The floorboards creaked as I moved through the room. Joanne always said she was going to fix the floor when Katie got better. She said she was going to take out the horrible shag carpet and replace it with hardwood like Katie wanted. Maybe she was trying to bribe her daughter to get better, as if that could have helped. Still, we would have tried anything, even if it meant tricking her body to get better.
Katie’s room was filled with toys. Every inch was covered with Transformers, and action figures, and Hello Kitty dolls, and ceramic cats. How she got any work done was beyond me.
“I didn’t.” The soft voice was behind me. “I had to lay in bed to work. Of course, I didn’t have much homework by the end.”
I swung around frantically in every direction. I swore I heard Katie’s voice, but that was impossible. I shook my head and turned around. My mind was playing tricks on me, hearing voices on the wind.
“It’s not a trick.” It was Katie’s voice. “And it’s not the wind.”
Tears filled my eyes. Why would my mind be so cruel to me? Did it want me to suffer? The air in the room felt stale in my lungs. My throat was constricted, and I knew I needed to leave. I was going to hyperventilate. I clawed at my throat, trying to breathe again. I pulled open the door to her room and ran outside into the hall, leaping down the stairs and out the door without saying goodbye to Joanne.
Tears filled my eyes as I ran across the street. I ran up to my room, locking the door behind me. In my own bed, I could breathe again, and slowly everything went back to normal. Or as normal as I could ever expect, given that my best friend was dead.
Chapter 8
I heard Katie’s voice in my head all night. I tossed and turned, trying to find a place where she wasn’t speaking to me. It turned out to be an impossible task. All night, she kept trying to get my attention, but I had to ignore her voice.
She wasn’t real. She wasn’t talking to me. Katie was dead.
The next morning, I forced Mom to drive me to the cemetery before school. All she wanted to do was sleep, but I needed to be reminded that Katie was still buried six feet into the ground.
“Is there anything I can do, hija?” my mom asked after standing over Katie’s grave for ten minutes.
The soil was still fresh and the flowers we placed on the headstone hadn’t wilted yet. It was all so new still. I couldn’t tell Mom the truth about why we were there. I couldn’t tell her that I was going crazy.
“You’re not crazy,” Katie’s voice whispered in my ear. “You’re not crazy.”
I wanted to believe her, but that’s the kind of thing a crazy person would believe. I certainly didn’t think I was losing my mind, but then nobody ever thought they were crazy. They thought they were the sanest person in the world. That didn’t change the fact that I was hearing Katie’s voice even though she was dead. I was standing over her grave, watching the wind blow dirt off the top of it.
“Can we go?” my mom said. “I don’t want to cheapen your grief, but I just worked a long shift and I need to sleep, chica.”
“Fine.” I nodded.
Walking away from her grave, I swore I saw a haunting blue light under the willow tree that hung down over Katie’s grave. That’s when I knew I was going crazy. Not only was I hearing Katie, now I was seeing her, too.
Crazy people still had to go to school, though. I had already missed enough days throughout the year sitting by Katie’s bedside, and I had a slew of work I’d fallen behind on after her funeral. My teachers were all very understanding, but not understanding enough to just give me an A without doing the work. I needed top marks if I wanted to be valedictorian.
“You look horrible,” Samantha said, sitting down next to me. I hadn’t gotten over a usurper in Katie’s seat. I knew Samantha wasn’t intentionally slapping my best friend in the face by sitting next to me, but just the fact that she existed was enough to cut the wound of Katie’s death even deeper.
“So do you.”
She didn’t actually look horrible. She had tied her frizzy, brown hair into big, bushy pig tails, and they looked quite cute with the green and black flannel that she’d tied up at the waist.
“I got up at five am to get ready today for today,” she said. “So, I don’t believe you. You, on the other hand, look like you haven’t slept in days.”
She was right. I hadn’t slept in days. Not really. Every day since Katie’s death I’d slept worse and worse, and I wasn’t even sure whether I’d slept at all the night before.
I hadn’t slept well in the months leading up to Katie’s death, either. Every single day, I thought I would wake up and she would be gone, and then one day I was right. If I hadn’t slept so long the night of her death, maybe I could have seen Katie one last time. Maybe I would have told her one last time that I loved her.
“Hello?” Samantha said. I realized I had been locked in a daze for several minutes without answering her.
Mercifully, Mrs. Thomas spoke up before I had to answer Samantha. “All right, class. Now, on to today’s lesson.”
She wasn’t much of an orator, but I still paid close attention. Even in the most boring lectures I could lock in on taking notes. I used to take notes for Katie and was diligent about them. I wasn’t much of a student before she got sick, but I learned how
