Three Quarters Dead (7 page)

ALMOST A MONTH ago on a Saturday afternoon without a cloud in the blue sky, my three best friends forever, Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie, were killed. Their SUV went off the Country Club Road and hit a tree. An apple tree in full bloom. Tanya was at the wheel, on her phone . . . with me.

I’d wanted to think my mother wouldn’t let me go with them that afternoon, to the mall. But actually they hadn’t asked me. They hadn’t gotten around to it. Anyway, the whole trip was about prom dresses—that day they’d been planning since Halloween at least. The day they’d make their basic decision. Then Tanya would take Joanne back.

But then halfway to Nordstrom, Tanya called me. She started to. Just a few words: “Kerry, we’re all—” Was she going to ask me to join them at Nordstrom? Or was she just monitoring me? She monitored a lot of people. She’d monitored Alyssa Stark to the day she graduated.

I thought maybe Tanya had hit the wrong button or dropped the phone or something. But in that moment the SUV must have been in the air. Over a ditch. And then the tree. They weren’t wearing seat belts. They never did. We didn’t. Remember Halloween? We were in and out of the car, so we didn’t.

I tried to call Tanya right back, and got nothing. But by then they were gone, all of them. All the friends I had. Just like that. How can you exist in one moment and then
not
in the next? It wasn’t real. None of it. It wasn’t right, or what anybody wanted.

The school didn’t have a grief counselor. Nothing as bad as grief was supposed to happen at a school like Pondfield. They had to bring one in. Then they held an all-school assembly to introduce her to us. It was like sophomore orientation in September, but for everybody. Then they got into a lot of talk about driver safety and seat belts and phoning from behind the steering wheel. Two phones went off during the assembly.

In that first week a lot of people got appointments with the grief counselor. It was a free period for a bunch of people. Shannon Grady and half her cheerleaders went. I pictured them there in the counseling wing, in uniform, doing one of their pyramids for our game against Ridgefield.

Sophomores went. It was like an orgy of grief before it was over. There were pictures on every phone of the car wreckage. The BMW wrapped around the apple tree, with the apple blossoms fallen on it like spring snow. Even pictures of the BMW after it had been towed.

That was the week of the memorial service, and the shrine. The shrine sort of happened against the apple tree. Loads of flowers and ribbons in school colors, blue and silver. Stuffed animals. Downloaded pictures of Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie, laminated to weatherproof them. A rosette of orange and black ribbon that must have been somebody’s Halloween Hottie award. Somebody had left a vintage cell phone at the shrine. Which a few people said was in poor taste. But it just meant that Tanya died as she’d lived. She always networked and multitasked and kept her lines of communication open. She always had a finger on whatever was happening.

Anyway, Country Club Road wasn’t particularly safe. There’d been talk about widening it.

But the flowers on the shrine were still fresh when people started scrambling. The senior girls did. Tanya and Natalie had been the top of the heap. Makenzie could have ruled the juniors if she’d felt like it. A ton of people wanted to be who they’d been, including some people nobody had especially noticed. Like Emma Bentley and Jocelyn What’s-her-name. It wasn’t going to work for them, but they scrambled.

And people moved on.

The seniors had heard from their colleges, so there was buzz and Twitter about that. Graduation too, coming up. And after that, summer and summer plans. Endless summer.

AND NOW IT was May, the Friday of prom week. The prom posters were everywhere, and the juniors’ committees were down to the wire. I personally thought they might call off the prom, out of respect. Nobody else seemed to think so. They had their dresses.

Nobody left
that
to the last minute. I was hearing a lot about dresses. You’d be surprised what you can hear when there’s all this space around you.

I remembered last September and eating lunch alone and hearing every word from the conversation at the other end of the table. But back in September I hadn’t known what alone was.

The other thing about this year’s prom was that Tanya and Natalie had begun planning an after-prom party.
The
after-prom party. It was going to be—it would have been at Natalie’s house, on the terrace and around the pool. Tanya didn’t want the party at her house because of Joanne.

“She’d get off her StairMaster and be all over us,” Tanya said. “She’d be everywhere we turned. She’d hack in.”

So it was to have been at Natalie’s, and they had ordered blue and silver T-shirts that read:

They’d had forty of them silk-screened and handed out to let everybody know who was invited, and who wasn’t.

The days moved on, and somebody put a couple of The Only After-Prom Party T-shirts on eBay. Now the buzz was all about the after-prom party at Chase Haverkamp’s. And it was going to be given by guys. This was pretty outrageous because it was supposed to be girls who made the social rules. But what girl would dare? Emma Bentley? Jocelyn? Please.

So there was a lot of after-prom party buzz, which had zero to do with me.

The earth turned, but I didn’t budge. I pretty much just logged off of life. There was still some hallway crying from various people. But I was probably the only one still seeing the grief counselor. I’d lost the most.

SHE WAS ALL right, I suppose, as grief counselors go. She didn’t tell me to turn my frown upside down or anything. She didn’t try to patch me up with bumper sticker slogans. But needless to say, she wasn’t helping. How could she? Something had been taken away from me that no adult could give back.

We’d had some bad sessions in that poky, windowless little cell of an office down at the end of the counseling wing. Every third meeting was with my parents, and they were the worst times. Even Dad didn’t get it— that you don’t make new friends in high school. Not at Pondfield High School. You’re lucky if you hang on to the ones you have.

“Honey, there must be plenty of kids who’d be glad to—”

But I had to cut him off. He didn’t get it. It wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t get it.

Also, he couldn’t see what an honor it had been. I was only this first-semester sophomore last fall when Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie took me in. Me. A nothing little tenth grader who knew zero about layering or labels or who was in charge. Even Dad didn’t see the miracle of it.

My mother was way worse, of course. “Honey,” she said, “Tanya and Natalie were seniors. They wouldn’t have even been here next—”

“So you’re saying they might as well be dead because they were going to graduate anyway?” I said, really screaming at her. Besides, Makenzie was a junior, and she’d have—

“I’m not saying that,” my mother said. “But you can’t blame me for being grateful you weren’t in the car with them. And I think you need to use this time to—”

“Don’t tell me to go out and get new friends!” I screamed. “Don’t
you
start.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you that,” my mother said. “I was going to say that maybe now you can begin to find out who you are.”

Me? Who was I without them? My mother so didn’t get it. My clueless mother. She couldn’t see I was three-quarters dead myself.

TODAY, THOUGH—NOW—everything was different.

I was smiling inside, grinning from ear to ear, all the way along the hall of the counseling wing. I’d turned my frown upside down because this big rock had rolled off me. Because Tanya had texted, and the nightmare was over, almost.

THE GRIEF COUNSELOR was Ms. Gordon, but she’d asked me to call her Rosemary. I didn’t want to, so I hadn’t called her anything. She seemed to live and work out of an oversized tote bag with her other shoes in it. The only thing on her desk was a box of Kleenex.

I was braced for her when I heard voices coming out of her office. I’d forgotten this was a session with parents. They were there early, talking about me behind my back, which I didn’t particularly like. I stopped outside the door because my mother was talking.

“I should have done something sooner,” she was saying. “I should have nipped this in the bud. After that business last Halloween at the latest. Kerry was just too . . . grateful to be accepted. She was swept off her feet and didn’t know which way was up. She didn’t know what was real. These girls were too old for her. I was so busy playing hands-off suburban single parent and giving her all the freedom she—”

“Why are you overanalyzing this?” my dad said, breaking in. “You overanalyze everything. We’re talking kids here. Kids. They’re resilient. They move on. I never had a friend in high school I couldn’t do without. All Kerry needs is time to—”

I walked in then. Dad was on one side, his chair tipped back, having his say. And looking at his watch. My mother was on the other side, as far from him as she could get. She was wearing her quilted Burberry and her concerned look.

I walked in, and I didn’t need this now. I so totally didn’t need any of this.

“I’m fine,” I said to them in the old voice I hadn’t used in weeks. “I’m done here.”

Then I spun around and got out before anybody could say anything. Ms. Gordon could keep her Kleenex. I wasn’t even numb now. I could feel my feet, slapping along the floor tiles. And where was my backpack? And my books? And what class did I have third period? Language Arts? Something. And what were we discussing in that class?
Lord of the Flies?
Whatever.

I was fine because Tanya had texted. And everything else had been a . . . mistake. A cosmic mistake. And I had to be on the 3:50 train into the city because in another miracle, Tanya had texted me.