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tunic dress made out of one of her old oversize sweaters. She’d never wear them to school, but at sleepovers or on weekends, she lived in them. This one was printed all over with giant purple strawberries. The night before, I’d cut down the body and the sleeves, and sewed little bunches of sequins to the middles of all the berries, but it was still so obviously the same bright, obnoxious sweater she always used to wear. It was so clearly Lillian.
    When I came up to our regular table at lunch and sat down, everyone stopped talking.
    “Are you for freaking serious?” said Angelie, who’d worshipped Lillian when she was alive. “I mean, that’s the one she got last year at Camelot. It’s hers.”
    I nodded, trying to explain that I thought (knew) it was what Lillian would have wanted, but by then, Angelie wasn’t even listening. She leaned closer, until her nose was almost touching mine, and I could see the little hairs where her eyebrows grew too close together. “Do you think it’s just okay? Do you think it’s normal to go around cutting up dead people’s clothes and wearing them?”
    Over my shoulder, Lillian made a disgusted noise. I could feel her humming with a cool, skin-crawling static as she leaned to whisper in my ear. “God, those brows are horrific. Someone needs to get her, like, a pamphlet to encourage proper use of tweezers.”
    And I laughed, even though I knew that I shouldn’t have, even though I knew it was a bad, bad thing to do.
    Angelie was supremely not amused. “Is something funny?”
    Well, yes. But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out and all the rest of them were just looking at me.
    “Do you think maybe you should go see the counselor or something?” said Jessica, and I couldn’t decide if she sounded like she was being nice or nicely vicious. “I mean, if you’re having, like, some kind of psychotic episode.”
    And in that moment, I thought maybe I was. Maybe this was the part where I gave up everything and went to the counselor, admitted to myself that it wasn’t normal, living with the ghost of your best friend.
    I left my plastic tray and my hot lunch and my social studies notebook. I left everything except my coat, and instead of the counselor’s office, I walked out of the building. It was a long, gray day and the sky was low and wet, spitting ice pellets like it couldn’t decide if it should rain or snow.
    I walked all the way across the south lawn toward the football field, and sat alone on the bleachers. The field looked as big as an ocean and too green.
    I thought about all the times we’d sat in the same place for football games or track meets or just hung around in the summer, and how we used to talk about what things would be like once we were in high school. I’d always imagined full-size lockers, better art classes. Lillian talked about boys. About parties and all the places we’d go once we got our driver’s licenses, and then she stopped. After a while, the only thing she ever talked about was whether I thought her nonfat yogurt tasted like it had fat in it, and if no-calorie sweetener was made with real sugar, then where did the calories go? I thought about how I might be living with her ghost forever.
    After a long time, the bell rang and I got up, but I didn’t go inside. The thought of sitting through Earth Sciences made me feel like I was flaking apart into little pieces. Instead, I just climbed down the bleachers and started toward home.
    I walked slowly, crossing the parking lot with the sleet in my hair and soaking through my jacket, until I was stopped in the bus lane by Mr. Harmon, the security guard.
    He was wearing a clear plastic poncho and looking annoyed. “Are you supposed to be wandering around out here?”
    The question hung there in the air between us, and suddenly my mind was blank.
    He reached for my arm, talking louder, like I might be deaf. “Why are you here?”
    I stood looking up at him, trying to think, because he was