Read Six Feet Over It for Free Online Page B

sympathy and you’ll wind up comforting her proxy grief instead.
    “It’s all right,” I say dutifully, rubbing her arm as she weeps.
    “What about presents?”
    “Maybe later, okay? Please?”
    She finds a package of tissue in the clutter on my floor. Blows her nose.
    “But why ?”
    “Just don’t feel well. Okay? Okay?”
    She nods. “I’ll bring your present later, can I?”
    “Yeah, sure, thank you.” My chest aches.
    “You want Mom?”
    “No.”
    She closes the door behind her, goes sniffling off to relay the message to Wade and Meredith, who do not come to my room. A relief. Sort of.
    I lie staring at the glitter-infused popcorn ceiling (whose idea was that?), toying briefly with the idea of abandoning my soiled day in exchange for what was supposed to be my real birthday—somewhere around late January, early February. I have no problem sharing with, say, Martin Luther King Jr. or Abraham Lincoln. Even stern, ponytailed George Washington would be better than a stupid, creepy, empty-eyed skeleton. I give up, settle on no birthday at all, and seethe.
    Dario.
    That a-hole has ruined my birthday, dropped it into a double-depth grave of stupidity. Not a birthday, but every birthday forever, the actual day of my birth. Like the liners and urns and fresh, upturned grave soil, my birthday is now just one more thing I never want to touch. It is, if his out-of-control excitement was any indication, the Super Bowl of death holidays.
    My birthday is dead and buried.
    My blame knows no bounds. Or logic. This Dario person is not just the messenger; he is the Grim Reaper.
    Or no, wait—that’s me.

three
    IN RETROSPECT, kudos to Wade for dragging us to live in a graveyard, a genuinely logical next step in my already death-soaked existence. Wade says I’m super-dramatic. Wade is the one using headstones for a walkway.
    Only five months ago we’d been safe beside the ocean. Home.
    Kai and I were born in Mendocino, a cluster of East Coasty–looking cottages hidden among redwood and cypress trees perched on the edge of insanely beautiful cliffs above the wild coast of Northern California. Meredith painted seascapes in oil to sell to tourists. She raised us to believe we were mermaids and made certain, even as toddlers, that we fostered a deep appreciation for the ocean, for this most beautiful place in all the world. She chose Kai’s name for its literal Hawaiian translation: ocean. We practically lived in salt water, our diapers and hair forever filled with sand. Heaven.
    Until out of the blue—leukemia. Every day turned suddenly sad. Kai’s thirteenth and my eleventh birthdays and all the days and months that followed I spent beside Kai, lying on the couch all day, dying. Sleeping, crying, drinking lukewarm 7UP. The house lost its misty ocean coolness; it turned warm and salty and bitter. It smelled of pills and vomit and sweat. She pulled loose, streaming fistfuls of hair from her head until it was gone. She slept. Her friends stopped coming around. I became Kai’s best friend and lost mine in the process.
    There was not a Taco Bell within a hundred mile radius of our town, let alone a decent medical facility, so there were a million road trips back and forth to San Francisco. Wade scavenged enough commissions at the real estate office to keep us well supplied in food, chemotherapy, spinal taps, and little else. I could not bear to bother him and Meredith for things like lunch money or new clothes, so I made myself Land O’Frost lunch meat sandwiches and wore the same pink sweatpants and T-shirt day after day, sometimes weeks between the Laundromat visits we resorted to when first the dryer, then the washer stopped working and we couldn’t afford to fix them. At school I hid, embarrassed and unnoticed, alone in the library at recess.
    For two years Kai languished but lived. Radiation left her so sick no food would stay in her long enough to matter, until the Halloween I fished a York from my pillowcase stash