Orange Rinds & Funerals

    I was in sixth grade and everyone else was going.
I didn’t want to be the one student who stayed behind, converting fractions to decimals. I didn’t want to play four square while everyone else was saying goodbye to someone who’d never do any of this again.
    
    I didn’t have funeral clothes.
My closet was spread with sky blue and blush pink dresses, jeans from American Eagle. My mom found a simple slip dress from TJ Maxx. It was a size too large, with sleeves that drape from my arms like a second, sagging skin.
    Molly sat beside me in the car. She was wearing shimmery eyeshadow. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, and it was the first time I wanted to. Next to my best friend, I looked like a kid, with limp ash blonde hair and a pimple on my chin.
     “We don’t have to stay long,” my mom told us as she drove to the funeral home.
It was the type of breathless spring morning where it felt like the world was opening up. Snowdrops and snapdragons bloomed beside dusky, cracked sidewalks. We passed by a Walgreens with a help wanted sign and a McDonalds advertising half off iced coffees.
My stomach grumbled. Molly’s did too.
    My mom turned on the radio, just so we didn’t have to sit in silence.

Molly and I never had a secret handshake, but we had ways of understanding each other without saying a word. We’d spent the summer practicing a dance routine no one would ever see. We had hours of a radio show recorded on my karaoke machine.
    I knew that Molly always unwrapped Dove chocolate and folded the wrapper into fours. She knew that I loved gray, rainy days the way everyone else loved Summer.
    But on the day of the funeral, I couldn’t read her at all.
     Molly smiled at another classmate- someone we’d barely spoken to. I tried to smile but the corners of my mouth wouldn’t work.
    My mom led us to the back of the visitation line. We moved step by step across the crimson velvet carpet. The scent of mothballs and carpet cleaner tickled my nose.
     And then  I saw the poster.
    It was Heather, her smiling face. All the things she wanted to do with her life. Her eyes were full of hope. Snapshots of her volunteer work.
     One day, it read, I want to be a marine biologist.
    I choked on something I couldn’t name. I glanced at Molly.
     But Molly had already moved on.

    We were told on a Monday.
    It was reading time. The time I usually dug into the latest Margaret Peterson Haddix book- and occasionally snuck in a little writing of my own, when our teacher wasn’t looking.
    I didn’t notice the absent desk. Only her close friends did.
    When the teacher told us we lost a student over the weekend, I imagined a hundred things. Getting lost in the woods. Search parties.
    Heather was found by her family, our teacher told us. The visitation would be next week- open to anyone who wanted to attend.
     What they didn’t tell us, what I found out in a newspaper clipping later:
    Heather had an allergic reaction to medication. A new medication, to manage her Type I Diabetes. She’d watched a movie with her family, then gone to bed.
   She stopped breathing while everyone was asleep.
     She was found by family.
   They just didn’t want to say that, really, she died alone.

     An open casket. I had the urge to run away.
     It’s funny: just a week ago, I’d been irritated with my mom. For watching me as I walked to Molly’s house. For making me call her if I was running late.
     Now, I wish she could hold my hand.
     It wasn’t Heather, in that casket.
     She’d always worn her hair up in a messy ponytail. It was carefully brushed, long and rich brown past her shoulders. Heather wore graphic t-s; they’d dressed her in a flowered blouse. Her skin wasn’t sunkissed, but pale, almost gray.
    I’d always been taught about Heaven, but I’d never thought about the realities of what that meant. What you left behind. What others did after you were gone.
   Just as I was passing by, there was a sudden noise.
     Heather’s mom was bent over the casket, lips to her daughter’s forehead. She kept mumbling things I couldn’t understand.
   A man- Heather’s father?- reached to comfort her.
     Or at least that’s what I thought, until I saw he was trying to pull her away. “It’s okay,” he said, over and over.
   Except it wasn’t.
    Except it was impossible for me to tell if he was trying to comfort her, or quiet her.
    
    My mistake came during the service.
    I sat sandwiched between Molly and my mom in the second to last row. The woman beside me was wearing a raspberry suit jacket. She was humming to herself, tapping her feet. I imagined she got confused: maybe she thought she was at a party or a wedding- anything but a funeral home. She snuck out a graham cracker and chewed.
     I couldn’t focus on the minister’s words.
     None of them described the Heather I knew, anyway. Not dutiful and dedicated. Those were words I used for our class Scrabble tournaments.
     Instead, I watched the woman.
     My mouth twitched again.
    Laughter bubbled in my throat.
     The woman took out another graham cracker and smacked her lips.
     If I die young, I hope someone like this woman comes.
     The thought was unexpected, ridiculous. A small gasp of laughter escaped my lips.
    My mom turned to me. I pressed my lips tight. I looked like a psychopath and knew it. But the more I tried to suppress my laughter, the less I could.
     Molly was watching me. Her lips were turning up, too.
     “Let’s go,” my mom whispered.
     But already, the damage was done.
    
    We couldn’t stop laughing once we were in the car. It was like those times we used to spin around in endless circles, making ourselves dizzy.
    And like those times, when Molly and I finally stopped, my stomach churned.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”
     “I shouldn’t have taken you. You’re too young.” My mom’s tone wasn’t angry, but flat. That made it worse. She hesitated. “It’s too late to go back to school. Why don’t we grab some lunch?”
    “I’m not hungry.”
     “Me either,” Molly said.
    “You need to at least eat something.” I had no idea, then, how many times I’d hear that phrase from my mom, in a few short years.

She handed us two mandarin oranges each.
    I unpeeled mine slowly, the way Molly always unwrapped her chocolates. But when I glanced at her, she was already eating.
    The orange was too sweet. It sprayed juice on my roomy dress. It tasted like mothballs and carpet cleaner. I worried everything would taste like that.
   I wanted to apologize for laughing. But words don't feel like enough. The more I spoke, the louder the quiet in the car became. My mom turned on the radio again. I willed Molly to say something. Like she did when she knew I was upset.
    She kept eating her orange.
     It would not be the last time we drove Molly somewhere or dropped her off. But it was the first day I saw how things could unravel. I saw why Molly preserved her wrappers.  I saw why you might go to bed one night dreaming of being a marine biologist, and be dead in hours.
    It was three and half years before Molly ditched our friendship.
     It was four years before my older brother left home for college.
    And during all those years in between, everytime I reached for an orange, I thought of

Heather.