Free Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson Page A

out of the reach of their sticky shadows.
    As I pass under a streetlight, the bulb pops and I smell burnt sugar. Her. Her.
    I run the rest of the way to the wake, one step ahead of the iron hooks she’s casting.
    The line of people waiting to stare at the empty body snakes out the front door of the church and down the steps to the sidewalk. Dark chords from the organ slip into the night, turning our shoes into concrete blocks and pulling down our faces until we look like trees drooping with black leaves.
    We’ve all been here before. In fifth grade it was Jim-my Myers, leukemia. In eighth, Madison Ellerson and her parents died in a thirty-car pileup during a blizzard. Last year it was a guy from the tennis team, the one who made State. Didn’t buckle his seat belt, no airbags. When his car hit a truck, he launched through the windshield in a perfect arc until he landed, tangled and speared, in the arms of a pine tree. The line for his wake went all the way around the block.
    Walking through the front door, I am hit by the buzz of people talking but trying not to be heard. Parents unbutton their coats and drape them awkwardly over their arms. Sweat beads up on the cheeks of boys, leaning on the walls with their hands in their pockets and their ties loosened. Girls teeter-totter on their highest heels and thank God it is not them in the pretty box up front.
    I leave my jacket on, unzipped. For the first time in weeks, I am almost warm. Plastic candles with orange bulbs flicker along the dark windows. The line moves along at a steady pace, like we’re filing in to a concert or a football game. When the soccer team walks by the casket, the captain hands a team ball signed by all the girls to Cassie’s father. He gives it to a man in black who puts the offering in with the corpse, gently, so she doesn’t wake up.
    It’s called a wake, but nobody really wants the dead to rise.
    The closer I get to the coffin, the hotter it is. Brown-edged chrysanthemum petals drop loudly from the wreaths that are perched on metal holders. I’m wilting, too, and my head is filling with rusty nails. I shouldn’t have worn jeans. Idiot.

    There is a gap between me and the guy ahead of me, a space big enough for four people. A lady behind me hisses, “Move up.”
    Suddenly the organist stops playing. People stop in mid-murmur. The organist reaches for something above her and a whole stack of books falls to the floor, echoing across the marble like a gunshot. People jump.
    I can see the bottom of the box now. The soccer ball rests next to a folded black T-shirt from the stage crew.
    Cassie’s feet are hidden under a white velvet sheet, toes sticking straight up. I hope they put warm slippers on her, and comfy socks. I hope they left on her toe ring.
    The music starts up again, a long, trembling minor chord.
    The guy in front of me walks over to Cassie’s parents. Her mother sobs and he puts his arms around her.
    He’s an uncle, the fun one, the one who taught us how to water-ski. He is crying, too, groaning. They are the only two people in this whole hot, crowded, dead-petal church strong enough to say and do what we are all thinking.
    My turn to stare. My turn to rape the dead.
    Sleeping Beauty is wearing a sky blue dress with a high neck and long sleeves. Her hair looks like an over-brushed doll’s wig, tired yellow with faded red highlights coming through. She is not wearing any earrings or her silver bell necklace, but her class ring was shoved on her finger. Her nose piercing and acne scars are hidden under the foundation plastered on her skin. They used the wrong shade of pale.
    I want to take off her dress and see if they unzipped her belly. I want to look inside. She would, too, because that’s all we ever talked about, the hidden creatures with itchy wings and antennae that poked us and sent us stumbling to the bathroom, Cassie to the toilet so she could get rid of it all, me to the mirror so the girl on the other side would keep