Between

by Jessica Warman

  My hair is long and shimmering; I look oddly pretty and docile among so many mourners, their faces somber, an almost palpable grief saturating the room. My head is down. I’m staring at my feet. At nine years old, I am wearing small, black patent leather high heels. At nine. Now, at eighteen, this choice of footwear—did my father let me wear those shoes? Did he buy them for me?—seems embarrassingly improper. Who lets their nine-year-old wear heels?

  Josie’s mother, Nicole, comes up behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders. She leans over to whisper in my ear. “Elizabeth. Sweetheart. How are you?”

  When she touches me, I flinch. I look up, gazing in confusion at the crowded room. My face is red and tear streaked. I look like I have no idea what’s going on, like a lost little girl who only wants her mommy back. Watching myself, I feel a pang of sadness, of grief so deep that I realize now it never went away, that it has always been with me somewhere inside.

  Back then, I knew Nicole as Mrs. Caruso, Josie’s mom. And while it feels like a struggle to recall specific events from my childhood, which is overall sort of fuzzy and indistinct in my mind, I remember the basics: At age nine, Josie and I had already been best friends for years. Our parents used to spend a lot of time together before my mother died. Then Josie’s dad left. What happened after that between my dad and Nicole almost seemed natural. Years ago, they’d been high school sweethearts. After my mother died, and after Nicole and her first husband got divorced, Nicole seemed to fall seamlessly into my life as a mother figure, and I never thought much about it; it was simply the way things were. My father needed a new wife; Nicole needed a new husband. I never felt like she was trying to replace my mother. And I’ve never believed any of the rumors that were spread around school, and throughout town, about my dad and Nicole having an affair before my mom died.

  Other people believed it, though. People close to me believed. Josie believed. It was a topic she and I tried not to broach much, and I never dared to bring it up with my dad. It occurs to me now that it isn’t that I was always certain there was no truth to the rumor; it was that I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that there could be any truth to it.

  “I’m okay,” I tell Nicole, attempting a smile. It seems obvious, now, how seriously Not Okay I was.

  Nicole kneels beside me. She holds my hands. Even as an observer, I can smell her. She’s wearing the same perfume she’s worn for as long as I’ve known her.

  In an instant, the thought occurs to me—who wears perfume to a funeral?

  “Josie is here,” she says. “She doesn’t want to come in, honey. She’s in the hallway. Would you like to come see her?”

  The nine-year-old me only nods, fresh tears filling my eyes. Where’s Mr. Caruso? I wonder. I don’t see him anywhere. It’s not all that surprising—he and Nicole got divorced a few months after my mom died.

  I follow my younger self and Nicole as they walk toward the back of the room and into the hallway. As I’m watching us, I notice several of the funeral attendees shooting glances at Nicole. They’re almost glaring at her. She doesn’t seem to notice; her arm is around my shoulders, guiding me toward the door as I take shaky steps in my high heels.

  Josie stands in the hallway, her back pressed into a corner that is covered in gaudy purple wallpaper.

  I can’t help but smile when I see her. She is so young, so innocent and pretty. She’s missing one of her front teeth. Her hair is pulled into two long, light-brown ponytails. An odd fact surfaces in my mind: Nicole didn’t let Josie start highlighting her hair until she was twelve.

  We hug each other tightly, holding on for a long time. Her hands are clenched into little fists around my neck. Out of total coincidence, we are wearing the same dress: black and dark green stripes on our full, knee-length skirts, black crushed velvet bodices tight around our tiny waists and chests.

  “Josie, honey? Do you have something you want to tell Liz?”

  Josie nods. She stares at me, wide eyed. “I wanted you to know,” she begins, her voice small and scared, “that you can come to our house whenever you want. You can even sleep over on school nights.” She glances up at Nicole. “Right, Mom?”

  “That’s right.” Nicole smoothes her daughter’s hair, winding a strand around her finger in thought. “If Liz’s dad says it’s okay.”

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  “I got you something,” Josie adds. She looks at her mother again. Nicole reaches into her white suede purse and removes a long, narrow velvet box. Inside, there’s a slim gold bracelet, a single charm dangling from a loop. It’s half of a heart.

  “Best friends. See?” Josie holds up her left wrist. She’s wearing another bracelet, the matching half of the heart dangling from the chain. Nicole removes my bracelet from the box. Carefully, she puts it on my wrist. Josie and I hold our arms side by side, pressing the hearts together so they form a full heart that says “Best Friends.”

  “I love it.” I smile at her. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She beams. For a moment she is too cheerful, as though she’s forgotten where she is. It’s not her fault, I think to myself now. She was only nine. “Come over soon, okay? We got a new Slip ’n Slide.”

  Leaving Josie alone in the hallway, Nicole guides me back through the double doors, back to my seat inside the viewing room.

  She leans forward to give me a long hug. “We loved your mom so much,” she whispers. “And we love you, too.”

  “Mrs. Caruso?”

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  I gaze at her, searching her face for answers. “Where is my mom now?”

  Nicole doesn’t miss a beat. “She’s safe, honey.” She gives my hands another squeeze. Whispering again, she says, “Next time you come over, I’ll show you.”

  I get a kiss on the forehead. Then she walks away, toward my father.

  I leave my younger self and follow her. When I was a child, I didn’t have a chance to observe so much; now it seems crucial that I pay close attention. I’m not sure why. But I’m here, aren’t I? There must be a reason for this memory. It’s like Alex said: I’m trying to put a puzzle together. But I have no idea what the picture will look like when it’s finished, which makes it hard for me to know quite where to start, or what pieces to pay attention to.

  “Marshall,” Nicole says, putting her arms around him. With her mouth beside his ear, she murmurs, “She’ll never be hungry again.”

  And like that, I’m back at my own funeral, watching as Mera and Topher walk hand in hand toward the front to stare at my closed casket. They are both crying. At eighteen and a half, Mera is older than everyone else—she got held back a year in preschool for what she calls behavior problems, but everyone knows the real problem was that she wasn’t potty trained in time for kindergarten. Anyway, for her eighteenth birthday, her parents bought her breast implants. Even if I didn’t remember the fact, it would be obvious just from looking at her. To my funeral, she’s wearing a low-cut black sweater and a push-up bra that really show off the twins.

  When she and Topher turn around, Mera notices Joe Wright standing in the back. She nudges Topher and whispers something under her breath.

  To anyone else, it could seem suspicious. But Mera didn’t have any reason to hurt me. Mera is the epitome of her breast implants: friendly, welcoming, and—at least according to the FDA—harmless. For that matter, I can’t imagine Topher killing anyone, either. He can be tempermental, but he’s actually a pretty calm guy. He’s a senior in high school, and he still has a pet rabbit that lives in his bedroom and is litter-box trained and sleeps beside his bed at night. People like that don’t kill their friends.

  “Bitches and jerks,” Alex says, stretching his legs out in front of himself, crossing his arms behind his head in a casual pose. “Honestly, Liz. How could you be friends with those people?” Then he smacks his forehead, as though it were a stupid question. “What am I saying?” he asks. “You were their leader. You were the worst of them.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t think that’s fair,” I tell him. “A few of us went to your funeral, you know. Lots of people went.”

  “Really?” His tone is cool. “I guess you were there.” But he doesn’t seem willing to give me any credit for the fact.

  There are still flyers up all over town, posted to the telephone poles. Alex’s parents are offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for anyone with information about what happened the night he died.

  “I changed my running route,” I tell him. I’m surprised that the memory, from just about a year ago, has come to me seemingly from nowhere.

  And while I’m talking, I tug off my left boot—I’m not wearing socks—to stare at my foot. My big toenail is almost completely gone. My piggy who went to market. The piggy who stayed home isn’t looking too good, either. It’s not because I drowned, though—it’s because of all the running I did. The rest of me might have been beautiful, but my feet were always downright ugly. Oddly enough, it never bothered me much.

  Well, it bothered me a little bit. My friends—Mera and Caroline and Josie—used to love to get mani-pedis all the time, but I usually opted for just a manicure. I was too embarrassed by the condition of my feet to let anybody else see them. Hence the ostentatious footwear; I guess you could say I was overcompensating.

  I smile as I stare at my left foot. Around my ankle, there’s the same “Best Friends” bracelet that Josie gave me nine years earlier. Once she and I got to middle school, we decided it wasn’t cool to wear them on our wrists anymore, so we had extra links added to the chains and wore them around our ankles. We almost never took them off. It occurs to me that, at the front of the room, lying in my casket, I’m probably still wearing it.

  “You changed your running route?” Alex asks. “When?”

  “It must have been after they found you. I used to run past the Mystic Market every morning, and once they found your body, I couldn’t bear to go there anymore.” I shudder, slipping my boot onto my foot. I have no choice but to put it back on. More than once I’ve tried to leave them off, but the boots simply reappear in place a moment later. The shoes are a part of me now. I’m stuck with them.

  “What happened to you was terrible, Alex.”

  But he’s busy gazing at Mera’s chest as she walks back to her seat.

  “You’ve got quite a collection of friends, Liz. All the hot girls. All the pretty boys.” He shakes his head. “I never imagined I’d get to spend so much time with them.”

  I shrug. “Well, I was beloved. You’re lucky to get to spend time with them now, I guess.” I pause, remembering that it’s not good manners to be boastful, embarrassed by what I’ve just said. “I don’t know if I was all that popular, though, now that you mention it.”

  He glares at me. “Oh, you weren’t? Let me ask you something, Liz. Did you ever have to eat lunch in the library?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I blink at him coolly. “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. I showed you the memory. You saw Frank in the lunchroom, getting bullied by your … friends. You saw me, eating by myself.”

  “Alex. I told you I was sorry about that.”

  “Sorry for what? For doing nothing? It happened almost every day, Liz. I knew it was only a matter of time before Topher, or one of your other friends, noticed that I was all alone, too, and that I packed my own lunch. So you know what I started doing?”

  “What?” I have a feeling I don’t want to know.

  “I used to take my lunch into the library and eat in there. All by myself.”

  “You didn’t have to—”

  “Yes, I did. I needed to be invisible. I knew what your group was capable of from watching Frank. You and your friends were … you were empty. You could be like monsters.”

  I don’t say anything. I stare at the front of the room, where my friends sit together, all of them red-eyed and crying. They certainly don’t look like monsters right now.

  “Richie’s the only one of you with half a conscience,” Alex says. “But he never did much to stop it. He was still right there by your side, no matter what you did. It was like, in his eyes, you could do no wrong.” Alex shakes his head bitterly. “You sure had him wrapped around your little finger, didn’t you?”

  “Alex, I already told you I feel bad about that.”

  But he’s not finished. “You don’t know what it was like to be uncool. To be alone. It wasn’t fun, Liz. It was hard.”

  I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to make him feel better, or if there’s anything I can do that will help at all. So I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. The only thing that’s been on my mind since the moment we walked into the room.

  “Do you know how my mother died?”

  He shakes his head. “Beats me. Champagne and caviar overdose?”

  “She was anorexic, Alex. She starved herself. She used to take cold medicine to control her appetite. She’d take handfuls of pills at a time.” I remember it so clearly now: my mother standing at the sink, her mouth stuffed with pills. Is there no mercy for a dead girl in the afterlife? Out of all the memories from my childhood, the ones surrounding my mother and her illness are what I’d love to forget. But they’re there, rooted, holding on tight.

  And then she died.

  “She had a stroke when she was thirty-three,” I tell him. “She collapsed in the shower.” I pause.

  “What?” Alex asks. “You look like you’re about to say—”

  “I’m not about to say anything. That’s what happened to her. Now you know.”

  If Alex feels sorry for me, he isn’t showing it. “And then what? Your dad married Josie’s mom?”

  I nod. “Yeah, he married Nicole.”

  She’s safe, honey. Next time you come over, I’ll show you.

  “Want to hear something weird?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  “A couple of weeks after my mom’s funeral, I went over to Josie’s house for a sleepover. Do you know what Nicole did?”

  “What?”

  “She brought out a Ouija board. I was nine, Alex, and she brought out this Ouija board to try and contact my mother for me.”

  We both look at Nicole. Alex was right when he said that she’s gorgeous; Nicole is the walking definition of a blond bombshell. She’s also flaky and superstitious. She believes in the afterlife, in UFOs, and in all things mystical. After she moved into our house, she had a feng shui expert come over to rearrange all the furniture. Nicole doesn’t work—instead, she takes frequent yoga and tai chi classes, spends a lot of time volunteering, and keeps herself otherwise occupied by continually redecorating the house. My dad doesn’t seem to mind.

  Josie is just like her mom. She goes to the Spiritualist Church with Nicole all the time. They both believe in ghosts. For a second, I consider approaching them, trying to touch them, to see if they can sense me. As quickly as the idea materializes, though, I dismiss it. Like my father, I’m much more pragmatic. I might be a real ghost now, but I’m still not convinced that anyone could be able to sense me. The possibility seems ridiculous.

  “Did it work?” Alex asks. “The Ouija board?”

  I close my eyes, trying not to cry again. “Yes. She asked how my mother was, and it spelled ‘safe.’ Just like Nicole promised me she was.”

  “That seems so inappropriate,” he says. “A grown adult shouldn’t be playing with a Ouija board with kids. Especially nine-year-olds.”

  It’s funny—it never occurred to me before now just how inappropriate it really was. And her words to my father, at my mom’s funeral—who says something like that?

  Before we can talk about it further, Alex and I are interrupted by the sound of canned organ music coming through the speakers in the corners of the room.

  “Show’s starting,” Alex says.

  My friends grip each other’s hands. Richie puts his arm around Josie. The two of them are crying so hard that they’re shaking. />
  I turn in my seat to look at Joe Wright, who’s still standing in the back. His arms are crossed, his gaze steady on my casket. As far as I know, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that my death was anything but accidental. So why is he here, watching everybody so closely? He might as well be jotting down notes.

  Local cops, I think. He probably has nothing better to do.

  As my gaze moves past him, taking in all of my friends and family, it occurs to me that my death is not a peaceful one. Here I am. Still on Earth, with Alex, watching and waiting—but for what? Why are we still here? What are we supposed to be doing? Piecing things together, according to Alex—but into what? Again, I try to reassure myself that none of my friends would have harmed me. What reason could any of them possibly have had?

  I try to swallow. I taste salt water. As though I’m still on the boat, the room seems to rock gently back and forth. Suddenly it’s hard to breathe.

  Six

  Everyone is leaving as Alex and I get to Richie’s house. Topher and Mera are climbing into Topher’s car. Caroline is getting ready to catch a ride with them; she stands on the front porch with Richie and Josie, buttoning her black jacket, hugging herself in the cool air. My friends all look so solemn and grown up in their funeral clothes, their eyes red and puffy from crying.

  The weather seems especially dreary for late August, considering that it’s still technically summertime. Caroline wraps a Burberry scarf around her neck and rubs her hands together, trying to warm them. She picks up her purse from the floor of the porch and holds it close to her body.

  “I have to get home,” she says. “My parents have been lunatics the past few days.”

  Josie nods. “I guess I should get going, too.” She glances at Richie. He sits on the floor of the covered front porch, staring at the space between his shoes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. There are circles under his eyes. His skin is broken out. His lips are chapped. He rode home from the funeral in his dad’s car, which is nowhere in sight on the street; his parents probably dropped him off and left. The fact makes me angry, but it doesn’t surprise me. I don’t even have to go inside to guess that they left some money for him on the kitchen counter. Like that can take care of everything. Like he’ll be just fine without them.