I pick my phone up and see it’s a Blocked caller.
I answered it.
I never really answer calls like that because, like I said, I have a lot of prank callers, but this time I did.
Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t.
“Hello?”
“Maricel.”
It was Mattie’s aunt.
Which meant she didn’t want me to have her cellphone number, the insufferable witch. She had always hated me and Mattie’s friendship, a bond forged on the worst of circumstances when I was 5 years old, sitting in a police station because I didn’t know where my mom was after we got separated on public transportation. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost your mom when you travel outside with her on a 2 train in New York City, but it’s horrible and traumatizing and ever since I always make sure to call my mom and tell her I love her after she leaves for work.
“What?”
And then there was silence.
She didn’t hang up on me. I could hear her uneven breathing on the other line, which started to worry me because if she was calling me, that meant it was important and I was hoping that nothing had happened to her or Mattie or his Uncle George because I really do love them all. It was a silence where she was trying to decide what she was going to say without using so many words because she couldn’t manage them all.
Of course, I know this all in retrospect, because at the time, I thought she just enjoyed making me wait for her words.
“I’m sorry, Maricel,” she finally said, sighing and heavily too, like the weight of the world and more was on her shoulders, weighing down her expensive-cashmere- sweater-clad shoulders.
“What? Why?”
I’m not gonna lie. I think I knew it before she said it. Before her brain sent the command to her tongue to form the words that–
“Maricel,” Deborah said on the other line, breathy and cracked like a lady of her composed stature's voice should never ever be. “Matthew is dead, Maricel. I got a call that he overdosed on god-knows-what. God, I’m so sorry, honey.”
–broke my heart.
And I could feel it too—my heart that is. It broke into fifteen million tiny little pieces and fell like sand in an hourglass straight into my stomach. The sand was weighing me down, pushing me down. Then I crumpled like paper and cried as I burned, screams stuck in my throat, clawing at the sides of my esophagus, begging to escape but they were trapped as I crushed them with my failing attempts to breathe. Somehow I got outside and the wind carried off my flaming edges, blacked and charred, as I curled into a ball on my lawn, sweating in the cool night air, my flannel pajama pants sticking to my legs like my own skin. I could feel the perspiration in the now damp underwire of my bra. That's when my mom pulled up in her new black Mercedes and I passed out into a pit I found in the ground. It sprouted just for me and I let it swallow me up.

In relaying the news that I was writing all of this down to my mother, she said I didn't come out of that pit for days until the funeral.

I know I was in there for much, much longer.
…
I sat in the front row in the first seat on the left side. Across the aisle from me sat Anthony, a good friend of Matt's who always managed to surface when everything was at its worst. He was too late to save the day now. My mother sat next to me, smoothly pulling at the mid length sleeved dress she wore because she was still self conscious about the scar on her arm she has from removing her malignant tumor.
When I told my mother funerals were pretentious, she blamed it on Ku??bler-Ross.
Well, not exactly.
She had no idea who Ku??bler-Ross was.
"You're grieving," she said, as she wrapped her motherly hand–warm, soft, and gentle with me–around my shoulder and gave it what was supposed to be a reassuring squeeze, "It's normal to be angry."
I wanted to scoff and tell her my sentiments towards the supposed stipulations of being normal, but there were already too many people crying around me, dressed in black, adding more bodily fluids to be evaporated by the relentless sun.
Morning mourners.
I opted to don a different costume, but she didn't let me out of the house until I was wearing the black dress and heels combo she had purchased just for the occasion.
When I looked around me, I could see the dark flock of foreigners at my back and nothing in front of me except a glorified man beside the box that went along with this whole charade.
It must've cost Deborah and George more than the Persian carpet Matthew had mangled with his saliva and vomit in his flamboyant exit, I mused.
What a drama king.
"Let us commend Matthewh to the mercy of God."
Mattie didn't believe in the mercy of the Christian god that had driven his mother into a padded room.
Somewhere to my right, I could hear his aunt not crying.
I couldn't concentrate on the priest as he gave his words about what a "precocious", "spirited", and "caring" individual Matthew was. The sobbing around me was hurting my ears and I reasserted my opinion that funerals were pretentious in a low murmur under my breath.
Why do people pay so much for a shiny box that will be covered with dirt from the outside and filled with a rotting corpse on the inside?
"We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life."
When people die, it means their hearts stop beating, their chests stop rising, the synapses in the brain no longer receive electrical impulses and messages, their nerves don't respond to stimuli and their lungs are no longer swelling with any intake of air.
By any definition, they are no longer alive and that is what makes them dead.
Then why did I feel so far gone?
Why did I feel that this antiquated ritual wasn't just for him?
Of course, I know why now.
The worst part of it all wasn’t just losing him; it was losing me.

My makeup was heavy and dark to hide the circles around my eyes and my hair was straight and lifeless, nothing like the fiery curls he would tug on for no reason. I gave a speech about Mattie that his aunt had written. It was distant and impersonal—just the way she liked it. It left me feeling emptier than I was before and when I woke up that morning, I could've sworn someone had drained my insides and scrubbed the empty husk with turpentine. I was the picture of composure and everyone who saw me complimented me on keeping it together while we hugged and they whispered in my ear.

Anthony hugged me and said nothing, something I was grateful for, because both of us were too cold on the warm day of Mattie's funeral.

I guess I should elaborate on Matt, for even just a little bit, so you can possibly imagine how badly I wanted to rip everyone's throats out with my teeth.

It's quite simple really, the way I'm putting it for you: He was my best friend.

Most people who know me believe Amber, someone I've known since before I knew anything, is my best friend. Well, they're wrong. She's my sister. She has clothes in my closet, a place at my dinner table, and a favorite cup in my cabinet. My mother gives her presents for Christmas. Amber is my sister and I can trust her to always, always be honest with me.
It was the reason why she wasn't there with me at that moment, holding my hand and squeezing my shoulder and holding onto little pieces of my facade that were out of reach, like my white-knuckled fists or the clenching of my thighs at the sound of his name. She was neither close enough to him to attend that day, nor fake enough to pretend she was enduring as I was. And I will always love her for that.

But Matt was my best friend.

He was my first crush and my first kiss. He brought me to prom and danced with me and we made all the other pairs jealous. He called shot gun whenever I drove somewhere and he never forgot a birthday. I used to tuck his little sister into bed and read her the same story every time before she took off her hearing aid: Little Red Riding Hood. On Saturdays, we ate ice cream and watched the Scream series over and over again. We loved each other. He was the one that knew what I was feeling before I knew it myself, and the one person who had the same opinions as me. He was also the one that I would argue with the most because of it, but no matter how angry we made each other, the love was always—obviously, blatantly, consistently, easily—there. Bitter and sweet, filling me and emptying me all at once, it was always there.

But now he was gone.

A small hand squeezed mine.

It was Charlotte, Mattie's little sister. I knelt down and took in the picture of her eight year old body in a mourning dress and recalled the conversation I had with her mother that morning.

"No one knows the circumstances of Matthew's death. And I plan on keeping it that way."

She stared at me, hard and impatient, before turning away and walking towards Mattie's uncle, George, who later came to me and apologized for his wife's harshness. He was always doing that for me; he was always apologizing for other people.

I once read an article about family stress when I was writing a college paper for one of my mom's friends about death, dying, and grief in families. It said that many women are prone to use means of social support as ways of coping.

Deborah's way of coping was to be a major b****. Who was I to blame her? Who was I to criticize her ways of dealing with losing her nephew who she had taken care of like a son? Especially since what I did was much worse.

After I knelt down to look at Charlotte, I told her that no matter what, I would always love her and that she could always rely on me.

Then I kissed her on top of her curly red hair, went to my car and drove away.

I drove all the way to New York City.