because I can remember.
Everything.
If I close my eyes, I can hear Mom reading us The Little Prince. It was always Mae’s favorite because it’s about space and planets and stars. It was always my favorite because it’s a love story.
It’s about this boy, the Little Prince, who lives on an asteroid. He’s got itchy feet. He wants to see the world. And there’s this rose on his planet and she’s kind of high-maintenance, so he ditches her and goes exploring the universe. But it’s not all it was cracked up to be. The universe. It’s full of all these funky planets that he’s not into, with the kind of people you meet on the boardwalk every day—dropouts and weirdos. Then he lands on Earth and meets a downed pilot—which to me feels like stranger danger, but it ends up being all good—and the Little Prince is sad because he realizes he does love his thorny rose, even though she’s needy as fuck. He wants to go back to his asteroid and be with her, only now he’s stuck on Earth.
See, in order to get back to where she is on Asteroid B-612—their planet—he has to get bitten by a poisonous snake. Supposedly he gets back to his asteroid and his rose at the end, but honestly? I’m not really sure the Little Prince is alive—I think he has to let the snake kill him so he can leave Earth. I think the pilot is telling his story to keep his memory alive. Don’t take my word for that. I got a D in English last semester.
But the reason this story is everything to me is because the Little Prince loves his rose so much that he’s willing to die for her. I want to be loved like that. I want a boy like him.
Micah should have come. To the clinic. To be with me. He should have come. If there were a wave like the wave and we were on the beach, he’d probably run as fast as he could. Leave me behind when I slow down. He already said he’d do that, didn’t he? I can’t carry you.
The sun spreads over me, and I close my eyes against the light. It hurts. So does the remembering.
I am seven, and Mae and I are lying on either side of Mom on the pull-out bed in the living room at Gram and Papa’s house on the Cape. We are squished against each other, and I breathe in Mom’s faint rose scent, which reminds me exactly of Gram’s garden of wild beach roses. Mae and I each hold a flashlight so Mom can see the words in the book.
“It is such a secret place,” Mom murmurs, “the land of tears.”
I run my fingers over the illustration of the Little Prince’s abandoned rose, sticking to the side of his small planet, all by herself, with nothing to protect her but four thorns.
Then Mom reads what has always been my favorite line from the book, which the rose says to the Little Prince when bragging about her thorns, which deep down she knows aren’t big enough to protect her, but she’s proud and she doesn’t want him to pity her and she doesn’t want to pity herself, so she says: “Let the tigers come with their claws!”
I whisper the words into the silence of my room: “Let the tigers come with their claws.”
It sounded better when the thorny rose said it in Mom’s voice. I open my eyes and look at the yoga mat I laid on my floor this morning, waiting, but she’s not there.
“Come back,” I whisper. I guess Mom can’t hear me. Where she is.
I pulled a card today from the tarot deck Mom bought me when I turned thirteen—Rider-Waite-Smith, the classic.
I got Death. That skeleton riding on his horse, looking fucking satisfied with himself. Maybe the card is telling me she’s not coming back, ever again. Maybe it’s telling me that my parents aren’t the only thing in my life that has died.
There is a knock on my door. I ignore it.
Poor little rose with all her bravado, all that insecurity coiled up inside her petals. Doesn’t she know that trying to be strong never works?
More knocking, louder this time. “Nah?”
“Yeah.”
The door creaks and I open my eyes when I can feel the heat of my sister over my face. She leans above me, her short, blond hair sticking up in every direction. Her blue eyes, a tropical blue like