Chapter 3

They wouldn't budge, and they'd even brought in two relatives to watch us. In the end they simply kept us there.

A length of white mourning cloth was draped over our shoulders, and two chairs were set on either side of Hilary's coffin, one left, one right, boxing it in.

They told me and Ina to sit right there and keep vigil, saying that once we made it through tonight, everything would be fine.

Neither of us had ever felt so wretched. Sitting in those chairs, every inch of me felt wrong, my mind stretched taut to the breaking point.

The whole family piled onto their scooters and set off for the riverside pond, and the horn band went off to rest too, ready to come back and play loud and long through the night.

That left only me and Ina in the main hall, and the body in the ice coffin.

We hardly dared to breathe. All we could hear was the low roar of the ice coffin running.

A dozen or so minutes later, the roar cut off all at once.

Ina and I both froze. We glanced at each other and realized the power had gone out.

Before long, corpse fluid began leaking from the ice coffin, and a foul smell spread through the whole hall in an instant.

"Ms. Rodriguez..."

Ina's voice trembled uncontrollably. She'd been on the verge of tears for a while.

"Let's go, please? Let's go while they're not here! Just now I felt like the two of us, sitting stock-still by this ice coffin, were like a pair of paper effigies. I'm so scared."

Honestly, I felt the same way.

I wanted to leave too, but given who I was, I couldn't.

If we just walked out, they'd probably call the school to complain again.

"Hold on a little longer! If we go back and they call the school to complain, we'll likely both get written up. Something that was nothing turns into something."

"But I'm really scared. What if Hilary follows us?"

"Come on! We never wronged Hilary and she never wronged us. She was a good kid. She wouldn't do anything to us."

As I said it, the two of us turned at the same moment to look at the ice coffin, meaning to steady our nerves. Instead we caught sight of something horrifying.

With the cold gone and nothing to hold its temperature, water kept beading up all over the surface of Hilary's body, slick and oozing oil, as if it were melting.

Her head slipped somehow, and all of her hair slid slowly off, exposing a bare, bald scalp.

The sight rocked me. Ina was too terrified to even turn her head, her whole body rigid.

"That's it, that's it. Did Hilary hear us? Did she get angry thinking we're leaving?"

"Don't talk nonsense!"

I snapped at her and fixed my eyes on Hilary, looking closely.

After a moment I realized something was wrong with the body.

"That's a wig she's wearing. There's a scar on her scalp. It looks surgical, running across the top of her head. The wound doesn't look that old, it hasn't fully healed yet."

"How is that possible? Did she have some major surgery? Or is it a scar from the accident?"

"No, it's not from the accident. This has already closed up. It just hasn't healed completely."

Thinking back, Hilary had always been healthy. She'd never had any major surgery, and her family had never said a word about anything like that.

So the body in front of us wasn't Hilary?

The moment the thought surfaced, my heart lurched with fright.

I asked Ina to help me. I wanted to open the ice coffin and take a look.