Apparition Read Online Free PDF

the type.
    But everyone talks about the possibility anyway. In some places teenage suicide is an epidemic, they say. One of the leading causes of death among young men. Some people think that if you talk about one suicide, you’ll encourage others to follow suit. Like they do it out of boredom or something. Well, not everyone wants to live all the time. I don’t know, but I think adults don’t take wanting to be dead very seriously. Not unless it’s close to home.

    Our school had an assembly on Monday. They brought in a counsellor to talk to us about the dangers of keeping emotional problems bottled up inside until you crack under the pressure and think death is your only escape. She talked for an hour about all the horrible things that can make us want to end our lives. An hour of her and I felt like
I
was going to crack. She encouraged us to open up and talk to a responsible adult about our painful little secrets, like sexual abuse, bullying, domestic violence, drug problems or drinking, and homosexuality.
    Sure. Look what happened to me when I told Joyce about seeing Mom’s ghost. It only freaked her out.
    The counsellor got really pumped talking about kids who commit suicide because they’re afraid of being gay. After that, there were rumours that Matthew was gay and was afraid to tell his strict, religious parents. I had a pretty strong hunch that wasn’t true, but I kept it to myself. The rumour lasted only a couple of days. Then there was a shift, and kids started wondering if he’d just gone psycho. Maybe he was hearing voices. Maybe he thought the Devil had told him to kill himself. Explains the pitchfork, for sure. But the Matthew I knew didn’t kill himself.
    A week or so after the assembly, I woke up from a bad night’s sleep and decided to visit the town cemetery. It just seemed like something I should do again. It’d been a while.
    I walked over after school, to the south end of town, at the top of the hill. There are about a dozen steps up from the sidewalk to the wrought-iron entrance gate. You can see the Sound from the highest point. You can almost see Georgian Bay. It’s a beautiful place, really. I could never figure out why the movies make cemeteries look scary. They’ve always felt sad and beautiful to me. Cemeteries are just there so the people who’ve been left behind have a nice place to hang out.

    The first thing I did was find my mother’s grave. It looked fine, but I should have brought flowers. She loved flowers. Sometimes I think it was her flower garden that kept her alive for so long after they told her the cancer was terminal. Even when she was too sick to do anything else, she’d sit on a lawn chair in the back garden, wrapped up in a blanket. Every once in a while, she would get to her feet and shuffle over to the flower bed and pull out a weed that had caught her eye. As if flowers alone could make life worth living. It must piss her off, how we’ve let the garden go.
    There were only two gravesites where the soil looked freshly turned, and one of them had MATTHEW JAMES SORENSON carved into the headstone. There were lots of flowers. Some were already dark and wilted, but some were fresh and colourful. Looking at the darker soil in front of the gravestone, I tried to imagine the casket six feet under me. Then I tried to imagine something inside the casket. I couldn’t, so I gave up and took a wander around, heading for an older section of the cemetery where the stones looked much more weather-worn, mossy and even cracked. They’re my favourites.
    I walked slowly through the rows, reading names and dates. The oldest gravestones were from the late 1800S . Most of the people buried there died in their sixties or seventies, but there were also a number of babies and small children. I looked for teenagers among the stones but I only found one girl. She died in 1932 , at sixteen, same age as me. There was a separate area for local soldiers at the other end of the cemetery, and