The Lies About Truth(68)

To Adam. Be the crash. Rhinos forever. Broadway is yours for the taking.

To my family: Mom, Dad, Matt, Angela, Bryce, Brooklyn, Grandmother, Nana, Barbara, Mike, Dave, Sheridon, Taylor, Daniel, Destin, Kristen, Claiborne, Shelby, Kurtis, Matt, and Pat. I love you. Thank you for loving me.

As always, to all you readers. Of the two of us, you will always be my better half.





EXCERPT FROM FAKING NORMAL


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CHAPTER 1


BLACK funeral dress. Black heels. Black headband in my hair. Death has a style all its own. I’m glad I don’t have to wear it very often.

My dress, which I found after rummaging in the back of my closet, still smells vaguely of summer and chlorine. The smell is probably just a memory.

“Alexi, slide in closer so Craig can sit with Kayla.” My mother’s voice pulls me from my misery and back to the funeral.

Mom makes room for me to shift down the pew toward her, and I slide obediently into the crook of her arm as Kayla’s boyfriend joins our family. Even though I don’t tell Mom, it feels good when her arm loops over my shoulder, and her hand gives me a little squeeze-pat that means she loves me. If we weren’t at a funeral, I’d probably shrug her off. But that would be sort of selfish, since Mrs. Lennox was in Mom’s prayer group all that time.

“How’s Bodee doing?” Mom asks.

“I don’t really know him,” I answer.

“You’ve been in school together for eleven years.”

I shrug. “He’s the Kool-Aid Kid.” Why do adults always think kids should be friends just because their mothers are? Sharing homeroom and next-door lockers doesn’t mean you know a person beyond his label. Across the church aisle from me is Rachel Tate, the girl whose mom did Principal James on Bus 32. I’m Kayla Littrell’s carbon-copy little sister. Before this week, Bodee was the Kool-Aid Kid. Now, he’ll be the kid whose dad murdered his mom. That label will pass from ear to ear whenever Bodee walks down the hall. But now it’s a pity-whisper instead of a spite-whisper.

“It would be nice if you reached out to him.” I can tell Mom wants to say more, but the music changes and she faces the front.

There are no words to the music, and that makes me sad. Every song deserves lyrics. Deserves a story to tell. Mrs. Lennox’s story is over, so maybe she doesn’t need words, but Bodee might. Reaching out to him is one of those Christian things my mom talks about, but you can’t share a closet and a stack of old football cards with someone you hardly know. So I say a prayer and hope he’ll find a place of his own to hide.

But this’ll probably always be what he goes back to. Mom. No Mom.

That’s a forever change. I never understood life could be so dramatically sectioned, but it can. And is. There is only after. And before.

My moment was by the pool; Bodee’s is by the casket. Or wherever he was when he found out about his mom.

Kayla leans away from Craig and asks, “Alexi, is he in your grade?”

I nod and wish Kayla would lower her voice.

“Lord, he’s homely,” she adds.

“His mom’s dead,” I say. I inch even closer to Mom, which isn’t exactly possible. Kayla’s wrong, anyway. He’s not homely; he’s unkempt, and there’s a difference.

I’d rather sit with Liz and Heather, but all the parents have their kids clumped around them like they’re trying to share one umbrella in a rainstorm. I love my family, but it seems that I’m always with people I don’t know how to talk to when I feel the saddest. With Kayla, and Craig, her appendage. Or Dad, and Mom the teacher.

“Who does he run around with?” Kayla persists.

“No one.”

Mom gives Kayla the eye, and we both stare at our programs.

I repeat Psalm 23 with the rest of the crowd and wonder if God ever considered writing the psalm in the past tense, since so many ministers read it during funerals. “Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death” is more accurate for Mrs. Lennox.

“And now,” the pastor says, “we’re going to hear from Jean’s two sons, Ben and Bodee.”

Ben strides forward, never looking up. He removes a piece of paper from his pocket. The room is quiet, and I can hear the page crinkle as he flattens it against the podium. He twists his sealed lips this way and that, and then opens his mouth and sings—half reading, half crying—part of a hymn. The song is beautiful, and I wonder if music is the real language of grief.

“Mom always sang that when she worked in the kitchen.” Ben stares at the ceiling as he says, “I don’t know how to make it without you, Mom.”

His pain and fear pass through the air like electricity. I don’t know how they’re going to make it either.

“Thank you, Ben,” the pastor says. “Bodee, come on up here, son.”

All eyes look to the left, where Bodee rises from his seat in the family section.

Bodee’s hair is blond today. I’d thought his Kool-Aid–colored locks were intended to disguise his misfit jeans and generic white T-shirts. Make him look artistic instead of just poor, but now I’m not so sure.

Mom moves her arm from my shoulder to crumple a tissue in her hand and dab at her tears. “Oh, this is just awful.”