By the time we got back to the cabin, the others had finished unpacking the car. They were milling around outside, Richard poking experimentally at the fire pit with a stick he found somewhere. He had the look of someone trying real hard to look casual, like maybe he was trying not to start a fight. 

Not for the first time, I questioned the wisdom of getting all of us drunk. Richard used to have a nasty mean streak when he was drinking. It was one of the reasons things had never worked out with him and Laurel, or at least one of the reasons she'd given. It had been a short-lived relationship after a long period of on-again, off-again courtship; they'd been better friends than lovers, and better lovers than partners. 

Who you are when you're drunk is who you really are, Laurel had once told me, shrewdly, while draining an over-filled glass of wine, a teal-green eye focused on me in a defiant challenge to tell her otherwise. 

I hadn't argued with her, but I hoped she was wrong. At the time, pre-transition and out only to a few friends, conflicted and questioning everything, drinking had been perilous. Sometimes it left me free and open and funny and bold. Sometimes it left me weepy and empty inside, like a great wide sinkhole had sprouted somewhere in my gut and everything that made me a person had fallen into it. 

Which one of those was the real me, I had wondered. Am I just a hollow person, all packaging with no insides? 

I don't know if Richard's tequila-fueled anger reflected some deeper truth about his soul. I do know that he and Laurel had fought about it, at the end, me holed up in my room of our shared apartment trying to pretend I couldn't hear everything through the paper thin walls. 

"If it's the drinking that bothers you, babe, I'll stop. I don't care about it. I just want to be with you." 

"I don't want you to stop drinking," Laurel had said, angry and exasperated. "I want you to stop being an asshole." 

I remember thinking, at the time, that it sounded like bullshit, and if I knew it then Richard surely must have known it too. 

"Hey," I called out to them, there in the campground. "We doing this thing?" 

"Yep." Parker had a map, the kind that folds up like a brochure. It flopped over in his hand, half-limp from its well-worn folds. "We've got a bit of a walk, though, to get out into the actual woods." 

Dawn pulled from my side and went to Parker, pressing in close as if to soak up his heat. He pulled an arm around her shoulders, hand still loosely gripping the wadded-up map, and looked at us all as if to say 'ready?' 

We set off in a loose single-file, staggered like drunken ants. Parker and Dawn, pressed together, at the head. Abby behind, then me, then Richard, and Liza trailing by a few paces. She was carrying the ashes this time, and I didn't mind; they were a heavy weight, far beyond the seven pounds they'd measure on a scale. 

We didn't say anything, just walked. The trail was mostly clear, just a place worn smooth between the trees, the route covered in small stones and pine needles. It inclined slowly, creeping its way uphill in a way that left me breathless. I was panting hard by the time we stopped, my breath escaping in little bursts of fog, and the back of my calves burned. 

The trail, curving up and around a hill, opened out into a little clearing at the edge of a cliff. The exposed stone face was red-brown and worn smooth by wind. Beyond the edge, the mountains fell away into a tumble of treetops and scruffy brush. But the cliff afforded a beautiful view of the neighboring peaks in the mountain chain, like a cluster of stony giants huddled against the sky. 

I had to give it to Parker; this place, whether he knew it was here or not, was beautiful. 

I tried to think of what Laurel would say if she could see it, if she'd like it or if she'd have some wry comment for its beauty, but all I could think about 

(Logan I'm scared) 

was the last time we'd spoken, and how her voice had grown thick, almost sleepy, right at the end. 

"Well. This is the place," Parker was saying, and I latched onto his words like a life preserver. 

"It's nice," Abby said, and she sounded surprised. She moved toward the cliff's edge, peering curiously over it and down where it broke off and fell into the trees below. 

"Liza?" 

"I'm here." She set the box of ashes on the dusty stone and knelt beside it, fumbling with the flaps. 

Here's something nobody tells you about cremains. Those decorative, fancy urns? You have to buy those separate, and they're expensive. When you're planning to scatter the ashes, there's no real point in spending that kind of money. So instead, the ashes come in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box, like the mystery ingredient in some weird meal kit delivery service. 

If the crematorium thought there was anything weird about me -- not a relative, not anybody -- handling the cremation, they didn't let on. They were perfectly professional throughout. There are probably lots of people who die without any close family. Some of them probably get cremated by the state. I think I read that, once, that the unclaimed bodies get cremated and left in a vault somewhere. In some city building, there's probably a whole file room full of dead people. 

Weird you never hear about places like that being haunted. 

Nobody thinks about it, I guess. 

"Okay. So..." Liza swallowed hard, obviously trying to get control of herself and stop crying. "There's this...scoop thing in here. I guess there's probably enough for six scoops, if everyone wants to take one and scatter it and...say something." 

Say something. Right. Something twisted up in my gut, thinking about the pages of abandoned memorials scribbled in a notebook, thinking of the things I wanted to say but had promised I would never tell. Secrets burn like acid when you hold them in, sizzling and gnawing through your belly. 

I looked around at the others, wondering what they might be thinking. No one seemed to be in a hurry to speak. It would be different, I thought, if I were alone with Laurel. I had plenty to talk to her about, plenty to ask. Had I done the right thing, I would have asked first. Was it what she had wanted? Was any of this what she wanted? 

But Laurel wasn't there. She wouldn't answer. And that was the point -- it was why we were all here. Saying anything felt performative and painfully intimate. I didn't know how to be weak in front of these people who used to mean so much to me but now were like an assembly of strangers. 

"I'll go first, I guess," Liza said, finally, when no one said anything. She bent over the box and withdrew a scoop of chalky ash. She stood pulled away, turning so the wind was at her back. When she spoke, it wasn't in a tear-choked voice; there was something almost cold in it, a bitter resolve. "Laurel saved my life. I wish I could have done the same."

A stab of guilt twisted through me, and something lurched up in my gut, but I forced it down. 

Liza had always been the odd one out in the group. Dawn was an outsider by virtue of being the newcomer, but Liza had been there from the beginning. All the same, she had always been Laurel's friend more than ours; while the rest of us would hang out independently, build our web of interconnected friendships and hookups and dramas, Liza only ever showed up places when Laurel invited her. 

They'd met in a screenwriting class Laurel had taken Freshman year. I remembered hearing about how much she hated it -- the professor had apparently been self-indulgent, pompous, and a borderline creeper -- but she'd liked this drama student in there well enough. And that was enough to bring Liza into the fold. Gorgeous Liza with her ebony skin and helter-skelter eyes, all long limbs and awkward, coltish grace. 

I wouldn't have minded being friends with her. At the time, still presenting to the world as a card-carrying lesbian, I wouldn't have minded being more than friends. But Liza had never seemed very interested in anyone but Laurel. 

I realized that Abby was talking, and I'd missed half the words. I tried to snap back to attention, just catching the tail end of "...miss you, girl" and then there were ashes fluttering in the wind like snow. 

Abby handed off the scoop to Parker and Dawn, who were still standing together. 

Dawn smiled awkwardly. "I didn't know her as well as the rest of you," she said, with the diplomacy of an in-law, the interloper to a family's grief. "But Laurel was so special, and she meant so much to everyone." 

Her voice hitched, and I caught Abby shooting her a look laced through with disgust, envious maybe of how freely tears could come to her. Abby hadn't cried since the day started. Thinking back, I couldn't remember ever seeing Abby cry. She was tiny, barely five-foot, but hard as steel; Abby Villalobos was a survivor, a self-proclaimed scrapper, and public displays of emotion were not a part of that identity. 

"Nobody ever talks about suicide at funerals," Parker was saying, with an uncharacteristic thoughtfulness in his voice. He was looking down at a scoop of ashes, brow furrowed. His glasses had slid partway down the bridge of his nose, the wind ruffling his comb-over, sweat stains starting in semicircles at the armpits of his dress shirt. He looked unkempt, like something gone feral. "It's a cliche that you never know what's going on in somebody else's life, but...damn, Laurel. I don't even know what to say. I hope you find what you're looking for." 

My heart was pounding so fast I was afraid it might falter to a stop. I could feel my legs trembling in a way that had nothing to do with exertion from the climb up here. I didn't meet Parker's eyes when he handed the scoop to me. 

Cremains aren't like the ashes in a hearth, all soft and ephemeral. They have a weight to them, and they're gritty like sand. The bone fragments sparkle like shards of quartz. I tried not to think about it as I plunged in the scoop, but I couldn't stop staring down at it in my hands, feeling like I'd swallowed a live snake. 

"I tried to do what you asked of me," I said, in a voice that was little more than a choked whisper. "I hope this is what you wanted." 

I tilted the scoop, watching the ash flow and swirl out with the wind, spreading in an uneven cloud.