A cardboard coffin.
Time slowed as Lucy saw into the coffin. The inside was filled with crumpled-up pieces of white printer paper. They reminded her of carnations. Gates’s dead face rose out of the sea of white paper like a lone, rosy-cheeked island. Some Saint girl had blown out her makeup kit, covering his bluish-gray dead skin with a sun-kissed flesh tone. Despite the approximation of healthy skin, Gates’s face had lost whatever fullness life gave it, and it was as if the flesh of his face was melting off the bone.
The memory of him the other night, on top of her in the rain, with his pants off, trying to strangle her, would never leave her mind. She wasn’t sorry to see him dead, but the Saints were.
They walked like they were wading through honey. Their heads seemed too heavy for their tired necks to support. They carried Gates to the center of the quad and set him down. When the last of the Saints exited the hallway, Lucy ducked back into the hall and watched from the shadows. As the procession passed she kept her head turtled inside the towel. If anyone had seen her, they hadn’t seen her face.
A Saint girl with short wispy white hair stood by Gates’s coffin, her puffed eyes dripping tears down onto the crumpled white paper. Lucy had seen her before. Her name was Lark. She had always been hanging around Gates, or off Will. She looked like she’d been crying for hours.
“Did you love him?” Lark said, in a voice squeezed tight with emotion.
The Saints answered back with a resounding, “Yes.”
“So did I,” Lark said.
Her face was clenched like she was being electrocuted. Lucy remembered seeing Lark with a dislocated jaw at the Saint—Slut battle. It looked like it pained her to talk.
Lark pulled out a black-and-white composition notebook she’d been holding under her arm. She opened it to a bookmarked page.
“Gates had a statement prepared in case of his death,” Lark said.
The Saints gasped like she’d said she’d brought stone tablets down from the mountaintop.
Lark cleared her throat.
“ ’S up, fags.”
The Saints laughed.
“I guess I’m dead,” she continued, “which is hard for me to imagine. Whatever took me out would have to be something pretty major. I hope I went down fighting two bears. Or in a bazooka fight. Was I at least on fire?”
More laughs from the Saints. The smiles their fallen leader’s words created were quick to fade. Their grief was too profound to be reversed with a few jokes from beyond the grave.
“I don’t know when you’ll be reading this, hopefully never. I’m writing this in the sewer underneath city hall. In Broomfield. In case we end up hiding out in any other sewers under any other city halls.”
The Saints nodded and smiled.
“The rest of you are eating dinner now. I’m watching you laugh. Telling stories about the summer before all this shit happened. I feel so grateful to have all of you, and to have had the opportunity to lead this group for a long time. I’ve done my best to keep us all alive. I’m going to keep going as long as I can, and try to make it fun as shit along the way. But let’s be real, my number could come up tomorrow. So I figured I had to write this letter to all of you. The group has to stay together. We are a family. Celebrate being alive together. Throw the biggest going-away party Colorado has ever seen for me, and tell stories about me till the sun rises. Please don’t forget me. I’ll never forget any of you. Peace, fuck, barf, love. Your pal, Gates.”
In one motion, Lark ripped the page out of the notebook. She fished a lighter out of the waist of her tights, and set the page on fire.
“Good-bye, baby,” Lark said, and dropped the flaming page into the coffin. The flames quickly ate their way across the crumpled paper until the entire coffin was ablaze. The tall fire churned out clouds of black smoke that snaked up into the sky, before getting swirled and spread thin by the gusting winds.
Lucy retreated from the quad as fast as she could. You aren’t supposed to go to the funeral of someone you killed. She felt nauseous. She’d ended someone’s life, and she’d really believed she should feel different, changed somehow, but she felt eerily the same. She saw their anguish, and she felt awful to be the cause of it, but if she was in the same situation again, she wouldn’t do any different. She didn’t know what kind of person that made her. Bad, she guessed.
At the top of a flight of stairs, she climbed up onto the handrail and removed the air vent cover grille above. A string was discreetly tied around one of the grille’s louvered slats, preventing it from falling to the floor. Lucy lifted herself up into the darkness of the metal air duct, and crawled through the square tunnel. She reached the grille that she was looking for and pushed till it popped out.
She’d made it. Maxine’s secret greenhouse. This would be her new home. The room that no one who was left in McKinley knew about. The room where she’d lost her virginity to Will. It was dark, but by the light that streamed in through the window, she could see that the white flower on the windowsill was still alive, its petals open, white, and fresh.
Lucy needed water. She’d finished the water from the spray bottle meant for Maxine’s flower the night before. And that was the last of it. She needed food too. The waves of hunger would take hold of her belly, but if she rode them out, they’d fade for another hour or two. Until they’d come back worse. Still, that was better than venturing out of her hidden room. At least in here, she was safe.
She stared at a piece of paper in her hand. It was a Xerox of Lucy’s and Will’s faces, nose to nose, their cheeks smushed into the copier glass. The image was overexposed and grainy, but they were both grinning like fools. They’d stuck their heads on the machine and made it on the one night they’d stayed in this room together. The last night he’d been here.
It was as if that night had never happened. Will was gone, people were dead, and all she had left of it was a piece of paper. She missed him like crazy. She wished he had never graduated, and it was just the two of them living in this room together. Then she wouldn’t be so afraid. Lucy touched his face on the Xerox.
She tucked the image in her pocket and climbed on top of the table. She pulled herself into the metal air duct. She brought the empty spray bottle with her. If she didn’t find food and water soon, she’d end up being too weak to do anything, and she’d die for sure. The duct was cold and dark. The metal popped and burped as she moved her weight across it. She came to the vent cover that opened to the stairwell, and pressed her face to the vent.