Where the Staircase Ends

by Stacy A. Stokes

  Sunny paused for a moment, her fingers uncurling from her overnight bag as my mother’s words registered. It was the beginning of summer, and Sunny practically lived at our house when school was out. A break from me meant that Sunny would have to spend the next few weeks in her house alone, or nearly alone for all the attention her father paid her. She never said it, but I knew my company was a reprieve from the hulking silence that roamed the hallways of her home. And while she had other friends who could fill the space, I was the only one who understood why she so desperately craved the company of others. I was the only one who knew to invite her over for dinner so she wouldn’t have to eat another microwave meal alone at the kitchen table.

  “Sunny—” I started, but she cut me off with a shake of her head and a weak smile.

  “Sorry I got you in trouble,” she said meaningfully, meeting my eyes in a look that said it’s okay.

  “Come on, Sunny. Time to go.” My mother tightened the belt on her robe and motioned for Sunny to follow. “Taylor, we’ll talk when I get home.”

  When she came back, she told me she was proud of me for standing up to my friend. Her words were a knife, but I smiled like I was pleased. Sunny and I weren’t allowed to see each other for a month.

  * * *

  The silk-pajamaed Sunny from seventh grade closed her fingers around the cigarette she held, leveling me with a knowing gaze. I felt the intensity of the other hundred Sunnys boring into me, like they were waiting for me to do something, begging for me to do something. It pissed me off, because I didn’t owe them anything. I already thanked Sunny years ago for taking the fall. What more did they want from me?

  “Go away,” I said to them. Then louder: “Go away, go away, go away!”

  Another Sunny stepped forward from the crowd, this one so recent I was surprised sparks didn’t fly out of my eyes when I saw her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to me, her eyes round and pleading.

  I laughed despite my anger because the idea was so ridiculous. I didn’t want to forgive her for what she’d done. When it came to Sunny, my grudge was water in a desert.

  I crouched down into a ball so I didn’t have to look at the Sunny from last week, or any of the Sunnys crowding the horrible stairs.

  “Leave me alone,” I shouted into the folds of my arms, so angry I could spit fire. I didn’t want to feel pity, I didn’t want to feel regret, I didn’t want to feel anything for Sunny other than the anger I’d felt towards her all week. If anything, I wanted to forget.

  Fury boiled inside of me as I felt the weight of a hundred sets of her eyes on my skin. It was horrible. Being dead was horrible and everything about this place was horrible.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier it made me. I was a kid. When kids died it was supposed to be a tragedy, but there I was without anyone to tell me what the hell was going on. There was nothing for me except the hideous ghosts, and I was tired of being haunted. What kind of horseshit place was I trapped in? Were the stairs trying to make me go crazy?

  I looked up from where I crouched and tipped my head back as far as it would go, trying hard to fight off the tears of frustration that welled in my eyes. It wasn’t fair.

  “It’s not fair!” I shouted at the sky, because saying it out loud made me feel a little better. “If you can hear me God, this isn’t fair! It isn’t fair to kill me and then leave me here like this! It isn’t fair to surround me with her, after everything that happened. You could at least give me something to look at besides this boring blue sky and this stupid staircase and her stupid, stupid face!”

  The tears were falling hard and fast, like someone flipped a switch inside of me. I fell forward onto the steps, wanting to sit down but not able to move any part of my body backward, so instead I had to do this awkward kneeling thing, and that pissed me off even more.

  “It’s not fair,” I said again, this time in a whisper because screaming didn’t seem to do any good.

  My head was in my hands as I sobbed uncontrollably, and the harder I cried the worse it made me feel, which only made me cry harder. I was feeling about as sorry as a person could feel for herself when something cold hit my shoulder, then my head, then my shoulder again. I looked up at the sky to see what was happening, and it was the craziest thing. Maybe the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

  It was snowing.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, nothing to explain where it came from, but huge white snowflakes—the kind you see drawn on a Christmas card—drifted down from the empty blue sky. Thousands of them, maybe even millions of them, made their way toward the place where I knelt, each one different than the last and each one a perfectly formed piece of lace. It was as if someone had taken the time to cut them out and send them down to me. I held my hand out and caught one. It sat there for a few moments, glittering star-like in the afternoon light before melting against my skin. The cold moisture was soft and comforting, a welcome change from the temperate afternoon. It was so beautiful that I forgot how angry I was and forgot that only a minute before I had been crying and screaming at the sky.

  I had no idea what it meant, or why in the world snow would be falling out here in the middle of nowhere. But one thing was clear: someone was listening to me after all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE FIELDS

  I was never in love with Logan, but I wanted to be. I at least wanted to know what it was like to love someone who saw me the way Logan did, so I tried hard to see the best in him.

  He had this floppy hair that fell in his eyes, and there was something sweet about the way he had to tip his head back to look at me through the mop. My mom used to say he was a “total Beatle,” which was stupid because the Beatles were like a billion years old. Plus it grossed me out because she was trying to tell me she thought he was cute. Who wanted their mom to think their boyfriend was cute? But he was cute in this boyish way, as if his face tried to hold on to its innocence even though the rest of him was grown up.

  He was also an incredible artist. He could draw pretty much anything he saw, even me. That was how he finally won me over. He drew this amazing pencil sketch in Spanish class with the words “WANT TO GRAB A BITE SOMETIME?” scrawled on the bottom of the page in his scratchy all-caps handwriting. I remember looking at the picture and thinking, is that me? Because the way he drew it made me look like so much more than I really was. In it, my chin rested on my hand and my head leaned to the side in this thoughtful way, making my neck look long and graceful and my ponytail smooth and polished. My lips were pressed together in a smile, like I was holding in a secret, and there was something about the way he drew my eyes that made them look both pensive and alluring all at the same time.

  The girl in the drawing wasn’t me, but she was the girl I wanted to be—the kind of girl whose mother never needed to nitpick her flaws because she didn’t have any. I knew I didn’t look that way to the rest of the world, but the fact that he saw me that way made me feel pretty amazing. I still had the picture taped up to my bedroom mirror, and every now and then I used to try resting my chin on my hand and tipping my head in the same way to capture the pose, but I could never quite recreate it.

  He liked to leave drawings of flowers in my locker: tulips, orchids, hydrangeas, roses, calla lilies, daisies, a whole botany exposition sketched out in perfect detail just for me. Sunny used to say they were cheap imitations, and I shouldn’t trust a guy who tried to pawn off drawings in place of the real things, but I preferred the drawings. Real flowers died, but I had a whole bouquet living inside my locker because of Logan.

  His jealousy could be irritating—sometimes all it took was some guy looking at me one millisecond longer than Logan thought was necessary and he’d fly off the handle. But I secretly liked the way he would sling his arm protectively over my shoulder, and the way he’d glare defiantly at people, daring them to take him on. It felt good to be wanted; it was nice to have someone who cared enough to fight for me.

  But there were things I
didn’t like about him no matter how hard I tried. And man, did I try. Sometimes it took all my patience to put up with him. Like the way he openly farted around me instead of blaming it on a squeaky shoe or the dog. Or the fact that he laughed like someone squeezed him, making noises that sounded more like honk, honk, honk rather than ha, ha, ha. And there was the way he kissed. His lips were always too wet and his tongue a little too forceful, like he was only doing it because he had to in order to get to the other stuff.

  Then there was the time in his car, when I told him to stop but he didn’t want to.

  His hands were rough and wrong, and when I pushed him away he only pressed me more firmly against the reclined seat, digging my thigh into the seatbelt clasp hard enough to bruise it. I squirmed underneath his hot breath as his lips worked their way up and down my neck and his hands fiddled with my bra clasp.

  “Come on, Taylor,” he crooned as I tried to wedge myself out from underneath him. “I thought you said you wanted to do this? Just relax.”

  I had said I wanted to do it. For a moment I thought I wanted to get the whole first time thing out of the way. Sunny said it wasn’t that great; it was better to tick the task off my to-do list than let the anticipation build, only to be let down in the end.

  Then I saw the green tree-shaped car freshener dangling from his rearview mirror, the edges brown from cigarette smoke and the pine fragrance long since evaporated from the cardboard. I watched it twist and spin against the air conditioner’s force, waving back at me from its noose.

  Not like this.

  “Stop,” I told him. “Logan, stop.”

  He ran his hands up and down my body, inching my skirt higher and higher until it wrapped around my waist, the fabric twisting and bunching against my skin. The air conditioner blasted against my bare thighs, and I broke out in goose pimples. Despite the cold, the back of my legs were sweating and sticking to the faux leather seats. Logan shifted his weight so he could pull down my underwear, his grip on me loosening enough so I could wriggle an arm free. He was too distracted to notice, a soft groan escaping his lips as he worked to undo his jeans. He ignored the “stops” still spilling from my mouth, and right before he pressed himself against me, I wheeled my hand back and slapped him. The first time I only managed to tap the side of his head, but the second time I put my rage behind the swing, striking him sharply across the side of his face.

  “God damn it, Taylor!” He climbed off me and into the driver’s seat. He touched his cheek and drew his hand back, like he expected to find blood. “Damn it,” he added more quietly.

  I watched his fingers grip and un-grip the vinyl steering wheel, each hand placed perfectly at ten and two as he looked at the wide expanse of trees at the edge of the field we had parked beside, his breath ragged and angry. My palm stung from the second slap, the skin tingling like I’d dragged it back and forth across a layer of tacks. I rolled my skirt back over my bare legs and sat quietly against the tilted seat. My hands were shaking too badly to reach for the lever and pull it upright.

  “I’m sorry,” Logan said after a while, his face turned away from mine. It was dark in the car, but I could make out a red handprint on his right cheek and an angry scratch running across the length of his jaw. “You just make me so crazy.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. When he looked back at me, moisture pooled in his eyes, and some of my anger melted away. He looked sorry, and I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe he hadn’t meant for things to go so far, even though my mascara had run down my face and my throat was raw from yelling stop, stop, stop.

  The next day I found a real flower taped to my locker instead of the usual drawings—a single, perfect red rose. Inside of my locker there was another one of Logan’s pictures, this one of a giant heart with my name inside it, each letter a different color of the rainbow. The words “please forgive me, please forgive me, please forgive me” were scrawled in teeny, tiny perfect cursive over and over again around the outer edge of the heart, so small I had to squint to read them. It must have taken him hours, and I found myself smiling even though I was still angry about what happened.

  Some days it took all my energy not to pick up the phone and dump Logan, and other days, like the ones when I found the drawings in my locker or the cute little text messages (“I <3 U”) on my phone, I thought I was pretty lucky in the grand scheme of things. It was nice to be wanted, nice to have someone who texted and wanted to spend time with me. And in those moments when I did think about ending things with him, I thought of the picture he drew of me, of the flawless, beautiful girl with the pensive eyes. What if Logan was the only person who would ever see me that way?

  On the night of The Fields, Logan was in rare form. When I checked my phone there were six missed calls and seven text messages from him, all some variation of “Where r u?” and “WTF?” and “Tell Justin hi for me.” Like he was my parole officer and I was supposed to check in with him every five minutes. It wasn’t my fault he decided to show up to The Fields on time. Who did that?

  We arrived later than I told him we would, but that’s to be expected when you’re with Sunny. We had to park far down the road because all the good spots were taken, then cut across the freshly sodded grass to get to the party. It took an annoyingly long time because Sunny decided to wear four-inch stilettos that kept getting stuck in the grass. It required two of us to pull them free, and they made this awful suck-pop sound every time we yanked one loose from the wet ground.

  “Can’t you just take them off?” I asked her, trying to hide my irritation. She gave me one of her WTF looks and released another heel with a suck-pop and an eye roll.

  “No, I can’t ‘just take them off.’ It’s part of the look, and I don’t want to get my feet dirty. If you’re in such a hurry to get to the party, then by all means, go right ahead.” She waved her hand in front of her like she was dismissing me, and I pressed my lips together to keep from saying the thing I really wanted to say. Instead I meditated on my vow for the night: be cool, relax.

  Greg Younger’s truck was parked in the center of the main field, the doors open and the bass pumping loudly from inside the cabin. It sounded like one of the speakers was blown, so the music that poured out was a bass-y thump, thump, thump, with the occasional inaudible word that sounded a lot like sex, or slut, or some combination of the two. A group of girls had assembled a makeshift dance floor near one of the open doors, all of them giggling and bouncing to the rattling music. Tracey Allen hovered on the edge of the group, shaking in a too-tight black-skirt-and-top combination, and shimmying her shoulders at one of the girls in the crowd. I wondered if she was still dating pervy Mr. Thomas. It always amazed me how Tracey handled her reputation, wearing the gossip like a crown rather than drowning in the shame of it. It was almost as if she wanted us to keep talking about her.

  “Isn’t it a little early for the skank patrol to be out?” Sunny asked as we passed the group, raising her voice to make sure they heard her over the thump, thump, sex, slut chorus.

  Tracey scowled in response but kept dancing, mumbling something that sounded an awful lot like “stupid bitches” in our direction.

  We headed out of the glare of the headlights to the crowd gathered around the keg, grabbing plastic cups from the stack on the ground and standing in line to get a beer even though we’d brought our container of vodka and OJ. No point in wasting perfectly good free beer.

  Logan stood near the keg glaring at me the way my parents did when I missed curfew. His eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles twitched, reminding me of the Logan from the previous year—the one who loved a good fight. Sunny saw him and muttered an “uh-oh” to the other girls, motioning for them to steer clear of the drama that was clearly about to explode all over my night. They all mumbled some lame excuse about hitting The Ladies’ Room even though it was obvious they weren’t going there. The toilet paper was tucked safely in my purse, and Sunny would never dream of hitting up The
Ladies’ Room without it.

  I watched with growing apprehension as they teetered on their heels toward the group that usually hung out by the water tower after school, assuming Justin was somewhere in the mass of bodies clustering under the cloud of smoke. That meant Sunny would get to him first, and even though I told myself to stop obsessing and be cool about everything, it made me crazy to think he would see her in that dress before I even had the chance to say hello. Score one point for team Sunny.

  Logan grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the keg. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out he was pissed as a bee in a jar, so it was no surprise when whispers and curious stares followed us as we melted into the shadows of The Fields. He didn’t stop dragging me until we were behind the wooden frame of a partially finished house, out of earshot.

  “What the hell, Taylor?”

  I noticed for the first time he held a beer, the foamy surface sloshing over the top of the plastic cup when he moved. Logan wasn’t a big drinker, which was part of the reason he hated going to The Fields. That, and what happened to his brother last year. No one pressed Logan to drink, or argued with him when he tried to take their car keys away or lectured them on the dangers of drinking and driving. We kind of expected him to go all After School Special on us about drinking, so it was weird watching him take a big swallow from his cup and stagger slightly when he looked at me, his gaze unsteady. It made me nervous.

  I smiled really big at him, trying to look like I was glad to see him so he wouldn’t know I was scared.

  “Well, hello to you too,” I said, reaching my hand out to touch him. He swatted me away and gave my shoulder a shove. Not hard enough to knock me over, but hard enough that I staggered backward and spilled beer down the front of my shirt.

  “What is your problem?” I asked, recovering and stepping backward so I was leaning against one of the raw pieces of skeletal wood framing the unfinished house. I wished it wasn’t there so I could put more distance between us. I didn’t like the angry look in Logan’s eyes.