It is. Ben deserved a better send-off than he got. He would have hated his funeral, because it wasn’t for us. It was for them. It was for Gant. It was big and spectacular and morose with its black stretch limos and its five-course banquet hall dinner at the club.
I didn’t used to understand why Ben just didn’t tell all those kids to eff off if he hated them so much. I wondered why he ate lunch in the quad and not with the fringes of the school social order on the field. Why go to parties and make out with the girls and fist-bump jocks? Granted, Ben dating Maggie, the opposite of Gant, senior year was as close as he got to saying screw you all. He’d never gone out with a girl for more than a few weeks until her, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on the parts of all those perky populars.
Now I get it. It’s how I feel about the core. I shouldn’t care what they think about me. I know better. But it’s as if wanting to be accepted is in my teenage DNA. I can’t resist it. I look at Carolynn and think, I want to be friends with that girl. She’s not a kitten. She’s a lion. I want to bask in her laser-beam gaze and Becca’s sunshiny grin. Josh’s smiling eyes are straying toward me every few seconds as the others go on about how Ben loved giving authority the finger; how Ben would have approved of a prank in his honor. With Josh’s attention aimed at me, my stomach almost doesn’t knot at them acting like they knew Ben.
I want to prove the five of them wrong for ignoring me—or worse—up until this summer. I want to make it really hard for them to ice me out come classes starting. I want to show them that I am brave, alive, dazzling, and full of nerve and mischief.
Ben’s send-off is as clear to me as the Seattle skyline isn’t on a gray, stormy day. We spend the next hour masterminding what Becca calls a giant peace out for Ben. Rusty and Duncan are all eager grins and fist bumps as they insist on staking out the location. It’s agreed that barring disaster, we’ll spring into action tomorrow night. Even Carolynn props her elbows on the coffee table, stirring her caramel-spiked coffee with a spoon, and adds to the plan.
As I walk to my car, I stare clear down the street to where it dives into the harbor. The Mira is docked farther down, where most of Gant’s residents keep their vessels year-round. I wish I was on her now, sailing with the cold air splashing my skin. The breathless way I smiled into it always cleared my head. I’m floating, feeling lighter than I have since we surfaced with Maggie. June hasn’t crawled through July and into August to get me. The core is going to help me memorialize Ben. But Ben’s killer is out there; Maggie’s too. And I feel detached, like a helium balloon that’s broken free from its string and is sailing away, when instead I should be grounded and disturbed that my great-great-grandmother’s rosary found its way into my secret place and that a girl has died.
This is not what I experience, although at this point, I’m used to not feeling what I’m supposed to. Instead it’s as if the universe has gift-wrapped a dazzling, perfect present of revenge and left it at my feet.
This is why, when I get home, I don’t march to the lower terrace to destroy the rosary like I should. It’s either the rosary used to kill Maggie, or else it’s not and I’m losing my mind and can’t remember storing it there eons ago. Either way, it looks suspicious that I’m hiding it. I won’t throw it away, though, because it’s a reminder that sometimes evil deeds do get punished and that villains end up dead.
It allows me to believe that the world is the way Ben imagined it.
– 18 –
Bullies don’t get to win, Lana.” The fire was a rosy glow on Ben’s face; his nose cast a dark triangle on his left cheek.
Fitzgerald Moore had been found that morning by a woman driving her two kids to school. He was beaten bloody and unconscious on the shoulder of the road. She’d pulled over, kept the car doors locked, and called the police.
“Ethan and Max were laughing in second