All That Was

by Karen Rivers

  Right now, we are platinum blond.

  I touch my stupid, ugly short hair. Our hair.

  It looks better on Piper than on me. On her, it’s gamine. On me, it just looks shorn. I know I’m supposed to say something now to Piper’s mom but I don’t know what it is. My brain is suddenly thick with fog. I can’t find any words.

  Piper’s mom is crying now. She is crying hard. She is talking like she’s not crying or maybe like she hasn’t noticed that she is. The cry is more of a moan that I can feel underneath my skin, buzzing like static. It is unbearable.

  “Stop,” I say. “Stop doing that.” I can’t stand it. My eyes water and I can’t blame bleach this time. She doesn’t stop. “STOP!” I shout.

  Piper’s mom is supposed to be in Hong Kong. She’s a flight attendant. She is not coming back until next Thursday, Piper said. She’s working on starting a business over there, importing strings of pearls to North America. Pearls are cheaper in Hong Kong.

  Today is Saturday. “It’s only Saturday,” I say, more quietly.

  She says, “Sloane. Your mother.” Then, “Please.”

  Mom has gone into work, but I can’t seem to say that. My words are scabbing in my throat, dry and hard. I can’t breathe. I cough. Tonight Piper and I are having a huge party at Piper’s house. We are celebrating the start of our last year at Rogers. “The party,” Piper said, “that will set the tone for all other parties.” (But that was before last night, the biggest worst best party I’d ever seen.)

  I have a terrible feeling. It’s not that I’m choking, it’s something else. Something inside me is collapsing.

  My logical brain keeps trying to interrupt: maybe her mom found out about the party. I’ve already bought watermelons that are right now piled up in Piper’s living room, two deep, absorbing the vodka we carefully injected with huge syringes. “Junkie melons,” Piper said. She put the pics on her feed. “When melons go bad,” she typed. “Support clean needle sites for melons.” She drew sad faces on the watermelons.

  “Sloane, now,” Piper’s mom says again, and a sound comes out of her that peels my skin away in sheets.

  “Where is she?” I say, in someone else’s voice. “Where is Piper? Is this about the party?” But I know that isn’t it. I already know. I knew. Maybe I’ve known for this whole morning. I’m drifting entirely away from myself and up into the sky, where I can see myself below in the blue chair. Flakes of me fall onto the roof like feathers from a zombie bird.

  I’m the zombie apocalypse.

  I’m the dead.

  Am I?

  “Tell me.” My voice is a tape recorder and the battery has run out. My words are thick and coagulated. “Tellll meeee.”

  “Sloane,” she screams. What is left of my insides is made of glass. The glass shatters and falls up like sharp rain and maybe that’s why the sky is falling in pieces all around me, bringing birds down with it, dead before they hit the ground.

  The gardener starts the hedge trimmer and the roar fills up the world, which is now entirely a blue bowl of noise. I can’t hear anything at all.

  “I can’t hear you,” I say, panicked. “I can’t hear you! What? I can’t hear!”

  I think she says, “Sloane, I need you.” Or maybe she says, “Sloane, I need you to…”

  And I say it, I say, “She’s dead, isn’t she? Is Piper dead? Tell me.”

  The word “dead” catches in my throat and I start to choke. I press the lit end of the cigarette into the flesh of my leg. I lie down on the deck. The wood is burning hot. My skin is bubbling off. Nothing is safe.

  Nowhere.

  I’m still holding the phone and I can’t hear anything but a roar that’s inside the blue sky of my skull, which is inside out. I smell flesh burning but I still can’t feel it and so I press harder and harder until the cigarette breaks and falls away.

  “I can’t feel it,” I say between coughs. I’m choking. My lungs are hands, grappling for air. “I can’t feel anything.”

  The sky is crumpling up and I see a freckling of stars that can’t be there, but are, and a halo of light that is coming from the sea or everywhere.

  I’m talking in slow motion but I’m not talking, I’m screaming, but I’m not screaming either, I’m moaning.

  I’m silent. I am silence.

  “Sloane?” the phone squawks. “SLOANE.”

  I throw the phone up into the sky and it somersaults, mirrored against the too-blue brightness, down onto the lawn, where the sprinklers have come on with a rat-a-tat machine-gun fire. And even as it is midflight, still falling, a police cruiser crunches onto the gravel of the long, curved driveway.

  That’s when I know for sure that I’m right.

  Then I hear her, her voice cutting cleanly into the mess of everything.

  Look what you did, she says, as real as I am. I’m the price we paid.

  And then nothing nothing nothing just the sound of my own scream curling around my head like smoke.

  BEFORE

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Piper says. She’s leaning on the counter of the mall store where she’s working for the summer. The store sells quirky fashion. She’s wearing a baby doll dress and combat boots like it’s 1993. She looks great, of course. She looks perfect.

  I’m sitting on the floor in my going-to-the-gym leggings and an old T-shirt of Dad’s from the eighties—FRANKIE SAYS RELAX, it says—over a sports bra that is digging uncomfortably into my ribs. From here, I have a good view of her legs and shoes. I have to awkwardly look up to see her properly, my head banging against a shelf labeled RETURNS AND GROSS, where they put the things that are brought back dirty or damaged, things that can’t be resold.

  “I can see up your nose,” I tell her. “It’s not pretty from down here. Why do I have to hide? Can’t I pretend to shop or something?”

  “I told you,” she says impatiently. “I don’t want to get fired. You never know when they’ll be watching.”

  “I’m not sure they would appreciate me being behind the counter more than they’d appreciate me trying on that weird fairy dress”—I point to the rack of glittery pale pink wafting dresses that are moving in the breeze generated by a carefully positioned fan—“and maybe buying it.”

  “You’d look terrible in that dress,” she says. “Pale pink washes you out.” She goes over and takes it off the rack and holds it up to herself, squinting in the mirror. “Exactly zero people who have tried this on look good in it. You know what they look like? Adults playing reverse dress-up. Why do grown women want to look like three-year-olds in ballet class?”

  “You’d look good in it,” I say flatly, because it’s annoying but it’s also true.

  She disappears behind the mirror-sequined curtain and emerges in the dress. She looks gorgeous. She’s left the boots on, which somehow only make it look prettier. “Yeah, you’re washed out,” I lie. “Take it off. This sucks. The floor is cold. I could sit on a chair or something. I’ll hold really still. I’ll be a mannequin.”

  She shrugs, twirls over (literally), and pats me on the head, before vanishing back behind the curtain. “You’re a good friend,” she calls. “I’d die without you, remember? And today it would be death by boredom. Who goes to the mall on a Saturday in July when it’s perfect weather? Only losers.”

  “I’m here,” I point out.

  “Exactly,” she says. “Ha ha. I’m kidding. Anyway, stay.”

  “Woof,” I say.

  She comes back, dressed in her own clothes, and reaches up to the shelf behind the counter and changes the music from one satellite station to the next. The tinny pop hurts my ears. “You have terrible taste in music,” I say. “How can we still be friends when you voluntarily listen to Katy Perry? It’s an abomination.”

  She sticks out her tongue and hoists herself up onto the counter, where she dances, giddily, until she falls off, somehow landing on her feet.

  “Oops,” she laughs.

  “Show-off,” I mumble.

&nb
sp; Piper’s legs are as smooth as wax, brown from the summer sun already. My legs need shaving. They look like ghost legs next to hers. I need a tan, but I don’t want to get cancer. We’re all only one sunburn away from a fatal diagnosis. Not that it stops me from smoking, which fails the logic test, I know.

  “I need a cigarette,” she says, reading my mind. She takes a few sips from a huge smoothie that I brought for her. “Oh, shhhh,” she says, even though I’m not talking.

  “I didn’t say—”

  She kicks me in the shin.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Can I help you?” she says. I can’t see who she’s talking to, but she’s using her fake British accent, so I know it’s a boy. Or a man. Someone male.

  If I were filming this, I’d contrast it against a jungle scene. A lioness circling a dopey antelope. The dopey antelope not understanding until it’s too late that he’s been destroyed, the lioness already tearing the flesh from his neck.

  “Um, yeah.” I hear his antelope-y voice. “I’m looking for, like, a gift.”

  “Oooh, for your girlfriend?” she purrs. Even from here, I can tell she is doing that thing with her tongue. A pressing of her tongue against her top teeth. It’s a new thing that she does that drives me nuts, and boys love it. I want to push the back of her knee so she falls over, laughing, in a heap next to me. I sit on my hands. This is Piper 2.0: The Sexy Years. Maybe a month or two from now she’ll say, “I was acting! Couldn’t you tell? I thought you were in on it. Boys are so dumb, amirite? So obvious.”

  But it’s been at least three months now. Maybe more. Maybe it’s happened gradually over the last year or even two and I didn’t notice when it started. When people change, that’s how they do it: too slowly to be seen.

  Maybe I’ve changed, too. I pick at my cuticle. I put my own tongue on my lip but it feels ugly, not seductive. I look like Grandma, drool and all, not Piper, who always looks great.

  “No, no,” the man-boy says. “No girlfriend. I don’t have … I mean, I do, but…” His lie is so obvious, I want to giggle. “It’s for my, um, sister?”

  Piper steps over my legs and goes around the counter. “Is she my size?” she says. And I know when she says this, she’s spinning for him slowly. I know he’s into it. I know he’s into her. I know that’s why he came into this shop—maybe on a bet or a dare from his buddy—and I know what he wants.

  And I know that she knows, that she’s playing. But I really don’t like the game.

  I slip my earbuds into my ears and dial up a podcast. I turn it up loud. I hope they can hear it. She’ll be annoyed with me after, but I don’t care. The podcast is called Stuff You Should Know. This one is about extinction. Did you know that over fifty million different species have lived on this planet at one time or another? Almost all of them are dead.

  Gone.

  Wiped out.

  I close my eyes and let the voice in my ear fill me up. I find facts calming, even when they are terrifying. I definitely enjoy listening to podcasts more than I like watching Piper flirt another guy into buying a tiny cashmere sweater that she’s modeled for him that he doesn’t want (or have anyone to give to). When he returns that sweater, it’s definitely going on the Gross Shelf, that’s for sure. She accidentally on purpose drops a lace tank top over the counter. It lands on my head and gets stuck on my messy ponytail, my gym hair.

  I take out one earbud. “So, do you go to school?” I hear him say.

  “For now,” she says. “I’m really a filmmaker, though.” My stomach clenches. I’m the filmmaker, I want to say. Let me have at least that. “I’m hoping to make a movie about—”

  I put the earbud back in before I can hear her taking everything of mine for herself. I close my eyes. The podcast ends and I let the next one start up without caring what it is. Trees. It’s about trees. The floor is cold and hard under me and my tailbone is starting to ache. I’ll get up and go, I decide. I’ll skip the gym and I’ll walk home. It’s a perfect Pacific Northwest day. Hot, but not too hot. Maybe I’ll stop for a frozen mocha from the coffee truck that parks near the mall parking lot. Better than mall coffee by a mile. I love those things.

  Trees, the podcast intones, have a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that grows hairlike on their roots and attaches them to other trees. If you looked at a map of trees’ roots, you’d see they were all connected. You’d see everything that they share.

  There is maybe a fungus that has woven me to Piper.

  Piper is the fungus, invading my roots.

  It’s symbiotic, of course.

  But what am I getting?

  It’s more parasitic than that.

  I turn it off and leave the earbuds in, so I can hear her still, but it’s muffled. Her laugh—like a creaky gate—leaks through. She’s always laughed like that, ever since I can remember. It’s a little kid’s laugh that she never outgrew. I smile because I can’t help it. The creaky-gate laugh is contagious.

  She steps back around the counter and nudges me with her boot while she rings him up. He must be able to see me, my legs, my shoes. He doesn’t mention me. I wonder if he’s averting his eyes on purpose. I wonder if he knows that I’m laughing at him.

  “Thank you so much,” she says. “She’s going to look so hot in that.”

  He laughs nervously, then he’s gone, $78 poorer. I hope it was worth it, the poor idiot.

  “What was that?” I say.

  She laughs, pulls my earbuds out with a dramatic hand movement. “Why are you mad?” she says. “I’m working, remember? This is my jooooooob.”

  I roll my eyes. “Did you get his number?”

  “It’s not like that,” she says. “He wanted a sweater. For his girlfriend slash sister. For his sister, who is also his girlfriend.” She pauses. “And his cousin.” She laughs. “Come on, that was funny!”

  I shrug. “What he actually wanted isn’t exactly for sale,” I mumble under my breath.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says.

  “There’s everything wrong with me,” I say, which is true, but I can’t explain. It’s not only this latest version of Piper, this tongue-on-teeth Piper, that’s my problem. It’s more than that. It’s me. I’m changing. I feel like I’m growing out of my life. Nothing fits right and everything is an irritating seam that’s pressing into my skin. If I were a tree, I’d be one that was painfully pushing out of my own bark, splintering down the sides. But without bark, trees die.

  I don’t know how to say it without sounding crazy. I can just imagine what she’d say: Trees? What? I can imagine her creaky-gate laugh, at me, not with me.

  “I’m going to go,” I say. “I’m going to the gym.” I don’t move, though.

  She slides down next to me, our backs pressed against the canvas bags that she gives to customers who spend more than $100. They smell like rope and potatoes. Dirt. They were probably made by kids in India or Bangladesh for a penny a day, or worse. The last doc that I watched was about the factories where they make cheap clothes for Old Navy and the Gap. It made me want to cry, all those young girls, our age. Younger. Hunched over sewing machines so we can have $5 tank tops.

  I scratch my neck.

  “I’m just bored,” I lie. “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe you’re just boring,” she says.

  “Ouch. That’s actually mean. Even for you.”

  “I was joking,” she says. She makes a face, drapes her arm around my back, kisses my hair. “Take a joke. God.”

  I shrug her arm off me. “Don’t touch,” I say. “I don’t feel like being touched.”

  “This conversation is getting boring.”

  “Sorry,” I say automatically. Even though I’m not.

  “Whatever,” she says. Her head is bent over her phone, her thumbs moving across the screen, rapid-fire.

  “Soup?” I say.

  She nods without looking up.

  I hate Soup.

  I love Soup.

  I have so many feelings about Soup
that I can’t share and I don’t know what to do with.

  I have no feelings about Soup.

  Why would I?

  He’s Piper’s boyfriend.

  Soup, with Piper, makes me think of moths and how they are always fluttering around the porch light. If they had a brain at all, they’d understand that the bulb was going to adhere to their wings, burn them up into nothing but dust.

  I’ve had a crush on Soup since fourth grade.

  “We could go to the beach when you’re done with work,” I say. “Have a fire or something?”

  “What?” she says without waiting for an answer. “Oh my God, he’s so funny.”

  “What did he say?”

  She laughs and bites her lip. This stuff with her mouth is so awful. I’m fixated on it in an unhealthy way. I stare. I read somewhere about a wife murdering her husband because of the sound of his chewing. This is like that, but worse. “Don’t do that,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  “Do what?” she says, still typing.

  “Forget it,” I say, even though she already has. My heart is beating double time, the anxiety sweeping over me like a stealth wave, catching me unprepared. “I’m going to go work out,” I manage. I pull myself up and grab my gym bag.

  “You’re thin enough already,” Piper says. “You’re thinner than me.”

  “It’s not about being thin; I just like it. I feel like sweating.”

  She shrugs. “Sure, okay, whatever. But don’t get so small we can’t share clothes.”

  “Priorities, amirite?” I say, laughing, or trying to laugh. When I’m panicky, everything feels like an act. Fake. “Later, alligator hater.”

  She raises her hand in farewell, already typing with her other thumb.

  “In a while, vile crocodile,” she murmurs, but it’s an afterthought. She doesn’t even look up as I go, knocking the ballet pink dress off its hanger as I pass. It doesn’t make any sound at all as it drifts slowly down to the floor.

  * * *

  From the escalator, going up to the top floor, I can see the rows of treadmills lined up at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the gym, with a view down to the food court. The sight of them gives me vertigo, and my vision trips and tilts. I try to steady myself by taking a long, slow breath in, but the air feels too manufactured to breathe, metallic and air-conditioned. I’m going to faint. The gray light of an oncoming spell shivers at the edge of everything, like the vignette feature in Instagram.