Dead To You

30. nerdy boy in a 90s romcom

Tuesday morning began with another assembly in the Chanler auditorium before classes, something I already suspected before the email notification appeared on my phone screen in the passenger seat of my mother's car or heard the announcement crackling through the loudspeaker in the hallway while I shoved my textbooks into my locker a few minutes later, sighing at the thought of listening to Principal Ackerman and the guidance counselor use familiar phrases like deep loss in our community or this difficult time that were beginning to grate against my eardrums like a sandpaper burn, all to the soundtrack of sniffling and barely muffled crying from everyone else around me.

I could already hear it in the hallway, girls greeting each other with choked heys and prolonged rocking hugs, a couple of guys pretending like they weren't emotional too and like no one noticed them loudly sniffing every so often.

I closed my locker, my fingernail scratching at the notices in the dial, before I decided to head into the restroom, purposefully not glancing towards a small group of cheerleaders gathered at the sinks who were huddled together, an indistinguishable mass of limbs and ponytails, before ducking into the furthest empty stall. I stood there for a moment, wondering how in movies whenever teens were hiding in bathrooms, they could just sit on the toilet seat in their clothes, and waited while the cheerleaders then awkwardly laughed about the state of their respective mascaras before the assembly finally began and I was left alone in the restroom.

I never skipped anything before, assembly or otherwise, so I wasn't sure if someone was going to come check the bathrooms to make sure that no one was ditching. Hopefully the answer was no. According to the email, the assembly was supposed to be for about fifteen minutes, so I pulled out my phone and resumed the Google search I had done earlier about missing person cases, the ones when they were found alive.

It had gotten to the point where I was beginning to recognize most of the names on the lists I found, even remembering vague details about their disappearances and how they were found. Most of the names were kidnap victims found years later, still with their captor, which I didn't think were that applicable to this situation, but they were also a few who had amnesia, war prisoners, even some that were the criminals themselves on the verge of being caught so they fled.

The ones about lost hikers or unaccounted for swimmers were harder to find—I told myself that this was because those cases were less exciting and newsworthy than ones about kidnapped children resurfacing alive decades later—but eventually I started searching for those cases specifically.

I wasn't sure why it mattered so much to me that the funeral was happening that week—on Thursday, according to the text message I had received from Victoria late last night, complete with the time and the address of the cathedral in town where it was being held, like it was all set in the stone she had probably already ordered for the burial plot—because how naïve it sounded in my mind to think that she could still be alive after ten days, when the police supposedly had reasonable evidence to suggest that she had drowned, whatever that meant.

It sounded like I was in denial, which was part of the reason I never mentioned any of this to my mom when she asked me last night how visiting the Rosenblooms went, because I knew that would be the first thing she thought if I told her, that soft sympathetic lowering of her eyebrows just as gentle as her voice would be as she tried to normalize this feeling as a stage of grief. And, sure, maybe I was in denial. But that didn't mean I was wrong.

And if I was in denial, a former friend of hers, then why wasn't her mother?

When I emerged from the restroom a safe eighteen minutes later, it was uncharacteristically quiet in the hall, as if everything had been hushed. The lockers were delicately closed with soft clicks instead of the typical hurried metallic slam that ricocheted from one end of the hall to the other, the squeaking of sneaker soles against the tiles was almost entirely absent, and the usually loud boisterous conversations had been toned down to shared whispers.