4.16: The Funeral

For Mae and Terry’s friend’s party, I had been told to dress as if I were going to a funeral. According to Max, Refujeyo’s proper funeral colour was white, but one’s own cultural funeral traditions were accepted pretty much anywhere and I preferred wearing black to white, so. I was going in black.

I straightened the collar on my fitted black robes, stared at my reflection, and willed myself to seem ‘dignified funeral goer’ instead of ‘edgy teen in a trenchcoat’. Baggy robes seemed disrespectful at a funeral, so I was wearing the damned binder again, which I hated. It was comfortable for now. I knew it wouldn’t be in a few hours.

I tied the sash of my robes and hoped that the rest of the party wouldn’t care that it was red. It just felt weird not to wear Acolyte colours. Sue me. I wasn’t an Initiate, so just dressing in black would be… ugh. This place had gotten to me, hadn’t it?

Okay. No need to be nervous. It was just an important party for someone I didn’t know, that I was going to because their friends had invited me on impulse, and I was definitely going to feel like a third wheel the whole time and everything would be super awkward. Totally fine.

Mae met me a few halls away from the party, probably so I wouldn’t get lost or chicken out, and it became clear that I didn’t need to stress all that much about my outfit. She was wearing a black suit (a tuxedo maybe? I don’t know suits) with a bright yellow bowtie to denote her craftswoman status. She’d recently redyed her hair bright red, so she had a kind of ‘fire and coal’ look going on that was probably unintentional. As I approached, she raised the lollipop that she was sucking in lieu of a cigarette in greeting, then stuck it back in her mouth.

“All right there, Koala?”

“Fantastic.”

“Great. Terry’s in an exam right now, she’ll swing by later. Let me introduce you to the friends of the dearly departed.”

The party itself took place in one of the larger rooms in the school, as big as the cafeteria. A broad crimson carpet created a pathway from the door to the other end of the room, where an ornate wooden coffin sat on a stone platform next to a podium. On either side of the carpet were rows of church pews, and at each end of each pew an ornate wrought iron candelebra, as tall as I was, made to look like a pillar of tangled vines and roses, already marked with wax from the huge dripping candles adorning them. Somewhere, solemn organ music was playing.

A few people were scattered about the pews, but most of them were crowded around the edges of the room, where the buffet tables were. Most of the guests were dressed in white, sometimes with a splash of their rank colour and sometimes without, but a handful were dressed in black like Mae and I, and I saw a couple of yellows and reds. One guy was dressed as a ghost. Like, covered in an actual white sheet, with actual eyeholes cut into it. He was talking to a Japanese woman dressed in a white kimono.

“Oh, there’s Josh. You’ll like him. Hey! Jaybabe!” She grabbed my wrist and tugged me over to a corner where a large guy with a scruffy beard was considering a tray of canapes. He looked up at our approach and raised the thickest eyebrows I’d ever seen. “Mae. A pleasure as always.”

“Yeah, yeah; I’m a delight. How’s the robot?”

“Still refusing to work properly. Who’s this? You get in a fight with Terry and find a rebound guy?”

“Yeah, absolutely; if I fought with Terry then my immediate action would be to cradle snatch an acolyte twink. You know me so well. This is Kayden. Koala, this is Josh.”

“Uh,” I said. “Hi.”

Josh grinned. “Oh, Koala! Nice one.”

“Of course it’s a nice one, I’m hilarious. And you can keep your meaty paws off him, Josh; he’s way too good for the likes of you. Koala dates legacy boys.”

“I dated onelegacy boy,” I grumbled, because that was the only part of the conversation I understood.

“So you’re single now?” Josh asked.

“Oh my god! You just met him, Jaybabe!”

“Joking! I was joking.”

I didn’t correct him. Pointing out that I was dating a legacy girl was unlikely to help my case.

Mae huffed. “One of these days you have to learn to go easy on the baby ga – hang on, is Himari talking to the dearly departed?!”

I followed Mae’s gaze; the woman in the white kimono had lifted the lid of the coffin slightly and was engaged in animated conversation with someone inside.

“Wait a second,” I said. “He’s actually in there? Just locked in a coffin while everyone’s having a party?”

“He’s fine; the coffin’s got ventilation. But Himari knows better! He’s not a ghost yet! Until he’s buried, he’s still ours! There are rules! I’ve half a mind to – oh, never mind; Carson’s handling it.” As someone strode over to shoo Himari away, Mae seemed to dismiss her from her personal universe and turned back to our discussion. “So your robot still sucks then?”

“Better than anything you could make,” Josh retorted.

“Only because I’m smart enough not to try.”

“Such an excellent work ethic you have.”

“I save my work ethic for important things,” Mae said.

“Like vegetable gardens?” I asked blankly.

“Exactly! Vegetables before robots.”

“Aww, girls, you’re both pretty,” said a gruff voice behind us. I spun to see the tallest woman I’d ever seen in my life. She looked about Mae’s age, but a good head taller, and that wasn’t helped by the golden ringlets piled on top of her head. Her white funeral robes hung like an expensive dress.

“Koala, this is Robert,” Mae said, “and yes, they’re always like this.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, too, Mae,” Robert said with a heart-melting grin.

“You know what you’re like, Princess.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean.” They reached past us to pick up a canape between long fingernails sparkling with golden glitter, gave me another small, private little smile and a nod, and vanished back into the throng of people. I stared after them.

“Hey. Koala. You okay?”

“Was that even a real person?”

“Must have been; they stole the last canape with pickles on it, the bastard. C’mon, I should probably introduce you to the deceased before the speeches begin.”

As we walked along the thick red carpet through the ridiculously ornate faux church setup, I reflected on the people I’d spoken with at the party so far, and a suspicion started to form. I glanced at two girls on a pew we were passing, sitting very close together, one resting her head on the other’s shoulder. I glanced at Mae, beside me.

“Hey, Mae?” I asked quietly.

“Mmm?”

“Is everyone here… um…?” I waved my hands vaguely, trying to come up with a way to ask that didn’t sound stupid or offensive.

Mae saved me the trouble. “Queer as a herd of rainbow-eating unicorns? Nah. Only about eighty per cent.”

“Oh.” That still sounded like an awful lot. Statistically. “Is there like, a club, or…?”

“Oh, yeah; about a dozen of them. All fighting with each other constantly over stupid pointless bullshit.  The people here are just friends, though, and that’s kind of an accident.”

“Seems statistically unlikely.”

“Why? People often become friends with people like them. Most of us are raised in environment where we’re different. Often it’s bad or dangerous, but even when it isn’t, people get tired of being different. It’s nice to hang out with people like you sometimes, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t, really. I’d never gone out of my way to hang out with other bisexual people, and I wouldn’t even know where to start with other trans people. I didn’t see how hanging out with people just because we shared some random characteristic like that would –

But I’d felt the same about witches, hadn’t I, before Kylie had insisted on the coven. And it was nice to hang out with them. To not be different.

So this was why I’d been invited to a random graduation party.

The coffin turned out to be a lot bigger than a normal coffin. Not comically so; it was still within the size range recogniseable as an actual coffin. But it was clear that the occupant wasn’t just wedged in there. They would have room to move around a bit and stay comfortable.

Mae was very slow and noisy about lifting the coffin lid. I understood why when I peeked under the rising lid and saw the occupant hurriedly getting into position, flat on his back, hands over his heart, face blank. The edge of his tablet, clearly on and recently in use, poked out from under the cushion beneath his head; Mae pretended not to see it.

“This,” she announced dramatically, “is Morris. A treasured soul, taken from us too young. But hopefully, he is going to a better place.” She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped away imaginary tears. “A place beyond the petty trials of life such as homework and nitpicky teachers, a place where the spectre of bad grades can haunt him no longer. A heaven of free movement and free enterprise; the afterlife that he deserves. We shall miss our treasured friend and brother, but his courage and drive through his short life will continue to inspire us all.”

The departed’s jaw was tight as he visibly struggled to keep his face expressionless.

“Alas, time is eternal for no one, and graduation eventually comes for us all. Rest in peace, sweet Morris.” She started to close the lid. It wasn’t even all the way down before Morris was reaching for his tablet again; Mae let her eyes skip away from the movement as if he was a janitor she’d just spotted sweeping the floor.

“What exactly is going to happen here?” I asked as we walked away.

Mae shrugged. “You’ve been to funerals before, right? There’ll be a service, and some eulogies, and then we’ll bury him. But you don’t have to stick around for that part. I mean, you can, if you want to hear people make heartfelt speeches about a guy you don’t know for about two hours, but personally I wouldn’t. This is why we do the wake first.”

“By bury him, you mean…?”

“You know. In the ground. Don’t look like that, he’ll be fine! It’s perfectly safe. His spell will cut through the coffin wood perfectly well and we make sure the soil is really loose.”

“Do you always bury your friends alive when they graduate?” I hissed.

“Usually, yeah. People who are claustrophobic pick a different method. Leah went for a Viking funeral last year, which was great; I got to set the boat on fire. Oh, Terry’s here; let’s go see how her exam went.”

The rest of the wake was kind of a blur. Terry’s exam had gone fine. I met some more people. Someone made a joke about Mae’s hair that I didn’t have the context to understand. I met some more people. The cocktail sausages were pretty good. Every person I met made my own little groups of neurotic legacy politicians and conspiracy theorist witches look downright normal.

At one point, a girl with a mohawk and an enormous hoop in her nose asked me if I was ‘that human familiar guy’. Mae immediately swept in with some lighthearted joke I didn’t understand, but the girl’s body language made it clear that she was being politely told to shut the fuck up, while Terry stood between us and kind of herded me off to talk to someone else. I didn’t get a chance to ask any follow up questions, because at that moment a bell tolled.

“This is your last chance to get out before being subjected to the eulogies,” Terry whispered.

I was kind of curious about the eulogies, but not curious enough to hang around for them. I snuck out while everyone was sorting out where to sit.

Well. That had been. A thing. That had happened. Now to… go back to… worrying about preventing the upcoming divine apocalypse, I supposed?

After I got changed, and took the stupid binder off.