Girl in Snow(45)

But for now: Funeral. Mourners. Family sad up front. A line of people snaked up the aisle to offer condolences to the Hayeses, and Lucinda’s father shook their hands, murmuring quiet thanks. Lex wore a lavender dress and kicked her knobbly legs back and forth. Lucinda’s mother stared straight ahead. She sat on her hands. No one tried to speak to her.

Lucinda’s friends took up the next two rows of pews—Beth, Kaylee, and Ana were huddled together. The soccer girls, with thick, lean thighs, and the boys’ basketball team all stared at their laps, standing intermittently to sign the neon poster boards that lined every wall. Notes written in bubbly handwriting.

And the flowers. There were hundreds of flowers, toppling over each other in stuffed vases around the room. Flowers were draped across people’s legs because there wasn’t space to set them down, and everything smelled like pollen and antiseptic. A poster-sized photo of Lucinda had been propped on an easel—a basket of ballet shoes sat beneath, signed with notes to Lucinda in Sharpie, like ritual offerings. One girl stroked Lucinda’s pixelated photo face, sobbing hysterically while her less aggrieved friends hovered around the periphery, solemn and teary.

“Cameron,” Mr. O said. He slid into the pew next to Cameron, bringing the scent of cigarettes and the spearmint gum he chewed to cover it up. He peeled off his winter coat and draped it across his lap. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay,” Cameron said.

“Look,” Mr. O said. “I know you’ve been avoiding me, but we need to talk about yesterday.”

Mr. O took Mom out dancing once, to a dingy restaurant that offered free salsa classes on Tuesdays. Mom put on a red dress—tight at the top, like a river at the bottom—and a pair of high heels. Haven’t worn these in years. Her feet puffed out of the shoes like baking bread straining to break free from a pan. Mom’s chest was wrinkly, sun-spotted skin sagging over her breastbone and drooping under the cut of the dress where cleavage should have been. Well, look at you, Mr. O had said at the door.

“Cameron, I’m not going to say anything to your mother, okay? I’m still thinking of a way to get it to the police without implicating either of us.” Mr. O leaned close. “But I need you to tell me how you got that diary. I read some of it and I’m going to turn it in, but before I do, I need to make sure you weren’t involved in Lucinda’s death.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you were involved?”

“I don’t know how I got the diary. And I didn’t read any of it. You have to believe me.”

The Thorntons’ toddler was wailing in the pew behind them, shrill and unrelenting—both parents tried desperately to calm her. Cameron stared at Ronnie, sandwiched between his parents’ backs, flakes of dandruff snowing across his wiry shoulders and down his crinkly black shirt. There was a vase of orchids next to Lucinda’s photo; the petals blossomed up from a single stem, then arched back toward the ground in surrender. And the eye of the flower (the stamen, which held the ovaries and the ovule, where the pollen was produced)—looked like a human skull made of silk.

“Cameron, please,” Mr. O said. “I need you to talk to me about this, I can’t— Hello.”

Mom slid into the pew on the other side of Cameron. She wore her favorite black dress, the dress she wore on Christmas when she cooked salmon with orange peels and they drank sparkling grape juice from wineglasses. This made Cameron sad, because now that dress would remind them both of Lucinda’s funeral, and it really was her favorite.

“I shouldn’t have let you go to school today,” Mom said, putting her knuckles up to Cameron’s forehead as if to check for fever. “This is a madhouse. I can’t believe I let you come here by yourself.”

Mom pulled three copies of the Holy Bible from the bench pocket. As they flipped through the pages, Cameron thought of the term “three peas in a pod,” but remembered that wasn’t the saying, the saying was “two peas in a pod,” and this made him lonely, so he pretended to be extremely interested in Deuteronomy.



Cameron had started working in Mr. O’s office three months earlier, when Beth DeCasio began referring to Cameron as “American Psycho.” Beth cut off a lock of her own hair and pinned it to Cameron’s easel, while Ana Sanchez and Kaylee Walker giggled at the next table over.

That day, Mr. O walked by just as Cameron discovered the horrible thing. Mr. O picked up the lock of hair, dangled it in the air, examined it in warm art-classroom light. When he strode over to Beth’s table, the whole class hushed. Beth picked at her crimson-painted nails.

“Does this belong to you, Ms. DeCasio?” Mr. O said.

It was common knowledge: Beth and all her friends had crushes on Mr. O. When he leaned over the girls to critique their paintings, they blushed and crossed their arms over growing chests.

“I think I’ll keep it,” Mr. O said. “Could make a fine addition to an experimental sculpture I’m working on. I’ll make sure Principal Barnes sees the finished product.”

The girls didn’t talk in class for the rest of the day, and Mr. O helped Cameron pack up his things and move to the closet office, where the sound of the ninth-grade class was muffled through a thick aluminum door.

“Tell me if they bother you again,” Mr. O said.