The toilet flushed but she did not break eye contact with her reflection.
This is me. This is really me.
It was the Friday before Christmas break and Meredith did not want to go to school. It wasn’t even a real school day. They’d watch movies in half their classes, and there was some assembly where the sixth-graders were putting on a holiday play and of course it was going to be awful. She would have to decide who to sit with and that part would be awful, too. Mostly now at school she wanted to sit alone—in classes and in the library and especially at lunch. It was easier that way, and not nearly as lonely or lame as it sounded. She appreciated the quiet, the way the world spun while she stood off to the side. She watched without caring, or caring only in fragments, a moment here or there.
Like yesterday, she had wound up by accident walking into the locker room at the same time as Kristy, and so wound up changing beside her, and so wound up basically inadvertently being her changing shield. And that had been fine, if a little weird, because Kristy kept looking at her sideways like she didn’t quite trust her to hold up her end of the bargain. But then before Kristy went out into the gym, and Meredith was still tying her sneakers, Kristy said, “I hate volleyball,” and Meredith said, “Me, too.” And so there was that.
She slipped the cracked phone into her purse without looking at it, brushed her hair, put on her watch. Her father had given her the watch last week, claimed he’d seen it in a shop window, though she doubted this was true. It seemed like something he must’ve worked hard to find. Instead of whole numbers, the watch had equations around the dial, like instead of 3 it had 0.3*10. “That’s right, Meredith,” Evan had said earnestly, “this watch once belonged to Albert Einstein.” She had shot him a look to shut him up, because she understood why her father had given her the watch, understood it was the grown-up version of comic books and Tater Tots, that there was practical value in this gift, that it could endure.
Evan knocked on her door and stuck his head in.
“Y’okay?”
She turned from the mirror. “Why?”
“Dunno. You look a little sketchy.”
“It’s dumb to even have school today,” she said, sitting down on her bed. “It’s all bullshit.”
“Like most days,” he said.
Was he a little less paunchy? Perhaps. He’d been in a hole and then he’d crawled out. It happened. You couldn’t say why, but it happened. Last night she’d seen his catcher’s mitt in the pile on the dining-room table, things they’d be taking with them on their trip. She had picked up the glove and smelled it, deeply, the way you’d smell a towel out of the laundry. It was the smell of Evan, not just the leather but the sweat and maybe something else, too. In a year he would be away at college, somewhere; the thought of that loss, coming so soon after everything else, was almost too much for her to bear, and she pushed it away.
“Hey, Evan,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
He leaned against her door frame, took off his glasses and wiped them with the bottom of his oxford shirt. His face, without his glasses, was bare and unfamiliar, his left eye a stranger to her.
“So what do you want for Christmas?” he asked, looking up.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Good. ’Cause I didn’t get you anything.”
“Get me a book,” she said. “Get me one you haven’t spoiled.”
“Ha,” he said. Then after a moment he said, “Thirteen sucks. For Christmas I’ll get you fourteen.”
“My birthday’s not till March.”
“I’m aware. You can have it early. You just can’t use it.”
“Thirteen didn’t suck for you,” she said. “Thirteen’s when you got good at baseball. Thirteen’s when you changed.”
“Thirteen’s when you changed, too,” he said. “You know when else I changed?”
“When?”
“Fourteen.” He put his glasses back on. “You know when else?”
“I get it,” she said.
He winked. He wasn’t blind when he winked his right eye, she reminded herself. His left eye had abilities. Movement. Shapes. Light.
?
A few minutes after Evan left for school her mother appeared at her bedroom doorway.
“You feel sick?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“It’s okay if you’re late. I can write a note for you.”
Meredith was sitting on the floor in the middle of her battling animals. Her mother came into the room and sat on the edge of her bed. The tolerant cat stood up and turned a half turn and lay down again.
“You missed goal of the day,” her mother said.
“Bummer.”
Her mother smiled. “Evan says you don’t want to go to school.”
“I don’t know if I ever want to go to school,” Meredith said.
“You’ll have a long break,” her mother said. “Almost two weeks. You might feel differently after. And if you don’t, we can figure something out.”
“Like what? Be an eighth-grade dropout?”
“Maybe you could go to a different school.”
“You’d let me do that?”
“Meredith,” her mother said. “We’ll do whatever we need to do.”
They had found her a new therapist, someone who was less useless than Dr. Moon. They took her and picked her up from school every day now, even when she said she wanted to walk. On an unseasonably warm day last week, her mother had come to pick her up but then left the Audi in the school parking lot and walked home with her—past the Deli Barn, down Chestnut Street, then left on Duncan, then the cut across the edge of the park, then the right on Glenside, up the lawn to their house. Was that crazy? It was a little crazy, yes. But her mother was insistent. Resolved.
Meredith picked up the battling tiger with the ax. His tail had been broken off for as long as she could remember—Evan had always claimed it was she who’d done it, chewed it off as a toddler, but she’d always suspected he was the guilty party. For one, there were no teeth marks.
“I used to talk to her,” she said to her mother. “I mean, I used to pretend to talk to her. Do you think that’s weird?”
She could tell her mother was surprised by this information, or at least by the sharing of this information, but she recovered quickly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you do what you have to do.”
Meredith twisted the ax in the tiger’s paw. After a moment, her mother said, “Do you still do that? Talk to her?”
“Not really,” Meredith said. “We . . . I don’t know. We just . . . ” She shook her head and lay the tiger gently on the floor. “Not really.”
Sometimes she imagined herself back into the bathroom in the apartment. Sometimes she stood at the sink and looked into the mirror. Sometimes she could see Lisa in the reflection, stretched out in the tub, unobstructed. Sometimes Lisa was sleeping, her breaths deep and even. But sometimes Lisa was looking at her, and their eyes locked in the mirror, but Meredith did not get in the tub, and Lisa did not ask her to.
“It must be strange,” her mother said. “I don’t mean weird . . . just it must be strange, talking to someone you didn’t really know that well.”