Dig
The coolest thing that Mark ever found on a body was a brooch. It was gold and horse-shaped, and different gems made up all the parts of the horse: pearl stockings on its legs, an opal eyeball, the tail a little swish of rubies. On a living person it would have been tacky. On the dead, though, it was strangely appealing. Optimistic, even.
He put it in a drawer when he got home that evening, beneath his Desert Storm collectibles.
Mark never considered himself a graverobber. He was just a jewelry dealer whose suppliers happened to be the deceased. It wasn't really a big deal. Sending all of those valuables six feet under was essentially the same thing as dumping them in the trash, so why not rescue them and, if possible, capitalize? They would do the living a lot more good than the dead. Organ donation was based on the same exact principle.
He had felt guilty, though, when he realized that he'd taken something from Large's mom. He'd tried very hard to empathize - to imagine how he would feel if his mother's jewelry had been pulled from her cold neck and wrists and fingers. It didn't really work, though, because no one would steal his mom's cheap jewelry in the first place. It was all fake gold and fake pearls...worthless. The most expensive thing she owned was probably their stove, or something. She couldn't be bured with that even if she wanted to.
Fortunately Large seemed to get over it pretty quick, and he'd gotten the necklace back anyway - so it was all good.
At first Mark was kind of pissed when Large was always hanging around with Sam - after all, who was the one who'd known him since he was five? - but Sam was a cool enough chick, and it didn't bother him too much overall.
Sam was exactly the type of girl that Mark would never have. She was too good for him. And he didn't mean that in a "too good for me" sort of way; she was just too good. She'd probably never touched a bong in her entire life. She might like his guitar, or even his Desert Storm cards, but they weren't enough to make up for the fact that his spending money tended to come from hardware returns that he'd never owned in the first place.
She was pretty happy, though. Maybe some of her happy would spread to Large, and by association, to Mark. There was something to be said for being happy, Mark thought, though he didn't know exactly what was said about it.
So Mark gave Large the necklace and went inside; he strode up to his room and opened his drawer and looked at the gaudy horse pin he'd placed there three and a half months ago. He decided that ten, fifteen years ahead, when he'd sold his trading cards and his mom was a huge real estate mogul, he would leave the pin here. In his drawer, and when everything else was gone, there would still be the pin.
And later he decided that maybe that was why the horse had been so carefully pinned to its owner in the first place.