The hole in the floor was too small to expose the entire skeleton, but a human skull and shoulders stuck out from inside a roll of stiff fabric. The body had been dumped facedown, and the skull was turned sideways enough that I could see an eye socket and most of the nose hole. A hank of matted brownish hair clung to the bone. There were crusty patches of white gunk all over the cloth and the dirt around it.

The only dead person I’d seen before was my grandfather on Mom’s side. I was nine when he died, and had been allowed to decide for myself if I wanted to look in his open casket.

I did. And I remember the pretty silver and black beard hairs curling on his cheeks, each perfect and distinct, as if someone had planted them there one by one. But the hairs underneath his chin were coated with pancake makeup three shades darker than the light brown of his folded hands. That bothered me. Other than a few hurried Christmas visits and an awkward trip to Braum’s for a banana split, I hadn’t spent much time with my grandfather. Still, I knew he would have hated for people to see him painted up like that, lying on white satin in a fancy funeral home where the makeup person either didn’t know how to match a black man’s skin or didn’t care enough to try.

The skeleton bothered me even more, because someone had dumped it like garbage without even bothering to turn it faceup. That felt disrespectful. Wrong. And the longer I stared into the hole, the worse I felt. I mean, the bones down there weren’t props like the ones in crime shows; they’d been alive once—part of a living, breathing human being who’d loved and been loved back. I wasn’t grossed out or scared, and I definitely wasn’t about to pass out like some stupid girl in a Victorian novel. But I couldn’t breathe right. It felt like the full weight of everything the dead person in front of me used to be had settled on top of my chest. It was too real, too much to handle on my own. I needed help.

I needed James.

Sucking in a few lungfuls of fresh air outside helped clear my head. Squirrels chittered overhead in the big sycamore tree. Mist rose off the pool. And the whistle of a train crossing the tracks north of our neighborhood made things feel more normal.

I dropped into one of the pool chairs to start calling James. I say “start” because it was James’s first official day of vacation, too. He’d been busing tables after school at an Italian place on Cherry Street for the last year, and the manager had finally bumped him up to their waitstaff for the summer. Lunch only, but that meant he’d be able to sleep past nine and score decent tips. If I was lucky, he’d have his phone on vibrate next to the bed. Whether or not he’d actually answer it was another matter altogether.

Seven tries later, he picked up.

“Jesus, Chase,” he grumbled. “Why are you calling me?”

“Come over,” I said. “Please.”

James snuffled like he was rubbing the flat of his hand up and down over his face. “Why? And did you just say please?”

“You’ll see when you get here,” I said.

A rustle came over the speaker. James must have been using his shoulder to press the phone against his ear while he sat up.

“Rowan, tell me what’s going on so I know how bad to freak out,” he said. James never calls me by my first name.

I glanced at the back house and over to the fence separating our yard from Mr. Metzidakis’s.

“I found something. Something…”

There was no way to describe what I’d seen that wouldn’t make James think I was full of shit.

“Just something, okay? Will you come?”

“Fifteen minutes,” he said, and hung up. Which was fine and not fine all at once, because even though I knew he’d get there as fast as he could, and even though the sound of his voice only made me feel like I wasn’t alone, I kind of wished he would have stayed on the phone so I could pretend.

The thing about James is, he knows stuff about me that no one else does. It’s been that way since last December, when he came over to keep me company during Chase Oil’s annual employee Christmas party. I’d snagged a bottle of peppermint schnapps from the bartender’s supplies, and the two of us had played drunk Monopoly in the basement.

The rules were simple: Buy a railroad, take a shot. Ditto for properties. Land in jail, take two. We weren’t really drinkers, so it didn’t take long for both of us to get completely wasted. Neither one of us remembers who won.

What I do remember is waking up the next morning with a tidal wave headache and a fuzzy recollection of lying next to James on the floor, staring up at the ceiling while he told me how he’d gotten sent to the principal in seventh grade for kissing a girl on the playground. “I’ve never wanted to kiss anyone, girls or boys,” he’d said. “I just didn’t want Dad to think I was broken.”

And I remembered telling him about the birthday party I’d gone to in first grade. The one at the nicest country club in Tulsa, where all the mothers drank margaritas by the pool while we swam. I told him how beautiful Mom’s dark skin had looked against the pale pink of her bathing suit, and how ashamed I’d felt for wishing she looked just a little bit more like all the other grown-ups there.

We never talked about those confessions afterwards because we never needed to. James and I realized we were soul mates that night, and soul mates are okay with all the bad shit hidden in each other’s dark corners.

I think that’s why I called him instead of Mom or Dad that morning. To them, I was still a little girl who needed protecting. To James, I was just me.

After ten minutes, I started listening for his car. Then a siren started up in the distance and my heart jumped into my mouth. The construction guys must have called the police, I thought. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you find a dead body.

I considered running back to my room and pretending like I’d never gotten up. Even if the cops pulled my phone records, there was no way they could prove I hadn’t called James from bed.

Which was probably an overreaction. For one thing, the skeleton looked like it had been in our back house for a long, long time. Maybe since the place was built. And even though the whole setup had a distinct crime scene vibe, there was no way I could have been involved in something that happened before I even existed.

Then again, it wasn’t like there was a shortage of news stories about bad cops assuming the worst when it came to brown-skinned kids like me. So on second thought, maybe it wasn’t such an overreaction after all.

Either way, the siren was moving away. My heart settled back where it belonged. My shoulder blades pressed into the seat cushion. But my hands didn’t unclench until the noise faded completely, and the urge to run didn’t leave until Ethel had growled her way down the street out front and gone silent in our driveway.