she said. “I’m almost done.”
    “I don’t feel right, leaving you alone in a grave,” he said.
    She liked him there, with the sun behind him. She’d let him stay.
    “I’ve named him Hector,” she said, coaxing the skull from the dirt.
    “Who?”
    “Him.” She pointed to the hole that would have been his nose.
    “That’s a heroic name. Why do you think it’s a he?”
    She wasn’t sure if he was asking her or quizzing her. “By the size. We found a part of a female skull yesterday.”
    He nodded. “And what did you name her?”
    “Clytemnestra.”
    “I like it.”
    “Thanks. I’m keeping an eye out for the last few bits of her. Her skeleton is almost complete.”
    “Oh, so that’s Clytemnestra. I heard about her in the lab.”
    Bridget nodded. “The biology guys are excited about her.”
    Once almost all the dirt was processed, she gingerly lifted Hector’s skull. She began to brush out the grooves as she’d been taught.
    “It doesn’t get to you, does it?”
    She shrugged. “Not really.”
    “Something will eventually. It seems so far back, I know, but something always gets through.”
    “But there isn’t much tragedy in a death that took place three thousand years ago, is there?” Bridget mused aloud. “Old Hector would be long dead no matter what great or awful things happened in his lifetime.”
    Peter smiled at her. “It puts mortality in perspective, doesn’t it?”
    “Yeah. Why do we worry so much about everything when we’re just going to end up here?” she asked. She felt quite cheery considering she was standing in a burial site holding a large section of a human skull.
    He laughed at her, but he seemed appreciative. He sat down at the edge of the trench to consider. She had the odd perception that he had fine ears. He seemed to hear the full extent of what she said and meant, no matter how loudly or quietly she spoke. When you shared a context, it made hearing easier.
    “No question a recent death feels more tragic,” he reasoned. “I guess because we’re still experiencing the world that the dead person is missing. We are still around to miss them.”
    Did he have such a tragedy in his life? she wondered. Could he tell that she did?
    She pushed her hair back. She realized she’d drawn a streak of dirt across her forehead. “Our moral connection to people expires after a certain amount of time. Don’t you think? Otherwise how could we dig up their graves?”
    “You are exactly right, Bridget. I couldn’t agree more. But how long a time? Two hundred years? Two thousand? How do you calculate the moment when a