TAVIA’S LAST PHOTO
Tavia_Violet
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Tavia_Violet How, exactly, does one become a professional shoe shopper? #brightfuture #alltheshine
18 HOURS AGO
JAN. 14, 10:48 A.M.
I just saw you yesterday.
There’s no way this is real. It can’t be.
I keep waiting for you to call.
Tavia may not be on Hangouts right now. She’ll see your messages later.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Jan. 16, 5:17 p.m.
Subject: <none>
I stared at my phone through most of your funeral.
I could have said goodbye to you in my room with some vanilla-scented candles, a few of your favorite songs, violets, and a can of orange soda. But instead we had to do this public ritual where we all stood around, watching each other cry. When I woke up, I already knew today would be the worst day of my life.
When we get to the church, your brother walks straight to the front and kisses the top of the casket, but I can’t go up there. So I just head to the second row of pews and sit down at the very end. I look at my phone, at the infinite stream of pictures of you, and I try not to look anywhere else. For the first time ever, I feel grateful for how many selfies you took, and I feel bad that I always teased you about being conceited. If I didn’t have hundreds of digital squares with you in them, I’m not sure how I’d remember to breathe. After a while, when I do look up, I use different squares—ones of tinted sunshine spilling through the stained-glass windows—to mark time as they move across the room.
I’m sitting with your family. Your mom is squeezing rosary beads in her hand, weeping in a way that doesn’t make any noise. Your dad’s staring straight ahead, but not really looking at anything. Dante sits down beside me after he kisses your casket, and I can feel that he’s crying by the way his shoulder moves against mine.
Part of me wants to shift away from him, but I’m frozen.
My family’s sitting a few rows behind me. My mother’s dress is impeccable, but her blue eyes are sad, and my dad has had his head bent the whole time, like a world without you is one he doesn’t want to see. Between their blond heads is Willow’s angled black bob, and you’d love this haircut on her if you were here. Sometime between winter break ending and yesterday, she bleached the bluntly cut ends and dyed them hot pink. She looks like a K-Pop star despite her puffy, red eyes. When she flew in from college yesterday, she crawled into bed with me the minute she got home and rubbed small circles on my back.
Willow sees me looking at her, so she squeezes out of their pew and comes up to mine. You know I don’t really look like my sister, even on a good day. But with her hair the way it is now—so full and sharp and pink (and mine the way that it always is: too long and fine and flat)—we could be strangers. I look like the “before” scene in the Korean dramas we watched together, where the girls miraculously turn pretty.
But when Willow reaches me, she touches my flat black hair, like it’s silk. She holds my hand, as if it’s made of glass, and looks at me a little too closely. I squeeze her fingers before letting them go to look back down at my phone, and she steps back and stays quiet. She doesn’t try to make me talk, which is a miracle, because I thought she was going to be pushy—you know how my sister can get. But she was perfect. People forget how much silence can help at times like these.
No one in my family has said anything, but I can tell how they feel by the way my sister reaches for my hand. The way my mother stares at me. How differently my dad says my name. They’re so happy I wasn’t with you that night that they can’t keep their hands, eyes, and voices away from me. But every time I think about the fact that I wasn’t, I feel like I’m drowning.
When you went to Alexa’s party without me, I was upset that you didn’t beg me to come out with you; that you went, even though I didn’t want to go. It’s stupid, but it hurt, and Margo and Faye were there too, so there wasn’t even anyone for me to text and complain. I was just going to eat ice cream, read a book, and go to bed early.
Then Dante called.
I went to your house to hang out with him—to have some fun without you because you were doing things without me.
And now I have to live with this: I was flirting with him when I could have been stopping you.
For some reason, the priest asks everyone to stand. I wasn’t paying attention, so when Dante pulls me up and into his side, I don’t realize right away that it’s time to pray. His touch takes me away from the world inside my phone, where you’re still grinning and singing and alive. And for a second, I just collapse against your brother.
I can’t stand on my own in a world where you don’t exist.
Dante reads the weight of my body as an invitation. He tucks my head under his chin, and I feel a few of his tears hit my scalp where my hair’s parted.
It’s so complicated—the way I feel about him, but I can’t think about that now, when I can barely stay on my feet. So I hook my hand around his hip and hold on tight. And when the sounds around me return and I hear the priest praying, I look at the photo of you that sits at the front of the church in a wreath of violets instead of closing my eyes.
After a few minutes of standing here anchored to Dante, I start to feel a little less like I’m sinking. Or at least like if I’m going down, he won’t let me hit the bottom alone.
At the cemetery, Willow holds my hand again like a good big sister, and I lean into her like I did with Dante at the church. She cries and cries while the priest sprinkles holy water over the grave, and I just stare at the dirty hem of the priest’s robe. He says your full name the way your grandmother says it, at the same time as I read it in the obituary I’m somehow still holding.
“Oak-TAH-bia Bi-oh-LEH-tah SO-toe.”
Octavia Violeta Soto.
And my whole body goes cold.
I’m supposed to drop a handful of dirt into your grave like everyone else a few minutes later, but after your dad starts crying, I just can’t. By the time it’s my turn it’s raining, and most of the soil has turned to mud anyway. So instead, I shove the damp obituary into my pocket. I pull petals from a yellow rose, one at a time, and let them fall—bright against the dark earth all around them—right before the casket sinks into the ground.
I don’t try to figure out if anyone loves me as I yank away each velvety petal, the way you used to (He loves me? He loves me not? Autumn, he loves me!). I just tell the rose how much I’m going to miss you. How much I already do.