By fifth period I could pretty well catalog the variety of reactions. Some misread my tense, android gloom as some Mahatma Gandhian state of moral insight or knowledge. (As if, via something like virtue osmosis, those who brush up to death just arrive at the sense of what matters and what does not.) Other kids (friends of Celine’s and some basic misanthropes) flat-out blamed me for killing her, though this group mostly bit their tongues about it. But most people’s reactions lacked all intensity. If you were neither a close friend nor some kind of rival, it was easier to give “the tragic event” a minute of incomprehension and then go about your adolescence. “This,” I thought, “is it?”—someone has died. But the student body, stepping into summer sunlight, had grabbed its beach towel. It was nice out — that bright gush of weeks right before graduation — and your future rarely feels so present as it does in this June of your prime. The accident, to pretty much the whole school, was just one black feather in the larger scheme of things.
I didn’t understand that everyone’s tepid emotions were reasonable. The panicky little drum that kept me going required that this event, this death, be epochal. Of course, it was that: this was an incomprehensibly sad occurrence for our school, our town. But I didn’t yet know that there are some truths — that even young people die occasionally; that there’s only so much gnashing of teeth and weeping over another person’s tragedy — there are some truths that only come to us softened by beautiful stratagems of self-deception. Nobody wants to be reminded. Nobody wants to hear the sad song again.
Melanie Urquhart, at the end of that first day, approached my locker. I braced myself: here it comes.
As she closed in — backpack straps, yellowish hair, eyes at my face — I realized I wanted to hear it. This is what I craved, the fullest force. The worst thing. I needed it to be spoken, and by someone outside of myself, so I could determine whether it was true. Melanie was short but took long, fast steps. Here was judgment, at last. One quirk that makes life hard — for the mobile packets of truth and lies we all are — is that we’re all imprinted with a kind of bullshit meter. It’s nonpartisan. It gauges what others say, and what we say, too. It’s most active socially; it goes to sleep when we’re just thinking. I felt a magnetic pull to Melanie now. I got excited, even brimming.
“I’m sorry, I—” she barely managed, “—support you.” She told it straight to my sneaks.
It was insincere. Melanie had been peer-pressured into coming. “You’re okay, Darin, which is important, too.” She was talking with steep reluctance. Or maybe she meant everything she said. I don’t know. It couldn’t have been easy for her — or for any of my still-stunned classmates.
What I wanted to tell her was: “I’m sorry I haven’t cried. I may not look it, but I’m overcome by this, a total mess, a wreck on two feet.” I didn’t say that — not that, or much of anything I can recall.
And so, as with the policeman in the newspaper, as with the Shrink, as with my decision to not even find out which hospital Celine had been in, I avoided the moment once again. The moment when I would be compelled to know what I felt about this.
When would the funeral be? The weekend — meaning not tomorrow, or the day after, but on the far side of the week? I mean, weren’t they always on the weekend?
My father and I went to the funeral alone. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t join us. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted her to. But as a family, we’d fallen into a set of dance steps: when calamity happened, Mom would stand off to the side, looking into her soda until someone would ask if she wanted to join in or not.1
When it comes to the funeral itself, my memory squints and mumbles.
At the church door I took a shaky gulp and wrapped my palms around the handles and my heart was a live bird nailed to my chest. Selfishness was thrumming at me: Don’t open this door, just take off! Maybe it only seems like the right thing to do, showing up today, but probably mine is the last face her parents and friends and whoever wants to see, yes that’s true maybe it only appears that the more mature thing is to open this door right now, but in fact the braver thing is maybe to not face it. I mean, I am the guy who drove the car and I’m showing up to her funeral? Are you serious about this? Because no one and I mean no one would expect you to have to, even if it is the manlier thing to do, or whatever, because you’re not even a man yet really, etc.
My father stood at the door and showed no expression of any kind: it was up to me. I opened the door.
I bowed and averted through the crowd, I swallowed and hesitated. This was — and remains — the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I was relieved to feel tears on my face. Among the selves jostling inside me was an actor who could manipulate people, while the frightened kid in there sweated out his confusion. Real tears, some part of me knew, were right. I wasn’t fully aware of most of this: I felt so much but understood so little, could express so little. I greeted the wetness on my face with relief.
An old man clamped his eyes on me as if he wanted to cut my heart out. Imagine outliving not only your children, but your grandchildren. The man was frail, with the body — slim hips, short, a big belly — of a schoolgirl eight months into a mistake. He stood to the left of my path and didn’t move; my father and I had to glide around him. His head revolved carefully, never releasing me from the grip of his gaze. I turned and looked — my father had, too — and the man kept staring.
(I now think tears don’t mean anything so much as overload. You don’t know what you feel. So tears spill out.)
I was bewildered and guilt-ridden and I hadn’t even faced Celine’s parents yet.
And then I did. Some mortician or other heartache functionary shunted me into a back-chamber where they were — it was like a green room for this particular death’s celebrities. I tried, for some reason, not to cry here, as if that was what was expected of me. I was trying to act as a kind but hard-judging person would want me to act.
I had the child’s faith that going through every official rite — psychiatry, returning to class — would restore me to an appropriate place in everyone’s eyes. Darin was brave enough to go to the funeral. He didn’t duck, nor did he shirk. He did The Right Thing. I hadn’t realized that the hard-judging person was myself.
Celine’s father, a big man, came to me with a surprisingly light step. He didn’t know what to do with his face. It was soft and jowly, and he wore glasses that gave him a Tom Bosley, Happy Days aspect. This made me to think he’d be gentle and understanding.
In the long moment before he found words, and as he took my hand, Mr. Zilke settled on an expression, a hard-won glint of: I will be friendlier than you have any right to expect me to be.
“You’re Darin.”
My voice and my face behaved as if this were a regular meeting between cordial strangers. I was nervous about sounding nervous, and nervous about sounding anything but nervous. (Even now I feel my face go red as I remember this: having complicated her parents’ grief with the question of how to treat me was perhaps the worst thing I could have done. A possibly brave act for me, but awful for them.)
Celine’s mother joined us. (The thing is, I still don’t know what would have been the right and respectful thing to do, other than having shown up.) I think her mother attempted a smile, but not a single muscle obeyed; she stood there exempt from all expression. Then her cheeks flared a difficult color. She was preparing to do something.