I’ve changed my mind about going to Mason’s funeral, switched my mental RSVP from “yes” to “I’d rather chew glass.” Now that the day has arrived and I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to my mom on the way to the church, going through the awkward and depressing motions of it all feels impossible. I don’t trust myself not to underreact or overreact or both, since I know nothing about funerals except what I’ve seen on TV.
And who cares if I skip it? Not Mason. He’ll never know the difference if I’m there or not. That’s the worst part. This whole thing isn’t even for him. It’s for all of us ridiculous humans left behind, for us to have ashared experience(I just threw up a little in my mouth), or, more likely, just to prove to each other that we’re not so self-centered that we would skip a friend’s funeral.
So I can’t really pretend I don’t know who cares if I show my face. Asha cares, and the rest of our friends care, and Mason’s family double extra cares with a cherry on top. Shit. I’m going to have to see Mason’s family. I can’t.
But it’s too late. Maybe I could have pulled the rip cord back at the house, but I didn’t, and so here we are, pulling into the church parking lot. Any change in itinerary now would strike my mom asabnormaland require being peppered with questions. Even hanging in the car for a few more minutes, listening to the radio and feeling regular instead of severe and silent,would earn me a question storm from her. One of my friends has died. Mom’s going to have a magnifying glass on me pretty much forever.
“Here we are,” she says. I push myself from the car like I’m attached to a bungee cord and I’m jumping off a bridge, like maybe I’ll survive but everything under my skin will be jerked so hard it’ll get rearranged. We join the flow of people walking in the crisp fall sunshine toward the front door, our footsteps crunching on leaves scattered across the sidewalk. St. Brigit’s is as imposing as ever, as massive as a cathedral, with three high spires of white, sparkly stone. In our rural town filled with one- and two-story buildings, the church feels out of place, like someone wearing a prom dress to the drugstore. I like it, though. Everything about church is boring; might as well give us some interesting architecture to look at to pass the time.
I always used to forget that Mason was part of our congregation, because he never went to Mass. No idea how he got away with that. At the time, my only reaction was to be envious of his ability to be so persuasive with his parents. But now I realize I could have asked him to come with me. Sundays would have been so much more tolerable if we could have sat together, wordlessly sizing up the weird sweaters that the cantor always wore, Mason’s signature raised eyebrow saying paragraphs. But would my mom have even let me sit with him? Even if she didn’t, just having him in the pew across the aisle would have improved the whole church experience by several stars. How simple and solved everything would be if I could just see him in that pew right now.
But he won’t be anywhere in the church, even though this whole thing is for him. He’s skipping his own funeral. How fully textbook Mason. An unexpected chuckle bubbles out of me, and my mom gives me a sharp look. I meet her eyes with an innocent smile as we approach the entrance. Magnifying glass.
I hang back in the vestibule because the light is so low I’m afraid I might step on someone’s foot in the middle of their grieving. That would be bad form. It seems darker than usual. Can’t they turn the dimmer switches up a little? This is a funeral, for chrissake, not a haunted house.
Inching forward, I almost collide with the marble basin full of holy water, so I stall there to let my eyes adjust more, blessing myself repeatedly to buy time. The air in the vestibule is warm and thick with incense. It’s weird to me that church smells the same as the backpack of that kid at school who always has a knit pouch full of weed around his neck. What do they call that when things don’t match up in your head? Cognitive dissonance? Whatever it is, it’s happening to me a lot today.
My mom gets impatient and takes my arm, pulling me inside the church itself. Down the long aisle, the coffin sits prominently on the altar, which is as bright as the beach compared to the rest of the church, and there are two ostentatious flower arrangements on either side of the wooden box. God, Mason would hate those flowers. He would hate it all. He’d smirk his sarcastic smile that basically never left his face and roll his eyes. But again, it doesn’t matter. Coffin’s empty. He’s not here.
Mason drowned. He shouldn’t have been kayaking by himself, especially not at night with no life jacket, andespeciallybecause he had epilepsy, but Mason did a lot of things you shouldn’t do with epilepsy, like skip his medication, drink beer, stay up all night, etc. Maybe that’s why he had been having more seizures. His “fuck it” attitude resulted in him really truly fucking it.
The day it happened, his parents came back to their lake house after an evening out and couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in his usual place in front of his computer. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. Set on a steep wooded slope next to Seneca Lake, upstate New York’s deepest and coldest Finger Lake, the house wasn’t within walking distance of anything. So they called all his friends, who knew nothing. Well, I shouldn’t sayallhis friends. They didn’t call me. Thinking about it irks me all over again, because my brain can somehow manage to be petty in the most inappropriate of situations. Did they think we weren’t close enough for me to have maybe known where he was? I mean, I didn’t know where he was. But still, they should have called me. I deserved to be in that first handful of people who knew there was a problem. But by the time his mom called Jeff and Lucia and Asha, his dad had gone out to the water. Mason’s phone, shoes, a beer, and the life jacket he was too cool to wear were all clustered together at the end of the dock. And I don’t know if he’s tangled up in a mess of sunken branches or what, but the search teams never found his body.
I see Lucia, Asha, and Jeff now, sitting with Nolan toward thefront of the church on the left. I turn to my mom. “I’m going to go sit with my friends,” I say as the priest intones a welcome to the congregation. And I start to move to make it clear that I mean,Without you.
She opens her mouth to speak, then sighs and turns to find a spot closer to the back. I’m her ticket to a front-and-center seat, but now her weird sense of propriety dictates that she leave those spaces for people who knew him better.
“What’s up, Beavers,” I loud whisper as I slide in next to Asha. Mason started calling us the Beaver Bunch after Lucia and Jeff took to wearing sweatshirts from Roots. It’s basically a Canadian version of the Gap, and they put their logo on every shirt, sweater, and pair of underwear they sell. Said logo is a beaver holding a branch. It’ssoCanadian.
The nickname seemed innocent enough, until Lucia and Jeff got tired of wearing the sweatshirts but the name was still there. As it dawned on Asha, Lucia, and me thatbeaverwas also slang forvagina, the name started to seem super awkward. But Asha, in her wisdom, decided it was too late to back away from the nickname without opening ourselves up to ridicule. The smartest path was to lean in. So we did.
Asha Chawla looks gorgeous as usual, her wavy dark hair shining lustrous blue when the light strikes it, and her eyelashes sweeping so long it’s like she’s wearing falsies even though she’s not. Her frame is delicate and refined, from her slender wrists to her smooth collarbone, everything except her intimidating breasts. I honestly am surprised she doesn’ttip over sometimes; she seems to defy physics the same way a Barbie doll does. She’s the kind of girl it would be easy for me to hate for her unfair portion of physical gifts, if she wasn’t so freaking funny.
“You’re late, bitch,” she loud whispers back, grinning. Asha’s voice is like a Long Island sorority girl and a hokey country singer had a baby, nasally and twangy. She plays it up because she knows how surprising it sounds coming out of her elegant mouth. It’s part of her comedy. The other part is mostly swearing. She leans into the hard consonants of those words, bending them to her will.Bitch,beaver… soon she will own them all.
An older couple who’ve been together long enough to look and dress exactly alike turn around in the pew in front of us and give her an icy glare. Asha turns around, too, as if searching for who said the profanity, and then shakes her head at the couple like the three of them are all on the morality police force together. The couple face front again, seeming vaguely confused.
“Christ, Ash, you’re going to get us kicked out of Mason’s funeral,” I say under my breath.
She shrugs. “He would love that. What a tribute.”
She’s right about that. Anything against the grain—he was all for it.
Nolan Drake is sitting next to Asha. He has his money clip out and is absently pulling the cash out, then snapping the clip back on again, over and over. The money clip is one of his many little affectations that he takes on to seem—what—older? Cooler? Less pimply? I can see the chain for his pocket watchhanging out of his pants. If he came to school with a monocle and a top hat like Mr. Peanut one day, I wouldn’t be surprised.
He has a big stack in that clip, so it must be all ones.
“What you got there, big spender?” I ask quietly. “Fourteen dollars?” Asha grins and nudges me with her elbow to show she approves.
Nolan fans the money like a deck of cards. “Enough,” he says, trying to sound like he’s got swagger.
“Enough for what?” Asha asks. “A new outfit for your avatar?”
“Shhhh!” hisses the woman in front of us. We cast our eyes to the floor, but our shoulders are shaking with silent laughter. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.
Then Sarah, Mason’s sister, gets up to do the eulogy. Before this, it’s been church readings, droning passages about everlasting heaven with archaic syntax. Stuff that seemed irrelevant to Mason or his life. But Sarah is as real and relevant as my pulse, which I am suddenly aware of in my neck.
She starts out talking about cute things she remembers him doing as a baby, like when he fell asleep at the table with his face on a waffle and when he woke up, he just took another bite and said, “Nap waffle!” The air in the church is relaxed; people are laughing.
