by Aarsen, Zoe
I climbed into bed early, assuring myself that I’d be out late the following night. Fantasies about what it would be like to slow dance with Evan in just twenty-four hours filled my head, replacing thoughts of anxiety about Hannah and Olivia. Around midnight, I heard a car pull into the driveway next door, and sat straight up in bed to watch Mr. and Mrs. Emory enter their house through the side door with Eddie following behind them, rubbing his eyes tiredly. They were having a serious discussion, but with my window closed their voices sounded muffled and indiscernible. It bothered me for some reason that Trey wasn’t with them; where could he have been at that hour? For the first time it occurred to me that maybe Trey had a girlfriend I didn’t know about.
About ten minutes after the Emorys’ arrived home and I finally began to drift off to sleep, the door to my bedroom opened and the shape of my mother’s body appeared there, illuminated from behind by the light in the hallway.
“McKenna, honey? Are you awake?”
I struggled to pull myself free from the grip of sleep to focus on my mom. Something was wrong, I knew immediately. My mother never came into my room unannounced, and never woke me up in the middle of the night.
“I’m afraid I have some really awful news, honey. There’s been an accident.”
CHAPTER 6
Olivia’s memorial service was held on Monday, and school was cancelled for the day so that everyone could attend. It was a somber occasion, almost unbearably long, as students, parents, and the Richmonds’ extended family drifted in and out of Gundarsson’s funeral home over the course of three hours. Mom insisted on accompanying me, even though I knew that hanging out in a funeral parlor was hardly how she would have preferred to spend her day off from teaching. The Richmonds, all tall and fair, gathered near the front of the large room, speaking in hushed voices, tapping the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs. Olivia’s casket, ornate and shiny, was closed. Next to it, a huge picture Olivia smiling in her volleyball uniform was placed on an easel, with a few of her baby pictures pinned on top of it in a sort of hastily assembled collage. I had heard rumors that Evan had been forced to identify his sister’s body at the coroner’s office because it had been so mangled that Mrs. Richmond had passed out at the sight of it. He had greeted me with a painful smile when I’d first arrived, but after a few minutes of strained conversation, he excused himself to retreat back to his family’s territory near the casket and avoided even looking in my direction.
Over the course of the weekend, I had aggregated snippets of the story from various sources. The headline on the Saturday morning issue of the Willow Gazette had been Tragedy in Green Bay: Local Teen Killed in Collision. The three sparse paragraphs about the crash claimed that two local teens from Weeping Willow High School had been involved in a crash just outside Green Bay when an eighteen-wheeler truck had hit them head-on during the hailstorm. The driver of the car in which Olivia had been riding hadn’t been named, but had allegedly stumbled away from the scene with minor injuries. A picture of what was left of the car had run alongside the article. It was unrecognizable as a vehicle; it looked more like a gnarly knot of scrap metal, and the expression on the face of the state trooper who had been photographed next to the wreckage indicated that he was thinking the same thing that I was thinking: how was it possible that someone had walked away alive from that kind of an accident? The newspaper claimed that the truck driver responsible was devastated; he hadn’t even seen through the heavy hail that he had swerved out of his lane. Cheryl had called me on Saturday afternoon to share the rumor that Olivia’s body had practically been cut in half from the force of the collision. The shoes she had just bought at the mall were found nearly thirty feet away from the car, off to the side of the rural highway, in the woods. Not far, Cheryl added, from Olivia’s severed arm.
Of course I wondered who had been driving her, if perhaps she had run into someone from school at the mall and had decided to hitch a ride either to the game or back to town when her car refused to start. In none of the tearful conversations I’d had with friends who’d called to talk had the name of the driver been mentioned. It didn’t seem like anyone knew with whom Olivia had spent her final moments.
At the back of the room, just inside the doors, I lurked in a corner, watching quietly as kids from school and teachers drifted in. No one knew quite what to say to Olivia’s parents, quite how to stand, where to put their hands, where to rest their eyes. Everyone was hungry for more details, myself included, but it was absolutely out of the question to talk about the accident at the memorial. Soft classical music played throughout the afternoon, pumped in through the air vents along with chilly air. There were enormous floral arrangements on both sides of the casket; sent from the Lions Club, the Knights of Columbus, the PTA, the faculty union at the high school, and Olivia’s dad’s accounting firm. A hanging arrangement of pale pink bud roses and baby’s breath draped over the casket’s top, held together with silky cream-colored ribbon. It was probably not all that different from the corsage that Pete had planned to place on Olivia’s wrist the night of the Homecoming dance, the dance that had been cancelled in light of Olivia’s tragic death. It was a morbid thing to think; but if Olivia had been able to share her opinion of her own wake, I think she would have approved.
Pete had arrived not long after me and my mom, staying just a few brief minutes with his parents before hugging Olivia’s mom and dad, and promptly leaving. He had nodded at me from across the room, his eyes red and swollen. Seeing a boy my own age who had quite clearly been crying made me feel very uncomfortable. He was so good-looking, he was almost shocking, and I found myself embarrassed to even be thinking about his attractiveness just three days after Olivia’s death. His suit seemed to fit him perfectly and I wondered if maybe it had been bought recently for the dance.
Tracy Hartford and her mother arrived early, their faces solemn and pious. They made a point of greeting everyone who entered and thanking them for coming, as if they were part of Olivia’s family. In reality Olivia barely even spoke to Tracy and thought she was an annoying gossip, but the Hartfords thrived on gossip and were certainly in their element that day at the funeral home. They asked everyone in attendance to sign the guest book and they were so insistent about it, it was almost as if reaching a goal of signatures would bring Olivia back.
I couldn’t remember having attended a memorial service or wake for Jennie, but presumably if there had been one, it had been in the very same room where we all gathered to pay our respects to Olivia. Willow was a small enough town that everyone was waked at Gundarsson’s and buried either at our church, St. Monica’s, which was where Jennie was buried, or the Jewish cemetery on the other side of town. Wearing my only black dress, two sizes too large for me, I picked the light blue nail polish off of my thumbs and made small talk with people I recognized as they entered and left. Mischa and Amanda arrived with their parents, and Mischa and I hugged for what felt like five minutes even though we had been talking on the phone almost hourly since dawn on Saturday morning.
“Has Candace come yet?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
Candace was having a complete and utter freak-out. As if it wasn’t enough to have unexpectedly lost her best friend, her whole-hearted belief that Olivia’s death had been pre-meditated somehow by Hannah was driving her to the brink of sanity. She had called me three times since Friday night, each time rambling hysterically about how she wanted to tell the whole world about what Hannah had done because Olivia would have wanted it that way. I hadn’t heard a word from her since Sunday morning, and hadn’t even received a response when I had texted her to see if she was okay on Sunday afternoon.
“Her mom admitted her to the hospital yesterday,” Mischa confided in me. “Julia texted me. They were afraid she was having a nervous breakdown and she’s in the psychiatric ward.”
I bit my lower lip, suddenly feeling unbearably cold in the funeral parlor’s frosty air. A certain and unshakable fear that we had bro
ught this unthinkable tragedy upon ourselves nestled into the marrow of my bones. We had done something so childish and irresponsible by playing that stupid game, and now, if my irrational fears were correct, Olivia had paid for it with her life. Poor Candace. No one would believe her, of course. I wasn’t even sure, despite my own creepy feeling, that I believed Hannah had predicted Olivia’s death in such boggling detail. I imagined the patient, patronizing look on her attending physicians’ faces at the hospital as she wildly blabbed about the birthday party game, sounding absolutely crazy.
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
“I thought maybe her mom would let her out to come to this, but maybe not,” Mischa mused. “Maybe she’s worse than I thought.”
It couldn’t be discounted that Olivia’s death had been a purely random coincidence. Even though it seemed pretty undeniable that Hannah had known exactly what was going to happen, it was still hard to believe that it was true. There was simply no explanation for how she could have predicted everything, or had a hand in making all the events actualize.
“We’re stepping outside for air,” I told my mom, who was fiddling with her purse like she was ready to leave. Naturally, people couldn’t help but stare at my mom; many of the guests in attendance at Olivia’s service had also attended Jennie’s. Surely they were thinking that my mom had some kind of an obligation to offer words of comfort to the Richmonds, having herself lost a child in a freak accident. But my mom wasn’t like that; even after eight years, her grief over Jennie’s death was still very private. When she’d seen Tracy Hartford’s mother approach her earlier in the afternoon, she had busied herself by pretending to read Olivia’s prayer card. “You don’t have to stay. I can get a ride home when I’m ready.”
My mom looked like I had handed her a winning lottery ticket and confessed to having some lesson plans to prepare at home. She accompanied me and Mischa outside to the parking lot, and we waited in silence, our backs pressed against the brick exterior of Gundarsson’s, until she got into her car and drove off. It was cold out, significantly colder in just the ten days that had passed since Olivia’s birthday. Cold enough that I buttoned up my denim jacket and Mischa pulled her wool cardigan around her waist. We stood outside watching traffic pass on the highway in silence for a few seconds, our eyes adjusting to the bright, overcast day after being in the dim funeral parlor for so long.
“My parents asked me about the game. Candace’s mom called my mom, and wanted to know what we did on Friday night,” Mischa finally said, her voice flat and emotionless.
“Jesus, you didn’t tell her, did you?” I asked, suddenly fearful that rumors were going to sweep the high school that we had been invoking spirits or worshipping the devil. My stomach felt upset, like I knew I was going to get in trouble, only I was far too old to be afraid of punishment. Primarily I felt embarrassed, because the game we’d played was so childish, for middle-schoolers. It would be mortifying for the entire high school to find out that was how the most popular girls in the junior class had spent a Friday night.
“No! Of course not,” Mischa exclaimed. She thought for a second, and then added, “I said we were telling ghost stories, but that was it. I mean, I feel bad kind of implying that Candace is lying, but she needs to get a grip! She can’t just go around claiming that Hannah had something to do with Olivia’s death. She’s going to make us all seem nuts.”
“Have you heard from Hannah at all?” I asked. “I’ve left her two voicemails, but she hasn’t called me back.”
A car entered the parking lot of the funeral home and both of our heads turned. It was the Emorys’ car, and when it parked, Trey emerged with his parents, looking almost unrecognizable. It wasn’t so much the black eye he had or the bright blue sling around his left arm that made him look so much like a different person, but the dark navy suit he wore with a silk tie. My immediate assumption was that he’d been in some kind of fight, and I wondered if he’d been out causing trouble on Friday night. I knew he sometimes hung out at Tallmadge Park with the heavy metal guys from school, and every once in a while troublemakers from Ortonville would show up there looking to throw some punches. Our eyes met across the parking lot and he looked away quickly as he approached the entrance with his parents.
“I cannot believe he’s here,” Mischa commented as the Emorys’ approached where we were lingering.
“Why? Because he wasn’t friends with Olivia?” I asked.
Mischa looked at me as if I was crazy. “No, McKenna. Trey Emory was driving the night of the accident. How did you not know that?”
Time came to a standstill. My heart paused for a prolonged second as I tried to make sense of what Mischa had told me, working backwards from the present to the beginning of Trey’s involvement with Olivia’s death. Trey had been with Olivia at the moment she died. He’d approached her in a parking lot, offering assistance. That was the part that disturbed me the most, that he’d offered his help to her. Maybe I’d started thinking of him as my own at some point, because he lived next door to me. But it really bothered me to think that maybe Trey had a crush on her, and thought he could win her favor by driving her home from the mall. Olivia never would have given a guy like Trey a second thought, never would have seen how special he was. Suddenly the lift he’d given me to school during sophomore year when it was raining seemed a lot less significant. He was just a guy who gave rides. There was nothing meaningful between us, and the realization made me feel hollow.
“We’ve talked on the phone, like, fifty times since Saturday morning and you never mentioned that,” I said, sounding hoarse.
“I thought I told you this morning. He ran into Olivia in the parking lot at the mall and offered her a jump start, and when that didn’t work, he said he’d give her a ride back to Willow. Then the hail started.”
The Emorys’ reached the entrance to the funeral parlor, and Trey strode inside without even acknowledging me and Mischa. Mrs. Emory recognized me and paused to greet me, and Mr. Emory stood loyally behind her, his hand on the small of her back as she leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. Mrs. Emory smelled like powdery perfume, one that was expensive and worn only on special occasions.
“Hello, McKenna,” she said, sounding tired. “Is your mother here with you?”
“She already left,” I said. “She had stuff to do at school.”
“I’ll stop by the house to say hi later,” Mrs. Emory said wistfully, as if she and my mother were confidantes. Mrs. Emory was a little younger than my mom and to the best of my knowledge they rarely spoke other than trading niceties in the driveway. She and Mr. Emory entered the funeral parlor, and Mischa raised an eyebrow at me.
“Who did you hear that from, about Trey?” I asked, my voice sounding a little strangled.
“Do you, like, know them?” Mischa asked suspiciously, distracted by my interaction with Trey’s parents. Her eyes darted toward the doors of the funeral parlor, specifying that it was the Emorys’ to whom she was referring.
I let my eyes wander out casually over the cars parked in the lot. “Sort of. They live on our street.”
That explanation seemed sufficient for Mischa to believe that I hadn’t been holding out on her about us having some kind of secret friendship. “There’s a girl on my gymnastics team whose mom works in the emergency room at St. Matthew’s Hospital in Suamico. She told me that Trey was brought in by an ambulance on Friday and he was in shock. He couldn’t even tell the doctors what had happened. He saw everything,” Mischa told me, her eyes enormous. “They had to sedate him and take his ID out of his wallet to even figure out who to call. My stupid parents made us go to gymnastics practice last night even though we’re like, in mourning. So I only found out last night when Megan told me.”
Mischa continued grumbling about her parents’ insensitivity about Olivia’s death and insistence that she continue her training in preparation for the state sectionals in February. Her voice grew distant as my knees weakened with nausea. My heart ached for Tr
ey and my feelings were even more hurt that he hadn’t said hello to me as he had passed us on his way into the funeral home. If Olivia’s actual injuries had been as terrible as predicted by Hannah, I couldn’t imagine being inches away from that kind of gore. I thought of Trey’s beloved Corolla, and made the connection that it was the scrap heap I’d seen in the photo that ran in the town newspaper. That car, the one he’d spent so many weekend afternoons fixing, was completely wrecked.
I was so caught up in thinking about Trey, and wracked with anxiety about whether or not we would exchange words before he left Gundarsson’s, that I forgot if Mischa had said she’d heard a word from Hannah. The sun began to set just after six o’clock, and Mischa’s parents insisted on driving me home. On my way out of Gundarsson’s, I finally submitted to Tracy Hartford’s request for me to sign the guestbook. Nearly every single page was covered in the neat penmanship of parents, crude drawings of kitties, butterflies, hearts, and unicorns. Michael Walton had been enough of a freak to write Junior Class Vice President beneath his name as if he was the Vice President of the United States, as if Student Government elections had already been held. As I slowly signed my name in my best handwriting, I felt like I was making a promise to Olivia that I would find out why this happened. I remembered her trying to bribe me with tacos. If I had been a better friend, if I’d wanted her to like me more, if I hadn’t been so adamant about running for office and trying to carve out a little independence for myself, I might have saved Olivia’s life.