Mom thought death wouldn’t be so interesting to Lily if she got a job at a funeral home.

    Lily loved it.  She was a natural.  She’d been wearing black since the day after her eighth birthday, so she already had the wardrobe.  She was so at ease around the corpses.  I’d never seen Lily happier, except on the day she died.

    Nobody suspected anything when Lily began to chum around with the funeral director’s weird son.  I actually thought she was finally starting to act like a normal teenager.

    After Daisy died, I moved into the room she had shared with Lily.  Mom sort of appointed me Lily’s keeper.  She was really quiet and kept her side of the room very neat.  Lily was a good roommate, once I got over the fear that one of her suicide schemes would overlap onto me.

    I thought she was an angel already when she was at the window that night.  I opened my eyes, still half asleep, and saw her wearing a long, gauzy slip dress.  It was so white, it was hard to tell where the dress stopped and the glow of Lily’s translucent skin began.  The moonlight blurred the scar tissue on her lips as she blew me a kiss and stepped out of the window.

    I thought she was jumping, so I went after her.

    That’s when I saw the hearse waiting at the curb.  The funeral director’s son was at the bottom of a ladder propped at the window.

     I was so relieved that she was only sneaking out.  That’s the only way to get out of my house.  Well, that or killing yourself…