When people die, they become angel caricatures of themselves. Lucinda practically failed out of English class last year—now she’s a star student, role model to all her peers. I can’t even muster a hesitant sadness. Only a misplaced jealousy. The fact is: Everyone dies. Good people die and bad people die, some earlier than others.
Everyone writes about Lucinda in metallic marker on hefty slabs of poster board. Long, rambling epitaphs from everyone at school, signed next to lopsided hearts.
We had the pleasure of getting to know you over the past two years as you babysat our little Ollie. We will be sure to tell our daughter, as she grows older, the impact you had on her early years. Lucinda, it is our belief that your light and beauty will shine in our little girl forever.
—Chris, Eve, Ollie, and Puddles Thornton
I LOVE YOU LUC! I’m going to miss you so much. You’re in a better place now, sweet angel.
—Ana Sanchez
Lucinda, you have been my best friend since the fourth grade. Really, my best friend. When I moved from California, you were so nice to me, even when I was the new kid and I had, like, really weird teeth. And when I broke my toe on the bottom of the swimming pool on vacation and you ran into the hotel and you couldn’t find my mom, you made the hotel concierge carry me out of the pool, remember? I’m going to miss our sleepovers and our pillow fights. I still have that blue shirt of yours, the one you let me borrow for the dance, and I’m never going to wear it because it still smells like you. I love you. Okay. I have to go now.
—Beth DeCasio
Dear Lucinda—it was such a pleasure to have you in class this year. I know chemistry was never your strong suit, but you worked hard and you excelled. It breaks my heart to think of all the potential the world lost this week. I speak on behalf of the entire faculty at Jefferson High School when I say you were an incredible contribution to our student body and you will be terribly missed.
—Mrs. Hawthorne
I wonder what they’ll do with the poster boards once all this is over. I doubt Lucinda’s family will want them. I wonder if the man who takes out the garbage will look at these scribbled notes and think what a great girl Lucinda Hayes must have been. How humble. How beautiful. How smart. How kind.
No one remembers her how I do.
The annual neighborhood barbecue, the summer before sophomore year. It was a few weeks after everything went to shit with Zap, just before the ritual. I’d started showering in a baggy T-shirt so I didn’t have to look at myself. I didn’t blame Lucinda—not at first, anyway.
Ma told me to wear a swimsuit to the barbecue, but I refused to stoop to such frivolity. The girls on my block used the sprinklers as an excuse to get naked while the creepy dads watched. It worked. Kids ran around with sticky Popsicle mouths, but everyone watched Beth and Lucinda. Flat, tan stomachs dripping sprinkler water. Lucinda’s hair was brown at the ends, stuck in messy clumps to her bare shoulders. They seemed proud of their firm, bony bodies, bald under the gaze of the sun.
Amy ran around in a bright-pink one-piece with Lex. Lex looked so young that day, two purple barrettes pulling her hair from her face like a drawn curtain. Lex has never been as pretty as Lucinda. Her hair is cut to her chin. Where Lucinda has the right amount of freckles, Lex has too many. Her nose is bigger, beakier, and her stomach tubs out like a baby’s.
I stayed in my room until Ma made me come down. She had done her hair up big and was sipping a Jack and Coke on the driveway, even though it was barely noon. I sat on the porch with a warm Sprite and observed as Lucinda and Beth pushed their tiny tits together in front of the Hansens’ beverage table. Mr. Hansen stared down at their bikini tops. He heaved a jug of vodka from the cooler by his feet, and sloshed it into plastic cups. They giggled. Pressed their faces close together. I wanted to tell them to put their bodies away—that nobody cared to see them naked—but this was clearly not the case.
They wobbled away from the table, sipping and scrunching their noses at the bitter alcohol, until Beth spotted me. Pointed.
“Look who it is,” Beth said. She tottered halfway up the driveway. “I forgot. You’re completely above all this. You’re not even wearing a swimsuit.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
“Do you even own a swimsuit?” Beth said.
Beth didn’t bother me. I’d taken much worse from her (fake love letters addressed to me, dildos stuffed in my locker). Beth didn’t scare me, with mascara running in pools beneath her eyes.
“Go fuck yourself, Beth.”
“Why don’t you?” Beth snapped. “It’s not like you’ll get it anywhere else.”
She laughed loudly. Nudged Lucinda for support.
This is how I will always remember her.
Lucinda stood there, vacant, radiant and timeless in her yellow swimsuit, blond hair curling wet against her skin, toes painted white in those plastic flip-flops, not caring—not even knowing—what she’d taken from me.
It was worse than anything intentional. Girls like Beth, I could handle. But Lucinda was indifferent, so caught up in her bright, easy world, that contempt for her filled me like it never had before. How she stood, glittering and oblivious. It ignited me.
I saw you, I wanted to tell her. I saw your toothpick legs wrapped tight around him, I saw the way your back arched, I saw how the two of you thrashed and moved, a pair of undulating eels in shadow. I saw how he touched you. Hungry. Piggish. You can have him, I wanted to say.
But I couldn’t, because Lucinda was somewhere else. She stood in the August sun, one hip jutted out, completely removed from Beth’s taunts and my submission, her pretty head tilted charmingly to the right.
Lucinda Hayes didn’t recognize my goddamn face. She was unaware. The world is special for girls like her. It was this that burned me.
The funeral is almost over. Ma and Amy press tissues to their faces, and makeup seeps into the paper. The minister goes on about Lucinda’s “light,” how she will “never be forgotten,” how during a “tragedy like this” we must “support and appreciate the ones we love.” The old man in front of me is asleep, the Hansens are holding each other, and Jimmy Kessler wraps a piece of chewed gum around a Q-tip, which he pokes into a crack in the pew.
Hey, I would say to Zap, if this were a different world. Are you okay?
Zap wouldn’t need to say anything back. When we were little, we played a game called Telepathy. We’d freak out our parents by reading each other’s minds; I could tell you what he was thinking in less than three guesses. In reality, we’d invented this complicated system: words in sets of threes, a countless number of them, which we memorized and dictated to one another. Are you okay? I would say. The answer would be either Rottweiler, bagel, or Gandalf. By the third try, I’d undoubtedly get it right.