“It was hard to miss her,” I replied. “Mrs. Thomas sat her right next to me.”
“Yes,” Principal Foster said with a deeply uncomfortable sigh. “That was my idea. I thought it might help both of you.”
“It doesn’t help,” I grumbled. The bell rang for class. “Now excuse me. I don’t want our new student to be late.”
“Of course,” he said. “Keep your chin up. It does get better.”
I wanted to punch him in his smug face with its condescending smile. “I doubt it.”
I met Samantha outside each of her morning classes until it was time for lunch. Lunch was my least favorite part of the day because it meant socializing with humans who weren’t Katie. I had no interest in seeing anyone, least of all people who were laughing with their friends while mine was dead.
“And this is another place that sucks.” I pushed open the door to the cafeteria. It was pretty standard. Long picnic tables lined the room, and a disgusting lunch counter vacillated between serving sludge, muck, and gruel, depending on the day.
“So, what I’ve gathered is this whole place really does suck,” Samantha said. “Just like my old school. Shouldn’t be a problem not fitting in then.”
I walked toward the back of the cafeteria. “Was that a problem at your old school? Not fitting in, I mean.”
Samantha followed me. “I wouldn’t call it a problem. More like a necessary survival mechanism. I’m a bit of a loner.”
“Well, then it won’t be much different here.”
I sat down in my usual spot at the far end of the cafeteria where even the stoners and rejects didn’t gather, and pulled out my brown bag lunch, which assuredly contained a chicken salad sandwich and bag of potato chips. Usually, I would have given them to Katie, or thrown them away when she was absent, but I just didn’t have the energy, so I pushed them away and laid my head on the table.
“Are you going to eat that?” Samantha asked, sitting down across from me.
“I thought you were a loner. That’s the one thing I liked about you.”
She sighed, reaching for my chips and popping them open without asking. “I am a loner. I’ve been a loner in every school I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot.”
“Why do you keep switching schools? Are you a delinquent or something?”
“No,” she said, stuffing a handful of chips into her mouth. “Army brat. Well, Air Force brat, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily. I’ve been to eight schools in ten years, so I know a thing or two about being a loner for survival.”
“And yet…you are talking to me.” I sighed and put my head back on the table.
“Cuz you’re like me.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I get your thing. You’re alone for survival. We are the same.”
I lifted my head and stared at her. “We are nothing alike.”
She crunched on chips and shrugged. “Fine, but I can see somebody with the morbs from a hundred yards away.”
“The morbs?”
“It’s an old Victorian expression. Means being sad.”
“Then yeah, I guess I have the morbs.”
“Who did you lose?” she asked, taking a bite of my sandwich. “Mom, Dad, cousin?”
She’d hit a sore spot. “My best friend, okay? I mean, whatever, you’re going to find out anyway.”
Samantha gulped. “That was…unexpected. Did she get hit by a car or was it something you knew about?”
“Cancer. Leukemia.” I buried my head in my arms on the table and tried to hold back my tears. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“I like death, grief, loss, and junk. I’m fascinated by that kind of stuff. So, sue me.”
I picked my head off the table again. “I’m more likely to put a restraining order out on you.”
“You want me to leave, just say the word.”
I did want her to leave, but I also didn’t want to be alone. For some reason, no matter how much I hated her, I also wanted her around. She was the only person in my life that didn’t have the smell of Katie all over them. She was the only person I could look at without seeing Katie’s face, and who didn’t look at me like the poor girl who’d lost her friend.
“What was her name?” Samantha asked after swallowing another bite of my sandwich.
“Katie. You would have hated her.”
“Yeah? Well it’s a good bet because I hate everybody, but why specifically would I hate her?”
I placed my head in my hands. “She was a ball of sunshine, all the way until the end. She was like sickeningly sunny. Even in the worst days of chemo, when she knew she wasn’t going to recover, she was still…happy. I loved that about her.”
“And you hated it about her too, right?”
I laughed. I hadn’t laughed in weeks, and it felt foreign to me. “Yeah, I guess I kind of hated it about her, too. She never let me wallow in anything, and sometimes you want to wallow.”
“Of course. Who doesn’t love a good wallow?”
“Right?” I replied. “Now, I have all the time in the world for wallowing.”
“Does it feel good?”
“No,” I said. “It feels like nothing, or it feels horrible. One of the two, but it definitely doesn’t feel good.”
“Yeah, that’s the worst part of it all for me. When it feels like nothing at all.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “Who have you lost?”
She finished the last of the chips and licked her fingers. “My dad died last year. Airstrike in Syria. Barely any casualties on that front, but my stupid dad had to be one of them.” Her eyes teared up. “It sucks. Now, I’m stuck here without him. I hated moving every couple of years, but I hate not having him around even more.”
“That hole never closes completely, does it? The best you can do is shrink it down with time.”
“Now you’re an expert at parental death, too?”
“Kind of. My dad died when I was eleven.”
“Jesus Christ,” Samantha said, raising her
