“I’ve never been to a funeral before,” I told her as we walked.
“Neither have I,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she was telling me the truth. “We’re like funeral virgins.”
I scowled at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll get serious.”
We were late for the service. There were maybe twenty people in the church pews. I didn’t recognize anyone except for my social worker, Emma. She noticed me coming in, walked back and led us to seats near the front as people sang a slow, sad song.
Lindsey sat down beside me on the empty wooden bench. The song ended and the minister began to read from the bible. My mom had never been religious. We’d never once gone to church, so this seemed very odd, very wrong. For a second I considered getting up and walking out of there. Or running.
Lindsey must have noticed me getting antsy, because first she touched my leg and then she took my hand and held it. Who was this nut job of a girl anyway? But then I closed my eyes as the minister droned on, and all I could think about was the fact that I was glad I was not alone.
I don’t remember much else about the service. There was no coffin. My mom had been cremated. The minister spoke about Jesus and about resurrection and about how my mom’s spirit was there in the church but that she had also “gone home.” If my mom had been here, really here, she would have hated it all. As the service was coming to a close, people stood up and sang another song from the hymn book. I had been fighting my emotions through the whole thing, but suddenly I found myself crying.
We sat there, Lindsey and me, while everyone else was standing. She put her arm around me. And I cried. I hadn’t cried in a long time. Not even when I had found my mom dead in her bed. But now I let it out.
I sobbed, and my body shook. And Lindsey held on to me and didn’t let go.
People nodded to us as they left the church. The minister came over and said something that was supposed to be comforting, I guess, but I wasn’t really listening to the words.
As we got up to go, the social worker came up and introduced herself to Lindsey.
“You gonna be okay?” she asked me. “Do you want me to come over and be with you?”
“No,” I said. “My uncle is coming in from out of town to stay with me for a few days.”
“That’s good,” Emma said. “I was afraid you were all alone. I’ll be over to sort things out with you in a couple of days, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. I had no uncle—not one that would ever come over to help out anyway.
As we walked away from the church, the world seemed different to me. I don’t know how to explain it. Just different. Unreal, I guess.
“Josh, are you going be all right?” Lindsey asked. I think she asked me three times before I heard her.
“I don’t know,” I finally answered. “I’ve been worrying about my mom for so long. That’s what I did. Every day. And I tried to help. And sometimes it seemed like things were going to be okay. But now she’s gone.”
Lindsey looked at me and touched my face. “It’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, I think it is. I should have taken better care of her.”
“I’m so sorry. You must have really loved her.”
I took a deep breath. My head was still filled with fog. That damn church service didn’t do me much good. It certainly didn’t do my mother any good. And then there was this girl beside me. Who was she? Why was she walking with me? I took a deep breath. I tried to focus on something. I was afraid to think about returning to that crappy apartment alone. I was afraid of what my life was going to be like tonight and tomorrow and the day after that. I was afraid, and I was alone in the world. All I knew right now was that I wanted this crazy girl, this Lindsey, to stay beside me, to keep talking.
“What about your parents?” I asked. “Tell me about them.”
“My mom and dad are the world’s most invisible parents. In some ways, they are every teenager’s dream. My dad works about sixty hours a week, and my mom has all this social stuff on the go. They are probably okay people. They’re just hardly ever home. There’s food in the fridge. They even gave my brother and me a credit card we can use for clothes and stuff. They trust us. Which, believe me, is totally nuts.”
“You have a brother?”
“Yeah. Caleb. He was raised by video games and YouTube videos.”
“Is he like you?”
“You mean, is he a thief?”
“No. I don’t know. What is he like?”
“Well, he has his problems.”
“Like what?” Suddenly I was interested in other people’s problems. Anything to get my mind off my own.
“Well, he gets depressed easily. But he’s also very insecure. So he acts out. He does things to try to impress people. He thinks if he can draw attention to himself, people will like him.”
“Like what?”
“Well, in the last year he has started to think he’s a great graffiti artist. He goes by the name Yo-Yo.”
“Yo-Yo?”
“I think it has to do with the depression thing. He says that he gets down, but he always bounces back. Yo-Yo.”
“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that name. Big puffy letters in the weirdest places.” “That’s my brother. If he can get at it, he’ll try to tag it.”
“But why?”
Lindsey threw up her hands. “You’d have to ask Caleb. Caleb the Conqueror, he used to call himself when he was in his superhero phase. He’s been caught more than once. He’s not that careful. But, like he says, he always bounces back. That’s the Yo-Yo for you.”
We were standing outside my apartment building—a dirty three-story brick building with trash on the front steps. “I’m home.”
“Now what?”
“I don’t know. I walk in there and try to figure out where my life goes from here.”
“What about me?” Lindsey asked.
“What about you?”
“Well, we did this funeral thing together, right?”
“Yeah. Well, you stole my wallet first, and then we did the funeral thing.”
“I know. But I didn’t know your mom had just died. Besides, it wasn’t personal.”
“It seemed pretty personal at the time.”
“I can explain, but maybe not now. Now I want you to tell me that we can be friends. We had a bad start, but it’s getting better, right?”
“It’s hard for me to think about anything getting better,” I said. And I almost turned and began to go up those trashy steps. But, despite all the weirdness, I knew that Lindsey was some kind of lifeline for me.
“Yeah, if you want to be my friend, I’d like that,” I said.
Lindsey smiled then. It was a great smile. “Hold out your hand.”
I held out my hand, and she wrote something on it. An email address.
“I have to go to the library if I want to check emails.”
“Okay.” She flipped my hand over and wrote a phone number on it. “You got a phone?”
“I have my mom’s cell phone. It’s really old. Guess it’s mine now.”
“Call me?”
I tried smiling back, but it was like my face wasn’t working. I started up the steps, then turned and said, “Thanks. Thanks, Lindsey.”