Lakeside

[7] The Funeral

June 5th, 2016

As the people started to walk away, I stand with my feet planted in the ground, my head hovering over the dirt. I can't get over it. I just can't understand how it really happened.

Nobody was blaming me for standing there longer than I needed to. The entire funeral I'd been bawling my eyes out, exactly what I'd been doing for the past few days. Everyone knew Brooke was my best friend, so they all let me have my moment.

When I was dumping a shovel of dirt onto her casket, I looked over to see on the other side was Delivigne, the girl Brooke hated the most. But tears fell from her eyes as she wept at the loss of my favorite person, and I wanted to shove her down into the hole and bury her with Brooke. She was never kind to her, and at every chance she could get she would humiliate Brooke. But she stood in front of the entire grade today to say that Brooke meant so much to her, and how great of friends they were. She didn't deserve to be here, because she could be a potential reason that Brooke decided to kill herself.

Next to Delivigne was her friends, who were all crying as well. Their boyfriends comforted them, and I watched how they hugged the girls who didn't deserve to be here. But one guy, with nobody to hug, Ashton Fields, stood there with his hands in front of him and stared at me. He didn't have a girlfriend to comfort, and I didn't have a boyfriend to comfort me. You'd think my family would be the ones trying to calm me down and wipe those tears away, but they weren't. Maybe he saw that, that nobody was there for me. But even if he walked over here I'd turn him down, because everyone knew that he didn't have sympathy for anyone.

Everyone was gone now, and I just thought back to everything. The day I found out was what I was really focused on.

"Mom, what's for dinner?" I yelled as I descended down the stairs with a pip in my step. She didn't respond, which was unusual. She always answered.

I reached the bottom, walking into the living room where her eyes were glued to the TV screen with a remote in her hand. Our local news was on.

"Mom?" I asked, looking to the TV screen myself.

What I saw saddened me. A picture of someone laid out on a stretcher, a body bag covering them. The caption being "TEEN COMMITTED SUICIDE IN BATHROOM STALL." There was an interviewer on the screen, and it shifted to two people being interviewed, and it made me curious.

"What did Brooke's parents have to do with this?" I asked, not thinking of the possibility.

"Brielle go up to your room." My mom demanded, but her eyes didn't leave the screen.

As I continued to walk away, I heard the words from Brooke's dad's mouth escape, "Brooklyn was so young, I can't believe that this happened to her. I can't believe she killed herself." His voice was shaky and broken.

I stopped in my tracks and let myself listen to the rest. He... He couldn't have said that.

"This can't be real," I said in denial, walking back over to my mom and watching the TV.

"Excuse me," Brooke's mom left the interviewer with her husband, and he went after her as she put a hand over her face, and then the news reporter transitioned into another topic.

That's how I found out that my best friend killed herself.

I was in denial for the first few hours, but it finally processed in my mind and I cried in my room for days, until I dressed in all black and walked out of my house for the first time in 72 hours this morning, not a word left my mouth and not a word left my family's mouths to console me.