She huffs dramatically and throws her parasol over her shoulder. A parasol that, since it’s nighttime, is completely absurd. “Fine, fine.” She bats her eyelashes for dramatic effect and disappears into the night.
I turn back to the window. Yes, it is time to move on. But for some reason, I am frozen in place.
It’s just my nerves getting the best of me. Soon I will be alone in a new world.
Chimere’s words, “Julia’s beloved,” repeat in my head. There are so many human concepts I know nothing of, things I’ve waited a hundred years to experience. Things I intend to experience.
A breeze gently blows through the tree, rustling the leaves all around me. Julia is still, and my next charge is waiting.
CHAPTER 3
Julia
My dad throws the car into park but keeps it running. “I don’t think I can get any closer.”
The street is filled with the cars of mourners, all here to say a final farewell to my boyfriend, so yes, I guess this is it. The end of the line. Time for me to face the music. For some reason, my mind is allowing me to think only in clichés. My eyes trail down to where I’m digging my fingernails into the vinyl armrest. I quickly remove my hand, but by then there are three little slits there, as well as the sweaty imprint of my palm. “Uh, I know. I’m going.”
But my body refuses to move. I’m frozen.
My dad reaches over and pushes a lock of hair behind my ear, but I shake it loose so it falls back against my cheek. “Take your time,” he says.
That’s something my parents are always telling me. They never push me. I could be spending this morning in bed, and they wouldn’t mind. In fact, they would be perfectly happy if I stayed with them until I was sixty. As I’m starting to wonder why I’m putting this pressure on myself, why I don’t just have my dad turn the car around and take me home, I remember.
It’s Griffin. My boyfriend.
I can’t let him down by not showing up, especially after making such a mockery of his death on the front page of the newspaper. That was just brilliance, Julia. Pure brilliance, I think.
I give my dad a peck on the cheek and push open the car door. The smell of grass greets me, and the heat burns my face. I totter among the headstones, heels digging into the mud as I make my way to the crowd of people gathered around Griffin’s coffin. I can already hear the sobs of my female classmates as they huddle together, clutching tissues and talking about the “senseless tragedy.” I can’t help wondering, Do tragedies ever make sense?
One of the girls looks up and studies me with her red-rimmed eyes, then taps her friend on the shoulder and whispers. They turn to watch me, and it’s almost as if big question marks are hanging over their heads in cartoon bubbles.
I know that the chasm separating Julia Devine from her classmates is as wide as it will ever be, thanks to that latest newspaper story. When my classmates get into the newspaper, it’s usually in the Community News section. They get positive little puff pieces about awards won or scholarships received. Both times I’ve been in the newspaper, the first when I was seven, it was front-page news. The kind of news people whisper about, and not in a good way, so that all you want to do is close your curtains and hide under your bed. The kind of news you wish you could run away from.
Before, they eyed Front-Page Julia with pity laced with fascination. Now there’s a little shock woven in there as well, as if I’ve finally proven them right and lost my marbles. If I could, I’d tell them, I thought it was a joke! You would have thought so, too, if your boyfriend was as sick in the head as Griffin Colburn.
The “dearly departed” was always prank-calling me, pretending to be the committee choosing runners for next year’s Olympics, or the selections board at Rutgers, offering me a full scholarship if I’d participate in their clam-baking team, or the Italian American Society, insisting I had won a Lamborghini. I only did what any of them would have done.
The reporter from the Courier Times had the sense not to print the stuff about Griffin’s fungus and his smell. Thank goodness for small miracles. But he did insinuate that I thought Griffin Colburn was a loose cannon. What the article said was “The victim’s girlfriend, Julia Devine, believes that the victim’s reckless nature may have contributed to the accident. ‘He was always taking chances,’ she said. ‘Clearly he is responsible.’”
The weird thing is that his mom still asked me to give his eulogy. She probably did it before she saw the story alerting the world to her son’s rep as an eff-up. At the time, she hugged me so tightly my gallbladder nearly caught in my throat, and moaned something about how she’d never be able to make it through the ceremony. Now I’m afraid that when she sees me, she’ll want to squeeze the rest of my organs out of my body, on purpose this time. I’m behind a bunch of freakishly tall men in suits (did Griffin know a lot of NBA players?), but between them I steal a glimpse of her—skin white, body crumpled, looking like she’s ready to jump on the coffin and join her son in the afterlife.
I can’t really blame her; Griffin was her only son. Though she, of all people, should realize that wherever Griffin is, he’s probably looking for the nacho dip and calling every last one of these mourners a pathetic sap. I can just hear his voice now: Go home, Griffin Groupies. Take your Prozac.
As I hide in the crowd, grimacing at the mud caked on my one good pair of heels and cursing the god who made it improper to wear flip-flops to these things, I hear a few voices mutter “eulogy.” People in the crowd start to look at one another, confused. Because of the wall of guys in front of me, I’m not sure what’s going on until I hear a full sentence: “Who is giving the eulogy? Please step forward.” It appears that Mrs. Colburn has gone mute, or else has forgotten that she asked me, or else is picturing how she might slay me, because she’s staring at the coffin as if attempting to levitate it.
“Here I am!” I say, squeezing past the Michael Jordan wannabes, waving a crinkled sheet of paper in my hand. My voice comes out wrong, too cheery for a funeral. Everything about me is wrong lately. I really should have listened to that little voice inside telling me to stay in bed. I turn the volume knob down and mumble, more weakly, “Um, here.”
I wobble through the crowd, all eyes on me. My heels kick up the mud, and I feel it splattering on my bare ankles and the hem of the only black skirt I had in my closet. When I get to the podium, I attempt to look up, but all I see is Mrs. Colburn squinting at me like How can you betray my son’s memory? and a bunch of girls hunched over, whispering and crying, crying and whispering. Crying for Griffin. Whispering about me.
I reach up and pat my cheeks; they’re hot but completely dry. In a way, it’s my fault that Griffin is dead; he died on the way home from my house at two in the morning. I should have seen how exhausted he was, made him stay, pumped coffee through his veins. But I didn’t. Plus we were always together; he was my Pug (because like the dog, he made ugliness cute), number one on my speed dial. You’d think these things would bring about some emotion in me. Sophomores and juniors who Griffin barely spoke to in the hallway are wailing in grief right now, but me? I’ve got nothing.
I clear my throat. “Griffin Colburn was a good person,” I say, pulling a lock of my hair forward to cover my right cheek, to hide the scars there, since I’m sure that’s what everyone is seeing.
Shock, Julia, you’re in shock, that’s all, I tell myself. I mean, I’m not made of steel. If anything could make me cry, I’d think Griffin’s death would be it. But that’s not the type of relationship Griffin and I had. Where Griffin is concerned, tears are not an option. “He was a good friend to many.”