After the funeral, I find my roommate Luke sitting on the floor of his room, still in his dress pants and button-up, a yearbook open on his lap. I lean against the doorframe. Luke doesn’t look up. Instead of telling him that I’m going riding, that I can’t think of any other way to clear the smell of lilies from my nose, I ask, “What are you doing?”

Luke scans the page. “Looking for something.”

I’m tired of looking. All morning Luke and I looked at the slideshow at the funeral parlor—photos of parties, graduations, the Birches’ living room, biking, Kayla posing with her parents, her cousins, us. Better the slideshow, though, than the closed casket. The purple “daughter” ribbon. The knots of Kayla’s family, their sympathetic frowns. It was harder to avoid Mrs. Birch. She yelled all day, thank you and she’s at peace now, but she didn’t cry, not once. Like she was already used to it.

Luke flips to the back of his yearbook. He’s still as he searches. I’m not like him. I need to move. Crumpled in my pocket is the index card Mrs. Birch handed out earlier. She wanted everyone to write down their favorite memory of Kayla. Kayla’s high school friends reminisced about prom and senior skip day. Luke made a bullet-point list. I wanted to write about the time that Kayla, Luke, and I biked the Maine section of the East Coast Greenway. When we stopped for lunch, Kayla pelted me and Luke with crabapples, so Luke pretended to throw her water bottle into a ravine—and then almost accidentally let go. We laughed for hours. Afterwards, we talked about doing the full 3000 miles. What was I supposed to write on that card, that we’d never do it now? That all the things we thought would happen wouldn’t?

I’m about to walk away when Luke turns his yearbook to me. He points to a signature in the middle of the page, the letters so large and loopy that I can read them from the door: It was nice getting to know you in study hall. Let’s hit the trails this summer. See you at SCSU! -Kayla Birch. Her handwriting doesn’t look any different than the last time I saw it—happy birthday, nerd! on a card I recycled months ago, stupid—and I try to imagine the trails Kayla and Luke pedaled that summer, before university, before me, the dreams she might have had, the person she thought she’d become. All that naked hope.

The doorjamb cuts into my arm. There’s no trail for this, no route recalculation. Formaldehyde swirls in my veins. “I’m going out,” I say.

Luke snaps his yearbook shut.