I lean into her embrace, burying my face in her hair, inhaling the scent of her summery bodywash. For the first time since I woke up this morning, something other than sorrow wiggles its way into my soul.
“How did you know?” I whisper.
She pulls back, holding my shoulders. Tears fill her eyes, threatening to ruin her makeup. “Sue just called me. She wanted to make sure you would be taken care of today, so don’t worry, honey, I’m not going to work.”
I make this half-snort, half-sobbing noise somewhere deep in my throat. Mrs. Cade’s daughter is dead and she’s worried about me. Mom leads me into the living room and allows me to cry on her shoulder for I don’t know how long. The ache in my chest is deep, hollow and somehow powered with a fuel that never seems to run dry. I cry and cry, and it doesn’t go away. Nothing makes this easier.
Deep down I feel shame for wanting it to be easier. I keep thinking if I cry a little longer, maybe I’ll cry myself out and I’ll feel better. When my eyelids are so heavy they’re nearly swollen shut, I sit up and brush my choppy hair out of my eyes. Mom’s work shirt is soaked, the entire shoulder wet and clinging to her skin. I can see the anchor tattoo on her shoulder, visible through the white fabric. Little details like this seem to matter to me. They are all pieces of life that Sasha will never ever get to experience again.
“God, I’m sorry,” I mutter, wiping at my eyes. “You want to go and change?”
Mom’s hands slide to her knees and she peers at me with red eyes, tear lines of mascara running down her cheeks. “Don’t worry about me, Raquel.”
Each breath hurts. As much as I tell my brain to stop, it keeps drudging up some random memory of Sasha and me: playing Queens of the Playground at recess, flirting our way into free tokens at the arcade, the time some creepy guy wouldn’t stop hitting on me at the Fourth of July parade and she slapped him right across the face. Each new memory brings forth a tidal wave of tears and a pain in my chest that feels as though the Grim Reaper has shoved his staff right into me and is dragging it down, breaking each rib just for the thrill of it.
By noon, Mom feels comfortable enough to leave me alone while she makes lunch, not like I want to eat any of it. But when she sets a bowl of her famous tomato soup in front of me, along with a grilled cheese sandwich, I’m suddenly starving. Eating feels wrong, given that Sasha can’t eat anymore, but I can practically hear her sarcastic laugh, telling me to stop being stupid.
Rocki, Rocki, Rocki. Don’t be a drama queen — that’s my job.
“How are you doing?” Mom asks softly as she dips her spoon into her soup.
I shrug. “I thought I had prepared for dealing with this. I thought —” The bite of grilled cheese now feels like cardboard in my mouth. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt as bad if I planned ahead.”
“That’s not how death works, honey.” Mom’s lips form a flat line, then they curve upward. “I remember your first grade field day,” she says with a little laugh. “Remember when you and Sasha won the three-legged race? You’ve pretty much been inseparable since then.”
I smile as the knot in my stomach twists in on itself, making one more loop that tugs into place just above my belly button.
After lunch, I tell Mom I need some alone time and she reluctantly stays on the couch while I walk away. I can hear my phone blowing up from my backpack, but I ignore it. By now, surely the whole school knows.
I wander outside, curling my toes over the edge of our pool. My reflection peers up at me, and I sit on the ledge. The concrete is hot from the Texas heat and it burns my butt, even through my leggings. I dunk my feet into the water, soaking my leggings up to the knees. Too late, I bend down and scrunch up the fabric, revealing my pale knees. We didn’t spend much time outside this summer, so I am woefully lacking in the tan department.
Sasha had said on more than one occasion that when she was gone, she would try to reach out to me in this spiritual, metaphysical way. “Keep an eye out,” she had said. “And I don’t mean like a cold draft in the room or some dumb butterfly landing on your shoulder. When I reach out to you from beyond the grave, you’re gonna know it’s me.”
“What, like you’ll appear as a ghost?” I said, snorting.
“Maybe,” she mused. “But when I visit you, you’ll know it. You’ll be able to hold on to it.”
“Should we have some kind of sign?”
She thought it over for a moment. “No. I’ll make it so obvious that you won’t need a sign. You’ll just know it’s me, saying hi to you from the afterlife.”
“You have a lot of faith in me,” I said.
She grinned. “Maybe I just have faith in my own abilities.”
I close my eyes and listen to the gentle swish of the pool water, the soft hum of the creepy pool suction thing as it makes its way across the bottom, cleaning off all the dirt. I take deep breaths and exhale slowly, trying to yoga my way into being peaceful and open to the spiritual realm. If Sasha tries to reach out to me from her afterlife, I want to be able to feel it.
Several moments pass and nothing happens.
I keep my eyes closed, grateful that for once since I woke up today, I’m not crying. I picture Sasha as an angel, her long, dark hair back and flowing in waves around her shoulders. I get all theatrical with it, picturing her smiling at me from atop her heavenly cloud, her bright new angel wings enormous and perfect.
Then my mind wanders into more practical daydreams. Maybe she’s not an angel yet because she’s stuck in some queue of dead people waiting to get inside the pearly gates of heaven. There’s no doubt that’s where she’s going. Sasha was pure and good and didn’t have an evil bone in her body.
The back door swings open, and the sound of flip-flops patters across the concrete. I smell his cologne before he says anything and force my eyes to open for the first time in what feels like hours.
“Zack?”
He sits next to me, kicking off his flip-flops and dunking his feet in the water.
Zack is the very definition of an on-again, off-again boyfriend. I had a huge crush on him in junior high and even though we had a few classes together, he never seemed to notice me. Finally, freshman year, while standing in the pizza line in the cafeteria, I pulled off the ballsiest move of my life and handed him a note that said I thought he was cute. We’ve kind of been a thing ever since then.
The breaking up and getting back together drama started way before Sasha got sick, but lately we’ve been off, off and off. There’s no time for a boyfriend when your best friend is dying.
“Hey, babe.” He wraps his arm around me, tugs me into his shoulder. He’s wearing board shorts and a T-shirt, which, if he were anyone else, would make me wonder if he even went to school today, but Zack dresses like this all the time. His short blond hair and full-body tan make him seem more like a surfer guy than a video game addict — the former is what made me like him all those years ago, and the latter is what he actually is.
I look at him, taking in the concern on his face. It’s so much nicer than the scowls and annoyance he showed the last few times I saw him.
“I’m sorry about Sasha.”
“Thanks.” The word is out of my mouth before I really think it over. Are you supposed to thank someone in this kind of situation?
I’m so sorry to hear that your friend is dead.
Why, thank you for the acknowledgment, good sir.
Ugh.
“So I guess everyone knows?” I ask, looking back at the water. The creepy pool brush is now in the deep end.
“Yeah,” he says, kicking at the water with his toes. “The principal made an announcement this morning. ‘Sasha Cade has lost her battle with cancer.’ Pretty much everyone was crying all day. Once I heard that, I knew you’d be staying home.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I’ll go to school for the rest of this week. I’m not in the mood for being pitied by a b
unch of idiots who only liked me because I was friends with Sasha.”
“Don’t be bitter, babe.” Zack takes my face in his hands and kisses my forehead. Once, that gesture would have made my heart swoon, but I’m not sure I’ll ever feel that way again. About anyone. Or anything. “You should try to look on the bright side.”
Since he’s holding both sides of my head, I’m kind of forced to look at him. I lift an eyebrow. Then my teeth grit together as anger rockets through me and I shove his hands away. “Where the hell can you find a bright side to my best friend dying?”
My outburst doesn’t startle him. He runs his hands through my short hair, making it stick up at the ends. “Well, for starters, you can let your hair grow out again.”
He wiggles his eyebrows and I pull away, my chest tight. He can’t seem to go one day without mentioning how much he hates my hair. How he fell in love with the girl who had light brown locks going down her back, and that when I shaved it all off, I should have consulted him first. It’s been four months since I handed Sasha the razor and told her to make me bald. I don’t regret it, not for a second.
She’d lost all of her hair from the chemo, and it was the right thing for me to do. Plus, it was kind of fun. A few years ago, I would have balked at the idea, but once you realize that people all over the world are dying and you’re still alive, several inches of hair doesn’t mean much.
“You shave your head all the time,” I say, flicking my hand over his super short hair. “Why can’t I?”
He rolls his eyes. “Because you’re a girl. You’re supposed to be my princess, not look like you’re about to go on the front lines of war.”
“I’m not some princess, Zachary. I’m tough. I’ve delivered five baby calves and I stitched up that lady’s Chihuahua, remember?” And I survived my best friend’s death.
He laughs and pats my back. “Yeah, yeah, okay. You’re tough. Still, I’m ready for your hair to be back. And now you can work at the animal clinic again, right?”
I swallow. Zack always made it seem like I was making some epic sacrifice in canceling all my plans for Sasha. When it’s done out of love, it’s not a sacrifice. The animal clinic, and the small scholarships I’ve won, will still be there next year. Sasha won’t.
“Zack.” I take a deep breath. “I appreciate that you came here to see me, but … you’re not even acting sad. You just want things to go back to normal, but I’m grieving. Can’t you just —” Every breath I take is a fight to hold back tears. Not only am I missing her, I want everyone else to miss her, too. “Aren’t you even a little sad?”
“I mean, yeah.” He shrugs. I focus on the pool water that reflects in his eyes since he won’t actually look at me.
“Why didn’t you like her?” My voice feels raw, and each word hurts. “Everyone liked Sasha.”
“I liked her,” he says too quickly, too defensively. “She didn’t like me. She always looked at me like —” He blows out a heavy breath of air, and if I didn’t know any better I might have said he’s ashamed. “Like I wasn’t good enough for you.”
The truth in his words hits me hard, and despite being pissed off at my sort-of boyfriend, here I am crying again.
“Babe,” he says, drawing out the word with his southern accent. He bumps me with his shoulder. “Don’t cry. Sasha wouldn’t want you to.”
I love how he suddenly thinks he can channel her spirit or something.
“It’s just hard.” I wish a hug from him was as comforting as one from my mom. “It hurts so much.”
“I know, babe, but think of it this way,” he says, wrapping a heavy arm around my shoulders. “You’re free now.”
The splashing of our feet in the pool, the hum of the pool cleaner — every single sound is drowned out by the pounding of my own heart. “What the hell did you just say?”
He holds up his hands, an innocent look on his face. “Rocki, you know what I meant. Your life has been halted lately because of Sasha, but now that she’s gone, you’re free. Free to be yourself and live your life.”
I scramble and stand up fast, water flopping off my feet and onto his dry clothes. “You need to leave.”
Zack frowns. “Stop being like this.”
I point toward the gate in the fence. My jaw clenches. “Please go.”
“Rocki, please.”
I shake my head and march into my house, slamming the back door behind me and twisting the dead bolt into place. I head into my room and open my backpack, pulling out the white binder that’s been adorned with a glitter pen and decorative duct tape. The time for moping is over. I have a funeral to plan.
Chapter Three
There’s only one flower shop that can get the insane volume of wildflowers Sasha wanted for her funeral. Izzy’s Flowers is a narrow storefront located at the end of the Peyton Colony Strip, a historic shopping center on the north side of Lake Peyton. The weathered wooden sign above the door has big bubbly lettering and peace signs painted on, a relic from the seventies with no intention of being updated.
Izzy’s thin lips fall into a frown when I step into the shop. The fragrance of hundreds of bouquets permeates the air, and a Sublime song plays from some hidden speaker. Izzy, the owner and sole employee — an older hippie wearing a patchwork dress — goes totally still, her hands wrapped around some daisies.
“Oh, child,” she says. “It’s far too soon. I thought she had more time.”
Sasha and I had visited Izzy’s Flowers on more than one occasion. This is the only place to get an affordable bouquet of Mother’s Day flowers each year, and although Sasha’s parents are filthy rich, she always refused to use their money to buy them gifts. Last May, Izzy comped both of our Mother’s Day bouquets after we walked in with shaved heads. Sasha called it a benefit of dying young.
I swallow the lump in my throat and approach the front counter, laying the binder down between us and opening it up to the flower page. Izzy helped us choose flowers just a few months ago. On the first visit, Mr. and Mrs. Cade came with us, but Sasha’s mom spent the entire time crying and Sasha banned her from any further funeral planning. She said planning your own funeral is something a girl should do with her best friend — that way, her parents wouldn’t be burdened with yet another task. Sasha’s death had rules like this, things we made up as we went along. Most people don’t get an advance warning of their demise, but Sasha did, and she didn’t want to waste it.
My voice comes out in a croak. “So … do you have all of these?”
Izzy puts a weathered hand on mine, her messy auburn hair falling in front of her shoulders. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Raquel.”
“Thanks.” Another raspy croak. I blink quickly to keep the tears at bay and get back to business. I promised to keep it together for Sasha’s parents so they don’t have to lift a finger. “So, the flowers?”
“I’ve got ’em,” she says, motioning for me to follow her around the counter. I follow the scent of flowers and the faint stench of pot until we get into the back part of the store. Though narrow, it stretches pretty far back, the shelves packed with vases, tools and wire spools.
From a high shelf, she retrieves a binder of her own, all withered and cracking at the corners. She opens it to the first page. “Here’s what I was thinking for the casket spray,” she says, passing me a hand-sketched, watercolor painting. Long-stemmed sunflowers with white wildflowers fan out, tied together with a white sparkly ribbon. I know the ribbon will be sparkly because she wrote “sparkly ribbon” and drew an arrow to it.
A floaty feeling rises in my stomach and I reach up to cover my mouth. “This is amazing,” I murmur, handing back the painting. I wish I could tell Sasha.
Izzy smiles, her eyes a dark blue that makes her seem both wise and a little off her rocker. “She wanted wildflowers everywhere, but they don’t do well off the stem.” She turns the page and hands me another painting
, pointing out the features as she talks. “I was thinking of having long, rectangular planter boxes filled with the flowers in soil. We can paint them white with glitter and line them around the casket, and up and down the rows of chairs at the cemetery.”
She peers at me, creases running up her forehead. “What do you think?”
I shake my head, but not from disapproval. It’s more like I’m totally in shock. “It’s beautiful. But the funeral is in a few days. Can we get this done on time?”
“Well …” She averts her gaze. “Come with me.”
We meander through the rest of the shop and into a small storage room at the back of the building. Inside are a dozen of the planter boxes, made and painted, gleaming like they came straight from a fairy castle.
“You made these?” I ask, mouth falling open.
She nods. “Couldn’t help myself. I’ve never had a client plan her own funeral before. I told her it could be done, knowing those suckers don’t hold up well, especially in the heat. So yeah, I had to find a way to make it work.”
I feel genuine happiness for the first time in the two days that Sasha has been gone. I know she would love this. “Can I pay extra to keep the boxes?”
She waves a hand at me. “No extra. They’re yours.”
This is working out better than I thought it would. Turns out preparing Sasha’s funeral is giving me something to do besides sit around and cry all day. We head back to the front of the store, where I pay for the flowers using Mrs. Cade’s credit card. Right now, she’s at the funeral home making the final arrangements, the one thing a best friend can’t exactly do. My next stop is the photo and print shop to pick up programs and a massive photo of Sasha. On Thursday morning at eleven a.m., we will lay my best friend to rest.
While signing the receipt, I notice a sign — or an index card, rather — that says Now Hiring. I point to it. “You’re hiring?”
Izzy nods, focused on her work. She picks a few flowers and bunches them together at the stems, then reaches for a white ribbon to tie around them. “Just something part-time. I could use a break every now and then.” She quirks an eyebrow. “Are you interested?”
The Last Wish of Sasha Cade Page 2