Looking at the tiny box sitting in his lap, Noah felt numb.
It shouldn't have happened. That was what everyone kept saying. They said it at the hospital, they said it at the funeral, and they said it at the school assembly where the principal droned on for an hour and a half about how young he was, how he'd been taken from them in his prime.
Noah had cried in the hospital and at the funeral. By the time the assembly came around, he didn't have any tears left. He just felt hollowed out, everything around him fading into indistinct white noise.
Grayson was gone.
It didn't seem real. It hadn't seemed real even as he wept, like a child, loud and inconsolable at the funeral home. He knew on some level that this was just grief, and sooner or later he'd feel different, but it just felt like Grayson would come around any minute now, smiling and asking Noah what he was doing out in the rain by himself. It felt like that. Maybe if he prayed hard enough...
No. He wasn't coming back. Noah had been there when he'd flat-lined, and his mother had picked up the cremation costs out of pity, though she'd muttered about the trouble when she thought Noah wasn't listening. He'd watched Grayson's father pick up the urn.
Grayson was gone.
Everything Noah had left of him was in this box. A lock of hair from the last time he'd dyed it; his favorite guitar pick; the stupid friendship bracelet Noah had made him when they were twelve. Eight years of company.
It felt so light in his hands, but they trembled as they lifted it anyway. He set it down in the hole that he'd dug with his fingers. He'd forgotten to bring a shovel, the way he'd forgotten a lot of things lately. The ground was hard with cold, full of pebbles, and he was bleeding under his nails, but it didn't really matter. He didn't feel it.
In all honesty, this was probably a waste of time. It was just an old superstition, one that Noah had never believed in anyway. If there were gods, they weren't listening. There was no way they would have let someone like Grayson die the way he did. But Noah could remember him talking about how his idols would pray to some occult pagan figure to bless the soul of their music, how the gods of old could be summoned if you buried a lock of hair at a crossroads. His eyes had been bright with enthusiasm then. Noah remembered thinking he could have watched Grayson like that forever.
The ritual was Grayson's. He'd meant to do it before his next gig at some seedy bar downtown. Said this was it, this was going to be the one.
Slowly, Noah scooped the dirt back over the box until it was covered, and stared at it dumbly. It was a dirt mound, buried beneath the sign at an intersection between an old railroad and a tiny backroad that had fallen into disrepair. The gods loved old places, Grayson had said. It reminded them of the golden days.
He stared at it, and tried to feel something--- that he was moving on, maybe, or that he had done the right thing. But no matter how he looked at it, it was just a box of scraps, buried in the dirt. Just like how Grayson was just dust in an urn now, sitting on the mantle of his dad's run-down apartment.
He curled up, hugging his knees to his chest, mindless of the way the rain soaked into his clothes.
Grayson was gone.