“Then it’s moot anyway. She’s shy two credits. Even under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have walked.”
She had seen Perri’s final paper, Alexa decided now. Hadn’t it been in her box that Friday morning? She tried to re-create the scene in her mind, but those moments of normalcy could not be brought back. She had been sorting papers, reading Barbara’s memo-and then Anita had started to scream.
Anita, who was here at the funeral, despite being out of work on a doctor’s note. The gall, as Alexa’s mother would say. The un-mitigated gall.
Peter pulled at his collar. He hadn’t worn a tie, off-stage, for a long, long time, and the day was vicious hot. He was such a bonehead, lurching at Kat’s uncle that way, but the resemblance was pretty strong and he hadn’t seen Mr. Hartigan for almost three years. Peter had spent far more time with Mrs. Hartigan, who honestly liked him, and the feeling was pretty mutual. A hot mom, a total MILF. Oh, shit, that was probably the kind of thought that got you struck by lightning, standing at your exgirlfriend’s grave and thinking about how sexy her mom was. I didn’t mean it, he assured God. It was just an observation. Besides, anyone could see that Kat’s mom was appealing. Mr. Hartigan’s girlfriend was nice, too, but Peter preferred Mrs. Hartigan. Her eyes had that little downward droop, so sad and sexy, and her hair was always slipping out of this semi-topknot she wore. There was something about Mrs. Hartigan that made it very easy to imagine her naked, as if her clothes would give way as easily as her hair, sliding to the floor, and there she would be. No, wait, this was really wrong. He had to stop thinking like this. Listen to the minister. Focus on the words. “We”… “Kat”… “special”… “extraordinary”… “before her time.”
Bit by bit the words assembled themselves into sentences, and Peter willed himself into an appropriate state of grieving.
Josie stole a quick glance over her shoulder, curious to see who had shown up. Peter Lasko was beet red-it looked almost like sunburn, but she had seen him just yesterday at the assembly and he hadn’t been red then. One nice thing about her darker skin-it was very hard to detect a blush. When Josie was nervous or embarrassed, her cheeks flared prettily, two spots of pink on the bone, perfect as a painted doll’s, but only her parents recognized her color as embarrassment or nervousness. The police officers, for example, hadn’t noticed she was blushing at all, especially when they kept asking her about that stupid Tampax.
Josie could tell by the heat in her face that she was blushing now, in her own way. Why had she said that thing to Mrs. Hartigan? Had anyone overheard? When her lawyer had told her that the cops wanted her cell phone to review her text messages from the day of the shooting, Josie had kept calm, handing over her phone as if she didn’t think it was any big deal-and it wasn’t. But that meant they were going to look for Kat’s and Perri’s phones, too. What if they found them? And why had that cop been asking about her Pumas? She had thought she could keep her sandals, wear them again, but maybe not. She shouldn’t have improvised. Definitely not her strong suit. She should have stuck to the plan.
She had never missed Kat or Perri more. Kat would have soothed her, told her it was all going to be all right, while Perri would have had a strategy to deal with those police officers, something far more inventive than just droning “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” over and over. She felt so lost without them.
“Ashes to ashes,” the minister said, sprinkling dirt on Kat’s casket. “Dust to dust.” On the second “ashes,” Anita Whitehead launched herself down the path, eager to get to her car before anyone else, not caring if her sandals sounded flat and loud on the asphalt path. She wasn’t going to get stuck in some traffic jam getting out of here. She had put herself out enough for these people. Just watch her get carjacked in this horrible neighborhood, and then wouldn’t they be sorry?
She hated to say, she really did, but last year’s funeral was so much better.
Eleventh grade
25
In the spring of the girls’ junior year, three soccer players had been killed in a one-car accident on Old Town Road. The boys had all been stars on the team, which had made it to regionals that year, and the two juniors, Seth Raskin and Chip Vasilarakis, were their longtime classmates, going all the way back to first grade-third grade for Josie, of course. The third was Seth’s little brother, Kenny, who was not as fortunate in his looks. The older brother’s enigmatic grin became a goofy, overtoothed leer in Kenny’s face, the long, lean body compacted into a much shorter frame, so Kenny was sometimes called “Munchkin” or even “Runtkin.”
But Kenny had been so good-natured and quick to laugh at himself that he was the most popular of the three. The news that he was behind the wheel of the Raskins’ SUV, playing the part of designated driver when he had only a provisional license, had been especially hard on everyone in Glendale. Parents such as Josie’s, assuming that their children were safely out of earshot, said as much. They would actually feel better if Kenny had been drunk, the Patels agreed, but blood tests made it clear that he’d had only a trace of alcohol in his system, whereas Seth and Chip had been just barely over the legal limit. But they also had failed to fasten their seat belts, so they were thrown from the Cadillac Escalade when it rolled.
“I know people misuse the term ‘irony’ all the time,” Josie’s mother had told her dad, making the mistake of thinking that Josie was too absorbed in the family room computer to pay attention to the adult conversation on the other side of the kitchen counter. “But this is truly ironic. Those boys might still be alive if one of the more experienced drivers had been behind the wheel. They were drunker, but they were probably better drivers. Kenny lost control on a curve, overcorrected, and flipped the SUV.”
“Maybe we should slow down with Josie,” her father said. “She needs forty hours of on-road practice before she gets her license. We could put it off until next spring. And I really think the county ought to rethink the Senior Ramble. All those new drivers on the roads at one time…”
“That’s not fair,” Josie had protested, turning away from her mother’s computer, where she and Kat had been IM’ing about the tragedy. “It’s bad enough that I’m the last one to get my license because I have an August birthday. I have to get my driver’s license this summer. How else am I supposed to get anywhere? Do you want to drive me everywhere forever?”
“Only until you’re fifty,” her father had said, coming over and ruffling her short curls.
“If we had stayed in the city,” her mother said, “this wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”
“Yeah, then all we’d have to worry about is whether Josie was going to be stabbed in the girls’ room.”
Given all the attention demanded by the three deaths, it was perhaps understandable that few Glendale parents noticed, much less cared, that there had been an incident of vandalism on a local farm the same weekend. Vandalism was, unfortunately, all too common in this part of the county. The stock ponds on farmland were a longtime lure. But this had gone far beyond mere mischief. Three pigs had been poisoned at the home of Cyrus Snyder. Under different circumstances such a crime might have been the talk of the north county. But the Glendale families bristled at the idea that the death of three boys should be mentioned in the same breath as the slaughter of three pigs. It was disrespectful to two families who had suffered a real loss.