Then it hits me. June’s testimony. The story about the toy slipping out of her hand and her dad saving her.
There’s a gentle knock as Pastor Pete comes back in.
“Looks like you’ve been acquainted with Mr. Wiggles,” he says with a smile. “That was my favorite toy growing up. I carried it everywhere until I was six.”
“Oh yeah?” I say. “It reminded me of June.”
He tilts his head, confused. “Why is that?”
“Her testimony. I watched it online with Paige the other day. Remember that story she told about riding the swings at Six Flags and losing the pig?”
A look of recognition dawns on his face. “Yes. That’s right.” He shakes his head, deep in thought. “What a miracle.”
I was thinking something else. I was thinking that if there was a God, it seems like he had it out for her, even back then.
When I get home, there is an e-mail from Jackson. I open it, and a picture of Central Park fills the screen. Green trees frame a stone bridge that stretches over a lake. A boat floats beneath it, carrying lovers who gaze at each other as if they are the only two people in the world.
Below it, his message:
I’m going to kiss you here.
Love,
Jackson
Despite the day I’ve had, my heart soars. How does he always do it? Remind me that the world is bigger than this moment? Remind me that we have a future together, no matter how hard things might be right now?
I type a message back to him:
And I’m going to kiss you back. ❤
Miss you like crazy. So much to tell you, but not safe to meet yet. I’ll let you know.
Love,
Emma
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WEDNESDAY MORNING COMES TOO fast. We arrive at the church just in time to open the doors for the men delivering June’s casket. She’s in there, inside that box. The thought thins the air around me.
Paige and Mike come in a few minutes later.
“I hate funerals,” Paige says. “Don’t let them give me one, okay? Just burn me and dump me somewhere pretty.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I say.
“Yeah. Don’t be stupid,” Mike says. “Of course you’re having a funeral. Everyone has a funeral.”
“Not if she doesn’t want one,” I say.
He glares at me. Apparently, he expects me to agree with him about everything in addition to pretending I don’t find him disgusting.
“Whatever,” he says. “Ready to go inside?”
“I guess so,” I say.
Mike grabs my hand, so hard it feels like it might break. His palms are sweaty, and it makes me wish there was a condom for hands. We find a seat together, me sandwiched between both him and Paige. Whenever we’re in regular service and not youth service, the youth group kids sit together in the section farthest to the left side of the stage. We’ve been doing it so long I don’t remember when it started.
All the other kids join us as they filter in: Ruth, Katie, Ben, Chuck, and all the others. Nicolas is here early too, but he’s not sitting with us today. He doesn’t even say hello. He’s sitting in front, staring at the casket like if he stares hard enough she’ll be alive again. His mom holds his hand, and his dad drapes a supportive arm around his back.
Soon, the five thousand-seat church is packed with people who barely knew June. Except for the kids in the youth group, maybe ten of the people here have had more than a five-minute conversation with her ever. Reporters take up a whole section marked for the press. Our own media team has the cameras going too, like they always do. In such a big space, people spend more time watching my dad on the three jumbo screens than they do watching my dad. The word spectacle was made for moments like this, and it makes me mad on June’s behalf.
“I can’t believe this, can you?” Paige says.
“No. It’s ridiculous.”
Paige looks at me funny. She likes it that so many people showed up to mourn June’s death.
“Just, all these people didn’t even know her.”
“I know, but she would have loved this.”
She’s right. June would have loved it. She always seemed so awestruck every time the audience clapped after a dance number. So seeing everyone here, just for her? She would have been bowled over. And here I am, getting defensive.
“There she is.” Paige says, her voice cracking a little as they open the casket for viewing. “She looks so sweet.”
June’s coffin is up at the front, surrounded by flowers and propped wide open. There’s a big photo standing on an easel with her smiling in it, broad and hopeful. I’m pretty sure the picture was taken before one of our dance performances, because she’s wearing what looks like our white costume, the one we used to play angels at Christmas, but without the wings.
Paige pulls me up with her as she stands. “Come on,” she says.
I’m scared to get closer, scared to look over the edge, but there’s no getting out of this.
“Coming?” Paige asks Mike.
“I’m fine here,” he says.
We get in line, Miss Hope and Pastor Pete just ahead of us. Miss Hope is crying softly, leaning on Pastor Pete’s shoulder for support. He drapes an arm around her shoulders and gives it a squeeze. It’s actually a little weird to even see that. They’re always careful about PDA around us, even though they’re engaged. But today no one is going to call it inappropriate.
“How are you girls doing?” Miss Hope asks. Her eyes are red, and the tissue in her hand is crumbling.
“Okay,” I say, though my voice says I’m not.
“I still can’t believe it,” Paige says.
“It’s tragic,” Pastor Pete says. He looks gray and empty, like an old balloon deflated and stretch-marked on the sidewalk.
Miss Hope hugs us both and sobs into our hair. It sets Paige off crying too, but I feel too empty to cry. Miss Hope finally lets go and kisses both of our foreheads.
“You call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay,” Paige says, and they turn back around.
The line moves too fast. As we get closer all I want to do is bolt.
June’s mom sits in the front row, at least I think it’s her. I’ve never met her. She’s crying a lot, and loud. A woman next to her, maybe June’s older sister, holds her hand but seems irritated with the crying, like maybe she wants to crawl under her chair. I would be too. I wonder how the church found them. As far as I know, June is the only one in her family who is a Christian.
Dad said the church is paying for everything. The only thing I really know about June’s family is that they’re really poor. She never wanted to say so, but you could tell. I think, more than anything, June just wanted us all to believe that she was just like us. Only she wasn’t. Nobody was like June.
I take the last few steps up to the stage, Paige’s hand clutched tightly around mine. And suddenly June’s there, and my throat closes up. She’s beautiful, but not the right kind of beautiful. June never wore makeup, but they have her painted like a beauty queen, too glossy and too perfect. She’s wearing a sky-blue silk dress I’ve never seen. It’s brand new, the kind she never had. Somehow that look of a lost little girl is gone. She looks too grown up, too generic. She could be any one of us, even me. And it makes me sad, because that thing that wasn’t like us, that thing that made her June, is gone.
I wrap my hands around my middle and try to make the tears stop, but my body is shaking and I can’t move away. I know I’m taking too long. I can feel their eyes on me, the cameras fixed on the sobbing girl who said she was June’s friend but didn’t mean it. The girl who should have been with her instead of shoving her away. The girl who should have stayed with her all night.
I want to go, but my feet are locked up and I can’t. I just can’t. Maybe if I stay here I can save her for real this time.
“Come on, sweetie,” Paige says, and my feet start to move again.
After June’s burial, e
veryone comes back to the church for the reception. The sound of people munching on sandwiches and slopping cold casserole onto their plates feels so wrong. It seems like we should be able to think of something better to honor a life than: A girl died—here’s some Jell-O salad.
I make my excuses and go home.
Paige calls as I’m throwing on clothes to go for a run.
“Hey,” I say, before I hear her crying. “What’s the matter?”
“Come over,” she says. “I found something.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PAIGE MEETS ME AT the door. Her house is a sprawling ranch with six bedrooms for four people in a gated community down the road from my own. I want to ask her if Mike’s there, but I can’t. She’s so upset, swiping at her eyes with her sleeves. She’s the toughest person I know, and it makes her look like a little girl.
“Look at this,” she says, holding her phone out to me. “I didn’t get it back until today when we were at church. And I totally forgot I took it.”
The phone is paused on a video, the image too blurry to make out. There’s a shuffling, and I look up to see Mike standing in the hall outside the living room, skulking in the dust-moted mid-afternoon shadows.
“Hey,” he says as he walks toward me and kisses me on the cheek. I try not to flinch. “What are you doing here?”
“Paige called,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, disappointed. He must have thought I was here to see him.
“Yeah,” she says. “And I have dibs on her right now, so back off.”
“Fine. Geez,” he says, rolling his eyes.
Paige yanks me by the elbow toward her room, calling over her shoulder, “Geez is short for Jesus, you know. It’s disrespectful.”
Mike shakes his head and saunters off.
Paige shuts the door. “Sorry, but I don’t want him seeing this until I figure out what to do about it. He can get all vigilante sometimes.”
“It’s fine.” I don’t tell her I’m relieved.
We sit down on her bed, which is covered in a pink eyelet bedspread. For being such a killer athlete, she’s super girlie.
She presses play. There’s laughter and shouting. The image is temporarily blocked by the back of people’s heads, but Paige, the one holding the phone, seems to elbow her way through the crowd as the camera twists and blurs. I think I can make out the red-on-wood stripe of the church gym floor.
Then Paige gets to the front and steadies the shot, and I see that the camera is pointed at me. I’m sitting in a chair blindfolded, with four other kids sitting next to me in a line, also blindfolded. It’s the night of the lock-in, maybe around nine thirty. We’re all in the gym, separated into groups of ten or so, going around the room in a circuit of games. I think we were split into teams? I can’t remember.
Miss Hope sets a small box on my lap. Then she gives similar boxes to the other kids. You can’t quite see it in the video, but it’s an old Kleenex box, wrapped in black paper, with a sign that says: BATTERIES. The other kids’ boxes say: SPAGHETTI, GUM DROPS, COTTON BALLS.
“Okay, everybody quiet down. No hints. No talking.” Miss Hope says to the crowd. Then she turns to us. “On your mark, get set, GO!”
We dive our hands into the boxes, feeling around. Chuck’s hand shoots up into the air in an instant, and he screams “Noodles!”
“Gummy Bears!” Ruth screams.
“Almost, guys,” Miss Hope says, jovial. “Almost!”
The look on my face is confused. I wasn’t even close. I’m terrible at this game, and I wasn’t exactly concentrating. I was thinking about Jackson, wondering when I could check my phone next to see if he had texted, to see if he was still coming.
“Um, um, spaghetti!” Chuck shouts.
“We have a winner!” Miss Hope says. I remember being glad Chuck won. It saved me from the embarrassment of having to guess. I had no idea.
There’s a swoosh of the camera down toward the floor, and the video ends. I turn toward Paige, confused.
“Didn’t you see it?” she asks.
“See what?”
Paige presses play and the video starts up again. She scrubs forward to where Chuck shoots his hand up. “There.” She points to the corner of the image.
Against the wall, to the side of all the action, June is standing with Nicolas. She has her arms wrapped around her body, the way she sometimes did. They were thin and long like a ballerina’s, and she could wrap them around her stomach so far that her fingers nearly met behind her back. The only time I ever saw her like that was when she seemed to be upset about something.
Nicolas reaches toward her, but she twists away. Then she runs out, leaving him standing there alone. Then Paige’s grip on the camera shifts slightly, and I can’t see Nicolas in the frame anymore.
I look over to Paige. She looks away, chews on the inside of her cheek, then looks back at me. “Can I tell you something?”
I nod yes.
“It’s probably nothing, but then I saw this. And now…I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“What?”
“June did talk to me a little bit more that night, before she disappeared. I think she was looking for you, but she found me instead, and…well, remember how she wanted to talk to us about him?”
“Yeah?”
“Well…she said she was going to break up with him.”
“Seriously? When she talked to us it seemed like they were having problems, but I thought June loved him. Like, loved him, loved him.”
“I know. But that’s what she said.”
“Did she say why?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“No, I…they didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to make him look any guiltier, you know? I mean, he’s already her boyfriend, right? So the police have to be looking at him. And he was all over the place that night, so he looks even worse. I really don’t think he did it, Emmy, I really don’t. But if the police keep asking questions like that, I’m gonna have to say something.”
I can’t believe he would do it either, but this business about them breaking up is weird. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have told you they’d be married by next summer.
And then there’s the gun in my room. Nicolas and I used to date. He’s been in my house before. Could he have done it? But why? And why try to blame me even if he did?
“No, you’re right. There’s no way he did it. Let’s just keep it to ourselves for a while, okay?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING, I show up at Nicolas’s house without calling. When he comes to the door, his eyes are red-rimmed, his hair sweat-smashed on one side of his head. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
He sinks into the couch. “Okay. Talk.” He seems angry, irritated I’m here. We didn’t work out as a couple, but I thought we were at least friends. I sit on the opposite end of the couch.
“Why don’t the police know you guys broke up?” I ask.
His head snaps up, surprised. “What? We didn’t—“
“She said she was going to.”
“It was just…it wasn’t for real. She got in these moods sometimes, but it never lasted. We would have been back together by morning.”
“What kind of moods?”
“Like, I don’t know, dark, opposite of what she usually was. She’d get to thinking that she was dragging me down, that I should be with someone better. It was always after things were really good for a while. Like she didn’t know what to do when things were good.”
“And then she’d break up with you?”
“Sometimes. For a little while. But I could always cheer her up, you know? Convince her that we were supposed to be together, and then everything would be okay again.”
“And that’s what happened the night of the lock-in?”
“Basically. She got this idea in her head that she shouldn’t be dating an
yone, that she needed to purify herself. That she was spoiled, because of, you know, her past. She wanted to get baptized. I told her, sure, that’s great. I mean, they do it, like, every three months. But she didn’t want to wait that long. She was trying to convince someone to do it sooner.”
“Who?” I’ve never seen anyone baptize people but my dad. It’s one of his favorite things about being a pastor.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. All she said is that she didn’t think we could be together until it was done.”
Something the police said catches in my mind. The swimsuit. You get baptized in your clothes, but women always wear a bathing suit underneath for decency. What if June wanted to get baptized the night of the lock-in? It would explain why she was up in the sanctuary.
You wouldn’t notice it by looking, but behind the choir loft, under a platform, there’s a baptistery big enough for my dad to stand in waist deep. The mechanized front panel slides back to expose a reinforced glass wall, so the whole audience can watch people get dunked, like it’s a whale exhibit at Sea World or something. When the cover is over it, it just looks like part of the stage. Would the police know to look for it?
But if the murderer was trying to baptize June, why not just drown her? Why the gun? And why at the church? It seems like one of the worst places you could choose to do something like that. Unless, of course, you’re trying to frame someone who was there at the same time.
Or maybe it wasn’t the murderer trying to baptize her at all. Maybe someone else is the reason she was up there that night, and they’re not saying so for fear of becoming a suspect.
Nicolas’s words pull me out of my thoughts. “She didn’t think she was good enough for me.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah, I know, that’s what I mean. It was crazy. I told her that it didn’t matter what had happened to her before, that I didn’t care, but she wouldn’t listen.” His voice gets all chokey. “It was kind of frustrating actually. It got to feeling like, I don’t know, a test. A test I kept having to pass over and over and over again. I thought maybe she’d…I thought she could use some time to calm down. So I told her to think about it. I told her I’d leave her alone to think about it for a little bit, then we’d talk about it again. But then I couldn’t find her.”
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