Women and Children First by Alina Frances Grabowski Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt Univers

Women and Children First

Alina Frances Grabowski

Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Vanderbilt University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

Creative Writing

August 9, 2019

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:

Lorrie Moore, M.F.A. Lorraine Lopez, Ph.D. Nancy Reisman, M.F.A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction ...... 1

Aftermath ...... 11

Fraternal ...... 34

DesignFuture ...... 60

Meninges ...... 87

Relapse ...... 108

A Girl Walks Into a Bar ...... 134

The Losers...... 155

Confirmation ...... 180

Introduction

The stories in Women and Children First take place in Mayfield, a thinly veiled version of

Scituate, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up. When I was in high school, my classmates loved to riff on its name as though it were a nonsense word: Skit-you-watty, Skitch-ee-wit, Satch-what?

This was when I entered private school, and my new friends came from towns with crisp, easy-to- swallow names: Newton, Belmont, Arlington. Stuffy names, names that didn’t imply adventure, as

Scituate’s apparently did. My private school friends were obsessed with my town; its distance from

Boston, coupled with its combination of beaches and forest (“Trees!” one of my friends cried upon stepping off the train), proved endlessly exotic in their eyes. My friends from home, however, called our town something else: Shit-You-Ate. To them the town was stifling, entertaining during the summer but boring otherwise, little more than a collection of parking lots where we idled late at night, seeking privacy from our parents. This penchant for distorting the town’s name was a legacy of sorts—the word Scituate is already the product of multiple reinterpretations and manipulations.

Our town was originally christened Satuit, the Wampanoag word for cold brook, but white settlers renamed the town Scituate in 1640. Locals refer to it as Scitown, some ironically, some not.

This is what drew me to Scituate in my fiction—the multiplicity of identities it inhabits. The town’s gorgeous but also brutal, depending on the season, and there’s a certain darkness that shadows the natural beauty. Many of the stories draw on real events that occurred in town. A girl did impale herself after jumping off a house during an illegal party, though she lived. Cancer affected a suspicious amount of people, especially children. You were never more than three degrees away from opiate addiction—a friend’s brother, a coworker, a niece. Heavy drinking was more than commonplace. As Nick Flynn, the poet who also grew up in Scituate, wrote in his memoir, Another

Bullshit Night in Suck City: “The morning ritual in Scituate becomes learning who totaled their car over the weekend—wrapped around what tree, driven off which pier.”

And then there were the men. My mother referred to them as “Neanderthals”, though I understood I wasn’t to share this nickname with anyone. Since I had grown up in town I wasn’t sure what other men she was comparing the Scituate ones to, but I did notice that my father was different than most of them (quieter, softer), and he certainly treated my mother differently than the other husbands treated their wives. There was a certain aggressive confidence among Scituate men, like my friend Michaela’s father, who looked my mother up and down at a Christmas party, or Jules’ dad, who argued with Mom about the relevance of contemporary art at dinner, claiming she didn’t know what she was talking about, though she’s an artist with an MFA. When I was younger, I wasn’t sure why my mother shared these things with me—it made me nervous, the prospect of not being able to trust my friends’ fathers. But as I grew up, I saw this strange authority firsthand, and the way it could quickly turn to anger. John, my friend Sarah’s brother, pounded a hammer against her door when we wouldn’t let him inside, and her parents were infamous for their shouting matches. They argued unselfconsciously in front of guests, shouting insults across the kitchen counter as we watched television in the attached room. I wasn’t allowed to go over Michaela’s anymore after her mother sported a mysterious bruise on her collarbone. For some time, I wondered if my mother and

I were crazy. My friends, whose opinions I trusted deeply, didn’t raise an eyebrow at any of this domestic hostility. Maybe we were overreacting.

I eventually realized that the conflict was clearer to us because we weren’t townies. We moved to Scituate when I was three, which meant we didn’t belong to the group of families who had been rooted there for decades. To us, the status quo was strange. For the twenty years that we lived in Scituate, we occupied a strange space between insider and outsider. It’s from this position that I wrote these stories.

When I read my thesis, I see the fingerprint of many authors I admire. Perhaps the most obvious are Elizabeth Strout and Jennifer Egan, because Olive Kittredge and A Visit from the Goon

Squad were the story collections I most referred to when writing my own, due to their linked nature.

I didn’t want to write a novel in stories (which I think of as a narrative more closely connected through plot and time), but a series of stories that mimic the experience of entering a new town— you begin to draw connections between the other people you’ve met, and slowly become acquainted with the town’s culture and rhythms. I found A Visit from the Goon Squad so engaging during my first read because of the way Egan draws peripheral characters from past stories into the spotlight, such as La Doll. She appears briefly in “A to B” as the blunt, fast-talking boss of the protagonist. She’s present for no more than half a page, but in the next story, “Selling the General,” she’s the main character. Time has passed, and La Doll’s fallen from grace, now forced to manage a dictator’s publicity in order to stay afloat. A character that was almost a cliché in the last story blooms into something full and complicated, despite the fact that Egan isn’t adhering to a continuous timeline or circling her characters around some catalytic event.

Strout’s book is more tightly trained on a single character, the eponymous Olive, but she’s not at the center of every story; sometimes she’s a supporting character, sometimes only her name is dropped. Like in A Visit from the Goon Squad, different characters show up in different contexts, such as Olive’s son, who we see as both a boy and a man. But there’s another component connecting these stories; the town of Crosby, Maine, which Strout describes with exacting beauty. The story

“Incoming Tide” begins like this:

The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them. Also, there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel.

Strout doesn’t use any metaphorical or symbolic language here; instead she’s painstakingly precise about the physical world, and she uses sound as well as sight to make these docks all the more vivid. The authority in the way she describes the landscape does more than set the scene; it tells us that our protagonist, Kevin, will be a close and careful observer.

I also turned to Alice Munro as I worked on these stories. Though Munro is often lauded for her nimbleness with time, I’m also impressed by the meta-fictional quality of her work, her ability to comment on why we tell ourselves the stories we do. In “Fiction,” which spans thirty years, a woman becomes convinced that a young writer she encounters wrote a book about her own childhood. When the woman goes to the book signing, it becomes obvious that this is untrue—the book is a work of fiction—and she leaves ashamed, embarrassed that she could have been so self- centered.

In my day-to-day reading life, I tend to lean towards books critics call “voice-driven”; I’ve recently been impressed by Catherine Lacey and Claire-Louise Benett’s work, and I return to Jeffrey

Eugenides’ and George Saunders’ books again and again. But I look to Otessa Moshfegh when I want to study bold, uncompromising voices. I admire her story collection, Homesick for Another

World, for its unflinching eye; Moshfegh refuses to turn away from the grotesque. And yet, she’s not all shock and outlandish strangeness; she can make a character delusional, difficult, and generous all

4 at once. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of my favorite stories, “Bettering Myself,” where she does just that:

But Popliasti and his incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool. "I cannot teach you if you act like animals!" I screamed. "We cannot learn if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy," said Popliasti, running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done without him.

But my seniors were all very respectful.

She seamlessly navigates between her narrrator’s frustration with her student, her dismissal of him, and her gratitude for her seniors, just in six sentences. This is what I hope to be able to do in my own writing: capture the complexity of a character in her own voice, while toggling between humor and darkness. This is why I often write in first-person or close-third; I enjoy scraping right up against a character’s conscious, especially if they lie to the reader or withhold things.

I find that humor is also linked closely to voice. I seek humor in every book I read, and return to Miriam Toew’s All My Puny Little Sorrows, a book about a sister trying to navigate her sister’s suicidal tendencies, as a model of how to fiction that’s both heartbreaking and hilarious, tough and tender. I look to Joy Williams as a different model of humor, dark and mysterious.

And sometimes, it’s important to be surprised by what you read. I was lucky to have a friend recommend Melinda Moustakis’s O’Henry-winning story, “They Find the Drowned” last year. It’s a piece about an Alaskan fishing community that’s told through individually-titled vignettes. After writing the Mayfield stories for a few months, my excitement with the project had begun to wane.

I’d always written in a rather straightforward, linear style; I rarely played with narrative structure until my second semester at Vanderbilt, when I wrote the first draft of “Relapse.” I decided to challenge

5 myself with new narrative forms as I moved forward. Moustakis’s collection, Bear Down, Bear North, proved to be an invaluable resource for my own writing. All of the stories in her collection take place in Alaska, but she’s frequently experimenting with narrative devices, experimenting with ways to portray time and space. Once I started playing with structure, the world of Mayfield reopened.

As I expand this project, I’ll continue to draw from Strout and Egan, strengthening the connection between the stories as well as the landscape of Mayfield. I’d like to write more pieces that directly address each other. I’m currently planning a story about Lacy, the young woman who gets impaled at the party, so her character can be more than a trigger for Mira’s abandonment of her sister. It’s also necessary to say that, in continuing to build this fictional world, I will have to expand the diversity of Mayfield inhabitants. Right now, the characters overwhelmingly share my own experiences: white and heterosexual. There are many such citizens in Mayfield, but they are not the only ones.

Finally, it would be dishonest to omit music from my influences, as I’m almost always listening to something when I write; I make a playlist for each story. For this collection there was one artist I committed to, singer-songwriter Mitski, whose album I played on repeat. Her lyrics have a gloomy poetic quality, such as these lines from her song “A Burning Hill”:

I am a forest fire

And I am the fire and I am the forest

And I am a witness watching it

I stand in a valley watching it

And you are not there at all

Many of the women in my stories feel that way—that they’re self-destructing, and no one can see.

Though the collection is now named Women and Children First, it was initially called Your

God-Given Potential, a story that no longer resides in the collection, though it was once crucial to the way I thought about these stories. Only the first and final stories explore religion directly, but all interrogate how women view their potential because of, or in spite of, outside forces. In her article,

“Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects),” Sara Ahmed writes of the unique pressure women feel to be happy: “When we feel happiness in proximity to the right objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. You become alienated—out of line with an affective community—when you do not experience happiness from the right things.” Harper struggles with this in “Relapse”; she wants to feel joy when her mother’s declared cancer-free, but she feels dread at a relapse instead.

The group of girls in “Confirmation” struggle with this in relation to their upcoming initiation into the church; their mothers stress that their confirmation is a source of happiness for the entire family, and thus their resistance harms everyone.

And yet, as I revised the collection, I felt the main theme knitting these stories together was safety, rather than potential. So I decided to change the title to the evacuation protocol first applied to sinking chips: “women and children first.” After all, my stories are populated with women and children trying to chart their own survival.

And one of the biggest threats to their safety doesn’t come from the outside world, but the female body. In “Girl of the Hour,” Amelia’s experience at Poppy’s party is affected by her body, which aches from the pain of her recent laparoscopy, though no one knows this, not even her best

7 friend Maura. Her pain is invisible to the outside world. As Susan Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor,

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Though Amelia would identify herself as a citizen of the unwell, others wouldn’t. And sickness, as anyone who’s been ill can attest, shapes your entire experience of the world, whether or not it’s a visible ailment. When I had epilepsy

(thankfully, I’m now ten years seizure-free), I appeared healthy except for the two minutes that my grand-mal seizures would last. No one knew I had epilepsy unless I told them, and outside of the seizures, I had no other symptoms—I didn’t even experience the auras some epileptics have, a warning that a seizure is about to occur. And yet my illness shadowed every aspect of my life. I stood at least five feet back from the edge of the subway platform, because I feared convulsing too close to the yellow line and falling onto the tracks. I took only showers, and even those I took with the door open. I stayed away from swimming pools and the ocean, even though I loved swimming and Scituate boasted five beaches. My world was circumscribed by my health, though no one on the outside could know this. Which points to a larger question that I continue to circle—how can you ever truly know someone?

Many of the stories are preoccupied with that uncertainty. In “Fraternal,” Marina’s perception of her twin, Mira, is constantly shifting, morphing into something new nearly every year.

Nell of “A Girl Walks Into a Bar” can’t decode her father and the nights they spent together during her youth. Harper can’t make sense of her mother’s art, and thus, her mother.

These questions of the shifting self require a clear sense of character motivation and interiority, because characters—and others’ perceptions of them—don’t change without reason.

These are the two elements of fiction that I find the most difficult to master. My struggle with interiority is likely a product of too much “show, don’t tell” advice as a young writer, but my grapple

8 with motivation is something more complicated. My impulse to write stems often, if not always, from a place of not-knowing, of confusion. My characters frequently occupy similar states; they’re undone and anxious, trying to make sense of the world around them. Oftentimes, they don’t know what they want. But this, I recognize, is no excuse for a lack of desire, as everyone wants something, even if they can’t articulate it. When I attended the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference this past summer, I worked with the writer Josh Weil, and he offered a useful way of reframing the question of character motivation. “What is your character’s wound?” he asked me. I carried this question with me as I revised, trying to pinpoint what my characters lacked—what did they hope to contribute to the world, but couldn’t? What in their lives had hurt them? I decided to omit one story,

“DesignFuture,” near the end of the thesis process, because, despite extreme amounts of interrogation, I couldn’t determine the narrator’s wound.

Motivation and interiority often lead to another question: why is the character telling this story? Why is it important? Ultimately, they offer justification for a narrative. I found that I needed to do this for experimentations with form, as well. “A Girl Walks Into a Bar” started as a series of vignettes that all began with “A girl walks into a bar with a…[fill in noun here],” a sort of literary

Mad-lib. I had great fun writing it, playing with language and ludicrous situations, but it became clear through critiques that the structure, in its current form, didn’t have a narrative purpose. Why was this joke starting each section? Was it even a joke (there wasn’t a punch line)? It wasn’t until months later, after returning to the draft over and over again, that I felt like I knew the answer: the narrator was using the language of bar jokes to tell the story of her father’s death, a traumatic event that she couldn’t yet confront through a traditional narrative. Suddenly, the story made sense.

In January my parents sold our Scituate house. My father retired, and they live in

Connecticut now, in a small town close to both of their families. It seems fitting, that I started the stories in this collection when I moved into my first apartment (a dusty three-bedroom on West End where I lived in a tiled sun room) and that I finished it without the possibility of returning to my first home. When I went back to Scituate for the last time during Thanksgiving break, the house looked completely different. The realtor’s stylist had rearranged our furniture and insisted that my parents take down our family photographs, lest potential buyers not be able to envision themselves in this space that belonged to someone else. When the deal went through in January, I thought I would feel something—a twinge of sadness or a wave of nostalgia. Instead I felt nothing; the day continued unaltered. I haven’t felt that revelation of emotion yet—perhaps it’s coming. But I don’t think it is. Maybe I’ve spent so much time in the Scituate of my own making that the loss feels false.

After all, I can return whenever I’d like; through these stories, I have.

Aftermath

Every Saturday morning, I woke up at six to ride my bike to Rob Taylor’s apartment. Rob was the newest teacher at my school, which he had also attended—according to rumors, he’d turned down a job at Google to teach at Nashquitten High. He was young, only twenty-three, and fresh out of Amherst, which Principal Cushing made clear was not UMass-Amherst.

He lived above Sandpiper Coffee Roasters, which served as a convenient cover for my frequent morning visits. I’d lock my bike to the Sandpiper’s rack and go to the back of the building, where the rusted fire escape stairs zig-zagged precariously down the building’s brick wall. Each section of the staircase was decorated differently according to its tenants. Soggy cigarette butts and waterlogged votive candles cluttered the balcony outside the first floor’s window, and the balcony above that was strung with limp lacy thongs, all spray-painted a metallic silver—maybe some kind of art project?

Sometimes I would stand just to the edge of a window, daring someone to see me, but they never did. Besides, Rob had a plan in case anyone noticed me and asked questions: I was his niece, who he was tutoring in math. He explained my alibi after the first time we saw each other naked. We hadn’t done more than kiss, yet things had changed. I felt it in the way he covered me with his quilt afterwards, though he continued to lay on top of it, the sweat from his neck darkening the fabric. I wasn’t a virgin, but I was young, and thrilled at his desire to craft our cover. It meant we had something worth hiding. This, I imagine, is the appeal of an affair—it allows you not only to act on your hidden desires, but then, together, craft a world where they didn’t happen. Is there anything more intimate than a shared lie?

Our lie, however, wasn’t shared. “Can’t I be your advisee or something?” I asked. “I don’t want to be related to you.”

Rob screwed up his face like a bug had flown into his mouth. “You’re not my advisee. That’s the premise for a thousand porn flicks.”

“Can’t I just be a kid you tutor, then?”

“No, that’s still sketchy. You’re my niece, Jane, okay?”

I flicked off the quilt so my chest was visible. “Fine,” I sighed. “Uncle Rob.”

Should I admit that his rigidity turned me on? Back then I thought adamancy was a byproduct of devotion, proof of how much someone was willing to fight for you.

Back then I really didn’t know much at all.

On the last Saturday of May, I did the usual: dressed in the dark so as not to wake my mother, smoked one of the cigarettes I kept in an empty Altoid tin inside my purse, and biked along

Fisherman Lane to Rob’s.

Every few days I would buy something at the Sandpiper to avoid raising suspicion, and that day I selected a chocolate chip cookie sprinkled with sea salt to bring home to my mother. I recognized the woman who sold it to me as Ms. Nancy, an old CCD teacher I’d had when our church-going habits were more robust. I didn’t say anything and neither did Ms. Nancy. The prayer plate I had made with her was still hanging on the back of the bathroom door, a paper Dixie dish with the Nicene Creed written on it in crayon.

I tucked the cookie into my backpack and took the stairs two at a time to Rob’s apartment, careful not to knock over the Mother Mary candles watching over the first flight’s steps. Rob lived on the third floor and his balcony was bare, except for a potted bonsai tree that he’d named Bertha.

He appeared quickly when I knocked on his raised window pane, opening the screen and offering his hand. I didn’t take it, opting to tumble onto his bed instead (he had moved it next to the window because of the time I fell to the floor and bruised my elbow).

He handed me coffee in one of the paper Starbucks cups he kept in a stack next to his microwave, because even though he had mugs, he didn’t feel like washing them. “Do you want some toast?” he asked. I recovered from my entrance and settled cross-legged onto the left side of his bed, the side I secretly thought of as mine.

“I’m good.” I smelled the bread burning in his toaster—he liked it so black that it appeared coated with charcoal.

He nodded and walked into the kitchen with his fingers raised to his temples, which he did when he felt a migraine coming. He was already dressed for his weekend gig at the SAT prep center a few doors down, across from the Village Market where I worked.

I lay back on his pillow and rested the coffee on top of my belly. “Is your head bothering you?” His popcorn ceiling was swirled with tea-colored water stains and its corners were fuzzy with mold. The ceiling in my own bedroom was crowded with glow-in-the-dark stars I had stuck there when I was seven. My mother had traced the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and Aquila and Lyra in pencil on the sheetrock, then lifted me on her shoulders so I could cover her sketched constellations with the plastic stars.

“No, it’s nothing,” he said from the kitchen. He returned with plastic plate in hand, a napkin tucked haphazardly into the collar of his shirt. He sat carefully on the edge of the mattress so as not to spill my coffee. I put my cup down on the floor beside me (he didn’t have a bed frame, just a mattress on the hardwood) and rolled over on my side to face him. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yes, JK.” He called me that because of my first and middle name—Jane Kathleen. It was the first time I’d had a nickname (it’s difficult to abbreviate one syllable), and God, how easily it melted me.

I sat up and kissed him on the cheek, which was considerably more stubbled now that school wasn’t in session. “Will you come visit me at work today?” I asked. The Market didn’t pick

13 up until mid-summer, when we had to feed the frazzled moms dragging their kids to the beach. I’d started juggling stale bakery rolls to entertain myself when the manager Marvin wasn’t around.

Rob opened his mouth as if to respond and then closed it, his trick to buy time when he wasn’t sure how to answer a question. “You know I can’t.”

“No one’s paying as much attention as you think they are.” I sat upright and broke a corner off of his toast, holding my hand beneath my chin to catch the crumbs. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head and took a bite. I reached for the top button of his shirt, flicking the tucked napkin aside, but he pulled away and held up his wrist so I could see his big-faced watch. A graduation gift from his parents, I’d guessed. “I don’t want to make you late.”

I got to work on time, disappointing because I enjoyed talking to my manager, Marvin, about what he called my “perpetual tardiness.” He was convinced I could be employee of the month material if I’d just learn to be timely. I didn’t tell him that I was already editor of the school paper, environmental club president, and mentor to a local Girl Scout troop. The deli was the one place where I allowed myself to be mediocre.

I considered waiting outside the back entrance until I was seven minutes late (seven being my lucky number), but Nashquitten was cold during spring mornings and I wasn’t wearing a jacket.

Inside, Eric’s fleece was already hanging on the coat rack next to the mop bucket, and I contemplated filling his pockets with some of the stale Twinkies sitting in the grocery cart where we tossed all expired goods, but decided I didn’t feel like starting something. I swiped my employee time card through the plastic strip mounted on the wall and put it back in my pocket without waiting for the machine’s tiny red bulb to turn green.

“What a surprise,” Eric said as I pushed open the swinging half-door to the deli. “I wasn’t expecting you for another half hour.”

“I’m full of surprises.” I went to the sink and washed my hands. Eric was also a sophomore in high school, but he went to Beacon Prep, so our paths rarely crossed. He worked at the deli because his father wanted him to understand how a business operated “from the ground up”—his father was very proud of being a self-made man, which he found an apt self-description even though his business had been passed down from father to son for close to a century. He owned a lobster company that employed half of Nashquitten’s fishermen and supplied Boston restaurants with their catch of the day. When I asked Eric why he wasn’t working for his father, he wrinkled his nose and asked me if I’d ever smelled a lobster boat.

“Did you take the sandwich temperatures?” I asked.

Eric opened a box of plastic gloves, stretching one until it broke. He took another. “No.”

“Did you put the sandwiches out?”

“No.” He blew the glove into a balloon, his face turning red as the fingers expanded.

“Did you do anything?”

“I don’t know why you still ask me these questions every morning. Ask me about my weekend instead.”

I took a rag from the cabinet behind us and began to wipe down the case. I rubbed my rag in small circles over the glass, focusing on what looked like a smear of coleslaw. Eric leaned against the sliding door to the meats and I spritzed his arm with cleaning spray. He didn’t flinch.

“Cops almost busted a party at my house. Would have been a mess. Alcohol and weed everywhere.”

I tossed the rag into the plastic bin underneath the sink and put the cleaning spray back in the cabinet. “Good thing you didn’t get caught.”

He came up behind me, close enough that I could smell his mix of spearmint toothpaste, fabric softener, and Axe. When I turned around I noticed a smudge of concealer above his left eyebrow hiding a crusted pimple. “I never get caught,” he said.

“Lucky you.” I opened the deli case to unwrap the plastic on yesterday’s corndogs and pizza rollups. “That’s not your shade, by the way.”

I made the first move. Rob was shy and boyish, with a vast collection of graphic t-shirts that he wore over button-ups in an effort to make them professional, the dress shirt’s collar peeking coyly out of the tee’s crewneck. He was the first adult I encountered that didn’t understand how to wield his authority. He proctored my grade’s statewide exams and sternly read the testing rules, then made a joke about using the school’s infamously slow internet to cheat, then threatened us with suspension if we cheated, only to end the tonal whiplash by singing a few bars of “Tequila,” but instead of tequila, he exclaimed: “MCAS!”

He wasn’t my teacher (he taught AP calculus and computer science, which only upperclassmen took), but I’d heard stories from friends about his antics—he was a particularly hot topic of discussion among the female students, because our youngest faculty member was Mr.

Robertson, 39-year-old jazz band leader that drank Chef Boyardee ravioli directly out of the can during lunch breaks. But Rob was the leader of an after-school tutoring program I did every

Thursday, helping third and fourth graders with their math homework. He drove the seven of us to

Laurel Elementary in a school minivan, where I would sit shotgun. I always turned the radio to the folk station, even though everyone else groaned when Dylan or Cat Stevens came on. This was what my mom played every day on the record player she kept next to our bookshelf. It was the only thing my father had left her when he took off before I was born. His name was scrawled on a piece of

16 tape we hadn’t been able to peel off of the base, so when I was little my mom let me cover it with glitter star stickers.

Rob had grown up on folk music, too. He’d first been stung by a bee at the Newport Folk

Festival when he was seven, and his parents had even been part of a band during their younger years called Neon Nougat. I understood our shared musical upbringings as romantic divination, the universe’s way of altering us to our inherent compatibility.

When our group returned from tutoring, we were to be picked up at the back of the school, near the soccer field. My mother never picked me up from tutoring because I never told her I tutored. The first few times I walked the forty-five minutes home, but during the third session it started to pour, and when I told Rob my mother wasn’t picking up her phone he took pity on me.

On that first ride I told him that my mother was sick, and that her doctors preferred she didn’t drive.

So we established a routine: Rob would drive me home. No matter that we waited until everyone left, so that there weren’t any witnesses to see me climb in next to him. “I just have to check a few things,” he would stall, walking in and out of the school until the rest of the kids had left.

His car smelled like artificial lavender and stale coffee, and his backseat was cluttered with opened mail and ungraded exams and empty Coke cans. The third or fourth time he drove me home, we stopped for gas on the way. While he stood by the pump I took one of the cans and put it in my backpack. That night I pressed the aluminum lip to my mouth, but it didn’t taste like anything besides dull, cool metal.

“What are you doing after this?” I asked him a couple months into tutoring, after I’d learned that he had three sisters, a tree nut allergy, and a childhood cat named Twinkie.

“I’ll go home and make dinner,” he said. “Look over tomorrow’s lesson, watch some television, and go to sleep.” There was a certain awkwardness to Rob; he spoke either too fast or too slow, as though he was afraid of taking up both too much space and too little.

“What will you do tomorrow?”

“The same thing.” He laughed. “Does that sound pathetic?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” There was a comforting rhythm to sameness, a metronome keeping your days steady. My mother had taught me that.

On the last day of tutoring Rob drove me home like usual. The sky had been threatening rain all day and fat drops splattered across his windshield. “Wait,” I said as we drove past the seawall. “Pull in there.” I pointed to the three painted parking rectangles near the concrete staircase to the beach.

The ocean is best during a storm. We leaned against the seawall, cracked from years of hurricanes and blizzards and floods, and watched the whitecaps froth inky waves, tasting salt as the surf punched the beach again and again. For a second I thought the distant blink of the lighthouse was faraway lightning, and I watched a seagull move through its weak white flash. Then there was a crack, and the heavy rain came. I closed my eyes and felt him take my hand, guide us back to the car.

The entire windshield blurred with water, like the rinse section of a car wash. I felt strangely heavy, my jeans and sweatshirt weighted with trapped rain. I took off my shoes and socks and wrung my ponytail over the car mat.

“You’re shivering,” Rob said. A raindrop clung to the tip of his nose like a tear. He reached into the backseat and dug around for a good minute until he found a beach towel to wrap around my shoulders. It was printed with girls in coconut bras doing the hula.

“I should take you home,” he said without turning the car on.

“You’re shivering, too. Here.” I took off the towel and put my hand on the back of his neck so that he’d lean forward. I placed it over his head and gently rubbed the fabric back and forth, drying his hair. When I was done he looked like a hedgehog, each strand standing spiky and straight.

“What?” he said, because I couldn’t help laughing. “What did you do?” He checked his reflection in the rearview mirror and groaned. “I think it’s only fair that we even the score.” He tossed the towel over my face and ground it against my head frantically, like it was a balloon he wanted to charge with static electricity. He finally yanked it off and I saw myself in the rain-streaked window, hair pointing sadly towards my left ear, like a poorly-executed mohawk. I immediately began patting it down, but Rob grabbed my hand. “How dare you?”

“What, would you rather do it?”

“Yes, I would.” He ran his fingers over my head, threading them through my hair. I sat very still. I was afraid any movement would make him stop.

“Let me fix you,” I said when he finished. I combed through his hair with my hands, running my fingers over the knobs of his skull. He bent further towards me. I traced my pinky across his temple, then down to his jawline. I could feel the bundle of tension at the edge of his mouth, his rows of teeth clenched tightly together. “Relax,” I said. I moved my finger to his mouth and closed my eyes as though his lips were made of braille, their meaning only discernible through touch. With my eyes still closed, I replaced my finger with my lips. His mouth was different when pressed to my own—I lose sense of its curves and borders, overwhelmed instead by its movement, the urgency in which we both fought to find something in the other.

We pulled away suddenly but in unison, our breathing whistling through the quiet car.

“Well,” he said finally. “What now?”

After work on Saturday I rode my bike to the beach and smoked by the tide pools, watching hermit crabs skitter past periwinkles and starfish cemented to rocks. I thought about stopping back at Rob’s, but we had rules, mainly: no stopping by unannounced. I took off my sneakers and socks and dipped my toes into the water, stirring the sandy puddle until a whirlpool appeared, a miniature tornado that tossed the empty snail shells and crab claws. Reflected smoke marbled in the swirled tide pool, and I finished three more Camel Crushes before I left, storing the spent stubs in my pocket.

When I came home my mom was in my room, reading a magazine and eating a cold slice of pizza we’d ordered the week before.

“Where have you been?” she asked, not accusatory, just curious.

“I went over to Heather’s,” I said. “We watched a movie.”

She put her magazine and plate on the floor and patted the spot next to her. “How is Mrs.

Kimball? She keeps sending me e-mails about joining the PTA next year.”

“She wasn’t home.” I hopped onto my side of the bed and turned on my side to face her.

“How are you?”

She reached under the covers and took my hand. Her fingers were cold, like always, and I squeezed her palm to transfer some warmth. “Tired,” she said. “Did you eat?”

“No.” I sat up and kicked off my shoes, flinging them across the room, which wasn’t very far. They bounced against the wall with a soft thud.

“I can make you a sandwich.” She pulled the comforter down to her knees.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat.”

“I will, I will.” She clicked her tongue at me. “Later, Mom.” I closed my eyes. “Just let me lie here for a second.”

She sighed and picked up her magazine, but I didn’t hear her flip the pages and I knew she was looking at me. “My Baby Jane,” she said softly.

I opened my eyes. “How was work?”

She glanced at the headset on the bedside table and shrugged. “Five sales.” She cold-called businesses to get them to buy advertisements on grocery carts, and was expected to make at least four sales a day. Whenever I asked her how she felt about it, she said, “It’s a job,” and changed the subject. She didn’t like people very much, and often told me she treasured her alone time, though I wasn’t sure what other kind of time she had.

She yawned and tugged the comforter back to her chest. “Do you want me to turn out the light?” I asked.

“I won’t be able to sleep if you haven’t eaten.”

“I’m going now. Hand me your dish?”

She gave me her empty pizza plate and I looked at the clock. It was seven thirty. “G’night mom.”

“Goodnight, baby.” I flicked off the light switch and the room went gray, glow-in-the-dark stars giving off a faint green haze. I could see the outline of my mother, bony shoulders two sharp peaks beneath the sheets. I often had the urge to say more to her, though I wasn’t sure what words I hoped would leave my mouth. Whatever they were, they still surface in my throat sometimes, hard lumps that plug my tightening esophagus. Maybe all I want to ask is, what made you like this? Which is a selfish, impossible question. What I really mean: what made me like this?

I assembled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it on the thin strip of our front lawn.

Someone was having a party the street over. Those houses were freshly painted with trimmed yards, and the people who lived there used our quiet cul-de-sac for extra parking when they had parties.

That night our road was clogged with cars, carefully spaced so as not to block our narrow driveways.

I couldn’t see the house or the people but I could hear laughter and the clinking of glasses. Their music radiated through the neighborhood, drowning out the waves and the wind.

The next day Rob and I were supposed to go to the beach in Rockpoint, a town an hour away where no one would recognize us. I waited by the bottom of the fire escape in my cover-up, holding a picnic basket packed with cucumber sandwiches and glass bottles of lemonade. I hadn’t realized that cucumbers had their own dedicated sandwich, but Martha Stewart’s magazine promised that they were the perfect beach food. We were scheduled to meet at noon sharp, but I waited fifteen minutes and Rob didn’t appear. Rob was always on time.

I left my picnic basket and bike on the grass, climbed up to his window and knocked twice. I watched him through the glass as he walked slowly into his room and heaved up the screen and the storm with effort, failing to raise them with his first attempts. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he tried, but his face quickly collapsed, the effort of the lie too much to sustain. “Something bad’s happened.” He offered me his arm, which I took this time in an effort to steady Rob rather than myself.

“Like, unfortunate, or bad?” I stepped onto his mattress.

“What’s the difference?” Rob lowered his elbow and I let go. I tried to tell if he was wearing swim trunks beneath his Amherst sweatpants.

“I mean, is it serious?”

“Extremely.”

“You’re freaking me out.” I sat on the bed and focused on the feel of his comforter in my hand, the tiny stitches burrowed in the cotton.

He sat beside me and the mattress rocked, like a boat moving over a gentle wave. “A girl’s missing.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “What do you mean, missing?”

“She’s been gone since yesterday. You’ll hear about it at school, I’m sure.”

“Don’t say gone like that. How old is she? She probably just tried to run away or something.”

“She’s around your age, I believe.” He tugged at his lower lip, the gum making a suction sound as he pulled it away from his teeth.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m her.”

He stood up after a moment and the bed bounced again. He traced something on the raised windowpane, his finger making greasy smudges on the glass. “Hm.”

“What?” I asked.

He pressed his palm flat to the glass, then pulled it away, examining the smeared handprint.

“You should really lock your bike.”

Since we weren’t going to the beach, I decided to pick up an extra shift at the deli. I wanted to have five thousand saved by graduation—not nearly enough for tuition, but it would help with book fees and administrative expenses. There was no question I would need a scholarship.

Eric wasn’t in yet, which surprised me, but at least it meant I wouldn’t have to deal with his antics. I’d been there for an hour already when he stormed in. “Look how the tables have turned,” I said as he shoved on the baseball cap we wore instead of hairnets.

“Fuck off.” He threw open the cabinet doors with such force that one swung back and hit him on the side of the head. “Shit!” He threw a box of plastic gloves onto the floor and stormed out of the deli, past the display of pre-made salads and the pot of chill that we froze before closing and thawed before opening. I heard the emergency exit door crash shut.

Marvin appeared at the end of the dairy aisle, clipboard in hand, a red pen bobbing behind his ear. “Everything all right?”

“Ask Eric.” Marvin walked into the deli and eyed the box of gloves Eric had thrown, which now sat dented on the smudged tile. He looked to me, then to the gloves, then to me again. “I’m not picking up his mess,” I clarified.

Marvin sighed with so much energy that spit splattered across his collar (he didn’t seem to notice). He bent over to retrieve the box, his undershirt bunching up to reveal a sliver of his surprisingly hairy back. “Eric’s mother called and asked us to be gentle with him today,” he said.

“Why?”

Marvin tented his fingers against the floor and pushed himself upright. “It’s none of my business, Jane.” He handed me the box. “These are still good, right?”

Eric returned fifteen minutes later, the knuckles on his right hand raw and dripping blood, like the juices that collected at the bottom of our roast beef packaging. “There’s Band-Aids in the back,” I said.

“What?” He was already pulling a glove over the hand, flinching as the latex stretched over the wound.

“Never mind.” I crisscrossed plastic wrap over the round of honey ham I had just sliced.

The old man who ordered it had asked me to slice it the same way he liked his women—thick. He’d been using one of our electric scooters, and after I handed him his meat he winked, then promptly drove it into the nearby pyramid of canned vegetables.

“Say what you wanted to say.” Eric stood with both arms crossed over his chest, taking a cue from whatever mobster movie he’d seen most recently.

“Band-Aids.” I opened the deli-case and plopped the plastic-wrapped ham behind the display meat. “You’re bleeding.”

“I know I’m bleeding,” he snarled. It took me a second to realize he was crying. I didn’t know how to deal with anyone’s tears except my own, and even that process was a shameful one that consisted only of roughly wiping my eyes with a hand towel and slapping my cheeks until they turned red. Panic hummed in my eardrums. “Let’s get a bandage,” I said.

I led Eric to the back room, where he sat on a shipment box of Oreos while I retrieved the first-aid kit from a slanted shelf behind the container of mop fluid. “Here.” I handed him two paper

Band-Aid sleeves, which he took with wobbling fingers. I watched him throw his glove on the floor and struggle to open the Band-Aids. I didn’t offer to help. He finally opened the bandages and lay one over the other so that they covered his entire knuckle. Slowly, I was starting to realize that this was what men did to you:

He was still crying but pretending he wasn’t, refusing to move his face or make any noise, just tears slipping quickly down his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I said, the words awkward in my mouth. He nodded and said thanks.

I pulled an unopened box of Pita Chips forward and sat on top of it, facing him. “I bet

Marvin would give you the day off.” I could hear the ingratiating lilt in my voice; I didn’t want to be responsible for evaluating and buoying his mood until closing. Over and over again I found myself accountable for the well-being of others, whether it was my lab partner (anorexic), my Aunt Linda

(Uncle John had been cheating for six months—I was the first to know) or even the school nurse,

Theresa (infertile). “You just have one of those faces,” my friend Heather once told me. “What faces?” I’d asked. “You know, one of those I’ll-keep-your-secrets-and-solve-your-problems faces.”

“Huh,” was all I could think to say.

Eric shook his head. “I wanted to work.”

“Sure.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Twenty seconds of silence—I counted the tick of the clock hands, because I’d decided I wouldn’t stay longer than a minute. “My cousin’s missing,” he said. I shifted my weight and felt the cardboard flaps of the box crease beneath me—did missing truly mean missing, like a kid wandering off at the shopping mall, or was the word a euphemism for dead?

These are the kinds of things you can’t ask a person.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he added quickly. “I just feel like I owe you some sort of explanation.” He held his bandaged hand in front of him the same way women do when they’re examining their nail polish. “Would you rather lose your hand or your foot?” he asked.

“A foot.” I’d considered this before. “You?”

“I don’t think it’d really matter,” he said, lowering his hand. “You’d still have at least one of each.”

I was slicing half a pound of low sodium turkey for a woman when Rob came in. He took a number from the red dispenser even though he was the only one in line, and asked for six slices of oven-roasted turkey breast and four slices of Muenster. “I’m planning a picnic.”

I folded the corners of the deli wrap to the middle of the sliced turkey and sealed them with the price sticker. “With who?”

He offered a slim smile as I handed him two envelopes of meat and cheese. “Someone special.”

“Huh,” I said.

I think he would have said more, but then Eric was behind me, asking where the crowbar was so he could open a container of sealed icing for the bakery. “Have a good one,” Rob said.

“Don’t slice your fingers off.”

I told Eric I had no idea where the crowbar was. “That guy was hitting on you,” he said.

I dipped a rag in the bucket of sanitizer we kept beneath the sink and wiped down the slicer.

“No, he wasn’t.”

“He was. You know how I know?”

“How?”

“He couldn’t look you in the eye. That’s how shy guys flirt. By looking at the floor.”

I tossed the dirty rag into the laundry basket beneath the sanitizer sink. “You’re so full of shit.”

He peeled up the edge of one of his band-aids and examined the skin beneath. “I’m just looking out for you, s’all.”

At twelve thirty, my lunch break, I left my cap on the coat hook in the back room, undid the top button of my green uniform polo, and walked through the plastic strips that hung from the entrance to the loading dock. Rob was waiting by the dumpster with his briefcase in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. “Where should we go?” he asked.

I couldn’t see him in the sun and held my hand above my eyes to cast some shade. “I only have thirty minutes.”

We ended up walking into the patch of wooded area behind the market that separated the grocery store from a nursing home. Rob took off his jacket and laid it on top of a damp log, which we sat on while he opened his briefcase. Inside were two turkey and cheese sandwiches that had been pressed to the thickness of a coaster by the pocket he’d zipped them into. “I made them in the car,” he apologized.

I could smell the sea on the wind, and I imagined that we were on the beach instead, eating our sandwiches on rainbow striped chairs close enough to the ocean that water splashed our toes when the waves broke. “We should go to next Saturday,” I said. “I’m off at noon.”

Rob reached into the grocery bag and took out two cans of iced tea, passed me one, and opened his with a hiss. “I have to go to New York.”

“Why?” I took a bite of my sandwich. The bread was soft and warm, the cheese cold and rubbery, the meat slick with the salty fluid it came packaged in.

“My grandfather. He fell and broke a rib, and he’s not doing well. That’s why I was…off earlier. I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you want to tell me?”

He tore the crust off the top slice of his bread and rolled into a tiny, compact ball. “I didn’t know what I wanted from you.”

“What do you mean? I can just be there for you.”

He flicked the ball into the grass.

“Don’t litter,” I said.

He rubbed his temple with the edge of his palm and got up to hunt for the bread ball. “I think we should stop this.”

I watched him drop to his knees and run his hands over the ground. One of his shoelaces was untied, and it trailed limply behind him in the dirt, like a dead worm. “You can’t decide for both of us,” I said.

He found the ball and slipped it into his pocket, but he spoke with his head turned away from me. “Unfortunately, that’s how a relationship works. You need two willing parties.”

“Don’t condescend to me.”

He returned to the log but didn’t sit down. His shadow blocked the sun that’d been warming my face. “It’s best for both of us.”

I coughed into the crook of my elbow—I was having trouble breathing. I can’t remember having felt so blatantly powerless before; it was like trying to swim against a riptide. He had decided

28 what he wanted, and that meant he had decided for me, as well. “I should get back to work.”

He put his jacket back on and zipped up his briefcase. I held the plastic bag open and he dropped his empty can inside. It jangled against my thigh as we walked back, the only noise besides squirrels running up and down the tree branches. “I’m sorry,” he said. He tried to take my hand but

I shook him away.

“You don’t get to touch me anymore.”

The next day after school, I ran into Eric at Dunkin Donuts. My mom was partial to their

French crullers, and sometimes that was the only thing that could get her out of bed—if I made her eat it in the kitchen with me instead. I was craving sugar, too; Rob hadn’t been at school and I need to eat my feelings.

Eric was sitting at one of the tiny tables near the window, something red and slushy in his hand. He offered it to me, but I shook my head. “How are you doing?” he asked.

Eric never asked me how I was doing. “Why?”

He took a long, slurpy sip of his drink. “You look like shit.”

“Makes sense. I feel like shit.” I opened the box of donuts I’d bought and decided on a strawberry-iced. It left a greasy O on the sheet of wax paper beneath, and sprinkles fell down the front of my shirt when I took a bite. I pretended not to have noticed. “How are you?”

“Also shitty.”

“Did they…?” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence, so I took another bite of my donut instead.

He shook his head. “It’s not looking good.”

We both stared out the window, where a couple around our own age was pressed against the door of an empty storefront, their blonde hair knotting together in the wind. “Hey,” I said. “Would you want to go to the beach?”

Widow’s Walk was almost empty, the temperature too cool for most beach goers, save a few wrapped in sweaters and blankets. It was a rare break in the record-setting heat we’d been having all summer, and the cold air felt good on my sunburned arms. We sat on the empty left side, and I buried my feet underneath the cold sand while Eric tossed an empty mussel shell between his hands.

Flies buzzed around the mounds of dried seaweed behind us.

“Would you rather live forever or die tomorrow?” he asked, tracing the lip of the shell.

“Die tomorrow,” I told him without hesitation. “You?”

“Live forever.”

I wiggled my feet so only my toes poked out of the sand. “Why?”

He lay down on the beach and began sweeping his arms and legs back and forth like he was making a snow angel. “Think of all the things you could do.”

“You’ll never get that sand out of your hair.”

He sat up and shook his head back and forth like a dog. “Okay. You’re dying tomorrow.

What do you do right after this?”

“I don’t know, Eric.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“What would you do?”

“Go find my childhood fort in the backyard and be alone. Like a wild animal.”

I reached over and brushed a scattering of sand off the back of his head. “That’s not true.”

He raised his three fingers, scouts-honor style. “I swear.”

“No, I mean, animals don’t actually like to die alone. It’s a myth.”

He scratched his nose skeptically. “You sure?”

“I’m positive. How terrifying would that be, just you at the end?”

“Hmm,” was all he said. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

Eric gave me a ride home not long after. I studied the profile of his face while he drove, the bump at the base of his nose and the mysterious scar that slashes through his eyebrow. The better I knew him the less I understood him. “I can feel you looking at me,” he said.

“Do you like me?” I asked. “Not romantically, just, like, in general.”

He caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Don’t make it weird.”

“Is that a no?”

He cracked his window and a breeze blew through the car. “We’re good, okay? Don’t overthink it.”

When I got home I found a sticky note on the kitchen table: Someone called for you. I took off my shoes and went to my mother’s bedroom, where I pressed my ear against the door, listening to see if she was on a call. “Mom, I’m home.”

She sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, a bowl of cereal in her lap, plastic headset on her pillow. She was wearing sweatpants, a knit sweater and wool socks. It was ninety-two degrees in our tiny cape, which trapped heat like a greenhouse. She patted the empty space to her left and I climbed onto the mattress. I rested my head on her thigh and closed my eyes.

She massaged my scalp with the hand that wasn’t spooning Cheerios into her mouth.

“There’s a message on the machine for you,” she said. “From someone named James.” James was

Rob’s middle name.

“I don’t know a James.”

“He said he was calling for Jane.”

“Must be a different Jane.”

She chewed her Cheerios. “A fling’s good for a girl.” She removed her hand from my head to tip the bowl to her lips. “Simple.”

“Sure.”

“Are you hungry?” I heard her slurp down the last of the milk.

“No.”

She set her bowl on the nightstand, her thigh shifting beneath my skull as she moved. “I’ll get you some cereal.”

“Oh, wait.” I opened my eyes, sat up and reached for my backpack. “I never gave this to you.” The chocolate chip cookie was still in the bag’s first pocket, wrapped in wax paper and somehow unbroken.

I handed the package to my mother, who raised an eyebrow but smiled. She laid the wax paper in her lap and split the cookie in two, careful not to scatter crumbs, and handed me half.

“Do you remember Mrs. Nancy?” I asked. My mother nodded, her mouth full. “She works at Sandpiper Roasters now.” I took a bite of my chunk, surprised at how hard the cookie had become in two days. “I don’t think she recognized me.”

“It’s been, what, almost ten years?” My mother wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and shook her head. “I was a whole different person then.”

I forced the rest of the cookie into my mouth. It tasted like sand. “How?”

“I thought if I named every bad thing I did, then I didn’t have to worry about why I’d done it. Confession only requires a sliver of self-awareness.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “Did you figure it out?” I asked. Why you did those things?”

She chuckled. “Well, turns out some of those things weren’t so bad to begin with. And the other things…I guess I’m still thinking about most of them.” There was a stain on the comforter, something dark and almond-shaped. Maybe old cereal milk. “Something on your mind, baby?”

“No. You just don’t talk about the past very often.”

I went to wipe the crumbs from my mouth, but my mother took my chin in her hand and did it for me. “I don’t see the point, really. Can only go forwards.” She let go and leaned backwards into the bed, like she was examining me from afar. “I don’t know the world you’re growing up in.

It’s so different than mine was.”

I reached for her bowl. “Let me take do the dishes.” She didn’t protest my leaving, but I could feel her eyes on my back as I opened the door. I splashed some water from the sink onto my face, and when I opened my eyes a muddy liquid was swirling down the drain. One of the pipes must have busted.

What did Rob want to tell me? I couldn’t call him back. It was the only authority I had left— the authority of upholding the decision he’d made. I needed a distraction.

We hadn’t touched the record player in months, not since music had started to give my mother migraines. I double-checked that the bedroom door was shut and put on my favorite record, found the song mom used to sing along to while we fell asleep.

And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off

Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft

“Did you put something on?” my mom called from the bedroom.

I lifted the needle and hit stop on the turntable. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Jane.” Her voice was muffled on the other side of the door. “Don’t lie to me.”

Fraternal

July 4th, 1985-1994

1985

“I really hate my sister,” I tell Kelly-Anne, our new next-door neighbor. She moved in two weeks ago, just after Mira and I turned ten.

“Why?” Kelly-Anne asks. She taps her sandal against a phonebook that’s been sitting on the ground so long it’s sprouted mold. Last month Mom and Dad decided to hold a Fourth of July party for the first time, and they’re paranoid no one will find the house, so here I am, tying red, white, and blue balloons to the mailbox.

“She’s really mean, like she kicks dogs and stuff. And she talks in her sleep, says how she’s gonna murder our Aunt Tess and set the middle school on fire.”

“Why the middle school?” Kelly-Anne asks. “Why not the elementary school?” Kelly-Anne’s smart, even though she’s pretty. Most of the pretty girls I know are dumb.

“Because she says all the older girls are sluts.” I like making up this other Mira. I can make her the villain, by which I mean, I can make myself the hero. “She even threw eggs at them during the eighth-grade formal.”

“Why was she at the eighth-grade formal?”

“I don’t know, Kelly-Anne. I’m her sister, not her spokesperson.”

Kelly-Anne flips up the mailbox flag so I can tie a balloon to it. “That’s not very nice, throwing eggs.”

“Girls, Kelly-Anne.” She looks at me like I’m going to say more, but I just repeat: “Girls.”

It’s something my cousin Bryan says when his little sister, Sheila, pulls on his hand or starts crying.

She just shrugs. I’m not sure if she’s buying the stuff about Mira or not. I should have left out the part about the formal. “Is that allowed?” she asks, after I’ve knotted the balloon’s ribbon to the flag.

“Is what allowed?”

“Hating your twin.” She scratches a scab on her elbow. “Isn’t that like hating yourself?”

“We’re fraternal,” I explain.

“I know that.” She scowls and I notice that her gums come too far down, a little pink hat on each tooth. Maybe she won’t grow up to be that pretty. “I’m not stupid.”

I want to go, I didn’t say you were stupid, but that’s what my father would call Reactionary

Defensiveness (he’s not a therapist, but he likes to read self-help books and watch The Dog

Whisperer). I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I understand it to lie somewhere between Don’t

Talk to Your Mother like That and Do You Understand Why I’m Disappointed in You?

“Can I get you some lemonade?” I ask, trying to smooth things over. I need Kerry-Anne to be my friend to prove I can make a friend that belongs solely to me. Ever since I can remember, my friends fall in love with Mira, even though she does nothing to earn them, just waltzes down the stairs when the doorbell rings and asks, “So what’re we doing?”

“Sure.” There’s that shrug again. Kerry-Anne’s always shrugging, and it’s a surprisingly powerful move. I feel the constant need to entertain her.

“Cool,” I say, and shrug back.

We walk up the hill to my house, past the rusted Slow Children sign that Mom says will give us tetanus. The children that used to live in the other two houses of our cul-de-sac are all grown up now, except for Helen. Well, she’s grown-up, but she just moved back in with her parents a couple

35 of months ago. No one will tell me or Mira why, and Mira tells me to just forget it, but how can I forget it when our window faces the Mitchell’s lawn and I see Helen roaming out there late at night like she’s waiting for someone? When I asked Mira if she thought something was weird about Helen, she said I was reading too much into things. That hurt because 1. if I could stop reading into things,

I obviously would, and 2. people tell you that when they think you’ve got nothing important to say.

The house smells like oranges and bleach when we go inside. Mira’s sitting at the dining room table, punching toothpicks through tiny cubes of watermelon, and I can hear Mom and Dad upstairs, talking about who saw the duster last. I expect Kelly-Anne to follow me into the kitchen, but instead she stays standing next to Mira. “Hiya,” she says.

“Hiya.” Mira waves a toothpick. “What are you guys doing?”

“Nothing,” I start to say, knocking my knuckles against the doorframe, Earth to Kelly-Anne, but Kelly-Ann pulls up a seat at the dining room table and says, “Getting lemonade, you want some?” Wow. 1. Did Kelly-Anne make the lemonade? 2. Did she stir the mix of powder and water twenty-three times to achieve the perfect consistency? 3. Did she add a squeeze of real lemon for a nice kick?

“Eh-hem,” I say, but Kelly-Anne is apparently like all of those other pretty girls, because she just leans over the tray of melon and nods. “Very nice.”

“Here.” Mira hands her a cube. “Have some.”

Watching the two of them gives me this bad stomach pain, like the time I got hit in the belly with a soccer ball during gym class. What’s so special about Mira? No matter what I do, people run to her like she’s a three-legged puppy. Maybe they’ll always like her best, because that’s how it works;

Mira’s better than me or I’m better than her, but we’re never the same at anything, whether it’s soccer or making friends.

“What’s wrong?” Mira asks, talking to me.

“Yeah, what’s wrong?” Kelly-Anne says, but her mouth is full of watermelon so she sounds stupid, like a gurgling baby.

“Nothing. I have to pee.” I go to the bathroom before they can see me cry. My least favorite thing about myself is how easily I cry. All of a sudden there’s this hot tickling behind my eyes and then it’s about to happen, here come the waterworks. I wipe my eyes with a washcloth and sit on the closed toilet. When our babcia was still alive, she called me tygrysek, which means baby tiger in

Polish. Mira was myszko—mouse. I always thought that meant babcia liked me better, because who’d want to be a mouse over a tiger? But maybe she meant I was too much, too loud and too hungry.

1986

“I’ve got a surprise for you girls,” Mom tells us, and when we follow her upstairs there are two identical outfits laid out on our beds. I look at the sparkly tank top and the denim skirt without much of an opinion—they’re cute, I guess—but then I put the pieces together in horror.

“That’s Mira,” I say, pointing to her, “And I’m Marina.” I point to my own chest so aggressively that I stab myself. “Mira, Marina, Mira, Marina.”

Mira pinches me on the elbow (the tiniest little pinch, an insult to pinches, really), which is her way of saying shut up.

“We’re too old for this,” I tell Mom, whose startled expression makes me even angrier with its lack of anticipation; I thought she knew me better than this by now.

Mira sits down at the edge of her bed and runs her fingers over the tank top, which is stitched with a sequined American flag. “It’s nice,” she offers, of course, because she loves making me look crazy by comparison.

“See? Mira likes it.” Thank God Mira likes it! “I want us to take a Christmas card photo.”

I try to cool down. I take a big breath through my nose. Sometimes, if Mom gets really mad at me, she’ll cross her arms and refuse to talk unless I get into a Reasonable Frame of Mind. “Do we have to wear it for the whole day? Can’t we just put it on for the photo?”

“Is this really that insulting, Marina Rose?” I’m in for it whenever she uses my middle name.

“Why don’t you take a cue from your sister and make this easy?” I have some things to say to that, but Mom grumbles that she has a party to get ready for and stomps out of our room. Since I can’t say anything to her, I turn to Mira.

“You really want to be the type of person who makes things easy?” I ask.

She’s already got her regular shirt off. “Oh, shut up.”

The tank top gets stuck on her big head, so I help her tug it down over her neck. I have to admit, it looks kind of nice on her, all of those sequins picking up the golden specks in her blue eyes.

That’s all we share, our string-bean bodies and those eyes. They’re the color of swimming pools lit from underneath, sea glass, the raspberry flavor of Jolly Ranchers. My eyes are my favorite feature, so I spend a lot of time looking at Mira’s, wondering how other people see them.

“Why don’t you just try it on,” she says, catching me staring. I moan and she seals her hands together in prayer position. “Please,” she says. “For me?”

“Fine. But I’m not showing Mom.” I yank off my shirt and wiggle into the new one. Mira and I stand side-by-side, looking at the mirror on the back of our door.

“You look good,” I tell her, because it’s true. She’s the prettier one, there’s no way around that. I’ve known it as long as I can remember. I wish we were identical, because at least then you

38 wouldn’t compare our faces. But we’re not the same, so when you see us together it’s clear: Mira’s the polished version, and I’m the rough draft.

That’s why I pull off the tank top and throw it on the floor when I see us both in the mirror.

I stand there with my arms crossed over my chest and I feel the familiar burning behind my eyes.

“I’m not wearing it.”

“Okay.” Mira picks up the shirt and stuffs it in the hamper where I can’t see it. “No big deal.” Sometimes she drives me crazy, but sometimes she’s the best person I know.

1987

The doorbell rings and I assume it’s Uncle Joe, who usually shows up drunk halfway through our party, sweaty from another set of festivities. I only even heard the doorbell because I was sent inside to retrieve another bowl of potato salad from the refrigerator. When I open the front door, potato salad pressed to my hip like a baby, a boy is standing there.

“Mira?” he asks.

His hair’s the color of roasted almonds and his eyes are so green I think they might give me a migraine, but in a good way. I didn’t know boys our age—and he really does look twelve—could be this clean. “I’m Marina,” I say. I can’t look at him any longer, so I stare at the potato salad instead.

“Oh, no.” He lets out a laugh that makes me feel wide open, the sound echoing in not only my ears but my ribs, my tongue, my thighs. “I’m looking for Mira.”

The party’s booming, so I don’t hear Mira run up behind me, her hair swept sideways from the movement. “Nick!” she says, practically throwing herself at him as she opens her arms for a hug.

I can’t quite figure out what I’m seeing. There are only two options: 1. Nick is a friend, or 2.

Nick is more than a friend. Mira’s a prude—she couldn’t even get through all of Dear God, It’s Me,

Margaret—which points to the former, but she’s looking up at him with these dewy eyes that point to the latter. “Huh,” I say out loud, accidentally.

I guess that reminds Mira that I’m right there, because she lets go of him and gestures towards our backyard. “You want a hot dog?”

A few hours later, I kiss Billy. He’s one of my cousin’s friends, and it happens in the tree house my father built for me and Mira when we were kids. I don’t like kissing him. He smells like

Fritos and tastes like coleslaw, and as his tongue is darting around in my mouth like a spazzy worm,

I think about how you only have a first kiss once, and that this is it, this sad, cabbage-tinged spit swapping is a milestone on the way to—what, exactly? Sex? Love? Then I’m picturing Boy Two and

Boy Three and Boy Four and Boy Five, and it seems very possible that none of these boys will be better but just different, a series of wet mouths and salty tongues.

After Billy and I climb down the ladder and go our separate ways (him towards the group of boys playing Frisbee, me into the house to pee) I feel depressed about the whole encounter. Maybe I should have waited for a boy that tasted like peppermint or even Oreos instead of coleslaw, a boy that didn’t say “Yow!” when we were done, but then I walk past the laundry room, and notice that the door is cracked ever-so-slightly. I peek into the little sliver between the door and the wall, and there’s Mira and Nick pressed up against our dryer, making out beneath the bottles of Tide and

Downy.

I feel better after I see that. Because the only thing worse than kissing Billy would have been not kissing him at all. That would have meant Mira was ahead. But for now we’re still even, which is important when you started life twelve minutes apart. It’s especially important if you came first.

After all, I am the oldest.

1988

Mira won’t come out of her room, and Dad comes lumbering into the kitchen complaining about it. “Get your sister,” he demands, annoyed, but not as annoyed as he would be if it were me pulling this stunt, because no one ever knows if I’ll ever come out of a room, but Mira will, eventually.

“I’m busy,” I tell him, which is true. I’m dropping sherbet into pineapple juice to make punch.

“Go,” he says, pointing the Swiffer he’s holding towards the stairs. I don’t fight him on it, because lately Mom and Dad have been threatening to make me hand out flyers dressed as Sandy the Traveling Seagull, the mascot of their travel agency, if I don’t behave.

I push open the door to our room without knocking first. “What’s the deal?”

“Fuck! Close the door!” Mira’s all bunched up on the floor, bent towards the ground like she’s looking for something on the carpet.

“Dad’s PO’d,” I tell her. “C’mon.”

“Okay, I’ll be out in a sec.” She doesn’t make any movements, though, just stays in that crouched position like a threatened animal.

“Well, are you coming?” I take a few steps forward. One of her hands is clenched closed while the other’s pressing a strip of gauze to her ankle. Her long skirt’s hiked up over her thighs, revealing the pink cotton of her underwear. “You need a Band-Aid?”

“No, M, please.” She hangs her head down so that her hair hides her face. “I’ll be down in a second.”

Her fist is purple, she’s tensing it so fiercely. I sit down next to her and start to pry her fingers apart one by one. She fights me at first, tells me to get the fuck away, but I’m not gentle, and

I win.

A razor blade. I touch the thin trickle of blood where it dug into the skin of her folded hand.

I wipe the blood away with my own thumb. “No,” I say, because the situation makes no sense. Our window’s open and the ice cream truck is idling down the street. I can hear the music and the laughter of children and the pop of some distant daytime fireworks. Mira likes Drumsticks. If we were at the ice cream truck, she would order a Drumstick.

“No what?” Mira asks bitterly. She unpeels the gauze on her shin and I see the slash, bordered by raised lines of flesh, healed-over and smooth. It occurs to me that it’s easier to get away with things if you don’t rock the boat. What if I added up all of Mira’s good behavior and divided it by the number of scars?

“Come to the bathroom.”

“No.”

“Do it or I’m telling Mom and Dad.”

In the bathroom, Mira sits on the toilet and I kneel in front of her, wiping the cut with isopropyl alcohol. She curses at me but I ignore her. Dad will be wondering what’s taking so long.

“You want to know why,” she says. Mira usually likes silence, but I can tell I’m making her uncomfortable with my own.

“No.”

She lets out this ugly little chuckle. “Yes, you do.”

I guess I do want to know, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve slept next to Mira for thirteen years, our beds so close I could touch her foot with mine, and that for however long she’s been lying there with those scars and I had no idea.

1989

“Your sister’s fucking smart,” says Henry, or maybe Harry—I wasn’t really listening. He’s on the science Olympiad team with Mira, which is why we’re at his house, which is on the other side of town, where the houses are propped up on stilts or concrete blocks so that they won’t float away when storms churn the ocean.

“Oh yeah?” I ask.

He reaches into the sand and tosses a few strands of dried seaweed into the bonfire he built with the other boys. We watch it burn blue before it turns black and charred. “Yeah.”

Mira’s the only girl on the team, which means we’re the only girls at this party. I don’t even want to be here, but Mira doesn’t care about that, because she would have snuck away from our own party whether I came along or not. “You in love with her?” I ask Henry.

“What?” He spits out a bit of the beer he’s drinking—the beer he offered me, that I refused—and it dribbles down his chin before dripping into the sand.

“I hear you’re all in love with Mira.” He’s kind of handsome, in the light of the fire, but undeniably geeky (like the rest of them). He still has braces, and they’re strung with elastics that are either blue or black; it’s too dark to tell. I wouldn’t mind if Mira dated him—he seems tame enough—but instead she’s sitting across the fire in a different boy’s lap, a boy who also looks tame, except for the way he’s running his fingers over her ribs, running them up and down her shirt for all of us to see.

When Mira said she was coming over to Henry’s, I said I wouldn’t let her go alone. “It’s not like I’m going to a rager.” She giggled, drunk on Mike’s Hards and Smirnoff Ices. “And it’s not like I

43 need a chaperone.” She’s been impulsive lately, and I think it was all those years of being on her best behavior so no one would suspect otherwise. When I ask her about it all she says is, “We’re young,

Mira!” like being stupid is one of youth’s free passes that I haven’t taken advantage of.

Now the safe boy she’s all cuddled up with is slipping his hands up her shirt, higher and higher until he’s kneading her breasts. I watch it all, though Henry glances down at his beer, more like he’s embarrassed than ashamed—two very different emotions. After a moment his eyes lift from his bottle and run over my own breasts. Probably looking to see where Mira and I are the same, where we diverge. This is the year we grew out of our shared silhouette. She thinned and I thickened, and we both want what the other has. I hate the way my breasts bounce and my thighs rub, but Mira watches me with envy when I change for bed. “What are you now?” she asked a few days ago. “C-cup?”

“Do you want to go inside?” Henry asks.

I’m about to say no, but then Mira and her boy start getting up, heading towards the house.

“Sure.”

None of Henry’s parents are home. I insist on following Mira and her boy to the finished basement, where Henry lights a half-melted Yankee Candle sitting on the coffee table. “The lights don’t work,” he explains. Sure.

Mira and her boy don’t wait for the candle to be lit, but immediately stumble into a corner, grabbing at each other’s most readily available parts. “I love you,” Mira says when the candle flares up, and it takes me a moment to realize that she’s talking to me. She’d never say anything like that sober. I want to say it back, but then the boy pushes her against a carpeted pillar and I look away.

“Hey,” Henry says, breathing into my ear. He leads me to the opposite corner of the basement, stepping over Tonka trucks and bent Barbie dolls. “One brother, one sister,” he explains, though I didn’t ask.

I let him rub my ass through my jeans, because boys have done that before and I expect it. I watch Mira as Henry shuts his eyes and kisses my neck. Her boy paws at her shirt like an agitated animal, but he won’t try anything, not with us here, and besides, I’ve only had soda all night—I could throw him off of her in an instant.

Mira wriggles out from underneath his arms and relief expands in my chest, but then she spins him around so that his back’s against the pillar and she can grind her pelvis into his. My boy slips a hand beneath the waist of my pants, beneath the waist of my underpants, and with his palm on my bare skin I realize that Mira doesn’t give a shit about what happens to me, or what doesn’t.

“Where are you going?” Henry asks.

Sometimes I get this violent feeling, this swell of rage that makes me into the kind of person

I didn’t think I could be. The kind of person that grabs Mira by the ponytail and drags her towards the basement stairs. “What the fuck?” Mira’s hand goes to her head and her boy looks freaked but frozen. I don’t care.

“We’re leaving.” I pull her up the steps and she thrashes her head back and forth, trying to loosen my grip, but it doesn’t work. She refuses to believe that I’m stronger than her. Once we get to the hallway and we’re out of that mossy-smelling, candlelit basement, I let go. Mira immediately backs away from me, rubbing her neck with one hand.

“What,” she breathes, “was that?”

“You made me do it.”

“This is my fault?” She points to the basement door. “Are you fucking insane?”

For a moment, I have the strange sensation that I’m still holding her hair, but when I look down, of course my hand is empty. “I’m leaving.”

“I could literally not care less.”

“So you’re staying?”

Mira balls her fists and shakes them at the ceiling. “Are you retarded?” When I don’t say anything back, she goes, “Yes, I’m staying.” She opens the door to the basement but doesn’t shut it behind her. I watch Mira’s shadow stretch against the wall, taller and taller, and then disappear.

1990

The house is silent as I cut watermelon. I can’t sleep lately, and so here I am in the kitchen, drinking green tea and slicing fruit. Mom bought the watermelon on sale, and there’s a big ugly dent on one side, like a baby that’s been dropped on its head. When I slice across the divot the flesh inside isn’t pink, but a greenish white. I carve away whatever this is—rot, decay—and drop it in the trashcan beside me.

It’s four in the morning and no one should be up, but I hear crying. At first I think it’s a coyote, but there’s something human to the sound; a bluntness, as though the edges of the scream have been filed down. I slide the screen of the kitchen window up and poke my head out. Helen’s moving across her front yard, baby pressed to her chest, hands moving over its back. Behind her, the Mitchell’s speedboat casts a slab of shadow across the grass. They’ve been saying they’re going to put it back in the water for years. They still say it.

Helen lost her last two babies, but I don’t know if that was before they were born or after. I made the mistake of asking about the first one when I ran into Mrs. Mitchell at Walgreens a week or so after Helen gave birth (Mrs. Mitchell had asked Mom to feed their dog while they were in the hospital). Some things are not meant for this world, she said quietly. We were in the make-up aisle looking at mascaras. Her hand shook when she selected one from the plastic shelf.

I know that Helen moved home addicted to heroin, which isn’t all that unusual around here, though in my family’s particular social circle it’s never discussed. My friend Betsy got hooked on oxycodone during her breaks at the Village Market. Turned out her manager was dealing, with a

“special offer” for pretty young cashiers. She entered rehab a few months ago, and occasionally I’ll receive a postcard where she talks in unusual, poetic detail about the food they serve (I wish you could taste the banana pudding, which is the color of daffodil petals and the thick, slick texture of mucus) and always ends with God bless! because she’s found Jesus and hopes that I’ll give him a chance, too.

Helen’s been clean on and off since she first moved back, leaving home and then inevitably returning, usually with some new boyfriend in tow who Mom calls “edgy” (which means he wears combat boots). Mom’s especially keen on news about Helen because she worries about Mira’s proximity to illegal substances. “Is your sister on drugs?” she demanded last week when Mira came home giggling so much that she started coughing. I told her no, because all Mira’d been doing was smoking pot. “Hmph,” Mom said, and then she dropped it, because Mira has a way of raising our parents’ suspicions without spurring them to action.

The baby screams. I can’t see much of it from this distance—just a lump attached to

Helen—and I get this sudden urge to see it up close, and the urge makes me panicky, like something bad will happen if I don’t see this baby.

It’s cooler outside than I thought it would be. I’m only in my sleep shorts and tank top, and the breeze seems to blow right through me. The moon’s huge and creamy, its light turning Helen and the baby metallic, like they’ve been dipped in pearlescent paint. I walk to the end edge of our yard and wave. Helen and I see each other occasionally, but we’ve never said much besides hello.

She approaches the edge of her own lawn. We’re separated by the communal driveway between our houses, a ribbon of asphalt that slopes so severely towards the main road that no one on the cul-de-sac bothers leaving when the weather turns icy. “Hi,” she says, bouncing the baby up

47 and down. She’s wearing a pink knitted cap with two little bunny ears stitched on either side. They flap back and forth in the light breeze. “What’s her name?” I ask.

“This is Lily. Lily, who hates sleep. Isn’t that right, little Lil Pill?” Helen pivots towards me and the bunny ears bounce. “Sorry, I’m going insane with sleep withdrawal. You want to come say hi?”

I do. I walk across the driveway, which is sprouting dandelions from its cracks, and stand next to her. Lily’s quiet now, her eyes droopy, one tiny fist clenched around her mom’s pinkie finger.

Her cheeks are so fat they looked stuffed with marshmallows.

When Mira and I were kids, a boy in our kindergarten class approached us on the playground and demanded to know what was wrong with our mother. He didn’t mean it maliciously—he’d just learned that his aunt was pregnant with two boys, and thought that twins were the product of disease. I told him to leave us alone, that he was a stupid dummy with fish lips, but for a long time I wondered if Mira and I had been lied to our whole lives, that we were actually something mutant.

I hover a hand above Lily, asking permission, and Helen nods. Lily’s eyes pop wide open as soon as I touch her chin, and she grabs my thumb with her hand, wrapping it in her own fingers.

“She likes you,” Helen says.

“Me, too.” I’m grateful that she lets me stand there for so long, that she lets me pretend I’m one of them. We don’t say anything, and I can hear the train whistle across town. That’s something

Mira and I haven’t mastered. We’ve never learned out how to be quiet, together.

1991

Mom holds up a single unlit sparkler and touches it to my forehead. “Let’s surprise her.”

Mira has never liked surprises. But my parents are desperate lately, doing anything to lure her out of our room. What’s wrong, they ask over and over, you can tell us, but Mira just says she doesn’t know. They don’t believe her. I do. Sometimes a heavy feeling settles over me, like I’m wearing one of those weighted aprons they make you put on for x-rays. Usually I can’t pinpoint a cause for this feeling. It just seems necessary, sometimes, to acknowledge how heavy life can be, to recognize all the bad things we’re forced to push aside each day just so we can keep breathing.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I tell Mom, but she pulls a lighter out of her pocket and dips the sparkler into its flame. The metal sputters immediately, spitting white across the picnic table we’d been sponging off. “Shit! Go, go, go!”

She’s suddenly running, and what else can I do but follow her inside and up to our bedroom door, which she kicks open with her bare foot. “Happy Fourth!” she shouts.

Mira’s supposedly getting ready, but instead she’s reading Cosmopolitan in bed, light slanting through the closed blinds of our window. Her hair’s tied up in a greasy ponytail, and our room smells like unwashed skin, as it has for weeks now. Before Mira can react to our intrusion, Mom darts to her bed and shoves the sparkler into her hand, wrestling the magazine away. “Ta-da!”

Mira stares at the sparkler as though it’s a wild animal that’s been brought indoors. I’ve crept up cautiously to the edge of her bed, and I shake my head so she knows I didn’t condone this. The sparks reflect in her dark pupils like fireworks. Mom claps.

Mira waves the thin wire back and forth, and for a second I think Mom’s aggressive enthusiasm might have worked. But then a spark lands on her comforter and hisses, instantly eating a hole in the fabric and sending a singed smell into the air. “Fuck!” Mira lurches backwards into the headboard and drops the sparkler on the floor. Without thinking, I stomp on it wire with my foot.

“Jesus!” Mira launches out of bed in one swift leap, bringing the comforter, which wraps around her ankle, with her. My mother grabs my arm. “Sit, sit.” Everything’s moving too fast, and I let her guide me onto the bed. She holds the burnt foot into the air, fanning it with her hand. Mira looks from my foot to my face, foot to face, neck wobbling like a bobble head.

“It’s fine,” I tell them. “Really, it doesn’t even hurt.” Which is the truth. My feet are so calloused they’re practically impenetrable to pain. I stand and they both make injured noises on my behalf.

“You should run it under cold water,” Mira suggests. Her breath is rotten and I try not to turn away. “I’ll start the tub.”

“I’ll do it,” I tell her. “You throw the sparkler away.” Mom takes a step towards me but I wave her off. “Please, I’m okay. Trust me.” We exchange a glance, and I understand that she does trust me, that this is something I do better than Mira: take care of myself.

“Okay,” she says with hesitation. “But I’m getting a Band-Aid.”

I go to the bathroom and lock the door so they won’t come in. I sit on the carpet as the tub fills and examine the underside of my foot; the skin below the toes is purple and bubbled with blister. It reminds me of a game I used to play with Mira, a competition that we simply called Tough.

“Does this hurt?” we would ask, pinching the sensitive skin of the other’s wrist. “Does this?”

Harder. “Does this?”

I always won, because I knew to focus on something else. A triangle of sunlight on the floor.

The hum of the wind vibrating the house. Her breathing, fast and panty, until she finally said, “You win, it hurts, you win!”

1992

Mira receives a text about a party happening at some bed and breakfast on Seaside Ave, and she wants to go. “No way,” I tell her. I’m tired. Our own party is in that sweet spot between ten and midnight when everyone is drunk, loose, happy. The bachelor from down the street, Timmy, brought his guitar, and our parents are doing a fluid waltz through the backyard, if not a graceful one. Mira and I are no longer expected to refill the cooler or retrieve another tray of crackers, though I wouldn’t mind getting started on clean-up. I’m already considering the abandoned cups speckling the lawn, the soiled napkins and ketchup-soaked paper plates. Mess makes me anxious.

“Please,” Mira says. “Please, please, please.” She scrunches up her fists, closes her eyes, and swoons towards me like we’re kid again, begging for sugary cereal at the grocery store. This is how

Mira treats me now, the way she treats her boyfriends, those disposable forms of entertainment: clingy one day and apathetic the next. Though I’m arguably less expendable, I, too, am of most use to her when she’s bored or antsy. Tonight she’s both.

“I want to have fun,” she whines. “With my sister!”

“Why don’t you call Patty?” Patty is Mira’s best friend. I can’t stand her. She’s on debate team and once shouted at me for fifteen minutes about the benefits of calcium when I mentioned that I didn’t like milk.

“Patty’s in Florida.” She puts her hands under my armpits and squeezes.

“Stop! You know I hate that.”

“Please? Please?”

Our aunts and uncles have joined our parents on the lawn, swaying back and forth and snapping their fingers in at least five different rhythms. Most of the cousins our age have hurried away to after-parties with easy booze access and shadowy make-out corners. “Fine.” I don’t want to

51 go with her, but I also don’t want to be alone. That’s how our time together is now; a sense of settling surrounds it, like taking your best friend to prom.

We go around the side of the house while everyone’s still dancing. The main driveway seems steeper in the darkness, and I find myself running down the slope so fast that I pass Mira, who shouts after me, “It isn’t a race!’

I let her lead the way, though I soon realize Mira doesn’t know where we’re going. “Trust me,” is all she’ll say. We take a wrong turn off the main road into the woods, where she almost slices her foot on a broken bottle of Fireball. Headlights strobe through the trees, revealing a mess of broken bottles and stomped cigarettes. We return to the road and walk for nearly an hour in the direction of the harbor, with Mira promising, “We’re almost there!” every ten minutes. When she insists we walk down a dirt path marked by crumbling stone pillars, I tell her I’m turning back with or without her. “But look, M!” She grabs my chin and jerks it towards a rusted gate in the distance.

“Jackpot!”

The B and B is another mile from the gate, set back behind wilted saw grass and a muddy pond. As we get closer, I can see that a ladder’s leaned against its side. A dumpster full of shingles and carpeting sits in the parking lot, and a huge pile of tree limbs is lying near the deck where our classmates are pumping their fists to a relentless bass line. Someone’s set up a projector on the lawn, and it throws kalediscoping American flags over the inn’s façade, blinking and bright. “Who lives here?” I ask Mira.

“What do you mean? It’s a bed and breakfast.”

“I realize that, but I thought you meant someone’s parents owned the bed and breakfast.”

“No, it’s abandoned.”

“Clearly it’s not. They’re renovating.”

Mira rolls her eyes. “What does it matter?”

“We should go home.”

“We’re already here, Marina.” Mira knows how to make my name sound ugly and excessive, like Gertrude or Mildred. She walks away and dissolves into the crowded entrance before I can say anything more. I’m left standing there in front of the flaking welcome sign that reads Sea Briar Inn:

Memories to Last a Lifetime, the No Vacancy board discarded on the ground below, rusted chains coiled on top like snakes. I’ve just bent down to touch their peeling metal when I hear someone shout,

“Cops! Cops!”

Blue light flashes in the corners of my eyes. Police in the distance, sirens clashing with our dance music. The exodus is immediate. More bodies rush out of the building than I thought possible, a swarm of swiveling heads and frantic arms. People start tossing beers over the deck, and one lands at my feet, splashing across my legs. The shock of the liquid freezes me momentarily, and that’s when Mira darts out of the crowd and grabs me by the hem of my shirt. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”

In the middle of the chaos, someone screams. A girl. She flies off the deck, blonde ponytail streaming behind her like a torch flame. It happens so quickly that for a second I don’t believe it, but then she rises from the pile of tree brush and lets out the most terrible noise I’ve ever heard, worse than a scream, white hot and blistering with pain. I can’t move, but Mira drags me forward with fierce urgency. The blue lights are getting closer. “Come on.”

Most of the kids have escaped into the woods by now, driven by the scream. Where’s the girl? She staggers from the brush pile, wobbling as she rises. Something is pierced through her middle like a toothpick. A branch.

“Fuck.” I can see Mira’s pulse in her neck, expanding and contracting. Her hand moves to my wrist and she claws at the skin. “We have to go.”

“Are you joking?”

Mira lets out a scream, but it’s nothing like the girl’s. She wipes her face over and over with her hands, the same way she did when we were little and she couldn’t make up her mind.

“Go,” I dare her. “Fucking leave.” I know she won’t. Despite everything, Mira’s more like me than any of those other kids, those cowards.

She runs. She sprints into the dark woods, leaving one bent flip-flop in her wake. I stare at that flip-flop for longer than I should, because it seems laughably symbolic, that piece of her left behind. I stare at the plastic sole, forcing myself to reconcile my idea of Mira with the sister that just left me here.

The girl moans. No one has stayed behind. The place is empty. “Stay standing,” I tell her as I step over the scattered tree limbs, though I have no idea if that’s good advice or not. The branch is speared right through her belly, and I can’t help thinking that she looks like a distorted scarecrow.

There’s more blood on her stomach than I’ve ever seen in my life. “You’re going to be okay.” She just keeps moaning. I rub her back, an obscenely trivial gesture, and keep my eyes trained on the horizon so that I don’t look at my wet hand. The sirens get louder. When the girl passes out from her pain, I hold her against my shoulder.

This is how I get arrested for trespassing.

1993

Mira wants us to get matching tattoos. “Of what?” I ask.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table, not helping at all as I wipe down the counter with one hand and salt potato salad with the other. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Romulus and Remus?”

I swear, sometimes I think she’s the dumb one. “Do you even know that story?”

“Of course,” she says defensively, which means no.

“We’re not getting tattoos.” I wipe the last smudge off the counter and toss the damp paper towel at her. She dodges it easily.

“We need something to bond us.”

“How about we bond through equal distribution of work.” I point to the fridge. “Can you count how many hot dogs are in there are? Dad’s headed to the store.”

Mira wants to bond because in a month and a half we’ll be headed to college orientation at separate schools. We both applied to Winsor College early, but only she got in. An arrest doesn’t look great on a college application, even with an explanatory note from your guidance counselor. I was deferred to regular admissions and then rejected, which means I’ll go to UMass-Amherst’s honor college instead, only thirty miles from Winsor. I wish it were farther.

“You’re no fun,” she pouts.

“Hot dogs. Please.”

Later that night she brings it up again. I’ve left the party early because I’ve got a shift at

Mullaney’s tomorrow morning, weighing cod and wrangling lobsters. Mira doesn’t have a summer job because she’s interning at a medical lab in Boston, something set up through our A.P. Bio teacher. She’s decided she wants to be a doctor.

I expect Mira to meet up with Patty and get into trouble. But instead she follows me upstairs and leans against the wall as I change into my pajamas. “I’ve got the stuff,” she says while I tug my shirt over my head.

“What stuff?”

She retrieves a shoebox from underneath her bed. Inside is a well of ink, a pack of sewing needles, a number two pencil, and a spool of white thread. “Let’s do it.” She grabs a lighter from her bedside table and runs a needle through the flame.

“I’m going to bed.” I flick off my lamp, which does nearly nothing, since Mira’s is still on. I face away from her, looking at the door, but my bed bounces and I know she’s sitting at the edge of my mattress.

“It won’t hurt, I promise,” she whispers. I haven’t gotten under the covers yet, and my shirt lifts, something pokes me. I flip over in an instant.

“Mira, do you understand what the fuck ‘no’ means?” I slap her across the hand and the needle falls to the floor. It’s a hard slap—a hit, if I’m being honest—and the fleshy pop reverberates through my ears like too-loud music. I’ve wanted to do this since last year, or maybe before that, maybe since we were born.

She looks down at her hand, which is red. Then she looks back at me, like she’s waiting for an apology. I’m not sorry. We both sit there, breathing heavy. “I hate you,” I tell her. The words fall from my mouth like loose teeth.

She nods, as if she’s known this all along. Or maybe she knows that I don’t actually hate her.

I hate that she gets everything. And, after a while, these two things start to look the same.

She rises from my bed and then drops to her hands and knees, searching for the needle. I’m trying to think of something else to say, but she speaks first. “I thought you would follow me. At the party. Really.”

We haven’t spoken about that night since it happened. The charges weren’t severe—twenty- five hours of community service and a two hundred dollar fine—so my parents pretended it hadn’t happened. I think they believed that’d be good for me, acting as though my life were still normal. I lied about going to Harper’s—that was her name—funeral because they didn’t think “being in that space would be productive.” I cried all the time last summer, when I fell asleep and when I woke up.

I tried to muffle it with a pillow, but I knew Mira heard anyways.

“I don’t know why you thought that.”

She puts the needle away and slides the shoebox under her bed. I turn back towards the door. “Turn off the light,” I tell her. She does.

1994

Mira doesn’t come home for Fourth of July. She’s working in a lab again, though this time she insists that she’s doing actual work, not just hovering around the real scientists. Or rather, she doesn’t tell me this—she writes it. Everyone thinks it’s strange, that we’ve converted to letters now that we’re in college. “What about your flip phones?” my mother asked, holding up her own, as if questioning its functionality—but I find it easier to get my bearings on paper. Mira and I don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. It was clear for the first time during winter break, when we couldn’t get through a conversation without pausing. “You’re just growing up,” Mom said when I mentioned it. “Totally normal.” For some reason, writing is different. Maybe we both feel safe, without the other’s eyes—our own eyes—staring back at us.

I decide to work a half-day at Mullaney’s on Fourth of July, largely because I know people will ask about Mira when they first arrive at the party. What’s she up to, how’d she like freshman year, is there a boy in the picture? I’m wiping down the scale when Helen comes in with Lily. The first thing I notice is Helena’s stomach, so round that I can see her belly button poking up through the thin fabric of her sun dress. “Marina!” she says. “What a nice surprise! Can you say hi, Lily?”

Lily hides behind her mother’s skirt. “Hi,” she whispers. I wave, but Lily looks down at the floor.

“You’re home for the summer?” Helen asks.

I nod. “What about you?” Helen doesn’t live in Nashquitten anymore. I heard through my mother that she moved to Vermont with her boyfriend.

“Just here for the day, visiting the parents.” We invite Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell to the party every year, but they always politely decline, saying they’re not really the party type. “Mom just burned the scallops, so here I am.” She bends down, leaning forward to allow Lily to mount her shoulders. “What do you think Lil?” she asks. “Salmon?” Lily voices her approval by slapping her hands against the fish case, leaving a splatter of greasy prints behind. “Stop that! Jeez, I’m sorry.”

Helen straightens up and Lily begins to yank her hair like horse reins. “How about a pound of salmon?”

I can hear Lily singing as I cut the fish, something about an old woman swallowing a horsefly. She’ll have a nice voice when she’s older. “Boy or girl?” I ask when I turn to weigh the salmon.

It takes Helen a moment to understand what I mean. “It’s a surprise. Right, Lily?”

Lily nestles her head into her mother’s shoulder. “Right.” Then she starts clapping. “Right, right, right!”

I wrap the fish in parchment paper and hand the package to Helen. She pauses before taking it from me. “It’s really good to see you,” she says. “Really, really good.”

“You, too,” I tell her, because she’s right, it does feel good, and I can’t figure out why.

Maybe it’s simply seeing Helen and Lily doing well. I worried during those long stretches of time when I didn’t seem them. I thought things might have gone sour.

After they leave, the bell tingling behind them, I go into the back room to drink a coke. I start a letter to Mira. Dear Mira, I write on one of the sticky notes we keep in the supplies cabinet. If you have kids, would you want twins?

It’s an easy question, at least for me. Would you rather have one unknown come into your life? Or two?

DesignFuture

Sophie wants zero environmental impact. Ross wants a racecar track. Monica wants a community garden with a row of fig trees.

“Stop the architecture of control,” Clay says when his turn comes. It’s unclear who, or what, he’s addressing.

“Isn’t that a self-help book?” I ask from my perch on the classroom’s broken radiator. The

Architecture of Control?” Clay offers a pitying smile from the floor. His mom is some kind of activist, or maybe just a vegan.

The radiator’s cap emits an unpleasant sputtering noise, like an overheated pasta pot. Kelly, the janitor, has forbade me from turning it on, claiming that it could cause a small grade explosion seriously endangering the students and the integrity of the water-heater, etc., etc. Even though it’s

May my classroom is freezing, thanks to a new air-conditioning system that Kelly refers to as the

Boss. “The Boss is very delicate,” she likes to remind me. “Mighty yet fragile, like our coral reef system.” Kelly’s one of those Greenpeace people.

“Okey-dokey, then.” I finish taking down everyone’s ideas on a piece of scrap paper. I’d thought no one would sign up for DesignFuture club except Monica, who spends health period in my classroom because her family opted out of the sex ed and reproductive unit. Sometimes we work on the crossword together, and she’ll ask me murmured questions about her body as we try to think of a four-letter word for what a germ may become. “What did you say?” I’ll ask her, and she’ll stare up at me with inflated pupils and go, “I didn’t say anything.”

The four members of our team lay belly-flopped on the floor, devouring snacks that I incorrectly assumed would be reimbursed by the school. The new digital thermostat claims it’s seventy-two degrees, but I brought in an instant-read meat thermometer last week and it showed

60 fifty-nine degrees. My kids are plumped by down jackets and knit scarves, fleece hats and wool socks. “Everything seems to be working,” Kelly says whenever I ask for another inspection, and then she whacks the screen of the thermostat with her bare knuckles. The whacking has yet to work.

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it,” I tell her. “Things are not as they appear.”

“I’m bored,” Ross announces. “And Chex Mix makes my tongue swell.”

“Are you allergic?” I ask, dreading a call to Nurse Patty. Girls keep getting their inaugural period during my classes, and Nurse Patty, in order to eradicate the shame surrounding menstruation, will send them back with a bag of mini Reese’s cups to celebrate this new stage of womanhood. Of course the girls hate this, their shame very much intact, and mini Reese’s cups have now come to signify a ripening reproductive system at Piper Middle. If you look inside any school trashcan you’ll probably find a foil-wrapped chocolate glinting among the discarded tissues and chewed erasers. The boys have started pelting them at the more developed girls when I’m not looking. Shit like this is why I don’t call myself a feminist.

“No, it’s just the salt.” He sticks out his tongue. It does look fatter than it should. “I’m sensitive to sodium.”

“Well, stop eating it.” I press one finger to my temple. Ross is in my geometry class, where he’s equally unfocused. He hands in homework doodled with polka-dotted thongs and grossly unrealistic breasts.

Sophie raises her hand. “What’s the deadline for the competition?”

“For our final city design?” She nods. I have no idea. I received the DesignFuture handbook in the mail a month ago, but I haven’t read it. All I know is that whoever designs the winning city model receives five thousand dollars, which got Principal Cline all hot and bothered. Starting the club wasn’t my idea. Kit, the seventh-grade bio teacher, and I were both roped into leading after- school activities because of our age. “We appreciate how you two have already begun to inject fresh

61 energy into Piper,” Principal Cline told us during a meeting at the beginning of last semester. “And I hope you’ll continue to engage the student population with your youthful spirit.” He used to be the commandant at a military school in New Hampshire, and everything he says sounds like a threat. It’s distractingly sexy.

Principal Cline explained that the school had received a state grant for extracurricular programming, and that it would disappear if the funds weren’t used once school reconvened after winter break. He leaned across his desk to where Kit and I were sitting, toppling a miniature boat-in- a-bottle that I’d seen him assembling with eyebrow tweezers the week prior. “Preferably something

STEM-oriented.” He righted the bottle. “The world doesn’t need another drama club, you know?”

The radiator sputters so dramatically that it sounds like a tuberculosis patient. I raise my ankles just before it lets out a spray of burning steam. “Let’s try stepping back for a moment. Who can define infrastructure for me?”

“Toilets,” Ross says.

“Toilets are the definition of infrastructure?”

“Are a type of infrastructure,” he says, as though I’m the idiot.

“Anyone else?”

Sophie throws me a bone. “It’s all the different things that allow the city to run. Roads, sewage systems, hospitals, stuff like that.” Sophie is headed to private school next year—I wrote her a recommendation back in November. She looks and acts like she’s seventeen, and already she’s taller than me, with a full chest that she hides beneath unflattering sweatshirts in muddy colors. A

Reese’s target, obviously.

I point a Twizzler at her. “Correct! And who remembers what I said the theme was for the cities this year?” Monica tugs her hat down over her eyes and Clay chews on the fringe of his scarf.

“Nobody? Natural disasters.”

“Duh,” Ross snorts.

I ignore him. “Why don’t you four try brainstorming a cohesive concept for our city. What you’d like it to look like, what kind of infrastructure you want to include.”

Monica raises her hand. “How much time do we have?”

“However much you need.” She blinks at me. “Until the Chex Mix is gone.”

“Do you want the ideas written down?” Clay asks.

“Do you have a pencil?”

“No.”

“Then no.” I hop off the radiator, which is their signal to start working. We learned the importance of designated independent work time as reaffirmation of student agency during our latest professional development day, so I go to the girls’ bathroom in the basement to vape. No one visits the basement after-hours except Kelly.

Still, I always take precautions. The last stall is the only one with a lock, so I hide there, standing on the toilet to make sure my shoes aren’t visible. The bathroom looks the same as when I attended Piper, save for the addition of some encouraging graffiti that, personally, I find condescending: you are beautiful; I love YOU; don’t cry!

I lived in Nashquitten for one year shortly after my father died in a car accident. I was thirteen years old. My mother couldn’t handle staying in our ranch on the outskirts of San Diego, which my father had entirely remodeled. He was a lawyer then, but had grown up working for his father’s construction business, and he loved any sort of project that involved working with his hands. He built me a canopy bed when I was a girl, carving my initials into the bedposts. “He’s everywhere,” my mother said when we returned home after the funeral. She said it flatly, a statement of fact. We were no longer capable of crying.

Two weeks later we flew to Massachusetts, where my mother had grown up and where my grandmother still lived. It was August, and I started school with the rest of the town in September.

My mother continued her work remotely as a copy-editor for the San Diego Tribune, and I lied to all of the kids at school, telling them that I had arrived in Nashquitten as part of a domestic exchange program sponsored by the California almond companies.

I inhale and the tiny light on my pen glows blue. My first serious boyfriend, Victor, got me into vaping. I started smoking cloves in high school, and by the time I met him during my junior year of college I was addicted to cigarettes. I lived with three other girls in a collapsing house in

West Philadelphia (the roof was quite literally caving in), all vaguely artsy except for me, and we would roll cigarettes on our front porch while we watched short-skirted girls flanked by handsy boys make their way to fraternity parties.

Victor told me that if I was going to kill myself, I should at least do it slowly. He bought me my first pen from a place called Vaporize, the same kind he had. We used to vape in bed after sex, blowing colorless clouds onto each other’s naked skin. A couple months ago I asked a man I met online to blow on my stomach, and he just laughed nervously and told me I was a real trip.

Fifteen minutes later, the alarm on my phone rings. I hop off the toilet and rub my shoe prints from the seat with a wad of toilet paper. No need to make more work for Kelly.

“We’re ready, Miss H,” Sophie announces the moment I reenter the classroom. It’s only recently that I’ve successfully broken their habit of calling me Mrs. H. It seems half of them think I have a child. Last month Monica asked me if I’d dealt with postpartum depression.

I lower myself to the carpet, tugging down my skirt and pretzeling my ankles to avoid flashing my underwear, but they rise once I’m settled. Sophie leads everyone to the blackboard, where she writes Nashquitten 2.0 in purple chalk. Ross, Clay, and Monica stand beside her with their

64 hands folded in front of their stomachs, gazing seriously ahead. I feel like the subject of an intervention.

Sophie places the chalk back in its box and clears her throat. “According to the latest scientific research, Nashquitten is projected to slip entirely underwater within the next one hundred years.” Ross squats to the floor and pounds the carpet like a distressed gorilla. I guess this is meant to represent the town crumbling into the ocean. I nod encouragingly.

“We propose redesigning Nashquitten for a sustainable future,” Sophie continues, gesturing to Monica, who runs to snatch a piece of paper off of one of the desks. Someone did manage to find a pencil, and Monica holds their sketch in the air, grid paper gone patchy with erasing. “We’ll reinforce the coast to discourage erosion, implement natural disaster training, and reduce our ecological impact on the land.”

Sophie explains the details of the drawing, which include a metal dome that will enclose the town whenever a storm alert sounds, like a convertible hardtop stretching over the frame of a car.

It’s not hard to see where their inspiration came from. This past winter Nashquitten’s seawall was decimated by Blizzard Andrea, a storm who roused the waves to unprecedented strength and height, flooding the harbor and coastal neighborhoods so severely that the New York Times printed a photo of Nashquitten on its cover, ice chunks floating through the streets like abandoned barges. “Excellent engagement with current climate concerns,” I tell them, because this is another thing we learned during professional development day—the importance of fostering students in tune with not only their minds, but the current world.

“So we won?” Ross demands. He’s still crouched over the floor, rubbing his knuckles against the carpet.

“It’s not a competition,” I tell him. “Not yet.”

But he shouts, “We won!” anyways, and who am I to damper his joy?

“Sure, you won,” I tell him, and the kids high five just as the radiator releases a volcano of hot, hissing steam.

There’s a message from Donna when I arrive at my grandmother’s house. The tiny red light on the phone’s base flickers alarmingly in the dark, like an ambulance siren. I shed my layers by the front door, stripping off my coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and even my skirt, until I’m standing there in only my shirt and tights. The house is the opposite of my classroom: clammy and overheated, condensation sweating down all the windows. It takes me a few moments to locate the light switch, tripping over the shoe rack in the process; my body seems to have unlearned the layout of the house since I moved in.

Hi Ellie, it’s Donna—Donna S from Coastal Realty, not Donna F from Beachfront, in case you’ve talked with her, too—calling about your grandmother’s house. I’d love to grab a coffee and just talk, see how you’re feeling, have a look inside—I’m sure it’s beautiful. Alrighty, well give me a ring when you’re able, God bless!

Donna lives just up the road, and tastefully slipped Mom her card at my grandmother’s funeral reception. “I can’t imagine how painful this must be,” she told us. “I would love to help make the process as simple as possible, and just take the whole business off your hands.” My mother and I had both arrived in town a week prior, and I’d seen Donna at her front window almost every evening, squinting out into the street from behind partially drawn curtains. My grandmother called her a Nosy Nancy when I was young, and “a pathetic snooping bitch” when age bolstered her candor.

I’m sure Donna knew the comings and goings of my grandmother’s house, which is to say, the lack of them. My grandmother received few guests outside of Nurse Liv and the Meals on

Wheels volunteers. My mother had tried to move her to a nursing home, but grandma had been

66 shocked at the proposal, and the suggestion caused a rift that continued until her death. “Do you know what kind of life that is?” she demanded when I called trying to smooth things over.

“No,” I’d admitted.

“Exactly. Because it’s not a life at all.”

My grandmother’s house isn’t large (Donna would probably list it as a “charming cottage”), but it’s located in Third Cliff, one of the most desirable neighborhoods for its nearby public beach and views of the ocean. Someone will probably buy it and knock it down to build a monstrous summer home. Kit tells me that’s the trend nowadays.

There’s another message, one from my mother. I press the play button with my pinky, rubbing my finger against the worn spot that my grandmother used to tap with her pen while she did Sudoku puzzles.

I already know my mother has lost patience with me, but usually she talks around the issue, listing all the pleasures of California as though she works for the tourism bureau. “Warm weather,” she’ll coo. “Avocados. The Redwoods.” But not today. Today there’s a clunking noise, a distant bark, and then, suddenly: “Get back to San Francisco! Get back to your life!” She sounds a little drunk. I wait for more, but the message ends with a click.

I was supposed to stay in Nashquitten for my grandmother’s funeral only, but when I stepped into her house—my house, according to the will (my mother got the money, I got the property)—my impending return to San Francisco became impossible. Just like falling out of love; one minute you’re head-over-heels, and then you’ve suddenly crossed a line you hadn’t even known was drawn, and wait—oh no!—now a barbed wire fence’s being built over the line, and a BEWARE

OF DOG! sign’s being tacked to the chain-link, and the metal spurs and the aggravated pitbull are both threatening to slash you to ribbons if you dare to pretend things are the same as they once were.

The day after the funeral I called my job to tell them I was leaving. These were the reasons I wrote on my hand to ensure I wouldn’t back out: I’d been single for years, the tech bros I worked with depressed me, and my boss had a habit of grazing my breasts as he spoke to me, blaming it on his gesticulating (“I’ve always talked with my hands!”). Really, though, San Francisco wasn’t a place where I could be the best. I wasn’t the smartest, or the prettiest, or the thinnest. Which meant I was nothing.

The worst part was telling my roommate Jill, who cried when I called with the news. She thought we were close, since she loved to talk about herself and I could never find a way to exit our conversations. Mostly that meant she told me about her sex life, probably because she’d watched too much Sex and the City and thought that was how you made female friends. (I knew the shape of her pubic hair after a month of living together.) She inferred that the move was due to some fissure in our relationship. I assured her that that wasn’t the case, but she just shouted, “Don’t tell me how it is or isn’t!”

The lease was easy enough to get out of. I lined up a dozen potential new roommates in two hours using Craigslist. Besides, it didn’t matter if my room remained empty for a few weeks. The only reason I could afford the apartment was because Jill’s parents owned it, charging a shockingly low rent that made them feel pious. I’d lied on my rental application and said I was a performance artist to milk their benefactors’ spirit. Jill invited them over for dinner once and insisted I give them a taste of my current project, so I stood in our shower fully-clothed and dumped canned tomatoes over my head. I called it The Body of Christ, the Blood of Women: Femininity’s Wound. They ate that shit up.

When May came, I moved out. I was doing freelance coding to stay afloat, building websites and teaching a few classes at the library. The superintendent was one of my students. She asked me

68 out to coffee one day after class, and handed me a job listing while we sat at Dunkin Donuts. “They need a math teacher at the middle school,” she said. “You certified?” I told her I wasn’t, and she said I could get certified online. I’d enjoyed teaching the coding class more than I expected, and I needed a job with health insurance, so that night I signed up for a course on teachme.com.

“What do you owe her?” my mother demanded on the phone when I shared my news. The her she was referring to wasn’t the superintendent, but my grandmother. “I thought this would just be a little vacation for you.” She grunted like an overworked horse. “You don’t need to actually live there, El. Not to sound harsh, but feeling indebted to the dead is pointless.”

I didn’t bother defending myself, because I knew my mother wouldn’t listen. She loved telling anyone who listened that her daughter worked in tech: “a really fancy start-up disrupting e- commerce,” she would brag. I’d only voiced my dissatisfaction about San Francisco to my grandmother, a few months before she died. I’d been working fourteen-hour days on a product launch and had almost fallen asleep at the wheel driving home. Her sigh was audible over the phone.

“You’re like a robot,” she told me. “You do what everyone tells you to, exactly how they want you to do it. How many conscious decisions have you made this year?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” she repeated. “Honestly, Ellie. What are you doing?”

Would you like to listen again? the machine asks me. Its light blinks red across the counter. I delete both messages and put on a pot of water to boil.

“You wanna grab something to eat?” Kit asks me the next day during the transition period between block four and lunch. “My treat.”

His classroom is beside mine, and we lean out of our adjacent doorways during the pungent rush of scrambling students. Strawberry body spray, B.O., and musty cologne linger in the hallway

69 even after they’re gone. I hold the collar of my shirt up over my nose to smell the welcome scent of

Tide. “Your treat?”

“Yeah.” He pulls a folded paper out of his pocket and dramatically unfurls it. Two-for-one cheese slices at Marcia’s. “We’re eating like kings, baby.”

Kit drives us to the harbor in his disintegrating Jeep. The handle on the passenger side door has fallen off, so he cranks down the window to allow me to open it from inside. A beach towel’s folded on the seat, and I don’t bother moving it. When I stand up I realize my ass is covered with sand, because Kit points at it like he’s sixteen.

Marcia’s, and the entire harbor, is empty. Nashquitten prides itself on being a residential town rather than a vacation destination, and May doesn’t bring a lot of business. The only people out are the fishermen, stationed behind the railing separating the sidewalk from the docks, casting their lines over and over.

Marcia’s has one woman working, and she glances up from her book in surprise when we enter. She quickly tucks it beneath the counter, but I see the cover anyways: Light My Fire, it’s called, with a half-naked fireman dangling an axe between his legs. I wink at her, and she fumbles with the pen in her pocket, asks if she can take our order.

“You want to go for a walk?” Kit asks after we receive our pizza. He holds the door open and we clutch our paper plates as we make our way down the sidewalk, dribbling orange oil behind us.

Front Street hasn’t emerged from winter kindly. The stores’ yellow and blue shingles, which normally emit a cheery (if paschal) vibe, are now tinted gray. A pale, muddy line cuts across their facades, revealing how high the water rose during the storm. We got snow until March, and by then the snowplow budget had been completely drained, so we just sat in our houses waiting for the huge

70 drifts to melt. The downtown won’t get a good cleaning until June’s arrival is imminent, with its summer people and beach-goers.

Kit doesn’t seem to notice the dreary state of the harbor. He gnaws on his pizza with pleasure, sauce crusting the corners of his lips. “How are you so happy?” I ask him.

“You sound suspicious.”

“I am.”

“Are you not happy?”

“I’m somewhere between miserable and happy.” I have this problem where I say things just to get a reaction. I don’t know what I’m feeling until someone responds to it, and then I think, Oh, that’s not right at all, or Yes, that’s exactly it.

“That’s quite the spectrum.” He finishes his crust and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, smearing marinara across his skin. “I never really think about whether I’m happy or not.”

“What do you think about?”

“Whether I’m helping others. Whether I’m being a good person.”

I throw the remainder of my pizza—almost half a slice—into a nearby trash can, its lip scabbed with seagull shit. “Bullshit.”

“It’s not!”

“You’re not concerned with being a good person,” I tell him. “You’re concerned with appearing like a good person.”

“Damn, Elle,” he says. “That’s pretty cold.

“Am I wrong?”

He considers this. “I mean, I hope so?”

“So no?”

He looks at me for a long time—too long. I pull my vape pen out of my pocket. “Want some?”

Back at school, the rest of my classes pass slowly. This is why I like to stay on campus for lunch—leaving school is a disorienting escape, like going to a movie in the middle of the day. I assign lots of group work because I don’t trust myself to lecture on proofs or parallel lines or anything else on the upcoming test. I look out my window instead and daydream, occasionally scribbling abstract doodles onto a notepad to appear occupied. Maybe I should go to therapy. Or maybe I should have more sex. That was my go-to remedy in California; whenever I became so lonely that I felt like a shard of glass, brittle and dangerous, I’d call Mark. He and his wife were polyamorous, and I’d meet him at a local spa where the two of us would fuck in a private steam room. The room was so hot and humid that I felt like I’d pass out on the wooden bench, his sweat- drenched hands moving my limbs this way and that, my spine a series of spikes beneath me. Say please, he would tell me, and I would say it over and over, please, please, please because it was the only time I allowed myself to beg. Come, he’d instruct me, and for a split second I’d feel full and explosive with the power of being given exactly what I wanted.

I’ve had only a handful of encounters since I came to Nashquitten, the most memorable being a boy I met in O’Dooley’s pub one night. My mother and I’d gotten into a fight earlier in the day—you’re making a mistake, she told me on the phone, as if the words were new to me, as if I didn’t say them to myself every day—and I wanted to drink. The boy’s name was Alex. He sat next to me at the bar, working on a glass of whiskey and picking at a basket of French fries. I was drinking Bud Light and writing a list of things I hated about myself on a cocktail napkin, which I find therapeutic.

“What’s that?” Alex asked, pointed to the napkin. I scribbled a title at the top—Things I

Hate About Myself—and passed it to him. “Yikes,” he said. He placed his glass on top of the napkin, then looked down at it through his whiskey. He told me his name, then asked mine. He nodded, as if I’d looked like an Elle to him all along. “You get pleasure from berating yourself?” he asked.

I didn’t feel like explaining that listing these qualities actually made me realize how absurd my self-loathing was. And I was interested, too—interested in what a man would do with such intimate knowledge. So I said, “You get pleasure from psycho-analyzing women you meet in bars?”

We had two more drinks each and then went back to my grandmother’s house because Alex lived with his mother. I still sleep in the room I had occupied as a girl, which means I sleep on a twin bed, so we went to the guest bedroom instead, where my mother had lived during that year. We kissed for a bit with our clothes still on, and then Alex forced his fingers into my mouth and ran them over the thighs of my jeans, which I guess was supposed to be sexy. When he finally entered me, he pulled my hair and told me I was a waste of everyone’s time, I was a directionless moron, I was selfish and self-pitying and a terrible daughter. This was why I found happiness so elusive; I loved to test the thickness of my own skin. I pretended to come so he would stop.

“I never get why girls like that stuff,” Alex told me after we finished. I didn’t know why, either. I tried to come up with an answer while he cleaned up, the stream of the bathroom faucet echoing through the empty house.

“It’s just a fantasy,” I told him when he returned to the room, because that’s what my friend

Andrea had called her desire to be slapped in the face during sex.

“A fantasy of what?” he asked, but I turned over on the bed and pretended not to have heard.

“Ms. H?” Sophie taps lightly on my desk with her pencil. “Is this right?” She slides a proof towards me. If angle A and angle B are supplementary , what angle relationship between angle A and angle B cannot be true?

“Sure,” I say, barely glancing at it. “Looks good.”

I nearly drive off a cliff on my way home. I’m not paying enough attention, toggling my phone’s screen from e-mail to Spotify to e-mail again. The narrow road that climbs Third Cliff is nothing more than a wispy zig-zag of potholed asphalt, studded with signs that say Drive Like Your

Children Live Here! and Golden Retriever Crossing. The car wavers when I round a corner, and my tires squeak as I pound the brake, bringing me to a stop at the very edge of the cliff. A dented guardrail is all that separates me from the sea below. I can see two children playing on the trail of rocks at the edge of the ocean, filling their plastic buckets with crabs and starfish. Where are their parents? In

San Francisco kids are tethered to their mom by literal leashes. Here, at least, kids still get a taste of freedom.

I turn carefully back onto the road. My grandmother’s house is near the end of Gull Lane, perched on a narrow swath of land just before the street dips dramatically towards the sea. Her garage door no longer responds to any sort of electrical controller, so I get out of the car and crank it up manually. The day’s heat is confusing after a day in my freezing classroom; a clammy chill moves through my stomach and I break into a sweat.

I finally haul the chain up, with the chafed fingers to prove it. I’ve never understood how my grandmother lived here her entire life. When she died last year it was in her own bed, the television stand pressed against the foot of the bedframe so that she could watch Days of Our Lives without glasses.

Inside, I take off all my clothes until I’m down to my underwear. I examine my belly in the window above the kitchen sink, my reflection a hazy imposter. It narrows my curves and cancels the red rash mysteriously lining my belly-button. Sometimes I’ll sit on my bedroom floor, in front of the mirror I secured to the wall with gobs of rubber cement, and try to figure out how the hell I occupied this same skin as a baby. I just can’t get my head around it, like the fact that a human being can grow safely in your stomach without air or light, and then know how to fight its way into this world, kicking and screaming with everything it’s got.

I put on a pot of water to boil.

I used to love cooking—I’d grow herbs and tomatoes on the kitchen windowsill. But it was more for show than anything else. I felt so proud, telling friends they were eating my fresh basil, whispering to dates that I’d plucked the tomatoes from my own plant (“is that a euphemism?” one asked). Most shamefully, I had an Instagram account dedicated to it, ElleGrowsUp, where I chronicled my various sprouts’ progress into adulthood. Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep, I think about all the hours I spent posing my plants for photos: rubbing olive oil on the leaves for a glossy sheen, moving a picked cherry tomato into the perfect square of light, trimming parsley in slow motion for my followers.

So now—buttered spaghetti. Every night except Friday, when I order oversalted lo mein from the white Chinese place on Main Street, Mandarin Palace of Delight. They finally know me by name, and the main checkout girl, Kylie, double-knots my plastic bag and adds extra fortune cookies to my order (last week I received seven). “This stuff’ll kill you,” she likes to tell me, very smug.

“God,” I said last time, “I hope so.”

I grade geometry quizzes standing over the kitchen counter while I wait for the pasta to cook. The kitchen faces the ocean, and I can see the distant blink of the lighthouse through the window, a soft flash of yellow as steady as a heartbeat. The timer dings and I drain the pasta, scoop

75 it into a bowl with a spoonful of margarine. I don’t bother sitting down to eat, but continue grading at the counter—it makes me feel busy. It’s important, I’ve found, to stay busy when alone. I’m not scared of my grandmother’s ghost, or anything like that. Fuck, I’d welcome her. My own mind’s much more terrifying, the way it’ll twist me into a knot of anxiety and pin me to the floor, snuffing out any of the self-respect I’ve tried so hard to maintain.

That’s why I fall asleep slumped against the uncomfortable arm of the brocade living room couch, student homework fanned over my stomach, a glass of red wine on the floor.

Our next DesignFuture meeting does not go smoothly. I write it off as just another Monday, everyone energetic and distracted. Monica and Sophie are in some deep discussion, huddled with

Monica’s raincoat held over their heads for privacy, and the boys keep throwing jam-crusted

PopTart corners at one another. I ask Monica and Sophie to please put the jacket back on the coat hook but they don’t listen, I tell the boys to please stop making a mess but they don’t pause, I raise my voice and instruct them to pay attention, I bang my fists against my desk and shout, “Can you all just listen to me for one minute?” Monica drops the raincoat to the ground. Ross tosses the rest of his Poptart into a nearby trash can. I’m breathing like a lunatic, some kind of overheated animal, the air pushing through my teeth in a long hiss.

“Sorry,” Clay mumbles into his crumb-covered fingers.

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” I’ve been off since Donna left not only another message, but a letter in the mailbox. I need to call her back and say I’m not interested, but something’s stopping me. “Let’s hear your ideas for individual innovations.”

Monica raises her hand timidly, rocking back and forth in her chair like she needs to pee.

“Cars that run on ocean water. Zero waste or pollution.”

“How’s that work?” Ross blows a huge pink bubble and it pops over his nose. “You can’t power stuff with water.” He busies himself pulling strands of gum off of his skin, which tangle around his fingers like a spider web.

“How do you think dams work?” Sophie asks, voice dripping with condescension.

“I never think about how dams work, because they’re dumb.”

“I think what you mean is that you’re dumb.”

Ross takes a step towards her desk. “Bet you can’t say it again.”

“You. Are. Dumb.”

“Guys,” Clay warns. He looks towards me for help.

“Please,” I try, but no one listens.

“Everyone shut up like Ms. H asked.” Monica’s eyes are closed and she’s pulling at the ends of her hair. “I can’t think with everyone talking.”

“I didn’t ask you to shut up,” I interject. “Those were not the words I used.”

“She just asked us to talk.” Ross pulls the final thread of gum off of his face and jams it into his mouth. “Ms. H said, quote, let’s hear some of your ideas, unquote.” He points at me. “You said it, didn’t you?”

I look up at the cracked clock installed above my desk. I feel like my brain’s stabbing the back of my eyeballs. Why does everybody want kids? “Let’s go outside.”

“What?” Despite the earlier discord, they seem to say this in chorus.

“C’mon, you heard me. Out.” I unzip my fleece sweatshirt and exchange it for the cardigan on the back of my chair. “Let’s go.”

The field behind the school is a slurry of dirt and rain from a brief afternoon shower, and I spot a used condom dangling from the gutter that I hope the kids don’t notice. The ground makes a wet suction noise as our shoes lift away from the muck, like lips smacking together.

“Looks like shit out here,” Ross says.

“Don’t say shit,” I tell him.

“No, I mean, like actual shit. Like poop.”

“Ross, shush. Now, look guys.” I point back towards Piper. A mess of pipes wraps around the building’s backside like diseased intestines, and a splatter of moss stains the lower rows of brick.

“This is a thought exercise. What element of Piper would you modify, if we were to include it in our city design?”

“Modify?” Clay asks.

“Yes, you know, alter,” I explain.

He raises his eyebrows. “I know what modify means.”

“Nothing.” Ross spits at the ground. “Tear it down. Build a new school.”

“Let’s talk renovation, not a totally new construction. What about the gym?” I ask. “You could keep that.”

“Kick out the boys.” Sophie raises her foot and examines the swampy grass within the indent of her shoeprint. “Girls-only.”

“That’s not really a structural renovation,” I tell her.

“Then ban Reese’s, at least,” Monica mumbles.

“And destroy the dress code,” Sophie adds.

I’ve heard rumors about the dress code, but our room’s so cold that I’ve never had to deal with any infractions. One of the other teachers, Mrs. Bent, told me Principal Cline takes particular pleasure measuring girls’ skirts with his wooden ruler, but then again, she also told me that Katy

Perry is JonBenét Ramsey.

“I think we’re getting a little off track,” I try.

“Aww, you two are so sensitive.” Ross contorts his face into a parody of sympathy. “Two wittle babies.”

“Ross,” I warn.

“I’m gonna throw candy at you whenever I see your boner,” Sophie threatens.

Ross grins. “That’ll only make me harder.”

“Alright, alright.” I wave my hands frantically. “Inappropriate.”

“Maybe we could add a handicap ramp?” Clay offers quietly. “To make the building more accessible?”

“Maybe we could get Monica a training bra,” Ross says. “I’m tired of seeing her nipples.”

“Fuck you!” Monica yells, but her voice cracks in the middle and Ross cackles. She turns to me, eyes glassy with tears. “Tell him to stop!” she demands. I reach for her shoulder but she yanks it away and turns to Sophie instead.

“C’mon,” Sophie says. “I’ll walk you home.”

“Pussies,” Ross whispers.

“Girls!” I shout after them. They start sprinting across the soccer field, hands clasped together. “Girls! You can’t leave after-school early without written permission!”

Clay looks from me to the girls’ retreating figures, his head swiveling back and forth. “We need to do something.”

“What, Clay?” I press my palms into my temples, hard. “What do you suggest I do?”

He blinks at me. “I said we.”

“Jesus, really?” Ross rolls his eyes and kicks his shoe into the ground, spraying mud across my ankles. “Talk about melodramatic.” He turns back for the school.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I ask.

He doesn’t bother turning around, just waves a hand at me dismissively. “This club’s stupid.

I was only in it for the snacks.” He saunters through the back door, which slams definitively shut behind him.

Clay and I are left in the wet grass, feet sinking into the ground. “Well this sucks,” he says.

My stomach’s gnawing at itself like that fox that chewed its trapped foot off. “You should go home.”

“It was terrible,” I tell Kit as I pack up my belongings in my classroom. Kit’s just concluded a meeting of engineering club, where the students dropped eggs from the stairwell packaged in various apparatuses meant to withstand the fall. Only one succeeded (bubble wrap in a Tupperware container), and Kit came into my room to ask if I knew anything about yolk stains.

“They’re just being kids.” He scrubs at the yellow splotch on his collar with the Tide-to-Go pen I’ve handed him.

“What, so they get a pass for cruelty?”

His left eyebrow shoots up. “Seriously?”

“Seriously what?”

He gives me the Tide pen back. “I wouldn’t call that cruelty, exactly. Insensitive, sure. But cruel?”

“I don’t want to debate semantics with you, Kit.” I open my desk drawer and root around for my vape pen. “These girls are hurt. And I froze. Froze!”

He shrugs. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s middle school, everybody sucks. They need it— thickens up their skin.”

I can’t find the pen. I dig through old receipts and uncapped pens, to the deepest corners of the drawer, but nada. “Are you even listening to yourself?”

Kit lets out a long puff of a sigh. “Listen, El, I have to run to the dentist. But do you want to come over for dinner? Discuss it more?”

“No, I’m exhausted. I need to go home.” Ah-ha! Wrapped up in a used tissue. I lift the pen to my lips and take a long, glorious exhale.

“Let me cook for you. It’s good to unwind after a long day.”

“Thanks, but—”

“I’m not taking no for answer.” He reaches forward and plucks the pen out of my mouth.

“Food’s better than smoking.”

“It’s not smoking.” I have no more energy to protest; I feel drained in the truest sense of the word. “But fine, yes, whatever.”

I’d only been to Kit’s place twice before, really only once, having not gone inside the first time (he’d retrieved my grading notebook after I left it behind at a teacher brunch). The second time had been for his twenty-sixth birthday party, an elaborate affair that, according to the yes RSVPs accessible from the e-vite, had consisted of over fifty people. Apparently many of Kit’s friends still lived in town, as the majority of party-goers were around our age and made small talk that involved asking if I’d grown up in Eastie or Westie, occasionally contorting their fingers into an E or a W. It took me a bit to catch on that this simply meant the east or west side of Nashquitten. “I’m from

California,” I told them, which elicited looks of both pity and sympathy. “I love your flag,” a man offered. “Badass bear.”

“It’s good to see you,” he says when I show up at his apartment, as though more than three hours have passed. He takes my denim jacket in both hands, like it’s something fragile.

Everything is already on the table—not just pale dinner rolls and glasses of red wine, but the main dish (I assume), too, hidden beneath tented aluminum foil on each of our plates. Kit notices

81 the way I survey the table. “I didn’t want things to get cold,” he explains anxiously. My grandmother used to do the same thing, smothering every hot item in tin foil no matter if we were sitting down in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds. “Sit, sit.” He pulls a chair out for me and bows dramatically, making fun of himself. There’s a franticness to all his movements, as though he’s an actor just barely remembering the blocking to a scene. “Bread?” He gestures to the rolls.

“I can get it.”

We both unwrap our meals and a salty steam gushes up from the plates. The aluminum’s damp with trapped condensation, and a few stray droplets plop onto the cheesy exterior of my chicken. I can feel Kit watching me. Apparently he won’t eat until I do. I burn my tongue by digging in without waiting for the meat to cool, and it seems rude to take a sip of water while my mouth is still full. I bite down on the inside of my lip, hoping to redirect the pain.

“Liv called,” Kit says. He’s barely touched his chicken, too absorbed by a bread roll. He excavates its middle with two hooked fingers, scattering crumbs across the table.

I’m not sure what to say to that. I’m also tempted not to have heard. “Oh?” Kit occasionally solicits me for advice on his long-distance girlfriend, Olivia, requesting my well-honed female perspective. But what does she really mean, he’ll demand, holding a text message so close to my face that I can’t read it.

“She says she doesn’t want to come back.” He encapsulates the entire sentence in aggressive air quotes, which makes me wonder what she actually did say. He glances up from the hollowed-out roll and looks exhausted rather than distraught. “She wants to stay in Austin.”

Olivia’s completing her final semester of grad school at UT, where she drinks craft beer wearing high-waisted shorts and gauzy crop tops. Kit’s shown me the photos. “What do you think about that?” I ask after a moment. Kit’s feelings—and most straight men’s feelings, I’ve found— need to be extracted like a rotten tooth. God forbid he offers them up easily.

“I mean, I love Liv.” He returns to destroying the roll.

“But?”

“But what?” he demands, suddenly angry. He throws the bread at the plate, where it lands with a barely-audible thump. I feel myself stiffen, and Kit notices, too. He drops his face into his hands. “Sorry.”

“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggest. “Fresh air will make you feel better.”

It’s loud outside. Kids are setting off firecrackers even though they’re illegal here. The golf course’s a mile away, and the teens like to hop the fence after dark and drive the carts across the driving range, drinking Bud Light and generally stirring up chaos. Kit showed me a feature they did about it in the Nashquitten Mariner, and that’s what the manager said, his quote blown up in huge letters next to a picture of an empty beer can lodged in a sand trap: “THEY COME AROUND

HERE MOST NIGHTS WEARING DARK HOODIES AND GENERALLY STIR UP

CHAOS!”

A shout whips through the night, the sound you make when you’re young and dumb and the stupid shit you do hasn’t started to add up yet.

“You seemed distracted,” Kit says as we make our way down the sidewalk. “You still thinking about the kids?” His condo complex is just down the road from the dump and the animal shelter, and the smell out here’s eye-watering, some combination of melting trash and sun-baked dog shit.

I hesitate. “Yes.”

“You can’t dwell on thing in our profession. You know how many times you’re going to accidentally make a kid feel like crap?”

“But that’s not what happened, Kit. It wasn’t an accident. In order to be an accident, you have to actually do something. I just stood there like a fucking idiot.”

“Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Why not?”

He stops walking. “Elle.”

“I didn’t ask you to let me off the hook.”

He reaches up to pull a crab apple from a tree branch reaching towards the sidewalk. He hurls it back towards the condos and we hear it hit something with a loud thunk. “You’re going to wake up tomorrow and realize how you’ve blown this out of proportion.”

“And maybe you’ll wake up and realize what a prick you were.” I turn back towards the parking lot, heat steaming my lungs. I open my mouth and let saliva dribble out onto the sidewalk as

I walk.

“Hey!” I keep my eyes trained ahead, but I can hear the rustle of his jacket as he jogs towards me. “I’m just trying to help you keep things in perspective!”

“Thanks for that.” As I walk back to my car, I hunch over to see if I can make myself as small as I feel. I can’t.

Ross doesn’t come to the DesignFuture meeting on Monday. I don’t bring it up with the other kids—we all know he’s not coming back.

“Ms. H,” Clay says carefully, “we want to change the plan.”

We’re sitting on the carpet, eating one-hundred calorie snack packs that I stole from the cafeteria. They taste like sadness. “Yeah?”

Sophie and Monica sit huddled in silence, arms interlinked. They nod in unison. I know I need to apologize, but I don’t know when, or where, or how. The shame makes it difficult; I’m just another adult that’s let them down.

“Well, what’s your new idea?”

Clay looks to the girls, as if asking permission to speak on their behalf. “We don’t want to do

Nashquitten. We want to create a new city.”

“What kind of city?”

“The safest, most environmentally-friendly city the world’s ever seen.” He stands up and goes to the chalkboard, where he writes Salus on the board. “She was the goddess of well-being,” he explains.

The girls exchange a glance with him, but when I look at Monica and Sophie their gazes drop to the ground. Why did I ever think I was cut out for this job? “How about I give you some time to work alone? Fifteen minutes,” I tell them. “Let’s start now.”

The heels of my shoes click loudly against the tile as I walk down the stairs to the basement.

If there any students still in the building I don’t want to face them, so I slip off my flats and tuck them beneath my arm. When I enter the girls’ bathroom I examine the soles of my feet—they’ve already turned gray, covered in dust and grit and strange gold sparkles. I don’t bother entering one of the stalls, just vape right there in the open, leaning against one of the rust-stained sinks. I find my phone deep in my sweater’s pocket and make the call I don’t want to make, but that I know I should. “Elle,” Donna says when she picks up. “So good to hear from you.”

“You, too.” But before I can say more, there’s a blast that rumbles the ceiling, shaking chalky bits of rubble to the floor. A scream. I drop my phone in the sink, Donna still on the line, and kick open the bathroom door with my bare foot.

The stairs, the stairs! Where are the stairs? I turn in the wrong direction and then turn in the right one, tripping in my spastic hurry. I sprint into our hallway and a wave of heat hits me, thick and charged and raging. I pause, panting. The main exit is in the opposite direction. White caution lights begin to flash and the fire alarm shrieks to life, blasting its shrill loops of warning. I stop thinking and drop to the floor, making myself as flat as possible as I creep towards my classroom. I

85 round the corner and the temperature rises, my entire body breaking into a fevered sweat. I press my hand to the wood of my door—hot as hell. I throw it open and call for Sophie and Monica and Clay.

“Follow my voice! Now!” Smoke rushes from the room and catches me in the back of the throat. I can’t see anything but the charcoal swirl of smoke and the tile floor.

“We’re trying!” Sophie shouts from somewhere inside the darkness.

“I’m here,” I scream, over and over and over. “Right here!”

I wait for hours, days, nights. Then—the pink ends of Sophie’s hair swinging in front of her face, surely tinted with Kool-Aid or permanent marker or some other bullshit. Monica and Clay are behind her, their hands linked together, a human chain. “Follow me,” I tell them, taking Sophie’s sweaty palm. “We’re getting out.”

“We didn’t think you were coming back,” Monica gasps.

I tug them towards the exit, my knees already raw and blistered from the floor. Then I stop, motioning them to go ahead. “Women and children first,” I tell them. “Hurry, go!”

Meninges

Gwen couldn’t remember if she’d taken her Keppra. She searched her purse for her pillbox, and found that only one pill, her evening dose, remained.

“Are you okay?” Cassandra asked her.

“Yes, I’m fine.” Gwen crossed and uncrossed her legs. “I thought that I’d forgotten something, was all.”

Cassandra nodded. Something was caught in her bangs—A crumb? A flake of skin?—and

Gwen wasn’t sure if she should tell her or not. She decided not to; she didn’t want Cassandra to think that she was trying to distract her. “Before I forget—did you have a chance to do the homework we discussed?”

“Oh, yeah.” Gwen found the wrinkled piece of paper in the front pocket of her purse, beneath an assortment of stray Mentos and Tic-Tacs. She compulsively sucked on things to distract her from her various anxieties; she once sucked on a plastic bottle cap because she couldn’t find anything edible.

Cassandra poured herself a glass of water from the glass jug on her desk, which was infused with a different variety of fruits and herbs every week. This time it was orange and mint. Gwen wasn’t a fan. “Shall we go over what you wrote?”

Cassandra had instructed Gwen to record any anxieties she experienced, rank their severity on a scale of one to ten, and then write down how she responded. Here was a new anxiety she could add: reading her anxieties out loud.

Cassandra must have sensed her hesitation, because she tapped her pen against her front teeth and said she could read it privately, if Gwen preferred. But that was the only more frightening

87 aspect: watching Cassandra read what she had written. “No, no, I’ll do it,” she said. She cleared her throat and uncreased a corner of the page. “Monday—fear that I failed my calculus test.”

“And did you?” Cassandra asked.

“I don’t know, we haven’t gotten them back yet.”

“Alright. And how did you respond?”

“I went to the bathroom and took a hydroxyzine.”

“Did the pill help?” Cassandra flipped over a new page in her notebook.

“Not really. It mostly made me sleepy.”

“Well, that’s not ideal. Maybe we’ll try you on clonidine.”

Gwen didn’t want another pill, with their side effects and artificial sense of calm. That was the main issue; Gwen couldn’t shake the feeling that any calm she felt was orchestrated, just as unstable as the negative thoughts. “Maybe,” she said. “What’s clonidine?”

“It’s a blood pressure medication, but it’s also used to treat anxiety. It basically slows down your nervous system.” Cassandra used the edge of a paperclip to extract something from beneath her thumbnail. “What else did you write down?”

Gwen wasn’t sure how much of her private self she wanted to reveal. Her inner thoughts were one of the few parts of herself that she controlled these days. She picked at the crusted corner of her lips until a flake came off on her finger. “Later that day I was afraid I’d have a seizure.”

Cassandra nodded. “And what did that feel like?”

“It felt bad.” What else could it have felt like? Exhilarating?

“I’m sure. Where were you?”

“In the shower. I’m not allowed to shower with the door closed, in case something happens, but no one was home.”

“Your neurologist prefers you shower when someone else is accessible?”

Gwen wondered if becoming a therapist simply meant paraphrasing your patients’ words.

“Yes.”

“And why do you think you chose to defy him?”

Defy was such a strange choice of word. Sometimes Cassandra sounded like a medieval knight. “Why do you think I chose to defy him?”

Cassandra smiled. “I’m not the patient, Gwen.”

Again, Gwen knew this. “Which is why I’m asking you to analyze me.”

Cassandra was still smiling, a stiff, awkward curl of her lips. “It looks like we’re out of time.

Why don’t you ruminate on that question for next week?”

“I would love nothing more.” Gwen stood up and retrieved her jacket from the gold coat hook near the door. Cassandra was partial to gold details: a gold lion stood on her desk as a paperweight, her business cards were embossed with gold script, and a gold diffuser sat on the top of a bookshelf in her office, emanating an overwhelming sandalwood scent.

“How’d it go?” Gwen’s mother, Denise, asked in the car. She’d never been in therapy, but she hoped it could help her daughter. Ever since her epilepsy diagnosis, Gwen had turned withdrawn and stoic, a curtain drawn between herself and the world. What worried her most was that Gwen hadn’t told her best friend, Lydia. The girls were so close she’d once walked in on them shaving in unison, a towel spread out over Gwen’s bedroom floor, a bucket of water placed beside them.

“It was fine,” Gwen said.

“Do you still think she’s weird?” Denise had chosen Cassandra at the recommendation of her girlfriend, Lucille, whose daughter’s eating disorder had whittled her down to nothing but skin and bones. Not so long ago, Denise thought she alone could have saved Gwen’s life. Gwen used to beg her for details of her life pre-motherhood, listening so closely Lea sometimes wondered if she

89 was writing the stories down in her diary to review later. But things changed so quickly with teens, especially girls.

Gwen popped a Mentos into her mouth. “Oh yeah, for sure.”

“Why is she weird?”

“I told you, I can’t explain it. You’d have to be there.”

Gwen and her mother ate dinner while they watched American Idol. Gwen believed her mother to be one of the last people on earth who still watched the show religiously, though she insisted that it was still very popular. Gwen didn’t understand her unwavering devotion to the show, which Gwen found predictable and overly-long. At eight her mother’s boyfriend Vince, came over to watch, too, and Gwen excused herself to her bedroom. Not because she disliked Vince—she was actually very fond of him—but because he could now take her spot. Gwen felt more than a twinge of guilt when she’d come downstairs and find her mother asleep on the couch, wrapped in a pilled blanket, the television soaking her in pale light.

Once in her bedroom, the first thing Gwen did was unplug the baby monitor on her nightstand. Her mother insisted on using it, in case she had a seizure in the middle of the night.

Gwen always turned it off before she went to bed, but when she woke in the morning the red light was inevitably blinking, the device plugged back into the wall. She didn’t bother bringing it up with her mother, because she already knew what she’d say—Please, let me do this one thing. And Gwen understood that. The desire to make yourself useful even when you’re useless.

She took off her clothes, rolled them into neat tubes, and arranged them in the proper dresser drawers—tee-shirts, cardigans, pants. She was considering rearranging her wardrobe according to color, but for now organization by category would do. At least in this area of her life she could have order. She put on an old tie-dyed tee-shirt and climbed into bed, where she rested

90 her laptop on her thighs and clicked the screen to life. She logged onto her secret Google account, the one her mother and friends didn’t know about, and hoped that he was online. He was.

Sandbar304: Hey.

DinoBoy1212: Hey!! I missed you.

Sandbar304: Yeah? What’d you do while I was gone.

DinoBoy1212: Thought of you.

Sandbar304: What’d you think about?

DinoBoy1212: What you look like.

Sandbar304: Do you want another picture?

DinoBoy1212: You know I do.

Gwen went to Gemma Anderson’s Facebook page, which the family kept open as an online memorial. No one had deleted her pictures yet, which made sense to Gwen. How could her parents log onto her page and confirm that yes, they would like to delete the albums that contained the last photos showing the real Gemma? The Gemma eating ice cream cake and the Gemma lying on the beach and the Gemma crouched down to pet a curly-haired puppy, her mouth stretched wide with delight.

Not the Gemma in the photo leaked by the teens who had found her.

Gwen found a picture of Gemma at what appeared to be a wedding, twirling in the middle of a dance floor. Her strapless yellow dress flares beneath her hips and her curled hair shoots out behind her like she’s caught in a windstorm. The other guests cheer her on in the background, hands clapping, fists pounding the air.

DinoBoy1212: Damn, babe.

Sandbar304: You like?

DinoBoy1212: I fucking LOVE.

Every time Gwen logs off, she tells herself she won’t do it again. This is sick, she thought just two nights ago. You are a sick person.

And yet, here she is.

Sandbar304: Do you jerk off to my photos?

DinoBoy1212: What else would I do? ;-)

But now Gemma can live on, can’t she? Be something other than a Dead Girl, a Reddit

TrueCrime thread, a brief Wikipedia entry whose hits will sharply decline once the next pretty young murdered thing comes around.

DinoBoy1212: Listen, I gotta go baby, but send me something to think about when you’re not here?

Gwen chose a picture of Gemma sitting on the beach, a blue triangle bikini hiding her flat chest, legs wrapped in a hibiscus-print towel.

DinoBoy1212: Mmm

Gwen didn’t feel shame when she closed her laptop. She felt the absence of it, burning hot and prickly across her neck like a sun rash. Her life thus far has been defined by this

92 keen awareness of deviation from the norm. She’s attracted to the disgusting, like Youtube videos of botfly extractions, where vets yank fat, wriggling larvae from kittens’ faces. She derives pleasure from testing her own pain tolerance, holding mouthfuls of Listerine until her gums scream and lying on her bed plucking ingrown hairs—slowly, one by one—from her bikini line. And she doesn’t find beauty in wonders others have established as undeniably stunning—she’s faked admiration at the

Grand Canyon, forced awe at multi-colored sunsets, feigned amazement at the moonlight-streaked ocean. This is it? she thought each time. What can’t I see?

She didn’t mention these things to anyone, especially not her best friend, Lydia. Lydia had her own, legitimate issues; her mother was sick, and getting sicker each day. She didn’t need Gwen to burden her as well.

Gwen slid her laptop underneath her bed and turned out her light. The noise of the television rumbled beneath her. She fell asleep to an off-key Alicia Keys rendition and her mother’s laugh.

The next day, Denise picked Gwen up early from school for her neurologist’s appointment.

“How was your morning?” she asked cheerily, and Gwen simply said, “Fine.”

“Do you want to stop for ice cream on the way?” she tried.

“I’m not six, Mom.” Denise waited for some kind of apology, but all she got was: “What?”

“Nothing. I’m seeing if I can change lanes.”

Though Denise wasn’t sure where she stood with her daughter on most things these days, she knew that they both hated the Children’s Hospital. It was painfully cheery, with its primary colors and mobiles and cartoon characters painted on the windows. Denise dreaded visiting the neurology ward, full of helmeted babies, crying children, alarming beeps, tiny hospital gowns, exhausted parents. If she hadn’t had to drive, she would have taken Vince up on his Xanax offer.

But what made her hatred of the hospital even worse was that it was unjustified—and, more shamefully, self-indulgent! Weren’t they were treating her daughter successfully? Treating her with the best care in the U.S.? Denise herself had no medical issues, no synapses misfiring without warning. She was healthy. She was safe.

Gwen read an US Weekly in the waiting room and watched a young boy wipe his hands on the windows. The window overlooked a courtyard and, behind it, another wing of the hospital that

Gwen knew housed patient rooms because their windows were determinedly decorated, spackled with sparkly banners, jelly decals, tea lights. She felt the itch of overstarched hospital sheets when she looked at them.

“Travis?”

“That’s us!” Her mother snapped to attention like a well-trained dog, hiking her purse from her lap to her shoulder.

“I can go alone,” Gwen insisted when her mother tried to follow her.

Her mother’s face flattened, a soufflé collapsing. “Are you sure?”

Gwen nodded.

“Well, alright then.” Her mother glanced back at her chair and slowly lowered herself onto its plastic-wrapped cushion. Something dark flared in Gwen, a plume of smoke. Don’t look so pathetic, she wanted to say. This isn’t about you.

“Travis?” the nurse called again.

“You better go,” her mother said.

Gwen chewed on a Mento while she waited for Dr. Suarez. She usually had to wait at least ten minutes to be seen, and she logged onto her chat room to give herself something to do besides look at the plastic model of the human brain and wonder why hers had decided to go haywire.

Sandbar304: Hey.

DinoBoy1212: Sorry, can’t talk right now.

Sandbar304: Then why are you online?

Gwen stared at her phone, waiting, but he didn’t respond. She often wondered what he looked like. He hadn’t sent her any photos—the one time she’d asked, he’d replied: That’s your thing, babe. Their conversations were so standard, so bluntly sexual, that they revealed nothing about him.

She’d considered more than once that he was also catfishing her. She found the idea almost poetic, the two of them stacking layer upon layer of disguise just to find some kind of intimacy.

“How are you doing, Gwen?” Dr. Suarez entered the room without knocking, clipboard in hand, glasses sliding down the slope of his nose. He always wore a silly tie—this was a children’s hospital, after all—and today’s was printed with fat cartoon corgis, their plump butts surrounded by tiny pink hearts.

“Fine.”

“Is your mother here?”

“She’s in the waiting room.”

He looked up from his clipboard. “Ah.” Gwen wasn’t sure if he preferred her alone. Dr.

Suarez had an excellent poker face; all of the neurologists she’d visited did. “How are you feeling on the Keppra?”

“Just tired, mostly.”

“But no seizures?”

“No seizures.”

“Excellent. Will you walk in a straight line for me, please?” Gwen did this at every visit, and it was the test that made her most self-conscious. The task was so intuitive that she panicked, her

95 foot wobbling with each deliberate step. The epilepsy had taught her to distrust her body, that container of bone and blood that will behave until it doesn’t, until you’re suddenly stumbling crookedly across your doctor’s floor.

“Excellent,” Dr. Suarez said. “Will you hop on the table for me?”

Gwen sat still while he tapped each of her knees with a small hammer, the rubber head knocking against the bone. “Do this,” he instructed when her leg didn’t jump, clasping his hands together and trying to pull them apart.

Gwen did as he said; her foot jolted at his next attempt, nearly knocking into his chest.

“Why does that work?” she asked.

“It takes your mind off things.” Dr. Suarez pulled at a thin hair curling from a mole above his lip. “You were thinking too hard the first time, and that clouded your reflexes.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” Gwen countered.

Dr. Suarez smiled. “Your body says otherwise.”

Gwen fell asleep on the drive home, which took an hour and a half due because of a wreck that scattered warped metal across the highway. Denise watched her daughter as she slept in the passenger seat, her head jerking forward over and over like she was trying to shake herself awake.

Denise had been the one who’d found Gwen during the first seizure. Gwen had been watching television while she cooked dinner, and then Denise heard a dull, heavy thump, like an animal collapsing. “Gwen, what was that?” she’d called from the kitchen, and when there was no response, she’d walked into the living room holding the wedge of parmesan she’d been grating. There she saw

Gwen on the thin layer of carpet between the couch and coffee table, eyes rolled back, body jerking and twitching and vibrating with foreign energy. If Denise doesn’t distract herself, her mind rolls back to this image, her daughter somewhere between life and death. The doctors told her the name for it later: a tonic-clonic seizure. In this type of seizure the brain’s nerve cells misfire, igniting an

96 electrical storm that short-circuits their authority over the body, sending frantic tremors in their fried wake. “An electrical storm?” she’d asked the nurse at the emergency room. They’d wheeled Gwen away for an MRI and said that she couldn’t follow. The nurse had smiled. “I’ll get you a pamphlet.”

Denise gripped the steering wheel tighter. She didn’t want a carefully diagrammed map of the nervous system, or any of the other visual devices the pamphlet employed, the crumpled piece of paper now crushed beneath the vehicle manual in the glove box. She especially didn’t want the metaphors the various doctors fed her—imagine a series of telephone lines, picture a subway map, think of a power outage. She wanted a cracked bone, a torn muscle, even a clogged artery. She wanted something concrete she could picture, something that required no distant comparisons to make sense. The closest she came to this was the dictionary definition of seize—to take possession of, to confiscate. Her daughter was possessed, confiscated from the realm of normality. That Denise could understand. Barely.

Gwen opened her eyes and leaned her forehead against the window. “Are we almost home?” she asked.

“Almost,” Denise promised. “Just a little longer.”

Later that night, Gwen had a panic attack. It came on suddenly, while she was working on her chemistry homework. She smelled something burning, her tongue felt itchy, she heard a vague ringing in her silent room. Some people saw or felt auras before their seizures, and though Celia hadn’t yet experienced one, she feared this was her first. She abandoned her homework and hurried to her bed, because if she fell from a chair the damage would be worse—she’d already chipped her front tooth after a seizure on the toilet had knocked her to the tiled bathroom floor. Now, she laid very still and slapped her stomach over and over in some vague bid for bodily authority. The slap barely registered. She would die on this bed. She would roll off of the mattress and choke on her

97 own spit and shit her pants and she would die having lived a small, uneventful life in a small, uneventful town.

“Gwen?” her mother shouted.

She closed her eyes and held her hand over her chest, counting the racing beats.

Onetowthreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. “What?”

“Will you come help me open the windows? I burned the lasagna and I don’t want the fire alarms to going off.”

Gwen’s heart was still out of control, its beats so agitated that she swore she could see her chest rattling with each one. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She took a deep, ragged breath and reached for her phone. Death felt so fucking close these days.

She unlocked the screen and did what she’d been daring herself to do for weeks, the thing she knew she shouldn’t do.

Sandbar304: Can we video chat? I want to see you.

DinoBoy1212 didn’t respond for four days. Gwen’s phone screen became blurry with fingerprints, she checked so often to see if he’d responded. “Who are you texting?” Lydia asked her in the cafeteria one afternoon, and Gwen quickly clicked to a message from her mother. “No one,” she said. Lydia chewed her sandwich very slowly, licking her teeth after she swallowed as if to say, sure. But instead of questioning Gwen further, she just dug her thumbnail into a clementine.

Gwen watched Lydia unspool the clementine’s skin, the scent of citrus wafting from her side of the table. What secrets did Lydia have that Gwen didn’t know? Did Lydia believe that secrets guarded your innermost self, like the membrane that wraps around your brain in three protective

98 layers, guarding against dangerous outside matter? Celia knew those layers existed because when she first started having seizures, the doctors thought hers were diseased. That her barrier was broken.

And that was why she hadn’t told Lydia about the epilepsy. She was scared the seizures were a physical manifestation of this secret self, the Gwen that Lydia knew nothing about. Gwen feared they were a punishment. Her body buckling beneath the weight of this dark, essential part of herself she tried so hard to hide.

But maybe she could show DinoBoy1212 who she really was.

She wanted to.

But she couldn’t take the waiting. She brushed her teeth until her gums bled and pulled her hangnails from the skin with tweezers and popped every pimple she could find on her body. She cleaned her room and organized her books and did her homework and cooked a plank-sized pan of macaroni and cheese. She drank so much water that she pissed clear urine every two hours.

“Are you on some kind of self-improvement kick?” her mother asked at dinner. “Her room’s so spotless you could eat off its floor,” she explained to Vince.

Vince waved his fork approvingly. “The spirit is ten times stronger than muscle!” He had recently begun taking personal training sessions at the YMCA.

“I’m just trying to get organized,” Gwen said. She felt the weight of her phone in her jeans pocket, nestled against her leg.

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started,” Vince proclaimed.

“Did you come up with that?” her mother asked.

“Mark Twain came up with that.”

“Since when do you read Mark Twain?”

“Everyone should read Twain.”

Gwen’s phone buzzed. It vibrated frantically against her thigh, sending a shiver down her skin. “Can I be excused?” she asked.

She pulled her phone out the minute she left the table, so focused on its pixelated screen that she tripped up the stairs to her room. She paused on the very top step.

DinoBoy1212: When?

Gwen for some kind of self-restraint, but she had none. Tomorrow at 8pm she typed immediately.

It took less than five minutes for him to respond.

DinoBoy1212: See you then, babe. <3

Gwen spent the next day sunk in anticipation. It felt as though she were moving through the deepest end of a pool, every part of her body awash in liquid excitement, the outside world blurred in the distance. Twice she was called on in English without realizing it, and Mrs. Nutter drew in her cheeks when Gwen gave her a blank stare. “Spirit Day isn’t until Friday,” she huffed. “Keep your thoughts on the book.”

Gwen did not keep her thoughts on the book. She skipped seventh period and walked an hour across town to her house, only stopping to buy a bag of Swedish Fish from Jimmy’s General

Store. She considered what she actually knew about DinoBoy1212 as she walked. Nothing, essentially. She pictured his features like fruits on the reels of a slot machine, noses and lips and eyes spinning round and round.

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That night her mother left for Vince’s at seven. “I’ll be back around eleven. There’s ziti in the fridge,” she reminded Gwen. “And ice cream in the freezer. Just remember, with the dishwasher you need to—”

“Press the start button twice, I know.”

“I know you know.” Her mother leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek and Gwen smelled the perfume she wore only for Vince, a mix of smoke and rosewater. “But let me feel like I’m doing my job, okay?”

“Okay,” Gwen said. She wanted to tell her mother to have fun, that she didn’t have to come home. Gwen didn’t care if she slept over at Vince’s. But of course her mother would come home.

She lived by a set of rules that positioned Gwen as her primary responsibility, motherhood the crown jewel of her duties. Gwen couldn’t imagine having a life dictated by someone else’s projected needs. That, too, was part of her darkness—a hardened instinct towards self-preservation.

After her mother left, Gwen went upstairs and applied her makeup with a pink sponge she’d seen Lydia use. Lydia had recently been applying her makeup like it was artwork, a plastic sleeve of tiny brushes stuffed in her backpack and a multicolored palette stored in her locker. Gwen knew practically nothing about cosmetics, but she’d made Lydia teach her the basics during study hall that week, the two of them leaning over the cracked sink in the handicap-accessible restroom. “Since when do you care about highlighter?” Lydia had asked.

“One of the girls I’m babysitting for wants me to give her a makeover.”

“Which one?” Lydia asked.

“Which what?”

“Which girl.” Lydia tapped the handle of her powder brush against the faucet, producing a tinny clink.

“Oh, Mrs. Smith’s daughter.”

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“Samantha?”

“Yeah, Samantha.”

“Sure.” Lydia snorted and took Gwen’s chin between her fingers. “Whatever. I’m just happy

I can finally show off my expertise. Now hold still.” She raised an eyeliner pencil with the other hand. “You move and it ruins everything.”

Gwen closed one eye and tried to trace the line of lashes. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t steady her hand. Her wrist wobbled and brown slashed across her eyelid like an old scar. It was already 7:55. She rubbed the errant liner, trying to erase it, but instead it smudged across her lid.

“Fuck,” she said aloud. She had no choice but to repeat it on the other eye.

She expected DinoBoy1212 to be punctual, per usual. Gwen sat cross-legged on her bed, her spine consciously arched into what her mother called ballerina posture. She logged onto Gchat and waited. At 8pm his message popped out from the menu of online users, a new, clean square hovering above her browser.

DinoBoy1212: I’m here! J Ready to see your beautiful face.

The camera button just below her name seemed to throb. She glanced at her own reflection in the screen, streaked with splatters and smears whose origins she couldn’t identify. She felt off- balance, as though she were sitting on a crooked surface. She tapped her mattress with a flat palm to confirm that wasn’t the case. He began typing.

DinoBoy1212: Babe?

Gwen pushed the laptop away from her and leaned against her pillows, ponytail snagging on the headboard. Saliva pooled beneath her tongue. Her bed wavered in front of her, as though warped by heat rising from the bedroom floor.

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DinoBoy1212: Hello?

She felt like she had fallen into a covered slide, her vision narrowing, darkness moving in around her.

Dust. She tasted dust. And blood. Gwen rolled from her side onto her back, carpet rustling beneath her. What was under her back? She stuck a hand beneath her ribs and pulled out a long- abandoned tube of cherry Chapstick. A serendipitous occurrence—her lips hurt like hell. She opened her mouth and tried to stretch them, making an O and then a stiff smile. They spread drily, cracking at the edges. Did she still have all her teeth? She ran her tongue over the inside of her mouth and yes, hallelujah, everything was intact.

She rose to her knees, hands planted firmly on the carpet, and then stood up carefully. She took slow steps to the mirror balanced on her dresser. Her bottom lip had swollen to twice its normal size, like that time when Lydia had insisted they try the homemade lip balm she’d infused with chili peppers.

Pain abruptly announced itself, like a cleaver cutting through cartilage. Gwen held both her hands to her head, as though steadying it could end the relentless stabbing of her skull. She stumbled back to her bed, one hand still on her temple, and stuffed her head face-first into her pillow. She swore she could hear the sizzle of pain searing her brain, and that was almost worse than the pain itself, the way this sound grew louder and louder, promising a more intense punishment next, the warning clap of thunder moving closer. She threw her pillow to the ground and the context of this moment rushed in around her, her computer screen gone black at the foot of her bed. She darted forward and clicked the keypad frantically, the laptop groaning at her efforts.

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DinoBoy1212: …

DinoBoy1212: This isn’t funny, you know.

DinoBoy1212: Seriously? I can see you’re online.

DinoBoy1212: Everyone here’s the same. I’m just looking for real conversation and a real connection.

DinoBoy1212: I didn’t ask for this.

DinoBoy1212: Fuck

DinoBoy1212: I hope someone treats you like you treated me.

DinoBoy1212: I liked you.

Gwen wanted to throw up. She dangled her head over her bed and shoved her fingers deep into her throat. All she did was choke herself, spit splattering over the carpet, her chest heaving for air. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“You’re not responsible for his actions,” Cassandra told Gwen at her next therapy session.

“Why not? Didn’t they convict that girl who texted her boyfriend to kill himself?”

Cassandra lifted a stockinged heel out of her pump and rubbed it against her calf. “Did you tell Dan to kill himself?”

“No, of course not, but—”

“I’m more interested in why you feel so indebted to a man you’ve never met.”

Dan was the name Gwen had given DinoBoy1212. She’d told Cassandra an altered version of the true events—Dan was a boy Celia had talked to on Tinder, and he’d sent her distressed messages after she’d stopped responding to him.

“I don’t feel indebted to him,” Gwen said.

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“Then why bring him up?”

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Talk?”

“You tell me things you feel guilty about,” Cassandra said. “You don’t like talking to me, so it’s a form of self-flagellation.” She plucked a tube of hand cream off her desk and applied it to her palms. “Just my professional opinion, of course.”

Gwen’s cheeks burned. “It’s not you. I don’t like talking to anyone.”

“You liked talking to Dan. Until you didn’t.”

“Writing to each other—texting—isn’t talking. It’s…”

“It’s what?” Cassandra asked gently.

Gwen’s chair squeaked as she shifted her weight. “There’s not a word for it yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you talk to someone—on the phone, or in person—your real voice or your real face is right there. You’re essentially anonymous until you meet someone in person. Your identities are totally unguaranteed.”

“Were you being genuine? With Dan?”

“Yes.” She pulled a piece of skin off of her healing lip. She’d told her mother that she’d had a bad reaction to some lip balm. “I was.”

After the session ended Gwen left the room quickly, an untied shoelace slapping against the hardwood floors. In the waiting room she tried to message DinoBoy1212 again, like she had since the incident occurred three days ago. But she was still blocked. She pulled at her lip until the skin opened, wet and raw.

On the way to pick up Gwen, Denise stopped at Walgreens for a pack of cigarettes. She promised herself that she would only smoke one and then throw the pack away, but she ended up

105 chain-smoking by the picnic tables behind the pharmacy drive-through where no one would see her.

Vince would throw a fit if she knew, and she had no idea what Gwen’s reaction would be—she seemed determined to keep her opinions to herself now, hiding them behind uninterested eyes.

The cigarette tasted amazing—smoky and rich and slightly sweet. It was her only vice, and wasn’t she allowed one? Apparently even Gwyneth Paltrow smoked a cigarette a week. And if

Gwyneth could, why not her?

After she finished the pack, she went back inside to purchase a cheap perfume from the glass case beside the cash register. She ended up with something called Sweetie Pie, an intensely spicy scent that made Denise smell like she’d dipped herself in spilled cinnamon. She held her breath until it mellowed so she wouldn’t gag.

“What the hell is that?” Gwen asked when she got in the car.

“What?”

“You’re telling me you can’t smell that?” Gwen asked.

“I was just at Vince’s. Maybe he’s using a new air freshener.”

Gwen grumbled something undecipherable and pulled out her phone. “You were late to pick me up, by the way.”

Denise chose to ignore this comment—Vince had recently been preaching the power of disengaging from provocation, and even though she thought most of his self-empowerment talk was bullshit, that point rang vaguely true.

“Who are you texting?” Denise asked as she pulled back onto the road.

“Just a friend.”

“Who? Lydia?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I do like to know what’s going on in my daughter’s life, from time-to-time.”

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When Denise tried to glance at the phone’s screen, Gwen covered it with her hand. “Mom!”

Denise threw her hands up in exasperation. “Okay, okay. Don’t tell me.”

Gwen put her phone in her pocket and turned to look out the window. “What’s going on in your life?”

“What do you mean?”

“That disgusting perfume did not come from Vince. Are you having a midlife crisis?”

Denise tugged at one eyebrow with her fingernails. Why did she think she could have a pleasant conversation with her teenage daughter? “Okay. We’ll just keep our secrets to ourselves for now.”

“Fine by me,” Gwen said. She picked up her phone and started typing.

Denise glanced at Gwen’s screen out of the corner of her eye. She was looking at pictures of

Gemma Anderson. Not the ones from the news, but ones Lea hadn’t seen. She was on Gemma’s

Facebook page.

“What?” Gwen demanded.

“Nothing,” Denise said, diverting her eyes. She wouldn’t bring it up. There were some thing about her daughter that she didn’t want to know.

107

Relapse

Laparotomy

Lydia sits on the edge of her mother’s bed. “My baby,” her mother says, lifting one hand to cup Sammy’s chin. The plastic IV taped to her wrist scrapes against Lydia’s face. “My sweet little babe.” She’s coming out of anesthesia, and sways slightly in the hospital bed, as though her neck can hardly support her head.

“You want some water?” her father asks. Cafeteria Jell-O clings to his overgrown mustache like red snot. While her mother was in surgery Lydia and her father consumed, collectively, three cups of cherry Jell-O, two double fudge brownies, one slice of key lime pie, one bowl of chocolate mousse, and a slab of something yellow and unlabeled—maybe cheesecake. Their gluttony seemed reasonable at the time, though they’re both viciously nauseous now. How else to dull the pang of panic in their stomachs than by smothering it with sugar and fat?

“Water sounds nice,” her mother says dreamily. She hooks one finger through a wave of hair that’s fallen loose from Lydia’s ponytail. She pulls the strands taught, until they’re straight as straw.

“One water, coming up!” Her father’s voice strains with forced cheer. He’s desperate to be helpful, and Lydia knows he’ll come back not just with water, but a vending machine treat and perhaps something from the gift shop—a teddy bear stuffed to obesity, a limp package of tulips, poorly made earrings. He works as a math teacher at the local high school, and this is how he is with his students, too: tutoring hours, study groups, endless extra credit. His students call him Mr. MIP, because his support often increases their SAT scores by hundreds of points.

Lydia’s mother continues to pull on her hair until her scalp burns. Lydia swallows her ouch and gently guides her mother’s hand to rest on top of the hospital blanket, careful not to tangle the

108

IV. Her father closes the door so quietly that Lydia doesn’t realize he’s left until she turns to ask for a Diet Coke.

“Can you massage my back?” Her mother’s words are half-slurred.

“Are you allowed to be on your side?” Lydia knows she should really be asking the nurse,

Jocelyn, but her mother is already tilting to the left of the bed, tucking her shoulder beneath her.

Lydia can do nothing but hold the tubes and cords out of the way.

“Right below the shoulder blades.”

“Does it hurt? Should we call someone?” Lydia feels like an uncertified babysitter, an incompetent lifeguard, a panicked pilot. The beep of the bedside monitor spikes her own pulse and the drip of the saline makes her bloated stomach squirm. Her mother’s vulnerability has never been so explicit.

“No no no. I’m fine.” Her mother cranes her neck to look up at Lydia, cheek splotched from the scratchy pillow. “Really, I’m fine.”

Lydia hates herself for hesitating. She remembers the way Sam Powers froze after she took off her shirt in his bedroom, the red stain of her birthmark spilling from the cup of her bra. “Oh,” he finally said, which would not have been so terrible if he hadn’t picked up her shirt from the floor and handed it to her.

Lydia unties the bow of her mother’s hospital gown and the dotted fabric flaps open, revealing her shoulders’ galaxy of sunspots and freckles. She kneads the heel of her hands into the pale flesh, but lightly, as though it’s a dough she fears overworking.

Lydia has never touched her mother’s bare back before, except for those hot days at the beach when her mother would struggle to coat herself in sunscreen. Their relationship is one with clear boundaries and borders, for which Lydia is mostly grateful. Sometimes, though, she wouldn’t mind being closer. Gwen can recite her mother’s entire personal history, hitting all the major

109 milestones along the way: first job, first sexual encounter, first tragedy. Lydia only knows her mother’s timeline from motherhood onward—what about the long stretch before she was born, when her mother’s life more closely resembled her own? Perhaps that’s simply the project of being a daughter: trying to forge your own identity without knowing if you’re stepping into the same traps your mother did. “Does this hurt?” Lydia asks.

“I can’t even feel it. Use more pressure.” Lydia presses tentatively against the skin. “C’mon, harder.” Irritation ripples through her mother’s voice. Lydia presses in again, and the tissue quivers beneath her hand, a knot of muscle refusing to untangle. “Harder. You’re not going to break me.”

Lydia digs her fingers in and something crunches, her knuckles pop. Her mother lets out a hiccup of a gasp. Before Lydia can stutter out an apology, the door opens.

“What’s going on?” Jocelyn chirps.

It’s an innocent question, an attempt at conversation and nothing more, but embarrassment warms Lydia’s cheeks like the afterglow of a slap. “Nothing,” she says, taking a step towards the window. “We were just talking.”

“Well then how about I hop on in and check these vitals.” Jocelyn starts tapping away at the computer mounted to the wall, her nails clicking against the plastic keys. “You’re looking ship-shape.

A real model patient.” She spins the single pearl on her necklace between her thumb and index finger, rolling it up and down the thin gold chain.

Lydia looks out the window to try and give her mother some privacy. The room faces the parking garage, and a woman in scrubs is leaning against the top floor’s railing, alternatively smoking a cigarette and taking sips of a green juice.

“Are you experiencing any pain?” Jocelyn asks.

“No,” her mother says, still folded on her side.

“Any discomfort at all?”

110

“No.”

Liar. Lydia glances at her mother’s naked back out of the corner of her eye, each freckle or sunspot a clue to some other life, a life where she slathered herself with baby oil and untied the straps of her bathing suit and smoked pot and kissed boys and drank sweating bottles of beer. Or maybe they’re simply pockets of melanized cells, as Mrs. Thompson, the health teacher, explained during her plea that Lydia’s class use sunscreen every single day. Lydia imagines her own daughter catching a glimpse of her birthmark, asking her what it is. Maybe she’ll say what her mother once told her: a scar from a past life. Or maybe she’ll say: too many red blood vessels, and what she’ll mean is: there’s no story here, just skin.

Anamnesis

When Lydia was eleven, she wore a black velvet dress and shiny Mary Janes to her mother’s gallery opening. Lydia remembers her mother attempting to buff out a scuff above the left toe with a dishtowel and mayonnaise. Back then she insisted on trying natural, homemade remedies before anything chemical or manufactured—the month prior she’d made an oatmeal-honey paste to coat

Lydia’s splotches of chicken pox. “You’re not careful, are you?” her mother said, scrubbing away.

“Stop it,” Lydia answered, because she felt too old to have her mother fussing over her shoe.

Lydia and her father stood by the refreshment table, a glass of red wine in his hand, a can of

Sprite in hers. When they got bored of eating butterfly-shaped crackers and squares of sharp cheddar cheese, they considered the doorway to the gallery.

“Should we do a lap?” her father proposed.

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The show was about bodies. Lydia’s father walked ahead of her as their shoes squeaked against the glossy wooden floor, scanning the pieces for explicit content. Upon spotting anything inappropriate, he would pick Lydia up and spin her to face the door leading to the bathrooms.

“Adult content,” he’d whisper. Lydia didn’t mind his censoring. The last thing she wanted was to confront a naked man or woman with her father beside her. Just two weeks ago she’d been scarred for life when she and Gemma walked in on her older brother reading a Playboy in the basement, his body supine on a beach towel, shiny athletic shorts and checkered boxers scrunched to his ankles.

Lydia and her father wandered from piece to piece in a strange shuffle, Lydia’s toes pressed to her father’s heels, her eyes trained on the stiff polyester of his blazer. There was a stain in the valley between his shoulder blades, a dark splotch whose shape reminded Lydia of a seahorse’s tail.

She imagined her mother secretly painting it there, dipping her tiniest paintbrush into a bottle of olive oil.

Her father stepped out of Lydia’s line of vision, having deemed the art in front of them daughter-appropriate, and they both cocked their heads at the sculpture, like collies hearing the patter of kibble. A woman’s face, sculpted from cracking marble, was stacked atop a pair of smooth copper legs and nothing else. The Body Snatcher, Lydia’s father suggested. This was his favorite gallery game, one he referred to as Art-ternative Titles. Even then, Lydia found this more embarrassing than funny, and glanced around to see if anyone had heard him.

“What do you think?” Her mother appeared with a sudden swirl of her metallic purple skirt.

She’d been making the rounds, as she called it, for the last hour.

Her father wrapped his arm around her mother’s shoulder. “I appreciate the various meditations on the ephemeral nature of the body.”

“Yes,” Lydia said.

112

“You two are so full of BS.” Her mother punched her father lightly on the arm. “But I’m glad you could guard the refreshments.”

“Always ready to report for duty.” Her father saluted in the direction of the snacks.

“And my paintings look good, right?”

“Best in show. I don’t know why anyone would bother with the rest, honestly.”

Lydia turned to look at one of her mother’s painting. She’d seen it in the studio before. It was a tornado of blush-colored swipes and gray swirls. Possibly in the shape of a woman’s silhouette? Lydia had spent many hours squinting at the arrangement of colors, reinterpreting the shapes again and again as though she were cloud watching. She finally decided that it was a portrait of their dog, Pistachio.

“What do you think?” her mother asked Lydia. “Do you like mom’s work?”

Her mother did this sometimes, but only when talking about her art—spoke in third person, as though encouraging Lydia to see her paintings as canvases without context, pieces she’d first stumbled upon in a museum instead of her basement. Lydia thought it was a tactic for eliciting an honest answer, though she’d never say anything remotely negative about her mother’s art. Still, she wasn’t a good liar. “Mm,” she responded.

“She loves it.” Her father squeezed Lydia’s shoulder. “She loves it so much she’s speechless!” Lydia looked down at the smooth toes of her shoes. The mayonnaise had worked well.

“Don’t speak for her, Roger.” Lydia’s eye twitched underneath her mother’s intense gaze.

She was looking at Lydia in the same way she looked at her canvases—searching, frustrated, critical.

“I’m going to get a refill.”

“Can you get me—“ her father said, but her mother had already walked away. Lydia wished she’d said the right thing, but that was how she felt, looking at her mother’s art: like she didn’t know what to say.

113

Etiology (Speculative)

Lydia was in fifth grade when the landfill shut down. The Nashquitten Mariner reported that the owner went bankrupt due to a gambling problem and what the paper called “entanglements with working women.” Gwen lived down the street from its gates, and her older brother, Jeremy, claimed that you could gain super powers by touching the giant hill of trash.

“What kind of powers?” Lydia asked. She and Gwen were sitting at Gwen’s kitchen table doing homework, and Jeremy had come downstairs to retrieve a slice of cold pizza from the fridge.

“It depends on the kind of trash,” he explained, mouth half-full. “Like, a dirty diaper isn’t gonna do anything. But a car battery? Or incinerator ash?” Jeremy wiggled his fingers like jellyfish tentacles. Gwen was not impressed.

“Oh, bite me.”

“Lydia believes me.” Jeremy pointed accusingly at her chest.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah, you do.” He gestured in the direction of the landfill like a television presenter. “Step right up and pick your mutation.”

Lydia walked past the landfill on her way home that day. Heaps of trash rose from the ground like dirty sand dunes, craggy with plastic bags, sodden diapers, cracked televisions, water bottles, stripped tires. She stuck her fingers through the loops of the chain-link fence and breathed in the place’s rotten ripeness. Where had her family’s trash ended up? Was it beneath that moldy box, or behind that one-eyed doll? If someone inventoried every speck of trash, what would it say about Nashquitten: about the things people wanted to forget, or forced themselves to?

114

No one was around. Lydia reached below the skirt of her dress and pulled down her underwear. She’d gotten her period for the first time a few days ago, and she hadn’t told anyone, not even Gwen or her mother. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed, she just didn’t want the fanfare that would inevitably ensue, Gwen pestering her with hundreds of questions and her mother doing something painfully “progressive,” like buying her a cake to celebrate. And the truth was, it didn’t feel like a milestone at all. She cramped and bled, but she didn’t feel like some ancient womanly wisdom had been bestowed upon her. If anything, she had less appreciation for her body.

Since she hadn’t told anyone, Lydia had been buying her pads from the coin-operated dispensers in the girls’ bathroom at school. They were extremely thin, and today she’d bled through one, though thankfully it hadn’t leaked through to her dress. She pinched the waistband between her fingers, examining the fabric. She didn’t want her mother taking her laundry and discovering the stain, which would lead to an endless stream of questions.

Lydia balled up the underwear in her hand and took a few steps backwards, arm cranked back like she’d learned in softball. The underwear tumbled over the fence and landed on a nearby mattress, a crumpled pile of purple cotton. Lydia looked over her shoulder and broke into a run.

Even though no one was there, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.

Anamnesis

“Imagine where all of this has been!” Lydia’s mother once said as they built sandcastles on the beach behind their house. “You’re holding rocks from all over the world in your very hand.”

115

“Even Antarctica?” asked Lydia. She was eight, and had recently learned the names of the continents.

“Sure,” her mother said. “Why not.”

“Antarctica incoming!” Her father leapt forward and dumped a sea turtle-shaped mold onto her mother’s head, raining sand and dried shards of seaweed over her hair.

After a brief moment of open-mouthed shock, Lydia’s mother chased her father into the ocean, where she jumped onto his back before they disappeared beneath the water. Panic jolted

Lydia to her feet. She stumbled in the sand and screamed, “Mom! Dad!” so loudly that a nearby sunbather asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”

They were gone. In the moments before her mother’s head reemerged, Lydia pictured her entire life altered: she would be sent off to live in Connecticut with her Aunt Terry, she would call herself an orphan, she would replay this moment over and over for years to come, thinking of everything she could have done differently.

And then, she returned. Her mother, bursting through the building curl of a wave, head as sleek as a seal’s. “I’m right here!” she shouted, waving a hand at Lydia. “See me? Right here!”

Relief was the first thing that hit her. But then, there was a twinge of something else, too. As she knelt down to sit in the sand, she realized it was disappointment. Disappointment that her life would continue as usual, uninterrupted by tragedy, which for a fleeting moment had seemed not just devastating, but thrilling.

Symptom

“On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you experiencing?” Dr. Robinson asks. Lydia has seen him for ten years, since she was seven. He has prescribed her ointments for her eczema,

116 antibiotics for her acne, inhalers for her asthma. This is the first visit she’s asked not be reported to her parents.

Lydia focuses on the throbbing in her pelvis. “A five?”

He nods and moves to the examination table where he’s instructed her to lie flat. He lifts her disposable gown and presses his hands to her bare stomach. They’re fleshy and cold, like recently defrosted fish. He lifts the band of her underwear and peers beneath. His fingertips rub a part of her no one else has touched before, and she tries to relax by breathing deeply through her nose. It doesn’t work. Every part of her is clenched. “Have you had any abnormal spotting or bleeding?”

“No.”

He releases her underwear and it snaps gently against the skin. “I don’t believe there’s anything abnormal here. It could be an ovarian cyst, which will likely pass on its own.” He steps back and squirts hand sanitizer onto his palms, which makes the whole room smell like spilt vodka.

Lydia sits up and her head goes dizzy. She grips the sides of the examination table for balance. “What should I do if the pain doesn’t improve?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. I mean, come back if so, but this is probably more psychosomatic than anything.” He hands Lydia the small plastic basket holding her clothes. “Deep breathing can be very helpful for anxiety,” he advises, which Lydia interprets as: you’re your own worst enemy.

“I’ll try that.” She dismounts the table, a surprisingly noisy task given the paper sheet beneath her. It crackles enthusiastically beneath her thighs.

“Try eating spinach, too,” he adds, one hand on the doorknob. “It’s got lots of iron. Maybe you’re anemic.”

After her appointment, Lydia is about to drive home when a cramp leaves her breathless.

She doubles over in the driver’s seat, touching her forehead to her knees, and imagines the

117 prolonged burst of pain knocking against her organs like a marble moving through a pinball machine.

“Fuck you,” she says aloud, and she’s not sure who she wants to tell this to, if it’s herself, or

Dr. Robinson, or both.

Follow-Up

They wait.

Her mother’s surgeon, Dr. Wilson, is optimistic—but cautiously so. Lydia focuses on the cautiously, her father focuses on the optimistic, and her mother refuses to focus on anything at all, ignoring all talk on the matter. She works in her basement studio all hours of the day, resurfacing only for meals with paint dried in her bangs and lodged beneath her fingernails. This is not quite as it was before—she’s working more, her project shrouded in unusual secrecy—but it’s close.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it,” Lydia says to Gwen. “That wait is a verb.” They’re tanning at the beach in front of Lydia’s house, baseball caps pulled over their faces. They have to lift their brims to speak.

“I guess.” Gwen says this in the kind of tone that implies a shrug. Lydia tries to make out her silhouette through the fabric of her cap, but all she sees is darkness. “You’ve been very philosophical lately.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s nothing. Just an observation.”

Gwen’s right, and though Lydia can tell that Gwen thinks her ruminations are steeped in bullshit, it’s still a comfort to have someone notice her patterns. The waiting has trapped Lydia in the whirlpool of her thoughts. Without any definitive news, she imagines each terrible possibility,

118 convinced that if she can name every unwanted outcome, then she will prevent them from happening. If the cancer has taught her anything, it’s that the universe favors surprise over the expected.

So, she tries to expect everything.

The doctors didn’t remove the cancer. The doctors discovered cancer in every organ and lymph node. The doctors found it was far worse than anything they’d ever imagined.

The timer on Lydia’s phone goes off, and she says goodbye to Gwen; she has a cake in the oven. She’ll return to the beach once she’s set it on the counter to cool. In an attempt to fill these liminal days, Lydia has taken up baking, and her father has revived his college fascination with mead- making.

Lydia wonders how long they’ll live in this space between before the cancer and after the cancer

(her worst fear: that they won’t reach after the cancer). She feels like she’s stepped off a treadmill, the belt of her old life still moving beneath her as she trudges through these uncertain days, the past reverberating beneath the present.

Lydia jogs through the sand to her house’s back steps. This house has been passed through her father’s family for years, from father to eldest son. It’s worth millions now—she’s heard her parents talking about its worth early in the morning, when they think she’s still asleep. They’re trying to figure out how to pay the hospital bills.

Her bare feet track grit through the house, which she knows her father will comment on later, but the compensatory vacuuming will give her something to do, and that is what she needs: something to do. Inside the kitchen, she opens the oven and a gust of heat blows back into her face.

It’s ninety-seven degrees outside and Gwen told her she must have some kind of death wish, except she realized what she was saying halfway through the sentence and pretended to start coughing.

119

Lydia sets the cake down on the counter. Its center immediately sinks, which usually means it’s underdone, but a toothpick comes out clean. She doesn’t care. A mistake is another thing to focus on, and a thing she can fix. Lydia begins to gather the bowls and measuring cups from the drying rack. This time she will follow the recipe exactly. This time the cake will be perfect.

Mead gurgles in plastic buckets beside the refrigerator, bubbles frothing in the glass bulbs measuring the alcohol content. Lydia often hears her father working late at night, reracking the liquid and noting its color in a journal. She cannot sleep, either, which is why she hears him. She would be in the kitchen if he weren’t.

Lydia’s so busy relocating the ingredients in the pantry that she doesn’t hear Gwen come inside. “What are you doing?” she asks. Her rainbow beach towel is tied around her waist like a sarong, and in the cool light of the kitchen her sunburn is obvious, her shoulders twin blisters. Lydia drops a bag on the counter and it sneezes flour. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I’m baking, like I said.” Lydia hears the bite in her voice but doesn’t apologize, focusing instead on sweeping flour into her hand.

“I thought you were done.” Gwen wets a paper towel and wipes the counter clean. She points to the cake. “You are done.”

“I’m not done.” Lydia is suddenly angry. Did she ask Gwen to leave the beach? To help clean this mess? To offer her opinion? “Are you blind?” She jabs a finger at the cake, the bowls, the flour. “Nothing is done. Absolutely nothing is done.”

Gwen stiffens and stares. Lydia realizes that she’s panting.

“Okay,” Gwen says slowly. She leans in front of Lydia to look at the cookbook open on the counter. “Should I get the wet ingredients?”

“If you want.” Lydia’s voice is still sharp. Leave, she’s trying to say. But Gwen, as though impervious to her volatility, squats to retrieve the oil from the Lazy Susan. She says nothing more,

120 and they make the batter this way, moving wordlessly from instruction to instruction, Lydia in charge of the dry ingredients, Gwen in charge of the wet.

Gwen only breaks the silence once their cake is in the oven. “Can we eat this?” She gestures to the sunken cake. Lydia shrugs, so Gwen cuts them both a slice. It’s simple vanilla, and they eat it sitting on the counter, drumming their feet against the drawers. “It’s good,” Gwen says.

“Thanks.” Lydia rests her plate on her thighs. “I’m sorry,” she begins to say, but Gwen waves her apology away.

“Keep eating.”

“Really—”

“I love you,” Gwen says. “You’re fine.”

Homeopathy

Lydia rolls over, knotted in sheets, and realizes it’s the first of August, her mother’s surgery already two weeks past. Just like that, she’s awake and ready. She runs to the shore wearing only her sleeping shirt, refusing to linger on the self-conscious heat that blooms across her bare thighs. No one is on the beach yet, but the sun is starting to spill across the horizon like fired glass. The ocean has grown cold under the moon, but Lydia still strips as the foam of the waves licks her toes. She weights her shirt and underwear with a pile of pebbles so that they won’t blow away.

She finds the drop-off from the sandbar quickly. The water splashes up to her neck and she can’t feel her feet or even her hands, everything numb and goose-pimpled beneath the frothed surface. A rubbery strand of seaweed wraps around her wrist like a bracelet.

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She holds her breath and dunks underwater. It used to be tradition. Her mother said that nothing bad could happen during a month that started in the sea.

Anamnesis

When Lydia was six years old, her mother announced that she was pregnant. A little sister, her parents told her. You’re going to have a little sister.

Lydia watched her mother’s stomach swell, rubbed the roundness of her belly with both hands while chanting parmesan parmesan parmesan. It was her favorite word at the time, and she thought it held magic that would help the baby grow. The incantation made her mother laugh without fail. She predicted the baby would be addicted to cheese.

Rosie was born three months early. Her mother’s water broke in the frozen aisle at the

Village Market; the setting was the most dramatic part of the event. A thin trickle of water ran down her thigh from beneath her skirt, which Lydia didn’t notice until her mother started frantically rubbing her leg. She slammed the freezer door shut, called Lydia’s father, and informed her that her sister was arriving earlier than expected.

Rosie turned out to be a puckered, gummy thing, much different than Lydia had imagined.

She’d pictured a plump, milky baby with a full head of hair, but Rosie was not that. Rosie scared her.

Lydia hoped, for her sister’s sake, that she would grow into something pretty. Rosie lived five hours hooked up to a series of tubes, her body warmed in a plastic box, but Lydia didn’t learn the exact amount of time until she found her mother’s diary years later.

That was Lydia’s first time in a hospital. She wandered away from her mother’s room while the doctor was talking to her parents and ended up in the cafeteria, shoving stolen brownies into her

122 pockets. There was a courtyard on the hospital’s second floor, and Lydia sat on the grass and pinched off bits of brownies, rolling them into tiny balls that she tossed into her mouth. Her father found her a half hour later, face flushed with anger, shoulders trembling. “You can’t just go off like that!” he shouted. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“No!” she screamed, and covered her ears with both hands. Her father never yelled.

He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the hospital entrance, where her aunt was waiting.

“Tammy’s taking you home.” Lydia opened her mouth to protest, but her father was already jogging down the corridor back to her mother’s room.

“We’ll have fun,” Tammy promised. Even then, young and uninformed, Lydia was shocked by her aunt’s statement. Of course they wouldn’t have fun. Fun wasn’t in the realm of possibilities.

The next morning her parents returned while Lydia was playing Uno with Tammy out of obligation. They had played Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Go Fish, and

Mouse Trap all in less than twenty-four hours, but Tammy seemed to enjoy the games, so Lydia indulged her. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, after they had returned the boxes to the game closet and Tammy had tucked her in. She’d kept asking her aunt when her parents were coming home with Rosie, trying to get her to admit some crucial bit of information, because clearly the adults were hiding something. But each time Tammy just said, “Honey, I don’t know.” That had been the scariest part of it all—a grownup admitting her ignorance.

When they heard the click of the doorknob, Tammy dropped her cards and jumped up from the coffee table, banging her knee against its leg in the process. Lydia carefully put down her hand and entered the hallway. She had the sense that something big was about to happen, but she wasn’t sure why.

123

Rosie wasn’t with them. Lydia tried to look behind her parents, to see if perhaps Rosie was in a carrier, set down momentarily in order to say hello, but no. Her father kept his arm on her mother’s shoulders, as though shielding her from a strong wind. “We’re going to bed,” he said.

“But it’s the morning. Where’s Rosie?” Lydia asked.

“It is early, isn’t it?” Her father cupped the back of her mother’s head with his palm. “We’re a bit beat, kiddo.” He kissed her dryly on the forehead as they walked past.

“What did you do to her?” Lydia asked quietly. Her parents stepped onto the stairs. “I said,

What did you do to her?”

“Lydia.” Tammy put her arm on Lydia’s shoulder, and Lydia could smell the artificial sweetness of her lotion.

Her mother turned on the stairs. Her hair was matted with grease and her lips had cracked at the edges, dried blood gathering in the crevices. Her father’s grip tightened on her arm. “Let me go,” she said.

Lydia walked backwards towards the door as her mother approached. “Don’t come near me,” she said. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Honey,” her mother tried, but Lydia put a hand on the door knob.

“Don’t touch me,” she warned. “Do you want to get rid of me, too?”

Lydia didn’t know what happened after that, because she ran out the door and towards the lighthouse, where she hid in the attached visitors’ center for two hours, huddled beneath a table that held a plastic model of Nashquitten’s topography, whose wall text explained that it would slip into the ocean by the year 2150 if the town did nothing.

124

Remission

“I have a good feeling,” Lydia’s father tells her. They’re sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a slice of devil’s food cake Lydia baked earlier in the week. She thinks the frosting is too sweet, but her father says that she never likes anything she makes. He’s not wrong.

“Don’t jinx it.” Lydia mashes her fork into a blob of frosting, forcing the chocolate to seep between the tines. It looks like mud. Like shit.

“Stop that.” Her father touches her wrist, his gentle gesture of reprimand. God, he’s so timid. So defenseless. “Call me crazy, but I think we’re going to get good news soon. I just feel it.”

He glances at the door beside the coat closet that leads to her mother’s studio. She still won’t allow either of them to see what she’s making.

“Last time I checked, feelings didn’t count as medical evidence.” Lydia can’t help her bitterness. The limbo has made her brittle, and the only way she can keep from cracking is through a cynicism that, though exhausting even to herself, feels like a safety net of sorts, a guard against disappointment.

Her father wipes away a crumb of cake stuck to his moustache. “What’s gotten into you?” he asks quietly. They do not raise their voices when her mother is home. That’s a rule.

“Nothing’s gotten into me.” She picks up her fork and rinses it at the sink. The water dashes off the metal handle and splatters across her chin, which feels like a rebuke. She and her father are wearing each other down. She can tell that she’ll break him first, rather than the other way around, because his disappointment in her cuts deeper than her frustration with him. His disappointment in

Lydia traces back to himself, in his own failure to raise a daughter who values hope over hardness.

“Positive thinking never hurt anyone,” he says tersely.

“Yeah, but it didn’t help either.”

125

Her father stands up and drops his plate into the sink with a clatter. He reaches over Lydia to flip on the food disposal, though there’s nothing to dispose of. It comes to life with a grinding whir and the bright, blooming scent of lemons—every other night he drops a curl of lemon peel down the drain to freshen the remnants of fish and egg and wet bread. He walks out of the kitchen and leaves Lydia to turn it off.

Two hours later the doctor calls. They can say with confidence that her mother is cancer- free. Not cautiously. With confidence.

Lydia listens in on the conversation from the phone in her parents’ bedroom. She can see the ocean through the window, dyed green in the bright sunlight. It’s a calm, beautiful day: the waves break gently against the damp shore, tickling the toes of parents holding their toddlers just above the water. She hangs up the phone and tries to understand why she’s numb. She should be elated, overjoyed, crying with relief, as she knows her father is downstairs. Instead she feels forcefully sealed-up, like a cauterized wound. She knows that she needs to participate in her family’s happiness, or else she’ll dim their pleasure, pleasure that God knows they’ve earned. So she smacks her own cheeks to give them some color and pinches the tender skin of her wrist before she goes downstairs. The pain doesn’t make her feel anything, either, but she likes that when she looks down she can see the flushed indentations of her nails, proof that even if she can’t control her feelings, she can control what her body does, and who it hurts.

Symptom

Lydia’s parents decide to have date night for the first time since her mother’s diagnosis. Her father leaves the house while her mother’s getting ready, and then rings the doorbell when he

126 returns with a bouquet of yellow roses in one hand. “Is your mother home?” he asks Lydia, who finds this whole performance impossibly corny. Is this how after-cancer will be—a loop of nostalgia meant to salvage the good times cancer didn’t touch?

But of course, it touches the good times anyways. Her mother wears a wig that’s meant to resemble the hair she lost, though the color’s too red and the texture’s too straight. Her mother used to have a head of acorn-colored waves, with wild, untamed eyebrows to match. But she’s penciled in her eyebrows and they’re too cleanly drawn, clearly devoid of dimension or imperfection. “How do I look?” her mother asks while she’s getting ready, self-consciously retying the belt of her wrap-dress, which is now a size too big. “Beautiful,” Lydia tells her.

After her parents leave Lydia cleans her room. Gwen will be arriving soon for a sleepover, and Lydia is tossing clothes from her floor into her hamper when she feels a wetness between her thighs. She practices Dr. Robinson’s deep breathing as she walks to the bathroom, but this only makes her anxious, the flutter of her heart apparent with each exhale.

The toilet seat chills her thighs. When she pulls down her underwear, its lavender cotton is spotted with mud-colored blood. Lydia once read that the older the blood, the darker it is. She repeats this to herself, the older the darker, the older the darker, as though it’s some kind of mantra.

Though she finished her period two weeks ago, she rationalizes that this is simply extra blood, residual blood, leftover blood. After all, she doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to self- diagnoses; just in the last year, she convinced herself she had kidney stones (stomach pain), hyperthyroidism (trembling hands), diabetes (slow-healing bruises). She takes a pad from the medicine cabinet and goes downstairs to wait for Gwen. After all, this isn’t anything to worry about.

So she’s been told.

127

Primary Peritoneal Carcinoma

The good news lasts nine months. Enough time for the saw grass at the edges of the beach to wilt and sprout, for the chickadees to depart and return, for the ocean to freeze and thaw.

Enough time for a tumor to grow, sneaky and sly, to the size of a grape.

“A grape,” Lydia tells Gwen over the phone. “What a nothing lump of a fruit.” Gwen’s away at summer camp in Maine, serving as a CIT to a cabin of nine-year-old girls who stick gum in her hair while she’s sleeping. She’s allowed one phone call a week from the counselor lounge, and alternates between phoning her mother and Lydia.

“Fuck grapes. And fuck cancer.”

“Yeah,” Lydia says. She’s not exactly sure what she wants Gwen to say, but it’s not that. She wishes Gwen would intuit what she needs, as she has so many times before, but then there’s a noise in the background, some sort of commotion, and Gwen tells her that she has to go.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, go. I’ll talk to you in two weeks.”

“Gwen, c’mon!” someone shouts. Gwen hurriedly tells Lydia she loves her.

“I love you, too.” Celia’s line goes dead, and the phone dings over and over, reminding her.

It’s times like this when Lydia thinks of Rosie. How nice it would be, to have just one other person who understands without explanation, and who will remember how it was years later. One person to say, “it wasn’t quite like that,” fighting with you to fill in the gaps, to carve out the truth and set history right.

128

Hysterectomy

Lydia eats the last of her father’s M&Ms while her mother watercolors. Her father’s hunting for a Diet Coke somewhere in the building, even though soda was recently banned from the hospital. Her mother has become obsessed with Diet Coke; she says it tastes like carbonated copper, as though this is a good thing. Her father’s been gone for longer than expected. He will do anything for her mother—steal her an extra bowl of syruped peaches, massage her wrists with rose oil, wash her face with makeup wipes so she can feel human again—especially today. The nurses start prepping her for surgery in an hour.

Her mother dips her paintbrush into a bottle of Dasani on the bedside table. Her lip curls, as it always does when she’s working.

“What are you painting?”

“I’m not sure yet.” She smashes the bristles of the brush against her watercolor pad.

“Something ugly.” She holds up the paper for Lydia to see. It’s a muddy puddle of purples, reds and greens that drips towards the sheets.

“Careful!” Lydia puts down the M&Ms and darts forward to stop the dribble of brown from escaping its page. She dabs at it with her thumb, which makes her mother roll her eyes.

“It’s just paint.” She rests the pad on her knees. “It won’t kill anyone.”

Lydia nods and stays silent. She knows her mother is about to lose something that she herself can’t comprehend, and all she wants is to soothe her, to provide some small comfort, but this is impossible. She’s full of questions she didn’t know she had until today. Did you want another child after Rosie? Were you trying to have another child after Rosie? Am I a disappointment, as your only child? She thinks back to Dr. Robinson. Maybe she’s making these questions mean more than they should.

129

Her mother looks out the window. The sky is thick with fog that smokes out the sunlight.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“Want?”

“Yes, want.” She turns her head back towards Lydia. “What are your dreams?”

Lydia’s throat tightens, as though she’s suddenly walked into a gust of freezing air. She knows her mother will judge her. Her mother, who graduated art school at twenty-one. Her mother, who, after art school, won a fellowship that allowed her to spend all her days painting in her

Brooklyn apartment. Her mother, who….

The timeline blurs. Lydia doesn’t know who her mother was between New York and

Nashquitten, though she knows that her mother moved to be with her father, who she met at a friend’s party. Her mother doesn’t like to talk about what she calls her Tornado Twenties. She says there’s no use romanticizing irresponsibility, and Lydia would kill to know what she means.

Her mother fixes her with dark eyes. Lydia has learned that pupils dilate with an elevated heart rate. She’s nervous. “I don’t know what I want,” Lydia lies. “I’m only sixteen.” She wants basic things, and she hates herself for it. A house, a husband, money. Things girls aren’t supposed to want anymore, because it means you’re ungrateful. Unambitious. Unintelligent. Look at all these things I did for you, she imagines her mother saying. And for what?

Lydia’s mother wants her to be different. Creative. Driven. Anything. Before cancer, she was on a fervent quest to find Lydia’s talent, throwing her at every extracurricular activity she could think of. Nothing stuck.

“I wanted so many things when I was your age,” her mother says sourly. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t share more with Lydia; she hadn’t earned it.

130

“I want things,” Lydia says, suddenly defensive. She’s trying to figure out if articulating her desires will make things better or worse when her mother sets her watercolor pad on the bedside table.

“Will you sell the rest of them?”

“The rest of what?” Her mother’s eyes have drifted to the television, where a commercial advertises the cleaning powers of Oxi-Clean.

“The paintings. The boat ones will sell.”

“You’re sure that’s what you want?” Lydia asks. She doesn’t know how to say no. The whispered money talk now takes place at night as well, after her parents think she’s gone to sleep.

They never name the exact sum of their medical debt during these talks, which makes Lydia think that they have the latest bills from the hospital in their laps, their fingers running over the columns that tell them what the insurance will pay for and what it won’t. Her father’s been teaching at the community college this summer instead of relaxing at home.

Even if she tried to sell the paintings, would anyone want them? She would never bring it up to her mother, but she hasn’t sold a painting in four years. She makes her money from teaching, not from the art itself.

Her mother closes the watercolor pad. “It is.”

Insomnia

Lydia’s parents go to sleep early. Her mother hasn’t healed as easily as the doctors had hoped, and one of her incisions is infected. This week has been measured not by time but location:

131 inside the hospital, or outside of it. Lydia baked three-dozen chocolate chip cookies, two-dozen scones, and a tasteless oatmeal cake with the texture of an organic dog treat.

Before joining her parents upstairs, Lydia descends the carpeted stairs to her mother’s studio. The windowless room reeks of linseed oil and uncapped paint. It makes Lydia lightheaded, and she presses a hand to the wall to steady herself. She knows the price list is somewhere in the swollen file cabinet beneath the desk, and she finally finds it behind an invitation to an art show. She flips over the postcard and sees that it’s a collage exhibition at the Coastal Art Center, where her mother used to teach. Happening tomorrow. She tosses it into the recycling bin.

Lydia has never leafed through the file cabinet before, and it feels like trespassing. She finally locates the packet sandwiched between two old issues of ARTnews. The first page is labeled

NAUTICAL in bold letters. At Sea for $500, Calm Waters for $750, Sailor’s Delight for $1250. She glances around the studio at the paintings tilted against the walls. They all feature blue skies, clear oceans, crisp boats. Anything for the rich white ladies of Nashquitten, her mother used to remark.

Maybe that’s what they didn’t sell—the rich white ladies could tell she was faking.

Lydia’s about to go upstairs when she notices a small canvas in the far corner of the room, propped against the door to the furnace. There’s no light in that edge of the studio, so she shines her cellphone on the painting. The paint has been spackled so thickly that it rises from the canvas in gloppy peaks, like underwhipped egg whites. It’s black and gritty, reminiscent of both tar and cement, and when Lydia touches it (ever so cautiously, with an extended pinkie thumb), the paint feels laced with sand. As far as she knows, her mother has never made anything like this—but really, what does she know?

There must be more. Lydia checks the furnace room, the closet, the narrow space beneath the stairs. She unrolls the yoga mat her mother keeps by her desk and surveys the studio from the floor. But she can’t find any more paintings from this series.

132

Or maybe there’s just one.

She lifts the painting from the floor and carries it to her room, careful to grip it only on the untouched edges of canvas. Her father’s snore punctures the quiet of the hallway, labored and scratchy. She still hears it when she shuts her door.

Lydia rests the painting on her dresser and props it against the supporting wall. It doesn’t look right—the wall’s too pale, the dresser’s too distracting—and so she picks it back up.

Something drips. She’s wet. Without thinking, Lydia carries the painting with her to the bathroom and leans it against the tub. She pulls the single string light above the sink and lowers her sweatpants. A splatter of brown on her underwear, damp and dark. Pain rattles below her left hipbone, dull and wide, like a bruise forming. Lydia takes a deep breath. She extends her feet and places them on the edge of the tub in front of her. She stares at the painting, tracing each paint peak, memorizing every change of color, trying to discover what exactly her mother wanted to say.

133

A Girl Walks Into a Bar

O’Dooley’s was the place where men told jokes. I’d just turned eleven when my father started taking me there after swim class, my towel-dried hair dribbling water over the thick green carpet as we made our way to the bar. I didn’t shower after class and the chlorine made my skin itch, but I didn’t tell my father that.

He’d been a drinker before that winter, but everyone in Nashquitten drank, especially the men, and I didn’t think my father’s four weeknight Sam Adams were unusual. He held his alcohol well, and he was a large man, so I never noticed much of a difference. Besides, how else were you supposed to survive the winters? We once had a blizzard so bad that the snow pressed against our windows like packed sugar. No light for two days. There was nothing to be done because the town’s plowing budget had run out, so we just sat in our dark house pretending we were pioneers, which made the whole thing suck more, because Pioneers was a game I played for fun and now it was anything but.

So, O’Dooley’s. It got us through the brutal winters and the unpredictable summers, when hurricanes would topple our power lines and force us to charge our phones at the generator- powered library. When I was nine I spent the blackout prelude to Hurricane Ophelia at O’Dooley’s; my mom was visiting my Aunt Sally in Florida, and my father said this could be the last chance for us to get out of the house (I didn’t consider that if things got really bad, we might not have a house to come back to). Someone had set tea lights on every booth, and most folks were there for the

Evacuation Special: a shot of whiskey poured into a glass of clam juice. The bartenders used flashlights to figure out what liquor they were pouring, and the waiters wore plastic ponchos because the roof had started to leak. No one seemed concerned that the building swayed like the drunks it

134 produced, so I tried to be brave, even though my hands shook until we left and my father drove us home in winds so strong that they made the car windows hiss like an angry cat.

Still, I thought of O’Dooley’s as a refuge. Its unassuming shabbiness was comforting; the opposite of our house, where my mother didn’t allow me to get on the school bus unless my bed was made and made me clean the bathroom faucet with a Q-tip. The pub was the most bedraggled building in the harbor, precariously balanced on long stilts that extended like spider legs into the harbor. It was in a perpetual state of disrepair, and that winter when me and my Dad became true

O’Dooley’s regulars, the stilts were sutured with caution tape and the door of one of the stalls in the women’s restroom was missing. (I once saw a middle-aged women wearing a leopard print leotard use that exposed toilet, pulling aside the leotard’s stretchy crotch and proceeding to apply fuchsia lipstick as she pissed.) The screens behind the windowpanes were torn, toilet paper stuffed into the holes, and cigarette burns defaced a poster of the Celtics hanging behind the bar. I liked the grit of the place, the way the booths were still covered with crumbs when you climbed into them, and the sticky puddles that covered every surface. My mother kept our house spotless; every morning she’d run her thumb over my bookshelf after she woke me up for school, checking that no dust had collected overnight. But my favorite thing about O’Dooley’s wasn’t the grime. It was the talking fish drilled to the wall named Alfred. My father let me touch Alfie one evening, when we’d first arrived and he was waiting on my Shirley Temple. He sang “Everyone Was Kong Fu Fighting” if you tapped his tail once, and “Penny Lane” if you tapped it twice.

That winter Alfie fell off the wall twice because the pub shook like a turbulent-tossed plane when the ocean got angry. She was furious that year, flinging a mixture of churned foam and ice at the sea wall. The men liked this, though; the harsh weather encouraged their joke-telling, as though humor generated heat, and I can’t deny that I felt warmer as their laughs echoed through

O’Dooley’s.

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The men telling these jokes sat at the table closest to the bar, and they were the only other weeknight patrons. There were five of them: Ben, Ollie, Paul, Chad, and Buck. But even before I knew anything about them, not even their names, it was clear that Buck was the only one that mattered. He wore either a navy blazer with tiny holes in the lapels or a leather jacket with wide arms and fleece lining peeking out of the sleeves. The other men could get a chuckle out of the group, but

Buck was the only one who made them cry with laughter.

My father pretended not to hear the jokes, because it wasn’t the kind of humor you condoned with your daughter sitting next to you. I understood this by the way the men started whispering when I came in, and because sometimes my father would cover my ears if they got too loud, and I’d swat him away, hating the wet heat of his beer-stained palms.

The first time I heard a joke all the way through was after my third or fourth swim lesson—

I’d just learned the butterfly stroke. My father was in the bathroom, and Buck cleared his throat, which meant he had something to say. I swiveled my stool so I could look right into their booth.

Buck beckoned the men closer with a finger, and they all leaned over the table so their foreheads were practically touching. “A girl walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre.” He didn’t whisper, maybe because he’d decided the joke wasn’t risqué enough. He paused, taking time to look each of the four men in the eye. “So he gives it to her!” I didn’t understand, and it seemed to go over his friends’ heads, too, because their necks were still craned forward after he finished, like they were waiting for another line. Eventually, they chuckled.

“I don’t get it,” I told Jill, the main bartender. She was young, probably just out of high school, but regarded the men with the weariness of a much older woman.

“Don’t listen to them, honey.” She plucked a jar of maraschino cherries from the shelf behind her and set them in front of me. “Boys being boys.”

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“Why’d the girl walk into the bar?” I asked my father when we walked home later that night.

Our house was a fifteen-minute walk or a five-minute drive from the bar. My father claimed that he liked the cold because it helped him think, and I didn’t know much about drunkenness back then besides the fact that it made my dad happier than I ever saw him at home. Plus, Sully, who owned

O’Dooley’s, was one of my Dad’s high school buddies and wouldn’t tow our car from the lot if it stayed there overnight. Sully was the reason why I was even allowed to be at the bar, drinking Shirley

Temple after Shirley Temple. I saw our strolls home, like our nights at O’Dooley’s, as proof of my father’s desire to spend more time with me, so I didn’t mind them either, not even when the temperature dropped so low that the snot in my nose froze.

“Why’d the what?” he asked. He couldn’t get his earmuffs to stay on and kept fiddling with them. “Why’d the girl walk into the bar?”

“I’m asking you,” I said. “Finish the joke.”

“Ruthie, I love you, but I’m too tired for jokes.” I would have felt defeated, except then he wrapped his arm around mine and suctioned me to his side, where it was warm and soft and safe.

The next week I walked up to Buck’s booth while Dad went to say hi to Sully in the back. I was a bold kid. I once punched Jeremy Jones in the mouth, knocking out one of his front teeth, because he opened his Swiss Army Knife and threatened one of the squirrels climbing the jungle gym. I was an adrenaline junkie, but not for roller-coasters or log flumes. I got my high from inserting myself where I shouldn’t be.

When I approached Buck my heart flipped the same way it did when I wound up my arm to punch Jeremy. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to feel the way he looked when he landed a good joke, the men laughing so hard they had to wipe their eyes with napkins. “Why’d the girl walk into the bar?” I asked.

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Buck turned towards me in surprise, toying with a speck of food stuck in his moustache.

“Where’s that dad of yours?”

“Why’d the girl walk into the bar?” I asked again.

“Let her tell the joke,” Paul said. The rest of them joined in, yeah, let her tell it, let the girl speak!

Buck stopped tugging at his moustache. “Fine. Why?” He crouched down so our heads were the same height.

I took my time looking all of them square in the face before I continued. They didn’t like that—everyone looked down at the table except for Buck. “Because her eyes were closed.”

“Ha!” Ollie snorted. Paul, Chad, and Ben snickered, too. When Buck cast Ollie a look he shrugged. “Pretty good.”

“You make that up?” Buck asked.

“Yeah,” I lied.

At some point my father emerged from the back room, but I didn’t realize he was standing behind me until I felt his hand on my back. “Sorry, fellas. She bothering you? Got her mother’s lip.”

“No I don’t,” I insisted, which made the men laugh again. I liked my father better than my mother, and I wasn’t sure if it was because we had less in common, or more.

My father tightened his grip on my shoulder. “Apologies if she disturbed the peace.”

“No, no, not at all.” Buck rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. He was thinking something over, that much was clear. “You two wanna sit down?”

My father hesitated. He didn’t have many friends, and the ones he did have he’d met decades ago—his best friend, Evan, he’d known since kindergarten. It wasn’t that he didn’t like to make friends (though this was also true), but that he had absolutely no desire to expand his social circle.

This infuriated my mother, who was always trying to get him to go on double dates with her, but it

138 wasn’t unusual behavior for people raised in Nashquitten, like my father. People stuck to the town like barnacles, no desire to change the shape their life had taken there.

“Please, it’d be our honor,” Buck said. He patted the booth’s leather cushion.

It was hard even for my father to resist Buck. He had a unique brand of charisma that made your self-worth triple just by looking at him. So my father and I sat down. Which was both the start of things, and the end of them.

A girl walks into a bar with her mother. At twenty-five she’s no longer a girl, but that’s what men in bars still call her, so hell, we’ll do the same. She thought suggesting the dive would cause her mother to cancel, or at least reschedule (“Let me make a reservation and call you back”), but all her mother said on the phone was, I don’t know why in God’s name you hang out there.

Her mother wants to know if there is sugar-free sour mix, and there isn’t, so she orders a whiskey Diet Coke instead. She’s shrunk in recent years, and now her head’s too big for her body, but the girl doesn’t bring this up because it would make her mother happy—she’d imply the girl is jealous. The mother thinks girls are most attractive when they’re small. The girl orders a Lagunitas and dips her pinkie finger in the foam when it arrives—it drives her mother nuts.

“How’s work?” her mother asks, ignoring the pinkie. For once she isn’t tapping at something on her iPhone. After she divorced the girl’s father she went back to work as an interior designer, and now spends her days muttering about swatches and feng shui.

“Oh you know,” the girl says. She works at the Coastal Art Center, giving tours to elementary school students and trying to convince them to enroll in the after-school program.

“Work-y.”

“Work-y,” her mother repeats. Her painted lip curls, leaving a splotch of red on her waxed skin. The girl remembers when she never wore make-up. “There’s no possibility of promotion

139 there.” Promotion, that essential rung on the ladder that leads to the girl’s Ultimate Potential, which involves blazers and home ownership and some kind of hypoallergenic dog.

“That’s not true,” the girl says. “I could start giving the spin art demonstrations.”

“Ha ha.” Her mother tips her glass to her mouth. “You’re a real comedian.”

“No,” the girl says. “My mom tells me I’m not very funny.”

Her mother pretends she hasn’t heard this, but the girl senses something else in her terse pause. She needs to steer the conversation elsewhere, and she’s dreading it. “What’s wrong?” the girl asks.

“We need to talk about your father.”

“What about him?” There is just one rule both parties follow in this relationship, and it’s Do

Not Talk About Dad. Sweat slides from the girl’s armpits down her ribs.

The girl’s mother takes a long, noiseless sip of her drink. “There’s been an accident.”

“An accident?” the girl repeats.

“I wasn’t exactly sure how to tell you,” she says, which the girl understands to mean: this will hurt.

Buck took a liking to me. He insisted on buying my Shirley Temples and started calling me

Freckles because of the sprinkling on my nose. One night he said I reminded him of his daughter, and I was about to say, “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” but then the rest of the group went quiet and I realized that he probably didn’t, not anymore.

That same night, when we were all getting ready to leave, he took me aside and made me promise that I wouldn’t turn out like them. “Turn out like who?” I asked.

“Do something with yourself,” he said. “So we can say we were the sad sacks that knew you when.”

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“Okay.” It seemed important to him that I agreed to this.

“What happened to Buck’s daughter?” I asked my father when we walked home. The sidewalk was icy and he made me hold onto his arm as we navigated the slick ground.

“I knew you were going to ask that.” His sigh puffed through the cold air like cigarette smoke. “She died.”

“But how?” I pushed.

“Impaled.”

“Impaled?” I didn’t know what the word meant. It was sharp on my tongue, like the icicles I would break off our gutters to suck like lollipops.

“We’re not talking about this. Let’s be quiet until we get home.”

I stopped walking. “But I want to know.”

He hadn’t realized I was no longer moving, and lost his balance for a moment when I tugged him backwards. “Don’t do that.” His cheeks were so red they looked sunburnt. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t care if you don’t want to talk about it.” By eleven I was already angry, a flammable wick of a girl. Anything could set me off: a cruel joke, an overheard whisper, a suspicious glance. My dad was especially dangerous because I loved him like crazy. In my experience, love doesn’t make you blind—it makes you demanding. I love people who make me dizzy with admiration and lightheaded with affection and dumbstruck with appreciation. I love people who show me how to be better.

I couldn’t watch my father fall short of the person I wanted him to be.

When we’d first gotten to the bar, I told Buck a joke I overheard on the school bus. “What do you call a woman with two black eyes?” I asked, not waiting for him to guess. “Nothing, you already told her twice!” I thought he’d find that funny; I didn’t (what had they told the women

141 twice?) but the older boys on the bus certainly did. And anyways, I didn’t laugh at most of the jokes the men told, because they’d figured out a particular brand of humor they felt comfortable using in front of me, which was Jokes That Went Over Ruth’s Head: “If the dove’s the bird of peace, what’s the bird of true love? The swallow.” Those didn’t make me mad, because I liked being the underdog.

One day I’d know exactly what they meant, and I’d show them all up, wipe those smug grins right off their faces.

Instead of laughing, Buck’s mouth turned stern as stone. “Don’t say things like that.” I’d wanted to ask, “Like what?” but then he’d gone quiet and stayed quiet for the rest of the evening.

“You just don’t know when to stop, do you, Ruth?” My father gripped my arm so tightly that it scared me.

“You don’t know when to stop!” I was yelling—it hurt to yell in the cold, those deep breaths of freezing air. “That’s why we aren’t driving home!”

We stood still on the icy sidewalk, the road empty, the night quiet. A streetlight flickered above us, turning the snow on the ground a harsh yellow.

My father bent down and moved his face so close to mine that I could smell the beer and rotten food on his breath. “You’re impaled when something skewers you right through the middle,” he whispered. “You’re impaled when a tree branch splits through your stomach, rupturing your internal organs so that there’s no way to take it out without killing you. You’re impaled when your friends leave you behind to die.”

I started crying but my father just pulled me along behind him. Even when I slipped and fell he kept dragging me, so that I trailed behind him on my knees the whole way home, scrambling over the ice, never finding my footing.

142

The girl walks into a bar with a man. It’s a hip bar, full of exposed light bulbs, rusted pipes, and candle-stuffed mason jars. The man was smoking cigarettes outside, and the girl could see that he was vulnerable, his lips scabbed from endless picking, his face as round and pale as an eggshell.

The girl didn’t care if he was recently dumped, or recently fired, or recently diagnosed with a terminal disease. She just wanted his body as a buffer for her own grief. And it looked like he could use her for the same thing.

“Distract me,” she dares him once they’re inside, seated at a table made from a hubcap. He orders her a drink from a man wearing a butcher’s apron.

“You seem a little—“ He doesn’t finish his sentence, but makes a series of increasingly frenetic hand gestures, like a mime having a seizure.

“I recently lost someone,” she tells him.

He leans in closer, damp-eyed and open-mouthed. “Oh, god.” He takes her hands. “Me, too.”

“Well, I don’t walk to talk about it.”

He releases her fingers. “Oh, fuck no.”

She had wanted to kiss him, maybe even bring him back to her apartment, but sitting there staring at him, she’s afraid that their cumulative sadness will be too much, a swamp neither of them know the way out of. So instead of touching him, she asks if he’d like to hear a joke.

My mother didn’t know we spent those nights after swim practice at McDooley’s. She thought we were eating dinner at Marcia’s, the pizza joint just three blocks down from the pub.

Around this time a new family had moved in across the street, the Johnsons, and my mother became good friends with Mrs. Johnson, who came over on swim nights and drank white wine and complained about her teenage son Roger, who she feared was either gay and “interested in poetry.”

143

“Let me talk. I don’t want to drag you into this,” my father would say during our walk, which I thought was dramatic, because when we got home all mom would say was, “You two have fun?” and then continue getting ready for bed. Sometimes Mrs. Johnson would still be over and she wouldn’t say anything to us at all, just wave hello with a flick of her fingers and pour herself another glass. When I got older, I wondered what she thought happened to the car. My father would get up before her and walk back to the bar to retrieve it, but surely she noticed our flushed cheeks when we returned at night, our chattering teeth and icy eyelashes. I think that she loved the idea of my father walking me home, chose to focus on the responsibility of that act instead of the irresponsibility that led to it. She was scared of criticizing him, too; he was more fragile than we were, and if you’ve ever seen someone that you love break, well, you know I couldn’t even describe it to you. But it wouldn’t be her who broke him—it’d be me.

One night, a few days after a tsnownami froze our garage shut, I was mad. My father had been uncharacteristically bold that night, drinking more than his usual (six or seven beers), and he wouldn’t stop talking over me. I’d been practicing a new joke all week, but he was being so obnoxious that I couldn’t get a word in. He kept making bad jokes, jokes that the other men found funny because my father was an outrageous, dopey drunk, a sharp contrast to his usual stoic demeanor. “Who am I?” he asked over and over, doing stupid impressions of elephants and lions and various beasts. “Who am I?” I’d learn a few days later that my father had lost his job at Coastal

Realty earlier that day (I’d learn years later that it was because he’d shown up to two showings drunk that week). If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have sold him out.

But I didn’t know that.

My anger was fanned to flames by the time we got home. My father was one of the few people who allowed me to speak without interruption, without guessing at the ends of my sentences or cutting me off with oh, I see what you mean. The man in front of me now was like so many of the

144 other men I encountered, and I hated him for it. “Dad took me to O’Dooley’s,” I told my mother when she asked how the night had been.

My father, who was busy untangling his scarf, snapped to attention. I’d been thinking about saying those words over and over during the walk home, silently shaping the syllables, but I didn’t know I was going to follow through until the truth had already escaped. My father looked at me as if he didn’t know me at all, which was its own strange reward. Keeping looking, I wanted to dare him, and I’ll change just like you did tonight. And I won’t even need a beer to do it.

“What?” My mother was lying on the couch watching TV, and she sat up suddenly, flipping a pillow off her stomach. “Why?”

“Kid’s night.” My father sounded confused by his own lie. “They do kid’s night on

Thursdays.”

“No, they don’t,” I said before my mother could ask. It was then, my father rubbing furiously at his stubbled chin, my mother reaching out to touch my shoulder, that I realized our nights at O’Dooley’s weren’t a shared secret. I was no collaborator. I was a witness. “We go every week after swim practice.”

“Every week? How long has this been going on?” My mother stood up—a menacing move, because although my father was a stocky man, my mother was half-a-foot taller. The vein in her neck wobbled with such intensity that I had to resist the urge to touch it. “How long, Ruth?”

“Since December.” I watched my mother calculate how many months that made; it was

February. I couldn’t stop talking—it was like some motor whirring inside me that I couldn’t shut off.

“We sit with these guys and tell jokes.” My father fixed his gaze on a painting of an apple core that hung beside our La-Z-Boy, and I watched him raise a hand to his mouth and sniff his own breath.

My mother’s lips puckered so tightly that her cheeks caved in like canyons. “What guys?”

“Friends,” my father said hoarsely.

145

“Old men,” I clarified. The motor was still whirring.

“Jesus Christ, Adi.” My mother pinched the skin between her eyebrows. “Go to bed,” she told me.

For the last month of swim class, Jessica Kimball’s mom drove me home.

A girl walks into a bar with a suitcase. This isn’t unusual, because the bar’s in a train station, and everyone’s companion is a purse or a duffle or a trunk.

“Where ya headed?” the bartender asks, simply to make conversation.

“New York,” she says, and then the conversation ends. Nearly everyone in the station is going to New York and there’s not much else to say about it. What the girl doesn’t tell him is that she won’t be ending her travels at Penn Station, but instead boarding another train towards

Poughkeepsie, where she’ll get off at Cold Spring, a town she’s never visited before but that she heard her father mention a few scattered times during her youth. She learned the news about him a week ago, and yet every morning she struggles to remember, like those words whose definitions she can never recall, despite looking them up over and over again: obfuscate, prognosticate, florid.

She orders a gin and tonic even though it’s eleven in the morning. She didn’t eat breakfast, and it doesn’t take long for the world to soften, to turn cushioned and formless despite what’s ahead. There are a handful of other people at the bar—a businessman with a thread-bare head of hair, a woman with a lip of fat hanging over her high-waisted jeans, a pair of suited young men. The girl focuses on these people, her comrades. It would be one thing if she were alone here—you have a problem when it’s just you and the bottle, she’d heard her uncle say before. But here are these strangers, all of them out in the open, sunlight from the station’s windows brightening their faces.

None of them hiding, no airplane bottles downed in restroom stalls or flasks produced from

146 pockets. The girl raises her glass in a toast, even though none of their eyes are on her. There is no reason for them to feel shame.

“When did Dad start drinking?” I asked my mother after they divorced. I was about to go off to college, which they’d decided was a reasonable time to drop the façade of the relationship.

They hadn’t made sense in a long time, even before my father’s drinking got out of hand. My mother loved nothing more than getting out of the house, going to museums or movies, while my father’s passion was constructing miniature models of cities in our basement. Though my mother and I are were often at odds, I felt sorry for her. She spent long periods of time staring out our windows, her mind somewhere else. I think she was considering two very different timelines: one where she met my father, and one where she didn’t. They were set up through a mutual friend, which my mother made into a joke: “Why do you think I don’t talk to Cathy anymore?”

“When did he start?” My mother scoffed. “Ask your grandmother. He was always drinking.”

“But did you notice it when you were dating?” I felt free because my days under her roof were numbered—I could ask questions without consequence.

“Everyone drinks at that age.” She sat on my bed as I packed, ostensibly helping, but really just remarking on what would or wouldn’t cut it in the world of collegiate fashion. “You split a bottle of wine at dinner, you have a whiskey when you get home, you drink a mimosa on the weekend.” She waved her youthful drinking habits away with one hand. “Yada yada yada.”

“Yada yada yada?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Ruth. You either grow up or you don’t.” But it wasn’t a question of outgrowing an urge, I knew that much. I’d watched the way my father drank at O’Dooley’s. Maybe he had anger like I did, and drinking was the only way to cage it. It’s not easy to move through the world angry. In high school I started an anonymous gossip supplement to the school newspaper

147 because I thought it could be a form of justice. It still amazes me, when I think of what those kids were capable of: nude pictures leaks and drugged drinks and rape. I know, I’m not God. It’s not my job to even the score. But how can you just sit still and do nothing?

“Not that.” My mother pointed at the dress in my hands. “It’s dowdy.”

I placed it on my bed instead of in my suitcase, even though it was one of my favorite dresses. I didn’t want her to think I was incapable of growing up.

A girl walks into a bar with a question. It’s the closest bar to her father’s apartment, according to Google maps: one-tenth of a mile. “Do you know Adi Turner?” she asks the bartender.

“Did you know Adi Turner?” she corrects herself. She’d hoped this place would have air conditioning, unlike the train, but there’s just a single ceiling fan spitting hot air into her face.

The bartender puts down the glass he’s polishing with a thump. “Do you?” He fingers his gray lump of a bun with one hand and flicks his tiny hoop earring with the other.

The girl wonders what her father looked like at the end, if he shaved his head like he’d once said he wanted to (her mother would not allow it). She hopes he did. It helps her, to imagine him with a different life, a life where his impulses played out harmlessly, in the form of a shiny skull or an ugly tattoo. “I’m his goddaughter.” The word is unruly in her mouth, like an oversized bite of food.

The bartender slumps into one elbow and looks her up and down. “No shit. Really?” He clears his throat. “S’cuse the language.”

The girl waves her hand, says no worries, though her heart is beating faster.

Then the bartender says the words she was hoping for: “Didn’t know him.”

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“Oh, too bad.” Maybe things had turned out differently than her mother had said. Maybe she hadn’t gotten the whole story. Maybe he did get help, like he told them he would over and over and over again.

“I know the bar had a little arrangement with him, though.” He reaches back and pats his bun again. “Happened before I started working here.”

“Arrangement?”

“Yeah. I don’t know the details, though. Drinks on delivery, or something like that. The owner loved him—once saw the guy carrying a gin and tonic down the street to his apartment.”

This is something the girl can’t stand about herself, the way her better judgment will always fail when it comes to her father. “Hey, you okay there?” She’s fallen against one of the stools—it’s too hot. The bartender reaches for her arm.

“I’m fine.” She forces herself onto the stool, where stuffing is spilling out of the leather cover.

“Can I fix you something? You look like you saw a possum.”

“A possum?”

“I hate possums.”

The girl considers the bottles of alcohol behind the counter, amber-tinted in the dim light.

When did she last have a mixed drink at a party, or even at home with friends? She hasn’t been looking for fun lately, just something to wash away the anxiety that hooks through her thoughts like burdock burs. “How about a gin and tonic?”

I saw my father for the last time at my college graduation. Before that, I hadn’t seen him since a brief visit sophomore year. I only saw my mother for Christmas; I avoided going home during breaks, and spent the summers working on campus. “Are you estranged?” my boyfriend at

149 the time asked, after begging to be “prepped” for meeting my parents. He was an Entrepreneurship and Innovation major, which meant he liked to plan our dates via Google docs.

“I don’t know.” It seemed like too big a word for what we were, and, anyways, I didn’t want a boy who’d never met my father to label our relationship. “It’s complicated.”

“Don’t worry.” He touched my knee. “I’m here for you.”

I planned a careful schedule of festivities in order to minimize the time my parents would have to spend in a room together. I emailed these separate schedules to each parent, asking them to please confirm. Received, my mother wrote. Then my father: wouldn’t miss it.

The first event was a solo dinner with my father, at a pizzeria known for putting macaroni and cheese on its slices. My father didn’t show up drunk or tipsy—he simply didn’t show up at all. I sat in one of the booths for over an hour, reminding myself of his terrible sense of direction and his perpetual tardiness. I called him once, twice, three times, and then finally went back to my dorm.

“How’s your Dad?” my roommate asked from our shared common room.

“Great,” I said. “Fantastic.” Then I hid a box of frozen chicken nuggets under my sweatshirt and ate them alone on my bed, scared that my roommate would grow suspicious if I used the microwave right after dinner.

My father didn’t show for any of the events that I’d e-mailed him about—no coffee at the school bookstore or brunch at the local diner. But he did make it to the ceremony, a huge event in the football stadium on the edge of campus. Look up, he texted as I passed the right side of the bleachers. We all had our phones in our hands, fielding messages from parents trying to take pictures, and I was so surprised to see his name light up my screen that I almost didn’t look up. He handed me a bouquet of roses over the railing. “I’m proud of you,” he said. He was crying. That pissed me off—you don’t get to cry now, I wanted to tell him. You don’t get to be proud of me. I did this without you.

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I couldn’t say anything, though, because I was quickly swept into line by a woman wearing a headset who stressed the importance of staying in alphabetical order. I planned to talk to him more after the ceremony, but when I dialed his number the second I stepped off the stage, the phone went directly to voicemail.

i didn’t want to see your mother, he wrote in an e-mail a few days later. I didn’t reply: But I planned around that or That was the whole point of the schedule, but simply: Ok. Back in my dorm, I threw the roses dramatically out my window, like a spurned lover in a soap opera. A girl on the lawn below actually caught them, and did a happy dance like she’d caught the bouquet at a wedding.

We e-mailed on and off over the few years afterwards. We made half-hearted attempts to visit one another, but one of us would cancel at the last minute. That was our big mistake: falling into a routine defined by broken agreements. Our proposed meetings became nothing more than a performance of what our relationship should be. My anger cooled and darkened, turning into something closer to regret. It settled in my stomach like tar.

Our e-mails were the only thing that stayed consistent. We exchanged two a week, usually on Monday and Friday. I told him about my job at the art center, my friends who had moved to

New York (Should I try that? I wrote, hoping to gain some rare paternal wisdom for once, but he just wrote: do what you think’s best), and whatever else was new. All he ever said about himself was things are things. Though he rarely answered questions, he liked to ask them: how’s working at the art center? does your boyfriend make you dinner sometimes? are you happy?

It reminded me of being a kid, when he made me feel like my thoughts deserved to be spoken aloud, to take up space. When I cleaned out his apartment, I found our emails beneath his bed, printed and stapled. I imagined he had put them there intentionally, as if to say: Look, I cared. I swear.

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A girl walks out of a bar. The air carries the smell of smoke, but the industrial kind, like it’s been funneled through a factory. She follows the directions on her phone to the address her mother gave her, which turns out to be a pet salon called Doggie Style. “I’m looking for 204A?” She says to the groomer, who’s wrangling a half-shaved poodle with weepy eyes. “Back entrance,” she says, tugging on the dog’s neck.

The girl goes around the side of the building, past a fenced yard that reeks of dog shit. A gang of growling terriers leaps at the chain-link as she passes, sticking their snouts through the wire diamonds. “Good dogs, good dogs,” she says over and over, though this seems to agitate them.

The flaking door that leads to the stairs isn’t looked. The steps shudder as she climbs them, and to calm herself she thinks good dogs, good dogs.

She can’t find the key her mother gave her. She digs through her purse frantically, tossing coins and balled tissues onto the ground. Why does she have three different chapsticks, all cherry- flavored? When did she buy miniature hand sanitizer? Why does she have an enormous sanitary pad when she only ever wears tampons? But then—halleujah!—there it is hidden beneath a pack of spearmint gum. She didn’t ask her mother what she should do with it when she’s done.

The apartment itself smells clean, like artificial lemon, and there’s almost nothing in the studio besides a stripped bed, a bureau, and a card table ringed with water stains. He must have known how poor his health was and prepared. Empty vodka handles form a pyramid in front of the bed, like a carnival milk bottle game. There will be boxes for you, her mother had told her, and indeed there are, flattened cardboard ones that, according to the images on their flaps, once held avocados and apples.

The girl is here to pack things up, and so she does. She finds a box of extra-large trash bags beneath the sink and drops the empty bottles into a bag one by one. She puts her father’s clothes in another trash bag, for donation.

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“You don’t have to do this,” her mother had said at the bar. “We can have someone take care of it.”

But isn’t this what a daughter does? She cleans up. And so she moves through the apartment, emptying it for whoever’s next.

I went straight to O’Dooley’s when I returned from Cold Spring. I walked the two miles from the train station to the harbor with my suitcase bumping over the cracks in the sidewalk, plastic wheels groaning. It was one in the afternoon. I’d spent a night in the city after packing up my dad’s things, sleeping on the couch of a friend who begged me to go out to a speakeasy that you entered through a refrigerator. When I told her I was too tired, she left without me. She believed I’d been camping upstate the day before.

I pass O’Dooley’s frequently, but I hadn’t been inside since I was eleven. I paused for a moment by the entrance, which looked as shitty as it had fifteen years ago, spider webs tangled in the awning and a dead box of flowers decaying below the front window. The doorknob felt warmly sticky when I turned it, how I imagined the inside of a body to feel. Inside, it still smelled like burnt hamburgers.

Jill was working the bar, though she didn’t recognize me. Her face had tightened, skin constricting around the bones as though in rebellion of her old nickname, Baby Cheeks. She looked both pissed and exhausted, a woman whose patience had been tried too many times. “What do you want?” she barked.

I ordered a Bud Light that she slid aggressively across the bar, foam trailing behind it like the wake of a wave. I took a sip and knocked my feet against my suitcase, which I’d jammed between my stool and the wall. Why had my father taken me here? Why hadn’t he just come to O’Dooley’s alone, heading back out after he dropped me at home? I waited for a revelation that I hoped would

153 come from this historical reenactment, some sudden understanding that could simultaneously rewrite the past and illuminate it.

It didn’t come. But I was no longer eleven. I didn’t have to wait for my father to say,

“Alright kid, time to go.” I left six folded dollars beneath my glass and abandoned the beer at the bar. I rolled my suitcase down the street towards my duplex, thinking of the e-mails in its front pocket. Things are things. One of the wheels caught on the curb and I tugged it free with a lurch. I may shit-talk my mother, but I will say this: she taught me to keep moving forwards. I lifted my head and blinked into the sun.

154

The Losers

Mona runs to the bathroom before saying hello to anyone at the party. She has to shit so badly that it feels like her bowels have been pumped with concrete. She considered stopping at a gas station during her drive to Remi’s but quickly talked herself out of it, because ten days earlier a doctor had cut open her stomach, and now she’s paranoid about germs, diseases, incurable superbugs that leave you seizing and vomiting. “Be extra aware of your hygiene,” the nurse warned her when she woke up from surgery, groggy and spittle-covered. “Hospitals weaken your immunity.”

That day Dr. Callahan had searched Mona’s insides for endometriosis, which could only be diagnosed through the same surgery meant to scrape it away. “That’s the only way?” Mona had asked at her initial appointment. “You can’t do an ultrasound or something?”

Dr. Callahan’s mouth had remained ruler-straight as she spoke. “I promise, we cannot.”

When she had entered Mona’s abdomen, pumping it full of carbon dioxide to get a better view of her organs, Dr. Callahan found rogue uterine lining colonizing her bladder, rectum, ovaries and cervix. “Guess my uterus is kind of a slut,” Mona said after Dr. Callahan relayed the news. The woman simply blinked and glanced down at her clipboard. Dr. Callahan wore no makeup and kept her fingernails trimmed so short and square that they resembled Chiclets. If her internal organs ever betrayed her it wouldn’t be through overpopulation, but some kind of worn decay, like osteoporosis.

“Take it easy,” she advised.

Now, Mona strains and strains, digging her fingers into her thighs so aggressively that she threatens to split the nylon of her tights. She’ll shoot an eyeball out of its socket before this turd exits her ass. Dr. Callahan warned that constipation was a side effect of the surgery, but no amount of prune juice or Citrucel seems to be helping. Mona gives one last push, but nothing escapes her

155 body besides an unintentional, gorilla-like grunt. She’s pulling her underwear up when the bathroom door rattles on its hinges.

“Let me in!” Fists pound against the wood. “Now! It’s an emergency!” Not the reedy, cool request of one of Remi’s friends, but the drawn-out squeal of a child. Poppy. “Come on!”

Mona hikes up her skirt and rushes towards the door, gliding ungracefully over spotless tile.

Remi must have Swiffered. Or paid someone to Swiffer. “What’s the password?” she asks, one hand on the knob.

“Auntie Mona?”

“I cannot reveal confidential information until you tell me the password.” Mona opens the door just a crack, enough for her left eye to peek out into the hallway. Poppy immediately jams her face into the crevice.

“I’m gonna pee my party clothes!” She stomps loudly back and forth, grabbing her crotch.

“Fine. I’ll make an exception for the lady of the hour.” She swings the door fully open and

Poppy rushes to the toilet, unzipping her jeans with the urgency Mona so recently experienced.

Poppy vaults onto the toilet (she literally needs a running start—the seat is too high without her stepstool, which is mysterious missing) before Mona can properly shut the door. Poppy exhales a musical sigh as her stream patters against the toilet bowl.

Mona hates the sound of piss and turns on the sink to drown it out. Just the sound makes her think of dehydrated urine, brass-colored and stinking of ammonia. She washes her hands with a diamond-shaped bar of soap that leaves bits of rose petals stuck beneath her nails. Remi spends her money on the most ridiculous stuff now; shampoo that comes in bars, state-of-the-art air purifiers, a disc-shaped variation on the tampon that allows you to have sex while it’s in place. Mona wonders how many of these tampons it would cost to pay her two-thousand-dollar post-insurance medical bill, which the hospital has generously offered to split into monthly installments.

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“Gross,” Poppy says when Mona turns the faucet off. “You didn’t even wash for ten seconds.”

“I did, too.”

“Did not.” Poppy knocks her bare feet against the base of the toilet. “That’s unsanitary.”

Poppy’s vocabulary is unusually large for a newly-minted seven-year-old, particularly when it comes to matters of health. Mona babysat her a couple of months ago while Remi was at a linguistics conference, and Poppy appraised their first dinner of chicken nuggets and French fries with a skeptical eye. Where’s the complex carbohydrate, she demanded to know. Mona had no idea what a complex carbohydrate even was. A twice-baked potato?

Poppy scooches her butt off the toilet. Her short legs make the dismount a precarious task, her thighs squeaking against the porcelain as she heaves herself forward.

“Here,” Mona says, offering her a hand, but Poppy just licks her upper lip in concentration.

“I’m fine.” She drops to the floor and bows like a gymnast that’s just stuck the landing.

Mona offers her applause, droplets of water spraying from her damp palms.

“Finishing drying those,” Poppy instructs. “No one likes wet hands.” She flushes the handle with an elegant flick of the wrist and swiftly zips her pants.

“I do. I love wet hands so much I’m dating a sailor.”

“You’re not dating a sailor.” Poppy picks up the diamond soap and rolls it over each hand.

“And why not?” Mona asks. She sits down on the terrycloth bathmat and undoes the first button of her skirt. She hasn’t worn anything without an elastic waistband for years now, and it was stupid to pick Poppy’s party as the day to change that. She wanted to impress Remi by choosing something polished, and this was the only skirt that still fit, due to its bandaged design, which both stretched across her stomach and constricted it. The bloating was why she went to the doctor in the first place—she looked six months pregnant.

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“Sailors only date skinny ladies,” she says matter-of-factly. “Like Prince Eric and Ariel.”

She’s not being cruel, just bluntly honest, in the way that kids are. In a way, her words are a relief, because they confirm what Mona already knows, but wishes were untrue: her friends are lying to her. She doesn’t look curvy, or sexy, or womanly. She looks undesirable and undisciplined, with her sagging skin and pale stretchmarks and ass as clumpy as cottage cheese.

Poppy crouches down next to her on the bath mat, oblivious. “Mom saw you come in, you know.”

“She didn’t.”

“Yeah, she did.”

Poppy tries to pull on her hand but Mona shakes her away. “Give me a minute,” she says sternly. Poppy’s face changes instantly, a punched lump of dough, and Mona wants to stretch it back into that childish confidence she exemplifies, that undisguised smirk, those wide-open eyes. “Pop,”

Mona tries again, careful to keep the edges of her word smooth. “I’ll see you out there, okay?”

“Okay.” That regret sketched all over her features—the feeling that you’ve hurt someone unintentionally, without knowing how—Mona understands it all too well. And then she feels it, too: she’s taken too long to decide what to say. Poppy’s left the bathroom.

“Fuck,” Mona says aloud. She feels viscerally repulsed by herself, a shiver of disgust scraping against her spine. Her appearance (pitted with acne scars, scattered with scabs, coated with dandruff) cannot be redeemed by some vague notion of inner beauty; at her core is a thick ball of ice, though she covers this with layer upon layer of calculated kindness—holding open doors for never-ending streams of people; fostering abused puppies; saying she’s sorry every time, though she almost never is. Poppy is the only person she loves unconditionally, because Poppy has nothing to prove. And this means Mona doesn’t, either.

158

She touches the trail of hair that begins at her belly button and disappears beneath her underwear. She hasn’t had sex in a long time (she stopped keeping track, though she knows Dave could name the exact date of their last encounter), not because she doesn’t want to, but because it’s become painful. Now she knows it was that promiscuous tissue all along, slamming against her cervix whenever Dave thrust into her, which never lasted for long because he pulled out with a panicked apology whenever she said “ow.” Dear Dave. He chases Mona’s orgasm like a hunter chases exotic pray, trying to lure it out with ever-evolving techniques and toys. Sometimes he’ll spend upwards of a half hour down there, rotating through his tools—fingers, lips, tongue—until

Mona writhes in fake ecstasy, something she doesn’t even feel that bad about, because it’s not

Dave’s fault that his efforts are wasted, and because they’re the sweetest efforts she’s ever encountered, slow and searching, as though he’s trying to memorize each part of her he touches. She hasn’t allowed him to see her stitches yet, because although they’re small—tiny Xs above and below her belly-button—she knows they’ll hurt him. He didn’t even want her to come today, fearing the drive and the party would exhaust her. This is why she can’t love Dave; he insulates her from the pain she deserves. He makes excuses for her when she’s cruel and tell her she’s “only human” when she argues against these excuses.

And yet, she can’t leave him. She doesn’t want to sleep alone.

Mona forces herself to stand up and walks into the living room, where the party is in full, terrifying swing. Pastel purple cups, animal masks, metallic gold streamers, Twister mat, heart- shaped piñata, silly string canisters, giant bubble wands, cone hats, horse-printed balloons, plastic champagne flutes.

Poppy’s standing by a plastic table covered in tiny cups of lemonade, and Mona tries to make her peace. “What exactly is the theme, Popsicle?”

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Poppy selects a cup and sips it without looking at Mona. “The theme is on-sale,” she says coolly. Mona isn’t sure if she’s joking or not. “Daddy took me to Party City and we got everything in the back room,” she explains.

“Daddy took you?”

A small smile. Poppy delights in knowing more than Mona does. “Uh-huh. Well, Mommy drove. We went to Outback, too, and got a blooming onion.” She reaches for Mona’s chin and pulls her face towards her own: she has a secret. “He’s coming today,” Poppy whispers.

“Today?” Mona points to the floor, to make sure she and Poppy are talking about the same world—this world—rather than the fantasy ones she’s so fond of creating.

“Yes!” Poppy’s giddy now, her secret finally out in the open. She tugs Mona towards the couch, where the coffee table’s scattered with animal masks and tiny gold snowflakes. She selects a zebra mask for Mona, presenting it to her with authority.

The elastic band tangles in Mona’s hair and the mask itself smells like damp basement.

“Does Mom know that Daddy’s coming?” she asks carefully.

Poppy chooses a lion mask for herself and slides it over her slim nose, ignoring Mona. She’s bored with this line of questioning.

“Poppy, come play!” A boy with a Wonder Pets Band-Aid beneath his left eye holds a

Twister spinner in the air and flicks its plastic arm.

“Listen, Pop—” Mona tries, but she’s already lost her.

“I wanna spin first!” Poppy shouts, and then she’s gone, sprinting towards the plastic

Twister mat. “I spin first because I’m the birthday girl,” Mona hears her say.

She needs to find Remi. Mona slides the mask up onto the top of her head and squints at the porch’s screen door, through which she can see Remi gliding from group to group with the social

160 ease Mona’s always envied. Hanging out with Remi in a group setting is like standing next to someone wearing the same outfit, except that person’s wearing it much, much better.

She could leave. Mona thought this before she even left her driveway, when she had to buckle a pillow between her stomach and the seatbelt to ease her abdominal pain. The problem is that she hasn’t told Remi about her surgery, so skipping Poppy’s party would only contribute to her reputation as a First-Class Flake—Remi’s nickname. Mona once avoided her mother’s recommitment ceremony to her second husband by fabricating an ovarian cyst the day before, going as far as to text a picture of a swollen pelvis she found on the Internet, asking, do you think I should go see a doctor?

Remi’s the only person who refuses to condone Mona’s bullshit, as she’s done for thirty years. Back in Nashquitten, Mona has a cluster of girlfriends that never left the town, women she never thought she’d be friends with. She loathed them in high school for the same reason she now envies Remi—their lack of insecurity, any self-doubt sealed tightly behind an appearance of confidence and well-being. They’re only friends now because they’ve allowed Mona a peek behind the curtain, and they’re just as fucked-up and frightened as she is. Which is not particularly beneficial for their friendship; they treat each other with such delicacy it’s as though they’re encouraging one another to self-destruct, dispensing endless amounts of support even when someone’s about to make a terrible mistake. They’ve condoned cheating, five-hundred dollar purses, “sick days” spent to lying around watching television—all in the name of “no judgment” or “treating yourself” or “self- care.” It goes without saying that they’re all white. But their easy approval is why Mona keeps seeing them; she never fears messing up, as she sometimes does with Remi, who is so on the opposite end of the morality spectrum that she once shamed Mona for taking a pen from Pizza Hut.

Grow up, Mona commands herself. She’s here, after all—what is she going to do, drive the three hours home? Hide in the bathroom? She takes a few steps towards the porch and waves.

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Remi’s head, pinned with loose braids the color of butter, turns. Her grin is so wide that both rows of spotless teeth are visible. “Look who it is!”

Mona enter the porch and Remi dances over, bumps her hip with her own, and laces their fingers together. “Let’s get you a fucking drink!” So this is the version of Remi present today—Party

Remi: sassy, carefree, expletive-happy. There’s also Sophisticated Remi: contemplative, theory- quoting, prone to asking, “Don’t you think you could interrogate that further?” Mona’s favorite is

Stoned Remi: relaxed, giggly, and able to shove thirteen Cheez-Its into her mouth at once.

“I need to talk to you,” Mona says, but Remi presses an impeccably manicured finger to her lips and tells her to put on her party face. Mona grimaces. That’s her party face.

She takes a deep breath and follows Remi to a cluster of people leaning against the porch’s railing, Remi’s fingers tight around her own. She admires Remi’s waist as she moves; it has the perfect curvature of a corset. She must be doing pilates again. Or maybe barre. Mona touches her own waist and jiggles the love handles buoying it. She’s not allowed to exercise for two more months.

“Take the television remote out of your mouth, Stella! Stella!” a woman is shouting when they approach, her swanlike neck craned towards the living room. “Kids, Jesus. Why give them fingers when they have a mouth?” She flashes a smile as the group shuffles to accommodate its two new members. “Is this the famous Mona?”

“God, I hope so.” She’s trying very hard to smile.

“Remi’s told us so much about you,” the woman continues. “Mona this, Mona that.” Is there a hint of annoyance in her voice?

“Same. You’re…?” Mona asks, though she’s met her before. Loretta. They spoke during a fundraising party that she accompanied Remi to last spring. Loretta teaches in the history department, owns two goldendoodles, and, at the time, was contemplating Botox.

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“Loretta. You can call me L.”

“Okay.” Mona knows she’s forgettable (her mother once left her at the Village Market and didn’t realize until there was no one to help unload the groceries), but Loretta is not. She adjusts a strand of hair, which is perfectly tousled, as though she’s pulled it into a bun while doing something more demanding, like riding a horse or driving a stick shift. Mona can’t help noting her thinness, too, somehow emphasized by a shapeless black dress. Could she pull off that dress? No. The love handles.

“Remi talks about you all the time,” says a man sporting tortoiseshell glasses and a ghost of a mustache.

“So I hear. No idea why.” Where do hands look natural? Clasped together, hanging at the sides of the body, folded across the chest? No, that last one’s bad body language. Mona’s ex- boyfriend once told her that—even the way you stand is hostile. Carl. She misses him.

Someone leans into Remi to report a spill, and when Remi marches away, a determined look on her face, Mona forces her hand into her pocket to avoid reaching for her.

“She just loves that you’re still in Nashquitten,” says a woman with a tattoo of a lemon stretched across her forearm. “It’s so nice, to have a legacy somewhere.”

“Amen. I’m a New Yorker,” Loretta laments. “It’s the same as being from nowhere at all.”

“Huh,” Mona says.

“What do you do?” Glasses asks.

“I work in telemarketing.” God, the job talk. She considers putting a nearby corkscrew through her neck, but Loretta probably knows how to staunch a wound with a tablecloth.

“A thankless job.” Lemon can’t seem to decide whether she wants to nod or shake her head, and ends up doing an awkward circle with her neck.

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“Well, teaching can be equally thankless, I’m sure.” Mona could hold her breath and force herself to pass out. She used to do that as a child. It was why she got kicked out of daycare.

“College students just want to be praised.” Loretta’s mouth puckers in disgust. “No one really wants to be critiqued, to learn from their failures.”

Mona’s trying to arrange her face into an expression of sympathy when Remi—sweet Remi!

–appears in a cloud of honeysuckle perfume holding a glass of wine. “I thought you could use this.”

She looks back at the children, who are in the final tense spins of Twister.

“Rem,” Mona tries. “A word?”

“Can it wait until after presents?” She turns to survey the group. “Should we open presents?

Is it time?”

Glasses nods. He gazes seriously out into the yard, as though a deer or some other sign will appear. “It does seem like it’s time.”

Lemon and Loretta both nod at Remi. Mona takes a huge swallow of wine.

“Well,” Remi says. “Then it’s time.”

They start to process into the living room, and Mona feels someone’s hand in her hair.

“Sorry, dear.” Loretta flashes a smile of apology. “Just didn’t want you wandering around with this.”

The zebra mask dangles from her pinky, twirling like a hooked fish.

“Poppy, say thank you.”

Poppy chews on a chunk of hair as she inspects a spelling workbook gifted to her by a sleek redheaded woman wearing a daisy-print jumpsuit.

“That’ll get you leaps and bounds ahead of the other second-graders.” The woman winks at her. “As if you weren’t already.”

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“Cool.” Poppy nods graciously. Mona can’t help wondering how her own imagined kid would react to such a present—violently, most likely, like Mona herself, who as a child was known for slamming unwanted toys against table legs, cracking them like lobster tails. Mona never thought much about children until her uterus went beserk. Dave wants them, she knows, because sometimes when he’s drunk he’ll grab his own stomach and go, “I want to have your babies.” If only he could.

The content of her ovaries is suspect now (“If you want a family, you should start trying soon,” Dr.

Callahan advised), and sometimes she imagines them protruding from her uterus like shriveled sunflowers, limp and useless.

In order to distract herself, Mona takes charge of recording what Poppy receives from each person, so that the appropriate thank you notes may be written later. She composes her own commentary on each gift in order to look busy for as long as possible, careful to immediately slash out the incriminating thoughts so Remi won’t catch wind.

Sudoku book – Sue last minute Barnes and Nobles purchase

Child productivity journal – Bryan why would anyone be productive before puberty

Anne of Green Gables board game – Olivia Anne was such a badass

Boggle – Loretta surprisingly uncreative

Documentary box set – Jim snoooozzeeee

Water gun – Samson Lydia’s gonna confiscate that immediately

Light-up jump rope – Lily breaks after third use

Franny Funtime Make-up kit – Gina also being confiscated immediately

Stuffed monkey and giraffe – Lyle Lyle would be a great name for a pet caterpillar

Bathrobe – Olivia do they make that in my size

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Poppy’s ripping the paper off what appears to be a shoebox when the front door swings open. “Happy happy happy birthday!” Andrew shouts. Late afternoon light leaks into the room, spilling from behind him like a broken egg yolk. Mona tightens her grip on the pen. Fuck fuck fuck.

“Daddy!” Poppy springs up and runs for her father, who grabs her at the waist and bounces her up and down like a much younger child. The kids see this interruption as an opportunity to test the gifts themselves, and they get busy examining the opened presents, poking through books and crumpling discarded wrapping paper. The adults exchange terse glances. “Who is that?” someone whispers. Mona doesn’t catch the culprit, but she does catch Remi’s gaze, which is electric with panic. She tried to warn her!

Mona pushes herself off the ground, her stomach aching with the sudden movement. She will make herself useful for once. “This is Andrew,” she announces to the room, since everyone seems to awaiting an explanation, their heads trained towards the strange man. “Welcome, Andrew,” she says, as if leading an AA meeting.

“Welcome,” some of the guests echo, nodding at one another, trying to make sense of what’s happening.

“Hello,” Andrew says, peeking over Poppy’s shoulder. Poppy waves, as if she’s only now entering her birthday party.

Mona clearly remembers the night that Remi found out she was pregnant. It was Mona who had the late period, and Remi bought a pregnancy test in solidarity, the two of them squinting at the offerings under Walgreens’ fluorescent lights. Remi was in grad school at the time, and Mona was visiting for the weekend, a break from her life that had turned swiftly and unexpectedly monotonous after college, working days as a massage parlor receptionist and nights as a cocktail waitress. Mona believed her one true talent was adaptability, and so she imagined some spontaneous, international adventure after college (a handful of friends had packed up and started working on organic farms in

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France and Spain while they tried to find themselves), but she quickly realized that spontaneity required money, and she had fifteen-thousand dollars in student debt. So instead of seeing the world she had returned home, where she consoled herself with the fact that at least she was living in a studio apartment instead of her parent’s basement (the landlord agreed to decrease the rent as long as Mona cared for her deceased husband’s cat).

That night, Remi and Mona had stumbled back to the rickety Victorian house Lydia rented with three other women, pissing over the tests in the backyard because they were both drunk and thought it was funny. Then the drinks really hit, so they tripped up to Remi’s bedroom afterwards, resting the tests on the edge of her desk and falling asleep immediately. It wasn’t until the morning that they saw the results. Mona negative. Remi positive.

“Breathe,” Andrew told her over the phone. Remi left it on speaker while she trembled on the floor, attempting to calm herself through yoga. “Breathe, babe, breathe.” A part of Mona doesn’t believe that this man in front of her is the same person. How skinny he is, with collarbones sharp as arrowheads. Remi’s right—he’s not off the painkillers, though he’s been claiming this in earnest for the past year. Mona thinks of the oxycodone in her purse, of the line of orange bottles in her medicine cabinet back home. How incredible it felt, to darken the unrelenting brightness of her pain, and how unbearable it was when the pain beamed like a spotlight again, how she was unable to move without a blazing awareness of its presence.

“What about a game of capture the flag, huh?” she suggests. “It’s a shame to be inside.

Follow me!” She waves her arm dramatically towards the backyard, like a cartoon character about to begin an expedition. The parents move unhurriedly, searching for their glasses of wine and beer before wrangling their children. “Choo choo,” Mona shouts, “the train is leaving!”

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Remi’s pulled Andrew aside now, huddling with him by the staircase while Poppy clings to his knee. Once everyone’s outside, Mona approaches them cautiously. “Everything alright?” she asks, but as they turn she sees that she’s chosen the wrong moment to interrupt.

“Tell him to leave,” Remi says. “Tell him that this is wildly inappropriate, showing up without an invitation.”

Poppy tugs at her mother’s elbow. “That’s not true. I invited him, I promise!”

“Tell me to leave, Daisy,” Andrew says, but without any conviction. He knows he’s already lost.

No one has called her Daisy in years, and Remi seems to sense the way that nickname softens Mona. “Don’t call her that,” she says. “You never even understood the joke.”

“What was the joke?” Andrew asks.

“That she didn’t look like a Daisy at all!”

The way Mona remembers it, the nickname hadn’t been a joke. Daisy McDonald, the homecoming queen, had walked past while Mona and Lydia were eating lunch, and Mona had lamented Daisy’s effortless poise (though she had called it “that graceful pretty girl shit”), something that she, clumsy Mona, would never possess. “Shut up. You’re my Daisy,” Remi had said, and the name stuck until college, until Remi wanted to leave who she’d been in high school behind, and insisted Mona do the same.

“What do I look like, then?” Mona asks. She’s getting swept up in tension, turning angry herself. “If I’m not Daisy?”

Remi lets a sigh of exasperation hiss through her teeth. “What are you talking about, Mona?

You look like yourself.”

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Mona turns to Andrew, examines his hunched shoulders and stupid earring, a tiny diamond buried in his left earlobe. God, how stupid is she? Remi sees her and Andrew the same way: the losers. That’s why she thinks Andrew might listen to her—because they’re equals.

“Get out or I’m going to call the cops,” Remi threatens.

“What the hell?” Mona reaches down to cover Poppy’s ears. She doesn’t protest. “He’s not doing anything.”

“Are you here to back me up, or not?” There’s a heat to Remi’s words, which means Mona better act fast.

“Here, Andrew.” Mona points to the door. “Let me walk you out?”

Poppy’s wrapped herself around his leg, and he reaches down to untangle her from his calf.

“Whatever. Good luck, Remi.”

Mona reaches down for Poppy’s hand—she figured she’d walk her out to say goodbye to her father—but Remi stops her. “No.”

Mona has a few things she’d like to say (mainly: I know you don’t like Andrew and I know he’s probably addicted to drugs, but he’s still her dad and I promise I’ll keep her safe), but it’s not her place. And besides, what does she know about being a mother? “Okay.” She follows him alone instead.

Andrew shakes his head as they cross the lawn. His hair’s thinned, and the sunlight bounces off the bald patches visible beneath it. “Sorry you got dragged into that. I thought Remi knew.”

“Did you, really?”

Andrew looks up at the cloudless sky and squints. “No.”

They continue down the road, where a few kids are running back and forth across the pavement. This is the kind of place where speeding cars are of no concern. “You got anyone in your life?” Andrew asks, trying to make small talk, trying to make things normal.

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Mona nods. “His name’s Dave.”

“Dave,” Andrew repeats. “He a good guy?”

“Yeah, he is.”

“Good.” Andrew’s looking across the street, at a Labrador sleeping in the sun. “That’s so important.”

They reach Andrew’s car, a dented Prius with duct tape stretched over the driver’s side window. “So what’s the deal?” he asks, an abrupt shift in tone. It feels like last call at a high school reunion—this is the first time they’ve seen each other in seven years.

“What’s your deal?” she asks. “Are you clean?”

“I asked you first.”

“What do you mean by deal?”

“Marriage, kids, what?”

“Oh, who knows,” Mona says. “I’m not in a rush.”

“Everyone’s in a rush, whether you realize it or not.” A sprinkler starts up on the yard behind them, and before they can get out of the way, a cold spray hits their ankles. Whatever spell they were under—and for a brief moment, there was magic, some erasure of circumstances—is broken. Andrew kicks his car door until it pops open. “Tell Pop I’ll see her soon.”

“Sure.” She runs back towards the house, telling herself she’s avoiding the sprinkler, but really it’s everything Andrew embodies: stasis, decay, disappointment. She imagines them as two halves of a Venn diagram, her own circle yanking violently away from his.

When Mona reaches the house Poppy’s sitting on the front lawn with her chin in her hands.

“You don’t want to go back to that party, do you?” Mona asks.

Poppy shakes her head furiously.

“Well then,” Mona says. “Follow me.”

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Mona’s never been to Brookswell when the college isn’t in session, and the emptiness of the town center spooks her. It’s so quiet that the distant moos of cows echo from some unseen farm.

Winsor College, where Remi teaches, is barely visible beyond the squat brick buildings that make up, according to a nearby plaque, the historic district. Huge hedges shield the campus, meticulously clipped and strangely glossy. When Remi first learned that she’d gotten the job in the linguistics department, she raved to Mona about Winsor’s “incredible attention to safety.” Mona thought that was a strange thing to focus on, but then again, that would make her a hypocrite. She never went to bed without setting her security system, and she never answered any unexpected knocks at her door, choosing instead to crouch behind the couch until they left (so they couldn’t see her through the front window), and peek out the door once the knocking subsided, where she’d try to place the figure retreating down the sidewalk.

Winsor had escorts you could call at any hour of the night if you felt unsafe walking back to your dorm, Remi had proudly told her, and large blinking blue streetlights with emergency buttons on their metal poles. “They were named one of the safest campuses in the country,” Remi recited.

She sounded like a tour guide who specialized in winning over suburban parents. It depressed Mona, the policed nature of the school. Even out here, in the Berkshires, such measures were necessary?

She supposes someone would say the same about her Nashquitten precautions.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket, but she silences it instantly. She knows it’s Remi. Just once, she’d like Remi to know what it feels to be uncertain, to be worried, to be anxious. Even today, with Andrew, she only freaked for a second before standing her ground. For once, can’t

Mona be the more confident one?

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“Can I have an ice cream?” Poppy asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer, but instead does a spastic skip to a shop up ahead where a giant wooden ice cream cone swings from its awning. Poppy pushes open its door and a bell cuts through the quiet.

The only other people inside are a young couple, sweetly nerdy in oversized glasses and Teva sandals. They’ve finished a sundae, and the boy taps the spoon against his lips while the girl rolls a maraschino cherry around in her mouth. She keeps opening her lips slightly, allowing the boy to glance the red marble sitting on her tongue. Mona doesn’t think it looks as sexy as the girl imagines.

A uniformed employee appears suddenly behind the counter. “We’ve got vegan options,” he says. “Low fat options. Lactose-free options. Gluten-free options.” He looks barely old enough to drive a car. His cheeks are ridged with the kind of acne that will scar, inflamed and cyst-like, and his lips are peeling at the edges, flaking with dead skin that resembles dried glue. His smile is small but sincere. Mona likes him immediately.

“What do you recommend?” she asks.

He shoves his hands into the wide pockets of his striped apron and rocks back and forth.

“Fudge tracks is our best seller. Next after that is maple nut. We use maple syrup from the trees around town.” He points to the maple nut label, which has a sticker that says I’m a Local! on it.

“I didn’t ask which were the best-sellers,” Mona says kindly. “I asked which you recommended.”

Poppy, bored with the length of the interaction, begins to jump up and down. “I want cotton candy.”

“Try the honeyed ricotta. It sounds gross, but it’s my favorite.”

Mona puts one hand on Poppy, who has begun to spin herself in rapid circles. This is her rebellion of choice. “One cotton candy and one honeyed ricotta, please.”

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Mona pays for the ice cream and lets Poppy decide where to sit, which turns out to be a small wooden table next to the young couple. The girl pops the cherry out of her mouth when they sit down and rolls it between her fingers. “I love your barrettes,” she tells Poppy, gesturing to the sparkly pink clips holding her overgrown bangs away from her face.

Poppy smiles shyly. “Thank you.”

The girl leans forward and hands the sheeny cherry to the boy, who looks confused to receive it. “How old are you?” she asks.

“I just turned seven.” Poppy sticks her thumb in her mouth, something Mona thought she’d grown out of. Strangers make Poppy nervous. Mona wants to extract the finger from her pursed lips, but stops herself as she’s about to reach forward. You’re not her mom, Remi told her during a particularly heated encounter at the local playground last year. Mona had reprimanded Poppy for stealing a swing from another young girl, and Poppy had started sobbing. You’re not even her aunt, really.

“Seven!” The girl is beyond delighted. “That was my favorite age, ever. I’ve never felt as good as when I was seven.”

“Is that true?” the boys asks. He’s still holding the cherry in his palm. The girl ignores him.

“This is going to be the best year of your life. I just feel it.” Poppy nods at her feet. How young it starts, this desire to win a child’s approval. Mona remembers it clearly—how she would stick out her tongue or puff up her cheeks whenever she saw a kid, in hopes of a laugh or a smile. It seemed proof of some early maternal instinct, or perhaps just some essential goodness. Children are like dogs—excellent judges of character.

The girl smiles at Poppy’s timidity and looks up at Mona. “She is so freakin’ cute. Like, geez.”

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“Thank you.” Mona expects the conversation to end there—the couple’s sundae is long- finished, and how long can you play with a maraschino cherry?—but the girl scoots her chair closer to their table.

“You live in town?” she asks. Mona nods. The girl points behind her, in the direction of campus. “Do you work for Winsor?”

A door of possibility presents itself to Mona, as though she’s entered a game show of her own design. She considers the door. She walks through it. “I’m a professor there, actually.”

“Seriously?” The girl’s smile splits her face. “What do you teach?”

“Linguistics.”

“Well, shoot. I haven’t declared yet, but I was thinking about that or anthropology. Do you teach intro?”

“Uh, yes.”

“What’s your name? I’ll look for you in the course catalog.”

Poppy glances up from the floor with raised brows, but says nothing. “Donaldson. Remi

Donaldson.”

“You know, that is my favorite thing about a small college.” The girl gestures to the walls of the ice cream shop. “You just run into your people left and right, even during the summer!”

Mona smiles tightly. “We should probably get going. But nice to meet you.”

“Enjoy!” The girl stands and extends her hand. It takes Mona a moment to recognize that she’s supposed to shake it. The girl’s palm is sticky and moist, as though coated with honey. “Maybe

I’ll see you in class.”

“Maybe. C’mon, Popsicle.”

Outside, Poppy licks her cone, attempting to catch a rogue drip of pink ice cream. “Why’d you do that?”

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“Do what?”

They pass a statue of an overweight man sitting on a throne-like chair. The original founder of the university, a sign reads. Ronald D. Winsor. A man of unparalleled vision, unrivaled work ethic, and unwavering integrity. Poppy rolls her eyes. She’s no chump. “You’re not my mom,” she says. “And you don’t work here.”

“Don’t you ever want to pretend, Pop? That’s all it was. Pretending.”

Poppy considers this, popping the last bit of cone into her mouth. “Huh.”

“Huh, what?”

She swallows audibly. “I just thought you were too old for pretend.”

Remi’s sitting on house’s front steps when they round the corner of the neighborhood, the driveway and street empty of cars. She rises immediately when she sees them, her arms crossed tightly across her body, as though she’s trying to keep warm.

“Go inside, please,” Remi tells Poppy when they reach the steps. “I’ll be in soon.”

“But—“

“Now.” No one argues with Remi. At least, the smart ones don’t. Once Poppy’s shut the door behind her, Remi uncrosses her arms. “What the fuck was that? I was five minutes away from calling the police!”

“Why is that your thing, suddenly? Calling the police?”

“You’re going to make me feel like shit for worrying now?” Remi cracks one of her knuckles. “Wow.”

“We were barely gone a half-hour.”

“Twenty-seven minutes. You were gone twenty-seven minutes.”

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A pain shoots through Mona’s pelvis and up her side. She lowers herself onto lawn and tries to breathe. “You treated Andrew like shit.”

Remi peers down at her from the top step. “Are you serious? He’s an addict.”

She can hear the professor in Remi yearning to explain: From the Latin addictus, meaning to devote, betray, abandon, sell-out, sacrifice. They’ve been over this word before.

“You’re the one who took him party-shopping with Poppy,” Mona points out. “That sends a message.”

Remi moves down to the lawn, settling in the grass beside her. She sucks in air without releasing it, which means she’s trying to figure whether or not to share something. She exhales.

“Poppy’s therapist claims she needs a paternal connection.”

Mona doesn’t say anything.

“Since all her mother’s done is fuck her up.”

Mona focuses on the smell of warm dirt, the sound of robins chirping. She doesn’t want to be forced into empathy now, take on the role of the kind, reassuring friend. She’s mad. No, she’s not mad. She’s hurt. And that’s something she’s never been good at doing—telling Remi how she’s hurt her.

“I don’t need you to lie to me,” Remi says after a moment. “That’s our thing, isn’t it? That we don’t lie to each other.”

“Is it?” Mona asks. She can feel the ice in her stomach, cold and sharp. “I thought our thing was that I fucked up and it made you feel better about yourself.”

“Why would you say that?” Remi looks truly taken aback.

“Because it’s true?”

“Don’t say that, Mona. That’s a horrible thing to say.”

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“What else do we have in common?” she asks. “Besides the fact that we both think I’m a loser?”

“You think I see you that way?” Remi’s expression is so over-the-top horrified that Mona doesn’t believe it.

“You have to be honest with me,” Mona challenges. “We don’t lie to each other.”

“Are you okay?” Remi asks softly. The tenderness in her voice infuriates Mona. She doesn’t need to be taken care of.

“I can’t do this.” When did she start crying? Mona’s not sure, but there are the tears, blurring her vision. “I don’t want to be the thing that props you up. You don’t need anything to prop you up.

You won.”

Remi spits onto the grass, something Mona hasn’t seen her do since high school. Something about the word “won”—it needles her. “Fine, I’ll be honest with you.” The tenderness is gone, replaced by steel. “That’s your problem. You want to blame everyone else for your problems, when the truth is you have so much potential that you refuse to use. You act like something traumatic’s happened to you when nothing has.”

Mona wipes her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “Thank you,” she says stiffly.

Remi stands up; she doesn’t want to see the aftermath of her words. “We should go in.

Poppy will be wondering what’s wrong.”

What choice does Mona have but to follow her?

Inside, Poppy stands in front of the refrigerator, playing with the colorful magnetic letters on its door. M-A-S-K she spells, then S-K-A-M. “Can I say goodbye to Auntie Mona by myself?” she asks as Mona gathers up her purse.

“Why?” Remi asks, unable to hide her irritation. “You two planning a heist?”

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“What’s a heist?” Poppy asks.

“A robbery,” Mona explains, playing with the zipper of her purse to avoid looking at them.

Remi taps her fingers on the kitchen counter. “A robbery of something of value, to be specific. A variant of the word hoist, spelled heist because it’s the theft of something at the height of its value.”

Mona clears her throat. “I should get going.”

Remi’s already turned towards the sink, tending to the pile of plates and wine glasses. “Drive safe.”

What else is there to say? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Outside on the lawn, the night’s gone cool with the absence of sun. Poppy shivers up to

Mona’s side. She wraps her arms around Mona, but the hug grows too painful, and Mona has to push her away. “Sorry, Pop,” she says. “Cramp.”

Fireflies pop in the darkness, sparks of light. Poppy enjoys feeling useful, so Mona gives her the keys to the car and allows her to open the driver’s side door. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead.” They stand on the sidewalk and Mona strokes the smooth top of Poppy’s head. “Goodbye, birthday girl.”

Poppy appears suddenly anxious. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything, Popsicle.”

“You have to promise not to tell anyone. Especially not Mommy.”

They link pinkies. “I promise.”

Poppy stands on her tip-toes to speak directly into Mona’s ear. “Sometimes, I pretend that you’re my mom.”

What to do with this information? Mona is so, so tired. She feels like a dead flower, dry and shriveled. “Don’t do that, Pop. Please just—don’t.”

It’s the first time she leaves without kissing Poppy goodbye.

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The drive takes three hours. Even with the pillow her abdomen aches, and she pulls over twice for the relief of unbuckling. When she arrives home Dave is there, and she lies still as he dips his hands beneath her shirt and runs his fingers over her ribs. He isn’t seeking sex; he just wants to feel her. Mona relaxes into his touch, into the lack of expectation.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep. She’s convinced that she can feel the endometriosis recolonizing her organs, spreading like hungry spores. It’s not an unfounded paranoia; in fact, it’s not a paranoia at all, because there’s no cure. Which makes this not a question of whether the tissue will return, but when. She’ll be in and out of surgery for the rest of her life, though Dr. Callahan said having a baby could sweep the endometriosis from her body temporarily (though that depends on her fertility).

Dave can tell she’s not asleep. He flips onto his side so that he’s facing her. “What are you thinking?”

She is thinking that her life’s gotten away from her, and that now it’s too late. She has wasted everything good.

“I’m thinking, fall asleep,” she tells him. “I’m thinking, shh, shh, shh.”

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Confirmation

The day before our last confirmation class, Gemma Anderson does not return home from her afternoon jog. The four of us hear this from Ruth Jones at the Village Market on Main Street, while we’re buying brownie mix for our sleepover. In the fluorescent light of the baking aisle she tells us that her cousin lives on the same street as Gemma, and that the cousin says a dozen police cars have been driving up and down the neighborhood all day, doing turn after turn in the dead end.

“They just went into the woods with the German Shepherds,” she says. It’s nine o’ clock now, dark enough that Sammy backed into a garden gnome when we left for the store. “Her parents brought out one of Gemma’s pajama shirts for them to sniff.”

“Where do they think she went?” we ask. A wrong turn in the Norris Forest, an unfamiliar fork on the McKinsey running path? Or was it more deliberate—a borrowed vehicle, a map with her route highlighted in yellow?

“Went?” Ruth’s eyes bug with the shock of our naiveté. “You don’t think someone took her?”

No, we don’t. It’s not where your mind jumps first, not here in Nashquitten, where there’s never anything more scandalous in the police log than a noise complaint. An anonymous voice announces a sale on Klondike bars. “Well,” we say, sounding like our mothers when they run into a mom that quit PTA, “Nice talking to you.”

Back at Sammy’s, we scoop raw brownie batter out of the bowl with our fingers and wonder if Ruth’s lying. Last year she spread a rumor that Vice Principal Douglas kept a dead tarantula named

Precious on her desk. She’s also the captain of the dramatic monologue team, the origin of most gossip that circulates through school. We’re licking the tips of our fingers clean when all of our cell

180 phones vibrate simultaneously on the kitchen counter. Our hands linger in our mouths as we lean forward.

AMBER ALERT: Nashquitten, MA. CHILD: 17. White F 5’5” 120 Bro/Bro.

The message fades from our screens and we feel a panic swirl through our chests, our hearts vibrating like the wings of the gypsy moths we captured in Lydia’s yard last April, their bodies beating against our caged fingers. We grasp for each other’s batter-splattered hands and squeeze, hard. No one says you’re hurting me but when we let go our palms are bone white and aching. “Oh my god,” says someone, maybe all of us, maybe none of us—maybe we’re all just thinking it.

We can’t sleep that night. We lie on Sammy’s floor in a tangle, heads tilted to stomachs, ankles pressed to thighs. Our pulses drum through each other’s skin, steady and persistent. We wonder about Gemma’s body. If she was taken—and maybe we’re being paranoid, maybe Ruth’s getting to us—was it because she was remarkable or unremarkable?

Which are we?

We stay silent. Words sour on our tongues, nothing more than coarse approximations of what we feel. In the quiet we blink up at gummy hands glued to the ceiling, covered with dust and dead insects. We stuck them there, years ago.

Sammy’s mother drives us to St. Anne’s, solemnly asking if we’d heard the news before shifting into drive. We try not to look too hard at her wig, a new addition after the most recent round of chemo. She’d learned of Gemma from Lindsay Kelowski who’d heard it from Sandra

Wang who’d heard it from Dana Meyers. Our mothers belong to a network of women so fiercely in touch with the town’s happenings that our fathers refer to them as the NAG—Neighborhood

Affiliated Gossips. “It’s not gossip,” we’ve heard our mothers say at one time or another, but we’re

181 not sure we agree. We side with our fathers, who at some point we decided knew more about the world than our mothers. It was their lack of concern about the crusted dish left soaking for two days, or the laundry neglected in the basket, or the stain blooming on the carpet. Our father’s largest worries, that we can tell, are tethered to their jobs, those parts of their lives that we do not see. Our mothers are constantly around, even those who work, like Lydia’s and Mona’s: texting, calling,

FaceTiming. We want what our fathers have: to leave the house in the morning and truly leave it behind until returning at dinnertime.

While Sammy’s mother parks, we find seats in the last pew, where we can pass notes to each other during the service without getting side-eye from the old ladies with blue rinsed hair (the ones who think St. Anne’s has perhaps turned a bit too progressive). Our mothers wave from faraway rows; only Vince, Celia’s mother’s boyfriend (though we think of him as her father) is present. They are allowed to miss church. We are not.

Gemma is on the prayer list, even though she goes to Catholic St. Mary’s like the rest of the town. We attend St. Anne’s, which is everything St. Mary’s isn’t: scruffy, liberal, Episcopalian. Babies are frequently howling during the services, and sometimes Julie Hunt brings her terrier strapped to her chest in a baby holder, and Father John will bless them both during communion.

We don’t write notes during the hymns or the prayers, which pass as routinely as the morning announcements at school. It is only Father John’s sermon where we turn our attention to each other instead, because at seventeen we are already tired of being told to forgive without limits and love without boundaries. We are teenage girls, which means we have learned the dangers of naiveté.

There are words we have been called, other than our names: bitch, slut, prude. Places that have been grabbed, other than our hands: chest, crotch, ass. Things we have been told, other than the truth:

This is just between us; I’ll stop; I love you.

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We watch the heads before us nod in unison, stained glass light rainbowing their scalps. It’s true—we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. We have sinned. But what came first: our neighbor’s sin, or our own?

Mona tears a scrap of paper from the service leaflet and scribbles on it with one of the golf pencils meant for filling out donor pledges. To defeat level one of Bad Episcopalian you must first complete a prayer for Mr. Fenderbaum. Mr. Fenderbaum was our old gym teacher. He’d always walk through the girls’ locker room to borrow shower spray—“boy’s is out,” he’d murmur, eyes surveying our widest parts: thighs, hips, breasts. He called all the girls in his classes Smiley. “Smiley, look alive out there!” he’d shout during a basketball game. You’d have no idea who he was talking to unless he caught you in the corner of the gym when everyone else had gone down to the locker room. “Something on your mind, Smiley?” he’d ask, touching your naked arm to show how much he cares. “You can talk to me.” The sad thing is, some of the girls did. They followed him into his office, a windowless concrete box near the paper supply closet, and sat on the swivel chair he offered. And because he pretended to listen, they would return after the last bell, and do what he asked.

Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe they went back to see what they could make him do.

To learn what could happen if you played a man at his own game.

To defeat level two you must forgive Jimmy Olsen for locking the door during Seven Minutes in Heaven,

Lydia adds.

To defeat level three you must forgive Uncle John for kissing you on the lips, Sammy writes.

Lydia shakes her head and reaches for the pencil. We’re going to hell. Lydia’s father is one of the deacons, and she has to “play the game,” as we call it, because he roped her into acolyting once a month, something the rest of us immediately vetoed when Mrs. Taylor proposed the idea to our table at the Pancake Supper. Whenever Lydia acolytes we sit in the front row, pulling faces and making the sign language word for fine: one palm held to the chest, thumb touching breastbone

183 before the hand hinges forward. This is the only word we remember from the brief lesson we received during diversity day last year, and it has become our secret distress signal, from I think I just got my period to save me from this boy to I think I’m about to cry. Fine, fine, fine.

Father John finishes his sermon and we sigh with relief—the service is at its halfway mark for everyone else, but for us, it’s almost over. Mrs. Brown comes up to the microphone to lead the prayers of the people, and the reply has been etched into our memory so deeply that it is less a response than a reflex: for our bishop lord have mercy, for our president lord have mercy, for this town lord have mercy. She comes to the list of names, which includes Sammy’s grandmother and Mona’s sister, and finally we hear Gemma Anderson. Is there a collective intake of breath, or do we imagine it?

A sudden reverence—something we once felt every time we entered the sanctuary—dips our heads toward the ground, seals our palms together. We stay like that until hear us, Lord; “for your mercy is great.”

When they start passing the gold plate for the collection we slip into the hall, where we climb the carpeted steps to the choir loft. There we open the window next to the baby grand and share a pack of American Spirits that Mona has transferred to an Altoids tin. We tug old choir robes over our dresses so their cotton won’t catch the smoke.

“Do you think Gemma’s alive?” Lydia asks, tapping her cigarette on the edge of a coffee mug holding rainbow pencils.

“Yes,” we say. “For now.”

“But we can’t be sure.”

“We would know.”

“How?” she demands. “How would we know?”

When Mona’s sister was in the car accident we all felt a churning in our stomachs, an uneasiness we didn’t understand until our mothers called us into our living rooms and said

184 something terrible had happened. We think of the chimpanzees we studied in biology class, who groomed the fur of a sick female for days before her death, whose mate pounded his chest moments before she died.

Our cigarettes begin to crumble between our fingers. “We just would.”

After the service we sit on the paisley couch in Father John’s office with the New Teen Bible on our laps, which he ordered especially for us. Each book is interspersed with text messages between God and his disciples, such as: God: Hey, Noah, can u do something 4 me? Noah: What’s up? God:

Ppl r becoming wicked so I’m sending a flood. Can u build an ark 2 save the animals & preach 2 the ppl about repenting their sins? Noah: 4 sure.

Father John walks in with a plate of donuts from coffee hour, curated specifically to our tastes: strawberry with sprinkles, cruller, Boston cream.

“How are you girls holding up?” he asks. “I know Gemma was your classmate.” He catches himself. “Is your classmate.”

We look to one another, then the carpet. Eye contact is dangerous with Father John. He takes it as a sign of unspoken confession, a signal of your barricaded desire for connection. This is a safe space, he has told us more than once.

He settles into the chair behind his desk and sets down the donuts. “Are you feeling worried? Anxious?”

The thing is, we like Father John, we really do. He does not interrupt with the gruff authority of our grandfathers, or listen with the filtered attention of our fathers. We wish that Brian were still in the class, that the Model UN kids had not corrupted him with their agnostic ways. At least when

Brian was here they could fill the silences with small talk about the Patriots. Now it’s just us four,

185 and not a session passes without horseshoes of sweat dampening the armpits of Father John’s black blouse.

“Well,” he says, breaking the silence. “If you want to talk, I’m always here.” We nod, our mothers’ voices swirling in our heads. Please, girls, just try harder—for us?

As if it hasn’t always been for them. We inherited our faith before we could speak, our naked heads dunked in the dove-shaped baptismal fount, our skin rubbed with holy oil. We screamed at the bizarre routine, triggering a wave of laughter among the congregation members, who knew this was simply part of the ceremony: protest.

Father John clears his throat with a phlegmy trill. “On a cheerier note,” he continues, a brief pause acknowledging the awkward transition, “How are you all feeling about becoming official members of St. Anne’s adult congregation next Sunday? Any doubts?” He pushes the plate of donuts closer to us, as though sweets are the key to our disclosure.

“No.” We don’t touch the donuts. “None.”

We tell our parents we’re going to Lydia’s after class, but instead we go to Jimmy’s General

Store and buy paper cones of Italian ice from the cooler in the back. We eat them on the concrete steps of the squat brick building, as we have since we were nine. The steps are splattered with our fallen drips from years past, stains of melted sherbet and popsicles.

“What if we know the guy?” Mona says. “The guy who took Gemma.” Last week Mona offered to tattoo our hips with nothing but a sewing needle and an unsharpened pencil. She is not afraid to say what we’re all thinking.

We think of Dylan, who pushed Lydia’s head into his crotch when they were alone in his bedroom. Eric, who raised a broken beer bottle to his wrist, showing what he would do if Lydia left

186 him. Patrick, who trailed Sammy’s bike in his truck because he said he liked the view. Travis, who texted Mona for weeks on end nothing but, fuck?

“Yeah.” Our Italian ices are melting and we tilt our heads to catch the dribble. “Maybe.”

At school on Monday we expect an assembly, but there is none. Instead we are greeted by flyers half-heartedly taped to the mayonnaise-colored tile of the hallway, bottom corners flapping towards the floor. They are printed on the backs of posters for last week’s Spring Fling Dance, ghost outlines of roses and tulips lurking beneath the police’s phone number, beneath CALL WITH ANY

INFO ON ANDERSON CASE.

Sammy snatches one of them off the wall. We lean against the janitorial closet and run our fingers over the wrinkled paper. We try to place the picture we saw on the news reports: face round and pale as a rice cake, hair and eyes the color of chocolate pudding. There are two hundred students in our grade, ninety of which are girls, all of which are more remarkable than Gemma. She is not pretty enough to trigger a memory of jealousy, not unattractive enough to trigger one of pity.

The bell for first period rings and bodies flood the hallway, tugging us toward the center of the school like a riptide. We lose one another in the wave of canvas backpacks and messenger bags, brushing up against metal zippers and mesh water bottle pockets. Above us we see the heads of our taller classmates: boys with hair newly cropped for spring, nicks announcing the curve of their skulls; girls with vanilla-scented braids, brushed smooth only an hour ago. They do not glance at the posters, which have begun to slip from the walls into the crowd, just another flu flyer or SAT class announcement. We are careful not to step on them, though they are already stamped with the prints of dirty sneakers.

An ugly thought: if not for Gemma’s family, would anyone have noticed her gone? We shake it from our heads with a snap of our ponytails. Of course we would have.

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When we return home from school the air is thick with our mothers’ anxiety. They are baking casseroles for the Andersons, they are dusting the bookshelves, they are calling one another on the phone, saying can you imagine if she were yours? We try to avoid them altogether, to run right up to our rooms without being noticed, but they turn towards the stairs and say, where do you think you’re going?

Sammy’s mother gives her a black can of pepper spray no larger than a lipstick. Mona’s mother shows her the proper way to execute a kick to the groin. Lydia’s mother buys her a metal cat to hang on her keychain, its ears sharp as thorns. “Carry your house keys when you’re walking home,” Lydia’s mother instructs. She demonstrates how to hide the jagged teeth between your index and middle finger, how to dart for the eyes.

“You’ll probably never have to use this,” they tell us.

“Did you?” we ask.

They smile, ruffling our hair as when we were kids, and say nothing.

On Wednesday morning policemen come and open Gemma’s locker, put her gel pens and star-stamped notebook into plastic baggies labeled with different letters of the alphabet. “Nothing to see here, nothing to see,” Principal Hector declares as we bottleneck the hallway. “Move right along, this isn’t your business.”

There is an announcement over the loudspeaker after the Pledge of Allegiance: “In regards to recent events, anyone who feels they need extra support should seek out Ms. Sweeney in guidance.”

Who will seek out Ms. Sweeney? Who are Gemma’s friends? How do you know if you need extra support? At lunch we scan the cafeteria for tables that are visibly distressed. But the basketball

188 girls are throwing chicken tenders at one other, the alt girls are sharing a package of grocery store sushi, the student council girls are trading Poptart flavors.

“Someone must be missing her,” Lydia says.

“Yes,” we agree. “But who?”

In the last month alone two cats, three dogs, and one albino iguana went missing in

Nashquitten. There is a special section for missing pets in the Nashquitten Mariner called “A.W.O.L.:

Animals Wayward Or Lost.” The cats, dogs and iguana were all found within three days of wandering from home.

Is it that much harder to find a girl?

Confirmation would have slipped to the backs of our minds, if not for our mothers. They come to us when we’re alone, knocking gently on our closed doors. They sit on our desk chairs and our bed corners. They tell us that though it may not seem like it, this is actually the perfect time to be confirmed. Right now our faith is more essential than ever.

“Are you praying?” they ask.

“Of course,” we say.

Our mothers aren’t stupid. They look at us like we’re lying, but for once we’re not. We’ve been crossing our chests in bathroom stalls and murmuring Gemma’s name as we shove folders into our backpacks. We’re not convinced that prayer works, and yet, it seems selfish not to try.

On Wednesday we gather at Lydia’s house after school. We attempt calculus homework in the kitchen and eventually our mothers arrive, congregating in the living room, where they sip whiskey and diet ginger ale from coffee mugs. Today is normally (one glass of) Wine Wednesday, but upon arriving they handed us their keys, said that we’ll be driving home. “What’s happening on

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Sunday, Luce?” Mrs. Flanders calls from the living room after they’ve finished their first round.

“What are you going to wear?”

“Clothes?” Lydia says without looking up from her notebook.

“Don’t be fresh.” We can’t see into the doorway of the living room from our spot at the kitchen’s corner, but one of the mothers snaps her fingers in agreement.

“Does your homecoming dress still fit, Celia?” Mrs. Warner’s voice is louder than usual— she is the type of woman constantly encouraged to speak up, speak up! “Around the waist?”

“Yes, mother.”

“We need to get Sammy a haircut,” Mrs. Kimball says, in a hushed tone that fails to drop to the volume of a whisper. “Those split ends look like straw.”

“They forget that it’s an occasion for the family, too,” says Mrs. Hodgkins. “It’s not just about them.”

Mona rolls her eyes. “We can hear you.”

We lower our heads and continue to solve the quadratic equations in front of us. The older we get, the less energy we have for arguing with our mothers. We no longer care about being right or about being heard. We just want to be left alone, away from their attempts to shape us into girls we’ll never be.

The week continues without any news. On Friday we skip school and spend the day in

Mona’s bed, because she has a king size her Aunt Lottie gifted her post-divorce. (We feel a particular bond with this mattress, because we helped Mona cleanse it with a bundle of sage, eliminating any bad sex vibes.)

We each call in sick to school, imitating the voices of our mothers so easily that we wonder if we are growing into their cadences rather than mimicking them. Normally skipping would make

190 our hands sweat and our hearts skip, but not this week. We remind ourselves of our perfect attendance records, our honor roll achievements, our polite behavior. The stakes of school do not feel as high as we once believed them to be.

Mona has been charging a collection of gold-flecked crystals on her windowsill, where they can collect energy in the moonlight. We place the smooth stones on one another’s foreheads, touching toes beneath the blankets. “They’re protection crystals,” Mona explains. We hold our heads still on the pillows so that the rocks will not slip down the bridges of our noses.

“Will they protect my uterus from impregnation?” Sammy asks. “I’m almost out of birth control.”

“Just shove one of the crystals up there,” Celia says. “My cousin did that with a potato once.”

“She did not.”

“Did too. And a turnip another time. She says root vegetables are best.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

Lydia fake gags. “I’m gonna puke.”

“Shut up, all of you,” Mona says. “This is serious business.”

“Sorry.” We touch the crystals to make sure they’re still in place. “What now?”

“Close your eyes and let the energy move through you.”

We do as she says and concentrate on the coolness of the crystals against our foreheads, picture light branching from the stones into our veins, infusing our blood with a secret defense serum.

“Is it working?” Mona whispers.

A soft heat warms us from the inside like a glug of hot tea. This is how prayer used to feel.

When we couldn’t sleep without first pressing our palms together. When we wore needle-thin

191 crosses around our necks. When we thought recitations could keep us safe. Watch over me as I sleep tonight, and be with me when I wake at morning’s light.

“Yes,” we say. “It’s working.”

The next day we drive around town in Sammy’s Toyota. Sammy’s the only one with her own car, which she has named Betsy and bedazzled with stick-on jewels of all colors. According to

Sammy, the car is the physical manifestation of American independence. Sammy is very into her independence. She says she’s never getting married and plans on being our generation’s most notorious spinster.

Normally, we would start our Nashquitten 500 in the harbor, then loop through the

Driftway and North Side. We’ve been doing this since we received our licenses a few months ago: burning time by going nowhere. But today we are not driving laps—today we have a destination.

We approach Sagebrook Drive slowly, because going our usual ten miles above the speed limit seems disrespectful. There are no police cars or yellow tape, as we imagined there would be.

We know from the news and the paper that this is her street, but we cannot tell which house is

Gemma’s as we drive up and down the newly paved road. All of the neutral-colored houses, with their trimmed lawns and two-car garages, seem equally innocent.

“It’s that one,” Mona says, pointing to a white colonial with black shutters. She rubs a finger against the window, leaving a greasy trail. “Look at the trashcan.”

We crank down the windows and lean outside to see the trashcan, which has been dragged to the curb for pick up. The plastic top is slightly askew, and crushed casserole pans poke out beneath, their aluminum caked with crusted cheese and tomato sauce.

“Shit,” we say.

“Do you feel that?” Mona asks.

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“Feel what?

“I don’t know. It.”

“Shut up,” we tell her, but something heavy settles in our stomachs, something that makes us think Gemma isn’t coming home.

That night Lydia’s parents are at St. Anne’s annual budget meeting, so we sit on her floor eating takeout pizza while she digs through her closet for last year’s yearbook.

“Don’t drip on the rug, please,” she says from behind a wall of skirts and jackets.

“We’re not,” we chorus, shifting our legs to cover a stain of marinara blooming over the fabric.

“Here’s tenth grade.” Lydia appears with a thin hardcover book creased at the spine. She plops into the middle of our circle and we fight to turn the pages, tearing the glossy paper as we flip to the student photos. There is Polly Abner, Lance Acken and Lily Anderson, but no Gemma

Anderson. We turn to The Fallen, a page dedicated to dropout students, but she’s not there, either.

“Fuck,” we say.

Lydia closes the yearbook. “Maybe she was new this year.”

“Maybe,” we say. But the truth is that no one moves to Nashquitten at our age. The only reason to move here is to start a family. You see our stellar test scores and miniscule crime rate. You drive to one of our five beaches and catch a crab in the shallow water. You walk the quiet sidewalks and smell the tiger lilies poking over our fences. Gosh, you say. What a nice place to grow up.

Early Sunday morning we gather at the salt marsh, our meeting spot since childhood. The sun is just beginning to rise, a trickle of citrusy light on the horizon, and the water is low and muddy,

193 reeking of fish. We are still in our pajamas, not yet dressed for church, and our skin prickles beneath the thin cotton. It’s cold here, air blowing off the nearby ocean that flooded these parts years ago.

“Today’s the day,” Mona says.

We nod, settling onto the ground and pulling fistfuls of grass towards us. It is straw-like in our palms.

“So we’re all going?” Mona asks. She is the only one standing. Looming. “For sure?”

We know what she’s getting at. “We can’t just ditch.”

“Why not?” It sounds tough, but she won’t look at us as she says it.

“They’d be mad.”

“Who?” She hurls a stone into the marsh. It lands with a wet thunk. “Who’s ‘they’?”

We glance at one another, little more than silhouettes in the early light. “Everyone.”

“You think everyone is going to care?” Mona asks. She’s clutching a sharp stone in her hand, chipped at its edges. “You think everyone is going to notice?”

We stand up and examine our legs, covered with red marks from the long yellow blades, a series of slashes. “Yes,” we say, tired of this nonsense. “They would.”

We think she’s going to throw the stone, but she pockets it instead. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

St. Anne’s is hosting the confirmation service not only for us, but the entire South Shore deanery. We’ve never seen the parking lot this crowded except at Christmas and Easter. Even the spots near the dumpster are taken, where the pavement’s constantly swampy with a mustard colored liquid.

We follow the line of blow-dried and unwrinkled teens inside, where we are directed into

Parish Hall. Our parents are funneled into the sanctuary. “Good luck,” they whisper before we part, as though we’re warming up for an important sports match.

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A large circle of metal chairs has been arranged in the hall, and we sit on the side closest to the kitchen, from which the smell of post-service refreshments drifts: monkey bread, tater-tot casserole, deviled eggs.

Everyone is chatting with someone else except the girl beside us. Her dress is too heavy for

May, a knee-length red velvet clearly recycled from Christmas season. Her eyes are swollen with the signature puffiness of a cry, something we are well acquainted with. She looks up for a second and we smile. “What church are you from?”

“St. Mark’s in Weymouth.” She tucks a flyaway curl behind her ear. If only we had some hairspray. “What about you guys?”

“From here.”

Her eyes widen. She leans closer, grasping for Lydia’s arm. “Did you know Gemma

Anderson?”

We’re not sure how to answer, and we want to say the right thing. This girl is vibrating with intensity. “We went to school with her.”

She nods. “Me too.” Confusion flickers over our eyebrows. “Not at Nashquitten, of course.

At Minot Community College. We were in the Accelerated Scholars program together. Gemma was always talking about how stupid it was that they still required her to take P.E. at your school.

Administrations never have our best interests at heart, you know.”

She is talking too fast, saying too much. The rush of information makes us lightheaded, like we’ve just stood still after a cartwheel.

“It’s nice to talk to other people who knew her. I almost didn’t come this morning.” She flashes a sympathetic smile. “How are you all holding up?”

“Oh, you know.”

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The girl places a supportive hand on Lydia’s arm and drops her voice to a whisper. “Are you going to be at the funeral?”

“Funeral?” we ask, but everyone is turning in their seats. The Bishop has walked into the room, dressed in a floor-length ivory robe belted with braided tassel. A moss-colored cape hangs from her shoulders, beneath which we can see a metallic emerald stole, whose two fringed rectangles remind us of bookmarks. She clears her throat and taps the floor with a cane that looks meant for herding sheep.

“Hello, my friends!” She spreads her arms wide like she is trying to encompass us all in one giant hug. “Who’s ready to be confirmed?”

There is a cheering from our peers that surprises us.

The Bishop nods. “That’s what I like to hear. This is what the Church needs, enthusiasm from young members like yourselves.” She enters the ring of chairs and begins to walk its circumference, looking each of us in the eye. Her irises are the artificial blue of mouthwash. “There are few things that give me greater joy than ushering in the new generation of the Episcopalian community. But.” She taps the floor with the cane. “I would also like to say that there is no pressure to confirm. This is your decision, not your parents’, or grandparents’, or anyone else’s.

Understood?”

“Understood,” echoes the circle.

“Now,” she says. “Shall we pray?”

While the rest of the room lines up to process into the sanctuary, we run to the bathroom and lock the door behind us. “So she’s dead?” asks Celia. We lost the Weymouth girl to a friend she spotted across the room before we could ask her to clarify.

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“Seems like it.” Mona is already sitting on the tile floor, searching the Internet on her phone.

We slide down the wall to crouch beside her, the skirts of our dresses wrinkling at the waist like crumpled Kleenex.

“Seventeen-year-old Gemma Anderson, who was reported missing last Saturday, was found dead near the Nashquitten water tower early Sunday morning,” she reads. “Police confirmed that a male suspect is in custody but declined to release a name. An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.”

For a moment, we feel nothing. Like sugar tossed in hot water, we’ve dissolved.

But then we are thrust back into our bodies. Aware of our thighs, cold against the icy tile, aware of spines, sealed with dress zippers, aware of our waists, sore with the indent of panty hose.

“Come here.” We reach for each other’s heads to untangle the braids and buns our mothers constructed only an hour ago, dropping bobby pins to the floor where they clang with the sound of a struck triangle. We rake through the Aquanet-stiffened strands with our fingers, loosening seared curls.

Organ music filters in from the sanctuary. We unlock the door and stumble into the hallway, our path blocked by the rope of waiting confirmants. We consider taking our place at the back of the line, smoothing our skirts and straightening our backs and marching down the aisle to the altar as we have done so many times before.

The music crescendos. Lucy is the first one to raise a thumb to her breastbone. We all move one palm perpendicular to our chests, then tilt our hands forward. Fine?

We run as we had when we were kids playing Capture the Flashlight on our darkened lawns, convinced every shadow was chasing us. “Is something wrong?” someone calls after us, but we just heave open the front door and sprint into the parking lot, passing our parents’ parked cars. We plunge into Sammy’s Toyota, clicking the seatbelts so quickly that the buckles bite our fingers, nip our hips. The water tower looms like an oversized funnel in the distance, Nashquitten painted on its

197 side in thick straight script. We jolt onto the road and imagine Gemma’s last moments, dragged through the woods to the naked patch of field that surrounds the tower (we have been there before, to smoke and drink and kiss). She must have screamed, or maybe she didn’t. As a girl you learn that silence might save you, like when Ricky Flannery pushes you into the dark tunnel of the slide during recess, hand beneath your skirt, saying it will be over quick if you don’t shout; or when your mother tells you not to provoke your brother (provoke, that word so often leveraged against you), that he hit you because you’re too loud, too wild.

But we are not quiet. We roll down our windows and scream into the blurred landscape until our ears ring. Maybe this is how we pray now: howling towards the sky, until no one, not even God, can ignore us.

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