I get a bag out of the car and start cleaning up around the gravestones. I find a condom wrapper. Next to it in the grass I find a jagged piece of granite. They’ve broken a chip off a corner of the Helmers’ stone. It’s thin and sharp, and about as long as my hand. I sit up on the Helmers with the piece of rock in my lap, fingering the edge of it.

There will be no experience that will set the world back the way it was. The way I feel now, an alloy of anger and guilt fused together, is probably permanent, so I just have to get used to it. I’ve been acting like Grimshaw’s murder is a movie I’m watching on TV. I’ve been waiting to cast myself in the right setting with the right script, and so have my catharsis, sob my too-long-held-in sobs, shine my tearful smile of healing, learn my spiritual lesson, which I then channel for the benefit of humanity. Then I understand that everything happens for a higher purpose, even a murder, which in the end serves its own purpose, as long as somebody expendable dies. I’ve been waiting for the TV movie to end. I’ve been waiting for her to come back.

I press the edge of the granite into the flesh of my arm, and then I keep slowly adding pressure, harder and harder. I find a threshold where I can’t stand the pain, and it brings a cool sense of relief. Exactly one tear slides down my cheek. No more follow. When it gets dark, I get Aaron’s sleeping bag out of the trunk of the BMW and spread it out on the grass so I can sleep where I belong, among the Helmers, the Getmans, the Purdys, and Mr. Sprague.

sixteen

WHEN I GET BACK TO Versailles on Saturday, there’s a sign over the gate that says CONGRATULATIONS SERENA in capital letters. A big party is going on in the back, the noise bubbling up over the house. I lean my forehead on the steering wheel. I can tell without even getting out of the car that there is going to be nobody here that I want to see or talk to. But I don’t have anywhere else to go. So I dig out the mascara that has been in the bottom of my backpack since my cheerleader days. Looking in the rearview mirror, I paint on a little makeup and a little smile. As I get out of the car, Allegra comes out to greet me. She’s in bartender garb, complete with a garter on her arm.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she says. We gaze at each other, new adults, across the wide expanse of asphalt.

“I guess I’m the dead body at the funeral,” I say finally.

“Yeah,” she says. As I get closer to her, she says, “Um, Serena?”

“Yeah?”