As Dead as It Gets

by Katie Alender

“We’re fine,” I said.

  She stared up at the spindly, leafless treetops. “I guess it kind of makes sense that you guys are together.”

  My pulse quickened. “What does that mean?”

  She gave me an uncomfortable glance. “You know, because you’re both sort of—”

  “Girls!” Ben called. He was standing on the path up ahead. “We’re starting!”

  “Sort of what?” I asked.

  Megan gave her head a quick shake. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  Brother Ben was waiting for us at the door. “Howdy, Megs. And Lex. How are we today?”

  Carter and Megan used to be the only people who called me “Lex.” But considering Carter didn’t call me anything at all anymore, and Megan only existed in the context of these weird, stupid meetings…Brother Ben could have it.

  But “Megs”? Five months ago, I would have assumed Megan would pulverize anyone who said it to her face.

  Now she just grinned at Brother Ben. “Happy Tuesday.”

  I started to take a seat in the fourth row, but Megan touched my sleeve. “Hey, let’s sit up front.”

  I couldn’t muster the energy to protest. I just picked up my bag and moved to the chair next to hers.

  Ben stood at the front of the room and began the meeting, then passed the contraband box, then opened the floor for discussion. A couple of kids got up and spoke, but the testimonials ended faster than usual, which momentarily put me in a good mood. I thought I might get a few extra minutes to spend with Megan in the parking lot. Maybe once the meeting was out of her system, she’d calm down and actually act like my old best friend.

  But after the last kid went back to his seat, Ben gave Megan a nod that seemed to suggest they shared a secret. She glanced at me (rather ominously, I thought) and stood up.

  Uh-oh.

  “So today we’re going to try something new.” Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a bright, encouraging, and one hundred percent artificial smile. “It’s called the ‘hot seat.’ And it’s basically sixty seconds where you stand up and people can ask you anything. And you have to answer honestly.”

  Oh, no. No, no, no.

  A thousand times no.

  “So, I was thinking…um…Lex? Do you want to go first?”

  I shook my head. Nope. I did not.

  She didn’t lose her plastered-on smile. “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

  “Megan, no,” I said, my voice low—almost a growl.

  Ben stood up, his whole face one big I told you so. “Well, Megs, I guess your sales pitch needs some work.”

  People behind me tittered, more from a collective sense of discomfort than anything else, and Megan went red from her neck to her ears. As much as I couldn’t bear this new weird Megan, I also couldn’t bear to watch Ben make fun of her, knowing how she worshipped every word that came out of his stupid puffer-fish mouth.

  “Fine,” I said, standing up.

  Megan’s eyes were wide. “No, Alexis—you don’t have to.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Brother Ben rubbed his hands together like a villain who’s finally got the helpless damsel tied to the train tracks. No doubt he’d been waiting a long time to probe my evil brain.

  Megan was already looking regretful. “Sixty seconds starts…” She hit the start button and let a couple more seconds pass. “Right…now.”

  Hands went up around the room, but Ben ignored them all and looked right at me. “Why did you get involved with the occult?”

  I glared at him. “Because I had to.”

  “Are you truly unaware of the danger you’re dealing with?”

  I let the question hang in the air before I turned to him. “Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

  “So why do you continue to do it?” he asked, a challenge.

  “Who said I do?”

  His nostrils flared. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious, judging by your attitude alone, that—”

  “My attitude is fine,” I said. “And I don’t need to sit here and be attacked—”

  “We’re not trying to attack you.” Megan clawed her way in, trying to defuse the tension before the situation exploded in her face. “We’re trying to help you.”

  This was help? My insides felt like they were being twisted, and I felt a sudden shock of love for my sister—who, when she said she wanted to help me, meant it from the bottom of her heart.

  Megan was giving me a chance to calm down, to take the easy way out. But I didn’t want the easy way out. I was too angry. I’d been ambushed, and I was looking for a fight. Brother Ben had wanted this to happen, even if Megan was too blinded by her willful ignorance to see that. On purpose or not, she’d led me right into his trap.

  And as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t forgive that.

  “The questions you were asking me before…” She let her voice trail off.

  “What questions?” Ben asked. “What have you two been discussing?”

  “Nothing!” Megan cried. “Nothing. It wasn’t important!”

  “Maybe not to you,” I said, staring her down.

  She looked at the floor.

  “Now, hold on,” Ben said. “Megs, if you’ve been backsliding, maybe it’s you who needs to be on the hot seat.”

  Anything I wanted to say now would be like slapping my best friend in the face, so I stared at him, seething.

  The mood in the room had become decidedly dark for a Brighter Path meeting, and Ben took notice and lowered his voice. “I don’t know why you feel you need to be rude and hostile,” he said, dragging his lips into what was supposed to be a smile. “We’re all here to support one another.”

  “Support? That’s what you call it?” I said, picking up my bag. “Telling us we’re weak and helpless?”

  “Alexis, I’m sorry!” Megan said. “I didn’t know—”

  “Maybe it’s better that you go,” Ben said. “Since you’ve proven yourself to be not only a liar, but a thief as well.”

  Megan was practically frantic. “No, wait. This is all wrong. Alexis—”

  “Let her go, Megs,” Ben said. “She’s chosen her path. She knows what she wants.”

  What I wanted was to heave Megan over my shoulder and carry her out of there, straight to a cult deprogrammer.

  No, that wasn’t true. What I really wanted was for her to walk out on her own two feet.

  I turned and looked at her. Her expression was sad, pleading—but she hadn’t moved, not an inch, in my direction.

  She was staying.

  A sea of astounded eyes watched me from the rows of seats.

  “Everyone has moments of weakness,” I said. “But that doesn’t make you weak.”

  I pushed the door open and felt a rush of winter air in my face.

  I was walking away from more than just Brighter Path.

  I was walking away from my best friend.

  I STORMED ACROSS the parking lot and slammed the car door behind me, hurling my bag onto the passenger seat. “Lydia!” I called. “Where are you?”

  She didn’t appear. I turned the key in the ignition so forcefully I had a moment of fear that it might break in two.

  “What? What is it?” Lydia faded into view in the backseat.

  “I need your help.”

  “About time!” She smirked. “I’ve been waiting for you to give up on the albino Swede look.”

  “Not with my hair,” I said, pulling out of the parking lot. “With something else.”

  “Like what?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she batted a hand through my arm. “Like what, Alexis?”

  “You’ll see when we get there,” I said.

  Lydia squirmed in her seat. “Can’t you just call an exorcist? Or a tiny creepy little old lady, like in Poltergeist?”

  “Lydia,” I said, “if I got an exorcist, what do you think would happen to you?”

  “Right,” she said. “Never mind.”

  We were parked in front of the funeral
home that had handled Lydia’s services, and she was pretty jumpy. When I finally I told her that I wanted to get more information about the yellow roses, she freaked out and disappeared completely for a few minutes. Then she faded back in, looking embarrassed. I wonder if popping out of sight is the ghostly equivalent of peeing your pants.

  “If there are any funerals going on, we’re not going in, right?” Lydia said. “I can’t. I won’t. I hate funerals.”

  I wasn’t wild about them myself. “I promise,” I said, because the parking lot was empty. I pushed my shoulders back, held my head high, and went inside, with Lydia right at my heels like a nervous dog.

  The lobby was carpeted in plush beige and wallpapered in soft olive-green paper with blue flowers. There was a small sofa, a side table with a lamp and a stack of magazines, and a desk with a small bell on it. I rang the bell.

  “Hello?”

  Lydia yelped in surprised, and I spun around to see a man standing between me and the door, silhouetted in the late afternoon sun.

  “Can I help you?”

  He moved into the light so I could see him. He had a long, wrinkled face and wore a jacket and tie.

  “Hi,” I said. “Um…I wanted to ask some questions.”

  He frowned.

  I’d invented a few different explanations, figuring I’d use the one that seemed most appropriate in the moment. I discarded “my best friend is dying and wants me to find her a cool funeral home” and “I think I might want to be a mortician when I grow up” and went for the one that was closest to the truth.

  “I’m a student at Surrey High, and I’m doing research on issues related to death and dying,” I said. “I was hoping someone here would have a couple of minutes to talk to me.”

  He seemed to consider it, but was on the verge of saying no, I could tell. So I started talking again.

  “What I’ve found is that our society seems to think of death as, like, this mysterious, horrible thing. When really, it happens to everyone. So I’m sort of researching the idea that death is more like a passage. And how funerals help people cope.”

  He checked his watch. “Well, I guess we could chat for a few minutes. Do you mind coming back to the office? We have an appointment coming in shortly, and I’d rather they not overhear us.”

  I followed him through a wood-paneled door. We passed a woman sitting at a desk, talking on the phone, and went into a glass-walled office.

  “It’s good that she’s here,” Lydia said, looking out at the woman. “So you don’t have to worry about him murdering you and dissolving your body in a vat of acid.”

  I couldn’t reply, so I gave her a withering glare.

  “I’m Richard Henry Gordon,” the man said. “And you are?”

  Uh. “Alexis Ann Warren.”

  “What?” Lydia said. “Henry-Gordon is his last name. It’s on the sign, doofus.”

  He gestured to a guest chair, then sat down at his desk. “Well, Alexis Ann, would you like some candy?”

  “Would you like some dead-people candy?” Lydia asked. “Alexis Ann?”

  “Um, no, thank you,” I said.

  “All right, then. Ask away.”

  “I was wondering about the ritual of having a funeral. What goes into that? Who makes all the decisions?”

  He touched his fingertips together and leaned back, staring at an invisible spot on the ceiling. “Obviously, there are considerations such as religion, the wishes of the family, budget—that’s a big one. Sometimes the deceased will have expressed certain preferences, and in that case, we make those a priority.”

  That was my in.

  “Like—the kind of flowers?”

  “Flowers, music, the casket, the format of the service, the location…”

  “But are people specific about that stuff? If I said I want daisies, you would give me daisies?” Or if I said yellow roses…?

  “Provided your parents were supportive, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t.”

  “What if people don’t have preferences about things?”

  “That happens quite a lot. We’re often left to make certain decisions if the family isn’t feeling up to it. Usually, the more sudden and unexpected a death, the less the family is prepared to come up with specific answers. So we go with our tried-and-true standbys.”

  “Sudden, like…when kids die?”

  He frowned and sat forward.

  “Easy, Nancy Drew,” Lydia said. “You’re spooking him.”

  “Can you give me an example of your standbys?” I asked. “If a person came in and didn’t have any preferences or whatever?”

  “Well,” he said, “in the mid-range, you’d have a solid pine casket, lined, with a split lid; some classical music, which we provide—”

  “And the flowers?”

  “Our standby flowers are yellow roses,” he said.

  Bingo.

  “Do yellow roses mean, like, death?”

  That actually got me a smile. “No. Yellow roses symbolize joy and friendship. But we’ve always used them. They were a favorite of my mother’s. It’s just preference. Bergen and Sons uses a lot of lilies. Victor Campos likes white roses.”

  I was guessing Bergen and Sons and Victor Campos were other funeral homes. “Kind of a signature,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You could call it that.”

  Yellow roses were their standby. Their default. That meant this ghost could be anyone.

  “That sucks,” Lydia said. “My mom was too sad to even pick flowers? I would have picked black roses.”

  I glanced at her to make sure she was okay. She just seemed bummed, so I turned back to Mr. Henry-Gordon.

  “Do you do funerals for young people?” I asked. “People my age?”

  “Of course.” He gave me a sympathetic look, like he was about to deliver some pretty bad news. “Death can come for any of us, no matter how old or young we are.”

  “Ugh, he’s creepy,” Lydia said, perking up a little. “Do you think he saw me naked? I hope not.”

  I stared down at my notebook, trying to ignore her and focus. “So you’ve done a lot of funerals for teenagers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me roughly how many…in the past three years, maybe?”

  He leaned toward the computer and tapped a few buttons.

  I tried to catch Lydia’s eye, to get her to go around and look at the screen. But she was staring at the family portrait on the wall behind the desk. So I faked a coughing fit, stood up, and waved my hand through her body.

  “God! Keep your hands to yourself!” she said, jerking away. “I’m already traumatized from being dragged here, and—”

  I gave Mr. Henry-Gordon a meaningful look.

  “Oh,” she said. She walked around the desk and leaned over his shoulder.

  “It looks like, in the past three years, we’ve done twelve services for teenagers.”

  “I can’t read them,” Lydia said. “He’s scrolling too fast.”

  “Um, wow,” I said. “Do you mind telling me how many were girls and how many were boys?”

  He started clicking through again, more slowly.

  “Okay.” Lydia leaned over his shoulder. “Boy, boy, Claudine, Rachel, boy, Laina, boy, Quinn—is that a boy or a girl?—Jamila, boy, Grace…Lydia. Saved the best for last.”

  “Seven girls and five boys,” Mr. Henry-Gordon said.

  “Were they all sudden deaths?”

  “I’m sorry, Alexis Ann, I don’t know that I feel comfortable going into that level of detail.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m obligated to respect the confidentiality of our relationships with the bereaved.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Lydia said. “My screen says ‘aneurysm.’ If you can get him to scroll back, I’ll tell you what they all say.”

  I only had one chance left. “Of course,” I said. “I definitely understand. But could you tell me if any of them were—”

  The woman who’d been on the phone knocked on the door and opened i
t. She cast a suspicious glance at my white hair, then looked at Mr. Henry-Gordon. “Your five o’clock is here.”

  He stood up. “I hope I’ve helped you some. I think it’s a very interesting topic for a paper. If you’d like to take my card, you could e-mail me a copy when it’s finished.”

  “You bet,” I said, slipping the card into my pocket.

  “SO WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING NEW,” Lydia said. She was perched on the back of the toilet, watching me brush my teeth.

  “Yes, we do,” I said, dribbling toothpaste down my chin. I leaned over to spit. “We know the names of the other girls who have had their funerals there.”

  “What good does that do for us?”

  “We look up those girls and find the one that looks like the ghost I keep seeing.”

  Lydia reached down and absently spun the toilet paper roll. “But why does the ghost seem to be obsessed with you? Do you think this town house is haunted?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “According to Mimi, that dress was two years old. This neighborhood is newer than that.”

  Lydia glanced up. “Unless…maybe she died here before construction started. Or during it?”

  “Hm,” I said. “That’s worth looking into.”

  “Alexis?” It was my mother’s voice. “Who are you talking to?”

  “I’m on the phone!” I called.

  “In the bathroom?” Mom asked. There was a longish pause. “Well, okay.”

  Lydia cackled, so I grabbed my hairbrush and swung it lightly through her head. She recoiled, pressing her hands against her ears. “Not cool.”

  She followed me into my bedroom and sat on my dresser while I pulled the covers back and got ready for bed. I looked up at her, wondering why she was still around. Before, she’d never stayed longer than an hour or two, but today she’d been hanging out all afternoon. And from the looks of things, she planned to stay the night.

  I tried to keep my voice light. “So what is this—a slumber party?”

  “Ha,” she said. “You wish you could have people as cool as me at your parties.”

  I almost pointed out that she didn’t fall into the “people” category anymore, but I bit my tongue. No point in hurting her feelings. And then I realized—why should I care if she slept in my room? It was a billion times better than waking up to the superghost.