Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,29

I know that making me sit here adding up pennies while she paws through her calendar is kind of the point.

“That gives us less than six weeks.”

I nod again. She peers at me over the rims of her cat’s-eye glasses.

“You’re distracted. Why?”

I think about the Imperial Hotel, my nightmare last night, the unopened garbage bag on Sukey’s old bed. My face must betray a glimmer of guilt, because Dr. Scaliteri pounces.

“Aha. A boyfriend.”

I shake my head.

“Dog died.”

Shake.

“Grandma sick.”

Shake again.

Dr. Scaliteri scowls.

“Then whatever it is, it can’t possibly be as important as the Italian Concerto. Now let’s get to work.”

We work for three and a half hell-bent hours, until the keys are literally smeared with blood and my mind has been bleached to a glorious blankness, a lunar eclipse of the soul. The music is a castle I conjure around myself, a fortress of notes no feeling can storm. Inside it, I am powerful. I wield my own skill like a sword.

When I’m getting ready to leave, Dr. Scaliteri looks at me sternly.

“You cannot have distractions, Kiri. Piano must come first. Whoever this boy is”—she narrows her eyes—“you tell him not to call until August.”

The powerful feeling lasts all the way home. But the badness from this morning comes back when I walk in my front door, like a hornet that was waiting all day to sting me. The can of soup I heat up for dinner burns. I bang my shin on the coffee table. When I unload the dishwasher, I drop a plate, and although it doesn’t shatter, a crack spreads across it like a vindictive grin, and I don’t know whether to put it in the cupboard or throw it out. Everything feels an inch out of place, just enough to make me clumsy. The garbage bag in Sukey’s room is a boulder someone heaved into the pond of our house, disturbing the pebbly bottom and making the water rise to lick the banked canoes.

I can’t open it.

I won’t open it.

I go to bed early in an attempt to escape.

But when I’ve been lying there for forty-five minutes wide awake, I finally get up and pad down the hall to Sukey’s room.

Hi, Sukey, I think, walking to the bed and laying my hand on the garbage bag. It’s good to see you.

I slowly tear the trash bag open.

Sukey had an accident.

What I want to ask my mom is, who calls getting stabbed to death an accident?

The hole in the bag widens until its contents start spilling out. I watch while a portrait of Sukey takes shape before my eyes.

There are some things I recognize:

-paintbrushes with red and black paint dried onto their tips;

-a little glass jar of turpentine;

-pencils and pens;

-the pair of high-heeled silver shoes she wore at her art opening;

-a half-finished tube of vanilla-scented hand cream;

-empty CD cases: Nevermind, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness;

-a mug that says BLACK CAT ART SUPPLY;

-one of the ceramic frogs that used to sit on her windowsill at home, now chipped;

-a little kid’s painting of daisies that I recognize as mine;

-a bag of glass paint jars with their lids stuck shut.

And some things I don’t recognize:

-a rumpled denim jacket with silver hearts Bedazzled around the cuffs;

-a plastic purple brush;

-a cheap digital alarm clock;

-a short leather skirt with beaded fringe;

-a sparkly pink tube top;

-Zig-Zag rolling papers;

-a picture frame with no picture;

-an empty lighter;

-a small wooden carving of a bear.

And there are things that scare me:

-empty orange pill bottles of all different sizes;

-a weirdly stiff and bunched-up quilt I slowly realize is covered in dried blood;

-an unbent paper clip with a curiously blackened tip.

chapter fifteen

That night, I don’t go back to bed at all. I lay out Sukey’s things like holy artifacts. I can’t stop looking at them. I can’t stop touching them. I can’t leave them alone. I move from object to object like a paleontologist inspecting fossils, the same way I moved around her old bedroom touching everything I could find on the night Mom and Dad told us she died.

I try on the denim jacket with the silver hearts. It smells a little rancid, like french fry grease, probably from being buried under the trash in Doug’s closet for so long. I want so much for it to smell like Sukey that I bury my nose in the sleeve again and again, but there’s no trace of her cigarette smoke or her perfume.

I run the purple brush through my hair.

I plug in the alarm clock.

I buckle on the silver shoes