Page 37 of Cemetery Boys

Julian’s grin quickly vanished.

Yadriel groaned and scrubbed a hand over his face. “We can’t—”

“If he stays here, he’s one hundred percent getting caught by Lita,” Maritza pointed out. “She’s a Cuban abuelita who’s got nothing better to do than hang around the house and pick up after a house full of boys.”

Yadriel didn’t want to admit it, but she had a point. By the time he got home from school almost every day, his room was straightened up, or his laundry cleaned and folded on his bed.

Well, at least today Lita would have plenty to keep her busy.

He looked over at Julian, who appeared hopeful, though mostly desperate. Logically, Yadriel knew Maritza had a point. He knew it was dangerous to leave Julian at home unsupervised, but still.

“Maybe we could just leave him in the cemetery,” Yadriel tried, which was met with another series of groans from Julian.

“Yads,” Maritza said firmly, standing upright and frowning at him. “What’s the deal?”

Heat clawed up Yadriel’s throat. “I don’t want to take him to school.”

“But why?”

“Because of what happened with Lisa!” he lashed out.

Maritza’s shoulders sank. “Yads…” Her expression softened to a look of pity. It made his skin crawl.

Meanwhile, Julian was looking around, annoyed. “Uh, should I know who Lisa is?” he asked, voice edged with impatience.

“She was a dead girl who haunted my elementary school,” Yadriel snapped at him.

Julian’s thick eyebrows shot up toward his buzzed hair.

“Except I didn’t know she was dead,” he went on, words spilling from his mouth. “So I was just the weird kid who was talking to himself, who also lived in a cemetery and had no friends!” Yadriel clenched his hands into fists at his sides, turning to Julian. “There, is that a good enough reason?” he demanded.

Julian leaned back. “Oh,” he said, his voice awkward and small, cheeks turning red.

“Yads,” Maritza said gently, moving to touch his arm, but Yadriel quickly twisted out of her reach.

“I’m going to get dressed,” he said. He went into the bathroom with the clothes clutched in his arms. When he closed the door behind him, he let out a long breath, trying to exhale all the tension from his shoulders. Yadriel closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the mirror, letting the cool glass soothe the throbbing in his head. It’d been a long time since he’d thought about Lisa.

When he was only seven and just starting to understand what the brujx were and how they were different from everyone else, he was friends with a little girl named Lisa. They would play together during recess in the field and hang out during free time in class. Lisa loved to play with the stuffed animals. Her absolute favorite was the floppy-eared spotted dog. Yadriel told his parents about her and always drew pictures of them during art. When other kids in class started teasing Yadriel, he didn’t understand why.

A couple of weeks later, his teacher had a meeting with his mom and dad. When they got home, they asked him about Lisa.

Even now, sometimes Yadriel could be looking at someone and not realize they were a spirit. If he wasn’t paying attention, it could be easy to overlook. When he was little, it was even harder to spot.

Lisa had passed away the year before from an extreme case of the flu over the course of just a couple of days. It had been sudden and unexpected. The floppy-eared dog had become the tether to her spirit.

Yadriel remembered being inconsolable in his grief, crying and clutching his mom and refusing the comfort of his father, thinking he was going to kill Lisa. As Camila rocked him in her lap, rubbing his back in slow circles, Enrique tried his best to explain.

His dad told him that Lisa was already dead, but that was okay. They didn’t force peaceful spirits to cross over. He told Yadriel he had actually helped Lisa—now that Enrique knew about her, he could check in on her and make sure she was okay. If she started to get “sick”—the word he used when Yadriel was little to describe spirits who turned maligno—then he could help her cross over to the other side. It would be painless, and she would be happy.

But when Yadriel went back to school the next day, there was no unknowing that Lisa was a spirit. His classmates were making fun of him because, to their eyes, he was talking to himself and playing with an imaginary friend. Yadriel decided to ignore Lisa. She followed him around; sometimes she would get angry, but mostly she would just cry.

Eventually, Yadriel stopped seeing her. Even now, he didn’t know if she’d crossed over on her own, or if his dad released her spirit. He never went near the floppy-eared dog again.

The idea of bringing Julian to school stirred up all the bad memories of Lisa. What if he slipped up? What if someone caught him talking to Julian? The last thing he ever wanted was to draw more attention to himself.

Yadriel let the mundane tasks of getting dressed, washing his face, and styling his hair calm his frayed nerves.

When Yadriel opened the door, Maritza was standing with her hands on her hips, staring down at Julian. He sat with his hands in his lap and his chin tucked to his chest. They both looked up when Yadriel walked in.