“I just wanted her to leave me alone.”
And she did. Sarah died at the end of senior year, right before graduation. I never went to visit her in the hospital but I did go to her funeral. Her mother recognized me right away. She told me how much my friendship had meant to Sarah. How she’d considered me her best friend.
“She would always tell me how nice you were to her. How you were the only one who didn’t tease her. I think she had a bit of a crush on you. Thank you for being so kind. I know it meant a lot.”
I didn’t say a word. Sarah obviously hadn’t told her how horrible I’d been to her at the end. But I hardly knew the girl. She was just some weird chick who followed me around the school. But apparently the little attention I had given her was more than anyone else had. Enough to make me her closest friend. I held Mrs. Michelle’s hand and we wept together over Sarah’s grave.
Now Sarah’s following me again.
I first spotted her the morning after the funeral. I came down for breakfast and she was standing in my kitchen with the morning light shining right through her, encountering no resistance from her flesh. Sarah looked over at me when I entered the room then smiled and turned quickly away, blushing. I froze, my muscles and tendons locked in fear, staring at her with my jaw hanging slack and my tongue like a dead weight lolling stupidly in my open mouth.
Sarah looked terrible. She looked as if she’d just climbed off of the autopsy table. But then again she’d always looked like that. Her sunken cheeks and thin lips were drawn tight around a tremulous smile. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and seemed to be little more than holes cored into her face. I could almost smell the formaldehyde wafting from her pores. At first I thought she was some type of zombie until I saw that she was the only thing in the room not casting a shadow. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there staring at her with all my nerves jangling as if electrified. When I didn’t smile back, her face cracked with a wounded sadness. Sarah turned and bolted from the room, letting out a mournful wail like the sound she’d made the day I’d shunned her in the hallway at school.
She wrenched open the backdoor and slammed it with a loud bang. I was less than a second behind her when she ran out into the yard. Still, when I opened the door, the yard was empty. Sarah was gone.
I didn’t tell my mom about it or any of my friends at school. That would have meant admitting to my mother how cruel I’d been and admitting to my friends that I felt guilty about it. So I kept quiet. And Sarah kept following me.
Next I saw her at school. Waiting for me in the halls as she always had. She smiled that same tepid grin that looked now like a rictus of death and I quickly turned around and stalked off in the other direction, ignoring the questions from my friends who obviously couldn’t see her and could not understand why I was retreating from them. Of course they couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been able to see her when she was alive. Besides, I was the one she was haunting. I was the one who’d killed her.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Everywhere I looked Sarah would be there.
She was waiting for me in the bathrooms. I nearly killed myself one morning reaching for a towel as I spotted her staring at herself in the vanity mirror, picking the scabs on her bald head. She turned to me and flashed me that lip-less grin that made her look even more like a skeleton. Her arms and legs held no fat at all and very little muscle and every blue vein stood out prominently through her translucent skin. Sometimes she would be naked with her shriveled breasts partially concealed by one arm coyly draped across her chest. Her stomach completely concave and her ribs pressed tight against her skin. These weren’t the ravages of death I was seeing in her emaciated body. I knew that this was exactly how she had looked in life. I soon avoided taking showers.
I stared across the kitchen table at her every morning as I choked down oatmeal and stirred the runny eggs on my plate with a fork, swallowing hard and trying not to regurgitate. She would smile at me so that her red bleeding gums would show and her eyes would water up as if she really wanted to cry, but was only forcing that ghastly grin onto her face in an attempt to appear friendly, for my sake. Her cheeks were sunken so deep that it looked like she was trying to suck a lemon through a straw and her cheekbones appeared ready to rip through her skin. Her eyes were huge in her shrunken head and stared back at me looking wounded and expectant. I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea what she wanted. I wanted to implore her to eat something but then I would remember that it was far too late for that. She began showing up at every meal. I quickly lost my appetite.
The first night she appeared in my bedroom I had tried apologizing for not being nicer to her while she was alive. I told her I was sorry for not being a better friend. She smiled that same nervous unenthusiastic grimace and reached out and stroked my face with her fingertips. I leaped back about ten feet when those icy appendages raked my flesh. I kept forgetting she was dead. By then she had been following me for so many weeks that I had almost gotten used to her.
It was my mother who first began to notice my weight-loss. She would beg me to eat and then look frightened and concerned when I would refuse or regurgitate the few morsels I managed to ingest. She would constantly ask me what was wrong because I had completely withdrawn from all my friends and would stare off into space for long minutes, occasionally bursting into tears. Nothing could comfort me. Sarah’s melancholy presence haunted me every hour of the day.
Pretty soon the kids at school started to remark on my increasing strangeness. Not just my daydreaming and emotional outbursts but my deteriorating appearance. My cheeks began to get that drawn and sunken look. The bones in my face grew more and more pronounced as if my skull was rising to the surface. I spent hours in the restroom vomiting up what little I was able to force myself to consume. My friends at school were the first to make the connection to Sarah, even before I did. They recognized the same stench of death.
“What, did you catch AIDS from that crack whore who died last year? I knew you were fucking her! Man, that’s nasty!”
In the end I lost all my friends anyway. None of them stuck by my side. Teenagers were supposed to be immortal and my obvious illness threatened that notion. I was a reminder that all things die. So they shunned me like the plague. My mother said that they had never been real friends anyway. I hated to hear that. I’d killed a girl out of fear of losing their friendship. Now she was the only one who still came around.
Sarah’s been with me now every night since I started chemotherapy. The feel of her cold dead flesh against me as I lay nauseous with radiation poisoning is the worst of it all. I know she thinks she’s doing me some kindness; being at my side in my hour of need. Trying to give me the comfort I’d never extended to her. But seeing her just reminds me of what I will soon become and how I hadn’t been there for her. Maybe that’s part of her plan as well; to save my soul by giving me a taste of true remorse. She no longer looks anything like the Sarah I knew. Her body is bloated with gasses and her skin looks loose and oily as if it’s ready to slip right off of her. Her eyes are gone and her hair and nails have grown long. I know that this is how she now looks lying in her coffin.
I turn to look into the empty pits where her eyes should be and feel her sorrow wafting toward me in waves. I’d had it wrong this whole time.
It wasn’t her own death or even my cruel betrayal that caused the terrible sadness within her. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, but for me. She knew all along that I was dying too. The tremors start and I wrap my arms around her frigid flesh as Sarah curls against me. And I’m grateful for the comfort she offers. The coolness of her bloodless flesh brings some relief from the fever raging through my dying body. I feel her cold tears drip from her cheeks onto my arms like drops of ice water and I warm them with my own. Sarah had not been so crazy after all. In the end, she was my best friend.