I still haven’t committed to Rhodes when my diminished family goes skiing for Thanksgiving, unable to face our first holiday at home. Dad accidentally told the hotel clerk there’s four of us. He calls the front desk to remove the extra rollaway from our room, and we watch it go like a hearse wheeling into the hall.
When we get back to town, Dad wipes Andrew’s laptop clean and sells it, then finds a buyer for his car. It’s a compromise: Dad thinks it’s best to move forward, while Mom clings to every single scrap of the past she can. So the bedroom stays, but the car goes, and I watch from my window as Dad shakes the new owner’s hand. I hope she gets to drive it more than Andrew did.
*
When Dr. Shin asks me in late November how things are going with Raychel, I don’t know what to say. “She still works for my dad,” I start.
“How do you feel about that?”
I shrug. “He’s pretty careful not to mention her, so I guess it doesn’t affect me.”
“Does it bother you that he still pays attention to her?”
“What?” I almost laugh. “No. God, somebody has to.”
“Does it bother you not to be that person?”
“No.” I cross my arms, then uncross them. “Yeah. Of course. But I get it’s not healthy or whatever.” Amateur self-analysis has turned out to be that new hobby Mindy suggested I find.
Dr. Shin smiles. She has very straight, shiny teeth. “How are you feeling otherwise?”
“Like crap,” I say, running a hand through my hair. “Like something’s sitting on my chest.” Andrew used to do that plenty, once he got bigger than me.
“That’s normal,” she says, and it takes all my willpower not to say “Duh.” “Tell me, do you feel like the depression is unmanageable?”
“Like what? Like, am I going to throw myself off a cliff?”
She doesn’t think that’s funny.
“I feel … low,” I say, looking away. “Like, literally low. Flat. It’s not … sad, exactly. I mean, sad too, obviously. But that’s a different feeling, I guess.”
She nods. “There’s a reason it’s called ‘depression’ and not ‘chronic sadness’ or ‘manic sorrow.’” She picks up a foam stress ball and squeezes it, leaving imprints of her fingers. “Depressions like these are holes left behind by a physical force. With mental depression, the force can be chemical or situational or both, but it doesn’t just make a hole—it presses you into one that feels impossible to escape.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to picture Andrew in his own hole in the ground. “It’s a lot like that.”
RAYCHEL
One step at a time. Wake up, school, work, study, bed. Start over again. Any deviation is a chance to get knocked down, so I don’t go anywhere else if I can help it. Mom and Eddie and I went out for Mexican food on Thanksgiving, and she’s made me come to the grocery store once or twice. Keri’s invited me to a few movies and football games, but she always accepts my excuses or ends up coming here.
Asha, on the other hand, is very persistent about trying to make me leave the house. She calls again as I’m walking home from work one Friday early in December. “Rayyyyych,” she sings.
“No,” I say immediately. This is her new thing. Just like everyone else, she’s decided I need to move on—no more babying Raychel. Back on the horse. “Cowboy up.” She seriously said that.
“There’s a fiesta this weekend and you are my date,” she informs me. She and Spencer still haven’t gotten back together. I thought for sure they would, but now I don’t know. I’m not the best judge of relationships, as it turns out.
“Don’t you have to study for finals?”
She huffs. “Yes, but Dead Day is Monday, so tomorrow we’re going out.”
When I was younger, I always thought Dead Day was a big concert. Finding out it’s just a day with no classes was disappointing. “You’re going out.”
She makes a buzzer noise. “I’m going out, and you’re coming with me.”
I hold the phone with my shoulder as I open the door. “What are the chances I can talk you into a movie or something instead?”
“Negative one zillion. Get your ass over here by seven or I’m coming to get it for you.”
We hang up and I drop my stuff next to Mom, who’s folding laundry. “That stack is yours,” she says. “I still need to sort socks.”
“You want help?”
She shakes her head. “Almost done. Go do your homework.”
It’s really weird, Mom suddenly caring about things like homework. “Asha wants me to go out with her tomorrow,” I say, hoping she’ll suddenly care about curfews too, but she smiles.
“I think that’d be good for you. You barely leave the house.”
I don’t bother to argue. She’s right about the second part, anyway. Some of our friends came home again for the Thanksgiving break, but hanging out with them was awkward. Not because of Matt, who was out of town, but because their being more his friends than mine was too obvious. The boys didn’t come out and say it, but if forced, they’d take his side.
The girls are still friendly, except Eliza, but we never really had that much in common. We were mostly friends by proximity, thrown together by our connections to boys we knew. Just a group of girls occupying a weird space in the middle.
Spaces in the margins, I think, remembering a line from early in The Handmaid’s Tale. “We lived in the gap between words,” or something like that.
Now I live in the gap between my old life and my new one. Asha has a place in it, but I don’t know where everyone else will fit.
The doorbell rings, and I hear Mom greeting Eddie. He has a spot in this new life of mine. First he was invisible; now he basically lives here. I try to show that I don’t mind by being extra friendly, laughing at his jokes, that kind of thing. I’m about to come say hello when Mom brings the sock basket to my room. She sets it on my dresser and I’m about to thank her when she gasps. “What is this?”
My head jerks up. She’s holding the baggie with Andrew’s pipe. “It’s not mine,” I say reflexively.
“Really?” She throws the socks down. “You just keep drug paraphernalia around for fun?”
“No!” I say, trying to take the pipe from her. I was in a hurry this morning and left my jewelry box open, like a genius. “It’s all … it’s all I have,” I say out loud.
“You think it makes a difference whether you have one pipe or several?”
“No!” I say again, desperately. I’m petrified she’s going to break it. “I mean that’s not what it’s for, it’s—”
“I work in a college dormitory, Raychel!” she shouts. “I know what it’s for!”
“No!” I yell back. “I mean it was Andrew’s!”
That shuts her up for a moment, but she’s still livid. “I don’t care why you have this or where it came from,” she says, her nostrils flaring, “but you cannot expect to live in my house—”
“I gave it to her.”