As Dead As It Gets

Instead, there was a hole in the corner of the bag where a seam had come apart.

I retraced my steps to my car, and then I drove all the way back to Lydia’s house and retraced my steps there. I looked at every square inch of space within ten feet of where I’d walked, not even caring if Mrs. Small looked outside and saw me.

But the bird was gone.

SCHOOL STARTED UP AGAIN on a Wednesday. I took a deep breath as I got out of my car. New year, hopeful new outlook. (Or at least slightly less terrible outlook.)

The 700 wing was the newest building in the school. It had wide, spacious hallways with skylights and classrooms with air-conditioning that actually functioned. The only reason to stray this far from the center of campus before school was to be part of an advanced science lab or some sort of extracurricular organization, so all the kids I passed moved with purpose, like they had somewhere to be.

Halfway down the hall was a door marked PUBLICATIONS. A printed sign hung beneath that with the name of the yearbook: THE WINGSPAN.

I pushed the door open and walked into a large room that was painted nonregulation dark blue, with a row of computers along the far wall and bookshelves along the near one. About a third of the floor space was taken up with matching file cabinets, and next to those were a conference table and a small, untidy cluster of desks. Five or six kids sat on the desks, staring up at a giant whiteboard on the side wall. The whiteboard was covered in printed pages that seemed to represent an early draft of a yearbook.

A girl was talking. She had short curly hair, thin wire-frame glasses, and dark olive skin. Her baggy sweatshirt read harvard.

“It doesn’t make sense to try to divide clubs up by grade level. There are only six that determine their membership that way.” She pointed to a sheet with a list of club names on it. “We’re going to list them either alphabetically or grouped according to the type of activity. Actually…both. Alphabetically by activity.”

One of the boys opened his mouth to reply.

“Forget it, Chad,” she said. “That’s my final answer.”

They all scattered, with no one taking any particular notice of me. I hung back, not knowing whom to approach.

Finally, the curly-haired girl glanced over at me. “You look lost.”

“I’m looking for…” I consulted the note the office secretary had written for me. “Elliot Quilimaco? Is he here?”

“Hmm…someone’s looking for Elliot.…Is he here?” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, speaking in a loud voice. “You know, the boy in charge of the yearbook, because of course no mere female could ever be a yearbook editor. Has anyone seen Elliot, the exalted male?”

Nobody looked up. But the boy she’d called Chad, a burly guy with spiky dirty-blond hair, said, “Did you skip your meds today?”

She ignored him and turned back to me. “I am Elliot Quilimaco.”

“Sorry.” Couldn’t she have just said so? I mean, it is a boy’s name.

“Bless my stars!” she said, eyes widening in horror. “A girl named Elliot! Stop the presses!”

“Wait, really?” asked a boy a few feet away. He was hovering over a humming machine.

Elliot rolled her eyes. “That’s not a press, Kevin. It’s a laser printer.”

If I hadn’t already been saturated with regret about my promise to Mrs. Small, this would definitely have tipped me over the edge.

“What brings you to our humble corner of the school, Alexis?” she asked. “I thought you spent your time in the courtyard with the important people.”

She knew who I was?

She tapped her foot, waiting for my answer.

“Um,” I said. “I have a favor to ask.”

“I’m listening.”

I lowered my voice, not that anyone in the room seemed to be paying attention to us. “I was wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of memorial in the yearbook for Lydia Small—I mean, if you weren’t already pla

Elliot’s alert, questioning expression didn’t change at all. “No, sorry, I don’t think so. Have a nice day.”

She started to turn away.

“Wait!” I said. “Are you kidding? You know she died, right?”

Elliot shrugged. “Even if I didn’t, which I did, the request for a memorial would have been a pretty good clue.”

“And…” I decided to change tactics. “It would really mean a lot to…people.”

“Oh, I see.” She blew air out of her nostrils. “Well, that doesn’t actually change anything.”

“Come on, seriously?”

Elliot put her hands back on her hips and leaned ever so slightly forward. “All right. Let’s move this along. Here’s the part where you say, ‘What did she ever do to you?’”

“Um, no,” I said. “That’s probably not a good question to ask about Lydia.”

“You’re right,” she said, moving closer. “Because I’ll tell you what your little friend did to me. Last year—I don’t know if you know this, but I doubt it, because obviously you’ve never deigned to notice me before—my older sister was a senior. And she was diagnosed with cancer, so she had to miss the last two months of school.”

My hands were suddenly slick with sweat. I didn’t see what this had to do with Lydia. Had Elliot’s sister died and not gotten a yearbook memorial? Why did everything end with death and misery?

“She’s in remission now, thank God,” Elliot said a little more gently, probably after seeing my face. “But anyway, her greatest wish was to have her senior yearbook signed by all of her friends and teachers. So I brought it to school, carried it around for a week, made sure everyone wrote in it. And the stuff people wrote? Epic, Alexis. Poems, song lyrics, quotes—so much amazing material.”

A vague sense of dread began to churn in my stomach.

“So on the last day of school, Lydia Small—who I kind of knew in junior high—comes up to me and asks if she can write something for Dale—yes, my sister also has a boy’s name.”

Lord, here it comes.

“She signed it, I said thanks, took it home and gave it to my sister. It was a huge surprise—Dale was so happy, we were crying…and she opened it up and started to read, and it was, like, better than I ever imagined.”

She was telling the story with such relish that I couldn’t bear to interrupt her, even though I knew I didn’t want to hear how it ended.

“And then she gets to some random page…and stops smiling.” Elliot’s face turned from rapturous to deadly serious. “And the next page after that, she’s frowning. And so on, until she’s in tears, and she gets up and throws the yearbook in the trash. Because Lydia Small took a bright red Sharpie and wrote on, I don’t know, I never actually counted—fifteen pages? Stuff like, ‘Sorry you had to miss school because of the chlamydia,’ ‘Hope those crabs clear up before bathing suit season!’”

Now Elliot’s eyes were bright and cold and diamond-hard, and everyone in the room was staring at us.

“So, yeah,” she said. “Forgive me if I don’t want to devote a two-page spread to your little friend who didn’t give a flying—”

“Language, Quilimaco,” said a voice from the corner. A teacher was sitting with his feet up on a desk, reading a magazine.

“A flying foot,” Elliot said primly, “about what could have ended up being my sister’s dying wish.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “She’s not my friend. I couldn’t stand her, for the record.”

Elliot shifted her weight and looked at me with blank curiosity. “Then why are you here?”

“I promised her mother I’d ask. But whatever.” I turned to go.

Elliot heaved a mighty put-upon sigh. “Okay, fine.”

“Wait, really?” To be honest, if I’d been in her shoes, I don’t think anything could have changed my mind.

“Yes,” Elliot said. “Mostly because you didn’t try to go over my head and ask Mr. Janicke about it.”