I felt the car stop and heard the engine purring in stillness outside my house. I sat there, feeling so sick. Finally I said, “Sorry.” And I reached for the handle.
“Did you do drugs or something?”
“I took some pill they gave me.” They weren’t caffeine pills, I realized now. Maybe I always knew.
“Why did you do that?”
I looked at him. “I don’t know,” I said.
I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to go back to the fall and the night when I was dressed as Amelia and I could fly over everything. I wanted his hands to burn on me and make me new again. To erase everything else. Everything that was wrong and bad and dirty.
I put my lips near his mouth. Then I put them closer.
“You’re messed up right now,” he said.
He was right. I was too messed up, in every way. “I know,” I said. “It’s not supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be in love.”
“Do you ever think that for one second you could forget about how it’s supposed to be and just deal with the way it is?”
“You don’t understand. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She was supposed to love me.” I started to cry.
“Who? Your sister?”
I nodded. I tried to erase what I was feeling. I tried to get rid of the anger that seared me. I was sobbing now. I opened the car door. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I have to go.”
His engine idled as he waited for me to crawl in through the window. And then I heard his car pull away. I felt sick with regret. I wanted him to come back. I wanted to tell him everything.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
May and I are going to go to the movies. She just got her driver’s license, from Roadrunner Driving School, where they don’t much care if you pass the test or not. The teacher just puts you on the highway to go somewhere to buy him fireworks. This is what May told me, but she didn’t tell Mom and Dad. So Dad decided that she could drive me to the movies. It’s his week with us. She and Dad get in a fight first, because May is wearing this lace-up shirt. Dad must think she is too pretty, because he says she should change out of it. He says she gives people the wrong idea when she dresses that way. He never usually says things like that. He usually lets her do what she wants. May cries, and I do, too, because this is our night together and I don’t want Dad to ruin it. Finally Dad says softly, “Just change your clothes, May. And you can go.”
May and I used to always do everything together, before she left for high school. But now I am thirteen, a for-real teenager. And now we are going to be friends again. In my head, I am begging May to do what Dad said so we can still go to the movies in her car together.
Finally May says, “Okay.” And she goes to her room and puts on a giant sweatshirt. A Christmas one with puffy reindeer on it. It looks funny with the kitten heels she still has on. She wipes away the tears and she says, “Can we go now?”
“Go ahead,” my dad says.
We are going to see Aladdin at the dollar theater. Lots of times they play old Disney movies there, which May and I still love. We are in the old Camry with May’s pink beads hanging from the mirror. As soon as we are down the block, May pulls off her sweatshirt. She fixes the mascara smudged from crying and grins at me. I am wearing the shirt that I love, the one that I’ve had since fifth grade, with a picture of a rain forest and rain forest animals that snap on and off. I hope that it’s cool to wear again, the way that Rainbow Brite and the Smurfs are. I wonder now if I should have worn something else. But my hair is clean, and I can smell the sweet green apple shampoo. I think that the night is not ruined after all.
It’s the end of November, but we roll down the windows anyway and blast the heater, and May turns up the music. She sings along to “Heart-Shaped Box,” and then she looks at me and asks, “Do you like it?” I nod that I do.
She kisses my forehead. She says, “I am going to meet Paul at the movie, is that okay? You can’t tell Dad, or Mom, either.”
I nod. I am a little sad that it won’t be just me and May, but the most important thing is that she let me in.
When we stop at the light before the movie theater, she tucks her hair behind her ears, and then ruffles it up, and then tucks it again. And then she puts on lipstick.
She turns to me. Her lips look grown-up, like the ones she cuts out of her magazines for collages, but her face is soft. She says, “Do I look okay?” I say she looks beautiful. I haven’t ever seen anyone look like that before. Not even her.
When we get there, only a couple of people are left in the ticket line, and there is Paul with another man standing off to the side. Paul has on the same plaid shirt he wore the only other time I’ve seen him, at Fallfest. He looks a little cleaner than the other guy, who has jeans with holes and a shirt that says BACK IN MY DAY, WE HAD NINE PLANETS. When May sees Paul, she waves a little wave. She walks up slowly, her hair swinging behind her. I follow. When we get close, they don’t touch, but from her look, I can tell they will.
I am playing with the frog snap on my shirt. I am snapping it on and off.
May talks in a grown-up voice and says, “Laurel, you remember Paul, and this is his friend Billy.”
Paul says, “Hey, kid,” which is what Carl and Mark, the neighbor boys, call me, and ruffles my hair. I don’t want him to.
May says, “Paul and I are going to go somewhere, okay? Billy will take you to the movie.”
I don’t want to go see Aladdin with Billy, whose hair is long and dirty. I want to go with May. But I say, “Okay.”
May says to Paul, “He’ll take good care of her?”
And Paul says, “Of course he will.”
May looks at Billy and says, “You will?”
“You bet.”
May sounds very in charge when she tells him, “You are going to take her to Aladdin. Don’t try to sneak her into something R-rated.” He says he won’t, but I start to feel like maybe he will. I am still snapping the frog on and off my shirt, on and off. The frog is my favorite. I am looking down at the shadows of the trees on the sidewalk.
May gives Billy Dad’s ten dollars. She tells Billy that we love Sour Patch Kids. She makes him promise to get me some. And then May kisses me on the head and says have fun, and she says, “I’ll be back right after the movie’s over.” And she walks off with Paul. I watch the car leave, taking May away, and I don’t want it to go.
Billy says, “So what do you want to do?” My throat gets dry. I squeeze the frog in my hands. I try to swallow. I mean to ask if we are going to the movie, but I don’t know if I say it out loud or not. I find the cherry Jolly Rancher in my pocket that I’d saved from the Village Inn where we had dinner that night. I start sucking on it, but somehow my mouth is still just as dry.
Billy says, “Do you talk?”
I shrug.
He says he forgot something in his car. He says come on. So I follow him over the long stretch of blacktop. The world is dizzy, like something happened to the earth under my feet. We get to a car at the edge of everything. He opens the door. He says get in. I don’t want to. I just stand there. My mouth is really dry still. He says it again: “Get in.” He sounds angry this time. It scares me, so I do what he says. He leans really close to me. I can feel his breath, which smells like something too sweet and wrong and hot and, now that I think of it, I guess maybe like booze.
The sky is dark already, and I wish that it wasn’t. Billy says that he can tell I’m too old for a kid’s movie. He asks if I want to go somewhere instead. “Ice cream?” he asks. I shake my head no. “Have it your way,” he says, but he drives off anyway, and then he parks in an empty lot nearby.
The next thing I remember is that his hand is in my rain forest shirt. Underneath, I mean. I swallow the Jolly Rancher whole, and it hurts stuck in my throat, so I think I can’t breathe. The frog is unsnapped, I remember, because I remember it in my hand, the plastic of it, and I remember thinking about the frog and wishing I c
ould put it back on my shirt, because that is its home. Only now I never can. I would never be able to wear that shirt another time, and it wouldn’t be safe for the frog. He would always be lost.
I try not to think of Billy’s hand or where it is, so I just focus on trying to breathe. His hair is greasy, and his body is long. Too long. He tells me I am pretty.
I wonder if he means pretty like May is. I think of May with Paul and wonder if this is what is happening, if this is what’s supposed to happen. Deep down I know it’s not right, but I pretend, pretend I am like May with her pink cheeks and her lips that look like close-up pictures in a magazine.
I keep thinking she is about to come back. I can hear cars in the distance like ocean sounds. I am listening hard to engines rolling by like waves. Like the silence that isn’t silence when you put a shell to your ear. And then sometimes something gets louder, and I hear a car, and I think it is getting closer. And I think it is May. She is about to come back. And it will stop. As soon as May comes, it will stop. But all the getting closer cars turn away. They go back on the highway. Maybe they are going to California.
When he is done doing that stuff, Billy drops me off outside the movie theater. The sign shines with the movie times. It still feels like there is a sliver of the Jolly Rancher stuck in the back of my throat. I am sitting there on the sidewalk, trying to concentrate on something. I look at the pale scattered stars in the sky, and then at the concrete and the pieces of glass glinting in it, like brighter stars. And then I read the numbers on the movie sign, over and over, trying to figure out what time it is so I could know when my sister would come.
People must be coming out of the movie, because there are voices around. When May jumps out of the silver car and it pulls away, everything is real again. She looks worried. She says, “Laurel! Why are you alone? Where’s Billy?” I shrug. I tell her that he was late for something and had to go. “Were you waiting long?” she asks.
“No, not that much. He just left.”
She tilts a little on her kitten heel, and when she thinks I am okay, she giggles like something good happened, but almost too much, like too happily. She says that Paul likes HardCore Cider, which is even better than the cider that we used to have at the apple farms in the fall.
When we are back in the Camry, I smile at her. And even though I don’t feel well, I think maybe the world is back to normal again, because now we are in the car driving home, and May is my sister. I don’t say what happened or anything about Billy. I know that it’s not what was supposed to happen, and if May knew, she would always be sad. Too sad. She would go away from me. I didn’t want that. And if only I’d never said anything, maybe she’d still be here.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
The day after the party was Sunday. I stayed in bed as long as I possibly could without Dad getting worried, and when I got up, I felt like I was walking through the thickest fog, like the kind that comes off of dry ice. I snuck into the bathroom and washed off the party makeup that was giving me black eyes.
Evan and Sky and May and the movies—it was all this frozen blur. I saw Jason’s face in my mind. I called Natalie and Hannah a bunch of times, but neither of them answered. So I asked Dad to drop me off at Natalie’s and said that I’d walk to Aunt Amy’s from there.
When Dad pulled up and parked in front of her house, he hugged me and held on for a long time, which I thought was strange.
He looked at me and said, “Are you okay today?”
I worried that somehow he could see through me. “Yeah,” I said. “Love you,” and I hurried out of the car before he could ask me anything else.
When nobody answered the door, I went around to the back and found Natalie lying on the trampoline, crying. Hannah was sitting on the edge of it, her knees curled in a ball against her chest.
I stood toward the edge of the yard, listening. Natalie asked, through sobs, “Do you even love me?”
“Of course,” Hannah said flatly. “But people won’t understand. They’ll take it apart and turn it into something else.”
Natalie looked crushed. “Love isn’t a secret. I can’t act like it doesn’t count. It counts, doesn’t it?” Her voice went up at the end.
“You don’t know my brother,” Hannah said. “He flipped out, and he’ll flip out even more if he finds out we’re, like, together.” I couldn’t help thinking of the look in Jason’s eyes. The kind of anger that could make anyone turn small.
“Are we even? You’re with Kasey and whatever other guys. Like I don’t even matter.”
“That’s not true,” Hannah said. “Of course you matter.” Then she said, more softly, “It’s just better if I’m not around so much,” and she got up. “I’ve got to get back. Jason thinks I’m at the library.”
As Hannah turned around to walk out, she saw me standing there. “Hey. What happened to you last night? You opened the door on us, and then you just disappeared after that?”
“I know. I, um … I’m sorry.” I knew that I should tell them what happened with Evan. I knew that I should. But this horrible panicky feeling was all over me, and my voice felt choked.
“Laurel? Hello? Where did you go last night?”
“Sky took me home.”
“Oh, great. So you open the door on us and then go off with Sky? Well, FYI, things are pretty much ruined now. Do you even care?”
“No, I mean, yeah, I…” May was falling off the bridge. I was falling with her. It was all my fault, all of it.
“Forget it,” Hannah said. “It’s done now.”
She hopped over the low wall. Natalie watched her go, but Hannah never turned around to look back. Natalie cried harder. I tried to go and sit by her, but she curled into a ball.
“I’m sorry,” I said before I got up.
On the walk to Aunt Amy’s, I put your voice on my headphones and listened to you singing “Lithium.” I shouted along with you, “I’m not gonna crack,” and it’s exactly—not just the words, but how your voice sounded singing them—how I felt.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
When I got to Aunt Amy’s, she wasn’t home yet. She must have been out with the Jesus Man, I figured, who came into town last week. I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I guess I fell asleep, because when Aunt Amy came in the door, she woke me up.
I asked her how her week was, trying to tell if she was happy now that the Jesus Man was back, but she just said, “It was good. How was yours?”
“Fine,” I lied, and then she put on 60 Minutes, which is pretty much the only show she likes other than Mister Ed. That little ticking stopwatch must be almost as old as he is. The episode was about free divers. They dive hundreds of feet underwater without any oxygen tanks, and if they’re not careful, they can black out. I got sort of sucked into it, imagining what it would be like, trying to swim up from so far down with no air.
When the show was over, Aunt Amy called me to come eat. She’d made pancakes and bacon. That was May’s favorite—breakfast-for-dinner night. I sat at the kitchen table and waited for the prayer. But instead, Aunt Amy just looked at me and asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered if I really looked that bad.
Then she said, “I know you must be thinking of your sister today. Should we pray for her?”
It hit me in a flash. It was a year ago today that May died. How could I have forgotten? I felt awful.
“Um, yeah. Can you do it?” I asked.
She squeezed my hand and then bowed her head and said, “Dear Lord, we ask that you keep May, our beloved sister, daughter, and niece, with you in heaven’s care. We thank you for the blessing of the time we shared with her. We also pray for her sister, Laurel, who she’s left on this earth, that you cherish her heart and stay by her side in her time of grief. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
When she finished, Aunt Amy looked up at me with teary eyes. I didn’t know what to say. I choked down
a bite of my pancake and wanted to throw up.
After dinner, I tried to disappear into my room, except a couple of minutes later Aunt Amy came in to bring me the phone. It was Mom. Since we got in that fight last month, our few conversations had been about five seconds long.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi.”
“How are you tonight?”
“Okay, I guess.” I sat down on my bed and pulled the rose quilt around me and stared at the empty, pale pink walls.
“I know it feels like I’m far away, but I want you to know, my heart is with you today.”
I couldn’t swallow it. “That’s nice, Mom, but it doesn’t really make anything easier.”
The other end of the line was quiet, until Mom said, “I’m sorry, Laurel. I just thought … I thought you’d be better off without my grief to deal with. I didn’t know how to be strong for you after May died. I thought it would be worse, your seeing me cry all the time.”
The words fell out of my mouth before I could think about it. “Nothing is worse than when someone who’s supposed to love you just leaves.”
The phone line filled with static that sounded like the ocean, both of us crying in our separate corners of the planet.
“Maybe you think it’s my fault. Maybe that’s why you left,” I finally said.
“Laurel, it’s not your fault. Of course it’s not your fault.”
“Well, maybe it is. I should have never told her…”
“Told her what?”
The room was spinning and spinning now, and I was breathing too fast. “I don’t know. I have to go.”
I let the phone fall to the floor. I couldn’t stop crying. Everything was flooding in, everything too fast. Hannah in her bra at Blake’s, her face-painted bruise, Natalie’s chipped tooth, don’t tell, the door open with them kissing and it’s my fault, I didn’t save them, I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t save her. The soap in the shower that will never get it clean enough and the frog in the back of my drawer, I just left him there, and your poster torn to shreds and the bunk beds taken apart, I just want to climb the ladder and lie by May so it can be okay. Sky walking away, driving away, everyone away, and May rolling away from the car, how it was going to hit her, how she yelled at me when I tried to stop her, the car going too fast down the road, too fast, and now Mark the neighbor boy will never love me, the river flooding my whole head, the guy’s hand reaching toward me, his hand on me, his hand under my shirt, sticky thighs on his seats, but just be like May, be pretty like her, be brave, this is what it’s supposed to be, this is the world now, wake up, his hand on me, how it felt, and the night hot and sticky and sticking to me and your voice I’m not gonna crack—