I’m gonna need a horse tranquilizer.
Please.
Let me wake up tomorrow when all of this is over.
“First door on the right,” Muffy murmurs to herself.
First door on the right. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Don’t focus. Follow Muffy. Don’t concentrate. Don’t breathe.
What the hell is that smell, anyway?
Is that flowers?
Dead flowers?
“Here.” Muffy turns left, I follow, and oh, fuck me.
That’s a body.
That’s a dead body. Straight ahead. Laid out in an empty room.
With a dog.
There’s a dead stuffed poodle, head cocked, staring straight at us, while sitting on the chest of a dead elderly woman in a pink glitter casket.
They’re both dead.
Dead-dead.
Why do they have to elevate the bodies in the caskets so you can see all the deadness?
And why is this room empty? Why aren’t there people in here?
Am I hallucinating?
Is that actually a dead lady?
Am I having a horrible dream?
Am I dead?
Is this how it all ends, with me trapped in a room with a dead body?
And is she actually dead?
And the dog too. If that dog moves—
It’ll be Grandpa 2.0.
I am okay. That body is dead. Death is part of life. That person is not coming back to life.
I am okay.
That’s not Grandpa.
“Tyler?”
Tyler? Tyler! Oh my god, Grandpa came back to life! How long have you been sitting here?
All I can see are my grandfather’s eyes.
They took him off life support.
He died.
Everyone cried.
Everyone left.
I stayed.
And then Grandpa came back to life.
Fuck me.
I need to sit down, but hell if I’m sitting in this room.
Muffy’s voice is tinny in my ears. “Right. I went left. Whoops. C’mon, Tyler, this way. Hey, Tyler? Oh my god, are you going to faint?”
I am not going to faint.
I’m not.
I’m a badass hockey terror. I don’t faint.
But everything’s going blurry at the edges of the room.
The dog’s still staring at me, its head cocked and its tongue hanging out, but still fucking dead.
“Oh my god, that’s seriously disturbing,” Muffy says.
The casket jumps.
Swear to fuck, it does. It jumps. The dog jiggles. The body jiggles. I scream.
And then the world goes black.
13
Muffy
There comes a point in every dreaded trip back to your college town for a funeral when you give up counting all the ways things are going wrong and start wondering when you should call a biographer or a Netflix studio executive and offer them your life story for a train wreck biopic.
Pretty sure we’re there.
The funeral director was all kinds of nice while helping revive Tyler, and also super apologetic over accidentally backing into the casket while he was trying to get the lectern in place for that viewing for his other customer—customer? Patient? Whatever—to start later. Basically, either of us can have a funeral for free if we happen to die in Richmond now.
I got to drive Tyler’s car from the funeral home to the hotel, and I’m pretty sure that’s only a minor ding in the bumper from where I hit that concrete log thingie at the front of the parking spot at the hotel. What are those even called?
Whatever it is, it should really be two inches shorter.
Also, Tyler only twitched a little when my credit card was declined when we checked in and he had to offer his instead—no, I don’t want to talk about it—but the twitch could’ve as easily been because there was also no record of me booking two rooms.
Only one.
And the rest of the hotel is full with—you guessed it.
Funeral guests.
So now, we’re in a single hotel room with a double bed—yes, a double bed, not a queen, not a king, but a lone double bed—while he sits on the ugly green and brown comforter, the top two buttons in his shirt undone to reveal the white undershirt, sleeves rolled up to show off his tattoos, glowering at the fish and chips I got him from the local Cod Pieces with my seventeen dollars’ worth of coins on our way here.
Veda arrived not long after I texted her the room number, and I’m attempting to not ogle Tyler while my best friend and I huddle over the small round table smushed next to the bed, sharing the margaritas.
She ditched the viewing after faking menstrual cramps and is the brightest part of my evening.
Completely, one hundred percent worth running into Dr. Richardson to be here for her right now.
“I am so glad you’re here,” she tells me again.
I hug her tight, loving the way she smells like cardamom and cinnamon. “I’m so gladder you’re here.”
“No, you’re not.”
We make eye contact, and we both burst into snort-filled laughter.
“To not being here!” She lifts the massive Yeti tumbler Tyler bought at the liquor store, takes a long gulp, then passes it to me.
The other one got left at the funeral home, because I didn’t realize it rolled away when he hit the floor.
Whoops.
“To not being here!” I echo.
Tyler gives both of us the death-eye, which is what I’m calling it every time he looks up from his fish and chips on the bed and glares at us for being happy in the midst of all of this.
Also, is it hot in here, or is it just him?
Probably just him. He came to a funeral with me despite clearly having issues with death, and he definitely knew what he was in for by the time we saw that casket.
That’s sexier than all the orgasms in the world.
Possibly I have weird standards.
I hold out the Yeti to him. “Alcohol?”
“Not during the season,” he mutters, like I didn’t see him drinking at Manning Frey’s annual Halloween party a few weeks ago when he didn’t realize I was there since I was hiding inside a giant blow-up chicken costume, and he goes back to his fish.
Maybe it was juice or water?
Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I still got to see him bench press a casket, so I really did not expect him to pass out.
I guess it’s different when you know it’s fake versus knowing it’s real?
Veda leans over and pats his leg. “Thank you for being here for Muffy.”
He grunts, not at all charmed by Veda’s sweet voice and gorgeous face and warm smile.
I want to hug him and apologize, but I’m also not eager to get close to him, considering he has reason to basically hate me for the rest of my life and if I were him, I’d be plotting how best to handcuff me naked to the shower curtain rod before leaving me here to find my demise on my own.
And now I’m thinking about myself naked, and Tyler, who’s a million times more attractive right now than he was back when I thought he was an attractive hockey player who sometimes talked to me like we were equals.
I make myself focus on Veda. “How are you? Has it been awful?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Yes and no? I don’t think it’s fully processed yet. It wasn’t even two weeks ago that we were having dinner and he was lecturing me about how I wasn’t being aggressive enough with expanding my practice, and now it’s like…”