Amy, dizzy, knows that she will faint. She frees herself from the boy’s grasp and takes one last look at Katie and begins to force her way back out through the crowd. The closer she gets to the edge of the square of people, the more air she is able to take in. But the security guards come together and won’t let her leave. They say she has to wait until it’s over. Amy looks at them, from face to face, and then she gives up. She passes out. When she wakes up she is lying in the bed of a truck with a stranger holding her hand. She has to pee. She is overwhelmed by the desire to urinate, infused with a sudden strength; she hops out of the back of the truck and runs across the parking lot and pulls down her jeans and pees leaning back against a dirty old silver Cadillac. Her coat conceals her, mostly. She sinks down lower and lower to the ground, repeating after the minister, quietly, then almost silently, like an echo, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life, and then it’s over, and she pulls her jeans back up and fastens them. She finds Katie’s little Honda Civic by the bumper stickers and slumps down against the left front tire and waits, teeth chattering, although she isn’t really cold.
Zoe has been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, which explains the pain, and hemochromatosis, which is a genetic mutation that prevents her body from processing the iron it takes in, and they also think her brain tumor might have started growing back
For the lupus they prescribe steroids, an antimalarial, and codeine for use as needed.
Amy hangs up the phone and sits cross-legged on the cheap gray carpet. She cracks her hand down on the floor.
Amy prays without believing, bartering with the void. She will give anything. She will give everything. I’m so sorry, she chants into her hands, please save Zoe please save Zoe please save Zoe, she whispers into the hard cheap carpet, please save please save please
I wouldn’t know how to translate homesick, either, without sacrificing something, like the clash of its component parts.
Amy has never liked to shower at the Honors House, but now it hurts
She hates it because you have next to no privacy, just a flimsy curtain anyone could pull open by mistake. She hates it because the suds from your shampoo collect at the drain and slime up everything. She always tries to be quick. But now she has to be careful. The hot water makes the cuts on her wrist sting from where she has been practicing. She tries to find a way to wash her hair without getting her wrists in it but can’t.
One night Tommy hears her crying and comes into her room to ask if she’s okay. He offers to drive her anywhere, and she thinks and pulls herself together and says, Let’s go to the liquor store, because tomorrow is Sunday, and they will all be closed. Tommy has a fake ID. They buy three bottles of vodka. He buys them. He says she can pay him back later. She knows she will probably never pay him back, but she doesn’t care: she needs the vodka.
According to their mother, suicide is the most selfish thing you can do
Amy weighs this against the certainty that Sasha was perfect and that everything he ever did was perfect. At the funeral, Amy overheard one of the college girls saying that Sasha had spread a tarp out over his bed so that he wouldn’t get any bloodstains on the sheet. He had done it in the middle of the night but held a pillow over his face thinking that way the gunshot wouldn’t wake his roommates, although it had, although it hadn’t mattered, because he was already dead.
One thing Amy gets tripped up on is how come Sasha didn’t leave a note. In Amy’s understanding, suicides left notes to say goodbye and to explain why they were leaving. Without this explanation, no one will ever know what made him go, and that question will scrape up their insides like a swallowed fish hook, forever.
Amy cannot bear to think about Zoe, or how she feels.
For the millionth or trillionth time, Amy asks herself why Sasha started crying that day after their last class, and why he killed himself. For the millionth or trillionth time, she runs through all the scenarios she can possibly think of. None satisfies.
For a while she cries in bed, but then she starts to suffocate. She gets up and quiets down. She can’t think of anything to do besides shots. She starts on the peppermint vodka she hasn’t tried yet. Then she goes outside and sits on the front step and smokes a cigarette someone gave her at a party that she didn’t use because she never really smokes. It gives her a headache.
She walks in circles around the House. The grass is wet.
She watches MTV all night after everyone else has gone to bed. She falls asleep around dawn and misses all her classes. It doesn’t matter.
She thinks of Sasha: how they never heard him play the drums. Amy thinks he would have been good at dancing. She wishes she had seen him dance.
When we were kids I was so focused on making up our secret languages I never even wondered what I’d tell you if it worked—let alone what you had to tell me.
One night, in the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs to the living room in the Honors House to take the rest of the cough syrup samples
She finds some samples of some migraine medication, as well. She takes everything, stuffing it into her backpack and then dumping it back out on the floor of her closet.
Katie’s door is cracked open when she walks by. She doubles back and peeks inside. Katie and another girl are sitting on a bed with a mirror covered in white powder balanced between their laps. Amy looks at the other girl trying to figure out who she might be, and Katie looks up and leaps up and almost knocks the mirror over, but the other girl grabs it in time, spilling little.
Katie grabs Amy by the arm and pulls her into the room and slams the door shut. Her friend shushes her and eyes Amy and then looks back down. Katie pulls Amy towards her and asks, in a whisper, if Amy sees the insects. Amy pulls back and looks at her friend, brow furrowed, and now she sees that her friend is scratching at her arms and her neck, and that there are bloodied welts all over everywhere where her skin is bare. Amy looks into her face, which is scratched up and drawn. Amy does not understand, and Amy does not know what to do, or say. For a moment she just stands there, and then Katie lets her go, and she goes back over to the bed and sits down with the other girl. Amy looks at them, and then she goes back to her bedroom.
The next day, when Amy gets back from her classes, there are people coming out of Katie’s room when she walks by, holding boxes. She doesn’t see Katie again.
All evening Amy thinks of things she has to talk over with Katie. Outside the lag between these thoughts and the remembrance that her friend is gone now she’s not capable of any kind of motion. She drinks and grips the box knife in her fist.
That night for the third night in a row she does not call Zoe. Amy knows she is responsible for other people’s pains and disappearances. Like the time she tried playing with the children at the hospital, who all lost at Chutes and Ladders because she won.
It will be worse for Zoe if Amy sticks around. She hurts people, and doesn’t help them, and she can’t help it.
Amy knows that to save Zoe she must sacrifice herself.
What I never saw before was all the secret languages we always had already, the made-up names of things, and the real names of the features of our lives I see from here were specific to a time and place shared only really by the two of us: the highways we drove on and the meals we ate and the stories we were read;
Amy knows it is time for her to go back upstairs to her room now, but she is afraid
She has so many nightmares now that she wants to stop sleeping, forever. Sometimes at night she goes and sits in the closet thinking sleeping sitting up with the door shut might help, but it doesn’t. She has tried sleeping everywhere: on the spare bed, under her own bed, on the floor in the corner, under the desk, on top of the desk curled up into a little ball. It doesn’t help.
Being awake is even worse. Amy thinks of all the times she sat alone with Sasha in the dining room talking about pets and hobbies and furniture and food. All those times she could have told him not to do it. Maybe all he needed was s
omeone to hold his hand and to tell him not to do it. But she did not do that. She just sat there, an idiot, a miserable, disgusting, worthless, useless idiot. And now he is dead.
So she keeps on drinking in Tommy’s room, taking shots with him at first and then continuing alone out of a big plastic cup, slumped against his Nine Inch Nails poster. The short coarse carpet chafes against her legs through her pajama pants. She repositions herself. He is playing computer games. The door is open. Someone stops by. She doesn’t say anything for fear of slurring her speech. When they leave, Tommy shuts the door.
Amy simultaneously wishes that Zoe were there and rejoices that Zoe is not there. She wants to set a good example for Zoe. This is not a good example, she knows. She knows she should go back up to her room now and try to go to sleep. But she is afraid, and when Tommy offers to let her have his lower bunk, she says yes.
Tommy is supposed to take the upper bunk. But at some point, after she has been asleep for a while, he sits down on the edge of the mattress where she lies curled up around his pillow. He cradles the nape of her neck in his right hand. She wakes up, sort of.
It has been a long time since Amy gave any thought to losing her virginity, or to her first kiss
She is startled by her own body once it is bared. She looks down and sees that she is very pale and so slight she is barely there, like a ghost, and it gives her vertigo.
Now she can’t quite keep track of what is happening. When he takes her hand and puts it around his penis, she thinks it undulates, slithers, like a snake. Amy stiffens, and then she detaches from her body, watching the rest from overhead.
Afterwards she passes out again. She dreams of Sasha.
At dawn the next day Amy calls her grandparents, who are annoyed to be awakened but who come to pick her up and take her home with them
She goes upstairs when they get there and lies in bed all day listening to the sirens of the ambulances heading up to the hospital and the birds in the backyard. She thinks of when she and Zoe played rock-paper-scissors and how Zoe used to try to cheat, how mad she used to get at her. She follows the cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Water over eons wears through rock; every summer the girls would look for proof, stones without centers like negatives of islands, like the one their mother had, but of course they never found a single one.
When they turn the news on downstairs, Amy rolls over and covers her head with a pillow, but she can still hear it. She thinks about the fairy tales their grandma used to read them, how scared they’d get. How frustrating it was that Hansel’s path back home didn’t lead anywhere. She scoots out from underneath the pillow and turns over again. She watches the ceiling until it begins to get dark.
Suddenly seized by something, she picks up a pillow, wrings its middle, and hurls it against the wall. She thinks how Anna Karenina lay down in front of a train. How Vronsky tried to shoot himself in the heart.
and the way we’d loop back to one another in every story that we told—the answers to each other’s questions (even unasked—even unimaginable)—like the intertwining spirals of our common DNA.
In the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs and takes her grandpa’s car keys from the big ceramic bowl in the hallway and drives east
In the headlights the tar marks on the roads look like the splatters after animals. But Amy only thinks about where she is going because she doesn’t want to get lost. She keeps the map of everything illuminated in her mind. She reaches the cemetery after about half an hour, and she drives straight to his grave. She turns the car off and slides down onto the ground. She shuts the door on her arm, forty or fifty or sixty times, trying to work up a bruise. She lies down on the ground, and then she gets up and gets back into the car. The windows in it are automatic, and she thinks how if they drove off a bridge in a car with automatic windows she might not be able to get them down in time to get out and save Zoe.
When she gets home she sneaks into the downstairs bathroom and carefully pops open the bottle of painkillers her sister left at Christmas. With the pills in her fist she tiptoes back up the stairs. When she turns the corner for a second she thinks she sees Zoe. But then her eyes adjust, and it’s just a pillow lying crooked in the bed.
Every word is untranslatable if what translation is is making something new that stays the same.
On Monday, Amy can’t speak Russian anymore
Her brain has changed. In class the letters wriggle out of her grasp and swim away. Amy realizes the world has ended for her now, and she can’t keep going to her classes. She considers going to the cafeteria for a piece of chocolate cake, but she discovers she’s too tired, and she has a big task ahead of her.
She tries to write a letter to her sister
As she struggles to summon any words in any language, she drinks all the little bottles of cough syrup, hoping they will help her know what she should say. But they don’t help her.
She starts to write about nothing—about the weather, about how dumb their parents are, about how much stupid homework they have—but she crosses it all out and wads up the paper and tosses it in the basket by the door. When she is done with the cough syrup, she starts in on the rest of the vodka. When the vodka is gone, she takes the pills.
She is wearing jeans and her best long-sleeved shirt, which is red and has a pocket on the left side and three buttons down the front at the top made of abalone shells.
For the first time since she moved into the Honors House, Amy takes her shoebox out and opens it. She looks at the pictures of Zoe, from before her surgery, at her raucous eyes and her flaxen hair all specked with leaves and grass. She wishes she had taken a picture of Sasha—even one. She wishes she had let their mother take a picture of the three of them after Sasha’s play.
There is the yellow string he brought and played with during an early class, and then forgot about and left behind. Amy never knew what it was or why he’d had it. But she kept it in her shoebox, and now she rolls it back and forth between her fingers. Then she takes a small scrap of paper with Sasha’s handwriting on it and folds it up and clutches it in her right hand. Then she takes the box knife and begins to work at her left wrist.
It isn’t easy, even though she has been practicing. The vodka helps, and the cough syrup, and the pills, but it still hurts, and her skin wants to resist. Amy begins to feel very tired. But she keeps on trying.
But that’s not what translation is.
Amy wakes up in a white room with a minister who is holding her hand
Her eyes fight to stay open.
Cradled in her other arm, filthy now, its tentacles worn down to hard nubs of fabric, is Amy’s octopus. She knows she tried not to get any blood on it. But she also held it to her and buried her face in it and stayed that way as they carried her down the stairs of the Honors House and out the door, and she can see she ended up getting blood on it anyway.
Amy tries to get out of bed but finds she is tethered to machines
She tries to count to ten in Russian, and then to twenty. The nurses have left a curtain half drawn, and she can see a clock that says eleven. It doesn’t say if it is day or night.
Amy doesn’t know what to think about except for time and numbers. She can barely even keep the numbers in her head.
She tries to imagine her sister sitting somewhere just outside her section of the hospital, like Amy used to do when it was Zoe inside, a coloring book black and white in her lap.
A sudden burning exhaustion knocks her back onto her pillow. She counts: раз, два, три.
She wakes up and sees her mom standing over her and flinches, and then her mom starts yelling
Amy wishes she was dead.
A nurse wheels her down to the thirteenth floor
They come to two sets of locked doors. The nurse presses the red button on the intercom, and together they wait. After a while something buzzes, and then the doors give, and then the first nurse hands Amy over to a second nurse and walks away.
Amy has been transf
erred from Pediatric Intensive Care to Adult Psychiatric, where minors are still allowed to come. Now Amy expects to see Zoe at visiting hours; this is how she makes it through the long first day. But when she returns to her room after art therapy, she finds, instead of her family, just a sea-green plastic basket on her bed, with a note in their mother’s labored script.
The basket reminds her of the wild strawberries their father would take them to gather for their mother every May Day, but this memory disperses quickly, and Amy picks up the note.
We tried to bring your Sunflowers perfume, she reads, but they say you can’t have glass. Here’s your homework. We’re driving back to Rochester today.
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