I held her hand harder. She had not given me many details on the phone. I certainly did not know Quinn had seen Sienna's body before the coroner covered her. My mind reeled the rest of the service.
I had no idea what bothered me the most about Quinn seeing Sienna like that. The crowd of mourners finally moved on through the dining room and into the backyard for refreshments. I found myself alone with a few stranglers ringed around the edge of the living room. I walked up to Sienna's open casket.
She looked perfect – her makeup a little too thick and her lips a little too red, but perfect.
"Hey, beautiful. Remember how a long time ago you asked me to tell you when you were behaving rotten? I gotta call you out one last time. You knew someone was going to find you. Either your roommate or your siste
r. What an awful thing to put on someone else. You didn't think of that, did you? You probably had this whole damned funeral planned down to the photographs and flowers. But you didn't think for one second what you'd be doing to other people. She saw you, Sienna. Like that. Makes me glad you're gone. You can't hurt me or Quinn anymore."
I stepped back and swiped away the angry tears. Across the room, closer than she should have been, Quinn stared at me wide-eyed. I swallowed hard and hoped she did not hear what I had said.
#
It was time to go. I turned to make a break for the front door only to bump into a wall of former classmates.
"Weird high school reunion, huh?" Ben said. He had been the captain of the football team. The same irritated estimation from our teenage years was in his eyes as he looked me over. He still could not understand why Sienna chose me over him.
Ben was my height with buzzed brown hair. His square jaw and cleft chin could have put him in those mail order sweater catalogs. He'd gone on to college with a football scholarship and had not changed one bit.
"What are you up to these days?" he asked. "Is there a market for being too cool for school?"
His cronies, a trio of Ben knockoffs at various heights, laughed.
"I heard you're still hanging out at arcades or something, right?" the first crony asked.
"Something like that," I said. I tried to step past them.
"You were still with Sienna, weren't you?" Ben asked. "That is rough, man, just rough. You doing okay?"
The actual sincerity of his statement set me back a step. "I think I'm still in shock."
"No kidding. I could have imagined a dozen other people from our graduating class offing themselves, but not her." Ben scrubbed his cleft chin. "I keep thinking maybe it’s a joke. Like that time you swapped out the science dummies’ insides with lunch meat. Remember? You used food coloring to make the white rats have bloody mouths so it looked like they'd turned zombie or something?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sienna would never go for a fake-your-death-then-zombie-attack-your-own-funeral kind of joke."
"See, that's what I'm saying. I could never figure you two out," Ben said. He clapped an arm around my shoulder and forced me to join him on the back porch.
The yard was full of cliques I remembered from high school. I looked around and could not find one knot of people with a gravitational pull. It was the same when I was actually in high school. I drifted, had plenty of friends, but no one close, and people either thought that was really cool or really weird.
I played it off then like I was a rebel, but looking at the funeral reception, I did not have the energy. The truth was I did not care. Small talk, schmoozing, and keeping up appearances – that was all Sienna. She made me hit my limit and I could not go back.
"Shit, this looks miserable. Count me out," I said.
"So, what? That's it. Sienna dies and you head back to whatever basement you make your money from?" Ben asked. "Yeah, I know all about the gaming thing. Nice gig."
"Yeah, guess I have a talent for it."
"You're for real? No wonder Sienna was getting sick of you. She was heading off to be a surgeon and you're playing video games," he said. He unwrapped his arm and gave my shoulder a punch. "This your wake-up call or what?"
"Wake up to what?" I asked. "Learning to tie a tie and take Daddy's place behind a useless desk at the shipping company?"
"That's legit, man. A real job. Something my honey is proud of," Ben said. He nodded across the yard to a stick-thin bottle blonde. She waved like a terrier wags its tail. "I don't mean to hit you when you're down, man, but think about it. Maybe now's the time to do something with your life."
"Funerals bring out the philosophers," I said. "Good luck with all that." I waved to his girlfriend. She gave me a once-over and a bright smile. I could hear Ben's teeth grinding.
"I don't get you, man. I just know you're going nowhere," he said. "Good luck with that." He clapped me on the shoulder one more time and led his trio off the patio into the grass.
Their next stop was Sienna's father. I snorted, remembering the last conversation I had with him before today. It had been remarkably similar to Ben's topic of choice: my lack of career. They just did not understand that my world was not theirs. That was what made people uncomfortable. Succeeding on the screens and high scores of the gaming world was not obvious to the rest of the world, especially to non-gamers, so they assumed I was floundering.