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| Your Name Here by Teece Aronin. Available at RedBubble.com/people/phylliswalter. |
This to me from my college gal-pal, Margie. I was barely out of my teens and Laurie was a few years older.
"Are you kidding? Yes!"
"This'll be fun! I'll knock on your door at 11:30."
I thought about the upcoming adventure all afternoon. Would I be scared? No way. Margie was such a sweet girl; kind, funny, smart and reliable. If she said tonight would be fun, then tonight would be fun.
But by that evening I was getting nervous and at 11:30 when Margie knocked, I jumped out of my skin. I opened the door and there she stood: five feet tall, glasses, a brunette with a pageboy haircut. She held a flashlight that was as big as she and she'd nearly buried herself in a black wool coat. It was October and nippy so I slipped my coat on, too. We arrived at the cemetery at 11:55 and waited until midnight to walk in.
The darkness was near total. Branches trimmed out in decaying leaves were faintly silhouetted against the sky. Margie was in front of me fumbling with that steel pillar she called a flashlight and I was praying for her batteries to have more life than what was buried in the cemetery. And I was frustrated because I couldn't see her.
"Did you have to wear black?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Hang on - I'm trying to switch on this flashlight."
Blessedly it finally lit and we walked farther in.
"Margie?" I asked. "Are you scared?"
"No! This is fun!" she bubbled, making me want to forget her adorable pluck and just knock her right down. "You?" she asked.
"Oh, you have no idea," I whined. I grabbed the back of her coat, the toes of my shoes just inches from the heels of her boots.
Margie shined the flashlight in my face to read my expression, unintentionally blinding me. "You poor thing, You're fine. Really you are. But you want to know the real reason I wanted to do this?"
This was the part of the horror movie where the heroine finds out that the best friend is a homicidal maniac. In the morning, some grieving widow bearing flowers would stumble upon a corpse with a flashlight-shaped indentation in her scalp.
"No - I mean yes - I mean I guess," I answered, looking at her in a whole new horrifying light.
"Because someone told me they saw a gravestone in here with my name on it. I thought it would be fun to come find it."
"You mean there's a gravestone in this cemetery that says IDIOT?"
"No, my last name," she said.
That was when Margie turned around, took one step and tripped. She fell forward and it didn't occur to me to let go of her coat, so I went with her. The momentum of the fall caused her arm to fling up - the arm that was attached to the hand that held the flashlight. The light swung up and flashed full onto a granite monument. The name engraved there: BYRNES. Margie's last name: Byrnes.
We screamed, but Margie was the one who named names, mentioning a few you've seen in the bible. Then we scrambled to our feet and ran faster than two chunky little girls ever dreamed possible. We didn't stop until we skidded to a halt at the steps of Saint Gabriel Hall.
"Wanna do that again tomorrow?" I gasped.
"#%!@ you!" she cursed - just not as sweetly as usual.
