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 t
he guys, and how it made me want to slip out of my skin.
All of a sudden, I didn’t want to be alone. The rain was blurry, and I was scared of something I couldn’t see, but it felt close enough to breathe on me. And I got worried that somehow the XTC guy at the store that we ran away from would come back and find me.
So I went inside and found Natalie and Hannah in the bedroom. They were kissing again. Or more like making out, really. Their shirts were still off and their wet hair was stuck to their heads. When I opened the door, they didn’t notice for a minute. Hannah saw me first. She jumped off Natalie and started laughing.
Natalie said, “We were just cold. We were trying to get warm.”
“Come on, you can, too,” Hannah said.
“That’s okay,” I said, and closed the door.
I don’t think they worried as much, because last time I didn’t tell anyone. They probably kept kissing. I went to the den, and I found where the heat comes out of the floor and fell asleep next to it until it was time to go home.
Maybe Hannah wants to kiss Natalie even without any booze, but she can’t admit it. Hannah says that Natalie knows her better than anyone in the world. She says they are soul mates. But I think maybe Natalie loves her as more than a soul mate. I wonder if Hannah loves her like that, too, and if there’s a reason she’s too scared to say.