asks: “Are you mad at me?”
I put my arms around her. I feel like a machine.
She wants to go to the police. She wants to go back to his house and kill him.
“I know you’re mad at me,” she repeats. “I can tell you’re mad at me.”
I’d never be mad at her. I’m not avoiding her because I’m mad at her. She just makes me tired.
She pulls me into the bathroom while Mom and Dad talk about colleges downstairs. She’s full of thunder. “We need to tell somebody. I can’t do this silence. You can’t.”
Why do I have to be the one to make her feel better? Nothing even happened to her.
Did anything even happen to me?
Five hours of sleep. Four hours of studying. Two hours of exercise. Three hours of self-improvement reading. If I don’t go over six hundred calories a day, I won’t have bad dreams. If I can do my makeup in under two hours, she’ll stop asking if I’m mad at her.
I build little pyres out of my emotions and burn them. I am clean.
She comes to my room at night and whispers, even though I pretend I’m asleep: “Just let me do something. Let me go to his house. I’ll . . . I’ll . . . You’re not being normal about this.”
I’m not normal. I’m stronger than normal people. It’s my head. I’m in control of it.
She’s not in control of anything. Why did I ever want to be like her?
She comes to me outside, when I’m sitting on the porch, tying and untying one shoe.
“Are you sure you’re not mad at me?”
“Yes,” I tell her. But my voice is different now. I can’t tell if she’s not listening or if I didn’t speak.
Time slips in and out, like it did when I was drunk, but I’m not drunk now. Whole days pass without me noticing. Everything is dry and clear and flat. And far away. Joy feels very far away.
She comes to me in the exercise room when I’m sweating off breakfast. “We can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen.”
“Yes we can.” If I don’t call it anything, it isn’t anything. “Nothing even happened.”
“That’s not what you said the night it—”
“I don’t know what I said. Leave it alone, Joy.”
She whispers to me in the bathroom, when I’m flossing too hard, cutting my gums. “Mom and Dad ask me to do the dishes and I’m screaming the truth at them in my head. We need to tell.”
“Please don’t tell,” I say, my mouth full of blood. “Promise me you won’t tell. If you tell, I’ll hate you forever.”
After that, she stops asking if I’m mad at her.
That night, I dream I’m in a crowd and everyone’s wearing Adam’s face. I’m called into Principal Eastman’s office, and Eastman is wearing Adam’s face. I walk into Joy’s room in the middle of the night and she’s wearing his face.
He’s astral projecting into my head. This dark-haired, guitar-playing person . . .
All my old fantasies transform. It’s me who finds his body at the bottom of the quarry. He comes to me with his problems and I bash his brains in with a rock. I’m in a crowd of people wearing his face, and I set off a bomb, blowing them all apart.
Dream: I stick a knife between his ribs. I feel it go in.
I don’t want to be someone who dreams about this.
It’s fine. It will go away. I’m stronger than this. I’m better than normal people.
FIFTEEN
October 23
Joy
AS KIDS, GRACE AND I SPENT A LOT OF TIME at the elementary school playground, on the wooden ship with the fake wheel. I’d steer us over oceans, away from pirates. I’d climb to the top of the jungle gym and she’d wait below me, face screwed up in fear, arms out to catch me if I fell, even though she wasn’t big enough. Even though she knew I’d bring her down with me.
“Sorry I didn’t reply to your texts.” November’s sitting on the swing next to me. School’s been out for an hour now. The sky’s cloudy, rain threatening. The wind scatters dead leaves underneath the jungle gym.
I’m the one to say it for once: “Are you okay?”
“I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.” She says it like she’s tearing off chunks of something inside her chest and throwing them into a fire. “The department’s put him on unpaid leave. He was already in trouble, the way he went around asking unauthorized questions about Adam