For the first time maybe ever, JD regretted his clothes: too many colors, too many patterns. Not one nice button-down, not one tie that didn’t feature sunglasses or turtles or something funny. Did he really own nothing he could wear to Drea Feiffer’s memorial service?
He’d have to swipe something from his dad’s closet. His dad was a lot bigger, and JD would look like a kid playing dress-up, but he already felt like he was playing dress-up—trying on someone else’s life, maybe. At least sometimes he wished he was. At any second he expected he might wake up and find that the past week, since Spring Fling and the fire that had consumed Ascension High School’s gym and Drea’s death, had just been some awful hallucination.
One week. One week of floating, bad dreams, and sickening guilt. A week since he’d rescued Em from the smoke and flames—and in doing so, left Drea behind. A shudder of guilt ran along his spine. He flung open his dad’s closet door and tried to focus on the silk ties, all variations of blacks, blues, browns, and grays.
School was closed for two days after the accident; even when it reopened, Em did not return. She’s going to take the week and see how she feels, JD heard Em’s mom, Susan Winters, say to his parents one night. Theories ran rampant at school: Em’s lungs were permanently scarred due to smoke inhalation. She was horribly burned in the fire, doomed to be disfigured forever. The doctors had cut off all of Em’s long, beautiful dark hair in order to address the blisters on her scalp and neck.
JD knew none of that was true. Em’s trauma was mental—she’d been struck by the deaths, in quick succession, of Sasha Bowlder and Chase Singer late last year. And now . . . Drea and Em had only recently become close, but JD sensed that both girls had bonded quickly—that Drea had become really important to Em. Which, frankly, surprised JD. Just this past Christmas, Em was still cracking jokes about Drea’s uniform when they went to the movies.
But something had obviously changed in Em since then. Something had changed in Ascension.
He hadn’t spoken with Em in a week. He’d seen her only once, just out of his periphery: the wisp of a figure flitting past the window in her room, which directly faced his. She’d looked like a ghost; he might not have even noticed if it wasn’t for her long brown hair. But he knew he’d probably see her at the church today, honoring their friend Drea: Drea of the half-shaved head and black nail polish and clove cigarette smell and dripping sarcasm.
His throat tightened up. Jesus. He was going to miss her.
He needed to talk to Em today, and know that she was okay. He couldn’t bear to lose her, too.
JD selected a navy-blue tie to go with the gray suit he’d unearthed from the back of his dad’s closet. It was vintage—pinstripe—but not over the top. Fumbling with the knot as he faced his parents’ mirror, JD gave himself a once-over. He hardly recognized himself in his father’s clothing. It might have been a stranger in the mirror: hair slicked back, fifties-style glasses, polished black shoes. Like one of those ad guys on Mad Men. JD wondered momentarily whether Em watched that show—whether she’d think he looked okay in a suit—and then hated himself for being so shallow.
He took a deep breath, then headed downstairs—going as slowly as possible, as if he could delay the inevitable.
“Poor Walt,” JD’s mom said as they piled into the family station wagon. “First his wife . . . now Drea . . . ”
“He’s going to fall apart,” his dad said matter-of-factly as usual. “He’s barely been holding it together these past few years.” Mr. Fount and Mr. Feiffer knew each other from work—JD’s dad bought fish for his restaurant from Walt Feiffer’s seafood warehouse down on the waterfront in Portland. Over the years, Mr. Fount had made little comments here and there, about how Drea’s dad smelled like booze early in the morning, or how he once saw him crying over a bucket of clams.
“It’s a terrible coincidence. . . . ” His mom trailed off, fiddling with her seat belt.
“What is?” Melissa piped up from the backseat.
“Well, it’s just that . . . he caused an accident a few years ago. It was a fire—and Drea was almost hurt. He was drinking then, too. But now . . . ”
“Let’s just leave it at that, Mom,” JD said.
In the backseat on the way to the memorial service, he watched the thawing landscape whirring past the car window. Everything is changing.
Truth was, any one of them could have died in the gym. It could have been his funeral today, and the only thing he’d have to show for his barely seventeen years on Earth would be a pile of stellar report cards, a few credits in school-play programs for lighting gigs, and years of romantic regrets. Well, just one regret, really.