The Creeping by Alexandra Sirowy

Jeanie? See? Look what you were spared. Those girls can’t hurt you.’ ”
    I lock my sagging knees and resist the urge to cover my face. As we fled the cove, Daniel was whispering to his dead sister. I know that he doesn’t really mean that Jeanie’s better off dead; this is the endless grief talking, the sorrow that inspires conversations with ghosts.
    â€œDaniel, why would you come home today ?” I already know the answer. My eyes dart upward. We’re unwittingly standing under a dummy corpse. Its clothes are saturated with rain, and rivulets run from its boots. Staring at it, tears well in my eyes. I doubt he notices because my face is already slick with water. “You’re here for this.” I motion with my free hand. Vaguely, I register screaming coming from behind us. Not the celebratory yips about the storm or the manic laughing of the drunk dancers, but something shrill and full of alarm.
    The fine lines on his lips stretch and vanish as he opens his mouth to speak. Of course he’s here to see how his sister is being remembered or forgotten, how I turned out, how his parents are doing across town. He’s here today for the same reason I had trouble sleeping last night; for the same reason I asked Shane for the case file. Who knows? Maybe Daniel has come back every anniversary with no one other than his parents the wiser. Before he can rumble all this at me, a sharp cry like a siren carried on the wind reaches us: “There’s a body! A body!”

Chapter Four
    I don’t know how we go from the charged moment where I’m afraid of Daniel, to tearing through the mud and spitting rain toward the screams. One second he’s clutching my arm to keep me from running, a captive to his sadness, and the next he’s holding me up as I slip and slide over the eroding sludge the ground has become. We turn in unison, both of us instantly filled with dread that a body might mean something intimate to us. It could be decomposed Jeanie. It could be grown and killed Jeanie. It doesn’t matter which; all that matters is that we are both running because of Jeanie.
    Daniel’s fingers lace tightly with mine, but it doesn’t feel like holding hands. It’s more like being handcuffed to him. A confusion of colors and shapes spirals around us as a dizzying crowd surges toward the cries for help. Water splashes from the ground and the sky as though we’re underwater, and I wonder for a second if we should be swimming rather than running. We’re in slow motion, wading through the mud to reach the cemetery. Allthe while the screams find us on the current of the wind.
    As I reach to tap the heart on the iron gate, my tennis shoe snags the uneven rocks lining the path. I stumble forward, my hand missing the heart. Daniel’s arm wraps around my waist, his left hand clings to my right, and he hoists me to my feet.
    My stomach churns as we draw closer, the girl’s cries getting louder as we move toward the edge of the cemetery nearest to the lake. The candles are still lit, powered by batteries like the lanterns. Their wash of light makes it possible to see Tara Boden, a sophomore who shouldn’t even be here, hunched over an uprooted gravestone. Her voice is worn and ragged now, barely more than a hoarse whimper. Her shirt is unbuttoned, revealing her yellow lace bra. A junior boy is shirtless and rubbing a wide circle with his palm on her back.
    Only a handful of my classmates have reached the site, teetering unsteadily on the disrupted soil. All hang back and gawk at where Tara’s quivering hand points. The pelting rain washed away a ten-or fifteen-foot segment of the wrough-iron fence that separates the cemetery from the shore. Where there used to be a gradual slope down to the pebbled bank, it looks as though a giant monster took a bite.
    All the things that should stay hidden at cemeteries are unearthed by the mudslide. Coffins exposed,