My first short: Grave of the Girl

As promised, here is my first short for you all to critique. Looking forward to it. This is just the very beginning, but I wanted to get something up to keep this moving. It's titled "Grave of the Girl", and here it is for your reading pleasure:

Grave of the Girl

Rachel didn't want to be there. In fact, she wanted to be at home watching MTV and eating some of her mom's rice crispy treats that had been made fresh that morning. But, Rachel knew that coming might impress Josh, and at the fragile age of 16, impressing Josh was number one on her list of priorities. It was cold out, and she hated the cold. The ground was wet from the fresh rain that afternoon, and while it provided a sense of calm, it added to the somber tone of the place and made it that much more unbearable. She noticed that on this night, the glow of the moon seemed particularly bright, maybe because it was a full moon, but even so it seemed to shine more than normal. The air was stiff and while everyone else was laughing and having fun, Rachel just wanted to get somewhere inside with a heater. But she endured. Every so often he would speak to her, and this was more than enough to make it worthwhile. Somewhere, in the back of her mind she knew this wasn't her thing but she kept telling herself, "shut up, you'll be fine".

She first heard about it on Friday afternoon, right after that douche bag Mr.Everding's physics class. She always wanted to ask why he had one lazy eye, but "when is the appropriate time to bring that up in class? or even outside of class?" she would often tell herself. As the bell rang and she was on her normal 5 minute jaunt to her locker and then on to AP history, she felt something grab her shoulder from behind. "RACHEL!" screamed Barb, with a look on her face that was a mix of extreme excitment and a retarded child learning to eat by themselves for the first time. "We are IN! They said we can come, I told them we are there for sure because I know you know who I know is going to be there!". The "who" Barb was referring to was none other than Josh Hackerson, the typical "I'm an indie kid with problems" at any given high school in America, and also the object of Rachels current desires. Barb didn't have to use his name, for they more or less talked about either Josh or Craig 90% of their conversations together. Without even knowing what or where they were "in" for, Rachel was already elated. She had kept an ongoing list in her notebook of the last 7 times she had been lucky enough to spend time outside of school with Josh and was always excited to make an update. "Sweet" said Rachel, trying to contain her enthusiasm and seem more relaxed than she felt inside. "When, where, and how much?" Barb looked at her watch, "Fuck! I'm going to miss chemistry. Saturday night, Hampton Cemetery. They go up there an play tag or something - sounds kind of stupid, but screw it, might be fun". And with that, Barb was off and Rachel was left to think about her new weekend plans.

Hampton Cemetery was probably the biggest near Rachels suburb. It wasn't particularly scary and surprisingly didn't have any urban legends associated with it. What it did have was that undeniable draw for the local teens, they couldn't leave it alone. Even with all the measures the owners had taken for security (and there were many), it was just to irresistible for the kids to leave it alone. They would go there for parties, they would go there to scare each other, whatever it was, you could generally plan on finding a group of kids there on any given weekend.

The group of kids on this cold Saturday night just happened to be the group that Rachel and Barb were invited to tag along with. Officer Chris Brown knew all to well that he'd find some kids up there, and at this point in his career, he wasn't even sure if he cared enough anymore to ask them to leave. Tonight, he decided to park his car in the darkness and just watch them for awhile. To remember what it was like when he used to break into the cemetary gorunds with his friends, before meeting his future wife, before having 3 children, and before talking about this goddamn divorce anymore. "God she is such a bitch!" officer Brown thought to himself, "Why does everything have to be a soap opera".