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A Grave

1

A Grave

Funerals were shitty,

and God how Amelie would have hated hers.

We should get up and show our tits,

she would’ve muttered in Gin’s ear, and keeping a straight face while a black-robed priest droned on about the kingdom and the glory would have broken them both to giggling pieces.

Assuming Ami was in a good mood.

As it was, Gin just barely kept from screaming during the whole ordeal, the familiar panicky slipstream in her ears rising to drown out the organ, the shuffling, and the dead dry rustling cry caught in her throat. The undertakers had worked some kind of miracle, or maybe drowning left a pretty corpse. Amelie’s coppery hair was arranged in loose ringlets, and she looked pale and perfect before the casket was sealed up and everyone had to endure homily after homily about how this was all part of God’s plan and their beloved friend was in heaven now.

Well, fuck God, and fuck Heaven, and fuck everything

else

, too. Even standing at the graveside, raw geologic stripes of earth down the sides of the hole like cake layers, the noise inside Gin’s skull just wouldn’t stop. There was Danny, his jaw set and his cheek ticking madly like someone was poking it with a sharp object, but his gaze was roving over anything female in range. Bena and Carolyn and Sharpe were in attendance, all fractionally different shades of blonde but with their hemlines hitting exactly the same mark just above the knee like a trio of Barbies with slightly different molds meant to trick you into thinking they were separate, individual people instead of a mycelium collective. There were Bobby and Tucker from Danny’s frat house, both probably mourning they never got in Ami’s pants rather than saddened by the loss of a human being. There was Amelie’s father Carl, the broken veins on his nose glaring and the stench of Clorets whenever he exhaled, his tongue green and nobody fooled, slugging from a flask each time the world came back into focus. The kids from Amelie’s shop, too—Giovanni scratching at his arms, Thea frowning a little and probably wishing to be elsewhere, all Ami’s other employees solemn-faced and probably wishing they were staring at their phones instead...

Oh, yeah, her bestie would have elbowed Gin and whispered, cracking both of them up and garnering looks of bovine disapproval from the herd.

Worst of all was Carl grabbing at Gin’s arm when it started to snow at the graveside, swaying like he was going to pass out.

Let him drop

, Amelie would have said, pushing her reading glasses—worn when she wanted to look serious—up the bridge of her patrician nose, but the egg-eyed priest rambling on about shepherds and valleys of fear pinned Gin with a stare that said

hold him up, will you?

Of course Gin did, because that was her lot in life. What else did a best friend do when you went and got yourself drowned swimming drunk out at Old Matchead Quarry with some asshole from a bar who left you in black water? Oh, sure, the cops were looking for anyone who’d seen anything, but it was like finding a needle in a haystack. Water in the lungs, a blood alcohol level over .13, no sign of any funny business in the rape kit—well, they wouldn’t work very hard, since there was no proof that the guy in the tan leather jacket Amelie was seen leaving with had driven her out to the quarry after all.

Except Ami didn’t drive, the quarry wasn’t off a bus line, and who the fuck would go swimming on a January night anyway? It was the type of thing you

thought

about doing while drunk but never actually got to because your responsible best friend would drag you home and put you to bed with a hilarious antique rubber pillow full of sloshing hot water instead.

Just like my Gramma Lettie used for her rheumatiz

, Gin would have said soothingly, and probably later held Ami’s hair back while her bestie heaved.

She should have been silently reciting something more appropriate, like Linda at her salesman’s grave free and clear, or a passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead—what good was a lit major if you didn’t use it?

Instead, Gin watched the casket sinking into the hole, white flakes speckling its polished hood and Carl’s hand a python-squeeze around her upper arm as he made a low groaning noise. The priest talked louder, the machine with the straps lowering the coffin down buzzed, and Danny’s gaze—

I’m gonna break up with him this weekend

, Amelie had said, shaking her head so her earrings shivered,

come on, I just want to get drunk and not think tonight

—finally rested on Gin’s face.

If he couldn’t have what he wanted, he’d settle for second best. It was how the whole thing started, after all, dating Gin for three weeks before confessing it was Ami he was “in love with” anyway. Bena and Carolyn and Sharpe—plastic souls closed in mass-produced blonde bodies—were a closed circuit, no way for him to worm in since they only dated high-cash guys, and the kids from Ami’s coffee shop were just this side of jailbait.

No, Gin was his best bet for once, and he knew it.

The sky was a flat, depthless iron pan. The graveyard, wet green starred with chunks of rock carved to shout

here’s a dead body, no really, you just can’t see it

, had a line of leafless trees at the bottom of the hill, and the freeway was a solid grey bar without any car-glitter in the distance, grey buildings choking the view. The church walls were rough wet grey stone and evergreens crouched over buried coffins, their roots probably squirming with maggots and other wriggling things.

It was enough to make you throw up into an open grave, and if she didn’t, if she closed her eyes and counted to ten, would God notice he’d pulled an enormous boner—

you’re twelve inside,

Ami giggled inside her head—and rewind everything, like he hadn’t when her parents died?

Carl actually dropped to his knees when the casket thumped on the bottom of the hole, and the urge to kick him filled Gin like a shot of tequila. She didn’t move, staring at the snow-clots forming on the coffin-lid, and Ginevra’s own trembling was a final treachery. She was breathing and alive and her best friend wasn’t.

It was a monstrous fucking mistake, because only one of them had nightmares about drowning, and it wasn’t Amelie.

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