1
They call Los Angeles the City of Angels. They being people who’ve never actually been here, lived here, and seen the truth in LA’s bones that its beautiful skin does a good job of hiding.
But people like me, people who live in the underbelly of the beautiful beast, know there are no angels in Los Angeles.
Here, there are only people.
And people are closer to being devils than anything holy.
I find myself on unholy grounds now. The Medical Examiner’s Office is an unassuming brick building that stands calm and quiet, as if that might somehow soften the realities of what lies inside. I wonder if that’s intentional. If it’s meant to soothe those called here like I’ve been called.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Calm or not, soothed or not, I have to go inside. So I take a deep breath, ignore the woman and her daughter who step outside—eyes rimmed red, dead in the center—and enter to find my own source of agony.
Or at least I would feel agony, if I allowed myself to feel much of anything.
Instead, I crush my emotions into a ball so dense it’s like a black hole. I shove them down and keep them buried.
As unassuming as its exterior, the interior of the Medical Examiner’s Office is downright welcoming. Warm. I feel almost like I’ve walked into someone’s home, kept pristine for guests, rather than a place where the dead go when their lives have come to gruesome ends.
Jared’s corpse is inside this building.
The bitterness, or sadness, or whatever-the-fuckness that I feel bubbling in my chest gurgles up into my throat. The bile of emotion is acidic, and I swallow it back as a man approaches me. He’s young, barely older than I am, with an impressively clean lab coat and rectangular glasses that do little to keep his shaggy blonde bangs out of his face.
“Hello,” he says, dipping his head in greeting. “Sophie, yes?”
I raise a brow, instantly wary.
“Sorry.” He chuckles, somewhat awkwardly. “I recognize you. The deceased had a picture of you in the contact on his phone. I figured properly greeting you might make the situation a little less awkward for you.” His smile falters a little as he takes in my blank stare. “Uh, anyway. I’m Max Alders. Shall we? Or do you need anything? A little more time to prepare, or—”
“No. I’d rather just get this over with.”
Max nods, taking the lead through a corridor that brings us deeper into the building. I pay little attention to my surroundings, keeping my gaze glued to the back of Max’s white lab coat. I just want to get in and out. As quickly as possible, the way you’re supposed to remove a band-aid: swift, with a sharp sting that doesn’t linger past its welcome.
“Here we are,” Max says after another minute. He stops in front of a large, stainless steel door—the first indication of coldness since stepping foot in the building. Wide, crystal clear windows allow me to look in and see walls lined with more stainless steel, freezer-like doors in three neat rows from the floor to the ceiling. There’s a matching table in the middle where I know a body lays, shrouded beneath a white cloth.
“I can give you a moment,” Max offers, shooting me a sympathetic look.
“No. No point in waiting.”
I lead the way in, confident for a girl who’s about to identify a dead body. I’m the first to stand before the shrouded corpse, the ghostly outline of a skinny man showing through. I think back to the dead-eyed woman and her daughter who were leaving as I came in. I wonder who it was they came to see.
Who was it that they lost? Who made them so dead-eyed?
I reach for the shroud, but before I can touch it, a hand settles on mine. I look to Max, shaggy haired coroner that he is, and think he looks more like a stoner than someone with a legitimate degree.
“Some people get a shock,” he warns, “seeing their first dead body.”
“Good thing it’s not my first time, then, huh? That’d make it messy.”
I pull back the shroud to reveal the face before Max can stop me again, before he can even tell me what I should be preparing myself for or warn me that what I find might be disturbing.
After all, I haven’t even been told yet how my friend died.
Jared lies on the stainless steel slab, his blonde hair like straw atop his head and his skin a waxy mockery of flesh. His eyes are closed, but I can’t even pretend he’s sleeping; the once-naïve part of me doesn’t exist anymore. The young girl who could kid herself into thinking that angels do exist is nowhere to be found in the woman I am now.
That woman, standing over the corpse of someone she used to love, remembers Jared at seventeen, a lanky, troubled boy who shared a room with her in their foster parents’ house. Jared was a year older than me, and people always thought it was strange we shared a room from the moment he was taken in to the day he turned eighteen—when instead of getting a birthday party, he got an eviction notice.
He was what the state likes to call a “problem youth.” Always got into trouble one way or another, didn’t respect authority, had a bit of a crutch for drugs when the going got tough. But he was always sweet to me. Tender. Nothing ever happened between us, but when I was sixteen and lonely and dumb, I thought maybe something could.
As I pull down the shroud lower, or try to, Max stops my hand again. My chest squeezes. I can’t help but wonder if things would’ve gone differently for Jared had we become something more than a pair of wayward orphans brought together in a temporary home.
“What’s the sheet hiding?” I ask Max when he doesn’t let go of my hand. It occurs to me that he still hasn’t told me how Jared died.
“All you have to do is confirm whether or not this is Jared Masters,” he says. Slow. Deliberate. As if he’s trying to convince me not to do this to myself.
I ignore him, lowering the shroud just a little more until the bruises around Jared’s neck show.
Fuck.
My fingers tighten on the sheet as I stare down at the bruises. Ugly purple and black markings that leave the phantom imprint of a rope behind. Or maybe chorded bedsheets or electric wire—
Fuck. Fuck, fuck.
The black hole in my chest pulses dangerously, as if threatening to explode like a dying star. To spew forth all the emotions I’ve kept locked inside for years.
My hand is shaking, and even though I can see it happening, I can’t get it to stop.
How long until this is me, cold and dead on a coroner’s slab? The thought is invasive, pervasive, and unavoidable as I look down at Jared, seeing in his stead my own corpse—my blue-streaked blonde hair fanned out on the slab, my eyes sunken and closed in an endless sleep, and that waxy, ashen skin replacing all semblance of life.
One of the only people I’ve ever cared about is dead. How much longer until I go that way too?
There isn’t much difference between Jared and me, really. The system that raised us both is the same system that delivered Jared to his demise. And I’m the only person who’s come to identify him. To mourn him.
When it’s me and not Jared on this cold, hard slab, who will be there to pull back my shroud?
Who will mourn me?
“Yes. That’s Jared Masters.” I choke the words out as I cover his face, trying to forget I can still see my own in its place.