The Dead Girl in the Blue Dress

The Dead Girl in the Blue Dress

Jenny hadn’t known the dead girl in the coffin. She didn’t care that Frannie Stern would be wearing a royal blue satin dress. That’s what her mother said she heard dead Fran nie would wear in the coffin. She didn’t know why it was important to go to the scary church, a church she’d never been in. As big as an office building, gray like wet cement, old, older than about anything she could think of except the lady who sat on the street corner in her wheelchair. That lady had a face like a white raisin, Jenny told her mother. Her mother said it wasn’t nice to compare an old lady to a raisin. Like raisins, the church had cracks up, down and around its gray.

It was dark inside except for a bunch of candles on a table at the front of the church. They flickered, probably because it was November, windy out there, too. People opened and closed the big old front doors, which creaked.

They stood, hands folded, 28 of them, fifth graders, 14 girls, in a single line in the center aisle of St. Christopher’s Church. Jenny’s hands stung from the cold. It had been a five-block walk to this church. She should have worn mittens, the kind Judy was wearing near the front of the line. When Jenny stepped sideways, she could see Judy taking her red mittens on and off. The mittens were the color Jenny’s mother’s lipstick. She wondered if her mother’s lips felt cold with that red stuff on them. Anyway, they always looked cold, even though her kisses were warm. Jenny thought that odd. The cold of the aisle where she lifted one foot, then the other – had it been 15 minutes now? The cold of the brown benches she knew had a name but couldn’t remember it. Darren, behind her, pulled at her left sleeve. She frowned and turned all the way around, which was, she was sure, forbidden.

“What do you want?” She hissed. On purpose. She enjoyed the sound of her hiss.

“Nothing. I just felt like pulling something, and that something happened to be you.” He smirked.

“Well, cut it out.” She hissed again, this time a little louder, but not so loud for their teacher to hear.

Miss Aubrey was at the end of the line, the great doors behind her. People were now walking down the two side aisles. They crowded into each other in the three aisles. Why, Jenny wondered, were all of us here to see a coffin with a dead girl in it?

Jenny heard but didn’t understand Carol’s whispers. Carol was behind Darren. Maybe Carol heard Darren whisper to Jenny, heard Jenny hiss and made some remark to Darren. Jenny wondered what that remark might be. She wished she had better hearing, knew that couldn’t be so. She always passed the hearing tests.

The line wasn’t moving. Not an inch.

The president of their class this week (they changed presidents once a month by vote) was Carl Smythe. He was plunk at the front of the line where he’d been assigned. Jenny couldn’t see him. She thought it was his duty as president to do something about moving this line. It didn’t appear Carl was doing anything. When she got to be president, Jenny thought, she’d certainly take on responsibilities like seeing that lines of her classmates moved. And moved with, she scratched her left eyebrow, efficiently. Yes, she’d be more efficient than Carl Smythe who wasn’t at all efficient.

. Jenny thought she should have at least brought a book. What a waste of time to stand in a line, a line waiting to see a dead girl, without a book. She could, she knew, make up her own books in her mind. She began her mind’s book about a lost cocker spaniel when whispers began up and down the line. She’d name the puppy Scatterbug, a name that had come to her five seconds ago. Why that name, she wondered? But there it was. She felt in her coat pocket for a pencil but there was no pencil.

“We’re moving,” Darren said in a voice above, but not much above, a whisper.

“Duh,” someone nearly shouted.

Then came the shh sounds, mostly from girls.

Jenny walked, her head down. She decided she’d close her eyes when it was her turn to kneel on the cushion in front of the coffin. That’s what they’d all been instructed to do by their school principal that morning.

“You will be quiet, very quiet, as you wait your turn. You will kneel on the cushion provided. You will not talk to little Frannie. You will not talk to your classmates. You will file out the same way you came in. Frannie’s parents will be inside by the big doors. You should say something to them. If you can’t think of anything to say, you might curtsy or bow or wipe away a tear, even if it’s a pretend tear. Then you are dismissed for the day.”

While she was thinking about Scatterbug being lost in a forest, she realized there were only three people in front of her. She could see the white coffin but not Frannie in it.

I could, she thought, close my eyes right now and feel my way around that area. I could ask Darren to take my hand because I think I may faint right there in front of the coffin with Frannie in a blue dress.

Marsha knelt. Jenny was next. Marsha got up and smirked at Jenny. At least that’s the look Jenny thought of, but she couldn’t be sure. Marsha had a lot of looks. Maybe this was a look of being sad. What was a look of being sad?

“You can do it okay,” Marsha said. She gave Jenny a little shove.

Jenny did not kneel. She kept her eyes closed. She’d not seen Frannie in her blue dress. She did not want to see Frannie. Frannie dead. But, for the rest of her life, Jenny didn’t forget the walk up that aisle to Frannie’s coffin.