Letters to Elle

01 | Closed Casket

The sooner you learn that proofreading and I are mortal enemies, the better (; enjoyyy.

__________________

            01 | Closed Casket

            Elle Summers’ funeral is closed casket, her body too managed to be shown to others.

            It was one thing for them to tell me that Elle Summers was dead and that they found their body. It was another thing for them to tell me that her body was so badly damaged that they couldn’t confirm or deny that it was Elle Summers until some serious chemical tests were ran.

            “Why chemical tests?” I had asked my dad. “How bad is it?”

            The thing is, the police and doctors show the adults the medical records. Not the kids. No, the kids aren’t old enough to stomach the truth of life. Their words, not mine.

            Dad had simply shaken his head. “It’s so sad. Elle’s death. She was such a young girl. Sweet, too. How could someone do this to her?”

            “I don’t know, Dad,” I had told him. “I don’t know. I also don’t know how bad her body was when they found it.”

            Even to this day, I feel like a callous person when I talk about Elle like that. When I talk about her body. But it’s the truth of the matter. Her body may still be on this earth, rotting away in a casket, but her spirit is elsewhere. I’m a self-proclaimed atheist, but there’s just something about imagining Elle in a better place that makes me feel reassured.

            Dad had sighed. I know that he didn’t want to tell me the condition of Elle’s body, but he still did. “When they contacted us last month, there was only a top half of the body. It wasn’t for another few days did they find the bottom half.”

            I think it’s completely and absolutely sadistic that Elle’s killer cut her in half. I don’t know if they did this before or after she drew her last breath, but either way, it would take a completely psychopath to even think to do something as cruel as chop a human being into two parts of a whole.

            When I told this to Dad, he reminded me that it’s very possible that the waters were what broke my dead best friend in two. Apparently, both of her . . . parts . . . were found washed up on Long Beach’s shore.

            Such a happy vacation spot for families quickly turns into a horror zone where parts of a teenage girl’s body are brought in by the tide.

            “Elle was greatly loved,” the pastor says, his voice monotonous and boring.

            Soft sobs sound in the church, and it takes everything I have to not break down into tears just like Mrs. Summers sitting in the front row. Elle was my best friend, and I loved her so much. Why did she just have to leave?

            It was tragic enough when Elle disappeared last year, but we—we being Elle’s parents and her group of friends—coped just fine. And then when we thought that maybe, just maybe, things were starting to look up for us, the police show up on our front steps, questioning us on that night.

            Of course, none of us had known what had happened. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Elle was missing, but it never occurred to me that she had run away until an officer pulled me away from my parents separately to ask me a few questions. She informed me that a lot of kids would rather tell the authorities what they knew in private instead of in front of their parents. But that wasn’t the cast for me. Regardless of who else was in the room, I would’ve told them whatever they wanted to know. Too bad I didn’t know anything.