Free Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak Page A

when she said it. Her eyes were red from crying, and her cheeks looked wind-chapped. I thanked her for helping me out.
    I got her talking after that. She talked a little about Jamie and how she found him, but she didn’t say too much. Really, she only seemed to want to talk about rocks. “So you really do collect rocks?” I asked, and Gracie bobbed her head.
    “You should see them,” she told me. “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow? My parents will be at marriage counse ling. Come around five.”
    “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
    Gracie dipped her head and looked up at me through brown bangs. She turned to go, then stopped a moment later and waved. I waved back.
    I waited for her to leave before me. I waited until I heard the squeal and clang of the wrought-iron front gates. Then I knelt down beside Jamie’s grave and wiped Gracie’s name out of the dirt. I wrote my name in place of it, etching into the dirt deeply.
    My letters were straight and fierce.
     
    I went home to find I’d missed dinner. My father was already in the living room, watching TV, the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours listening to the muzak play over and over. He watched it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I would start groaning for a channel switch. He’d change the channel but never acknowledge us. Usually he never had much to say anyway.
    When I got home, though, he wanted to talk. It took him only a few minutes after I sat down with a plate of meatloaf before he changed the channel, and I about choked. There was a news brief on about the search for Jamie’s murderers. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie’s murde rers”, the same way you might say, “Jamie’s dogs” or “Jamie’s Boy Scout honors”. My dad stretched out on his reclining chair and started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy.
    I stopped eating, set my fork down on my plate.
    “What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”
    My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those ba stard’s armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas, slowly, to let the little suckers have at their flesh.”
    He looked back at the TV.
    “But what if the police got them first?” I said. “What would you do then?”
    Dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards up there on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their God-damned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands i nto a gun shape, pointing it at me. He pulled the fake trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam!
    I nodded with approval. I felt really loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I ate up all this great attention and kept asking, “What if?” again and again, making up different situations. He was so cool, the best dad in the world. I wanted to buy him a hat: Best Dad in the World! printed on it. We were rea lly close, I felt, for the first time in a long time.
     
    Gracie Highsmith’s house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where she found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal and nickel when she found him. All of this she told me in her bedroom, on the second floor of her house. She held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black speckles embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. Gracie said she’d found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine. I said, “It’s something special all right,” and she beamed like someone’s mother.
    “That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.”
    She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she found, mysteriously, in the woods behind her house,