Rapid Falls(26)

Wade caught my eye and smiled, then quickly erased the expression. I nodded back solemnly. Neither of us knew how to act.

“Hi, Wade,” I said, taking the paper from his hand.

“Hi, Cara.”

I noticed his mom staring at me, so I gave her a small smile, moving forward quickly before I could see if she responded in kind. I hadn’t been out in Rapid Falls since Anna was charged. I didn’t know if Mrs. Turner would forgive Anna for what she had done. Jesse was like a son to her. She might not want Wade to be seen speaking with the drunk girl’s sister. My mom led the way through the throng of people gathered in the foyer. The crowd was a blur of old teachers, high school friends, people who knew Jesse, and people who seemed to be there just to say they had been. Rapid Falls didn’t have a lot of funerals, let alone funerals for teenagers. Jesse would have laughed at the ghoulishness of the crowd, every gawker and gossip hound in Rapid Falls in attendance. It appeared to be the social event of the season. I smiled at Jesse’s old boss, Mr. Johnson from the Food Mart. He hesitated, then responded with a nod and a blank face.

If it wasn’t for my mom’s hand on my forearm, I might have walked out right then. Jesse, Wade, Anna, and I had played together for years. We were like siblings. Then, one January afternoon when I was thirteen, the sun had caught Jesse’s dark hair and turned it the color of milk chocolate. All of a sudden I couldn’t look at his mouth without wanting to kiss him. He was the boy I wanted to belong to. And then I did, for a while. Or at least I thought I did.

A few weeks after I realized how I really felt about Jesse, it was Valentine’s Day. Every year, the twelfth-grade class sold Candy-Grams: a small bag of cinnamon hearts stapled to a piece of cardboard that you could write a message on. For days I had agonized over the right words to declare my love. I was so desperate that I asked my mom for help. We finally ended up with a quote, something far beyond the sophistication I possessed. It was from a book I had never read, with characters I didn’t know. But the words were exactly how I felt.

Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

—Emily Bront?

I handed over my dollar to the older girl with permed hair and painstakingly inscribed the pink-and-red card she gave me. In the high school ecosystem, I was at the bottom of the pecking order, so I was thrilled at her response when I handed it back to her.

“Lucky guy,” she said softly, looking at me with what seemed like newfound respect.

I felt heat rise in my cheeks and laughed uncomfortably. I went off to class, but all I could think of was Jesse’s reaction. He’d probably get tons of Candy-Grams. It was stupid to think that he felt anything for me. But when I found him after school, his face lit up with a smile as he rushed toward my locker, clutching the cheap card.

“You sent me a Candy-Gram.” His voice was full of joy and promise. “I love it,” he said.

He gently leaned in and brushed my lips with his.

When I told Anna, she made me recite the story twice. Instead of being enthusiastic about our brand-new love, she was skeptical.

“He said he loved it?” she asked. “It seems kind of dumb. You think your soul is made of the same thing as his? What does that even mean?”

I was too elated to respond to her scorn. “It means we like each other, dummy. We always have. We just didn’t know it.”

She snorted, then turned back to her Lois Duncan book. “Whatever.” She could never understand, I thought. What Jesse and I had was one in a million. No one else could ever feel the way we felt.

I must have stopped walking, because I felt my mom steering me toward the last pew. I sat down dutifully on the empty bench. I wondered if he had kept that card and where it was now. I felt like I could cry. For real. I didn’t need to pinch myself.

I stretched my neck slightly to look around the room. Cindy was in the front pew, flanked by her barfly best friend and her brother, Dan. Dan was Jesse’s favorite uncle. I was glad he was there. There was no coffin at the front, just a lectern and a whole bunch of flowers and wreaths. Anna’s best friend, Sandy, was a couple of rows back with her mom and dad. I tried to meet her eyes when she glanced around, but she quickly turned back to the front of the church. Her mom looked pointedly down as well, as if she regretted being so friendly to me at the hospital, before everyone learned what Anna had done.

I took a deep breath. This was the last place I wanted to display my grief. I hoped that the funeral would be cathartic for Cindy and the others who had loved Jesse, a place to mourn a fallen son of the community. But for me, showing emotion here would be like swimming with a flesh wound while waving to a shark. I knew the town needed a scapegoat for Jesse’s death. Anna was it. They were still deciding about me.

People slid into the pews around us, but no one entered our row even when space ran out and latecomers stood in the back. Some folks nodded and greeted my mom softly as they passed, extending eye contact to me only occasionally.

There had been only one issue of the Rapid Falls Times published since the accident, and the paper had covered the story in an uncharacteristically neutral way, with a brief description of the incident and no mention of alcohol. The sidebar, a recycled list of statistics on the deaths and injuries associated with drinking and driving in our county, was slightly damning, but it could have been worse. The Times often served as the court of public opinion in our town, and it rarely took such a measured stance in times of salacious happenings. The paper’s editor sat in the front row. The funeral could change things.