by Katrina Leno
“Gosh, I don’t mean to. I’ll stop now,” Clare said. “Hey—do you want to do something after school? My mom works late; we could watch a movie at my place or something.”
Magpie considered—a week ago, maybe a few days ago, maybe even five minutes ago, she would have said no, the word would have been out of her mouth before Clare had even finished speaking. But today, now, she thought about it. And instead of no, she said: “I don’t think I can.”
Clare rolled her eyes an impressive distance back in her head. “Look, if this is about your baggage or whatever, lemme just say that I think Allison Lefferts is a huge shithead, not to mention a liar. I wouldn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth even if she was pointing at the sky and telling me it was blue, okay? For what it’s worth.”
Magpie felt something very much like a swell of happiness in the pit of her stomach. And even though she knew the truth (or at least she thought she did sometimes), she said, “Sure, I’ll come over.”
“Great. My locker’s 309. Meet me after last period.”
Clare’s locker was nowhere near Magpie’s, which meant it was nowhere near Allison’s, and in the interest of not being too late, Magpie arrived with her backpack full of books.
“Geez, that thing’s loaded. Do you want to put some stuff in here?” Clare offered. She moved aside, and Magpie began scooping books into Clare’s locker. Clare regarded her with confusion, then something clicked. “Ah… Lewis, Lefferts. Your lockers are right next to each other, aren’t they?”
Magpie froze a little, brought a book to her chest, and squeezed. “I just…”
“It’s fine. I wouldn’t want to run into that dickhole in the hallways, either,” Clare said.
Magpie relaxed a little. She put another book into Clare’s locker. Then her fingers found the yellow notebook, and she squeezed it so tightly that she knew, when she let it go, she’d have spiral-ring imprints on her palm.
When Magpie finally finished putting her stuff away and turned around, Clare was smiling, but it was a sad smile.
“You know—somebody once told me that my dad probably killed himself because I wasn’t good enough.” She laughed softly. “Good enough? What does that even mean, right? Like how do you be a good enough daughter?” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, my therapist and I have talked a lot about how to let those things just roll off your back. Because those things… they say way more about the person who said them than they say about you. I mean, of course they do. Who says something like that. And who still calls Brianna bloody girl in the hallways. And Luke the f-word. That doesn’t say anything about them, you know?”
Clare fidgeted for a second, put on her backpack, and coughed. “I just thought I should say something. I mean—I understand. Because Allison’s the one who said that. That my dad killed himself because I wasn’t good enough. So I can only imagine what she’s said to you.”
Clare didn’t linger long enough to see Magpie’s reaction. She turned and started down the hall, and Magpie struggled to catch up to her, suddenly embarrassed, as if she were somehow accountable for Allison’s actions.
That’s not me, she reminded herself. I didn’t do that.
And from another part of her brain, a different voice answered.
Ah, but you didn’t stop it, either.
It never made sense: Allison and Magpie. Allison was never not popular, never not beautiful; there was not even a ten-minute period in her life where she underwent the so-called awkward phase. Her school photos would stand the test of time as the perfect example of the right clothes, the right hairstyle, the right shade of baby-pink lip gloss.
“Guys like when you wear lip gloss, Magpie,” Allison had said once. Fourteen. Heart-shaped sunglasses. Yellow-and-white bikini. “They like it especially when you suck their—”
“Ew, Allison,” Magpie had replied, stuffing her fingers into her ears.
Allison hadn’t always been like that—so vulgar, so gross. They’d met when they were five years old in swim class at the local YMCA, and back then Allison had been a quiet, gentle girl who had won Magpie’s favor by always breaking her string cheese in half and sharing it with her. But something had happened to Allison around eleven or twelve. She’d started to become obsessed with her own self-worth, which she based entirely on how she looked and how many people wanted to be her friend. She became a true craftsman of her own image; her aesthetic was carefully cut out of magazines and pasted into a binder kept hidden away in the deepest depths of her soul. And while she still clung to Magpie fiercely, she also began to make and set up little factions of other friends. Magpie noticed this but did not say anything. When she questioned Allison, all hell broke loose. Allison had once gone so far as to throw a dinner plate into the wall above Magpie’s head, exactly like they had seen in countless movies.
What had caused it? Magpie had suggested they go ask Allison’s father for money so they could walk to the gas station on the corner and buy candy. It was something they always did, something they’d done a thousand times, but Allison had said no. And when Magpie had pressed her, she’d thrown the plate, still dirty with leftover lasagna, bits of cheese and vegetables flying in every single direction.
Afterward, Allison had sunk to her knees (also exactly like in movies, the well-established stance of extreme emotion, be it anger, happiness, or embarrassment) and cried, her hands covering her face and her shoulders heaving.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.
Were they fourteen? Thirteen?
The years blurred together.
Magpie picked up the pieces of the dinner plate and held them in her cupped bare hands, careful not to cut herself. She used her foot to open the lid of the Leffertses’ trash can and dumped them inside.
They waited a moment, the two of them, but only Mr. Lefferts had been home, and he was holed up in his study on the other side of the house. After a few breaths, it became obvious he hadn’t heard it.
And if nobody had heard it, it could be just as if it hadn’t even happened.
Magpie stood over Allison, and for just a moment, a brief moment that lit up the kitchen in blinding yellow light, she saw that something inside her friend, something very important and fragile and tender, had snapped in half. She saw into Allison’s body as if her friend’s skin were transparent. She saw that Allison’s heart was cracked open, and what was spilling out of it was something very unpleasant. She felt bad for her despite Allison’s almost breaking open her skull with a plate a few minutes ago. She bent down and put her hands on Allison’s knees.
“I’m so sorry,” Allison repeated.
“What’s going on with you?”
What Magpie should have asked, what she would have asked if she could do it all over again, was so much more complicated.
Why would you rather throw a dinner plate at my head than ask your father for ten or twenty dollars?
“I’m sorry,” Allison repeated, still crying. “Please don’t tell my dad, okay?”
“I won’t tell,” Magpie said. She wrapped her arms around Allison and squeezed her tightly. “I promise.”
Why hadn’t it upset her more, that Allison had thrown a plate at her head? If it had hit her, it could have broken her nose, or sliced open her forehead, or blacked an eye.
Maybe it was because, when she looked at Allison, she still saw the only kid in swim class who hadn’t laughed when Magpie had jumped out of the pool too late to make it to the bathroom, a stream of urine running down the insides of her legs as she’d stood frozen at the edge of the water.
Maybe it was the way Allison had introduced herself that very same day during snack break when all the other five-year-olds had found other little groups to sit with. The way she had pulled the string cheese out of her bright-blue lunch box and broken it in half without saying a word, handing it to Magpie with a smile. The way she had leaned in to whisper, “It happens to me sometimes, too. It’s okay.”
Maybe it was because Allison was like that—whe
n you were on her good side, she defended you fiercely. An unwavering protector.
Until you gave her a reason not to be.
And Magpie had been upset, of course, when Allison had thrown the plate at her head, but underneath that anger there had been Allison, at five, hair wet from the pool, a fierce expression on her face as she pushed a snotty little boy into the deep end because he had laughed at Magpie for her accident.
Allison, at seven, poking holes into the tires of a bike that belonged to a boy who’d stolen colored pencils out of Magpie’s backpack.
Allison, at ten, sticking gum into a girl’s long curly hair after that girl had called Magpie ugly.
So maybe she had been upset for just a moment, but she could never stay mad at Allison for long.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Allison said. “It’s like I’m not even me anymore.”
Magpie could not argue with that.
Clare’s house was small and homey. Her little brother, Ringo (“His real name’s Teddy, and I have no idea who introduced him to the Beatles, but it wasn’t me.”), greeted them at the door, fully launching himself into Clare’s arms before she’d even stepped into the hall.
Magpie knew his story. Clare’s mom had been nine months pregnant with Teddy—Ringo—when her husband had shot himself in the family car after pulling into the garage after work. They had a different car now. They had a different house, a different garage. The boy was four.
Magpie tried to make herself as small as possible in the foyer. The walls were lined with school photos of Clare and one from Ringo’s nursery class. There was one photo of the family before Mr. Brown had killed himself; Mrs. Brown’s belly was full and Clare was laughing, laughing. Clare caught Magpie looking at it.
“We go back and forth,” Clare said quietly. “You know. About how much to tell him. That photo is a compromise.”
Ringo had darted back down the hall; Clare watched him go.
“I’m so sorry,” Magpie said.
“It sort of gets easier,” Clare said. “It sort of doesn’t.”
She led Magpie down the short hallway into a small kitchen. An older woman was stirring something in an enormous pot.
“Hi, Linda,” Clare said. She dumped her backpack on a kitchen chair, and so Magpie did the same. “This is Mags.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mags,” Linda said. She peered into the pot, saw something she didn’t like, made a face, and then threw a bunch of dried herbs into it. “You’re okay with Teddy, Clare? I can’t stick around today.”
“Ringo!” the boy said, shooting in and out of the kitchen so quickly that he was more blur than boy.
“Ringo,” Linda said, rolling her eyes. “I’d prefer it if he wanted to be called George, but what do I know?” She crossed the kitchen and gave Clare the wooden spoon and a kiss on the cheek. “Simmer until you girls get hungry, okay? Tell your mom I’ll come a little early tomorrow so she can make her meeting. She worries too much, you know?”
“I know,” Clare said. She took her place behind the stove as Linda left. “Ringo!”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Yeah!”
“Go pick one out, okay?”
“Okay!”
“Sorry,” Clare said to Magpie. “I forgot Linda had to leave early today. She usually stays until my mom gets home. I didn’t know we’d have to babysit.”
“I don’t mind,” Magpie said.
And she didn’t—it was nice, sitting in the Browns’ kitchen watching Clare adjust the dial on the stove and stir whatever was cooking in the pot. Clare looked far more at ease than she ever did at school. She leaned over the pot and breathed deeply, smelling. “Are you hungry? I’m starving.”
“Yeah, actually,” Magpie replied.
“ROBIN HOOD,” Ringo shrieked, running into the kitchen, somehow without the shirt he’d just been wearing.
“Sure, Ringo. Stop stripping and go turn the movie on, okay?”
“ROBIN HOOD,” Ringo repeated, running back into what Magpie assumed was the living room.
Clare opened a cabinet and took two bowls from it.
“Isn’t Robin Hood a little violent?” Magpie asked.
“Oh, not the bloody one. The one with the talking animals.”
Magpie watched Clare ladle two heaping portions of soup into bowls, and her stomach growled audibly, suddenly aching for something other than macaroni and cheese.
“Linda makes stew in the summer and salads in the winter. It makes no sense,” Clare said. She dropped a spoon in the first bowl and nudged it toward Magpie. “Come on, you can eat it while we watch the movie.”
Magpie took the warm bowl in her hands and followed Clare into the living room. The opening credits of the movie were already playing, but Ringo was stretched out on his stomach on the carpet, snoring loudly.
“Did he just—”
“Fall asleep in .2 seconds?” Clare said, laughing. “Yup. He goes from ten to zero and back again. Which is lucky for us, because we don’t have to watch Robin Hood anymore.” She found the remote and turned off the movie, flipping through a few channels before she landed on a rerun of some crime show. She kept the TV on but turned down the volume so they could barely hear it. She blew into her soup and took a bite. Magpie did the same. It was filled with vegetables and beans and little macaroni elbows. Her stomach was so unused to anything that didn’t taste like artificial cheese, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep it down.
“Good, right?” Clare asked.
“So good.”
“She’s a good cook. My mom is hopeless. Without Linda and Ben, I’d never eat a decent meal.”
“Ben cooks?”
“He’s the best, seriously. He makes this veggie lasagna, oh my God.”
“Have you been friends for long?”
Clare smiled a little sadly. “Since my dad died, yeah. We’d been friends before, kind of, but after that, he was really there for me. A lot of people just disappeared, but not Ben.”
“He’s always been nice to me, too,” Magpie said.
“He’s the best. I don’t know what I would do without him.”
That choice of wording: I don’t know what I would do without him.
At one point Magpie didn’t know what she would have done without Allison. Without her sister. Without her father. If she had learned anything in life, it was that you could always do without people. You could always find a way to do without them.
“Mags?”
“Hmm?”
“I just wanted to say, about the party… It’s totally okay if you don’t want to go. I know Allison is going to be there. But I meant what I said before. I think Allison is a liar. And even if she isn’t lying? It’s not like you killed anyone. We all make mistakes.”
We all make mistakes. Wasn’t that the truth?
The thing was—there were some mistakes you couldn’t come back from.
Magpie arrived home to a dark house. She’d had two enormous helpings of Linda’s stew, and her mind and her heart and her body felt full, and she turned on the light in the living room and was silently overjoyed that her mother wasn’t lying passed out on the couch. It was eight o’clock; Magpie and Clare had done a little homework together after watching TV, and it had felt like the most normal night she’d had in a while.
She dropped her backpack on the couch and walked down the hall to her bedroom. She could do this. She could have friends again; she could graduate high school; she could go on dates and forget about her father and forget about Eryn and forget about Allison. She could do all of these things and—
But no.
She could not.
Because as much as she tried to convince herself that the sour, acidy smell that drifted into her bedroom and brought tears to her eyes was not vomit, the rational part of her brain understood that she must get up, must go check on her mother, must get the bleach out of the bathroom cupboard, and must do what she had to d
o to scrub that smell out of the carpet.
She walked to her mother’s bedroom.
The smell grew greater, more urgent.
Something buzzed in Magpie’s skull, a tiny warning alarm that sounded only in the most desperate of emergencies.
Something was not right.
Her mother’s door was slightly ajar; she pushed and it swung open, revealing a dark cave stuffed full of the sharp fumes of vodka and the thick, heavy scent of vomit.
“Mom?” Magpie whispered into the darkness. Her hand fumbled along the wall for the light switch, and the room was thrust into an immediate wash of color.
Her mother was lying on the carpet next to the bed, half-naked, her shirt around her neck and one breast hanging loose from her bra.
It was the breast Magpie concentrated on, the breast that confused her, because her mother’s skin around the nipple and out across the mountain of her boob was all blue. A pale, tender blue.
Vomit was arranged in a perfect halo around Ann Marie’s head. Magpie took two noiseless steps closer to her and noted the empty bottle of vodka just out of reach. The blueness turned her mother’s entire body into something foreign, something Magpie did not recognize. She thought wildly of Smurfs, of those cat creatures from that James Cameron movie, of the bottle of Dawn dish soap at their sink.
She knelt at her mother’s feet and laid one hand on her shin, then pulled it back, recoiling. She had never felt a body so cold, and for one minute she thought—
But no.
Ann Marie’s chest rose and fell slowly, slowly, slowly.
Up and down.
Slowly.
Up…
Down…
Magpie stood up and ran back down the hall and tripped and fell and pulled herself up and dove across the living room to reach the phone, and she dialed 911 even as some tiny voice in the back of her head thought—Wait.
What if you don’t?
What if you let her die?
Would that be so bad?