Page 45 of The Wrong Quarterback

Jace froze and stared at us in horror. “This was not part of the job description!” he snapped, beginning to freak out. He dropped his shovel on the ground. “I signed up for skeletons, notNight of The Living Deadcorpses! I want a refund!”

I rolled my eyes and jabbed my shovel deeper into the ground, the sound of metal scraping against the dirt grounding me. “Suck it up, Thatcher. You’ll be fine. Just think of it as a really screwed-up scavenger hunt.”

“Yeah, a scavenger hunt with dead bodies,” Jace muttered, but he resumed digging beside me, his face scrunched up in disgust like he was already touching the corpse.

I didn’t blame him for being freaked out. If I could pick what would be the worst initiation task, this would have been top of the list—if my brain was even nefarious enough to think about something like this to begin with.

The graveyard was too quiet, the air too still, like it was waiting for something. The moon hung low in the sky, casting long shadows across the tombstones, turning them into twisted, crooked figures in the darkness. I tried not to think about how many bodies were buried beneath our feet or how disrespectful this felt. Luckily, we weren’t here to make friends with the dead—a good thing as long as Matty’s theories on ghosts weren’t real.

“You know,” Jace commented, breaking the tense silence, “I bet the old lady in this grave was a total badass when she was alive. I mean, she had to have been to keep the ring until she died. She’s probably just waiting for some idiots like us to disturb her eternal slumber, and then she’ll take her revenge.”

Matty groaned, throwing a handful of dirt at Jace. “Would you shut up? Can you not make this worse?”

Jace just grinned. “Whoops.”

We kept digging, the dirt slowly giving way beneath our shovels, revealing the metal casket below. The sound of the metal hitting metal sent a shiver down my spine, but I ignored it, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

“Alright, almost done, boys,” I said, tossing my shovel aside and crouching down near the casket. My pulse quickened as I stared at the dark top, realizing this was it. We were about to pop open a casket and steal a ring off a dead woman’s finger. If that didn’t scream “secret society,” I didn’t know what did.

For a second, Casey’s face popped into my head. I wondered what she would think about this particular situation. I quickly pushed her out of my head. If I thought it was disrespectful to steal from a corpse, it was even worse to do it with an erection.

“You’re actually going to open that?” Matty asked, his voice higher than usual as he stepped back, his shovel still in hand like he was ready to run if he saw one finger of hers move.

I glanced up at him. “You want to leave now?”

Jace leaned against his own shovel. “This is your induction thingy. Please proceed with touching the dead body. That falls outside of our job descriptions.”

“Of course, it does,” I muttered, taking a deep breath as I wedged the tip of the shovel under the edge of the casket’s lid. I’d googled how to unseal the rubber gasket they used to seal these things nowadays…but actually doing it was a whole other matter.

A few more hits with my shovel, and I heard a pop as the seal broke and the air inside of the casket rushed out.

Along with a terrible smell.

“Help. I’m dying,” Jace groaned, staggering back.

I leaned away, bile rising in my throat. The smell of decomposing bodies was way worse than the frogs I’d dissected in seventh grade.

I was going to puke.

I pulled my shirt up over my face, taking deep breaths. Matty and Jace were now several feet away, staring at me in horror.

How helpful. I really wished this was a one-hand kind of job. The smell might end me.

Taking one more covered breath, I dropped my shirt and held out my hand, my nose wrinkled in disgust from the odor assaulting my nostrils.

“Hand me my flashlight,” I asked, catching it when Jace threw it over.

Heart pounding, I lifted the lid and shined my light, revealing the body inside. There she was, lying peacefully in her eternal sleep, her face pale and sunken, her hands folded over her chest. And smelly. So very smelly.

“Oh, she doesn’t look that bad,” Jace commented, cocking his head and covering his nose as he stared down at her over my shoulder. Matty’s eyes were firmly trained at the sky.

“This is definitely how you get ghosts,” he said roughly.

I kind of agreed with him. This was…creepy.

Shining the light over her hands I breathed a sigh of relief. There it was. The ring.

It glinted in the pale light, the large ruby catching the beam. Etched into the stone was the unmistakable symbol of the Sphinx, intricate lines carved with precision.

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