Elizabeth Miles: Eternity

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.

The service began with a brief sermon, and it wasn’t long before a heavy pressure started to build in JD’s chest. He felt heat pricking at the backs of his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and he forced himself to look around the room to distract himself. His eyes drifted from Em’s back to the dark, wooden, satin-lined casket to the heaps of flowers toward the front of the room. Sent by grieving—or guilty—classmates, probably. One of the arrangements in particular stood out: an enormous bouquet of red orchids. They looked strange and garish next to the other flowers, in muted shades of cream and white, and reminded him unpleasantly of blood. His stomach twisted.

“. . . and now, we welcome to the podium Drea’s good friend Colin Roberts, who will perform a song he wrote for today.” JD snapped back to attention and watched Crow walk to the microphone, holding his guitar in one hand and brushing his black hair out of his eyes with the other.

There he was: Asshole of the Year. What did Em see in this guy? What had Drea seen in him? Crow hadn’t even finished high school. Rumor was, he dropped out—before he could be kicked out. JD had hung out with Crow only once, at a party at Drea’s house. They’d barely spoken, so JD knew only two things about Crow: He played in a band and he used to be really good with computers. Oh, and he smoked a lot of pot.

There was no question in JD’s mind that he and Crow were after the same girl. It was Crow who Em went to meet that night at the old mall. Which meant it was Crow who was to blame for what happened to JD there; he’d been hit in the head with a falling industrial pipe, an accident that nearly got him smothered in concrete and left to die. Luckily, Em had managed to get him out of there with just a scar above his eyebrow to show for it, but it was her fault that he’d been hurt in the first place.

Which meant it was Crow’s fault.

Crow cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone. “Many of you barely knew Drea,” he said, not even trying to conceal his disdain for the crowd in front of him. But then his voice broke as he went on. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s not too late for you to pick up a thing or two from her anyway. She was always open-minded. Obsessed with everything unique and different. So if you want to honor her, try to be a little bit more like her from now on. Be like how she would want you all to be if she were still around to see it. Break away from the fold.” With that, he brought up his guitar. “Drea, this one’s for you.” And he began to pluck out a song, slowly at first.

Then he found the melody and his music washed over the room, at once sad and defiant.

Just like Drea.

JD was more than a little annoyed that the song was so good. Crow could really sing, too, in that raw, rough way that girls were always into—belting his voice into the air and tapping his foot to the beat. JD imagined Em staring up at him in the front row, listening to that voice, finding comfort in it. God, it made him feel sick how girls loved musicians. He lowered his head, consumed again by feelings of confusion and resentment.

He felt an elbow in his side.

“Here,” Red Ribbon Girl, Meg, murmured, offering a tissue. He was about to tell her he was okay, he wasn’t going to cry, but she pressed the tissue into his hand before he could resist. She must have mistook his annoyed expression for anguish. She turned her petite face at an angle and stared at him with that same doll-like expression: “Ya know, I’ve always thought death was really just the beginning of something else. Something we can’t understand.” Her voice was light and girly, and yet it felt like ice sliding down his back.

JD nodded and turned back to the altar, hoping that the girl would leave him alone. She was clearly trying to be nice, but her whole attitude was so clinical it just came off creepy.

Crow was playing the final notes of his tribute. When he finished he turned and walked offstage without even acknowledging the quiet and respectful round of applause. Everyone clapped. Everyone except JD.

You may have won over this crowd, he thought. But Em will see through your bullshit eventually.

At the end of the service, JD squeezed his mom’s shoulder.

“Do you think I should go up there?” he asked, motioning toward the casket, where some mourners were lining up to pay their final respects.

“Only if you want to, JD,” his mother replied.

Of course he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to see Drea’s face, frozen in an eternal expression of death. He didn’t want to see what they’d done to her, how they’d “fixed her up” with makeup she’d never have worn. What if it was a cookie-cutter version of Drea Feiffer up there—made to look fake and plastic and everything she’d railed against her entire life? Plus, he thought open caskets were creepy. Who wanted to see their dead loved ones like that? But he owed her this. One last good-bye.