Undead Girl Gang(16)
The thought makes me want to start smashing things. To yank fistfuls of petals and shred them down to white mulch. To crunch vases under my heel.
Would Xander help? Does he hate these symbols of false grief as much as I do? I’m scared to ask in case it makes me look jaded. Maybe he truly appreciates everyone keeping his family in their thoughts, even if they never did when Riley was alive.
Thankfully, the back hallway is devoid of flowers. The long wall of beige paint is broken up by doors—Mr. and Mrs. Greenway’s bedroom, Xander’s room, the bathroom, and, finally, Riley’s room. The door is closed. Maybe they like it better this way, the hope that maybe, just maybe, she’s on the other side.
Xander doesn’t hesitate before walking into her bedroom, but I do. I wasn’t expecting him to stay. Instead of looking for the items I’m here to steal, I watch him sit on the edge of Riley’s daybed. The comforter wrinkles under the weight of him.
He looks up at me. His eyes are ice blue. Not the color winter is but the color winter feels. The color behind your lids when peppermint floods your sinuses. The color the guy who wrote the Pocahontas songs meant when he made up the phrase blue corn moon.
Other people would call it sky blue, but the sky has never made me want to strip off all my clothes and rub myself against it, so I’m not convinced that’s the right term.
He shifts to the side, making space for me. Not an offensive amount of space—some people eyeball me and think I need yards of room to sit—but enough that I won’t have to brush by him to get comfortable.
“You left the funeral before I could talk to you,” he says, his tone light and nonjudgmental.
I settle down next to him and fold my hands in my lap. I peer up at the string of lifeless twinkle lights hanging above the bed. I remember how Riley used to leave them on at night, yellow pinpricks casting shadows against the pale turquoise paint. “I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t hang anymore. It was too—”
“Fake?” he supplies. The corner of his mouth lifts in a sad smile. “Dad says that funerals are for the living, but, man, Riley really would have hated the whole thing.”
My heart flutters with a lightness I haven’t felt in days, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as comfort. “Yes, exactly. It felt like she was missing from it, you know? I mean, come on, who invited the show choir?”
He huffs out a breath that sounds a bit like a laugh. “My mom, of course. She thought they were a nice touch at June and Dayton’s service.” Invoking his friends’ names washes the glimpse of happiness off his face. Deflecting, he throws the heat to me. “You haven’t gone back to school yet?”
I twitch a shrug. “I made it about halfway through yesterday and then walked out of a meeting with the school psych. She called my parents and said that I might not be ready to interact with the public yet.”
“I don’t think she’s ready to interact with the public. She’s kind of a trip,” he says. His shoulders roll back, stretching his chest. The soft crackle of joints and bones makes his insides sound like a campfire. “She cornered me after Riley’s service, tried to get me to have a session right there. I told her that we have our own grief counselor—we’re a funeral home, you know—and she still went to my parents, asking permission to have daily meetings with me when I go back to school.”
“I don’t recommend even one meeting with her.” I shudder at the thought. “Are you coming back to school?”
“Ever?” he teases, and I’m living for the flash of teeth he gives me. “Of course. I’m going to finish my senior year. I need to graduate. And there are people depending on me—honor society and the Rausch Committee. I’m a peer counselor, too. But my parents don’t want me to rush into going back. They’ve already gone back to work, but they’ll come up here randomly during the day and just . . . look at me. Like they’re checking to make sure that I’m still here. They didn’t know she was out when she died.” He closes his eyes. His lashes are unfairly long. Of course, he’s never had them snap off while wearing three coats of waterproof mascara. “They never knew where she was. They kept pushing her away, making her pretend to be something she wasn’t. I keep thinking if they’d just let her be Wiccan instead of pretending like she quit because they forced her to, would she still be here? Would she have told them where she was going that night? Would she have told me? I was with June’s family, at the funeral reception. When I came home, she was gone, and my parents had no idea.”
“I didn’t know either,” I say, my voice suddenly working hard to be more than a whisper. I haven’t been able to say this to anyone yet. There hasn’t been anyone to hear it. “I left her here after June and Dayton’s service. I had a paper to write, so I told her that I’d talk to her in the morning and warned her not to text me unless it was the biggest emergency. I don’t even know why she would go near the creek.” My sinuses burn, and I scrub under my eyes to keep the tears from spilling. “And maybe if I hadn’t told her not to bother me, she would have told me why she was going down there. I could have saved her—”
I almost divulge my theory about Riley’s murder and the spell that could bring her back. But I stop myself mid-breath. Xander is burdened with enough right now. If I succeed in raising Riley from the dead, he can reap the benefit without having to know how it happened. I lost my best friend, but he lost his friends and his sister. I can’t complicate that with thoughts of murder and revenge.