The Boys & Girls of the Back Row [#Wattys2016]

This is How it Continued

Hannah's funeral was a debacle.

We all knew it. How could she be dead, when the newspapers had called her missing in action? How could she be gone, when she had loved, and been loved in return? With a tumbling championship on the line and five anxious friends knitting together around SATs and college applications?

The mourners had been given the narrowest, smallest details: Hannah was eighteen (and beautiful: because it was polite to call dead people beautiful, regardless of the truth). That her friends had loved her. That she made bad choices involving men and strangers. That her parents had called the police immediately, were grief-stricken, couldn't even work through the sympathy offerings of gritty coffee and undercooked quiche.

Paul's frequenting the coffin – appropriate, but unnecessary. His parents are making enough of a scene without their beloved stepson. Last week he shaved his head and took out his earrings. The mourners have no idea that he looks different, so very different from the Paul we know, the Paul Hannah knew.

Rowan's kneeling beside the drink table, heels pressed against the wall. She sits like a sinking stone: arms tucked around her ribcage, chin bound to chest. Headphones shimmering mauve through over-bleached hair. Her breathing is deep, crying-in-corners and losing-your-shit kind of deep, enough to split her wide open.

Before Hannah left, that last week, she was the best friend. Gwen and Lexya were jealous because, for once, they were excluded, so they had constructed their own butterfly walls of carelessness and nonchalance. It wounded them, Hannah's favoritism.

But Hannah was like that. Selfish. Sometimes cruel. We saw it in different ways: Paul thought she was heedless of social boundaries; Christopher thought she was just a brat; Gwen thought she didn't know how to navigate close friendship; Lexya thought she smoked when no one was watching; Rowan thought she hung the moon.

Gwen's rounding the pews, laughing under her breath with Hannah's fifteen year-old cousin. Her dress is lilac and sporting henna stains. Ink twists, serpentine, around her wrists, disappearing back into her sleeves. No emotion wasted, no tears spent.

Christopher and Lexya sit together. He, in the third row facing backward, legs hooked around the front of his chair. She, in front of him, toes touching his toes. Her face is blush-stained, bruise-weary. Last night her stepfather pinched her cheek too hard. Today, she wore too much concealer.

Christopher keeps reaching out to touch her, running his fingers over her dress and not her skin, like a gentleman. His pinkies, however, slip under the hem, wiggle against her cold kneecaps.

"Remember six months ago?" he's saying. "When we all crashed that funeral?"

"Chris," Lexya says, and she unhooks his finger from her dress. "Funerals for strangers are different..."

He's still talking. "...I slipped on a bottle cap when we climbed up on the drink table, you remember that? I think I shit myself a little – I thought I was going to fall – and, damn –" he lets his hands drop, pulls them together " – funerals for strangers are a helluva lot better than funerals for strangers."

"I know," Lexya says. She watches Paul watch the mourners. "Funerals suck."

Hannah's classmates filtered out in a steady stream. Friends glared at parents who glared at coffins who glared at nothing, and grief stank heavy in the air.

It's startling to sit and remember the sober darkness that sunk our spirits that afternoon. Perhaps it's better not to remember. We wouldn't, if we couldn't, but we must.

Because we know where she is now: safe, with us, again.

But we still don't know: why she left.

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