New Girl - By Paige Harbison Page 0,99
okay. It’ll be okay.” I said the words, and then slipped into dreamless unconsciousness.
I could not remember my dream. But when I awoke, I felt as though a weight had been lifted.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I DON’T THINK I BELIEVED SHE WAS REALLY DEAD until I was at her funeral.
I had spent ten months building up a case against Becca in my mind. I had turned her into my rival. All the while, she’d just been an unseen body being whipped around by currents and undertow.
She was supposed to be the reason for everything that had happened this year. She was supposed to come back. Not that I’d wanted her to. How many times had I wondered what would happen to everyone if she did? I never had a happy answer for that. And that’s a terrible thing to think.
But here she was. Here was everyone else. Here I was. In a church.
I wasn’t being selfish; I knew this wasn’t about me. That was the problem. I had spent a year thinking about this girl, resenting her at times, and that entire time, she’d been just a ghost. She wasn’t even real anymore. She couldn’t fight back. She was innocent. The dead always are. I think it would be hard to stand over a dead body and ever feel like they completely deserved it. Once someone dies…I don’t know, I don’t want to spout off something about how we come into this world the same way we leave it—alone—because I don’t think that’s so.
We come into the world the furthest thing from alone. We come into the world with everyone fawning over us, and helping us. That’s just not how it is when we die. I don’t know what’s different. Maybe it’s the fact that when you look at someone’s dead body you see their entire lives flattened, with an end point. When I was eight, and went to my grandfather’s funeral, I had that realization. I didn’t even know him. But you look at that person…and you see everything they ever felt, thought, cried over, worried over, was thrilled by, and you realize that someday someone will look down at you when your brain is quiet and you’re lying in your last bed. You realize that everything you think and feel now will be encompassed in the hyphen between two years. It’s not even that depressing, it’s just true.
But of course we couldn’t see Becca’s body, thanks to the ravages of the deep waters. She was just the mystery she’d always been and would be to me. She was on the inside of that chestnut box, only inches of wood separating her from us. Her body anyway.
It was colder than it should be in May. Not just for me, but for everyone. Rain was pounding against the tall, stained-glass windows and no doubt reminding everyone grimly of the night she died, almost a year ago. For me it was just a haunting sound track to the dour scene in front of me, and the gruesome one from the past that my subconscious couldn’t help but imagine.
I was out of place. I knew that. Everyone else knew that. I didn’t know Becca Normandy. But I had to come.
I went to the service kind of early, in an effort to not arrive late and have a rerun of my first assembly at Manderley. So from my seat, somewhere in the back left middle, as inconspicuous as possible, I just watched. Her parents were sitting up front, quietly sitting a respectful and quiet distance from each other. Her mother wore a hat with that net down in front of her face like the girls in old movies. I could see that she had the same blond hair as her daughter. The neat waves met the shoulders of her black dress. She was still, like her husband. There were a few other people on the same bench that I supposed were the rest of Becca’s family.
More people trickled in that I didn’t know. All of the men were wearing dark suits, which made it seem like we were all being transported to another time. All the women and girls wore black panty hose and sensible heels. Everyone looked neat, no one stunning. This wasn’t the time for that.
There were more people on my row now, and no one seemed to notice me. I was exceedingly grateful for that. If I could have come to the funeral and been invisible, I would have chosen to. Eventually, I