Six
I don’t retain much of the weekend. It’s a series of the same information confirmed seemingly every hour in a different form.
I read through all my texts from my classmates in a fog in my room, waiting for my parents to burst through the door and try to untangle the emotional mess of it all.
By Saturday night, the local news has picked up the story, airbrushed anchors out on the scene near a taped-off portion of woods.
Woods that stretch into the same road I was on Friday night, hallucinating a woman in the road because I was too tired.
There are interviews with park rangers, other campers, wilderness experts.
A ranger found their bodies at the bottom of a small cliff, already starting to be picked apart by scavenging animals.
Opal’s and Harlow’s bodies, anyway. They found Paisley’s hair and a trail of blood, but they’re still searching for her body, hoping to find it before the winter.
My parents and Owen watch the news on the couch together, the takeout we thought we could eat getting cold on the coffee table in front of us.
Mom holds my hand the whole time, but I can’t feel anything.
They must’ve died long after Paisley sent her text, but there’s no real way for me to know.
I have to leave the room when they say missing body parts. But even with my door closed, I can still hear the drone of the news and the murmurs of Owen and my parents talking.
It’s all deemed a horrible accident, likely caused by hiking irresponsibly at night and not knowing the terrain.
I wished so badly for something to happen to them that night, and then something did. I punctured Paisley’s front tire with a crowbar, and then they died.
Within a week of the news hitting, there are two funerals and a vigil.
Everyone in the community knows Paisley is dead too, but her parents refuse to lump her in with the fates of our other friends.
So, I put on an itchy black dress and mascara and join my classmates for the weekend events no one could’ve seen coming.
The only funeral scene that’s really stuck with me from the Winona Ryder era would be the one in Heathers, right after Heather Chandler died.
There’s something poignant about the transition between the chest-rattling baritone of Father Ripper’s omen about Jesus and the way the teens in that movie then immediately took a little piece of the “praise Jesus” message and used it for their own selfish means.
There’s something about how the girls then used that message until not only did Jesus not seem as scary as when Father Ripper named him, but He had lost meaning altogether.
I don’t think there’s any other way for communities to mourn teenagers—it’s either about a paternal force larger than them, or they’re the butt of jokes.
It’s also not lost on me what Veronica says in her prayer in the movie—I just wanted to make the school a better place.
Before I entered the campsite that night, I would’ve said something pretty bitchy about my dead girls, too. Now? I say nothing.
The entirety of the Hastings community attends the mourning events the way folks attend music festivals.
Three-day ticket all around LA. Viewings as openers, funerals as headliners, wakes as the after-party.
Students, parents never seen otherwise, and faculty clump together in their best designer clothing.
Wives nag their husbands to get off their phones.
Students talk about who asked whom out “to celebrate life,” who cried too hard, who didn’t cry at all, who would take the dead’s place in the school clubs they ran.
Each funeral gets bigger than the last.
Harlow’s family has money, but after classmates, her weepy father, and a rabbi do the service, we ultimately go to a simple dirt plot that overlooks Disney Studio, as she would’ve wanted.
There’s a gathering at Harlow’s family’s home after, full of homemade versions of her favorite foods.
I don’t know if her family does the full seven days of shiva.
With Opal, there’s double the people, relatives from all over the world she’s never mentioned.
One of Opal’s cousins stands at the chapel entrance with a pile of envelopes and colorful ribbons, encouraging us to participate in giving koden.
By the time my dad slips a wrinkled twenty into an envelope and I tie it off with a yellow ribbon, our contribution joins hundreds of others being collected by Opal’s casket in the front.
Opal’s parents are Christian, so despite Opal’s family never practicing, there is a cross placed across her casket.
She’s laid to rest near Harlow, but I overhear her mother talk about the expensive marble they bought for Opal’s headstone in the parking lot as everyone heads to the banquet they’re holding after.
No one asks me to give any eulogies. They touch my shoulder like I’m made of glass.
The distraught parents cling to me like I’ve got a piece of their daughters’ souls transferred to me because of our friendship.
My mom holds my hand during every service like I’m five again.
I watch people cry. Tears escape me, but it feels like a mammal mimicking behaviors of the pack to stay alive.
I don’t know what I feel, and I’m not sure time will make that any clearer.
Everyone’s a headliner at their own show, but there’s also the softest, most insidious hierarchy to the whole thing. The funerals are on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Paisley’s prayer vigil, naturally, gets the Sunday.
Owen’s suit jacket is starting to smell; there was no time for anyone to get anything laundered during the marathon of funerals.
We’re somewhere in the middle of all the pews, not because my family has any issue with Paisley’s family, but because it’s so crowded.
Opal’s funeral had industry people there, but there’s a buzz at this one.
There are actors here, even if they’re so old I only know them because of all the old movies I’ve watched over my high school career, between my Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver, and Jodie Foster special interests.
They display a professionally done headshot of Paisley, where the background is a solid color and she looks more like a doll than a human.
Some of those semi-famous names come up to deliver kind messages about Paisley and express hope for her miraculous rescue, describing Paisley as a niece, a grandchild they never had.
Her father goes up and delivers a speech set around memories.
Only two, though. It’s something I can’t help but notice, like he didn’t have any other ones to pull from.
But everything’s in a shaky present tense.
It makes me sadder, in a strange way. Because if they never recover a proper body, will Paisley Horne ever be truly mourned by her community?
She’d hate having less attention on her than Harlow and Opal got.
Beck is the last one on the program. It leaves a pit in my stomach all the way through the speeches before hers.
The dread has me glancing over at Owen every other second.
Paisley and Beck have the same age difference as me and Owen, and even as disconnected as we are, I don’t think I’d know how to live life without him.
Some things just are. The ocean is here, I go to school every day, I have an older brother.
“Paisley’s older sister Rebecca will now join us to say a few words,” the priest says.
But no one emerges from the audience. The priest looks out into the crowd, eyes falling on who I can only assume is Beck. He nods a few times, shakes his head, and leans away from the microphone.
But we all catch what he says. “Do you want someone else to read it?”
My heart twinges, the first real ache I internalize from all of this. Cool Beck, Fearless Beck—I don’t want to imagine what she looks like up in that front-row pew. Is she hugging her mother, covering her tearstained face, hand over her mouth to keep the sobs at bay?
A piece of paper is handed to the priest. He straightens it out and squints at it.
“I was a baby when you were born,” the priest begins.
The chapel falls silent. For the first time today, I feel Owen’s gaze settle over to me.
“But I’m still convinced I remember the day.
I remember Mom showing me you swaddled up for the first time, how you looked like such a perfect baby doll that I wanted to throw all my real dolls away because nothing would ever compare to you.
” The priest speaks in the same monotone he delivered the sermon in, but I hear it all in Beck’s voice.
I hear the way she’d emphasize the words, the moments when her voice would’ve cracked.
My throat hurts as I listen. “I remember tasting the baby food Mom gave you because I wanted to know what you were tasting, to experience it for the first time with you, even if it was actually my hundredth time. I chewed on the plastic keys and felt the same mobiles you did, wanting to know what captivated you about them. It was like when you were born, I was born again, and I had a whole new world to explore. And in a way, I guess I did. I don’t know a world without you.
” The priest’s voice shakes before I fully internalize his next words.
“Now that you’re gone, I don’t know what comes next. I—”
Mrs. Horne rises from her seat. “Stop! Stop reading!” Mrs. Horne looks to Beck. “Why would you write that?”
Beck rises from the pew and the priest stops. He says, “Shall we move on to the prayer?”
Beck snatches the paper out of the priest’s hand. “This is a fucking joke. She’s dead, Mom!”
“Rebecca!” Mr. Horne scolds. His voice is the kind of loud reserved for at home, when there’s less humiliation in the admonishment. We all feel it. The whole chapel cringes together.
Beck heads down the center aisle, eyes forward for all but a few moments…
until her gaze falls on me. For those seconds, the anger melts into the agony underneath it.
I swear she’s pleading with me, but I don’t know what she’s saying.
And just as quickly as the moment happens, she looks away, and it disappears.
Beck walks right out the back door of the building. A single sob rings out. Mrs. Horne. I look over at Owen, who’s scanning the crowd as well. We’re all thinking it. Someone needs to go after Beck, but no one’s moving.
Someone needs to go after Beck Horne, but I don’t move.
I’ve failed them both.
Paisley’s dead.
I feel it in my bones. My life as I knew it is over.
I’ll never see my friends again unless I come to this cemetery, and even here all that’s left is their remains rotting away in coffins.
No more of their newest outfits, no more of their color commentary on our peers or the latest TV episode that dropped, no more anything.
I wanted to end our friendship, but now they’re gone and we can never reconnect no matter how hard the ache hits me.
And somehow, the sun is still going to rise, I’ll still have school come Monday, and my life will have to continue in this unreal world without them.
I don’t want to know what that life looks like.