Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 14

"Simmons. Christina and Ann Simmons."

Standing in the freezing cold wind at the entrance of the Lake Forest Cemetery, I tried to remember how I had originally formed an impression of Mischa Portnoy. I'd known her since kindergarten—pre-school, actually, but could barely remember that year of our lives—when she was a tiny dynamo with two brown braids. Mischa had always been more petite than all of the other girls in our class, taking after her mom. Even her older sister Amanda had a height advantage of a few inches over her. Teachers adored her because she was outspoken and sassy. Even when her answers in class weren't correct, they were relevant. In third grade, she had incorrectly guessed that Ben Franklin was the first president of the United States, but had stupefied our teacher, Mrs. Graham, by informing the entire class that perhaps Ben Franklin hadn't been the country's first president, but he had organized the first insurance company in America.

As with all of my classmates in Willow, the memories I'd retained of Mischa were nonsensical and disjointed. I remembered her wearing a lavender Izod sweater in first or second grade of which I'd been deeply envious. In gym class, she'd always been one of the girls chosen first for teams, and she seized every opportunity to show off her aptitude for gymnastics, turning cartwheels and back handsprings wherever there was available space. Even at a very early age, I remember thinking, Mischa has a talent, and feeling very inadequate, myself. We weren't in the same class for sixth grade, but I could still recall her walking through the hallway of our middle school with a purple cast on her broken arm, bearing at least one hundred sloppy signatures. I'd been jealous; I'd wanted her to ask me to autograph the cast, but the request was never made.

Even though I had known Mischa for pretty much my entire life, I hadn't really begun to understand the nature of her character, or the depths of her strength, until that fall. I supposed that most girls, facing their own impending deaths, would curl into balls and helplessly cry. Mischa, on the other hand, had brazenly told Violet that she'd gladly kill her if necessary. She was proving to be a convincing, imaginative liar and devious planner, too. It was a pity that it had taken such unpleasant circumstances for me to truly get to know her. I never would have guessed the year before, when we were sophomores, that by the middle of my junior year, I would trust her more than any other girl at school.

The middle-aged, mustached guard at the cemetery seemed a bit suspicious as to our reason for wanting to visit the cemetery. Who could blame him? It was seventeen degrees outside, and we were a bunch of sneaky-looking teenagers, wiping at our dripping noses. We had arrived in a cab that remained idling at the cemetery's front gates, which had to seem weird to the guard. Henry had given the cab driver his VISA card to cover the running meter, since none of us wanted to wait in the bitter cold for yet another cab to come and fetch us when our business at the cemetery was finished. We weren't even really sure what we thought we'd find at the cemetery; we were simply all in agreement that it seemed like something we should check out.

It hadn't occurred to any of us until the cab came to a rest in front of the guard's station that it was unlikely we were going to find anything worthwhile there without putting in some serious elbow grease. The entire cemetery was still buried under nearly three feet of snow.

"Simmons," the guard said, handing Mischa a map of the cemetery after checking on his computer. He had drawn a path for us to follow in red marker through the cemetery's winding roads and aisles, although in the map, the cemetery looked like a summer garden with green fields and blue ponds. It was a vastly different reality around us, practically impossible to correlate back to the map. "That plot's in Row 108, Section E. You'd be better off driving around to the East gate than trying to walk there from here. Only the main roads have been plowed in the memorial park, and from here, it's going to be an unpleasant walk."