Mojo

CHAPTER 4

The next morning there wasn’t much in the news about Hector, just the basics about where he went to school and who his family was. Body in the Dumpster. Cause of death: suspected drug overdose. Discovered by two teenagers. Names not released because of their ages.

Really? It was okay to tell Hector’s name but not Randy’s and mine? No wonder the local news wasn’t barraging us with phone calls.

My parents offered to let me stay home, like finding a dead body was some kind of stomach bug. I passed. No, I had to go somewhere. If the newspapers weren’t going to call, I could hang with Audrey and rehash the ordeal with Randy. Funny thing, though. As I walked down the hall to first hour, kids started calling to me.

“Hey, dude! Way to go!”

“Dylan! That is, like, so surreal, man!”

“Hey, Dylan, what was it like?”

Some of these people I didn’t even think knew my name. Obviously, the story had blazed its way across the text-message universe like a renegade asteroid. Nothing so perfect to prick up the curiosity of the high school populace like the death of a classmate.

So there I was, surrounded by eager faces, some of them even belonging to some pretty decent-looking girls. They all wanted to know what it was like, sitting in a Dumpster with a dead body. Hector and I were suddenly famous. Too bad Hector wasn’t there to enjoy it.

I don’t know how many times I told the story that day. First in one hall, then another. At the beginning of class, at the end of class. In the cafeteria, the library, the parking lot. Everybody wanted to hear it. This one guy, the baggy-black-clothes-and-silver-chain-wearing Corman Rogers, kept coming back for more. I’m like, “Dude, morbid much?”

I got better with each telling. By lunch, it started to seem more like a movie I’d seen than something real that’d happened to me. And Hector, I guess, became more like a movie character than a kid who had walked those same high school halls. Maybe that was what I needed him to be at the time.

After lunch, my teacher sent me to the front office to have a talk with this special grief counselor they called in to deal with the student population’s feelings about the death. There wasn’t exactly a line waiting to get in. Apparently, Principal Chrome Dome, or whoever, thought if anyone needed to talk about it, Randy and I were it. But I didn’t have much to say. Nobody likes having someone they don’t know picking at their brain.

I was okay, I told the counselor lady, but she insisted I had some feelings I needed to sort through. Maybe she was right. Later, at night, when I was in bed in the dark, Hector’s face came back again, and the detectives came back, and it wasn’t like a movie. It was like doom itself had infiltrated my brain.

CHAPTER 5

A couple days later, Hector’s family threw him a funeral. I thought it would be weird to go—maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of the condition I’d found him in—but Audrey was like, “No, you have to go. We’ll both go. It’d just be too sad for his family if, like, nobody from school shows up. Besides, don’t you want to remember him at peace instead of how you found him?”

So there we were on Thursday afternoon at St. Andrew Avellino, and what do you know—the place was actually pretty full. Sure, there were only a couple of kids from school—that’s all the friends Hector had—but apparently he had a pretty big extended family. By far most of the people there looked Hispanic to some degree. Audrey and I had to grab a seat in back, which was fine. I didn’t want to stick out as the guy who only spent time with Hector in the Dumpster after he was already dead.

I’d never been to a Catholic funeral before. My parents aren’t exactly into organized religion. On Facebook, under Religion, they entered spiritual. But I have to say this for the Catholics—they really know how to put on a show. And I don’t mean that in any kind of disrespectful way. I don’t usually call clothes garments, but the priest running the program had some mega-cool garments going on. The hat alone made you feel like, This is going to be serious.

And then there was the light filtering through the stained-glass saints, and the praying, and the Latin, and the rituals. Even some Mexican songs. And on top of that, this huge crucifix staring down at you from the front of the sanctuary, all kind of sad and beat and worn out with humanity but forgiving you anyway. I’m telling you—as the thing wound down, I couldn’t help but feel Hector’s ghost or spirit or whatever was a long way from the high school trash bin.

It made me wonder what my funeral might be like. I’d probably have about the same number of friends from school show up but a whole lot less family, since I was an only child and our nearest relatives lived in Dallas. No fancy garments or elaborate rituals either. No big accomplishments to reel off in the eulogy. After all, my most noteworthy act so far was finding Hector. That wasn’t exactly eulogy material.

I’d be lucky to get a half-dozen flowers around my casket. The school probably wouldn’t even hire a special grief counselor to come in. Outside of Audrey and Randy, my other so-called friends would probably forget me in a week. I felt like Scrooge from A Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed him his own gravestone. The good thing was Scrooge had a second chance to do something, so maybe I did too.

After the service, we hung around so Audrey could snap some photos of the church and the crowd coming out for the school paper. I should mention that I submitted a story about Hector in the Dumpster to the paper, but Ms. Jansen, my journalism teacher, wouldn’t accept it. She said my writing style was too informal and the Dumpster stuff was too undignified. She thought a simple obituary would do.