by Karen Rivers
I pour half a cup of coffee into my favorite mug. I bought it last year on the class trip we took to Brazil. It’s bright blue and has a faint cobweb cobbling the surface. There isn’t anything South American about it, but the web looks so real that it’s impossible to not try to wipe it off every time. I bought it at the airport—one for me, one for Piper—the only shop we actually saw on the trip. In the village where we helped build huts, there weren’t any shops, only dust and mud and kids playing soccer and staring and a guy with a camera capturing pictures of all of your white-rich-person “goodness.” A bunch of high school kids hammering nails. Probably they had to rebuild everything after we left. The whole thing never felt like something real that would ever matter.
I carry the mug to the fridge and top it up with milk, trying to look casual and like myself, Sloane, and not like marionette Piper, dancing on a string. I’m slouching, like she did. I stand up straighter. I’m aware the whole time that Dad is staring at me, flipping through possible things he can say and dismissing all of them. Finally he settles on “Come here, baby.”
“Nope,” I say. I’m holding the coffee in my hands like I need it to warm me up, even though I don’t feel either hot or cold. I feel unreal. “Well, it’s a school day. I’m going to school.”
“Pardon?” he mutters, distracted by something on his phone.
“Nothing.” I sip my coffee and it tastes so good that I gulp it. “I’m going to be late for school.”
“Come here.” Dad stands and then he’s coming toward me and gathering me into his arms, bundling me as though I’m tiny and he’s huge and I start blubbering again and get snot on his shirt and I don’t know why I’ve shrunk and he’s grown.
“Dad,” I say. “Thanks a lot. Now I’m going to be blotchy and red and everyone will know I’ve been crying.”
He shrugs. “You have plenty of reasons to be sad; no one’s going to judge you. And don’t feel bad about my shirt! I have lots of shirts,” he says. “Are you sure you want to go today?”
“I’m going to school,” I say. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got to go back sooner or later, right?”
“Well, right,” he says. “But it can be later. You can take time.”
“Time isn’t going to make her not dead, Dad,” I say, more angrily than I mean to. “God.”
“I know! I know. I … obviously. But maybe you’re not ready.”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Still have to graduate, right?”
“True,” he says. “I think that if you feel like it’s time, then it’s time. But you are allowed to change your mind. It’s your call.” He rubs the snot spot with a paper towel. “I’ll go change this shirt, then I’ve got to fly.” He stands up, stares out the window. “Wow, would you look at that.”
Outside, the sun is rising in a band of orange, firelike and vivid, from the sea. We both stare.
“Beautiful sky,” he says. “I should take a picture.” But he doesn’t move. He stares, as though he’s frozen in place by the gloriousness of it all.
“Sun’s coming up again,” I say. “Big surprise, huh.” I’m aiming at sarcastic but it comes out wrong. Staring at the sun has left a black hole in the center of my vision. I look around the room and the black hole moves with my eyes. “Fine. I mean, I’ll be fine. Fly. Me not going to school isn’t going to make her alive. I still have to graduate and study. I still have to … I mean, people say things like, ‘She’d want you to!’ but I don’t think she’d care. She definitely wouldn’t. But I care, I think. I mean, I do. Care.” I pour another cup of coffee and drink it down. I’m so thirsty. I pour a third cup. My hand is shaking like something trapped in the wire mesh cover of a fan. I squeeze the cup so Dad doesn’t see.
“It’s good, sweetheart,” he says. “Really. Truly. Take it slow. You can leave whenever you want.”
I sit down at the table, my back to the rising sun.
The table is clean. I half expect the red sock will still be there. The note about the dentist.
“I’m okay,” I whisper.
Liar, she says.
“Shut up,” I mumble. “Leave me alone.”
“What?” says Dad. He kisses the top of my head on his way to the stairs. “I like your new hair,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Thanks.” There were a bunch of different colors under the bathroom sink from last Halloween when Piper and I couldn’t decide what, exactly, to be. We went as conjoined twins, our hair (which was long back then) braided together so it looked like we were joined at the head. My neck hurt for a week, but it was worth it. It was amazing.
Everything we did together was amazing.
But now there is no we. There is only me, alone with my awkward shortish hair, which is now dark brown, almost black. I look so ugly. I pulse with self-loathing; then just as quickly, the feeling is gone, like it was an insect that lit on me and then took off again, within the same split second.
Dad comes back, this time in a blue shirt.
“Very corporate,” I tell him. “You look like a Best Buy salesman.”
“Brings out the blue in my eyes,” he grins.
“Your eyes are brown!”
“Nothing gets by you.” His eyes twinkle. “Glad you’re still paying attention.” He grabs his travel coffee mug and fills it up and then he’s going.
Then he’s gone.
“Bye, Dad,” I call, a beat too late, the door already closing behind him, his feet crunching on the gravel path to the garage, the sun now hidden behind the fine veil of gray in the sky.
Dad has left the newspaper on the table, being one of the last holdouts to continue to receive an actual newspaper in the morning, the thwack of it against the door waking the crows every morning so that they caw and wake everyone else up. I take another inadvisable sip of my coffee, the hot liquid in my empty stomach sloshing acidly around. My teeth feel thick and knitted, each one sporting a tooth-warmer of plaque and goo. The coffee rushes up my throat and threatens.
Don’t touch the paper, I warn myself. Do not open up that paper and look at anything. Do not read that newspaper. Stop.
When Piper first died, the story was full pages in the paper every day, but it’s mostly dropped out of the paper now. What else is there left to say? She died. James Robert Wilson is in prison, awaiting a bail hearing. There is no more news. That’s all there is.
She’s dead.
He killed her.
I’m jittery and itching to smoke a cigarette at the same time as feeling repulsed by the idea of smoking a cigarette. I wonder if I’ll ever feel right again, like I fit inside myself properly.
I know that I have to get back to school and make it happen. I grab a brown bag and put a couple of apples in it and a piece of cheese for lunch. A container of yogurt. Some grapes.
From a million miles away, I hear the sound of the shower turning off.
“Mom,” I say. I put the bag back down on the counter. My hand is already reaching for the paper and unfolding it and I take yet another sip of coffee like this is just another day and I’m flipping through the paper for the horoscope section, Mom’s favorite.
I stare at a recipe for enchiladas and an article about how the algae bloom in the ocean has been found to be the cause for the dead whales, the ocean turning on itself. Seven whales on one single beach up north. They have to burn the carcasses.
Piper was cremated. I don’t know where her mom is spreading her ashes.
My mouth turns to ashes.
I need to spit, but I can’t.
I gulp coffee. More coffee. My mouth is too dry.
I can’t.
I just can’t.
But I have to do it.
“Mom,” I’ll say. “See you after school!”
She’ll probably cry and say I’m not ready.
I’ll never be ready.
But I have to do it.
“Honey?” Mom calls from upstairs.
“NOTHING,” I shout. “I’VE GOT TO GO IN A MINUTE, I’LL BE LATE
FOR SCHOOL.”
My coffee cup falls on the floor without me even touching it. It’s like it jumped off the table by itself.
Piper.
The cup breaks, the blue shattering into crumbs and dust, the webs becoming cracks.
“Sorry, Piper,” I whisper. “Sorry,” I say, louder this time. “But you have to leave me alone now. You’ve got to. Sorry.” I suddenly can’t remember any of the translations. I only have English left.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The cup stays on the floor, still broken.
“What happened?” asks Mom, coming into the room, looking fresh and clean in a way that I feel like I’ll never be again.
“Nothing,” I say. “Careful! Don’t step on the broken…” I point at the pool of coffee and cup shards.
“Oh no,” she says. “Not your favorite cup!” Her eyes instantly fill with tears. Since Grandma’s funeral, she’s been crying at the drop of a hat. I see her in the kitchen, in the garden, in the car, tears pouring down her cheeks.
“Mom,” I say. “Can you … It’s just a cup. Don’t get so worked up. God.” The room vibrates with a weird energy, like something is about to happen. She sighs and pours some coffee into her own cup, stepping around the mess.
I exhale and I say, “It looks like you’ll be running into a new friend at work today and your lucky numbers are eighteen and two thousand.”
“What are you talking about?” She takes a second to catch up. Then, “Well, I’ll keep that in mind, I guess. Eighteen and two thousand, huh.”
“Yep,” I say. “You’ve got to listen to the stars, Mom. They know.”
“They’re never wrong.” She laughs a little bit, nervously, as though she’s worried that I’ll break, the worry itself breaking me, almost.
“Proven fact. Gotta go, Mom.”
“It’s okay if you have to—”
“I KNOW, it’s fine,” I say. I grab my lunch bag. “Later!”
I make myself do it. I make my legs walk. I make myself keep moving until I get there.
I hold my spine as straight as I can. Shoulders square.
I can do this.
“This is for you, Pipes,” I say, and I go through the door.
Which is a lie.
It’s for me, of course. It’s all for me.
SOUP
Everything about the day feels surreal. It’s like how I imagine it feels to get glasses when you hadn’t known you’d needed them: things are more sharply in focus, smaller, crisper. I notice things I’ve never noticed before, like a crack in the stone wall that separates the school lawns from the road, the way the iron gate is being held up by a piece of two-by-four that has vines growing over it as if it broke ten years ago and no one bothered to fix it, a hole in the window on the lower part of the boathouse.
I take my phone out of my pocket and check for texts from Sloane.
Nothing.
I start dialing her number but then I click the phone off before it rings. What will I say?
The sky is tight, holding on to rain that will spill out as soon as it lets its guard down. Soon it will start pouring itself over everything, splattering marks over the pale paved drive.
* * *
I push open the doors to the school. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but what I get is open, blatant stares. Each one, if I could paint it, would be an orange haze of judgment. Fiery. Hot. I almost step back out again.
Almost.
I make myself go inside. My sneakers squeak on the waxed floors. It smells like everything I remember: wood and dust and cologne and sweat and stale coffee breath and something plasticky.
Charlie.
I make my face go still. I can’t look like I expect anything from him. Not now. That would cost me my pride.
He gives me exactly nothing.
I feel like the new kid in a new town except I’m not new and this place isn’t new to me.
Screw pride.
I catch Charlie’s eye, finally. I raise my hand in a salute. He comes over.
“Yo, Soup,” Charlie says after a pause. He doesn’t quite look at me, his gaze skating off my face, slipping into the distance.
“Decided to come back, huh,” he says, breaking the silence that is hovering like insects around us, practically buzzing. I nod. A couple of other guys make their way over. Charlie punches me in the arm. Hard.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m back. I missed you jerks.”
There’s a terrible awkward silence.
They don’t have to worry. I step off.
I go, “Yeah, I should go figure out where I’m supposed to…” I let my voice trail away. They look relieved and I hate them so much, I can feel it in my teeth, which are grinding.
A girl who I don’t even know blinks when she registers my face, steps backward, and starts crying. Maybe she was a friend of Piper’s, but I doubt it. I don’t recognize her and Piper didn’t really have friends. Piper hated most of these people. Don’t they get it? She scorned them.
The bell goes and my heart lurches. I feel like I won’t know how to find my locker or remember my combination or where I’m supposed to be. I try to shut off my brain and simply let it happen, see if my body remembers which way to go. I try to keep my breathing steady. I had no idea it was going to be like this.
I don’t know what I thought.
I should have known.
But then I look up and there she is.
She’s late. She’s hurrying.
She looks like I feel: Overwhelmed. Awkward.
Without Piper next to her, she looks nothing like Piper.
She’s so utterly and completely Sloane. Alone.
The halls are empty now. She has no choice but to come toward me. Then we are simply standing there, actors waiting for our lines. Are you scared? I want to ask. They don’t know how to treat us, that’s the thing. We’re different now. They don’t know how to react. There’s so much that I want to say that’s waiting to be said, but I don’t say it. I stare at her, mute.
“Hey,” she says, no eye contact. Why can’t anyone look at me? “Philip.” My name sounds ironic in her mouth. I look at her lips.
“Mom’s the only one who calls me that,” I say. I nudge her just to make contact, to feel something.
She steps back slightly, takes her phone out of her pocket, starts looking at it. I don’t have to form an expression on my face, which is good because I have no idea what to do with myself. I swallow. My mouth is dry, papery, collapsing. You know, I want to say, I miss her, too. It doesn’t change how I feel about you. You and me.
But I don’t say anything because I’m a coward and I’ve forgotten how to make my mouth form words and maybe I’ve had a stroke or this is a hallucination, I don’t know.
I breathe her in deep and she smells clean, like toothpaste and coconut and something darker and saltier. My body tilts toward hers, even now. I can’t step back.
I have to step back.
I step back before I accidentally lean in too far.
This is crazy.
I can’t stop staring at her. I can’t talk. I want to grab her and hold her. She looks fragile, like she might fall. She’s so thin now, she’s practically two-dimensional. It’s not sexy, but it also is, or maybe it’s that she is, no matter what. Her hair is so dark, expensive brown, like polished wood. Her face is hollow and bare, washed clean of makeup. You can see her freckles as clear and certain as her new hair and her unblinking eyes. Piper didn’t have freckles.
“You look different,” I offer.
“Different from her, you mean,” she snaps. “Yeah, that’s kind of the point.”
“I like your hair like that.”
She’s wearing a men’s shirt, open and untucked over a T-shirt, jeans so tight and new and dark that I’d bet when she takes them off, her legs will be as dark blue as blueberries, a permanent tattoo from the indigo dye.
“This is weird,” she says finally. “Awkward. It sucks.”
“Yeah,�
� I agree. “It’s impossible.” I spread my hands wide, to show the size of it, the impossibility of everything.
She’s scrolling through something on her phone, like there’s an answer there.
“I want to leave,” she says; it comes out a whisper. “I want to get out of here. Just go, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We could get into the car and drive forever or for however long it takes to get somewhere that isn’t here.”
She looks at me properly for the first time, seeing me. “You know what? I’m late for something. Math, I think.”
“Me, too,” I say. “Same. We’re in all the same classes, remember?”
There are a million things between us, everything is between us, the air alive like it’s glittering with all that we aren’t saying; I mean, it’s practically shimmering, can’t she see it? But her gaze keeps falling away, onto the floor, away, away, and she says, “Screw this. We get through it. And then it stops feeling like this. Eventually, right? Eventually she’ll let us go.” She grabs my bare arm, tight, her fingers digging into my arm, nails into my skin. “She’d say that no one saw it, so it didn’t happen. So it didn’t happen, okay?”
“I don’t get it.” I try to catch up. Can’t. Feel stupid. “What do you mean?” A girl half walks, half runs by, her boots making clopping sounds on the floor like horses’ hooves. We both watch her and then Sloane starts walking away, slow at first, then faster and faster, till she’s gone, not waiting for me.
I don’t want to go to class. I want to leave. I need water. I need something. I make my legs move, make them carry me to the bathroom. I can make it that far, at least.
Someone is coming out as I push the door to go in.
“Hey,” I say to Fatty. He blinks at me slowly, like he’s suddenly stupider than he is.
How was I ever friends with him? Why? He smells like Axe deodorant body spray. Everything about him is terrible.
I close my eyes and I can see him on the beach clearly, holding Sloane’s camera as Charlie pinned Sloane against the log, egging him on. I see him at the party, his face beyond Sloane’s shoulder when we were kissing, his tongue making lewd gestures. He’s suddenly and unreasonably everything I hate for reasons I don’t even know, and I can’t take it. I can’t stop myself. I shove him, too hard, against the door.
