Текст книги "Love Letters to the Dead"

Автор книги: Ava Dellaira

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Kristen’s face stayed blank, but her eyes focused toward me in a way that made me know she was deep-down nice. She said, “Kristen. ‘I’m one of those regular weird people.’”

Tristan explained, “Quote courtesy of Lady Joplin. She’s obsessed.” So then Kristen started talking about you, and I figured out that Kristen really loves you, pretty much as much as she loves Tristan.

When I got home today, I looked up about Slash, and I also looked up about your life, so that I can start my education, and so that I can be friends with Tristan and Kristen. I read that you grew up next to oil towers in Texas, and that when you were a teenager, everyone in high school was terrible to you. But that made you fearless. And then you became famous. When Kristen and I are better friends, I am going to ask her to play me some of your music. I know that I could find some online, but I sort of hope that the first time I hear it will be with her. Until then, though, I am writing because I wanted to thank you for saying that thing about regular weird people, because I thought about that a lot, and I am one of them, too. With all of us standing there together, Kristen, Tristan, Natalie, Hannah, and me, I realized that there is a reason that we were all there—we are each weird in a different way, but together, that’s actually normal. And even if there’s a lot that I can’t say to them, it feels good to belong somewhere.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Allan Lane,

I am at my aunt Amy’s. It’s her week. I like the weeks with my dad better, because Dad is my dad and he’s part of my used-to-be-normal family. But I still love Aunt Amy, which is why I am writing to you. Since you are Mister Ed the talking horse’s voice, I figured you’d be the closest thing to Mister Ed himself. My aunt Amy loves Mister Ed. Really loves him. She also really loves Jesus.

When we were little, Dad didn’t used to like us to spend time with her, because he thought that she was unstable. But Mom would cry and say, “Jim, they’re all she has.” Since Aunt Amy never had kids of her own, she’s always thought of May and me as her daughters, too, I guess.

Even though she’s only forty now, Aunt Amy’s hair is silver already and long, and she wears flower-print dresses. You can tell that she was pretty when she was young. But she’s not like Mom, who seems just as pretty now. Mom looks soft, like an out-of-focus picture that blurs her hair and her face a little bit into the landscape. Or maybe that’s just how I see her now that she’s gone. Aunt Amy is skinny and bony and you don’t want her to stroke your head or hug you. She holds too tight.

Aunt Amy had a few boyfriends a long time ago, but they were all bad ones. I probably shouldn’t know about that, except I heard Mom talking about it once when she and Dad were fighting. Aunt Amy hadn’t dated anyone since I’ve known her until last year, when she fell for this guy who was walking across the country for Jesus. She found out about him on the news, and she decided she really admired this man. She sent him letters and care packages to pit stops along his route. And then she decided to fly out to Florida so she could join the end of his pilgrimage. She walked the last one hundred miles with him, and they struck up a romance on the road. I think Aunt Amy imagined she’d finally found her mate. Afterward, she called him a lot and left him messages, where she did impressions of Mister Ed or of the Jamaican bobsledders from the movie Cool Runnings. (That is her next favorite thing after Mister Ed.) At first, he called back a little bit. She’d ask him when she could see him again, but he’d never say exactly when. And soon the calls stopped coming. She’s always checking the answering machine, though she tries to act like she doesn’t care. I think she doesn’t want me to see her being hopeful. (I don’t know if being super into Jesus makes you against things like modern technology, but Aunt Amy still hasn’t figured out cell phones.)

At the beginning of the summer, after Mom had told me she was going to go to California for a while, she decided she needed to call some kind of family meeting. It was there that Aunt Amy asked if I wanted to spend Mom’s weeks with her. Clearly the two of them had planned this. Mom and Dad and Aunt Amy and I were sitting in the house May and I grew up in, on the sofa that had been worn in by years of our bodies. Aunt Amy turned to me and asked, “What do you think, Laurel?” She looked so hopeful about it.

Dad didn’t look so sure, but I knew that if I said no to Aunt Amy, she would start talking about how they let May go too far down a path of sin and how I needed God or something.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Then Aunt Amy pointed out that if I stayed with her, I could go to the high school in her district. I had barely considered the fact that I’d have to go to high school at the end of the summer, but if I did have to go, it seemed like a good idea to go somewhere else. So I agreed.

Now Aunt Amy hardly wants me to do anything. Go out, or see anyone, or talk to boys, or anything. The only thing she really lets me do is go on “study dates,” which is how I get to hang out with Natalie and Hannah when I’m at her house. Tonight Aunt Amy and I went to dinner at Furr’s Cafeteria, like we’ve done ever since May and I were kids. I got what I always get at Furr’s—Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes with no gravy, and red Jell-O. Aunt Amy always makes the two of us pray before dinner, even when it’s only an iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich and I’m watching TV, and even though my dad and I never pray at our real house. Now the prayer is always for May.

Afterward, Aunt Amy asks if I have been saved or not and if I’ve accepted Jesus into my heart. And I always say yes, because I want to get it over with. And I don’t want her to worry. May used to say no. Then she would ask, “What about a baby? What if a baby was just born, and didn’t have time yet to accept Jesus, and the baby died? Would they still go to hell? Or what about a grown-up person, who wasn’t a bad person, but just didn’t know about Jesus because he never learned? Would they go to hell?” Aunt Amy never really answered. She’d just get sad and say that she wanted us to know Jesus’ love. She’d say see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. She’d try to make it like a game, with us covering our eyes and ears and mouths. May hated that. Now Aunt Amy is scared, I guess, that May never got saved. She wants to make sure that doesn’t happen to me. But she doesn’t know how guilty I am. I can’t ever tell.

We were sitting in the Furr’s dining room in the dark red vinyl booth under the ceiling that is too high even for a high ceiling, and I was on to the red Jell-O, cutting every cube into a quarter. Aunt Amy was asking for more ice for her iced tea. And then she started doing her Mister Ed impression and asking me, “How does Mister Ed go? Show me.” She wanted me to make my hands like horse hoofs on the table and a horse noise with my lips. Like we did when I was a kid. I’ve seen how her face falls when I say no, or how she keeps on insisting. So I swallowed and did the horse lips. Just then I looked across the room and I saw this guy Teddy from my history class with his parents, I guess. He’s one of the popular soccer boys. My face turned hot, and I prayed he hadn’t seen me pretending to clip-clop on the table.

I’m nervous, because I am going to sneak out for the first time tonight. Tristan and Kristen are coming to pick me up at midnight. Tristan nicknamed me Buttercup. They adopted me and Natalie and Hannah, and they are especially nice to me, because I am the quietest and I love to listen to their education. When they asked us what we were going to do this weekend, Natalie and Hannah said they were going to spend the night at Hannah’s outside of town. I told them how I couldn’t go because I am kinda trapped at my aunt’s house. So Kristen and Tristan offered to break me out to hang out with them.

I explained living with Aunt Amy part-time by saying that my mom is on some sort of big retreat-type thing. I know that it’s strange that I haven’t talked to any of them about May, but it’s like I have a chance now to forget the bad stuff. To be someone else, someone like her. If I’d gone to Sandia, everyone would be watching me, wanting an answer. But at West Mesa, her identity is my secret. Besides Mrs. Buster, if anyone happened to read the story in the paper all those months ago, or heard of it, they don’t say anything about it. More likely, they didn’t pay attention, or forgot.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Janis Joplin,

I just got home from my first night sneaking out. The window was stuck, but I got it open. Luckily for me, it’s the old push-up kind that’s easy to get in and out of. I can hear Aunt Amy snoring a little, so I’m safe. There were no parties tonight, so we went to Garcia’s Drive-In, which is open all night, and I ordered cherry limeade, and Tristan ordered ten taquitos, and they smoked pot in the car, and Kristen put you on the stereo.

This was the first time that I’d seen people smoke pot, and also the first time I’d heard you sing. Your voice whispered into me, exploding slowly. And Kristen sang along, her eyes closed and the neon lights broken by the window on her cheeks.

I got nervous that she or Tristan would pass me the pipe, and I wasn’t sure what I would do. I was studying them in case I needed to know the right way to use it.

But when Tristan leaned into the backseat, Kristen took it out of his hand and said, “Don’t corrupt her.”

Tristan said, “What? It’s part of her education, right, babe?”

Kristen hit him on the shoulder and said, “Let’s keep it musical.”

Tristan looked at me and shrugged and said, “Sorry, Buttercup. Can’t cross the missus.”

But I think that I might have gotten kind of high from them smoking it in the car, anyway. Because the way you and Kristen sang “Summertime,” it felt like I was so far inside of the song. There was nothing else around. You made me feel what summertime really is. Underneath what’s bright, you knew the hot dark rasp of it. The other thing is, it was like a goodbye, and I could feel that, too. It’s fall now. September’s nearly over.

And then what happened is this. I asked them, trying to sound real casual about it, if they knew Sky. Since I ran into him in the hallway that day, I’ve been hoping for it to happen again, but it hasn’t yet. He did wave to me at lunch the other day, when he caught me looking at him. I thought Kristen and Tristan might know something about him. I tried to sound like I was asking for no reason. But of course my cheeks burned and a giggle burst out of me, and they guessed immediately. Tristan started sing-songing, “Buttercup’s in love!”

Kristen told me that the rumor is Sky transferred because he got kicked out of his old school. She said that he doesn’t talk to anyone about that stuff, so no one knows for sure what happened. She also said that he stands around with the stoners, as if he was one, except he doesn’t even smoke cigarettes. “But,” she said, “he’s cool, definitely. Capital C. I mean, everyone agrees on that.”

Tristan decided we should drive by his house so I could see it. He looked up Sky’s last name—Sheppard—on Kristen’s phone and found a listing. Kristen said we were being creepy, but Tristan laughed and said it was fun. And secretly, I was really excited to see it. We were out of the high school area, in a neighborhood where the houses are smaller and either adobe or tin-sided. Most of the yards were messy, full of sunflowers whose stems were scrambled together, parts of old cars, or trees that somebody cut at the trunk and never hauled away. But at Sky’s address, everything was perfect. The tin siding on the house looked shinier than the rest, as if someone had polished it. And there were rows and rows of perfect marigolds in the front yard in two long flower beds. A welcome mat and a fall wreath on the door, and two same-sized pumpkins on either side, though they were early for Halloween. I saw there was someone outside. A woman, in her bathrobe, watering the flowers with a bright green watering can. It was two a.m. Just as we were driving away, I saw someone else open the door, and when I turned back, it looked like Sky.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Judy Garland,

I’m in English right now, not paying attention in class and writing this letter instead, which is sort of ironic because technically this whole thing started as an assignment for English that I never turned in.

After I got off the phone with Mom last night, I went on Google Earth and tried to see if I could find where she is. California was colored in blocky splotches of gray and brown and green, like all the other states. I knew the ranch is close to Los Angeles, but I didn’t know where exactly. I scanned around, hovering above the city, trying to find some context. When I would start to zoom in, the picture plummeted toward the ground, until it would land in a street view of a road leading nowhere in particular.

Finally, instead I typed in the address of where you used to live in the desert town of Lancaster, California. It looked like a normal neighborhood, one that I could imagine walking in. My mom told us how before you were Judy Garland, you were Frances Ethel Gumm, “Baby” they called you, from Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Your family moved to Lancaster when you were four. It was dry and dusty, but after the winter rains, miles of red poppies would spring up everywhere. I found a photo of the Lancaster poppies online, and it made me think of you falling to sleep in the field of them in The Wizard of Oz after the Wicked Witch cast a spell. Mom didn’t ever tell us this part, but I read that your family moved because of rumors that your dad hit on male ushers at this theater in Grand Rapids. Your parents used to fight so much it scared you, but you kept singing. Your mom put all of her energy into trying to make you a star. You traveled on the vaudeville circuit with your two older sisters—first the Gumm Sisters, then the Garland Sisters, and then it was you who got signed by MGM.

My sister was a bit like you were as a little girl. She was the bright spark of the family, the one who everyone relied on to shine, the one who tried to keep everyone from fighting. I think because of Mom’s story about how May brought our family together, she felt like it was her job to keep it that way.

When we’d be at the dinner table, if Mom and Dad were fighting, I would sit there silently, trying not to cry. But May would disappear and come back wearing her leotard. She’d go into the living room, where we could all see her, and she’d start doing back walkovers and pirouettes. The way May was, it was impossible not to look at her. She’d do cartwheels and long leaps, and if they hadn’t stopped fighting yet, she’d do handsprings down the runner of the rug. She’d say, “Look!” and flip right there. We’d clap for May, and when she had finished her show, she’d say, “Can we have ice cream for dessert?” So Mom would get the bowls, and everything bad was gone for the moment.

But once in a while, there were times when Mom was having a “bad night,” and no matter how many handsprings May did, or songs she sang, or jokes she told, she couldn’t make Mom snap out of it. Mom would put her hand on May’s forehead and say, “I’m sorry, honey, but I’m having a bad night.” Mom would say she was too tired for a bedtime story. She’d tuck us in early and disappear into her room. Dad would follow her in and try to calm her down. Sometimes, if it didn’t work, we’d hear him leave the house.

We’d be in bed, May and I, both of us pretending to be asleep but still wide awake, and we’d hear Mom cry through the wall. I didn’t realize it then, but maybe she was thinking of her own mom who drank too much, or her dad who died, or the life she thought she’d have when she wanted to move to California to be an actress, and everything that didn’t come true. Those were the nights when May and I weren’t enough. And even though we couldn’t say it, or even think it, somehow I think we both knew it.

It was one of those nights, one of Mom’s bad nights, when May taught me magic. I guess I was maybe five. I whispered from the bottom bunk of the bed we used to share, before we got our own rooms as teenagers, “May? I’m scared.”

She climbed down her ladder and lay next to me. “What are you scared of?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I know what it is,” May said. “You’re scared of the witches. The bad witches are here, but it’s okay, we can beat them. We have magic.”

“We do?” I asked.

“I’ve been waiting to tell you until you were old enough. But I think you’re ready.”

The sound of Mom crying had faded away with the rest of the world. All that mattered was May and the secret that she was about to tell me. I leaned in, waiting. “What?” I asked eagerly.

May whispered, “We’re fairies.”

She explained that every seventh generation of children in our family inherits the magic. It’s in our genes, she said. And she said that because we were fairies, we had the power to fight the invisible evil witches.

“Come on!” she said, pulling me out of bed. “Are you ready to learn your first spell?” We snuck through the dark house and out the back door to gather up the ingredients. The moonlit yard was a world all our own. I followed her onto the grass, the feet of my pajamas wet with the dew, the cicadas making a strange sort of music. We needed three empty snail shells, the soft kind of sand, a bundle of berries, and the bark of one of the baby elms that sprang up at the edge of the garden. When we’d gathered all of our ingredients into a pail, we carried them back into our bedroom, and May stirred it up and said the spell in a whisper.

“Beem-am-boom-am-bomb-am-witches-be-gone!” She thrust her hands like she was throwing tiny stars from her fingers.

“See?” She turned to me, grinning. “They’re gone.”

And they were.

We put the potion under the bed, and May said that as long as we kept it there, the witches couldn’t get us. In that moment, I knew that as long as I had May, everything would be okay.

Now that May isn’t here, I have to find another way to make magic. And it feels like she’s sending me a spell that might help. This is what happened. At the beginning of class, I asked Mrs. Buster for a pass. Instead of going to the bathroom, I walked up and down the empty hallways, peeking into the tiny windows of the classroom doors, as if I could find something that I was looking for.

Then I passed by one of the cases they use to display trophies for sports and debate and science fairs, and I noticed my reflection swimming in the blurry glass. Everything about me looked wrong. I couldn’t very well try to rearrange my face then and there, so I started with my hair. I was smoothing my ponytail for the third time when Sky turned the corner.

“Do you want to go on a drive or something?” he just asked me right then. The second time we’d ever talked.

“Um, I’m in English.”

He laughed. “No you’re not. You’re standing here. Right in front of me, in fact.”

I smiled back. I wanted to ask him about his house and the woman who must have been his mother tending the garden in the middle of the night. But of course I couldn’t. So I was quiet for a long moment, noticing things. Like the eyelash on his cheek. And the way his chest looked underneath his sweatshirt. And I forgot I was supposed to be saying something.

“So do you want to go for a drive or what?”

“After school?”

“Yeah. I’ll meet you in the alley.” And with that, he turned around and walked down the hallway.

I glanced back at myself in the murky glass and caught the edge of my grin. My face didn’t look so wrong anymore, and before I turned to go, I noticed the way my eyes are shaped like May’s.

My stomach is flipping all around. I wonder if Sky swerves and runs red lights and stuff like May did. I used to get scared in the car with her and grip on to the handle over the door and hold my breath, but I loved it. I loved the feeling of being alone together in the car, like we could go anywhere we wanted. Just us.

Luckily for me I’m with Dad this week and I take the bus home, so I won’t have to think about what to tell Aunt Amy. I have to go now. The bell is ringing. Wish me luck and bravery.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Jim Morrison,

I waited at the edge of the alley after school, and Sky pulled up in his truck. A Chevy. Kristen was there, smoking, and she gave me a quiet wink. I got in and looked at Sky. I wondered if he could hear how hard my heart was hitting my chest. Like my ribs really were a cage, and my heart wanted out. When the ignition turned, the music came on loud. I asked Sky who was singing, and he said it was the Doors, and the song was called “Light My Fire.” He said, “If you love Kurt, you’ll love Jim Morrison, too.” He was right—I do love you.

All of a sudden we were out of the lot and on the highway next to the mountains, flying. I put my hand out the window, and then I put my head out. I felt my hair blow behind me and the air rush into me, and I forgot for a moment to worry about how I was supposed to be. Because I was perfect right then. Everything was. And Sky was a perfect driver. Not scary. Just steady. And fast. I wanted the music to last forever.

When I brought my head back in, Sky looked at me and kind of smiled. “Sit closer,” he said. So I moved to the middle of the bench seat, and everything slowed down except the car. The song and its drums were going. He put his hand on my thigh. High up. Right on the skin where my skirt ended. His fingers moved, just the littlest bit. Such a little bit that if I looked down, I probably couldn’t even have seen them moving. But I felt them, just enough that I knew he knew what he was doing. He’d done this before.

For a moment, I went somewhere else. I remembered how it felt, those nights with May, when we were supposed to be at the movies. I got scared suddenly, and I tried not to let Sky know that I was breathing too fast. I stared straight ahead at the road and imagined I was above the earth, looking down through the window of a plane. The road would look like a streak of lightning laid across the land. Sky’s truck would be a tiny toy car.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Nothing…”

“Do you want to go somewhere?”

“No, I like driving.”

And then he took his hand off of my leg, and his hand found mine, and he held on to it, and he seemed like an anchor to the earth. I was back in the car with him, and he kept driving, fast but never faster, and never slower. He stayed just right the whole time.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Amy Winehouse,

In a way you were like the singers from the sixties, like Janis and Jim, and from the nineties, like Kurt, because your fearlessness seemed like it came from a different time. When your first album was released, you still looked innocent, a pretty girl who said she thought she was ugly. But by the time your second album came out, it’s like you’d invented a new person to be. You would step onstage in your little dress, sipping a drink, with your big beehive hairdo and Cleopatra eyeliner, and sing with a voice that poured out of your tiny body. You wore your clothes like armor, but in your songs you opened all the way up. You were willing to expose yourself without caring what anyone thought. I wish I was more like that.

You were always wild, even as a kid. You got kicked out of your theater school in London when you were sixteen because you pierced your nose and because you didn’t “apply yourself.” Hannah told me this. She doesn’t really apply herself, either, even though the teachers are always telling her how she’s so bright.

Today, instead of forgetting our gym clothes, Hannah suggested ditching PE altogether. She said that Natalie would ditch her last class, too, and Natalie’s mom would be at work until late, so we could go get some booze and drink it at her house. I was worried about getting drunk in the daytime, but I called Dad anyway and said, “I’m going to Natalie’s house to study after school, so I might be home a little late, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and then he paused. “I’m proud of you, Laurel. It’s not easy, what you’ve been through, and you’re out there living your life.”

He sounded like he meant it, and it was more than he’d said about anything in a long time. My stomach sank with guilt. I wondered what he would think if he knew what we were really doing.

I swallowed. “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and hung up as quickly as I could.

On our way to the store, Hannah sang “Valerie,” because that’s Natalie’s favorite of your songs. Hannah said that you had the best style of anyone, and then Natalie said that you had tattoos of pin-up girls, and Hannah said that she thought you even had affairs with a few, but she added, “Amy wasn’t a lesbian, she said, at least not without a little Sambuca.” Then she laughed. I wondered if this is what Hannah thought about herself.

When we got to Safeway, the pounding rain was sticking the bright leaves to the sidewalk. The way to do it, Hannah explained, is you just stand outside the door, trying to look pretty. And when a guy walks by, you stare at him in that way. You give him the money, and when he comes out and asks what you are up to, you take the bottle and run. You feel the whole rush of it. Natalie said Hannah is best at this, and that the guys always come when she looks. But Hannah made me try. Eventually a guy with a black ponytail and jeans with a patch that said XTC came over. He looked like a rocker left over from twenty years ago. I got my eyes ready, and he noticed me and said hi. I guess the key is to act like maybe he’ll get something in return for the favor. That’s what Hannah told me. It made me nervous, but I tried not to show it.

Then, when we were standing outside the door waiting for him to come back, I saw Janey, my old friend from elementary and middle school, walk up. Oh no, I thought. My heart started racing. She was holding hands with this cute soccer boy wearing a Sandia uniform. Her hair was perfect and pushed back by a headband, her skirt just the right amount of short with matching tights and rain boots. I wondered what she was doing here. Janey isn’t the type for ditching, I thought, but then I realized that by now the school day must have been over. I tried to turn away so she wouldn’t see me, but unfortunately it was too late. Janey’s eyes fell on me and froze.

“Hey,” I mumbled.

She glanced back at the guy she was with, and I wondered if she was embarrassed to be talking to me. “Hey, Laurel.” She paused for a moment, and I hoped that she would just go inside. But she walked up closer and touched my arm, the way you would if you were a doctor who had to tell someone they were dying. “How are you?”

“Um, I’m fine.”

She pursed her lips into a sad smile. “I miss you,” she said.

“Yeah, you too.”

I was about to ask her what she was doing when the XTC guy came out of the store with a bottle of Jim Beam. I knew I had to grab the bottle and run. So just as Janey gave me a freaked-out look, I said to her and the XTC guy both, “We gotta go,” and I grabbed the bottle and ran as hard as I could, Natalie and Hannah chasing behind me.

When we got far enough away that we slowed down to catch our breath, Hannah asked, “Who was that?”

“Oh,” I said, “just a girl I used to know. From middle school.”

I didn’t tell them that Janey and I had spent the night at each other’s houses every weekend when we were kids, or that we used to put on Wizard of Oz performances with May and charge our parents quarters to see them. I didn’t tell them that the last time I’d seen Janey was at May’s memorial six months ago, or that over the summer she’d called and left messages a couple of times to see if I wanted to spend the night. I didn’t tell them that I never called back. Because I didn’t know how to explain that after May died, all I wanted was to disappear. That my sister was the only person I could disappear into.

Suddenly I wanted to let it all come spilling out, but when I thought of saying May’s name, I froze up. If I tried to tell them, they’d want to know what happened, and I wouldn’t know what to say. They’d feel bad for me, and when you are guilty, there is nothing worse than pity. It just makes you feel guiltier.

There was something between me and the world right then. I saw it like a big sheet of glass, too thick to break through. I could make new friends, but they could never know me, not really, because they could never know my sister, the person I loved most in the world. And they could never know what I’d done. I would have to be okay standing on the other side of something too big to break through.

So I did my best to forget about Janey and to laugh with Natalie and Hannah when we got back to Natalie’s and opened our bottle of Jim Beam. In all of the excitement, I forgot to specify that we wanted something with fruit flavor in it. Straight whiskey, it turns out, is not so good, so we had to mix it up with apple cider.

Apple cider reminds me of when we would go apple picking in the fall with Mom and Dad. May and I always wanted to get to the apples we couldn’t reach. High up, they were shiny and spotless and best. We would run ahead of Mom and Dad, and when no one was looking, we’d hide in between the rows of trees and climb up. Once I fell and skinned my knee. But I didn’t cry. I let it bleed under my leggings so no one would know the secret and make us stop. After the apple picking, we’d get cinnamon doughnuts and apple cider, hot.

I wanted my whiskey cider hot, so I put it in the microwave. It smelled like memories mixed with fire. It didn’t taste that good, but Natalie and Hannah and I drank it anyway, and took off our shirts and ran around the backyard twirling in the rain. We fell down laughing.

I ended up lying there a long time, just looking at the rain falling and trying to pick out each separate drop. They started coming so fast. I thought of Janey and how during sleepovers at my house we’d stay up late and eat root beer float bars and ask May to paint our nails. I looked down at my hands, the purple polish now chipped down to the shapes of foreign continents. I thought about how in middle school, after I started going out with May, Janey and I had fewer and fewer sleepovers. It got harder to be around her, because I didn’t know how to tell her about the nights at the movies, and the guys, and how it made me want to slip out of my skin.