Free Wake by Abria Mattina Page A

sounds uncomfortable. Maybe my stare bothers him. Or maybe it’s the aura of death that people perceive around me.
    Elise gets this panicked look on her face like she doesn’t want him to leave. “Oh…okay. Maybe I’ll talk to you again sometime?”
    Desperate, much?
    “Sure. I’ll see you around.”
    Elise turns right around in her chair to watch him leave. She only turns back to the table when he’s taken a seat across the room with his friends.
    “You’re such a jerk.” She kicks me under the table.
    “Jesus, Lise.” That’s going to bruise.
    “Why’d you have to go and ruin it? He was actually talking to me.”
    “Did he apologize for calling you a dyke?” Elise growls and kicks me again. “I’m just looking out for you.”
    “Well knock it off! You never want me to meet anybody or have any fun.”
    Now that the senior is gone, Elise’s friends descend upon the table and demand to know every single detail of what was said. Their chatter derails our conversation, and I leave to go sit with Willa and Co. Elise and I will talk later. We each know where the other lives.
     

Friday
     
    Today at lunch I try eating something other than soup, yogurt or Jell-O: a cup of tapioca pudding from the cafeteria cooler. It goes down okay, but my stomach starts to hurt by the end of the period.
    “Don’t piss me off today,” I tell Kirk as she sits down at the table, “or I’ll readily puke on you.”
    “You can do it on cue?” she says with false admiration. Then she turns off the smartass and offers me a mint to suck on. “Why did you come to class? Just go to the nurse’s office if you’re feeling sick.” I would, but then I’d miss the only part of my day where I get to have conversations with someone who isn’t a member of my immediate family. I can’t tell her that, of course. It would over-inflate her sense of self-worth.
    And make you look pathetic.
    “I don’t want to deprive you of the chance to guess what I had for lunch.”
    “You’re such an ass.” She shakes her head and turns her attention to her work. After five minutes, I’ve sucked my mint down to nothing and I ask her for another one.
    “That was my last.”
    “What good are you?”
    She casually elbows me in the side, and that slight jab is enough to make me gag. As I lean over the sink at the back of the room, I regret that I didn’t aim for Willa instead. That would teach her.
     

Saturday
     
    Willa’s car is in desperate need of a new muffler. I can hear her coming from the end of the block. She’s right on time. I can’t believe I’m about to let that snarky bitch into my house. Mom had better not embarrass me. She works mostly from home, and even though it’s two in the afternoon she’s probably still in sweats with three or four drafting pencils sticking out from her ponytail.
    I subtly close her office door as a preemptive measure, and then go to open the front door before Willa can ring the bell and tip Mom off to the presence of company.
    “Nice house,” Willa says by way of greeting.
    “Thanks. Nice shirt.”
    “Stop staring at my tits, Harper.”
    “Easy. There’s hardly anything to stare at.” That makes her laugh. It’s sort of nice that she can take a joke about her own body. I’m still trying to train Elise to do that. Over-sensitive teenage girls are annoying.
    Who can’t take a joke about their body?
    Oh shut up, you.
    “The snapdragons are in the kitchen.” I lead the way through the front room and down the hall towards the kitchen and our project planters. We pass by a row of family photos on the way and Willa stops by one. It’s the only picture of before that Mom wouldn’t let me temporarily take down: the last one before we left Ottawa, when we went for an outing as a family. Elise had long hair then, and Eric’s idea of an appropriate pose for a family photo had been to pretend to crush her like the Hulk.
    Willa gapes at the photo. “You’re a ginger?”
    “Kirk.”
    “Oh you