“Just a little burn,” he said as he tugged down his sleeve. “You might want to disengage from that thing before we go inside,” he added, glancing at her phone as they pulled into the church parking lot. She rolled her eyes, but placed her cell on the seat between them.
The lot was, surprisingly, full of cars. JD felt a flicker of anger. Hardly anyone had been nice to Drea when she was alive. She was a weirdo, at least by typical high school standards. Did Ascensionites think they’d get extra credit if they showed up for the memorial service? He hated how people only cared after the fact. It was like that after Sasha Bowlder committed suicide, too.
Or maybe it was the guilt. The kids in his school had laughed at Drea and Sasha when they were alive. They’d accused them of being witches and performing midnight rites in the Haunted Woods; they’d whispered about them getting naked and painting themselves with blood. Maybe all the recent shock was forcing his classmates to get their heads out of their own asses.
“There’s that girl who had that terrible accident a few weeks ago,” his mom whispered to his dad, who nodded with solemn recognition. It was Skylar McVoy, who was limping into the building—wearing an oversize black dress that made her look tiny and frail. She was on the arm of an older woman. JD shuddered. He’d barely known Skylar before the Gazebo’s glass ceiling had collapsed on her; now that section of the cafeteria had been cordoned off and she was a minor celebrity, having escaped with horrible, but not life-threatening, injuries.
His family filed into the church and sat in a pew toward the back, with JD scooting the farthest into the row and Mel immediately following. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, trying desperately not to stare at the open casket at the front of the room. Melissa nudged him with her elbow and cocked her head, giving him a look that asked without actually asking: Are you okay? He gave her a thumbs-up and did his best to approximate a smile.
But he was definitely not okay.
Dust motes revolved lazily in the light streaming through the stained-glass windows. It was warm in the church, too bright. The smell of musky incense mixed with sympathy bouquets was unfamiliar—his family never went to church. He couldn’t get comfortable; the bench was too hard and he felt like he was overheating. In the process of wrestling off his coat, he nearly elbowed the girl on the other side of him in the face. “Sorry,” he whispered.
She was small, with wavy, honey-blond hair and an elfin face. She was wearing all black, except for a bright red ribbon tied tightly around her neck. He’d never seen her before—maybe she was part of Drea’s “non-Ascension” crowd. Drea had hung around at punk clubs and attended dub-step shows religiously—she’d made friends from all over.
“That’s okay,” she said. She didn’t look like one of Drea’s music friends, though. She looked like a plastic model of a person, almost too perfect. Her face seemed oddly frozen into an expression of neutrality, like one of the dolls Mel used to play with. “I’m Meg.”
“JD,” JD muttered absently. He wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. Wrong place, wrong time. He scanned the room, looking for Em. His heart skipped. There. Em and her parents were sitting close to the front with Gabby and the Doves. Her head was down and he could see her shoulders moving ever so slightly. She looked broken. Beautiful, but broken.
Everything is changing, JD thought again. Life was short and he couldn’t waste any more time. He had to forgive Em, and then tell her how he felt: that he loved her. He had realized he loved her years ago, and remembered the moment exactly.
They’d been on the couch in his den, watching a documentary about the death penalty for their freshman year civics class. It was just some boring assignment; he was getting ready to turn the movie off and pop in another movie so he could hear her laugh. But when he turned to Em, he saw tears streaming down her face.
And his first, overwhelming instinct was to reach over and comfort her somehow—but he realized he, too, needed her comfort. He wanted to smell her hair, to scoop her up, kiss her, and tell her it would all be okay. Instead, he’d shoved a box of tissues at her and turned back to the movie, heart pounding, earth-shattered.
That was the day JD admitted to himself that he was in love with his best friend.