Jennifer Two

Prologue.

I like to pretend that she is still dead. That she did die in that awful shooting, never to return, and that she is nothing but bones and dissolved life, melded in with dirt and mud and whatever else lurks and flourishes underneath a graveyard. I like to pretend she never made it. I replay this beautiful funeral in my head, over and over and over until it's like a movie on repeat, one that I return to whenever I'm bored. I'll pause it at the part when my older brother tries to hold in tears while mumbling her eulogy, with a voice so husky, so wobbly, so hollow. He'll be talking about the school tennis tournament she won in '98 a year back, and he'll throw in some light joke about how she threw a minor tantrum before the photo-shoot with her trophy, because the humidity on the court made her hair damp and spring out dishevelled curls. Sometimes I'll return to the part where they lower her in her shiny mahogany casket with golden accents, and the sun coincidentally falls back into clouds, ripping light out of the world like snapping curtains shut. I like to pretend that she is dead, because she should be.

Then I laugh, because in the back of my mind, I know I don't have to pretend. I don't have to daydream; I don't have to imagine my brother actually showing poignant emotion, or my sister with eyes so puffy and red, shocking against the icy blue of her irises, swelling with tears. I don't need to 'what-if' my demise, or the denial and heartbreak of my parents when they realised it was all over. I don't have to imagine her death, because she did die. She did die in that god-awful shooting in '99, and she is nothing but bones and dissolved life. She just also happens to be alive.

She was born again; resurrected, they might say. She's like Jesus Effin' Christ; a miracle. She's lived before and she lives again.

Well, kind of.