How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

  “Whoa,” Cake breathes. “This is intense.” She paws through the box, but there isn’t anything else to see. We’ve looked through all of it. I stare at the photos of my equestrian mother, and my grandparents, while Cake crawls back into the closet and shuffles things around. She comes out, sweaty and satisfied.

  “That’s it,” she says. “The rest of the shoeboxes are just shoes. Who knew your mom liked shoes so much? Also, now we know the names of your grandparents, which is going to help. We can Google them.”

  I carefully refold the newspaper article. Area Girl Canters Her Way to Great Things. My mother went from a chubby, wet-cheeked baby to a slim girl with medals and ribbons and a horse, and then her life…stopped. Until me.

  There are no middle school photos. No more ribbons after a certain year. No high school photo. Prom. Graduation.

  I ask the dragon boxes, “Who are you? What happened from the time you were ten until…me?”

  Cake holds up her hands. “Wait, who are you talking to?”

  I point to my mom’s boxes on top of the dresser. “June. She’s over there.”

  Cake breathes in deeply, considering.

  Then she says, “Not that I’m criticizing, but I just want to clarify: First, the dress, and now…talking to your mom’s ashes? Do I have everything clear?”

  I feel weird inside, not as empty as I could, or as sad, but not happy, either. I give Cake a half smile. She’s a good friend, to do all this for me.

  “Yes, I talk to my dead mom now.”

  Cake grimaces at the word and brushes the dust off her knees. “Good to know. But, like, if you decide to do weird experiments with electricity and, like, other people’s body parts or something, to bring her back? I’m not sure I can be the supportive best friend. I just want to state that up front.”

  “Noted,” I say.

  “I’m gonna go wash my hands.” She closes the bathroom door.

  I hear a car pull up outside and the slams of two car doors. Then angry whispering. I put the photographs down.

  “It’s ridiculous.” A man’s voice. Cake’s dad. “She’s going to go.”

  “She’s sixteen. She can make her own choices, good or bad, and then live with them. She doesn’t want to leave her friend.” Rhonda sounds pleading, like they’ve been talking about this too long.

  Talking about Cake, I think. About the camp.

  “We have done everything we could for this girl. We have helped with money, we’ve helped with food, we’ve helped with car repairs, we’re paying for her phone, and I love her, I do, but at some point, she is holding our daughter back. Our very, very talented daughter. She cannot turn down this camp again. She was lucky enough to get another chance to apply after turning them down last year.”

  Rhonda murmurs, “Tiger had mono. They’ve always been so close. Frankly, I think it’s nice our daughter has the heart she does.”

  Cake was accepted to the music camp in Massachusetts? I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she got in last summer, too.

  I was so sick for a month. Cake stayed with me as much as she could, wearing a mask and rubber gloves, so my mom could do the Bookmobile and Jellymobile. She joked about her hazmat fashion. We watched oodles of television and listened to records and took naps and I held her while she cried about Troy, the guy from Sierra Vista.

  And what are they talking about, money and car repairs?

  Did they give my mom money and I didn’t know?

  “I mean, Rhonda, come on. I’m sorry June died, and I miss her, I do, but our daughter is going places. What, is she not going to go to college because her friend can’t afford to? We need to start pushing her to think of herself first. It’s time.”

  That is something Cake would do. The college thing. I haven’t really thought about it, not in the real sense, only abstract. But she would. She would stay behind for me.

  The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Cake comes out.

  “What?” she says. “You have a funny look on your face.”

  “Your parents are here.”

  “Oh, cool.” She puts her earbuds and phone in her backpack.

  “Hey, what happened with your music camp?” I ask, keeping my voice mild. “You get in?”

  She doesn’t look at me. “I haven’t heard back, and I’m sure I won’t get in, but it’s no big deal.”

  My friend is lying to me about something that she should be happy about.

  She’s lying because I’m unhappy, and have a dead mom, and she thinks she shouldn’t be happy.

  “Cake,” I start to say, but Shayna breezes into the room.

  “I’m gonna hop in the shower and then head out to Tucson, okay? Not sure when I’ll be back.”

  She shuts the bathroom door. The shower starts running. There’s a knock at the front door.

  “Cake!” her mom calls. “Let’s go! We’re meeting Connor for dinner in fifteen minutes.”

  Cake hoists her backpack on her shoulders and we walk out to the front room.

  Her mom is picking up stray bras from the back of the couch. “How’s it going, honey? Things seem a little…messy around here.” She dangles two purple bras in front of me. Cake’s dad sighs heavily.

  I try to ignore the fact that he was just bitching about saving my mom and me from, well, everything, and concentrate on Rhonda.

  “My sister is making herself at home,” I say lightly.

  It’s true. The house is starting to get Shayna-fied: bras on the bathroom door handle, the couch, eyeliner pencils on the vanity in the bathroom. Lipsticked coffee mugs and dirty plates on the kitchen counter. Copies of Cosmo all over the floor.

  She even shoves her own clothes in my hamper. If I didn’t do laundry, or the dishes, or straighten up, I don’t think they’d get done.

  Rhonda folds the bras and puts them on the couch. “You doing okay? Staying brave?”

  I look at her. What does bravery have to do with anything? My mom is dead and I’m supposed to be brave? It’s like I’m not allowed to even cry now that the funeral is done and my sister is here and, well, this is life now.

  Because crying would make people uncomfortable, I guess.

  “Sure,” I say flatly.

  Rhonda frowns and hesitates, like she wants to say something, but she’s not sure what.

  “Why don’t you come stay with me tonight?” Cake says, watching me and her mom. She uses her extra-cheerful voice. “Your sister’s going out anyway.”

  “Cake,” Gabe says impatiently. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”

  That would be nice, to be at Cake’s comfortable Earthship, with its ferns everywhere and low lights and music always playing in the background.

  But now I would feel weird. Like I was just taking something else from them. Keeping Cake from being Cake.

  “No,” I say. “That’s cool. I’ll be fine.”

  Rhonda hugs me. I let her for a few seconds, but then I gently disentangle myself and step away. Gabe claps his hands. “Well, kid, let’s get a move on, okay? Maybe we can give that new piece a whirl when we get home, all right, Cake?”

  Inside the bathroom, Shayna’s humming a song softly. I hear the whir of her electric toothbrush.

  I can’t always run to a better life, like Cake’s, and hide. This is my life now. Bras on the couch. Cleaning up spilled coffee grounds on the floor.

  Cake nods. “I’ll text you,” she calls on her way out.

  I go back into my room, slide onto the bed, draw the lid back over the photos and medals.

  My mom’s whole life, small enough to fit in a blue hatbox.

  HERE IS WHAT IT feels like when your half sister leaves the house you used to share with your mother.

  You listen to the silence.

  You wonder when she’s going to come back

  You wonder if
she’s going to come back.

  What if something happened to her what if a car hit her what if her car hit another car what if she just kept driving in the car and never came back and gradually the sky would get darker and darker and the stars would pop and here you’d be, waiting.

  Alone.

  Once, you left the house and went to school and your mother died.

  Your heart squeezes. Your fingers tremble above your phone.

  You press her name.

  What time do you think you’ll be back?

  She’s been gone three hours, twenty-two minutes, and eleven seconds.

  You wait.

  The girl-bug blinks, waiting. Whispers, If you lose this one, you are really shit out of luck.

  No answer.

  Is everything okay? Do you know when you’ll be back?

  No answer.

  Getting worried.

  No answer.

  You pace around the house. Laps around the couch, where it must have happened, and you get more and more panicky, black dots swimming in front of your eyes. You move back to the bedroom.

  You should call the police. Report her missing. But you don’t even know where she went. You don’t even really know anything about her. And she’s an adult. Well, adult-ish.

  You call. Voice mail. I’m just getting worried, I haven’t heard from—

  God, you’re stupid. What a freak. You end the voice mail.

  The front door to the house opens just as tears spring from your eyes. Your sister appears in the doorway to the bedroom, holding the phone to her ear. Her hair is mussed and her eyes are red.

  You stare at each other.

  “I’m right here,” she says softly. “Okay?”

  You nod.

  Okay.

  13 days, 10 hours

  SHAYNA IS STILL ASLEEP when I leave for school the next morning. I thought she might wake up in time to take me to school, but in the end, I texted Cake. Don’t know what she did last night, but my sister isn’t getting up. Give me a ride?

  In the car, she says, “Maybe she parties or something. I mean her FB was full of beer shots.”

  “I haven’t seen her drink one thing while she’s been here.”

  “Well, she’s only twenty. Maybe she went to a meet-up or something. Somewhere. To…meet people of her own…ilk.” Cake laughs. “She seems cool. I think this is gonna all work out. Probably just growing pains. Like when a person has a baby and has to learn how to understand which cry means what, like hungry, sleepy, change me. Your sister has to learn all that stuff.”

  “I’m not a baby,” I say. I smooth the lap of my dress and adjust my hat.

  No, says the girl-bug. You’re a mess to clean up, remember?

  Cake frowns. “This cowgirl slash butter-churner outfit? How much longer is it going to last?”

  “I don’t know,” I say lightly, looking out the window. “Maybe my whole life. You’ll leave and go away to camp or college and I’ll still be here, forever, a loser, wandering the streets of our dusty town in my musty old dress and Clint Eastwood hat.”

  Because I’ll spend my whole life missing my mom, and so I should dress like it, just like the women in Dickens’s books. Dirty and sad and hollow.

  “That’s a weird thing to say,” Cake says slowly.

  She pulls into the Eugene Field parking lot. “What do you mean by that, anyway?” She looks at me, her face hurt. “I’d never leave you like that. You’re my best friend.”

  “Everybody leaves,” I mumble. “But I’m just being dumb. Forget it.”

  Tentatively, she says, “You seem mad at me or something.”

  “Just forget it.”

  We walk the lot in silence, enter the hallway in silence. I feel shitty for saying that, but I also feel shitty for thinking Cake should stay with me forever. Or that I’m holding her back somehow.

  Her poor, orphaned friend.

  Cake says, “Well, see you at lunch, then, I guess.”

  I watch her go, her shoulders slumped, her skull backpack swaying against her hip.

  I open my locker and see the photo of my mom on the door. A little slice of pain runs through me at the sight of her smiling face. My eyes start to feel hot, and wet. I press myself against the wall of metal.

  Oh my God, her clothes.

  She’s still in that dress.

  I’m going to die.

  Don’t say that word!

  Giggling.

  Oops. My bad.

  Slowly, I turn around, my heart on fire.

  Ellen Untermeyer is standing with a group of her friends, and Kai Henderson is next to her, looking down at the ground. He mumbles something, and tries to take her elbow, but she shakes him off and whispers in her friend’s ear.

  Ellen Untermeyer was Kai’s girlfriend in the eighth grade, the only other girl he ever kissed in the world besides me, a girl he claimed slobbered like a teething baby, and if I had to describe my feelings at this moment with emojis, they would be:

  And his face would be this and Ellen Untermeyer’s face would be this .

  “What did you say?” I try to keep my voice from shaking.

  Really, the whole world, at least the world inside the hallway, stops. Like, needles screeching across records and car tires skidding across blacktops in an endless movie-montage loop kind of thing. I mean, kids stop walking and start clustering around us.

  “Girly fight,” some guy in a leather jacket says, and laughs.

  “What did you say?” My voice sounds hard, and faraway.

  “Oh my God, Grace. Please. You can’t take a joke? I mean, have you looked at yourself?”

  Ellen Untermeyer called me a jackass freshman year in front of the entire English Lit class for pronouncing hyperbole incorrectly, and even though I always felt her eyes burning into my body whenever she’d catch me standing with Kai in the hallway at Eugene Field or on the knoll at The Pit, I never much paid attention to her after that.

  Her beady little eyes are exactly like mean raisins, if raisins could be mean.

  I look at Kai.

  Kai keeps his eyes on the ground.

  I’m so furious at him. Hurt and filled with fury, that he would…just stand here. Like he just left me at the hospital.

  “You just left me there,” I say.

  It’s out before I can stop it, my voice small, almost pleading.

  He looks up. “I said I was sorry.”

  “My mom died and you just left me there.”

  Oh God. My voice cracks. Some girl in the growing crowd of kids covers her mouth like she feels sorry for me.

  “Graaaaace…”

  Ellen Untermeyer’s voice is like a slice of lemon in the air, tart and sharp as she drags out my name.

  “Grace, get over it, already. Move on.”

  Ellen Untermeyer tosses her amber-colored hair over her shoulder. She’s that type of girl: smart in school, and never lets you forget it, but it’s also kind of her curse, because people hate her for it, so she doesn’t have too many friends, and she acts like she doesn’t care, but you know she totally does, and that just makes people like her even less.

  Something about the way her lips purse in that moment tears through me like a lightning bolt. I realize she’s never been touched by true harm, or she wouldn’t give me that look.

  She’s never felt carved out, hollow, weighted down.

  She’s never felt the way I’ve felt for the past thirteen days.

  Standing there in the middle of the hallway, smug in her unsmudged life.

  I walk over and slap Ellen Untermeyer in the face as hard as I can.

  And then, astonished, I hold my palm up and look at it, like, Hey, what are you doing here, you crazy, face-slapping piece of flesh?

  I’m almost more a
stonished at how good it felt. To hit her. To hit something. Anything.

  I’m breathing hard. I want to hit everything now. Kick everything with these kick-ass boots. Because it felt good.

  Maybe this will be my lifesaver, my grief talent: I’ll be a world-famous girl boxer, fighting her way out from her mom’s death by reducing horrible people to pulp.

  Awww, shit, says the crowd. People start clapping. Fight fight fight. Kids hold up their phones.

  #griefgirl #schoolfight #girlfight #madgirlwalking #dangdogyoufiercegirl

  I have so much adrenaline I can barely see or hear anything, blood pumping through me thickly, urgently. I think I hear Cake shout, Tiger, no.

  Because I have my hands up, and I want to go after Ellen again.

  Ellen, who is cupping her right cheek with both hands like it’s a Fabergé egg, which are these intricate gold eggs made for Russian royalty a long time ago, one of which even had a teeny tiny replica of a royal coach inside, something I learned about while watching Antiques Roadshow with my mother, who is now dead, and whom I am supposed to get over.

  Ellen Untermeyer wails and calls me a bitch. Her friends close ranks around her, cradling her like a lost kitten. Kai stares at me. Jesus, Tiger, what’s wrong with you?

  That makes me even more mad, because now I’m a mess and wrong, so I shove him as hard as I can, which sends him reeling backward into the crowd, his glasses flying off and skittering on the ground. There’s the sound of glass crunching.

  Someone in the crowd says, Oopsie.

  And then Walrus Jackson is there, pushing kids aside and shouting, “Oh, no, no, not in my school, no, uh-uh, and Tiger Tolliver, you will stop with all this right now, do you read me?”

  But I’m all hands and nerve and blood and shame, all the kids staring at me, Kai Henderson on the floor, feeling around for his glasses that kids keep kicking away, because kids are shitty like that, and that makes me feel even worse, so I fight Mr. Jackson, my fists crashing against his white button-up shirt, until he moves behind me and wraps his arms around me and picks me up and carries me down the hall like a wild, kicking doll.