Halloween used to be so much fun. I remember the year Tate and I dressed up as the moon and the sun. She was all yellow from her feet to the stocking on her head that kept getting caught on her ears. We’d made her sun rays together the night before, cutting cardboard triangles and painting the tips orange. Being the moon was easier. We just cut out a gray circle with a hole for my head and had Mom shade in the craters. She was always better at the artsy stuff than us. We ate so much candy that we stayed up until three in the morning, watching horror movies. Halloween has a different meaning now. It’s ugly and there are no yellow suns or gray moons anymore. Just black shadows and ghosts of the past.
I want to love Halloween like that again. But how can I without Tate? It’s only me now. No more goofy yellow sun costumes, no songs at night, no ice cream mustaches or lemonade to share. My entire face itches from tears and I want to scratch it, rip the skin from me and expose who I really am without her. Am I still me?
Like clockwork, familiar pangs of guilt sneak into my mind like a predator, stalking my thoughts, waiting to twist and destroy them. I could have saved her if I just had been more careful, just paid more attention. Dean would still be alive if I had just said something to someone. I let them both die.
Would Colter forgive me if he knew? Mom? Jackson and Janie? How could I expect that of them if I haven’t even asked that of myself?
I clutch my stomach, staring over the ledge to the river below, the breath in my lungs straining to flow. How am I supposed to know what’s right anymore? Everything is clouded and the puzzle pieces are jumbled in the box, and they’re going everywhere and they don’t fit right now.
I need them to fit.
40
A strand of hair blows into my face and gets stuck to my tears. I’m a well that’s run dry, a sea vacant of fish, a sky without stars. I keep clutching at my chest as if that will help my breath to finally release. I’m not numb yet. You can still breathe if you’re numb. I’ve only felt this short of breath one other time—after Tate died.
? ? ?
I wobble into the living room on my broken leg, clutching the crutch with my good arm, secretly wanting to let go and fall through the floor to what’s below. The room smells different, mustier. Everything’s in the same place but it’s empty, like the familiar’s been sucked away. I know nothing’s changed, but it feels like I’ve gone back in time and returned to an alternate universe. Somewhere along the space-time continuum, I turned the wrong way and my sister is dead in this life.
My parents walk past me, avoiding my eyes.
“Can you make sure she gets up the stairs to take a shower?” Mom asks Dad, as if I’m not in the room.
“Of course,” he says after a sigh.
My dad grabs my arm and helps me up the stairs without talking. My leg cast clunks on each stair. We finally maneuver to the top of the stairs and Mom is there with a small plastic bag and a garbage bag. She hands them to him.
“She needs to wrap her casts. Can you make sure she gets them on?”
He nods.
We stumble clumsily into the bathroom and I look up at my dad for the first time. He’s staring past me with a blank expression.
I grab the bags from his hands. “I can do it.”
He doesn’t argue, or tell me to yell if I need help. He just leaves and closes the door behind him. I lock the door, undress, and stare at the mirror, at the shell of a girl I am now. The dark circles under my eyes, my stringy hair, my chapped lips.
I want my mom.
The plastic bags provide a little protection, but I probably need to secure them better. I don’t really care if water gets on my casts, though. Nothing matters anymore. Not without Tate. I’ve been thinking about it—killing myself. My parents won’t look at me, and they’ve decided talking around me is easier than talking to me. Jackson’s in Michigan visiting his grandparents, so by the time anyone finds out, I’ll be gone. It’s the only way I can escape the pain and make everything right.
Her voice won’t stop replaying in my mind. I tell it to stop, but the more I try to make it go away the more it invades, amplifies, echoes.
“Sissy? What’s wrong?”
I open the medicine cabinet, grab my dad’s razor and extract the blade.
“Why are there stars, Sissy?”
The cut is deep as I glide it across my skin. My fingers fumble with the blade as I try again, the bag on my cast making it hard to push as hard as I want. I cut three more lines to make up for the other wrist. Maybe if I get enough cuts on this side, the cast-covered side won’t be an issue.
“One more song, Sissy.”
Blood bubbles on my skin and flows toward my fingers.
I turn the water on and hold my good hand under the rush of water and watch streaks of red stream down the drain. The water’s hot, but it needs to be to rinse away everything that happened. It needs to be scalding. I move the shower door to the side and maneuver myself inside, balancing on one leg, holding my bagged arm to my stomach.
At first I don’t feel anything but my emptying head. Before I have time to comprehend any sane thoughts, the water starts to feel like little knives slicing my skin. It burns. The droplets echo in my ears and they sound like a thunderstorm. I push against the walls and they start closing in on me, pushing, smashing.
I can’t breathe. It’s not coming. Breath isn’t coming.