Josie and her mother were sitting somewhere in the back, but that didn’t keep Josie from feeling that everyone was staring at her. She wasn’t sure if that was because they all knew she was Matt’s girlfriend or because they could see right through her.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” the pastor read, “for they will be comforted.”

Josie shivered. Was she mourning? Did mourning feel like a hole in the middle of you that got wider and wider every time you tried to plug it up? Or was she incapable of mourning, because that meant remembering, which she couldn’t do?

Her mother leaned closer. “We can leave. You just say the word.”

It was hard enough not having a clue who she was, but here in the Afterward, she couldn’t seem to recognize anyone else, either. People who had ignored her for her whole life suddenly knew her by name. Everyone’s eyes got soft at the edges when they looked at her. And her mother was the most foreign of all-like one of those corporate addicts who has a near-death experience and becomes a tree-hugger. Josie had expected to have to fight her mother in order to attend Matt’s funeral, but to Josie’s surprise, her mother had suggested it. The stupid shrink Josie had to see now-probably for the rest of her life-kept talking about closure. Closure, apparently, meant that she was supposed to realize that losing normal was something you got over, like losing a soccer game or a favorite T-shirt. Closure also meant that her mother had morphed into a crazy, overcompensating emotive machine, one who kept asking her if she needed anything (how many cups of herbal tea could a person drink without liquefying?) and trying to act like an ordinary mother, or at least what she imagined an ordinary mother to be. If you really want me to feel better, Josie felt like saying, go back to work. Then they could pretend it was business as usual, and after all, her mother was the one who’d taught Josie how to pretend in the first place.

In the front of the church was a coffin. Josie knew it wasn’t open; rumors had flown about that. It was hard to imagine that Matt was inside that lacquered black box. That he wasn’t breathing; that his blood had been drained out and his veins were pumped full of chemicals instead.

“Friends, as we gather here to remember Matthew Carlton Royston, we are beneath the protective shelter of God’s healing love,” the pastor said. “We are free to pour out our grief, release our anger, face our emptiness, and know that God cares.”

Last year, in ancient world history, they had learned about how the Egyptians prepared their dead. Matt-who studied only when Josie forced him to do it-had been truly fascinated. The way the brain was sucked out through the nose. The possessions that went into a tomb with a pharaoh. The pets that were buried beside him. Josie had been reading the chapter in the textbook out loud, her head cradled on Matt’s lap. He’d stopped her by putting his hand on her forehead. “When I go,” he said, “I’m going to take you with me.”

The pastor looked out over the congregation. “The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he’s found the peace in death he was denied here on earth.”

Matt didn’t go to church. His parents did, and they tried to make him go, but Josie knew he hated it. He thought it was a waste of a Sunday, and that if God was at all worthy of hanging around with, he’d probably be out riding around with the top down on his Jeep or playing pickup pond hockey instead of sitting in a stuffy building doing responsive reading.

The pastor moved aside, and Matt’s father stood up. Josie knew him, of course-he cracked the worst jokes, silly puns that were never funny. He’d played hockey at UVM until he blew out his knee, and he’d had high hopes for Matt. But overnight, he’d turned hunch-shouldered and sullen, like a husk that used to contain the whole of him. He stood up and talked about the first time he’d taken Matt out to skate, how he’d started out pulling him along on the end of a hockey stick and realized, not much later, that Matt wasn’t holding on. In the front row, Matt’s mother began crying. Loud, noisy sobs-the kind that splattered against the walls of the church like paint.

Before Josie realized what she was doing, she’d gotten to her feet. “Josie!” her mother whispered, fierce, beside her-in that instant a flicker of the mother she was accustomed to, the one who would never make a spectacle of herself. Josie was shaking so hard that her feet did not seem to touch the ground, not as she stepped into the aisle in the black dress she had borrowed from her mother, not as she moved toward Matt’s coffin, magnetically drawn to a pole.

She could feel Matt’s father’s eyes on her, could hear the whispers of the congregation. She reached the casket, polished to such a gleam that she could see her own face reflected back at her, an imposter.

“Josie,” Mr. Royston said, coming down from the podium to embrace her. “You all right?”

Josie’s throat closed like a rosebud. How could this man, whose son was dead, be asking her that? She felt herself dissolving, and wondered if you could turn into a ghost without dying; if that part of it was only a technicality.

“Did you want to say something?” Mr. Royston offered. “About Matt?”

Before she knew what was happening, Matt’s father had led her up to the podium. She was vaguely aware of her mother, who’d gotten out of her seat in the pew and was edging her way down toward the front of the church-to do what? Spirit her away? Stop her from making another mistake?

Josie stared out at a landscape of faces she recognized and did not really know at all. She loved him, they were all thinking. She was with him when he died. Her breath caught like a moth in the cage of her lungs.

But what would she say? The truth?

Josie felt her lips twist, her face crumple. She started to sob, so hard that the wooden floorboards of the church bowed and creaked; so hard that even in that sealed casket, Josie was sure Matt could hear her. “I’m sorry,” she choked out-to him, to Mr. Royston, to anyone who would listen. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

She did not notice her mother climbing the steps to the podium, wrapping an arm around Josie, leading her behind the altar to a little vestibule used by the organist. She didn’t protest when her mother handed her Kleenex and rubbed her back. She didn’t even mind when her mother tucked her hair back behind her ears, the way she used to when Josie was so small, she could barely remember the gesture. “Everyone must think I’m an idiot,” Josie said.

“No, they think you miss Matt.” Her mother hesitated. “I know you believe this was your fault.”

Josie’s heart was pounding so hard, it moved the thin chiffon fabric of the dress.

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, “you couldn’t have saved him.”

Josie reached for another tissue, and pretended that her mother understood.

Maximum security meant Peter did not have a roommate. He did not get recreation time. His food was brought to him three times a day in his cell. His reading material was restricted by the correctional officers. And because the staff still believed he might be suicidal, his room consisted of a toilet and a bench-no sheets, no mattress, nothing that might be fashioned into a means of checking out of this world.

There were four hundred and fifteen cinder blocks on the back wall of his cell; he’d counted. Twice. Since then, he’d taken the time to stare right at the camera that was watching him. Peter wondered who was at the other end of that camera. He pictured a bunch of COs clustered around a crummy TV monitor, poking each other and cracking up when Peter had to go to the bathroom. Or, in other words, yet another group of people who’d find a way to make fun of him.