You stand in the corner of the room. You’re in a chapel with salmon carpeting and oak pews and expensive flowers. Your eyes are swollen from crying, and you are one of hundreds. There is no space to walk or talk or breathe and the air around the altar is still and lifeless. There is a casket, too expensive for the chapel. There are goosebumps on arms and cold sweat stains on the backs of everyone’s shirts. Your pastor walks along the center aisle and the crowd scrambles to shove themselves in pews that groan in protest of the weight of the people who have never known how uncomfortable pews can be. People take turns talking at the altar and your friend’s mother stares at you from across the aisle, so you make your way up to the pulpit. You don’t look at the four-foot picture on the easel, but you feel its eyes on the side of your face, so you look at the ground hoping that the eyes turn to look at the crowd, or the pastor, or their mother. You speak. You are aware that words are leaving your mouth, but your tongue is numb, and your lips are running away from the words they’re forming. You smell ammonia. You smell the spray paint you used when you and he tagged abandoned buildings downtown. You smell the cigarettes you smoked with him in his Jeep. You smell his Jeep. You smell his cheap cologne and how it hung in the room after he left. You smell Bud Light and PBRs. You smell the bottle of Fireball you both drank three weeks ago you stole for him. You smell dripping gasoline from his gas tank. You smell broken glass on the pavement of a mountain road the night after a spring storm. You smell the unused textbooks and dull pencils and bottle of three-day-old Gatorade from his backseat that flew out the windshield with his body. You smell mint from his last breath. You smell the dirt he will be buried in after you stop speaking. You smell the mossy tombstone and the flowers his mother puts on his grave every Sunday after church. You smell yourself, and the hot air that keeps leaking from your mouth while you ramble about memories of someone who was meant to grow old with you. You stop talking. You follow your eyes back to your seat on the creaky pew and look up to the eyes of your best friend on the four-foot painting. 

He messaged half an hour ago, saying he’s on his way, and you’ll feel that grin on your face again, that wild, animal thing, like some primal instinct screaming, “You’re wanted, don’t you see? He wants you.” You’ll shove the phone into your pocket and peer out the window, looking for his headlights on the highway, his engine roaring with a mechanical scream; he loves that engine, you know, the one his dad bought for him when he turned 18, something you’d never understand, your dad’s a teacher, and you know that on your 18th birthday, you sure as hell won’t be getting a shining chrome mustang. That’s fine, though; you’re leaving home soon, parents and family be damned.