Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck Read Free Book Online

it was over. There were pictures on every phone of the car wreckage. The BMW wrapped around the apple tree, with the apple blossoms fallen on it like spring snow. Even pictures of the BMW after it had been towed.
    That was the week of the memorial service, and the shrine. The shrine sort of happened against the apple tree. Loads of flowers and ribbons in school colors, blue and silver. Stuffed animals. Downloaded pictures of Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie, laminated to weatherproof them. A rosette of orange and black ribbon that must have been somebody’s Halloween Hottie award. Somebody had left a vintage cell phone at the shrine. Which a few people said was in poor taste. But it just meant that Tanya died as she’d lived. She always networked and multitasked and kept her lines of communication open. She always had a finger on whatever was happening.
    Anyway, Country Club Road wasn’t particularly safe. There’d been talk about widening it.
    But the flowers on the shrine were still fresh when people started scrambling. The senior girls did. Tanya and Natalie had been the top of the heap. Makenzie could have ruled the juniors if she’d felt like it. A ton of people wanted to be who they’d been, including some people nobody had especially noticed. Like Emma Bentley and Jocelyn What’s-her-name. It wasn’t going to work for them, but they scrambled.
    And people moved on.
    The seniors had heard from their colleges, so there was buzz and Twitter about that. Graduation too, coming up. And after that, summer and summer plans. Endless summer.

    AND NOW IT was May, the Friday of prom week. The prom posters were everywhere, and the juniors’ committees were down to the wire. I personally thought they might call off the prom, out of respect. Nobody else seemed to think so. They had their dresses.
    Nobody left that to the last minute. I was hearing a lot about dresses. You’d be surprised what you can hear when there’s all this space around you.
    I remembered last September and eating lunch alone and hearing every word from the conversation at the other end of the table. But back in September I hadn’t known what alone was.
    The other thing about this year’s prom was that Tanya and Natalie had begun planning an after-prom party. The after-prom party. It was going to be—it would have been at Natalie’s house, on the terrace and around the pool. Tanya didn’t want the party at her house because of Joanne.
    “She’d get off her StairMaster and be all over us,” Tanya said. “She’d be everywhere we turned. She’d hack in.”
    So it was to have been at Natalie’s, and they had ordered blue and silver T-shirts that read:
    THE ONLY AFTER-PROM PARTY
    They’d had forty of them silk-screened and handed out to let everybody know who was invited, and who wasn’t.
    The days moved on, and somebody put a couple of The Only After-Prom Party T-shirts on eBay. Now the buzz was all about the after-prom party at Chase Haverkamp’s. And it was going to be given by guys. This was pretty outrageous because it was supposed to be girls who made the social rules. But what girl would dare? Emma Bentley? Jocelyn? Please.
    So there was a lot of after-prom party buzz, which had zero to do with me.
    The earth turned, but I didn’t budge. I pretty much just logged off of life. There was still some hallway crying from various people. But I was probably the only one still seeing the grief counselor. I’d lost the most.

    SHE WAS ALL right, I suppose, as grief counselors go. She didn’t tell me to turn my frown upside down or anything. She didn’t try to patch me up with bumper sticker slogans. But needless to say, she wasn’t helping. How could she? Something had been taken away from me that no adult could give back.
    We’d had some bad sessions in that poky, windowless little cell of an office down at the end of the counseling wing. Every third meeting was with my parents, and they were the worst times. Even Dad didn’t get it—