Free Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones Page A

two feet above it like could happen, but right on the surface of the carpet, reaching forward along it like a cat, her face just blank.
    Lindsay dropped her phone. It rattled under the table.
    More , I texted back to RJ.
    We were going to be so rich.
    I thought that was the only way things could go, yeah. There’s going to be an empty seat at graduation now, though.
    Maybe two.
     
    ~
     
    By the beginning of the next week, RJ was a star, at least on the cell networks. Instead of a ghost, now he was dragging a fuse. Like he’d weighed his options, studied the landscape of his life, considered the future, and made the measured decision that senior year, we were all going to know his name. One way or the other.
    Let me say here that I never took credit for the images he was getting the app to produce.
    I’d had a hand in the initial program, had spent a hurried two hours parsing through the code with him on Saturday, his dad grilling steaks for us in the backyard, but that was just maintenance and bugkilling, trying to get it all to spec before we took it live.
    Before we could do that, though, we had to nab a domain—it was actually available, and, because it was for ‘college,’ his dad floated us twenty-four months on his card, base package—we had to stake out some freebie bulletin board, complete with set-up and faq threads, each of us set up as boss moderators. We were also supposed to write up little backstories for ourselves, to attach faces to the app.
    “If you have time, I mean,” RJ had said from behind his laptop, about that.
    It was like we were playing battleship.
    “Ha ha,” I said back, and never looked up.
    “So is this the end of our summer romance?” he said back, and this stopped me.
    I looked around my screen, was about to say something back—no idea what, but I could feel the words in my throat—when his dad ducked in with news about those steaks, how if you don’t pay at least glancing attention to the corporeal, then you risk getting lost forever in the abstract—his usual out-loud bumpersticker—and I forgot what RJ had said.
    That night it came back, though.
    Two-thirty in the morning found me at our living room window, no lights on behind me, to give away that I was there.
    In the bushes there was the cherry of a cigarette, rhythmic like a heartbeat. Except slower. More deliberate. And at the wrong height for RJ.
    Unless he was breaking his own rules, using Cedric’s custom little headstone as a bench
    He was.
    I hugged my arms to my sides, felt the coldness of my phone press into my bare skin.
    Without looking back, I glowed the phone on, opened the app, and lowered my hand, the picture snapping once the phone was straight up-and-down enough.
    The picture was empty, of course.
    Just our couch, that stupid floor lamp I used to think was a robber. The doorway to the left of it, black and yawning.
    I deleted it.
     
    ~
     
    Probably the scariest image RJ sent to me that week, that he fully knew I had to show to Lindsay, who was going to cc the whole class, it was one of his dad that he’d doctored.
    It was in the hall again, like the rest—my guess is he was using his mom’s tall mirror at the turn into the living room to orient, keep the lateral in check—but it was different in that it was just static.
    Over our cheese-puffed, brainstormy weekend, we’d agreed that the suggestion of motion, of something approaching the phone, that that was all kinds of scary. Better than something you were walking away from, anyway.
    But this one, this time, it was what he was walking away from.
    It was his dad, way back by his bedroom—RJ’s mom’s long gone, of course; I don’t even remember her, so much—and he was just sitting against that wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, his head cocked over, an obvious kind of stain on the wall.
    Lindsay looked up to me in Life Science when she saw it, and I looked away, wasn’t thinking about money so much anymore.
    That afternoon, I