Free The Cemetery Boys by Heather Brewer

about the only time I could relax around my dad was when he had his nose in the paper or his laptop open, searching so desperately for employment that it was starting to seem might never come.
    I spent as much time as possible in my room and away from him, wondering how Cara was and if she’d been thinking much about me. I hadn’t seen her or Devon around during my errands into town, and I kept stopping just shy of knocking on their door. I was starting to think the night at the movie theater had been some sort of test, and I’d failed. And I didn’t want Cara to think I was stalking her or something. Things would have been a lot easier if I’d had a cell phone.
    Dad peered down at me from his place on the ladder and cleared his throat. “I talked to your mom this afternoon. She said she still hasn’t heard from you since the move.”
    â€œI was going to call her last night but Grandma was on the phone.”
    â€œUh-huh. Sure. Just call her, Stephen. She’s your mother, for crying out loud.”
    She’s not my mother, I thought. Not anymore.
    But I just nodded and passed him the paintbrush.
    Once we finished putting on the second coat of Soul-Sucking Gray—which might not have been the official shade,but who from Sherwin-Williams was going to stop me from calling it that?—I headed inside to grab a quick shower. I’d hardly made it ten feet before the sudden, powerful urge to call my mother swept over me. Before I knew it, I had the receiver in my hand and two numbers dialed. The truth was, my dad was right. The truth was, I missed her. I should let her know that I was okay, the move went fine, that there were some parts of my new home I was actually enjoying and I felt guilty because she wasn’t here to see that. She was my mom . Crazy or not, she had to be scared being shut up in a strange place with no family around. She probably missed us, missed me. And my refusal to pick up the phone until now couldn’t be helping matters.
    On the other hand . . .
    I slammed the receiver back down with a shaky breath. As selfish as it sounded, it didn’t matter what she was probably feeling at the moment. I was still hurt and angry and not ready to hear her voice. I knew it was irrational, but I couldn’t help it.
    I went to bed that night without ever taking a shower and with a load of guilt weighing down my thoughts. In an effort to distract myself, I devoured every page of that small leather book—which definitely turned out to be Devon’s journal. He’d signed his name on some of the sketches and poems, as if he’d meant for someone other than himself toread it all. At least, that’s how I justified what I was doing.
    A few pages in, I found a scratchy-looking sketch of a bird’s wing, drawn in heavy black lines that seemed so raw, so immediate, it was as if Devon had been driven to get the image out of his mind and onto the page as quickly as he could. Almost as if by drawing it, he could remove it from his thoughts—purge himself of the image. The wing dipped onto the opposite page, pointing to a few lines of poetry that Devon had attributed to someone named Michael R. Collings. The poem spoke of “winged shadows in clefts of wailing yews.”
    Not that I had any idea what a yew was.
    I flipped to the next page. A more carefully drawn sketch occupied much of the left side, as if Devon had taken his time with this one, maybe reveled in what it was that he’d been drawing. Maybe this was an image he wanted etched into his thoughts as well as onto the page. Who could say but Devon? All I knew was that whoever had drawn this large, winged creature attacking a train car had taken his time doing it. The detail was incredible. Tiny, horrified faces peered out of the car windows, mouths agape in screams as the car left the tracks. Water swirled in the reservoir below. Each feather on the creature’s wing was drawn in intricate