I shook my head, frustrated and confused. “No. We weren’t fighting. I’m not yelling—” Except now I could hear it myself—how my voice had become too loud, too fast—and I could see they’d all stopped listening to what I was saying, only registering the volume and my rising panic.
“Jess…” Mom closed her eyes for a second. “Okay, Jess. What do you think happened? Who do you think she was meeting?”
I took a deep breath, then another. Slowing myself, trying to make it so that they could hear me again. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t— She didn’t say anything to me.” I paused, then turned to the policeman. “Maybe we could check her contacts on her phone? She’d have had that with her.”
“I’m sorry,” the officer said. “Her phone was in her pocket. It’s…”
He spread out his hands in front of him, palms up, as if waiting for a delicate way to explain what had happened to a phone that had fallen two stories. We all waited. But there was no delicate way, and so he remained silent, his hands out, unsure of how to finish.
“Maybe you’re right, Jess,” Mom said quietly. The ache in her voice nestled under my skin like barbed wire. “Maybe there was a boy. Maybe there wasn’t. It doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t matter.”
Dad and the police officer both nodded, as if what she’d said was both hard-won wisdom and a self-evident truth.
But I didn’t nod along. Because I didn’t agree.
Because to me, it did matter.
Because I should have known. Because we were best friends. Because we were twins.
Because I couldn’t shake the idea that she’d tried to tell me and I hadn’t heard her.
That somehow I’d let her slip away.
I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the church. The whole space stretched out before me, rows and rows of pews with tall stained-glass windows all around, yet all I could see was the mountain of daisies overflowing the casket, obscene in their brightness. It took all I had not to picture Anna inside the casket, dressed by strangers in the clothes Mom and I had picked out for her: her favorite jeans, her favorite cable-knit sweater.
The church was empty when we arrived, but soon, people began to filter in. Some of them, when they saw me and my parents standing together, maintained a careful distance. Others beelined right for us, eyes wide, hands clasped.
A group of cross-country girls came in, with Lily hanging toward the back. They hovered nearby as my parents spoke to some people from Dad’s work. Mom gave me a meaningful look, nodding in the direction of the group of girls as if I might have missed them. I ignored her—I wanted to talk to Lily alone, to find out what Anna’s real plans had been for that night. When I made the mistake of glancing over at the group a second time, though, they saw me do it and took it as a signal to walk over en masse.
There was a long pause as they stared at me. Then Rachel, a brunette with rabbity teeth and a nervous smile, spoke up. “We’re so sorry. Anna was…” She faltered and looked down at the floor.
“Great,” another girl supplied, triggering a wave of nodding. “Really great.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that was the right response, but they began nodding again, and then we all just stood there.
Rachel started to cry, a soft, hiccupping cry. No one seemed to know whether they should comfort her, so we stood silently as the tears ran down her face, leaving tracks of mascara down her cheeks.
“I think I need to go sit down,” I finally said.
“Of course,” someone said. I wasn’t sure who said it, only that it wasn’t Lily, who stayed silent in the back of the group.
My parents tried to steer me toward the front, but I shook my head. I did not want to be that close to her casket.
The three of us ended up sitting near the back, one parent on either side of me. My mom sat bolt upright, her eyes fixed ahead; my dad’s posture mimicked hers, but his hands lay limp and helpless in his lap.
When the pastor came to the altar, the room went so quiet I could hear the rustle of fabric when the woman in front of me adjusted her skirt.
Then someone behind me let out a muffled sob, which was quickly echoed by someone else. I closed my eyes and hoped they’d stop—the sound was contagious, but I couldn’t let myself cry. If I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I would dissolve, leaving only a ring of salt behind. I bit my tongue until it bled and my mouth tasted like rust.
When the pastor began to speak, I tried to focus on him and blur out the sound of the people crying around me, yet his words stirred up another unwanted emotion: anger. Because he was talking about angels being returned to heaven, about lambs and shepherds, about things that had nothing to do with Anna. Nothing to do with the person who’d made terrible jokes under her breath, who’d tried to nurse injured birds back to health, who’d been the only person who ever really made me feel like I fit into the world.
To distract myself—from the sobs, from the nasal, anger-inducing voice of the pastor—I stared out at the sea of heads in front of me, trying to identify people from school.
Some teachers had come. Anna’s biology teacher, Ms. Brown, sat with Mr. Tutterline, her social studies teacher. Two pews up sat Mr. Matthews, who taught English and coached cross-country, his head bent forward as if in silent prayer.
On the other side of the church, the police chief sat up so straight that his spine could have been a steel rod. His wife sat on one side of him and on the other sat John Grahn, the head of the fire department.
Behind them sat their sons, Charlie
