NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE YOU

Chapter 2: Stuffed

Friendship, WI has a population of 689 people—well, technically it’s 688 now, I guess. But they haven’t changed the sign, or anything. Anyway it feels like pretty much everyone is at the memorial service. The fact that Ruth’s family is Jewish—the only Jewish family in town, actually—means they’re having the memorial at Cutter Funeral Home instead of a church. There’s a line out the door that wraps all the way around the sidewalk. About fifty people are just milling about on the front lawn, occasionally standing on their tiptoes, trying to see what’s going on inside. I’m just sort of standing there, watching them, with my arms wrapped around the food we brought and the wind whipping through my tights. I’d pretty much rather be anywhere else.

“You got it, baby,” Dom calls from the car. He’s running his engine in the parking lot. He was planning to come with me but then I asked him if I could please do this one thing by myself, since we’ve sort of been up each other’s butts the past week. The truth is I’m hoping it’ll be easier for me to improvise a eulogy without him staring at me. I didn’t end up writing anything.

“Pimple, that’s 100% reasonable. But just so you know I’ll keep an eye out from the Subaru.” Dom’s all about standing watch these days now that there’s a killer on the loose. “I’ll meet you at the wake.”

Robert Cutter is outside, playing bouncer, instructing everyone who’s just arrived to stay on the grass.
“The service room and hallways are filled to capacity,” he shouts. “I’ll open the windows so you guys can hear the rites, but that’s all I got, okeydokey?”

He takes one look at my face and nods, waving me through. Rob’s dad and grandpa cremated my mom, so he knows me, and everyone who knows me knows that I was Ruth’s best friend. I mean, apparently. Who knows anymore if she even liked me, and it’s not like I can confront her about it.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Kippy Bushman,” Rob says as I walk by.

I wish I could go back to being demented with grief. Feeling angry at a time like this is enough to make you hate yourself.

Inside everybody’s smashed together in a buzzing ruckus. They’re playing Ruth’s iPod over the speakers. I recognize the playlist, but it’s the wrong sort, and someone really needs to change the track. Whatever’s on is like, sexy hip-hop music, or something.

All of a sudden, a bunch of girls run up to me and attack me with stiff hugs, the kind where you’re pulling away just as much as embracing, the kind Olympic gymnasts give, that say, “Great job on the high bars! Now I’m going to put poison in your face glitter!” It’s Libby Quinn and those girls. Ruth was kind of a loner, but she was dating the most popular boy at school, so the popular girls sort of took an interest in her.

They’re all bawling. “OMG Kippy Bushman, we’re so sorry for you,” they keep saying. “Bless you, honey.”

Something about all the popular girls at my school is that they’re really Christian, or at least they pretend to be. Libby’s the worst of them though—because on top of being kind of pushy about her love for God, she’s also not very smart. She’s always going, “Oh my Gah,” because she refuses to say, “Oh my God”. And if she hears you saying, “Oh my god,” she’ll correct you (Gah, sayGah!). Ruth always said it was annoying how both her and Libby got held back a grade, because Libby gave it a bad grade. With Ruth it wasn’t about a learning disability. She got held back because she couldn’t name 10 animals in two minutes, which they had us do back in Kindergarten. Or at least that’s what she told me.

“Oh my Gah, Kippy,” the girls are saying. I hold the cookies I’ve brought protectively above my head while each one drapes her arms around my shoulders. Before driving over here, Dom and I went back to the house and he stood watch so I could bake. He was reluctant at first to return to “the scene of the crime,” but Dom knows firsthand how important it is to bring homemade food to a thing like this. He’s always reminding me how when Mom died, he and I existed on funeral food for like a month. The two of us were comatose—hardly able to move, much less pick up the phone and order pizza. If it hadn’t been for all those sweets and casseroles, we probably would have starved.