*
And school started again. Without her it was lonely and also kind of better. I got to like what I liked about it, without distraction. I paid attention in class. I raised my hand. In English, when I started to talk, the kids in the back audibly groaned. I didn’t skip—though I still crept out during breaks to smoke with Greg and Tidbit in the doghouses, in the copse of carved trees behind the football field. I was just a junior, but because of Concord, probably, I’d started to receive college brochures. Mostly for Michigan schools, little liberal arts places. I requested info from a handful of places in the New York area. I thought I might apply to one of the cheaper ones—Hunter, it was called. Marlena and I spread all the materials out all over my bedroom floor.
“At NYU you can major in evil,” she said. “What a waste of money. Everyone gets a major in evil just by being alive. At least a minor.” She loved looking at the college pamphlets. She spent hours with my highlighter, marking stuff like the percentage of students who go on to master’s programs, whether or not the university offered a cappella groups and chamber choirs, literary journals and a campus newspaper. She was doing the research for both of us.
“Honestly, Mar, I really don’t care,” I told her one night, as she blabbed on about kitchenettes in city dorms. It was true. Nothing about college mattered to me except the address.
*
September, the air sugary from the maple leaves just about to turn, warm enough still that at Bayview, the fancy restaurant downtown, they let us sit on the balcony. Marlena stood her leather-bound menu up on the table and read from it hands-free, trying to act like knowing French meant she understood all the nuances of the way the dishes were prepared. Marlena had some extra money from work, and she wanted to go out to eat at a real restaurant, not a fast-food place. We ate escargots without flinching and watched the sun set over the lighthouse and drank sparkling water and the bread came with oil to dip it into instead of butter, and it was the first of a million more dinners like that.
*
Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine. It’s between me and her, what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. Divide it further—between what I mean and what I say, who I am and who I appear to be, who she said she was and acted like she was and also, of course, who she really was, in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness, all her secrets. Imagine each of these perspectives like circles in a Venn diagram, a tiny period in the middle, the darkest spot on the chart. Maybe that is the truth. But my version of the story is all we fucking get.
*
For her eighteenth birthday, I had to give her something unexpected. Something thoughtful; something she wasn’t aware she wanted. It had to cost almost nothing, because I didn’t have any money to spend. I wanted my gift to illustrate to everyone, to her, how much better I knew her than anyone else. The pin came to mind out of nowhere, the last few minutes of trig, me dozing at my desk in the overbright room. That evening, I dug Marlena’s pin out of its hiding place in my old sweater pocket, pleased by my cleverness, and the next day I took it down to the watch repair place during lunch. They fixed it in two seconds flat, for free.
She spent September 27, the day she turned eighteen, less than two months before her death, with Sal at his foster home. I pushed, but she wouldn’t let me go with her. Privately, Candice told me that Sal’s new foster mom had experience with special needs children and that she was nice, not one of those people who took in foster kids for the checks they came with. After Marlena died I visited Sal a handful of times. The home seemed like an okay place, a dirty two-story on the grimier side of downtown, too many kids, shoes piled up near the back door, sticky old toys overflowing from bins in every corner, but there were always cookies or brownies on the counter, laughter coming from the rooms upstairs.
Sals so mad at me, Marlena texted, in the middle of choir. he wont look at me & he keeps acting like he doesnt know who you are!
give him a minute, M
.… poopooppooooopp
it’s your birthday!!!! be happy!!!! you’re a legal adult!! you can buy me cigarettes!!!
im TRYING
i know <3
Jimmy and I had made her a cake over the weekend, while she was working an extra shift. We poured Betty Crocker yellow cake mix into a bowl that wasn’t quite big enough. Powder splatted out all over the counter when we added sprinkles by the fistful. The sprinkles were Bridge Card eligible, and the frosting too.
“Are you sure that’s how you make it confetti,” he said. Having Marlena around had made him handsomer, somehow. He looked less angry all the time. That, and she’d cut his hair, snipped it into little blond layers. I suspected that he was in love. He’d put off college for another year, and I knew that meant he was probably never going to go, that Marlena was a good enough reason for him to stay.
“Why not? It looks right, doesn’t it?”
The cake came out of the oven with the sprinkles all sunk to the bottom.
“I can never decide if your weird on-and-off confidence about random shit is going to take you very far, Cath, or totally fuck you over.”
“Well, thanks, I guess.”
“I’ve got my money on far. You’re our last bright hope for the future.”
“You can still go. You could start in the spring. It’s not too late. I bet you could still get your scholarship, even.”
“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to anymore.”
“How? How could you just not want to? I don’t understand it.”
“Just don’t.”
He cut a little segment of the cake out of the pan and split it in two, handing me half. The cake was hot and the sprinkles at the bottom created a kind of extra-sweet crust. We smeared a can and a half of chocolate frosting on top, using it to plug the hole where he’d taken out our taste.
“Are you guys going to become like, official?” I asked, while he spelled out a message to her in blue sugar gel. His arm twitched, squiggling the curves of the B.
“So nosy. How would I know? But, I guess, I hope.” His skin flushed. “When she’s ready. When her life gets a little more back to normal. If she wants. Oh, Christ. Don’t repeat that.”
“Well, have you asked her?”
“Yes. I have.”
“And she just keeps saying no?”
“For now,” he said.
*
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR FAVORITE ONE” is what he wrote across the surface of the long, flat sheet cake, a message so long it covered the frosting like a filled-up page. The B’s loops were deformed. We didn’t know how else to say what we meant.