didn’t invite the Devil to the party. He isn’t the kind of guy that you have to invite. He’ll probably show up by himself. But now they’re in the closet together for five minutes. The cheerleader’s boyfriend isn’t too happy about this, but what can he do? It’s that kind of party. She’s that kind of cheerleader.
They’re a lot younger than they used to be. At parties like this, they used to be older, especially the Devil. He remembers all the way back to the end of the world. The cheerleader wasn’t a cheerleader then. She was married and had kids and a husband.
Something’s going to happen, or maybe it’s already happened. Nobody ever talks about it. If they could, what would they say?
But those end-of-the-world parties were crazy. People would drink too much and they wouldn’t have any clothes on. There’d be these sad little piles of clothes in the living room, as if something had happened, and the people had disappeared, disappeared right out of their clothes. Meanwhile, the people who belonged to the clothes would be out in the backyard, waiting until it was time to go home. They’d get up on the trampoline and bounce around and cry.
There would be a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and sooner or later someone was going to have to refill it and go put it back on the pantry shelf. You’d have had these slippery naked middle-aged people sliding around on the trampoline and the oily grass, and then in the end all you’d have would be a bottle of olive oil, some olives on a tree, a tree, an orchard, an empty field.
The Devil would stand around feeling awkward, hoping that it would turn out he’d come late.
The kids would be up in their bedrooms, out of the beds, looking out the windows, remembering when they used to be older. Not that they ever got that much older.
But the world is younger now. Things are simpler. Now the cheerleader has parents of her own, and all she has to do is wait for them to get home, and then this party can be over.
Two days ago was the funeral. It was just how everyone said it would be.
Then there were errands, people to talk to. She was busy.
She hugged her aunt and uncle good-bye and moved into the house where she would live for the rest of her life. She unpacked all her boxes, and the Salvation Army brought her parents’ clothes and furniture and pots and pans, and other people, her parents’ friends, helped her hang her mother’s clothes in her mother’s closet. (Not this closet.) She bunched her mother’s clothes up in her hand and sniffed, curious and hungry and afraid.
She suspects, remembering the smell of her mother’s monogrammed sweaters, that they’ll have fights about things. Boys, music, clothes. The cheerleader will learn to let all of these things go.
If her kids were still around, they would say I told you so. What they did say was, Just wait until you have parents of your own. You’ll see.
The cheerleader rubs her stomach. Are you in there?
She moved the unfamiliar, worn-down furniture around so that it matched up old grooves in the floor. Here was the shape of someone’s buttocks, printed onto a seat cushion. Maybe it would be her father’s favorite chair.
She looked through her father’s records. There was a record playing on the phonograph, it wasn’t anything she had ever heard before, and she took it off, laid it back in its empty white sleeve. She studied the death certificates. She tried to think what to tell her parents about their grandchildren, what they’d want to know.
Her favorite song had just been on the radio for the very last time. Years and years ago, she’d danced to that song at her wedding. Now it was gone, except for the feeling she’d had when she listened to it. Sometimes she still felt that way, but there wasn’t a word for it anymore.
Tonight, in a few hours, there will be a car wreck and then her parents will be coming home. By then, all her friends will have left, taking away six-packs and boyfriends and newly applied coats of hair spray and lipstick.
She thinks she looks a bit like her mother.
Before everyone showed up, while everything was still a wreck downstairs, before the police had arrived to say what they had to say, she was standing in her parents’ bathroom. She was looking in the mirror.
She picked