"This seat taken?" I asked.
Quinn shifted along the wall and almost smiled. It faded as the hired priest moved to stand in front of the fireplace. The packed room grew quiet.
"A great light amongst us has gone out. And we may feel as empty and cold as this unlit fireplace," the priest gestured behind him awkwardly, "but together we will stay warm."
It’s 86 degrees out, I thought.
"Sienna Thomas was a caring, thoughtful, and ambitious woman. She had her sights set on becoming a surgeon so she could help those among us that needed to be healed," the priest said.
Quinn shifted from one foot to the other. She refused to look at me, but I knew the greeting card version of Sienna's life bothered her. Within days, her sister had sky-rocketed into sugar-coated memories and ideal assumptions. Her real sister was fading away.
"When her life was tragically struck down by a drunk driver on her college campus, we all felt a deep and abiding loss," the priest droned on.
Quinn stood up, her pale face covered in shock. I took her hand and squeezed. If she said something now, it would only ruin her. Sienna's memory was perfect, unmarred by the truth. There was no way Quinn could change that without destroying herself.
"It’s not right," she whispered to me.
"It’s easier for your parents, for everyone," I told her.
"I was there. I saw. Nothing's going to make that easier for me, especially not some lie that blames someone else for her death," Quinn hissed.
I held her hand harder. She had not given me many details on the phone. I certainly did not know Quinn had seen Sienna's body before the coroner covered her. My mind reeled the rest of the service.
I had no idea what bothered me the most about Quinn seeing Sienna like that. The crowd of mourners finally moved on through the dining room and into the backyard for refreshments. I found myself alone with a few stranglers ringed around the edge of the living room. I walked up to Sienna's open casket.
She looked perfect – her make-up a little too thick and her lips a little too red, but perfect.
"Hey, beautiful. Remember how a long time ago you asked me to tell you when you were behaving rotten? I gotta call you out one last time. You knew someone was going to find you. Either your roommate or your sister. What an awful thing to put on someone else. You didn't think of that, did you? You probably had this whole damned funeral planned down to the photographs and flowers. But you didn't think for one second what you'd be doing to other people. She saw you, Sienna. Like that. Makes me glad you're gone. You can't hurt me or Quinn anymore."
I stepped back and swiped away the angry tears. Across the room, closer than she should have been, Quinn stared at me wide-eyed. I swallowed hard and hoped she did not hear what I had said.
#
It was time to go. I turned to make a break for the front door only to bump into a wall of former classmates.
"Weird high school reunion, huh?" Ben said. He had been the captain of the football team. The same irritated estimation from our teenage years was in his eyes as he looked me over. He still could not understand why Sienna chose me over him.
Ben was my height with buzzed brown hair. His square jaw and cleft chin could have put him in those mail order sweater catalogs. He'd gone on to college with a football scholarship and had not changed one bit.
"What are you up to these days?" he asked. "Is there a market for being too cool for school?"
His cronies, a trio of Ben knock-offs at various heights, laughed.
"I heard you're still hanging out at arcades or something, right?" the first crony asked.
"Something like that," I said. I tried to step past them.
"You were still with Sienna, weren't you?" Ben asked. "That is rough, man, just rough. You doing okay?"
The actual sincerity of his statement set me back a step. "I think I'm still in shock."
"No kidding. I could have imagined a dozen other people from our graduating class offing themselves, but not her." Ben scrubbed his cleft chin. "I keep thinking maybe it’s a joke. Like that time you swapped out the science dummies’ insides with lunch meat. Remember? You used food coloring to make the white rats have bloody mouths so it looked like they'd turned zombie or something?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sienna would never go for a fake-your-death-then-zombie-attack-your-own-funeral kind of joke."
"See, that's what I'm saying. I could never figure you two out," Ben said. He clapped an arm around my shoulder and forced me to join him on the back porch.
The yard was full of cliques I remembered from high school. I looked around and could not find one knot of people with a gravitational pull. It was the same when I was actually in high school. I drifted, had plenty of friends, but no one close, and people either thought that was really cool or really weird.