Epilogue

“Everybody has a purpose,” Sara said, addressing the teary-eyed crowd. “Sometimes—as it was for Delilah and Jasmine—a person’s purpose is cut short. Sometimes their purpose is twisted to bring pain or confusion to those who love them most. Jonathan Rogers and Kenneth Sear were both examples of this.

“It’s painful, I know, for all of us. For friends, acquaintances, parents…”—she glanced at Kenneth’s mother, who had a handkerchief over her eyes, and then at Matt, Kenneth close friend, who was very openly sobbing—“…girlfriends.” Now, she let her eyes stray toward the coffin before her. “But these things happen. They’re real. It may not seem so when we hear about them in the news or in history class, but they can happen to us.

“I loved Delilah, Kenneth, and Jasmine. I hate Jonathan Rogers despite the fact that he’s no longer here to hurt us, and I know that that’s wrong. But he shattered something precious when he fired at us—this town’s peace of mind. And he can never repair it now.

“I can’t give consolation for the death of this boy. I haven’t felt it yet myself. I don’t know if God or anyone else is waiting to receive his soul. I don’t know if he’ll be reincarnated as this or that higher or lower being.

“All I know is that he’s gone, and that I and many others are in deep mourning. And now, as a mortal, that is all that matters to me.” Again, she glanced that the pine box, and then at Delilah’s undisturbed grave not fifteen feet away.

“Sometimes, I think the world wasn’t made for people like us.

“Thank you.” She stepped down from the podium and away from the ceremony, not in the mood to embrace the loved ones of Kenneth Sear. The guests would likely blame her strange actions on grief alone—after three years with the boy, she had a right to that—but oddly, despite the length of their relationship, Kenneth and Sara really hadn’t been all that close. She could admit it to herself now that he was gone, and consequently would never have to admit it to anyone else.

The two youths had been brought together—and had stayed together—out of nothing more than a shared sorrow for Delilah Sear.

She stopped on the sidewalk and closed her eyes. After all this time, she still mourned for the one person she had ever truly loved. A hand fell upon her shoulder. Delilah had been fond of greeting people in such a way. She turned quickly.

Ryan Mendoza stood before her, his tears causing his thick, black eyeliner to run into the front most strands of his bleached white hair.

“Why did you have to bring Jonathan up like that?” he asked in his thick Puerto Rican accent. Years ago, rumors had spread throughout the school that Jonathan and Ryan had been dating. She was ninety-percent sure that they’d been started by Ryan himself.

“Fix your makeup.” She turned to walk away.

He grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. “I’m serious, Sara! Why can’t anyone let him rest in peace?”

“It all started with Jonathan,” she said.

“It did not! He was an OK guy. You bitches screwed with his head.”

“What are you going to do, kill me? Try for the Emo of the Year Award?”

He shoved her off and left the way he had come. “Slut!”

“I’m the one who lost someone, jackass!” she shouted, continuing.

The encounter had shaken her more than she would have liked to admit. All she wanted to do was take a nice long bath, perhaps as long as the one that Kenneth had taken two days before his funeral.

Stopped walking and closed her eyes. They hadn’t exactly been in love, but that didn’t mean that she did not miss him. She’d cared about him just enough that his death might be the final straw.

She played the night back in her head as she forced her legs to continue on.

Monday at school had been filled with one too many images of Delilah and Jasmine on the walls, on T-shirts—why did they always include Sara on those shirts instead of Jonathan? She wasn’t dead—and she’d walked out to get some fresh air instead of returning to graduation practice in the gym. She’d rode the bus to school that day, so her car was not waiting in the supermarket parking lot down the street. She’d walked home and grabbed her copy of Night of the Living Dead. Realizing that Kenneth would not be home for another hour, she’d picked a bouquet of white roses from her mother’s garden and walked to the local cemetery to visit her lost love.

She’d sat against the grave talking to Delilah as if she sat beside her. This was an odd habit she’d picked up over the years. Perhaps she’d never truly accepted that the girl was gone.

Maybe she fell asleep. She wasn’t sure. But after a while, she saw as well as heard Delilah sitting next to her. They spoke of old times. They spoke of a dream she’d had the previous night.

“You dreamt I was buried alive,” Delilah said.

“Right.”

“But you rented the DVD last night. Why?”

Sara pondered. “I don’t know.”

“It’s because you’ve had the dream before,” Delilah explained. “But you’ve forgotten it.”

“How do you know that, Delilah?”

Delilah placed a hand on her shoulder and then wound an arm around her upper back, whispering in her ear. “Because I was the source of the dreams.”

Sara had started crying. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You’re alive?”

“No. But I’m not gone.” Delilah had kissed the side of her face.

Sara had tried to turn around, to pull Delilah close, but she had already disappeared. “Come back….” There had been no answer. Maybe she had woken up. “God, Delilah…” she’d sobbed. “God!” She’d sat on her hands and knees and dug her fingers into the soil. But still Delilah did not return.

She surrendered to reality after seven minutes and stood up, grateful for the emptiness of the mid-day streets. She’d gone home and redone all of her makeup, applying extra powder to cover the redness of her face, and extra eyeliner to accentuate her sorrow. God, she was emo.

She walked back to Kenneth’s house—she wasn’t in the mood for driving today—and knocked on the door. All was quiet and the lights were off, but she had this feeling….

“Go to him.”

She door hadn’t been locked. She’d walked inside, drawn to the bathroom where she could hear a faint sloshing. She’d opened the door and found Kenneth naked, his eyes rolling back in his head, the back of which convulsed repeatedly into the rim of the tub. The water was quickly turning red.

She glanced at the pills which had sprawled from the bottle on the floor, and she knew that he was dying. “No!” she’d shrieked, mostly out of shock but partly out of sadness. She’d fallen to her knees beside the tub and tried to cradle his head in her arms. “Don’t do this! Don’t leave me!”

Then, forever the logical person, she had left his side, realizing that she was doing nothing at all to help, and run to the phone outside the bathroom to dial 9-1-1. “Kenneth’s dying,” she’d said evenly, feeling faint. “I think it’s poison.”

She’d hung up the phone and all had gone black.

She’d dreamt of movies and zombies and gifts from God. She remembered later that she had in fact seen Night of the Living Dead before and noticed the profoundly odd fact that everyone had died. She’d dreamt of an alternate reality where she had shown up at Kenneth’s house and all had gone as planned. Where they fought the first time she came over and then made-out the next. They fought then, too—the stress of the anniversary had gotten to them both—but later Kenneth dug up Delilah and together they defeated Jasmine and Jonathan. Sara told Delilah that she loved her like she’d never done in life and then kissed her goodbye. All would have been well and good if Kenneth hadn’t gone all emo in the end and sacrificed himself to turn back time. To make it as if the incident with the zombies had never occurred. God had a sense of humor—he was grateful for the offer. Later, the boy could always burn in Hell for taking his life.

She’d woken up in a hospital expecting to look over and see a heavily wired version of Kenneth lying next to her. But when she took a glance at the next bed, she saw that it was empty. Kenneth’s own mother had been waiting in her room to tell her that he’d died shortly after she’d fainted and hit her head on their coffee table.

The funeral had been Wednesday morning. They had it early so as not to interfere with Rowling High’s graduation ceremony later in the evening.

Sara had been asked to speak about Kenneth—at the funeral and later at the graduation—and hadn’t seen any reason to disagree. Her speech had been blunt and she hadn’t waited around to hear the preacher run his mouth.

In a way, she wished she’d killed herself the second she’d found Kenneth in the bath tub. She wished that she’d picked up some of the poisoned tablets off the floor, chewed them quickly and lain naked in the bathtub with Kenneth until it was over for them both.

But she hadn’t done that. She’d run hastily to the phone, holding on to some blind hope that it didn’t necessarily have to be over.

But now it was over. Kenneth hadn’t been much—a final thread of the rope that Delilah’s death had nearly severed three years before—but now that he was gone, Sara was falling. Had fallen. There was no going back now.

Before the funeral was over, Sara went to the hardware store and bought a large pair of bolt cutters. She entered Kenneth’s garage through the kitchen—the front door was still unlocked—and used her new toy to liberate the riffle of Kenneth Sear, Sr. from its “permanent” spot in the garage. She took the gun home and set it beside her bed.

She began a quick makeover. She washed her hair and then dyed it dark brown, the color it had been before her gothic stage. She removed her heavy makeup and replaced it with ordinary powder and red lipstick. She added a touch of green shadow to bring out her contact-free eye color. She removes every ring on her face save for the two in the lobes of her ears. She surveyed the damage with a small smirk. “This is for both of you.”

She put on a pair of blue jeans an old pink blouse from a few years ago that barely fit her. She lay and waited until five o’clock, when the students and guests would be safely attending at her graduation, then grabbed the gun and headed toward the cemetery.

About fifteen feet into the wrought-iron gate, the Sears lay peacefully together. Kenneth Sear, Sr. was on the far left, followed by Delilah Sear and finally Kenneth Sear, Jr. The tombstone hadn’t been placed on this spot yet but the soil was fresh. To Kenneth’s right was an empty plot of grass. Nadine Sear, Kenneth’s mother, had told him with an eerie laugh that she’d already put in an order for her tombstone along with Kenneth’s, just to be prepared. The woman was barely in her forties—it was a real shame.

Briefly, she mused that her passing would come too late to earn an enlarged photo and heart-wrenching quotation in her senior year book. If the Emo of the Year Award had an existing equivalent, she thought that that would be it.

But it was alright. Delilah’s death—three years and one day before—had sparked a legacy of half-assed memorials with or without a yearbook announcement. Sara expected that hers would do the same.

Sara sat down on the spot between Kenneth and Delilah, hoping that their mother would reconsider and allow her to lie beside her lovers.

She took out the small memo pad she’d brought with her and scribbled down this request, along with a simple message that had been ringing in her head for several days, almost like a song:

“The world wasn’t made for people like us.”

She put the riffle in her mouth, aiming carefully at the back of her head—she wanted to look pretty at her funeral—and pulled the trigger.

Sara entered the Darkness, the cool and peaceful eternal night.

Sara took her place beside Delilah and Kenneth.

Sara ceased to exist.

Thank you for reading.