Free Gravedigger's Cottage by Chris Lynch

sounding stupider by the syllable. Then, all eyes turned to Carmine.
    “What did you do?” Jennifer said.
    Carmine didn’t answer. Walter also looked peculiar, and guilty, but in a different way. A stupider way.
    Jennifer turned back to me. “Sorry, Sylvia. We were having a little beach fire. We do that sometimes. Just us. So then my brother, Mr. Delirious, starts blah-blabbing about how he knows you guys and how he’s been hanging out with you guys and even your dad is showing him around the place and everything…”
    Rude it may have been, but I found it physically impossible to look at Jennifer anymore. I found it impossible to look at the other girls or the fire or the sea. I could see nothing in this world other than the top of Carmine’s demented, rectangular head. I stared at him so hard, if I were a magnifying glass he’d already have a white-hot pinhole in his head.
    “So,” Jennifer went on, “like I said, sorry. For Carmine. He has reality problems. He should be made to wear a sign or something.”
    I looked at Walter then, and he at me. He shrugged. I shrugged. He just looked so forlorn, so young, so dumb. We were here now, so what could we do?
    “Tell us all about yourself,” Emma said, “tell us all.”
    Well, I didn’t want to do that. But like I said, I didn’t really want to be rude either.
    “There’s nothing to tell, really. We lived in New Hampshire before we moved here, up near the Canadian border. Then our dad was asked to move for his job. Then we came here. And then, tonight, we came here.”
    I don’t suppose I really thought that would be quite fleshed-out enough. I hoped, though.
    Everybody waited. You know that thing when people can help you out of an uncomfortable moment in the conversation, or they can just let it hang there, floating in the air and picking up gas until it’s like a blimp…
    “And she had a whole lot of pets that are dead now and buried all over the yard at our old house,” said Walter, being so helpful I wanted to bury him in the yard.
    “Shut up, Walter.”
    I thought it would just be a minor embarrassing moment, but it was apparently more.
    Debbie, Emma, Jennifer, and Robin all looked quickly to each other, pointing and nodding as if I had just said the secret word or something.
    “What?” I asked.
    Robin started playing something sad and mournful on her flute.
    “Nothing,” Jennifer said. “It was just that, well, we didn’t know that exactly about you but we knew, you know?”
    “No, I don’t know.” I didn’t mind sounding a little crisp with them now, since they were creeping me out. Or making me angry. They were weird. Or they were nosy. I wasn’t sure what they were, but right now they were too much of it.
    “Listen, stop,” Debbie said, getting up and coming over to wedge herself between Jennifer and me. “You’re scaring her.”
    “I’m not scared.”
    I was fairly seriously scared. I was right about the night. No good, the night, no good at all. Should have been in bed.
    “We just figured, there was some sort of…sorry…death connection to you, that’s all.”
    “Why?” I said, sliding away from Debbie through the sand.
    She slid along after me. Robin’s flute played louder, but the sea, the surf, got oddly flat and quiet.
    “It’s not you, Sylvia—don’t worry. It’s the house, that’s all.”
    “That’s all?” I said. “That’s all? Don’t worry? I think I will worry, maybe. What about the house? What about my dead pets?”
    “It’s just what happens,” Debbie said. She turned to address her friends. “Remember Sarah? She was really nice, remember? It was the same with Sarah. And what was the name of that girl before? It seems like such a long time ago…”
    “I’m going home,” Walter said, and stood up straight and expressionless as a toy soldier.
    “Don’t,” Carmine said. “Please, don’t do that. Here, let’s go down to the water and throw stuff in.”
    Walter was allowing himself to be