i hope it was joy.

I found her half-buried in the new November snow, smelling of something putrid and sickeningly sweet.

Her hand jutted out at an odd angle, pinky raised, bone showing beneath her silver fire-opal ring.

I bent near her side and tried not to breathe; her school uniform was torn apart where the animals had gotten to her, leaving her completely exposed. I shivered. I almost thought I saw her shiver, too. Her eyes were long gone (the first to go, I’d read somewhere), but I could still imagine her lying here, head on the mossy ground, green eyes heavenward as she took her last breath.

I looked up at the barren trees, lifeless and trembling in the wind. Crows watched from above, wary I might steal their leftovers. The sky was greying, clouding over with the promise of more snow.

I sat by her side, took what was left of her hand in mine, and watched the clouds roll in. I laid my puffer jacket on the ground as a makeshift picnic blanket and pulled out my school lunch. I watched the crows creep closer, eyeing my cookies and chips. I threw a crumb at them, above her head, and watched them fight over it, squeaking and cawing impossibly loud in the darkening, noiseless forest around us.

She sat up then, snow and leaves falling from her hair, her face impeccable - exactly how I remembered it, unchanged from before.

“Took you long enough,” she said, her voice far away. She took one of my cookies and sat cross-legged, leaning an elbow against my thigh as she broke it in half. She offered the other half to a one-eyed crow behind her. I exhaled.

“You didn’t leave a note. I didn’t…” Pause. Inhale. “I just wasn’t sure where to find you.”

“No. You didn’t want to find me.” Her voice had that classic, snarky bite to it - the way she spoke when she wanted to sound like she was joking, but you knew she was upset.

The breeze caught her perfume, musky and intensely floral. My stomach churned.

“Remember when we were little? We would drag blankets and pillows out here and build a fort. It was always so cold at night. How come we never just went home? You always insisted on staying out here all night.” She smiled to herself, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She ran her hands up and down her arms, trying to warm herself.

The snow started falling then. Gentle, perfect snowflakes, rhythmically dancing and gliding along the wind. She sighed.

“I’m so cold.” She laughed: short, hard.

I started giggling. A weird, panicky lightness spread through my stomach, up my chest, and into my throat. It was tight, and I was scared.

Then I was really laughing, from deep in my stomach. It hurt, but I couldn’t stop. Laughed as hot tears streaked down my face. As the laughs turned to sobs, to full-body wails that racked me, made my chest ache, and my head pound like a migraine. The noise startled the crows. They started flapping and squawking around us.

“Stop.”

I kept laugh-sobbing.

“I’m serious. Stop.” She wasn’t amused. She was angry, and maybe afraid. For me, or of me, I wasn’t sure. The crows were shouting now, screaming, their sounds mingling with the wind.

“STOP IT. THIS ISN’T FUNNY.”

I couldn’t breathe anymore. The laughs were choking me. The sobs turned into weeping, my body tight and cramping like I had just run a marathon.

I stopped laughing. She stopped yelling.

I don’t know how long I sat there, knees digging into the frozen ground, until the wind finally died down. The forest went silent, and I could breathe again.

The smell was back. Stinging my eyes, making me want to cough. I couldn’t look at her. I stayed on the ground, forehead to the dirt.

“You missed it,” I said finally. “The whole town was there. All the teachers and your old track coaches. Your piano teacher from when you were six. The food bank lady and that grumpy old man from the library who’d yell at us for playing dress-up games on the computer all night.” I half-laughed; a choking, rattling sound. “All your little cousins and your new niece. They even wheeled your grandpa out, though I’m not sure he knew what was going on.”

I expected her to tell me to shut up. She said nothing.

“The firemen came. The popular girls brought you yellow tulips. It made me laugh, you know, because you didn’t even like tulips. Like, at all. So I was there, front row, thinking about how mad you’d be about the flowers, and I started giggling. And my mom looked at me like, ‘What in the world is wrong with you,’ but she was too afraid to say anything. She hasn’t really talked to me much since then. I think she’s scared that if I think about it, I’ll want to do it too, or something.”

I rolled over to look at the sky. Twilight had started, and it was turning pink.

“Your mom cried the whole time, and every time she started, my mom would start crying all over again, too. Your dad just stared at the floor. I don’t think he breathed once.”

The sky deepened. Orange, purple, crimson.

“It was nice, though. You would’ve been proud.”

Inhale. Exhale.

The snow was catching on my eyelashes. I sat up, and she was back on the ground. The friend I used to know was gone again - tattered and lifeless.

I grabbed her hand, took her ring off, and slipped it in my coat pocket.

“I’m sorry. I know I can’t understand how you felt. But I hope, in those last moments, when your brain filled with all those chemicals and your life flashed before your eyes,” Inhale. Exhale. “I just... I hope the last thing you felt was joy. I hope you got that, at least.

I hope it was joy.”