Letters From The Dead

Chapter 2

It was three days later, Wednesday, when someone bothered to tell me that she’d died. Deidre’s mom called me, sobbing, telling me the news and I acted surprised and horrified. I’d expected guilt to wash up over me for lying, but I didn’t feel anything. She hung up, murmuring about me being in shock and how she would be in contact with me about funeral arrangements. I already knew that Deidre wanted to be cremated, but I also knew that with her mother in charge, it wasn’t going to happen. Cremation freaked out the woman and so there would be a coffin and a grave and a headstone that I could go and visit. I wasn’t sure if the idea bothered me or not, being able to visit the headstone of my best friend.

I wasn’t really sure of anything at this moment in time.

School was better than it had been in a long time. I did my homework and went to my classes and took the tests and did all the motions of finally getting my life back on track. My teachers were impressed, all of them stating that they knew I’d be able to do it if I just put my mind to it, and people who knew me from back when I actually did well in school were all under the impression that I was back to my old self.

It’s strange, because usually, when you think about someone who’s just lost someone important, they’re not automatically looking better than ever or doing really well in school or whatever. They’re supposed to be falling apart and all that crap you see in movies and read in books. But in a morbid sort of way, I’d been expecting it to happen at one point, my best friend killing herself. She’d been telling me for ages now. I was just. . .blank. Not even that numbness that you sometimes read about, but there wasn’t anything there at all. That week in school, no one suspected a thing.

And then it was Saturday, the day I was supposed retake my midterm and my mother dropped me off bright and early in the morning, trying—and failing—to kiss me on the cheek and wishing me luck. The date for the funeral had been set and it was that Wednesday, exactly a week from when I’d been officially told that Deidre was dead. I walked into the math classroom with a blank expression on my face, greeting my teacher politely and accepting the test, taking it to the far back of the room and sliding into my desk, slouching low as I scanned the first question.

I knew the answer to it, and when I looked at the next two, I knew the answers to those as well. I was so tempted to put them all right, just to surprise him since he was clearly sure that he would be giving me a low grade.

But in a weird way, I wanted someone to take me aside and ask me what was wrong. No one ever did that because no one ever suspected that something wasn’t right, and I just wanted to prove to myself that someone did actually care.

My average grades weren’t good enough to be bragged about like they used to be, but they weren’t bad enough to result in a talk from the teacher or my parents or some other random person. It wasn’t like I planned on spilling anything to whoever it was who asked—I’d probably tell them that no, nothing was wrong—but I wanted to hear the words anyway. “Are you alright?” Just one time I wanted someone to notice that something was amiss.

And so for the first time in my life, I deliberately failed my test. Marking each and every single question wrong, I scratched some random numbers under some of the problems to look like scratch work and scrawled my name across the line at the top before handing it in with a nod and leaving the classroom.