She stands and clears her throat, smoothing her shirt against her belly. “I’d like to read it eventually, her journal, I’m just not ready right now. Not to mention her handwriting.” She takes a step toward me. “Kippy, it’s not just about the eulogy. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything.” My heart is pounding. I get up off the floor.

“I need you to censor it for me.” She licks her lips, which are so dry I can hear her tongue slide across them, and takes another step toward me. “I thought maybe you could make it so that when I’m ready, none of it will . . . offend me.” She grabs me by the elbows so that my arms are stuck at my sides.

“Mrs. Fried?” I can feel her cold, bony fingers through the fabric of my T-shirt. Her breath smells like fish.

She stares at me with those bloodshot eyes, glancing around nervously like Dom might walk in—and then leans into my hair and whispers, “I need you to redact the sex parts.”

I open the cover of the journal—just some regular composition notebook—and feel the closest thing to a thrill since Ruth said yes to sleeping over last Friday. It’s kind of exciting to read your best friend’s secrets. I mean, hopefully you know all of them already, but it’s still kind of cool to think, “Ooh, what sort of nice things did she think about me that maybe felt too romantic to say out loud?”

Except then I remember Ruth’s handwriting, which is indescribably terrible. There are no spaces, for starters, and the penmanship looks like letters written on top of other letters—like graffiti that’s been scrawled over existing graffiti, so you can’t tell what either thing said.

I flip through, looking for my name, and am able to recognize a few Ks. It takes me about ten minutes a sentence—just to recognize each letter and then retranscribe it onto a separate sheet of paper, so I can read it—and this is what I end up with.

Ruth here. Kippy is so pathetic it makes me nauseous. She just told me that sometimes she gets lonely before bed and talks out loud to me like I’m there, like a fucking prayer, like I’m some god or something!!! If we lived anywhere else, like any place remotely interesting, I’d have way more options, and she and I wouldn’t even know each other.

I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. What did I even do to make Ruth so mad at me that day?

A door slams. “Hello?” Dom calls. “Honey, are you back in the bathroom again? Where’s Mrs. Fried? I’ve got that candy bar—did she leave already? I didn’t know which kind she wanted so I got a bunch.”

“Just a second!” I call.

Today I told Kippy to get a hobby so it’s not so obvious she’s crushing on me. I flat-out said, “You’ve got too much time on your hands. It’s like the corners of your mouth get wet whenever I’m around.” I can’t fucking take care of her anymore.

I don’t even remember her saying that.

Personally I don’t even know who she’s more jealous of—me for having a boyfriend, or Colt for having me. Like, whenever we try to include her in things all she does is stare at us while we make out. We’ll be bowling and I’ll be on his lap not even doing anything, and all of a sudden Kippy will be all, “Hey, I thought we were having a sleepover?” Seriously, girl, what a buzz kill.

I get off the toilet seat and stretch out on the bathroom floor, pressing my cheek against the cool tiles, waiting for something to happen. But for some reason there isn’t any urge to cry, just a silent weight behind my stomach, near my spine, and a hardness in my jaw. Everything feels okay, empty even, and I suddenly can’t remember anything about Ruth except for that cocky look in her eyes every time she told me to grow up.

“Chicken?” Dom says. From the sound of it, he’s pressed up against the door again. “I’ve got a Mars Bar, Snickers, a thing of M&M’S—”

“I’m not hungry!”

I’m going to transcribe one more sentence and if it isn’t something nice I’m setting the whole thing on fire.

Ruth here . . . made out with Jim Steele today. Officially cheating on Colt

Okay, seriously, what the heck. For the record, Jim Steele is, like, one hundred years old. Well, fifty, but still, ew. Rumor is he used to be some badass New York lawyer who came back to the Midwest to remind himself what life’s about, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s practically a grandpa. He’s got a bunch of sisters in Friendship—he grew up here, I guess—so he’s got tons of nieces and nephews. People call him Uncle Jimmy, which, given the fact that he was making out with Ruth, is probably just as perverted as it sounds. Mostly I can’t believe she never told me.

There’s a knock on the door. “Chompers?”

“Go away,” I snap, and roll onto my back. The memorial service is in three hours and I’m all out of ideas. I mean, Ruth was my best friend, but what are you supposed to say about someone who lies and sometimes secretly hates you and also hooks up with old men? Someone who you’ve already been trying not to be mad at for being dead in the first place?

STUFFED

Friendship, Wisconsin, has a population of 689 people—well, technically it’s 688 now, I guess. 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 at 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—my arms wrapped around the food we brought and the wind whipping through my tights. I’d pretty much rather be anywhere else.

“You can do it, Chocolate Butt,” 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.

“Honey, that’s one hundred percent reasonable to want to go it alone,” Dom said. “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.

“Okay,” I grumble. 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 dance 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. “We’re so sorry for you,” they keep saying. “You’re so sad. 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. She’s always screaming, “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, say Gah!”). Ruth always said it was annoying how both her and Libby got held back a grade, because Libby gave it a bad name, being so mean and legitimately slow, and all. With Ruth it wasn’t about a learning disability. She got held back because she couldn’t name ten animals in two minutes, which they had us do back in kindergarten. Or at least that’s what she told me. Who knows now whether it was true.

“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.

Libby Quinn walks up last, like some kind of queen about to knight me. She presses at the corners of her eyes, trying to push away the tears without messing up her mascara. One of her girls plucks the tray of cookies from my hands.

“Oh, Katie!” Libby coos. She’s about a head taller than me in her heels, and when she pulls me toward her I land face-first against her gigantic boobs. “How are you, honey?”