Finally the casket comes into view. A deep rose color with gold rails. A blown-up picture of Alissa sits atop the closed lid. From cross-country practice this past fall. They had to keep the casket closed because she no longer looked like that, not after she was floating in the river for a couple days.
We must pretend she is still as she was in that picture. Beautiful, flying on strong legs, face flush with color, her dark hair streaming behind her against the autumn foliage. She had spotted the camera in the moment the picture was taken, and she smiles a bit, because she knows her team is winning this race. She knows the people behind the camera, her parents, are proud of her.
We must pretend she is not bloated and blue and silent. We must pretend there are not fish in the river that would eat a corpse. My imagination has always been good.
A woman steps into my line of sight, blocking my view of the casket. Alissa’s mom. We’re at the front of the line now.Mr. Whitaker looks downright put together compared to his wife. Mrs. Whitaker is red eyed and weepy.
“Weepy” is probably an insensitive word to use.
She’s standing upright and talking, but it seems like some invisible force is holding her on her feet, like puppet strings. She hugs one of Alissa’s cousins, her arms shaking, and dabs at her nose with a tissue. Mr. Whitaker joins her. I stand alone, until the cousin moves up to the casket. Mr. Whitaker whispers to his wife, and Mrs. Whitaker turns to me, her eyes huge and glassy.
“Evie!” There’s no hesitation this time: Mrs. Whitaker pulls me into a tight, long hug. It’s nice not to have to think too hard about it, but I don’t want to be touched. Her fingertips dig into my spine. “I’m so glad you’re here. She would be too.”
Again, I want to laugh, partly because they’ve both said it now and partly because it is no less ridiculous than before.
Alissa wouldn’t be glad of anything. She’s dead.
Mrs. Whitaker holds me at arm’s length. She’s a tall woman, her chestnut hair held away from her face with clips. Her waterproof makeup is still holding. “It’s so good to see you, Evie. Alissa loved you. She really did.”
“Oh,” I say, because I can’t say what I’m actually thinking.If she loved me, she wouldn’t have done this. She would have said something to me.
Mrs. Whitaker turns to the tall boy standing behind her. I was so focused on the casket and the line of mourners that I didn’t notice him there, but of course he is. It’s Ash, Alissa’sbrother. His dark hair and dark clothes blend into the shadows. He retrieves a package from a chair set against the wall. The package is a cube the size of a toaster, wrapped in the comics section of the newspaper. Ash hands it to his mom with a quick glance at me.
We’ve never talked much, me and Ash. He is—was—ten months older than Alissa, and mostly kept to his room when I came over. He’s got a scar running through his top lip from an accident a few months ago, and it gives him a perpetual snarl. A lot of people at school think it makes him look hot. I think it makes him harder to read.
I can’t tell if he’s judging me for my lack of emotion, or if he just doesn’t care. That would be refreshing.
He retreats to the shadows when his task is done.
Mrs. Whitaker passes the package to me. There’s a folded note taped to it. EVIE is printed in the exact middle of the note.
“This was on Alissa’s desk,” Mrs. Whitaker says. “I think she was going to give it to you for your birthday.”
My birthday is next week. Now I get to celebrate each year by remembering my dead best friend. Happy birthday to me.
Mrs. Whitaker goes on. “I wanted to get it to you as soon as possible in case the note was... something important.”
The note is written on college-ruled paper, because Alissa liked having the guiding lines and she thought wide ruled was wasteful. It’s folded into a dense square. The scrawl of ink isvisible through the folds, but I can’t make out the words. I take it off the top. It burns my fingers.
We used to pass notes in school all the time. Stupid stuff like “Mrs. Grady’s hair looks like a skunk” or “The boys’ bathroom smells like a garbage dump.” Silly things to make each other laugh. Sometimes we made plans for after school, or asked pressing questions that couldn’t wait until class was over. I once had to ask via note if Alissa had a crush on Ben Foley, because she clearly did but I needed her to confirm, and she refused to answer.
What could this note say that would matter? That Alissa wanted to stop for smoothies after school on my birthday? That she still had a crush on Ben Foley, and hoped he’d ask her to prom? Happy birthday, Evie, I’m going to kill myself?
I shove the note into the pocket of my too-tight pants, suddenly breathing hard.
“Thank you,” I say.
Mrs. Whitaker’s face falls. There was hope there, for a moment, and I snuffed it out before I even noticed it. She wanted me to open the note in front of her. Maybe let her read it. Give her some final words from her daughter.
I can’t. There are too many people watching. If I read that note now and it says something I should have read days ago, before this happened—
“I’m so sorry,” I blurt out, and move past Mrs. Whitaker, toward the casket.
Alissa smiles at me. It was a home meet. She was running the path through the woods behind our high school, a route both of us had beat many times before. She has a round face, bright brown eyes, raven hair like her brother’s, French braids down either side of her head. I did those braids for her that day, and she did mine. Her front teeth tilt slightly toward one another, a feature she always hated about herself, and the reason she never liked her yearbook pictures, though she loved the yearbook. I don’t think there was any picture of herself she liked.
It doesn’t seem like she’s really in this casket. She’s somewhere behind me, about to tap me on the shoulder and joke about why I look so uncomfortable. She was better at social stuff than I am. She was my shield in situations like this. Her picture laughs at me. At my discomfort, my confusion, my swirling thoughts. Laughing even though she was never one to pull a prank, because she thought they were mean.
Liar,I think.You made me think everything was okay. You smiled in this picture like everything was fine. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar.
