50 Stories to Tell at my Funeral
an excerpt

Kira hated funerals. Come to think of it, just about everyone hates funerals. Having it be the funeral of someone’s 12-year old best friend didn’t help much either. If anyone’s not allowed to die, it’s happy, healthy 12 year olds. How on earth can anyone start out with a sore neck and end up dead the next day? That just shouldn’t happen, not to anyone.

Looking around the room, and trying to avoid the casket with an eerily lifeless best friend stuck in it, Kira looked at flowers, boring, painfully happy flowers. Half of Kira wanted to scream about how unjust and cruel this whole thing was. The other half? The other half of Kira had decided that this whole situation was a dream. Not a dream, but a nightmare. A terrifying nightmare that Kira would wake up from in the middle of the night, sweaty from fear. She wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep and would toss and turn around in bed until it was time for school, where she would see Alexa.

Except it wasn’t. Alexa wasn’t going to be there for Kira, not for tomorrow after she woke up, not for the next school dance, or any of them for that matter. Alexa and Kira weren’t going to graduate together, or go to college together. Alexa was never coming back. The only thing keeping Kira from losing her mind that very moment was the mental cloud that she was stuck in, protecting her from the big, bad universe. At times, Kira wanted out of this cloud, but right now it was the safest place in the world for her. There was no reason to ever expose herself to the rest of the world ever again, Kira reassured herself. No need to get hurt or live your life or anything.