Excerpt: Ghost Town

The funeral is tomorrow.

I've only ever been to one funeral in my life. This will be my second. At the first, I was only ten years old -- now I'm seventeen, soon to be eighteen. About seven years have elapsed since the first -- seven years in which I almost forgot what it was like to wake up every morning and experience one blissful second of relief, because for that one, miniscule second, I forgot that anything was wrong, that something -- someone -- was missing. Then I remembered.

It happened two weeks ago. I still can't believe it happened at all. Two weeks ago, the world was different. The world was an unfinished jigsaw puzzle -- most of the pieces were jumbled up, a few had been put together, but all the pieces were, without a doubt, in the box. Now it's incomplete -- one of the pieces is missing. And it's no use looking -- in the junk drawer, under the bed, beneath the coffee table, wherever. You know it's out there, somewhere, and the search is maddening, because you start checking and re-checking places you've already searched quite thoroughly, but you just have this feeling that it's going to turn up if you check one more time. And the more you look, the more you start to wonder -- idiotically, really, but you do wonder -- whether that piece ever existed at all.

If you were to tell me what was going to happen that night -- that windy night, brisk with an end-of-summer chill -- I would've said you were crazy. More specifically, I would have laughed at you. I would’ve snickered at you behind a cupped hand while hastily trying to turn that laugh into a hacking cough. The whole thing is so unbelievably absurd -- in fact, I would've leaned over to my friends and whispered, "This guy is one fry short of a Happy Meal." Then I would've smiled pityingly at you and hurried away.

But no one's smiling now.