It feels like a thousand needles dancing up and down my nerves when I meet every empty stare in this full church.
A church full of people who don't believe in God until they need something to pray to. Something to swear on.
As my sweaty fingers curl around the podium like vines, I steal a lingering glance towards the pine casket beside me. And just like the stares in the room: it's empty.
I swallow the knot of emotion in my throat and bring my eyes straight in front of me. That's where Rose would be; standing in a room of sitting people, sending me a wink and a subtle thumbs-up.
And even though funerals are to comfort the living, I talk to the dead.
"I noticed everything. From the shitty tattoo at the nape of your neck, to the extra polite way you talk to people when you don't like them. But what I didn't notice, was why you would fall silent sometimes and not tell me what was wrong. And you told me everything. We were a duo of everything's." The vines grow tighter. I'm sure that the shape of my fingers will be left in the wood of the podium.
I can feel the confusion.
'Where is she going with this?'
Distant aunts clutch their purses uncomfortably. Good for nothing uncles scan the room for a snack table. Rose's mom thinks the handkerchief is muffling her sobbing: it's not. The reassuring hand of a husband stiffly sits at her jerking shoulders while he sits there blaming himself for something he couldn't have prevented even if he was more present.
"And those last hours we had... were everything."
~
I could almost hear Rose's bones rattle in the passenger's seat as we peeled down the strip of road she pointed me to. I peeked out the corner of my eyes and caught her as she gripped her tiny body like she was edging towards the final stages of hypothermia.
A grin stretched across my face. "Cold?"
She whipped her head around to me and shouted over the wind. "Oh no, not at all, I am actually MELTING. I'm pretty sure some of my liquefied skin seeped into the leather!" Rose wriggled her body deeper into the seat and curled into a ball.
I dipped my foot into the gas and laughed when I heard her shouts of protest.
"Hey! You're just trying to kill me today, aren't you? Is that why we're really going to Chickpea? You're gonna drag me out to one of your weird ritualistic trees and sacrifice my cold, lifeless body to a guy wearing nothing but a wolf's face, and my mom's going to call your house and be like, 'Hey, where's Rose?' and your aunt's gonna be like, 'Oh, my lovely dear old wonderful niece Millie took her out to the forest and MURDERED HER IN COLD BLOOD. SHE USED A BLUNT TWIG AND SOMEHOW MANAGED TO CLEANLY CUT HER LIVER OUT AND EAT IT.' and then my family's gonna be like 'Hahaha, typical ol' Rosie.'"
My face coiled and I peered at her through my shades. "Why did your mom have a British accent at the end of that?"
"Because she was happy I was dead and had already moved to the UK to celebrate her new life without me."
I felt my eyes roll as we reached a wide curve into the thick brush of forest. The thrill of being enveloped by towering pine trees revved my spirit. We rolled over a naked patch of land and crawled to a stop.
I ducked out of the car as my camera swung from my neck and a hair clip sat pinched between my teeth. As I gathered my hair into a mess of a bun, Rose surfaced from the passenger's side with her arms tucked in her shirt. I reached in the back and tossed her a sweater.
She held up the sweater and shook it at me as she spoke."You had this the whole damn time?"
I flashed her a toothy grin and pivoted into the array of trees. As I dove into the more shadowy bit of forest ahead, I heard a groan and series of mumbled insults from behind me. Rose never liked the hike through Chickpea, but she sure loved getting to the destination. Sometimes I think the hike is the best part. Because that's when you have to forget about everything else. Cell service gets cut off. The sound of honking cars seems like a distant memory. And even if you screamed at the top of your lungs, there's absolutely no one there to hear you.
Well, assuming you're alone.
~
I was sure there was a plenty of people who have come to Chickpea bunch of times and pretended that it was their own little oasis. But amazingly, we would never see those other people, and we could keep on pretending it was our secret to keep.
Halfway through the hike, Rose started to moan about a cramp in her calf so we stopped at a large rock.
I poked around the area on her calf she claimed to have been "definitely attacked by a ravenous squirrel out to get her because of that one thing that happened that one time with that one other squirrel." I, of course, told her that she was totally right and that we should probably run before more of squirrels get her.
"I just wanted to feed him..." she pondered to herself as she looked up to the rolling clouds above us.
"Don't mess with nature," is what I always had to say when it came to her squirrel story.
I pushed myself up from my proposal stance and brushed the leaves off my pants. I helped Rose up and she paused for a moment to look at me. The look on her face was unsettling but I couldn't pinpoint exactly why. Even though the sun was staring down directly from above, she still shivered a little in that sweater. I felt a little chill, too, but not in the same way she did. I ignored the heavy feeling settling in my stomach. And it didn't matter until it did. I had thought nothing of it at the time. The way that the leaves sounded different. Like when we wouldn't move, but they still crunched. The way that the breaths I heard didn't match the way her chest moved. How I felt that if I screamed at the top of my lungs, someone else would hear me. But I ignored it.
So we kept going.
Once we reached the clearing, Millie and I booked it towards the colossal boulder that sat before another dip of land. When you stood on that rock you could see everything. The car, the rest of Chickpea, the tops of trees, other lowly boulders that wish to be as big someday.
We settled on the top of Millie Mountain ("Because you're my rock," she stated once proudly.) and continued to discuss how beautiful the view never ceased to be.
"It's so different every time we come here." My legs swung over the edge off the rock, kicking debris off to a large drop.
"Are you about to spit some photography bull at me, cause I'll pass on that."
"Do you always have to be so rude?" I hissed, smacking her shoulder.
She pretended it hurt.
I consoled her.
We took pictures.
We laughed about something stupid I don't remember.
We talked about what we'd do the next day and what time she got off work after school and how cute Dylan Homer was.
And then the rest of the day was a blur.
I drove her home.
And then the next morning, she didn't come out when I came to pick her up.
And then a week later, after being convinced that she had run off with another stupid guy, she was declared missing.
