I had to keep hiking up the dress Cole had picked out for me. My eighth-grade prom gown. The dress was simple—not shiny, not taffeta. But it was strapless, and now that I actually had them, my breasts bulged obscenely from it. Cole had paired it with the black shrug she’d brought to wear with her perfect and stylish sheath dress.

I looked fine, but I felt stupid. It didn’t help that I was carrying my flour baby. No one else was. I guess it was one of those universally understood things. Note to self: you don’t have to do social psych homework during a funeral.

As we moved inside, I caught sight of Chelsea Westad and her family huddled close to “The Surviving Kitzlers.” What exactly did that mean, anyway? That they survived the tragedy of losing their daughter? And wasn’t it a little soon to be declaring that victory? Or was the term surviving used more broadly? As in they had succeeded in living on this earth longer than she had? Judging from the smile on Mrs. K.’s face, it was a toss-up.

I glimpsed Mom’s blond hair and black suit as she snuck in late; she had dropped us off at the main entrance of the church before heading off to find a parking spot in the overflow lot. She took a seat in the back row even though we had saved a place for her.

Next to me Lexi sniffed back tears. Cole stayed strong and fed her tissues.

The funeral was numbing. Prayers, sermons, psalms, prayers, psalms, sermons. It was a total out-of-body experience. Inside, sea waves of sickness rocked through me while erratic clips of music kept repeating in my head—chafing hands, broken glass, and all the love gone bad.

I needed to get back to that black world. This bright one was moving way too fast. Spinning out of control. My brain snagged, over and over, repeating audio clips of Kori like a CD with a scratched surface, unable to skip past a lyric. Just spinning and skipping, skipping and spinning. The sides of my stomach jerked and clamped, ripping flames of acidic bile up the back of my throat with every convulsion. I needed to throw up. That’s what happens when you’ve been jerked upright and thrust out into the sunlight after spending four days in the horizontal position in a perfectly good dark room. I felt blind, slimy, like a larva forced out of its dark, safe cocoon too soon. Born to a new world that I had zero chance of surviving.

I needed to prove to myself that Kori was really and truly dead. In all honesty, that was the only reason I was even at the funeral. And I’m not entirely convinced I got proof of that.