“get up,” gabe said. “we’re going for a drive.”

sarah rolled over and pushed her face under the couch. “i’m sleeping ’til tomorrow. why am i on the floor?”

“you want my parents to know you're here?”

she groaned and raised her forearm to cover her ear.

“it’s saturday. that means dad’ll be home at eleven. he'll tinker with the boat and grass for the rest of the day. mom’ll be up by noon. unless there’s a showing, she’ll have a wine cooler for lunch then read in the parlor. i won't spend the last two days of my life trapped in my room.”

sarah moaned but her cry was muffled by the sofa. “i’ll get up if you don’t look at me.”

gabe walked to the empty birdcage. he forgot about edgar before crashing last night, but the crow probably didn’t mind an evening of roaming free.

sarah used the couch to push herself up. “told you not to look,” she said and waddled to the bathroom.

“wear something nice!” he shouted.

“how nice? i only have two outfits and i already wore them both.”

“that’s all you brought?” gabe poured bird food into edgar’s bowl.

“didn't think i'd need any more. and you were supposed to take me shopping after the beach.”

“we were wet.”

“YOU were wet.”

gabe scanned the room for his pet and found him pecking a sprig of rosemary from the hydroponic garden. he shook the box of seed and edgar fluttered to the cage.

the marijuana may have distorted his thought processes as he developed the day’s scheme, tossing and turning in half-waking dreams about the girl’s fate and stories of her past. the morning’s sobriety tried to convince him that his plan was a bad idea; either dangerous, or worthy of a lifetime original movie.

if sarah knew where they were going, she wouldn’t get in the van. if sarah knew WHY they were going, she would question his commitment to their pact. if she discovered any indication that gabe was not entirely suicidal, she'd find a partner with REAL problems and nobody would be able to save her.

*  *  *

it took jules forty minutes to realize they weren’t going to lunch.

after an hour of slouching silence in her kidnapper’s minivan, the boy turned right at the fork toward chicago.

trevor was gonna be pissed. jules texted him with every new development or hint of their destination, but gabe began eying her every time she checked her phone.

three hours after embarking on the mystery trip, jules felt the sickening ping of deja vu and her mind scrambled to identify the corridor of brick townhouses. “where are we?”

“we’re late. crap.”

“gabe? where. are. we.”

he turned a hard left into the parking lot of the west elsdon mortuary. “emma’s funeral,” he said.

*  *  *

gabe led sarah by the hand through a sterile hallway with thin maroon carpet and spindles of dusty silk roses. viewing room number two was identified by a plaque with emma’s name arranged in white plastic letters. the place smelled like preschool; like sawdust and chemical cleaners used to mop up nosebleeds.

sarah jerked his hand but gabe squeezed harder and led her to the back row of folding chairs. they slunk into empty seats beside two teenage girls. the congregation was smaller than he expected, with less than twenty-five family members and friends in attendance.

sarah flicked her eyes around the room like a soldier in the enemy’s camp. “why the hell are we here?” she tried to whisper, but the anger in her words carried an audible purr.

“i’m fascinated by death. i wanted to see the body.” a lie, of course. a bad one. sarah was so certain that her suicide wouldn’t have consequences, but maybe a teenager’s funeral would open her eyes. “does it bother you?” he asked softly.

“i don’t care about some dead tween.”

“emma said she didn’t have friends.” gabe nodded to the girls seated beside them.

“i can’t BE here,” she said and covered her head with her arms.

gabe considered resting a hand on her leg, but decided against it. instead, he sat up straight and focused his attention on the suited man approaching the podium.

*  *  *

it was mark, emma’s step-dad. jules knew it before he opened his mouth and nearly told gabe. 

she leaned forward. this chomo’s eulogy would be intriguing enough to make her forget she was in a den of lions.

“i was the first to find her,” mark began then paused to stifle his tears. “we arrived home late after an office party. sandy laid down on the sofa in the living room and i... i went upstairs to say goodnight to our little girl.”

jules couldn’t see the emma’s body over the heads. she didn’t want to.

the congregation held a collective breath while the dickhole wiped away tears with a hanky. he turned to the casket and muttered, “...these things shouldn’t happen.”

as mark stepped from the platform and found his place beneath his wife’s arm, jules wondered how emma’s suicide note didn’t tear them apart.

*  *  *

sarah was next in line.

gabe stood at her side and studied a giant photo of the deceased, framed and propped on a tripod beside the casket. emma’s irises were of indefinable color and outlined with pixelated squares like expressionistic artifacts from the cheap digital blow-up. she took the photo herself; arms outstretched to the foreground, holding the camera at her most flattering angle. she sat in a blood-red carriage. behind her, ferris-wheel bars splintered the mid-day sky like a broken mirror. she was alone. john was alone too.

sarah approached the casket.

gabe watched her expression for any indication that the proceedings were impacting her. unless the mask was thicker than he realized, she was unmoved.

“sad, isn’t it?” he asked. his elbow brushed hers.

“she’s better off.” sarah rapped her midnight-blue nails—just once—against the cherry wood. 

emma was a wax sculpture. her lips were thin. her eyebrows were painted. her plaster hands were posed unnaturally across her stomach.

“i need to pee,” sarah said and wandered away before gabe could respond.

emma’s friends snickered behind him. as gabe turned to follow his date, one girl whispered to the other, “at least she’ll lose weight now.”

*  *  *

jules draped her wig on a mounted roll of toilet paper. the scar on her left knee pressed against the tile as her stomach forced her mouth open against her will. she coughed, choked and heaved into the yawning bowl, but all the commotion yielded little more than a wad of spit and a sore throat.

the dress in the casket was the dress from that night. not the pink fluff with uncut tags that spent its first day off the rack cradling the stiffening flesh of a dying girl, but the cream burlap bag that had fluttered with life in the streetlamp's amber glow.

jules planted her hands on the rim of the toilet, pushed herself to her feet, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. 

if she had heard another person enter the bathroom, she would have checked her makeup and fastened her wig. instead, jules opened the stall door to find emma’s mother propping her head over the last of three sinks. her dark hair brushed the faucet’s motion sensor and turned on the water. jules stepped lightly, but couldn’t prevent her boots from clomping against the tile and the woman cocked her head like a startled doe. “sorry,” jules muttered.

“i thought i was alone,” the woman said, then dabbed toilet paper against the sacs beneath her eyes.

trevor’s voice rammed the forefront of jules’ brain and demanded that she reattach the fucking wig and exit the bathroom immediately. every fight-or-flight instinct pulled her toward that door; ignoring the broken woman should have been CAKE after years of shooing away TRAGEDY like flakes of dandruff, but jules ran her hands beneath the middle faucet and said, “i’m sorry for your loss.”

the woman forgot about her sagging skin and turned to face jules so fully that the girl took a half-step back. “did you know emma?” she asked.

jules straightened the clump of fake hair. “not well. i guess we were friends.”

“she never mentioned any friends. what’s your name?”

jules wanted to run. “sarah,” she replied.

“sarah... emma's bear was named sarah.”

“oh...”

in the awkward moment that followed this utterance, the woman's wet eyes searched jules’ for answers to a thousand invisible questions. she blinked rapidly, then stepped back and faced herself in the mirror. “my daughter didn’t have many friends in chicago. thank you for coming today. she would have... she...”

“i know,” jules said. “emma was a sweet girl.”

“was it her weight?”

“i’m sorry?”

“i pushed her on diet after diet. i never meant to be cruel. do you think that's why she...” the woman’s knees twisted and she grappled the sink but fell to the tile and leaned her head against the wall beneath the hand dryer. “she was barely overweight...” her body trembled like a crumpled newspaper caught in a subway grate. “i never meant to be cruel. i loved her just the way she was.”

jules couldn’t leave now. she stooped to the woman’s level but quickly remembered it was difficult to kneel in knee-highs. she swiped her mesh skirt under her butt and sat on the tile. “emma said nice things about you; said you were a good mother.”

the woman took jules’ hand. “she stole my jewelry box.”

“i'm sorry.”

“but bless her heart, she donated her entire room to charity; even sarah-bear. my husband searched the woman’s shelter and pawn shops for my jewelry. i told him i didn’t give a damn.”

jules could only repeat herself, “emma didn’t hate you.”

“she warned us! she told me she wanted to kill herself and i called her a drama queen.” the woman’s face was streaks and puddles of fallen mascara. “the autopsy said she had MY painkillers in her system. she bought the drugs that...” (a rapid intake of air substituted the impossible words) “...but she got high on MY drugs first.”

this mother WAS too good to be true and jules felt silly for sympathizing. “maybe you shouldn’t have been abusing pain killers,” she jabbed.

emma’s mom squinted. “abuse them? i had knee surgery last year. the pills made me groggy so i never touched them.”

“oh...” jules searched for a remedy to her mistake. “maybe they eased her pain.”

“she wrote a poem on her hand before she...” (another breath) “...but i scrubbed it off before it could hurt mark’s feelings. i didn’t want him to know she was thinking about their differences on the night she...”

“of course.”

the woman pressed her lips together and used the heel of her hand to wipe her cheeks. “i barely know anyone in this god-forsaken city. i’m glad we met.”

jules could have let it be. if she kept her mouth shut, the remainder of emma’s family could have lived happily ever after. instead, she spoke. “i’m sorry to pry—i know how hard this is—but did emma leave a note?”

“she did. she didn’t mention any friends, but i’m sure you were in her thoughts—”

“did she write anything about her stepfather?”

“mark? no.”

the pervert got to it first; probably ripped out the accusations. “ma’am,” jules began, “emma confided in me before she died. there’s something you need to know about your husband.”

*  *  *

the funeral home provided the silver-vested pallbearers that stood beside the open casket like spindles on sleeping beauty’s four-post bed. 

the remaining guests mingled in somber circles as they waited for emma’s mom. one man thought he saw her smoking out back. another claimed she snuck into the bathroom.

gabe sat in back, balancing the hind legs of a folding chair and lamenting his failed plan. the funeral was just vapid enough to confirm sarah's theory that suicide was a benign gesture—

the bathroom door exploded with a silence-rupturing clamor that captured the attention of every eye just in time to see a woman emerge in rapid strides—her limbs like albino spider legs with knobby joints poking from the slits of her black shroud—out the door and across the web of chairs and discarded programs. her face was marked with rambo smears of mascara as she trampled to emma’s stepdad and slapped his genuine look of concern with the palm of her hand.

“how dare you!” she screamed and shoved his chest.

the man stumbled backward, arms flailing for a solid handle but only grappled air. his head landed in the glass center of emma’s self-portrait and his ass toppled the tripod and knocked glass over his neck and across his legs.

it took the strength of four pallbearers to keep the woman from killing the man with the toe of her high heels, but nobody could stop her from screaming.

“you touched my daughter, you sick fuck! you molested a fifteen-year-old girl and now she’s dead! it was you!”

gabe was too enthralled by the drama to see sarah sneaking out the bathroom door, but he noticed her approach from the corner of his eye. her usual stride wobbled with uncharacteristic excitement.

“we need to bolt.” she weaved her arm between his and pinched her lips to fasten a smile (gabe thought he saw a hint of DIMPLE beneath the mask).

“what'd you do?” he asked as they scuttled toward the exit.

“my good deed for the day. i’ll tell you all about it in the car.”

*  *  *

“sexboy always joked about emma's stepdad, but i didn’t know it was true!” gabe drummed his hands on the steering wheel.

“i saw broken glass. did she hurt him?”

“his forehead was bleeding!”

“serves him right!”

gabe could barely catch his breath. “she just kept kicking him over and over and the pallbearers practically had to wrangle her!”

“un-fricken-believable. i was so afraid to leave the bathroom after she stormed out. think she woulda killed him if she had a gun?”

“she woulda killed him if she had a toothpick and a piece of string.”

sarah crinkled her nose and laughed. “what a crazy-crazy day.”

“was it weird to tell her?” gabe asked.

“what do you mean?”

“because of your father...”

“ah. ’discovering my darkness’ again, perv?”

gabe shrugged.

“i lied.” 

“last night? about your dad?”

“he left years ago. my mother lives in so-cal with my brother.”

“you have a brother?”

“dusty. he's a good kid.”

“so your mom didn’t die when you were—”

“nope. sorry.”

gabe held back a dozen new questions. the truth was emerging apprehensively and he was afraid of startling it.

sarah kicked off her shoes, leaned back in the seat, and propped her feet on the dash. her nylon toes wiggled. “crazy-crazy day...”

“yeah,” gabe said. “crazy day.”

*  *  *

“then he said my work wasn’t disturbing enough. told me to lose my sentimental outlook on life and they’ll reconsider me next year.”

“totally sucks. were those your drawings hanging above your desk? the animals and stuff?”

“yep.”

“well that guy must've been blind and retarded.”

“thank you!” gabe said (but knew sarah was unintentionally feeding the THING that still festered inside him, cheering with every sip of acknowledgment, approval, or understanding).

“i do see his point, though,” she said. “you’re kind of... sensitive.”

(the sympathy creature grunted. gabe did too.) “what? how?”

“you play out scenarios in your head, don’t you? about girls. about the things you would do if one showed interest.”

“every guy does that.”

“LOSERS do that. most guys put on a show until a girl agrees to sleep with them. they go to parties. they try new things. and eventually, that stuff brings the life experience that you obviously lack.”

“put on a show? like flexing their muscles and slapping girls on the ass?”

“sometimes.”

“and they like that?”

“confidence works.”

“what about good intentions? why is it so bad if a guy genuinely wants to make a girl happy? maybe you’re right; maybe i think about these things a lot. i fantasize about treating a woman right. if she wants the moon, i’ll find a way to get it. what’s so wrong with that?”

“it’s sweet! it really is! but it's also kinda faggy.”

“faggy. i’ve heard that before.” gabe eased his foot to the break and sighed at the stop-and-go saturday-night traffic of downtown grand harbor. the sigh was exaggerated though; despite the insult, he was enjoying the drive.

sarah’s seatbelt clinked and retracted with a metallic whack. she stretched her lacy arms and turned to gabe with poised feminine authority. “i’m going to do something for you, but before i do, you need to swear you won’t take it the wrong way.”

“uh...”

“i’m doing this for my own sake because you make me feel awful with all this pissing and moaning about girls or your lack-there-of.”

“what are you gonna do?”

“i’m going to kiss you without any shred of love or hint of romance. do not trick yourself into believing that i care about you in any way outside the terms of our agreement tomorrow night. i’ve kissed many guys and i know exactly what’s going through your raisin brain. promise me you understand that.”

“damn,” gabe glanced out his window to hide his smirk.

“say you swear,” she said.

“i swear.”

“and if i see or feel anything move in your pants, i’m walking home. got it?”

gabe nodded. a sympathy kiss wasn’t very romantic, but if touching lips could rekindle LIFE in this marionette called sarah—

a hundred feet away, a stoplight turned red and triggered a trail of break lights like the spark on a fuse. the car in front of gabe's stopped too and painted the van’s interior (and half of sarah’s face) with sanguine light. “watch the road,” she said and turned his cheek with a crimson arm. 

her lipstick felt like chalk, but her tongue ran the crease of his lips and tasted wet with a hint of human sour.

his senses forgot their duties. if his eyes were open, for this moment, he was blind.

sarah pulled back and readjusted herself; head against the window and feet on the dash. “there,” she said. “now you’re not so faggy.”

*  *  *

the boy didn’t notice the twitching orange tip of lit cigarette watching from the shadows of the driveway... but jules did. hell, she saw the falling ash the moment her lips touched gabe’s.

they parked in the garage and she made an excuse: “i need to think. ALONE.”

the boy scrawled his cell number on her palm and told her to text when she was ready to sneak past the ‘rents.

trevor watched the stars in jeans and a sleeveless shirt. when jules approached, he heeled the butt.

“the boy kidnapped me,” she said. “i’m—”

“we need to go back to the basics.”

“we don’t. i messed up—”

“our entire operation was compromised because my partner-in-crime is too fucking stupid to understand that when you kill a girl on wednesday you don’t attend her funeral on saturday.”

“i didn’t kill her.”

“i tricked myself into believing you were strong. but instead of rolling in this brat-hole’s cash with your boyfriend, HE has YOU by the balls.”

“screw you.”

trevor grit his teeth and punched the air, then he hugged her. “you’re my life, julesie,” he said. “you know i could never do this without you. our relationship is the only thing that matters to me in this fuck-tard world.”

trev’s arms were tender when his muscles relaxed. jules inhaled through her nose and smelled his chest.

he released her and stooped to a bag at his feet. “i bought us these.” he removed a pair of hands-free walkie-talkies—the kind that children wear on their heads to play war.

“how...” she stammered. “you want me to wear that?”

trevor snapped one of the headsets in two pieces, then handed jules the half with the earpiece and plastic microphone. “put it in your backpack with the mic sticking out the zipper.”

she spread her arms and looked down at her pocketless getup. “where do i put it now?”

it was too dark to see trevor roll his eyes, but jules knew him well enough. he snatched the broken headpiece, reached under her skirt, and wound the device into her elastic garter strap. “it’s for your protection.”

she turned back to the house.

“hey!” trevor called and she spun around. “tomorrow night, julesie. if you can’t make it happen, i will.”