When I brought them back, Marlena snipped one of the sponges into a heart shape. Outside my window, the sun was going down. Maybe she would stay for dinner. Maybe she would sleep over. I turned on the overhead light, so we could see what we were doing. She cut the last three sponges into the letters of my name, a lopsided C-A-T. In a cereal bowl she swirled together a dollop of yellow and blue paint until she made an Eastery green. She dipped her fingers in and wrote “sweet greens and blues are the colors I choose” in mouse-print along the baseboard. On my wall I’d done nothing but alternate yellow and blue squares, like I was decorating the dorm of an overeager U-of-M freshman. But hers—hearts in yellow, my name here and there in blue, song lyrics in varying shades of green running horizontally and vertically and even diagonally, little secret messages, so many that in the months to come I’d discover new phrases all the time.
When I looked at what she’d done, I felt embarrassed by my cookie-cutter geometric design, so on a clean square of wall below the window I tried for something different. After a long time staring I couldn’t come up with anything good, and just wound up drawing blue and yellow spirals until I wiped away the whole mess with a handful of solid blue. A sick green shone through where the yellow had been. As long as I lived there, whenever I saw that spot, I felt a sharp and particular pain.
I guess Jimmy was standing in the doorway for a while before we noticed him—we were singing again, and loud. “You are talented,” he said, blocking off the whole hallway, big as a grown man, and for a second I thought he was talking to me.
“Thank you,” Marlena said, and reflexively finger-combed her hair, streaking the blond a deeper yellow. That took me aback, too, how gracefully she accepted the compliment. Rich kids never bragged—the kids at Concord always spoke about their accomplishments with a kind of watered-down shame, forced or not, and so I did the same. Wasn’t it rude not to deflect compliments, especially when they came from boys? Immodest, unattractive, unladylike, somehow?
“Wanna hear how high I can go?” She paused the CD player, leaving a smear of paint on the button.
“Sure,” said Jimmy.
She lifted her chest and formed a perfect O with her mouth, her eyebrows raised, cheeks hollow, and out came a sound that was all needle, so high it reorganized your cells, lifted the hair on your arms. Audible from the future, where it follows me around. When she stopped we were all quiet for a few seconds, but the sound was still in the room, as if she’d made something real out of her voice and set it free.
“That was amazing,” Jimmy said, clapping his hands.
*
I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you’re irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena’s case, the person you’ll never have a chance to be. The world doesn’t care that you’re just a girl.
Let the record show that I was smarter than I looked. And anyway, I touched.
*
The cars started arriving at around ten in the morning on New Year’s Eve. First they parked on the lawn in front of the Joyner barn, barreling right through the snow. When the lawn was full they lined up along the street outside both our houses, a caravan of pickups. Around twilight, as Mom and I aligned dough-swaddled cocktail wienies into rows of bandaged thumbs on the baking sheet, a boxy van sped down the road, swerving on the pavement before coming to a stop right behind the final truck. Mom eased the tray into the oven, shaking her head.
“Look at that,” she said, pointing at the S scrawled by the van’s tires into the fine powder coating the street. “Those kids are going to kill someone.” The cuter of the two boys I’d seen hanging around Marlena’s hopped from the driver’s side, and his zitty friend hauled a duffel bag from the backseat. They roughhoused their way to the barn, the cute one ambushing the other with fistfuls of snow.
Mom and Jimmy and I still weren’t used to Dad-less holidays, even after our depressing Christmas. Instead of eating real dinner, we ate countless pigs-in-blankets and three cans of black olives, because, as Mom put it, “we could.” By nightfall Mom and Jimmy had graduated from festive to loopy. They laughed too loud and talked over each other and made increasingly stupid decisions in gin rummy, so that I won over and over. “You,” Mom said, “are the all-time champion.” She leaned across the table and tried to balance an olive on my headband. Her eyes were marbled with veins. The olive bounced onto my lap and then onto the carpet.
“I never believed in a germ I couldn’t see,” Jimmy said, picking it up, inspecting it for hairs, and popping it into his mouth.
Since well before sunset, bass had thrummed in the foundation of our modular, connecting our house to the Joyners’. The vibration held steady when the clock struck midnight. The ball slid down into the crowd of people in Times Square. The year prior, when I said I’d love to see it happen in person, Dad had given me one of his You’re no daughter of mine looks. That right there, New York City on New Year’s, is hell, he said. See all those people? Every single one of them has to pee, and there’s nowhere to do it. My first New Year’s in New York, I’d stand on my fire escape listening to the city-wide cheer of eight million people wishing for happiness at the same exact time, and think how he’d been wrong about that too. I remember wondering if we’re all cursed to have the same arguments with the same people forever, no matter how gone they are. Happy New Year, I whispered to the cabs below, to the goddamn Empire State Building, just drunk enough to squeeze the hands of Marlena and Dad, as if they were right there. Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.
“Happy New Year!” Mom and Jimmy shouted, banging their pans together.
“Happy New Year!” I said, two seconds late. I smacked the underside of my pot with my palm. Instead of my usual New Year’s feeling, that bubble in my heart, filling up, I felt the opposite; a deflation, a popping then a falling, as if I were one of the balloons in Times Square, drifting down to rest on the sidewalk before getting trampled.
“Going to go test out what the air feels like in the new year,” I said.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jimmy said. “It appears that no miracles have taken place here tonight. The old are still old, the ailing are still ailing, and my freak sister is still a complete and total freak-loser.”
“Hey,” Mom said.
Outside, the Joyners’ music was even louder; classic, country-infused rock, some male singer Dad would have recognized. Light seeped through the barn’s planks, pulsing in time with the music. Who would open the door if I walked over there and knocked? I felt, somehow, worried for Marlena. Absently, I wandered over to the road, to the line of parked cars. I would smoke somewhere too far from the window for Mom and Jimmy to see, on the off chance that either of them was coherent enough to wonder where I’d gone. I leaned against the van I’d seen those two boys drive up in and lit a cigarette, enjoying the sneaky little thrill that came with indulging in a new, bad habit. In five years, smoking a cigarette would be like putting on pants. I tipped my head against the window and exhaled.