We followed Jesse's blue Ford Focus across the Hillside bridge, through the South Side of Center City, and onto the winding road that wraps around South Mountain. We drove through the leafy, sharply-inclined campus of Packer College, a private research university that nobody in Linden Valley can actually afford. The frat boys there are all from New York or Connecticut- far beyond the reach of what Valerie calls "our uggo shield"- and are accordingly gorgeous. I caught Valerie checking out a six-foot-something brunette in boat shoes, and Valerie doesn't check out very many guys.
We passed the first and second guardrails on our way up the mountainside. When we got to the third, Jesse parked his car. Valerie pulled Gus into the spot behind him.
"I'm confused," I said. I looked out my window. Aside from the steep drop beside the guardrail, all that was around us was an exit onto Route 33 and forest.
"Looks like we're about to get some answers," Valerie pointed through the windshield at Jesse, getting out of his car.
***
"Is this private property?" I pushed a twiggy branch out of my way.
"Who knows?" Jesse shrugged, in the process jostling Old Grim Bones, who hung over his shoulder. Valerie carried her high heels and the rolling stand behind me. Jesse had led us across Route 33. There, amongst the densely-forested trees, was an unmarked hiking path, overgrown with grass and thorny burr bushes. The farther from the highway we got, the more the path opened. The overgrown grass turned to a boggy mud, and the mud to a coarse, rocky gravel, until we came across a blue, derelict shed, upon which a green dragon had been painted. Along its scaly tale were these lines, in loopy script.
What but a Soul could have the wit
To build me up for Sin so fit?
So Architects do square and hew
Green Trees that in the Forest grew.
I got goosebumps from that, and I still don't even understand what it's supposed to mean.
"Where the hell are we?" Valerie set down Grim Bone's stand and ran up to the shed. She pulled on its rhinestone-incrusted door knob. It was locked.
"You're looking at the wrong place," Jesse titled his head in the direction of a tree beside him. From each of the lowest branches dangled what looked to be shrunken heads. I jumped.
"Relax, Steve," Jesse chuckled. "They're plastic."
"The Alferd Packard Memorial Garden," Valerie read a corroded aluminum plaque hammered into the shrunken-head-tree's trunk. She narrowed her eyes at me. "Alferd Packer, wasn't he a serial killer?"
"A cannibal," Jesse corrected her.
I wondered then if Jesse were actually a cleverly disguised psycho, and that Valerie and I were minutes away from finding ourselves dismembered in a cooler. That would be an interesting way to prove the second O'Shaughnessy law of inevitability.
"He was first cousins with Packer College's founder," Jesse trudged forward down the path, "come on!"
Against my sense of self-preservation, I picked up Grim Bones' stand and followed Jesse and Valerie deeper into the woods. It might be worth getting hacked to bits, I thought, if it meant Jesse would touch me.
The deeper into the woods we walked, the thinner the woods became, until the trees gave way entirely to a meadow high on top a gentle-sloping hill. And was it the weirdest meadow I have seen in my life. There were three nine-or-ten foot tall statues- a Picasso cubist face with forked tongue, a grasping hand, a pentagram. A seven foot tall arch made of concrete, soda bottles, and nineteen-nineties childhood memorabilia. A sheet metal pinwheel, decorated with bits of Natty Lite cans. And in the center, elevated on three concrete steps, a throne, mosaic-tiled with pieces of rainbow ceramic and smooth mirror glass.
"It's a sculpture garden," Jesse explained, "Some Packer students built it after 9/11, when pop Satanism was a thing," he gestured at the pentagram with his thumb. "I guess it's become a tradition to add to it."
"How did you find out about this place?" Valerie set a bare foot on the back of the base of the face sculpture. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was considering whether it was sturdy enough to climb. It must have been, because she immediately began to scale it.
"My brother used to take me here when he was supposed to be babysitting me," Jesse shifted Grim Bones from one arm to the other. "He and his high school girlfriend would smoke pot and tell me ghost stories."
The thought of little child Jesse being babysat by delinquent teenagers made me angry.
"That's horrible," I yelped. "You must have been terrified!"
"I wasn't afraid of no ghost," Jesse boasted, and puffed his chest out. "See my dad made my brother this toy proton pack when he was a kid in the nineties, and then it got passed down to me, like a decade after that. As long as I had that thing with me, I was invincible."
I could have squeezed his cheeks. He had the most squeezable cheeks I had ever seen.
"Do you think if I jumped from here onto that throne, I could make it?" Valerie sat cross-legged, on the top of Picasso-face. Her high heels rested on her lap.
"Please don't," I pictured concussions and compound fractures. "Jesse will have to drive us to the hospital."
"The throne," Jesse lit up, "that's where I was thinking Old Grim Bones could go." He hiked the skeleton back over his shoulder. I watched Jesse lay each of the radiuses and ulnas over the throne's arm rests.
"Hey Steve," he called, "you have the stand? What do you think about that for his scepter?"
"Whatever you want," I handed the stand to Jesse. He flipped it so that wheels stuck out in the air. He wrapped Grim Bones' right phalanges around the stand's center pole, then propped it against the front of the throne's right arm rest.
"Old Grim Bones, Prince of Darkness," Jesse said, with the satisfaction of an artist admiring his work.
"I got it," Valerie appeared behind us. "The finishing touch." She placed a crown of bent twigs on Grim Bones' head.
"Magnificent," Jesse kissed the tips of his fingers and spread them out backwards. "Truly magnificent work, Miss DiPaolo."
"Thank you," Valerie held her hands over her heart and nodded at Jesse on her left and at me on her right. "I was divinely inspired."
"Don't say that," I noticed the pentagram sculpture directly behind her. "You're going to go to hell."
Valerie giggled like the devil she was.
***
"So, what's the deal with that window sticker?" Valerie asked, unprompted, like she didn't know how to socialize. "Was that also your brother's or what?"
"Nah," Jesse smoothed his fingers along the faded Ghostbusters logo stuck on his back window. "It was in the old Buick we had. My dad stuck it in there. When the Buick broke down a few years back, I saved it from the junkyard."
That interested me. If Jesse hated his dad so much, why did he keep something that would bring back his memory every time somebody pointed it out to him? Maybe it was just that he really did love Ghostbusters, or maybe? Jesse glanced up from the back bumper of his car, against which he had been leaning. His eyes met mine. They looked briefly fragile, like green sea glass. I think I forgot to breathe there for a moment. Weak, I plopped onto Gus's hood behind me.
"Anyway," Jesse peaked at the phone in his pocket, "I got to get to work. I agreed to take the evening shift tonight at Fiesta." He gagged at Valerie. "Bad decision. Can't even look at garlic knots anymore."
He took his keys out of his pocket and held out his arms at me.
I stared blankly at him, his arms, and his delicate, steady eyes.
Valerie elbowed me in the side and whispered in my ear, "Give him a hug."
I blacked out, I think. I remember taking a step forward, and I remember lifting my arms. I also remember Valerie punching Jesse on the shoulder, and saying, "Later days, kid."
The next thing I knew, I was in Gus, following Jesse's Ford Focus down the mountainside.
"Did you see that?" Valerie asked. The excitement in her voice was audible.
I mumbled something and looked around to determine what she was referring to.
"Wake up!" Valerie slapped the dashboard in front of me. "He offered you a hug first! He totally wants to have your babies!"
"What?" I pictured Jesse, with a ballooned, pregnant belly. "That's not even possible."
"Sure it is!" Valerie cheered. "Everything's coming together nicely!"
"Val," I said.
"I've got your next feat of courage figured out," Valerie took a curve at an alarming speed. I'm not sure if it was the winding mountain road or nervous anticipation as to what she'd say next that had me queasy.
"Val, slow down," I said, and grasped onto the passenger side grab handle.
"Listen," Valerie did not slow down. "You're going to ask him to homecoming."
I upchucked my lunch out my window.
***
A/N: Thanks for reading, voting, and commenting! Next update Tuesday!