Bernie looks at me. “Me too.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I say, and Bernie nods.

“Me neither.” Then she turns her head back to the cows in the field, and I think that’s the end of it.

But still looking away, she says, “I wish it was like this all the time.”

There are no animals on my side of the road, just green, but that is where I look and what I talk to.

“What did you think of the kangaroo thing?” I ask.

Bernie says, “Probably the same as you.”

I look at her then, and she’s already looking at me, the faintest impression of a smile on her face.

She’s prettier than when we were friends. Her hair looks better, but her smile hasn’t changed, and suddenly, I miss her.

“God knows what they’ve got planned for tonight,” she says.

I laugh and realize this couldn’t have happened yesterday. With a camera pointed at her face, Bernie wouldn’t have said a word.

She knew me when I had a mom, and being alone with her now, for the first time in forever, I want to cry. By the time I got to middle school, I was old news.

When you’re a kid and it’s your first day at a new school, a part of you wants to shout how your mom was murdered, to get it out of the way.

Nan said I should find out who my friends were first. She said it’s easy to be liked for the wrong reasons. That’s why I waited to tell Hanna and Emily about the Magpie Man. But Bernie knew so much earlier, and that should mean more than it does.

Ten years later, forced together by the flick of a teacher’s pen, she says, “How’s your dad?”

“He’s okay,” I lie.

I don’t tell her that what he’s doing right now, any now, is sitting, staring, remembering a life that feels impossible.

“I always liked him,” Bernie says. “I miss my dad so much. I don’t see him anymore.”

Her parents got divorced when we were babies, but he still picked her up on weekends. He’d wait outside and she would run to him, and they’d do whatever dads and daughters do when they only have a day to do it.

I remember once he argued with her mom’s new boyfriend, Bernie’s mom begging them not to, while we watched from a window, and after that, he stopped ringing the bell.

Families break in all sorts of ways, and I should feel sorry for her, but I don’t. She was one of the first examples of how people drift away after death, our playdates going from weekly to rarely to never, because whose parents want their kids hanging out in a house of grief?