“I've seen her twice this year; she works at the Gap.” Libby was talking about Sharon Hart. And Sharon Hart didn't work at the Gap anymore, she was dead (I suppose, however, that if she were still able to perform her duties, they couldn't fire her because she was deceased, but that's beside the point). Sharon Hart was a girl that had graduated in the class ahead of ours, and neither of us knew her that well. I had never had a conversation with her, but I knew her name and had a veague knowledge of what went on in her life, and had been enrolled in the same tiny school as she, and was therefore under obligation to go to her funeral. So, here I was, in Libby's 198 Honda Accord, sputtering along toward Marx Brothers Mortuary. Okay, so that wasn't the name of it, but it should have been. And do you know how Sharon Hart died? She was hit, not with a bullet, or an eighteen-wheeler, but a champagne cork. Let that be a lesson to those of you who have paid no heed in the past to those warnings on the labels of bottles of bubbly. She was at a birthday celebration with her boyfriend. I think his name is Chet. If that issn't his name, it should be. It was Chet's oltder brother's birthday, and he was rather tanked when he opened that last bottle. Obviously, he pointed it in the wrong direction.

Libby was smoking a cigarette, playing the Supremes entirely too loudly, and talking entirely too loudly for that matter. I have no idea what she was saying; I'd tuned her out. Then she finally nudged me, asking, “Isn't that sad?” I said yes, it was sad. I thought she was talking about Sharon Hart. She wasn't. She wasn't talking about the breakup of the Supremes. Tragic. Libby was really getting into oldies radio that day. Now, she was singing to “Leader of the Pack.” I was watching the trees zip by when Libby started yelling expletives and swerving around on the road. I figured we were probably out of gas, or we had a flat, or something equally terrifying, but when I looked she was just brushing ashes off her skirt. “I burned a hole in it! Grab the wheel!” So, there I was, steering a car toward Sharon Hart's last hurrah, so to speak. She was nineteen years old. She was never very nice. The only thing I ever heard her ay was that she liked unk, but only the mainstream kind, whatever that means. She said it was more musical. Now she was dead, the Supremes had long since broken up, and Libby had a cigarette burn in her skirt. There were lots of other kids from our school going to the funeral. Sharon Hart's parents have no idea who I am, but they probably didn't notice many of teir daughter's schoolmates at the funeral anyway.

On the way home, Libby hit the open door of a car parked on the side of the street. She had a horrendous dent in her front fender, and couldn't shut up about how mad her father would be. When we pulled up in front of my house, she was still complaining. “I think I'm going to Jay's party tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?”

I told her I guessed not. She asked why, but she was pulling away from the curb as she said it, and wouldn't have heard me even if I'd answered. I walked inside and changed out of my Sharon Hart funeral clothes.