“Like I said. Get up.” She set her mug down on a stack of books and started fussing around in my closet.
“We already talked about this.” I got out of bed, which basically just meant standing up—my mattress was still on the floor—and removed her coffee cup from the book, where it’d left a ring. “I told you not to put cups here.”
She stepped into a shift dress of my mom’s that I’d worn to Admitted Students Day at Concord a trillion years before. There was already a pile of my stuff pulled off the hanger and thrown onto the foot of my bed. “Can you zip?”
Up close, she was so thin that her spine was painful to look at, marbles against her skin. My bra, a red and lacy one I was too shy to wear, was clasped on the very tightest hooks—even so, I could have slid two fingers between her back and the band, no problem. “I thought you were going to wear black pants and that birthday shirt.”
We watched each other in the mirror, Marlena grabbing the loose fabric at her hips and frowning. “I think the dress looks more grown-up.”
“It doesn’t fit right.”
“I’ll wear a sweater. And thick tights. Don’t you think it’s better?”
“Frankly, I don’t think what you wear is going to make the difference, but the dress looks fine.”
I left for the bathroom, carrying my clothes with me. I still hated changing in front of her when I was sober. She would sit around in a T-shirt and underwear, but I always turned and faced the wall, unhooking my bra and pulling it out through a sleeve, so that my body was never fully uncovered, not even for a second. Even though she’d seen it all already, all those drunken nights. In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, droplets sliding down my neck, soaking my tank top. Mom and Marlena joked that when I finished with the bathroom, it was like an elephant had taken a sponge bath in the sink. Of course she hadn’t remembered about the test. In the scheme of things, it was very small, so much smaller than what was happening to her. She wasn’t the bad friend. I’d kept Ryder’s secret for him almost entirely out of selfishness. I didn’t want Marlena to put it all together, to realize that Ryder would never have gotten caught, would never have ratted out Marlena’s dad, if it weren’t for me, sitting there in the computer lab, trying so hard to be cool, encouraging Greg to post that dumb video on YouTube. I didn’t want her to know I’d lost my virginity to a boy that had belonged to her since she was a little kid, a boy, I was sure, who didn’t even much like me.
“Seriously, do I look okay?” she asked, when I reentered my room. She stood in front of my mirror, her face bare, her hair gathered into a low ponytail.
“You look great.”
“Yeah, but like, capable?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“I’m sorry. I love you.”
“I love you, too. It’s going to be fine.”
Unframed by eyeliner, her irises were somehow even more blue, dramatically so, a color so bright you could almost hear it. She wore the pin I’d given back to her, stuck through the fabric near the right side of her collar, just where she liked it. It looked ridiculous with the dress.
“Don’t wear that,” I said, touching the place on my shirt where the pin would be, if I were wearing it. Her reflection looked at mine.
“Why?”
“I know you’ve still got stuff. Pills. I know you still have some, and I just don’t think you should take any. I think you need to be sober for this.” An accident. A thought I barely knew I had. Would she really walk right into the courtroom with Oxy pinned to her shirt? I told myself she wouldn’t, but of course she would. The best place to hide something was in plain sight. That was why she’d started wearing the pin in the first place.
“You’re just going to start accusing me right now? Seven o’clock in the morning? Like I’m not taking this seriously? That is really lovely of you, Cat. Really supportive. Thanks a lot.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, not in real life, not in the mirror, and her voice had gotten sort of hysterical, so loud I thought she might wake Mom.
“No.”
“Then how could you, of all people, think I’d do something that stupid?”
“I didn’t. I don’t. It was a dumb thing to say.”
She sighed, yellow sparks in her eyes.
“I just can’t believe you’d stand there accusing me. You do this thing, where you just look at me like I’m a train wreck. It’s like a jinx, like you want me to fuck up.”
“Of course I don’t want you to. I get why you might feel like—”
“I get why you might feel like that,” she said back, in her I’m-Cat-the-baby voice. “You think you’re so smart, but there’s some stuff that’s out of your depth. You’re the best friend I ever had, so don’t get all hurt and big-eyed and take this the wrong way. But you don’t get it, and I’ve never expected you or anyone else to.”
I remember that what she said hurt me better than anything, especially since she was right.
*
All morning I felt horrible, except during English, where I spent the whole blessed fifty minutes thinking of nothing but Tess of the d’Urbervilles. As soon as class was over I texted Marlena, I’m sorry good luck, and then, when she didn’t answer, 2:30 right? I’ll try to cut trig I have really good tutor anyway. I left campus after lunch, traveling downtown via the long route through the woods, so I could smoke the cigarettes Marlena bought for me. She didn’t answer my texts until a little after three.
can you come i’m inside
The hearing lasted less than twenty minutes. I tried to get more details about what had happened in the courtroom, but all she said was that it was a joke. Two old men deemed Marlena an unfit caretaker for Sal. When she began to cry, one of them handed her a McDonald’s napkin, probably left over from his lunch, and another ushered her to the hallway where there was a bench for scenes like the one she was making. That’s where I found her, the napkin disintegrating in a fist, her eyes dry, cheeks splotched with red. In a few months, Sal would be moved to a new foster home in Charlevoix, a thirty-minute drive away. Marlena was eighteen—she was free to live where she pleased. She could do whatever she wanted, for all they cared.
Now it seems impossible that Candice could really have thought it would work. Maybe it was just a scheme to get Marlena sober, to give her a purpose, even temporarily, to replace the one that drove her. I thought of the gift Candice had given me and my mom, a plastic tub decal-ed with bluebells, full of body cream that smelled like a million flowers slamming into each other. I made it, she told us, but Marlena said that by “made it” Candice just meant that she mixed together a bunch of lotions that already existed and put them in a new jar.
*
Marlena lost her hearing at the beginning of October, just at the moment when all the trees in Silver Lake went up in flames, their leaves going orange and red, seemingly at once. One month left, though none of us were keeping track.