“Fair enough, and I am not throwing fashion stones in anyone’s direction. As long as you’re comfortable, I’m grateful for your presence.” Mr. Stephens wheeled on a squeaking leather shoe and led us through a curling hallway to a viewing room, the one named Midnight Wish.

Cayla latched on to my arm and yanked me back, allowing the others to go ahead. Mercy snapped pictures of the walls and ceiling, each flash a bit of lightning, foretelling larger storms to come. She dropped the grayed developing photos onto empty chairs.

Cayla whispered, “Do you know her?” I hesitated to answer, partly because her stage whisper echoed. “How’d she know about the club—oh, was it your flyers?”

“Yes, I mean, no. I mean, I sent a flyer but she’s a friend of my cousin. Jennifer. Graduated in ’85. She’s a senior in college, up at Bates.” (Why do we think added details makes something sound less like a lie?)

Cayla gave me a naked, unprotected, or unvarnished look, less I’m on to you than Oh, now I know who you are. “And what’s her deal with the pictures?”

“I don’t know—”

Mr. Stephens called us into the room.

The new and improved Pallbearers Club gathered by the casket, behind which was an assortment of potted plants, not flowers. Inside the gunmetal-gray coffin was an old, dead man wearing a cream-colored burial suit. He was bald but for cotton-candy tufts of white cumulonimbusing the horizon of his Jurassic ears. Jaundiced wallpaper skin displayed a complex pattern of liver spots on his forehead. His hands were a pile of sticks and stones. While my head buzzed with fascination and an urge to flee the room, I was not nearly as affected (mentally or physically) at the viewing of his body as I had been by Kathleen Blanchet’s, and I was not sure why. Perhaps this was what I always imagined a dead body would look like. And I did appreciate his suit; it read as cheerful to me.

I snuck a look at Mercy and Cayla, both shuttered inside their own heads, and I was reminded we are always alone.

So gloomy!

Mr. Stephens cleared his throat and announced the ceremony was about to begin. The club dropped a few steps back from the coffin and into Mr. Stephens’s orbit. He nodded at each of us. We returned our own volley of nods. He pulled out a letter from inside his jacket and almost as an afterthought, he told me to stop slouching.