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It was a grey day: the park was empty, abandoned, possibly due to the sharp wind that had picked up and whipped unmercifully at everybody's faces and made the park a horrible place to be. Everybody sensible had looked at the clouds and gone inside to have a hot drink, where it was comfortable to warm. Jacoba Darnell, who was not sensible, was the lone figure with her hoodie and her ripped-up jeans that flapped a bit where her legs were from the thigh down and she was kicking a roughed-up old hackey sack; lonely, lost, dull grey-and-blue except for the red slash of her hair, pushing the red spikes of it away in annoyance every time the wind pushed them back into her face. This happened a lot.

She blew around like a newspaper being tossed by the breeze -- aimless, shiftless, hands tucked inside her pockets tightly, until kicking the hackey sack had lost its appeal and she sat down on the bench. The see-saw in the playground went up and down constantly with a metallic squeal, skree, skree, and it was driving her nuts. She pushed herself away from the park bench like a shell from mid-career and suddenly she was kicking at it, sending up flurries of bark where she hit, denting the metal and making metallic shrieks with every fresh assault.

However, it didn't seem that talking was something that was on the menu: as Jace looked around, knowing with some sixth sense that there was someone there (probably on the look-out for a cop who would take her to juvie hall) she held Irelia in her sights and just stood there: stood there, looking at her, the expression on the redheaded girl's face somehow echoing everything frustrated and horrible and lost that Irelia felt.

It was obvious that Jace did not want to talk. But she came over anyway, silent, and after a while she sat down a little ways away from Irelia and the bike that she had always admired, hugging her knees in the way that Irelia was. They sat there for a bit without saying hello.

Eventually, presently, all the redheaded girl said was, "You look like a**," which wasn't an insult -- just a statement, empty.

"He's dead," said Jace. "He's not coming back."

It seemed as though it was mainly to remind herself, more than it was to remind Irelia: Jace's eyes were cold and hard, orange stones, and her fingers were white with cold and kept on knitting in and out of her other fingers. She had not bought the small talk for a moment. "I realised that today," she said, "and don't goddamn hate me for bringing it up because you're probably thinking about it as hard as you can and I, I can't stop. I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop going over it. Can you?"

Jace stretched out one leg; then she stretched out the other, flexing her metal toes within her sneaker. "Know when I found out?" she said. "I found out Tuesday night."

The other foot: flexing each individual toe. She seemed strangely patient, though there were tight lines around her mouth, the same as Irelia's. "And I think," she said, "that nobody knows s**t, nobody truly knows s**t, except you and me, because we were together even as kids." (Jace seemed much more apt to swear.) "And it's so stupid. It's so insane."

"My sister said that and I nearly hit her," said Jace, brittle with angry sympathy. "I nearly punched her in her stupid face. Like Harper'd go to heaven. Like there's a heaven anyway. That's just something they tell kids. They tell that crap to you too, don't they? M.B. took me Wednesday to see his grave, right, all closure closure closure, and you know what? He wasn't there. It had nothing to do with him. It was just some stupid rock."

She had to stop for a few moments, just to breathe. The air was cold and it hurt her lungs. Being with Irelia had ripped it open fresh all over again -- it had been her and Irelia and Harper, shooting their mouths off, acting tough. "That's the worst part," she said. "Everyone lying. Everyone just -- acting like it's natural, like it was something that just happens. s**t, Rel. s**t. Who dies in a fire?"

It wasn't comforting that Irelia had nearly exactly the same experience as she was having, right down to the last words she'd ever said to Harper: yelling stupid stuff at him, she thought, calling him names, probably making him laugh in that dumb way he used to laugh as he swaggered away and put his iPod earbuds on. "I think the last thing I told him," she said, "was that I wasn't his girlfriend, and, like, to stop calling me Jacie. And then we told each other that he was gay for Antony. So I guess we're both the biggest bitches who ever lived."

She hadn't thought about the fact that Harper's body was somewhere in the ground when she'd been taken to the grave. Just the stupid gravestone.

"Did you?" Jace sounded curiously neutral. "I don't know. Maybe I did, too. Maybe. I just... he could be such an a*****e. But then he could just turn around and be really nice, really really nice, and he'd still be an a*****e but he was funny about it. And when he was nice to you it made you just, just kind of -- and I was a b***h to him my whole life."

Somehow it was easier. Irelia had admitted it and Jace somehow knew that she hadn't admitted her crush on Harper to anyone else in the whole wide world: it was a secret between them, just for them. "I haven't cried," she said. "I don't know how. If you want to cry I won't make fun of you."

There was no answer for that. Jace rarely touched anyone in her life unless there was no way around it; but then her arm was very awkwardly around Irelia's shoulders, in a deeply retarded way trying to be comforting, when what she had been about to say very maturely was want to go trash the see-saw to see if that made Irelia feel better.

And then suddenly she was crying too: she felt her eyes go all funny and hot and her cheeks were wet. She scrubbed at her face over and over, hoping Irelia didn't notice, hunched close to the other girl in a bizarre half-hug and sort of daring her to say anything about it. She'd never comforted anyone willingly before in her entire life.