Beloved, You Called Her 
I knew a girl named Hiraya Canosa. 
I didn't know her well enough. She was, to me, that girl who waved to everyone she'd made more than 25 seconds of eye contact with at some point in her life, with a smile that dripped with the brightness of sunshine itself and dark brown eyes whose color contrasted with the gleaming look in her gaze. I could recognize the sound of her footsteps in the hallway because she walked awkwardly as if gravity could not tether her and her monopoly of acrylic keychains to the ground, each fictional character rattling behind her as she grabbed one strap of her backpack with one hand and linked arms with a friend using the other. She adorned her hair with the height of luxury–Hello Kitty clips–and twirling pink ribbons that flowed down to her shoulders where the ends of her hair used to be. “I'm going to grow it out again,” she said to me once, when I passed by her and asked about her new haircut which transformed her flowing locks into something so short it couldn't even be tied anymore. She professed the goal to me like a robber planning a heist while they slept in the confines of a jail cell. 
I thought nothing of it. I didn't know her well enough, after all. 
I still attended her funeral, though. 
It took place on a Saturday and it did not rain like it always seemed to in the movies but I wished that the sky had mourned with us that day to make up for the guests that seemed far more preoccupied with something… else. Many of the attendees consisted of classmates, most of whom were like me who knew of her but did not know her well enough to call her a friend when people asked of our relationship with the deceased. “They didn't know,” a girl had muttered after the services, a girl who used to link arms with the body now sitting motionless in the casket, “who her friends were. So her parents just invited whoever she shared classes with.” 
A cause of death was never mentioned but I'm sure you can imagine. 
It was an open casket funeral and I took it upon myself to look. It was important to me for some reason, to stare at Hiraya's waxed lips fixated in a straight line and brown skin so pale it looked as though it were dusted with powder in order to tell my heart what I knew in my mind: That she was dead. Instead of acceptance, however, I remember being appalled. 
“She’s wearing a suit.” 
The person behind me–another classmate, another Hiraya acquaintance–stated the observation like a judge reading the accused’s lists of crimes before the courtroom. The words were spoken softly but with an underlying bitterness, uttered with an unsaid accusation that cut like the edge of a knife. Perhaps we wouldn't have been so startled if it hadn't been more likely to confirm the yeti’s existence than find Hiraya Canosa in a suit whose design she would've called dull and stiff and boring if her lips hadn't been sealed shut.
Hiraya’s parents smiled uneasily. 
A rift formed.
Most of the class had gathered themselves into the opposite side of the room by then, casting glances at the casket then at the family, extended and all, with a look of suspicion. Gone were our tentative attempts to provide them with comforting words. To lose a daughter, after all, would surely bring a grief so deep you would drown in it. But by then we had grown skeptical of who exactly her relatives were mourning because the girl who would still have her smiling photo pasted in our yearbooks at the end of June was certainly not the same child the adults were describing to have lost. 
It was evident as the service progressed that I and the other Hiraya acquaintances in the room were not those most unfamiliar with the deceased. No, that title might've belonged to Hiraya's aunt. Or perhaps her grandmother. Or her parents even, who shared stories of her childhood with a look of longing and desperation and a confusing expression that none of us could place that implied they could only speak of her so lovingly when they recalled the person she used to be instead of the person she had died as. 
The silence was loud when we watched her body get lowered into the ground beside a poster that read: Rest In Peace, Jonathan. 
The gravestone, which bore the same name, was vandalized in less than a week. 
It was strange, this collective agreement that a soul could not rest with their body dressed up in an identity penned by people the deceased could no longer argue with–But I pointed out that had Hiraya’s parents addressed her with the name she wrote down on her school papers, then perhaps we wouldn’t have needed to bury anyone at all.