Hush

Half the bottle was gone before she fished her phone from her bag. “She’s dead,” she said, voice flat and words somehow clear despite the amount of booze she had drunk.

“Where are you?” Maddox demanded. He was calm. She guessed he had his cop voice on. She hated that her friend had to die for her to hear it, because she much preferred that emotionless tone to anything she’d heard from him up to that point.

She couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation, but she knew there had been one, since after she told him where she was, he had given her an order.

“I want you to stay on the phone with me, Orion,” he said. “You don’t have to make any conversation, you don’t have to say anything else, I just want you to stay here. I’m going to talk, but you don’t have to answer. Just listen to my voice and know that I’m on my way to you and you’re not alone.”

Hadn’t she just been thinking about how she needed to be alone? How she needed to learn how to handle trauma by herself? Yes. But she stayed on the phone anyway.

The funeral was bad.

Orion couldn’t imagine any funeral being good, but she would think at least they’d be better attended. As it was, the amount of people here was nothing short of depressing.

Shelby.

Her parents, because Shelby’s parents still hadn’t gotten out of the habit of going everywhere with her. No way could their sweet little daughter do anything on her own.

Orion wondered if they were thinking about how easily they could be attending their own daughter’s funeral. By the way her mother was clutching Shelby’s hands, that’s exactly what was on her mind. Orion worried that Jaclyn’s death would bring an even tighter grip from her parents around Shelby’s life, her existence.

Jaclyn didn’t have any family. No one slithering out of the woodwork with all the publicity and possibility of sucking some money from her. That was when you knew you truly had no one. When not even the leeches emerged for a payout. Orion knew what that was like because none of her family had done the same. In fact, her funeral would’ve had the exact same people as Jaclyn’s.

April’s hand was clenched in Orion’s much like Shelby’s mother held her daughter’s. They were both wearing gloves since the cold bite of winter crawled through any exposed skin, which was the only reason April was able to hold her hand. No skin touching skin. Orion couldn’t handle that. She was sure that meant terrible things about her recovery, but considering she hadn’t been to the shrink in quite some time, it didn’t matter. It was uncomfortable, but not unbearable. And, if she was honest with herself, she liked having something tethering her to this frozen ground.

She didn’t look behind her at the two last attendants of the funeral. She was doing her best to studiously ignore them, in fact. Well, she wasn’t studiously ignoring Eric. She didn’t have a problem with Eric. In fact, she almost, kind of liked him.

The man standing beside him, on the other hand, she didn’t kind of like. She was sure she hated him. Or was completely indifferent to him. Or was irrevocably confused about her toxic feelings toward him. Her toxic longing. Whatever it was, she was mad that he was there, distracting her from focusing on the fact she was burying one third of herself.

Jaclyn would’ve hated the funeral, since she was being buried in a Catholic cemetery with a priest eulogizing her. Jaclyn hated organized religion. Her father had been a lapsed Catholic who still held on to the notion he could sin however much he wanted as long as he asked for forgiveness afterward, with Jaclyn or her mother on the floor bleeding. This funeral was just another way that Orion had failed her.

Planning things wasn’t exactly her area of expertise, and to be fair, she’d been in somewhat of a catatonic state these past few days. She’d been residing in her heart of stone since Maddox had walked through the door to Jaclyn’s apartment and made this all too real. Which meant she didn’t have enough energy to argue when April’s mother and April decided to take over.

Now she was glad of the catatonic state, considering this was the first time she’d seen Gretchen Novak since she was fourteen and Gretchen was sending her home with some homemade cookies stuffed in her backpack. It wasn’t like she was her second mother or anything like that. Gretchen Novak was a good person and a good mother. So, she was kind to Orion because that’s what good mothers did. She invited her over for dinner often, gave her leftovers when she realized Orion didn’t get homecooked dinners, and was generally nurturing toward her daughter’s broke best friend. Nurturing in a distant sort of way. But as good of a person as she was, she didn’t like her daughter hanging out with trailer trash. Sure, she hid it well, almost perfectly, but even as a kid, Orion had seen the way she tilted her nose ever so slightly up at her. The way she’d make little comments here and there about clothes that didn’t fit Orion, or hair that needed cutting.