by Katrina Leno
“I don’t believe you,” Magpie said. “I don’t believe you—we were friends for years, Allison, and you’re saying—”
“I’m saying that you were annoying from the very beginning, that’s exactly what I’m saying. But you were useful, too. You were always there whenever I was bored, whenever I wanted to do something. But then you got unuseful really quickly, Magpie. Then you went and sucked my boyfriend’s dick. See how that works out?”
“But I didn’t—”
“Don’t get blackout drunk and let a boy lead you into his bedroom. It’s fucking obvious,” Allison said.
“That’s not how it works,” Magpie said, and her voice was a little louder now, and the figure at the bottom of the hill took another shaky step upward. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Whatever. Get on your little anti-slut-shaming soapbox. I’m not interested. And I’m going home.”
Allison moved so quickly that Magpie was taken off guard, and before she really knew what was happening, Allison had pushed her hard, and Magpie went to her knees on the top of the hill in Near, the glaring sun beating down on her as she watched Allison march decisively into Brandon’s nighttime bedroom, not looking back once as she slammed the door closed behind her, shutting out the hillside, shutting out the sunlight, shutting out Magpie, as she had done almost seven months ago when she’d taken Brandon Phipp’s side and never spoken another word to Magpie again.
Magpie stayed on her knees. She let herself sink back onto her shins. She let the sun warm her face; she let the sound of the ocean drown out every other noise.
And then she took a deep breath, and she pulled herself to her feet.
What are you doing? I thought this was supposed to be the end of it.
But Magpie couldn’t concentrate. She still heard her blood rushing around in her ears; her skin felt hot and sticky; she was filled with an anger that thrummed and pulsed through her, that showed no signs of slowing down, that needed to be let out.
And so she let it run free.
She let her anger take control.
And she took out her pen.
And she drew another door.
Magpie hadn’t been sure that this would work because she had never actually been in this room before, but she knew as soon as she stepped through the door that she had succeeded. Here was the little minifridge in the corner. Here was the skinny twin bed. Here was the desk; here was the bureau. Everything generic and identical in its simplicity.
The yoga mat rolled up neatly in one corner.
A folded pair of exercise pants on the bed.
A poster on the wall showing a woman standing ankle-deep in the ocean. Flowery script above her read: You only have yourself! See it! Do it! Be it!
A khaki book bag leaning against a nightstand.
The cinder-block walls that every dorm room in America had in common.
Eryn wasn’t home.
Magpie forced herself to be still. She located the anger flowing through her body and concentrated on calming it, focusing it, pinpointing it to a singular purpose.
She looked around the place that her sister had left home for.
There was not so much as a photograph of anyone in the Lewis family. No, here was Eryn and a group of girls in yoga wear. Here was Eryn with a guy who might have been her boyfriend, their arms around each other, caught midlaugh, his face angled toward hers like he might have just kissed her or perhaps was going to kiss her now. Here was Eryn in a complicated yoga pose, her legs folded in a way that looked almost painful, only one hand making contact with the ground. Her eyes were closed and her face looked utterly serene, as if the movement were effortless, natural, comfortable.
She picked up this last one, carefully undoing the back of the simple metal frame that held it, and she pulled out the photograph as if she were an archaeologist excavating something fragile and old.
There were two pictures of Eryn behind the first, both showing her in similar poses, with similar expressions of serenity on her face.
Magpie ripped them all carefully in half.
Then she turned her attention to the rest of the room.
And began, methodically, to destroy it.
In a little basket on top of the fridge, Magpie found a sharp kitchen knife, and she used this to slash Eryn’s bedsheets and comforter and curtains, long deep slashes that sent feathers billowing up into the air when she reached the pillows. Next, she smashed the rest of the picture frames and tore all the photos inside to bits. She felt a particular sense of satisfaction when she ripped the poster off the wall—what the fuck did that even mean? See it! Do it! Be it! It was just like Eryn to put so much stock into inspirational messages that, when you actually thought about them, didn’t make any sense at all.
With the knife, Magpie cut all of Eryn’s clothes into ribbons, emptying the bureau and the small closet, making sure that nothing was left untouched. The sensible bras. The overpriced yoga pants. The shirts with words on them like breathe and be and love. Then she set her attention on Eryn’s desk, shredding papers and upturning drawers, and finally, using a hammer she’d found in a small toolkit kept underneath her sister’s bed, she ruined the laptop, beating it to smithereens, a million pieces of plastic and metal and wire. An unsalvageable mess.
She paused for a minute in the middle of it to look for Hither.
There it was, in one high corner of the room where wall met ceiling: a tiny little spider sitting on a tiny little web, watching her.
When she was done, she considered leaving a note.
But she decided to give her sister a little more credit than that.
She decided that if she really put her mind to it, Eryn could figure out exactly who had done this.
So she just made herself another door and left that mess behind her.
The next person she visited was home; Magpie could tell this instantly, in the way that you might feel your skin tingle if someone was watching you.
She was in the living room of a little house. A tiny blue love seat sat in the middle of the room facing a TV that was just a touch too big for the space. She could see the kitchen through an open doorway and a bathroom down a short hallway that ended with an open door.
That’s where he was—Gabriel Lewis—fast asleep.
Magpie’s father had always been one to go to sleep early. She’d often had to wake him up from the couch during the end credits to a movie he would inevitably remember nothing about. He was an early riser, always awake before anyone else in the house, always working on something for breakfast, sipping coffee out of a forest-green mug that said, in red letters, #1 Dad! A gift from Magpie and Eryn on some Father’s Day past.
How inaccurate that mug had turned out to be; it was almost laughable. In fact, Magpie had to put a hand over her mouth now to drown out the rising giggle that was working its way up from her stomach.
She wondered if she could find a mug that said, #1 Fuckup! Or #1 Asshole! Or #1 Ruiner of Families!
Any of those sayings would have been more accurate than the one they had ended up choosing.
Well. You lived and you learned and you stopped buying cheap Hallmark mugs for people who didn’t deserve them.
Magpie made her way down the hallway.
She saw Hither near the ceiling, a spider again. Still watching her.
She wondered for a brief moment whether she would find her aunt asleep next to her father, the two of them cuddled against each other in some affectionate, unconscious embrace.
She wondered if that would make things easier or harder for her.
If they had ended up together, did that change anything? Did that take away some of the insult of Magpie’s walking in on them midcoitus; did that lessen some of the scarring she had inevitably suffered from seeing her father and aunt so exposed, so bare?
If it had been—as they say—true love?
Did that change anything at all?
Magpie didn’t think so, but she was a little bit relieved when she pushed op
en the bedroom door and saw her father asleep alone, one leg sticking out from underneath the comforter. He snored quietly, the sound like a cat’s purr.
She let herself watch him for one second, then she turned on the light.
He stirred instantly, putting his hand over his eyes, then rubbing them, then looking up, confused, blinking, adjusting to the sudden brightness.
“Magpie? Sweetheart? Is that you?”
Magpie made herself smile. “Dad. I have something so cool to show you. You’re really going to love it.”
She considered it.
Bringing Ann Marie into Near.
And she might have if Ann Marie had been home.
But the house was empty when Magpie finished with her father, and Magpie felt calmer now; the anger inside her body was subsiding moment by moment.
She couldn’t find any left to direct toward her mother.
She even touched a hand to her own cheek to see if any sting remained from where Ann Marie had slapped her.
But that was gone, too.
She thought about leaving a note.
But what would it say?
You were kind of a shitty mom.
I’m in a better place now.
Everything she wrote felt too much like something a suicide note might say.
But this wasn’t a suicide. This was almost the exact opposite. This was a whole new life.
So Magpie didn’t leave a note.
Instead, she stood in the doorway of her mother’s bedroom and tried to remember something nice. A happier time. A sober Ann Marie.
And she came up with this:
Eryn and Magpie. Magpie maybe four. Eryn ten. Laughing and giggling and still friends. Sneaking into their parents’ bedroom on Christmas morning. The house smelling like pine needles and mulled spices. Crawling underneath the covers. Tangling up their limbs in the limbs of their parents. Softness and warmth. Someone kissing Magpie on the head. Someone calling her sweetheart. The blankets over her head making her feel as if she were underwater.
And then a summer night. Magpie five or six, Eryn eleven or twelve. Gabriel cannonballing into the pool. Ann Marie sunning on the swim platform. Magpie holding the pool’s ladder to keep herself on the bottom. Eryn swimming underwater. Both their eyes open, meeting each other through the sting of chlorine, the burn of lungs needing oxygen.
It wasn’t always terrible in that house.
If she tried, she could remember that.
But that happiness was faded, too. Just like the anger.
There was an emptiness that had taken its place.
She preferred the emptiness.
It felt homey, comfortable.
She changed into her bathing suit.
Magpie loved to swim in the moonlight.
Her skin looked silver when she held her hands underneath the water, and there was a gentle rippling quality to the light that made her look like something from the sea, a creature bred in the very depths of the ocean, just a visitor on land.
The pizza pool float knocked into the sides of the pool and floated back to her, then bounced gently off an arm or leg and continued its cycle.
Magpie floated on her back and looked up at the sky. If she cupped her hands on either side of her face, she saw nothing but the ring of treetops that surrounded their small property on Pine Street, the bright orb of the almost-full moon, the brilliant dots of light of thousands and thousands of stars. There were more stars in the night sky than you could even see. There were more stars in the universe than you could even comprehend. Magpie knew this, and it made her feel overwhelmed and happy and humbled and scared all at the same exact time.
She had been back in Farther for an hour or so.
Her father hadn’t screamed when her Near-mother had stood in front of him and unhinged her jaw.
There had been a look in his eyes almost like…
Well. Almost like he knew he deserved it.
It had been such a long day.
Magpie’s body ached with the effort of jumping from one world to another; her head pounded even as she soaked it in the cool water, even as she closed her eyes and pinched the spot on her hand between her thumb and index fingers that Eryn had once told her was a pressure point.
There hadn’t been as much blood with her father.
Just one neat swallow, and it was over.
She had stayed to watch her Near-mother retreat slowly back down the hill.
“When will you come back to stay?” she had asked, and Magpie had smiled, and said, “Soon. I think I’m all done now.”
But in this world, in Farther, her favorite thing had been to stay in the pool until her fingers were wrinkled, until her ears sloshed with water, until her eyes turned red from the chlorine, so that’s what she chose to do, to let herself have just one more night in the empty, clear water.
The smell of chlorine.
It comforted her.
And so did the little patch of red on lime-green grass, and so did the sound Eryn’s comforter had made as Magpie sliced through it with a kitchen knife, and so did the look on her father’s face.
And so did being alone.
And so did the star-crowded sky above her, twinkling and glittering as if it were filled with diamonds instead of balls of luminous gas.
And so did the feeling of being weightless, of being supported by water, of being buoyant enough to float.
Are you finished now?
Magpie hadn’t even noticed Hither, but there it was, resting atop the pizza float, a small catlike animal with claws that dipped so low that they skimmed the top of the water.
“It’s nice to see you as something other than an insect.”
It’s good to be a quiet thing. You can sit and watch and not be bothered.
“Why don’t you go ahead and keep sitting and watching? I’m not in the mood for any more lectures.”
So far you haven’t taken a single piece of advice I’ve given you. What makes you think I’ve come to try again?
“So why are you here, then?”
I am always here, whether or not you are aware of me.
“Well, fine. Just don’t bother me. I was enjoying being alone.”
We are never truly alone; we always have ourselves beside us.
Magpie snorted. “This is why I can’t stand you. Nobody talks like that.”
Ah, but you talk like that, it said, and then it was quiet, and when Magpie next looked, it had turned into something like a small child, face pointed upward, staring at the stars.
And because nothing good or peaceful lasts forever, Magpie became aware of voices.
A pair of them, their familiar cadences rising and falling and slipping around the house so Magpie knew who they were before she could see them, before they emerged into the moonlit backyard and paused, seeing her. One of them burst into laughter.
“See? I told you she was fine,” Clare said, and before Ben could reply, she was stripping off her dress and climbing the pool ladder, then cannonballing into the pool with such a splash that even Ben, still three or four feet away, got wet.
“Clare, what the hell?” he said, wiping his hands on his shorts.
“Come in, grumpy! The water’s fine!” Clare called back.
She was drunk. Magpie could smell it coming off her in waves even before Clare waded through the water to reach her, throwing her arms around Magpie’s neck as if she hadn’t seen her in weeks.
“Why did you leeeee-ave?” Clare whined. Magpie did her best to escape her death grip without seeming rude.
“That party was a drag,” Magpie said. “Sorry.”
“I agree,” Ben added. He’d reached the side of the pool, and he leaned over the edge and let his hands float on the surface of the water.
Magpie took a step or two closer to him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m sorry about the movie. I just had to get out of there.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, Mags. I get it.”
“Some othe
r time,” she said, and he seemed to brighten a little.
“Magpie, is your mom home?” Clare asked. “I have to pee. Should I just pee outside?”
“She’s not home,” Magpie said. “You can go inside. The door’s unlocked.”
“Oh, good. Whenever I try to go outside, I end up peeing all over myself.”
“It’s true,” Ben said, when Clare had pulled herself out of the pool and was stumbling toward the house. “I’ve seen it happen.”
“Shut up!” Clare shouted, then pulled the door shut behind her with a slam.
A moment of awkwardness as Magpie and Ben found themselves suddenly alone.
“So. How was the rest of the party?” Magpie asked.
“You didn’t miss much. Allison Lefferts shut the whole thing down, like, fifteen minutes after we got there.”
“Did she?” Magpie asked. She tried to make her face look surprised.
“Sorry. I know she’s not your favorite person in the world.”
“Not by a long shot, but don’t worry, the sound of her name doesn’t make me feel like spontaneously splashing anyone.”
“Ha! Okay, well, I guess that’s good for me. But yeah. It was really weird. She was acting like… totally bizarre. Like, just running around, turning on all the lights, cutting the sound system. When a few of Brandon’s friends tried to talk to her, she just lost it. Went ballistic. I mean, she was throwing shit, screaming… She took one of their phones and called the cops. People started scrambling after that; I mean, you know it takes a week just to reach the street from Brandon’s house. But I swear I heard her say on the phone that…”
“What?” Magpie prompted, when a few seconds had gone by and Ben hadn’t finished his sentence.
“It’s probably nothing. It was loud and sort of chaotic at that point, so I’m probably wrong… I just could have sworn I heard her tell them he was dead. Brandon was dead. That’s what she said into the phone to the cops. That he was dead.”