Maya tried to listen but the bagel popped up, startling her.
She cut little slits in the tops, slathered it in butter, wrapped it, stuck it in a brown paper bag. She smiled brightly to herself for practice and then walked out into the foyer and re-
peated the gesture.
“Ready?” Hannah said.
“Yep,” she said, smiling. Sometimes you could make a thing
less bad by pretending that it wasn’t bad at all.
“Do you want us to come?” Blue said.
“No need,” Hannah said. “We can say goodbye here.”
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“I got this,” Maya mouthed, winking at Blue. She had to
believe she could still convince Hannah to stay. Aloud she
said, “I’ll be in the car.”
She grabbed the keys and walked out.
It was going to be a hot day. The air already smelled like
a furnace. She slipped into the driver’s seat, looked away as Hannah hugged Blue and Renee. The passenger door opened
and Maya handed Hannah the bagel and coffee.
“Thanks,” Hannah said, peeking into the bag and setting
it on her lap. “Smells good.”
Maya backed out onto the street. Too fast. Hannah braced.
The car filled with the weight of impending separation. They
passed the beach, the ocean, the promise of vacation. They
passed two young girls on bicycles. They passed the girls they’d been.
“There’s gotta be something I can say that’ll change your
mind,” Maya said.
Hannah was watching the girls recede into the distance.
“I wish.”
“You do?”
“I know he’s probably fine. If it was something really bad,
Vivian would tell me to come home.”
“Right. Okay. I don’t get it. Why leave, then?”
“Deer!” Hannah said.
“What? Oh, crap!”
Maya slammed the brakes. The deer, stopped in the middle
of the road, stared at her with blank, unblinking eyes.
“Jesus Christ on a cracker,” she yelled. “Why do they just
freeze like that? Dumb animals.”
“She can’t help it,” Hannah said. “It’s how she’s wired.”
“Seems counterproductive,” Maya said. The whole point of
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life was to keep going. Any living creature was bound to get
run over if they didn’t know that. “So, if you know Henry is
fine, are you leaving because of me?”
“No,” Hannah said. “That’s not it at all. I don’t know how
to explain. It doesn’t even feel like a choice, honestly. Everything just gets too…much. Like the world gets in too far. I
can’t keep it out. There’s no boundary. And then it’s too painful to stay. To stay anywhere, really.”
Maya pressed lightly on her horn. The deer ran off into the
shrubbery. She pulled out onto the tree-lined highway, the
low early sun throwing light in her eyes. She tried to imagine what Hannah was describing but she couldn’t. Not at first. But then she remembered herself in the bank, trying to get the
loan. The sense of something intolerable building inside her.
What was it? The possibility that she wouldn’t be okay. That
some pressurizing force would shatter her to bits. She considered mentioning this to Hannah but she couldn’t bring her-
self to. She didn’t want to give darkness a voice. She wanted to forget it. “That sounds awful,” she said.
Hannah held her gaze. “It is.” And then she added, “There
are worse things.”
Maya thought of Henry. Maybe they both did.
She didn’t want their last moments of the trip to be sad.
She turned and cracked a mischievous smile. “Do you re-
alize we just left Renee and Blue alone together?”
“With access to kitchen knives,” Hannah said. She made a
stabbing motion and they burst out laughing.
The air lightened. Hannah took a bagel out of the bag, un-
wrapped it. “Just what I needed, thank you.” She gave half
to Maya and then took a bite of the other half. Briefly closed her eyes to savor it. “Mmm, perfectly buttered.”
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“I used your trick,” Maya said. “Remember when you
taught me that?”
“Aww,” Hannah said. “I totally do. We were so little.”
“It’s stupid, but it’s the only food trick I know. It’s like being passed down a special recipe. And it really does make a bagel taste better.” Maya cleared her throat. She wasn’t saying what she meant. What she meant was that it had felt like mother-ing when Hannah taught her how to butter a bagel. What she
meant was that Hannah was important to her in a way that
other people could not be, in the way that only the people
who raised you could be. And sometimes friends raised each
other. Sometimes they were the only ones who did. But un-
like family, there was no shared home to return to for vaca-
tions and holidays. As soon as they graduated, they were off
on their own, no longer a unit but four divided parts. And this was what she hated most about being a grown-up—not having
a gang to experience the world with. Her friends used to be
her net. Without them there was nothing, there was falling.
Don’t go, she thought. But she couldn’t make herself say it.
She’d always been good at asking for things—for a couch to
crash on or a ride or a job lead. But it was asking for heart things that she had trouble with. It would reveal too much,
hurt too much if anyone said no.
They reached the station. Happy people with weekend bags
were stepping out of train cars, reuniting with their already tan family and friends who’d come to retrieve them. Summer joy in their faces.
Hannah put her hand on the door, turned to her. “I love
you,” she said.
“I love you too,” Maya said over the words stuck in her
throat.
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She hugged Hannah hard. “Give Henry a kiss for me.”
Hannah nodded and climbed out, her slender figure mov-
ing toward the ticket booth. She turned and waved and Maya
waved back.
Maya waited until Hannah paid her ticket and disappeared
inside the train. She kept waiting as the train pulled away with its loud goodbye, just in case, just in case.
But Hannah was gone.
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BLUE
Blue stood on the front porch, leaning against a pillar, smoking a cigarette. She peered out at the grassy yard, the cars passing beyond the fence like a slow-moving train. A large cloud
ambled above, washing the color out of the day as if with a
sponge. It was way too early for smoking. It was all she could think to do.
Back in high school if any of her friends were struggling,
Blue knew exactly how to fix it. A quick dose of fun with
a pinch of recklessness was always the cure. Cut school to-
gether or drive just fast enough to cause a lit
tle scare or do something a tiny bit illegal—shoplift a candy bar or jump a
Metro stall or sneak into a movie theater. Things that said we are young, we are alive, nothing can stop us, none of this matters! It was so easy, then, to move through things, to exist only in
the present. Before too many losses had accumulated. Before
the world got in.
But no more. Hannah had taken something with her when
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she left—not just a piece of the whole of them but some se-
creted hope that, with time, the damage of that night would
lessen rather than root and grow tentacles. Blue felt hollowed out by it and surprised by how heavy a feeling emptiness could be. This was the problem with people leaving. They didn’t just go away—their absence created a phantom presence, a haunt
of sorrow in their place.
She sighed—the body’s effort to expel the ghost.
Renee was upstairs somewhere, behind a closed door.
Which was good. A good thing. They were two soldiers stick-
ing to their respective sides of the border. But why was Renee still here at all? She should just march up there and tell her to leave. Why didn’t she? The thought occurred to her that
maybe she didn’t totally want Renee to leave, but that was
ridiculous. Of course she did.
Christ, this trip was a disaster.
At least before she came, she still had the fantasy of Jack,
ridiculous and self-deceptive as it was. Now that, too, was a hollow.
One last long inhale, letting the smoke linger and burn in
her lungs. Then she stubbed out her cigarette, reentered the
numb silence of the house. It reminded her of her apartment in NYC, of the too-quietness there as well—like she was walking
around in a world on pause. What a desolate thing it was to be the only sound in a room. She couldn’t wait to pull the covers up to her neck, close her eyes. Maybe later would be better.
She and Maya could have one drama-free day at the beach, a
bit of sun, nothing happening but the fold of waves on sand.
She trudged up the stairs—radar tuning into Renee’s loca-
tion. The strange tension of sharing a house with an enemy.
Halfway up she stopped, listened. Was that retching? Had
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Renee been drunk last night? Blue hadn’t noticed her booz-
ing, but then again she hadn’t been paying much attention.
She was almost at her bedroom door when she heard it again.
Yep, retching. At least it was best that Hannah wasn’t here to hear it. There wasn’t enough Purell in the world to get her
through that situation.
The bathroom door flew open. Renee appeared, looking
uncharacteristically disheveled.
“Help! I think the toilet’s about to—oh, you’re right there.”
Renee pointed shamefully in the direction of the impending
disaster. “Um…yeah.”
Blue pushed past her. “What did you do?” The room
smelled like vomit.
“Nothing,” Renee said. “I don’t know… I just flushed it
and it started…”
Blue avoided eye contact with the toilet, removed the tank’s
lid.
“It must have been something I ate,” Renee said.
“We all ate the same thing, and I feel fine.” It wasn’t fair
to be mad at Renee for getting sick, but then life wasn’t fair.
She tugged on the flush lever in the toilet tank and the water stopped running. She started toward the door.
“Wait. What did you do?” Renee said.
Blue paused, suppressed an exasperated sigh. “I jiggled this
thing.”
“Oh, right,” Renee said. “I think I remember this hap-
pening last time.”
It had. Only the last time, Maya had been the one to use it
and failed to notice the water rising until they all went to the beach and came back to a flood.
“If I recall correctly, Maya hit on the plumber,” Renee said.
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“Yeah. Who was like fifty,” Blue said. She couldn’t resist.
“Right. Because she was hoping for a discount.”
Blue tried not to laugh because laughter seemed like weak-
ness, like opening a door, but she couldn’t help it, it was still funny. It was so hilariously Maya.
She saw a glimmer of hope in Renee’s eyes. Abruptly she
turned, put the lid back on, snapped back into business mode.
It was easier when her anger was the barrier between them.
But take it away, even for a second, and the underbelly of
love and hurt could be exposed. Anger was the Band-Aid,
loss the wound.
“Guess he wasn’t much of a plumber,” Renee said. “If it’s
still broken twelve years later.”
“I’m sure he was fine,” Blue said dismissively. This wasn’t
a bonding session—she wanted to make that clear. Though it
was admittedly odd that Nana hadn’t bothered, in all the years since, to get it properly repaired. Maybe at a certain point everyone just sort of accepted broken things. Jiggling a lever became a reflex, so integrated into daily routine that it became unconscious. It was actually kind of scary, she thought, how
long a person could go without noticing everything falling
apart around them.
She started toward the hall.
“Do you think Hannah will be okay?” Renee said to her
back.
Blue paused. Like all the other broken things, she’d simply
stopped noticing how much Hannah had been damaged, ac-
cepted it as if it had always been that way. At least until today.
She didn’t have an answer, so she didn’t give one.
They both turned at the sound of the front door creaking
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open downstairs. Soft footsteps approached, and then Maya
appeared looking grim. “She’s gone.”
Blue sighed. “So much for your powers of persuasion.”
“Every superhero has their kryptonite,” Maya cracked, but
Blue could tell her heart wasn’t in the joke and her smile
looked jerry-rigged to her face.
Renee leaned against the open bathroom door. “That
sucks.”
Maya nodded outwardly, Blue inwardly.
“And I just barfed,” Renee added.
“Oh no,” Maya said.
“I’m fine. Probably just a little food poisoning.”
“Weird,” Maya said. “I wonder why no one else is sick. I
guess those clever calamari found a way to escape after all.”
Blue groaned.
“What? That was funny.”
“I hope Hannah isn’t yakking on the train,” Blue said.
They all looked at one another, and the pall of Hannah
being gone fell over them again.
“Well, I should probably hit the road,” Renee said.
“You’re going to get on a ferry right after you just puked?”
Maya asked. “Why don’t you give it a few hours?”
Renee looked at Blue.
What was Blue going to say, No, go puke on the ferry? She shrugged. “So…now w
hat?” she asked.
“I guess we could mope around the house,” Maya said. “Or
we could mope at the beach.”
“Mope and tan?” Renee said.
“Yeah, like multitask,” Maya said.
“I could do that,” Blue said.
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“I have an extra bikini,” Maya told Renee. “It’ll be three
sizes too big, but—”
“Actually,” Renee said, “I have one in the car. I didn’t know what the plan was for yesterday so I brought one in case.”
“Perfect!” Maya said.
They went to their rooms to change, and Blue consid-
ered a quick hit off her vape pen. But first, her bathing suit.
Which…ugh. She loved the sun, she loved the beach, she hated
its clothing requirements. And the fact that other people had to be there. That she had to be exposed in front of strangers.
And she hated that she hated it. It was not an inborn trait to be ashamed of your own body. It was taught. It was learned.
That old rage rushed up again. She lit her vape pen, took a
hit to squelch it, threw on her suit away from the mirror. She was going to make it a nice day if it killed her.
It was still a bit cloudy by the time they reconvened on
the front porch, but the sun was trying hard and the air was
sweet with honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass and the suggestion of the sea. Blue chucked Maya the car keys, climbed into the
passenger seat, spotted a book on the floor. She picked it up.
“Hannah’s,” Maya said. “She forgot it.”
“I’ll mail it to her,” Blue said. She opened the book—self-
help, of course—to a random page and scanned it. Hannah
had underlined a quote: “Our consciousness would be broken
up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.”
She snapped the book shut. She didn’t want to be made of
memory. Didn’t want Hannah or any of them to be made of
it either. If only a person could cherry-pick—turn their mind into an Instagram page made up of only the highlights. She
wondered if that’s what Maya’s inner life looked like.
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It was a short drive to their preferred beach, and they
reached Ditch Plains just as the clouds disappeared. The swarm of cars in the parking lot meant there was a decent swell. Every half-assed surfer came out for a wave over two feet, turned a paddle-out into a contact sport. Blue couldn’t help but think of Jack, of the morning after their first kiss when she’d watched him etch graceful zigzags in the surf with his board.
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