Autumn’s Sister
BY LILY TROTTA
I finally accepted that my mother was not the type to teach me how to be a woman. It’s not that she wanted to shelter me. She had never turned off a movie during the sex scenes or used a made-up word in place of vagina. Years earlier, she had given me one of those books about body odor and pubic hair and changing hormones. But she left it at that. She wore little makeup, dressed in scrubs at work and sweatpants at home. Her hair was cropped short, air-dried, and unevenly gray even though she was single, under fifty and, I thought, had the potential to be quite nice-looking. It was a working knowledge of the facts, what she had given me. The rest, I realized, the details, would be left to me to figure out. I resolved to take the problem of my appearance into my own hands first, beginning with my glasses.
The contact lenses I begged for proved an enemy to the liquid eyeliner I had begun applying every morning. They were always flipping inside out against my fingertips or catching pieces of dust along the journey to my eye. I found the navigation of touching my own eyeball confusing and it frequently took me four or five tries to get each lens securely set onto a cornea. Often, the irritation would make me tear up, pulling fat beads of makeup into my eyes, where they spread like spilled ink until I dabbed at my face with a square of toilet paper, ruining the look so that I had to start all over again.
It was during one of these episodes that I first remember meeting Autumn. I had made it through most of the day with my new face intact before finally giving in to a mid-yawn eye-rub that forced me, wincing, into the girls’ bathroom, a tube of black waterproof Revlon tucked beneath my sleeve. I was standing on tiptoe over the wall mounted sink, one hand forcing my left eye open while the other flicked around inside, attempting to pick out a dry lens that had folded in on itself like a hardshell taco. A toilet flushed behind me and there was Autumn.
“You can just wet it in your mouth, you know,” she said, pumping a heaping pile of pink soap into her hand. “My sister does it all the time.”
Autumn was best known in school for being one of the eight Horton children, and the helpfulness of this advice rested heavily on which sister she was referring to. Christina, a grade below us, was rumored to eat paper. Still, I had no other solutions at hand. I peeled the lens off my fingertip and lay it folded across my palm, a murky fingerprint still stamped across its surface. I lowered the tip of my tongue against it and felt it cling to my taste buds like something porous and dry. It had a flavor like nothing at all, air solidified and coated in salt and soap from my pruning hands. I sucked a pool of saliva into my mouth to soak it and rolled it back and forth over my tongue like an old-timey washing machine.
My left eye burned softly as I tried once again to poke it into place, while my right rested on Autumn in the mirror, squeezing a zit on her forehead, inches from her own reflection. My vision realigned and I blinked a few times for security, then unsheathed the eyeliner from my sleeve to reapply. Autumn watched me work until I met her gaze.
“Want some?” I finished a clumsy cat eye and held out the tube. Autumn was still babyish and pale, her brows and lashes nearly the same color as her skin. “I can do it for you if you want.”
We walked back to class looking vaguely alike.
*
By winter, Autumn and I spent most afternoons together. Her family lived at the very edge of the school district, which made it difficult to negotiate a ride, but Autumn was undeterred. She pulled me onto the bus with her one afternoon, sandwiched between two of her siblings (“They never know how many of us there are,” she said) and the driver didn’t even look up. We started cramming several days of sleepovers into a single visit this way, under the guise of saving our parents on gas.
As on the bus, it hardly made a difference whether I was at the Horton house or not. The eldest siblings were out of the house already, but the place was still stacked two or three kids to a bedroom. I loved it right away. The Hortons’ pantry was filled with gigantic versions of all the food my mother, a dental hygienist, never kept at home—gallon tubs of cheese dip, 72-packs of Pop-Tarts, a never-ending assortment of gummies and room temperature freeze pops in thin plastic tubes. The latter were a favorite among all the kids. The youngest competed to slurp down a frozen pop the fastest without getting brain freeze. Blue was the easiest and best tasting (they were almost always out of blue), but orange was sour when sucked up too quickly; it made a kid come up for air halfway through and lose. The older children—which included Autumn and me if the others were feeling generous—took pops straight from the pantry, still liquid, and snipped the top off the colorful tubes. We took one sip and filled up the empty section with Kirkland tequila that their parents bought in bulk and never noticed missing when they returned home at night.
The rest of the house was carpeted with pretzel crumbs and unnamed sticky patches. Every lampshade was cracked or stained and hung at an angle, every surface coated in dog hair from the two greasy yellow labs. Half-used bottles of pumpkin air freshening spray sat on every table, no matter the season. The sweet, chemical fog mixed with the unshakeable scent of mold from the carpeting and gasoline from the garage, all of it coagulating to form the house’s own thick atmosphere, which clung to each of the siblings, even at school. It started following me home, too, seeped into my hair.
Something about the neverending coming and going of children made for an infinitesimally brief welcome period. Autumn’s brothers and sisters were ruthless to each other and, as soon I crossed the threshold of their home, their wrath extended to me. I didn’t mind; my family was small, just my brother—a freshman at UConn—my mother, and me. It was nice to feel like a Horton. I liked the way being constantly ready for attack made me feel—agile, fast like an animal. They greeted each other with “what do you want, bitch” and “go away, you fucking shithead,” and frequently hit, shoved, and kicked one another for what seemed like no reason at all, like animals creating hierarchy on the Discovery Channel. Those who could take the abuse and deliver it back thrived. They snacked well before dinner, played video games or walked into town with the group, even got help with homework from the older kids, sometimes. The others stayed mostly in their rooms.
Once, lying on the trampoline out back, Autumn sent me inside for sodas. Christina’s twin, Patrick, and another of the boys were making Jiffy Pop on the stove. I opened the pantry cupboard and rifled through a stack of ShopRite branded colas. “Make sure you drink a diet one, fatass,” said Patrick from behind me, my innate superiority as a slightly older kid, so unshakeable at school, completely erased inside his house. My muscles tightened, my grip closing around two cans (diet, but not because of him), and I turned around.
“Get burnt, fag.” I smacked his hand lightly onto the electric stovetop on my way back out the door and he jumped back in pain, swearing, as the other brother, one of the big ones, cackled. I felt high.
*
Autumn’s sister, Kat, was my favorite Horton of them all and, it turned out, the one who knew the contacts trick. Her lenses were a pale blue that disguised the brown of her eyes and gave her a sort of cartoon look. She was a high school junior and shared Autumn’s bedroom in the basement, which was always slightly damp. Kat would allow us in the room while she messaged with strangers at the desktop computer in the corner and played crackly pop music through the speakers, as long as we were willing to retrieve Hot Pockets, CDs, and anything else she may want from upstairs on command.
“Ugh!” she would scream, jerking back in the folding chair at her desk and typing furiously into the keyboard. “This guy I’m talking to is a total fucktard.”
Kat especially liked UrbanDictionary.com, which I imagined was where she picked up a lot of the heinous names she tested out on Autumn and the others, though never on me. She spent hours delving into the site, searching grotesque names for body parts and sexual positions and squealing as she relayed them to Autumn and me. Once she found the chatroom feature, she hardly ever logged off.
Kat’s affection was a nice tonic to the battlefield upstairs, though it did always seem to come at Autumn’s expense. She often offered me bites of food off her desk, then swallowed the rest whole before it could get to Autumn. Or she ordered Autumn to let the dogs out or fetch a drink from upstairs and showed me alone a folder full of photos sent to her from other chatroom users. They were almost all penises. Just as Autumn came back in, huffing with frustration, Kat made a show of closing out all the pictures. I kept my eyes averted from Autumn, my only justification for being there, whenever this happened. Kat could be so available, so willing to tell us both about tongue piercings and the strange sexual appetites of her online friends, so quick to battle for our side when the Horton boys were feeling debaucherous, then turn on Autumn in an instant, banishing her—and, in turn, me—from the basement. The unpredictability kept us at full attention, shuffling between flattery and attempts to disappear from Kat’s line of vision altogether.
One night Autumn fell asleep before I did. I lay in a heap of blankets on the floor between the Horton sisters’ twin beds, watching Kat change into pajamas in the dark. Her legs were pale, her skin so dry it had a pattern, like monochromatic stained glass. A glimmering square of cubic zirconia dangled from her belly button, catching light off the computer screen before being smothered under a massive John Cena t-shirt. I shivered as Kat stepped over me to turn off the monitor, awe trickling from my core down through my legs. I may have even sighed. She caught my eye as she flopped into her bed. “What? Fucking homo.”
My breathing stopped and I pressed my eyelids together, obviously too late. Surely, there was no coming back from something like this at the Horton house. Christina wet the bed once, years earlier, and they all still called her Pisstina. Should I apologize? Deny I’d been looking at all? Or was it better to pretend nothing had happened, to wait until morning and act as if I hadn’t even been awake? Maybe I could convince them all I was sleeping with my eyes open. I chanced another look around the room, squinting. Kat looked fast asleep, her body curled lazily in my direction, her hair dangling over the side of the mattress.
*
But Kat seemed to have no desire to torture me. Weeks passed in the same relative peace they always did, the three of us lounging in the dim afternoon light of the basement, siphoning the tops of our syrupy tequila pops.
“Honestly, Aut-dumb,” Kat mused one day, her icy blue eyes resting across the room on her sister. “You shouldn’t try to do your makeup like that anymore. You look like a slutty baby.”
“Fuck you,” said Autumn, though she scrambled to the flimsy door mirror. Her face was sallow and freckled and her khaki-colored hair blended undetectably into her skin. She looked a lot like Kat but smaller and yellower, her body contorted slightly by the warping of cheap glass. In gym class that week, we had lined up shortest to tallest to get tested for scoliosis; Autumn was third in line. Kat was small too, but with a great round chest and a sharp voice that gave her the authority of a much older person. Her hair was dyed dark, her freckles even and distinct. I had been pleased, when I first met her, to find that we used the same shade of eyeliner. Lately, she had been listening to Amy Winehouse and, in homage, had started painting even heavier layers around her eyes than before. Autumn and I quickly followed suit.
Autumn leaned in closer to the mirror and picked at her eyelashes, a few of which were glued together with mascara too dark for her complexion. Kat turned her gaze to me. “You’re gonna be so hot once you lose your baby fat. Your face is like, really symmetrical.”
She smiled, her teeth a gloomy grape purple, and rose from her usual seat at the desk, her index finger stretched toward me. She placed it softly to my hairline and met my skin with a loud static shock we both ignored. Her face inches from mine, she traced the finger down my forehead, the bridge of my nose, to the round bulge of my chin, dividing my face in half. I felt heat swelling in my ears and my stomach bubbling with sugar and alcohol. Autumn swung the door open so the mirror smacked lightly into the wall and stomped upstairs to wash her face.
*
As I had hoped, a growth spurt was doing wonders for my body by springtime. I’d had pudgy breasts since elementary school, more like extra pockets of fat than anything else, but now that I was taller, my stomach long and nearly flat, they stood out on their own and were beginning to look more like they had their own purpose. My mother agreed, though I had had to bring it up, that I could do with a few underwire bras. Even Patrick didn’t call me “fatass” anymore, but was having to fall back on a more generic “bitch” whenever I was over, and even then, it was usually only a comeback.
As the weather got warmer, Kat let Autumn and me go through some of her old clothes. Autumn was still as small as ever, flat-chested and scrawny with shapeless, snappable limbs, but Kat and I had dyed her hair black in the kitchen sink listening to Rehab. Some faded trickles of gray coloring were still visible on her neck whenever she tied it in a bun. Kat’s tops, mostly black and low-cut, hung limp off of Autumn’s shoulders, her pants a full foot too long. Kat insisted that I take nearly all of it—“Everything fits you perfectly”—because Autumn looked like a sick kid in a hospital gown.
“One that no one will ever love,” she added, beaming as she draped a sweatshirt she no longer wore over my shoulders. Her breath smelled like cinnamon gum.
“Come on,” said Autumn, her eyes rolling. She dragged me from the basement by my new sleeve, my arms cradling a pair of Kat’s ripped jeans.
In the living room, I pretended to be invested in the TV while Autumn picked dog hairs from her sock and complained about her family. On some level I knew I should convey that I was generally on her side, that the couch was where I wanted to be and that she was who I wanted to be there with. I just didn’t want to actually have to say it. It had become so easy to fight with the rest of Autumn’s siblings the way she did—the pushing, the swearing—but even as she bemoaned Kat (“like I would want to wear that ugly shit anyway”… “wouldn’t be such a bitch if she actually had any friends”), I couldn’t bring myself to say anything against her. I did my best to maintain a silent nod of solidarity and fingered the worn denim of Kat’s hand-me-down jeans in my lap, their inner thighs soft and thin as old flannel, while Autumn talked herself out.
As much as I loved the endless variety of junk food and video games and other kids, the thrill of being around Kat had easily become my favorite part of the Horton house. She could ignore Autumn and I for hours, then look up from her computer and decide it was time we learned to crop a t-shirt or watch our first porn. It was like waiting for the jumpscare in a horror film. At her worst, she was no meaner than Patrick or the others, really. Even Autumn could be brutal when provoked. And though I watched her getting ready for bed almost nightly now, she had never said another word about it. More than anything, I didn’t want to negate what Kat had said about me weeks earlier—you’re gonna be so hot once you lose your baby fat. I wasn’t ugly and awkward. I was funny and tall, cool even. I was skinny, a woman. I didn’t see how Autumn could have missed the transformation.
Half an hour later, Kat appeared beside us on the couch and Autumn shifted to make room for her, their encounter downstairs apparently forgiven. Three pre-mixed freeze pops dangled from between Kat’s fingers, dripping food dye down her pale arm. She passed them around—a blue one for me—before falling back across the cushions, her legs stretched out, her knees sloping over Autumn’s legs and her holey socks resting linked together on my groin. I felt a movement inside of me, like the pull of a church bell reverberating from between my legs. I stiffened, barely breathing and afraid to move beneath her feet, horrified by the idea that she could take them away.
*
In April, Kat got her driver’s license. Autumn and the others were thrilled by the idea that she wouldn’t be home so much, that there might be one fewer sibling in the house at any given time, but I was nervous to lose access to her. Her taste in clothes and music, her sudden bursts of laughter or disgust at God knows what on the desktop, the feeling of her hand against my forehead tweezing stray hairs from my brow, helping me be perfect. I wore her hand-me-downs almost exclusively now, my skin and hair always faintly cinnamon-scented beneath the lingering Horton funk. I was finally coming into my own, but I still needed her.
Kat, in turn, got a part-time job at a pizzeria on my side of town. Her parents, perhaps finally noticing the constant presence of yet another child now that Kat was out of the house more, suggested she start dropping me back home on her way to work in the evenings. Autumn hung back, apparently unfazed by my direct line to her sister and ecstatic for the opportunity to have the basement to herself three nights a week. At last, Kat and I were alone.
Kat’s car was a minivan, of course, her mother’s old one. The bottom half of a hula dancer stood tragically still on the dash as we drove toward my house, her torso likely broken off by one of the younger kids. The whole van reeked of Kat and me—a more complicated blend of the Hortons’ house, gum, and something metallic. The heating system was overpowerful and made the air inside the vehicle dense, devoid of oxygen. I took huge open-mouthed breaths to save it in my lungs for later, when I had to get out, and sat otherwise still in the passenger seat, desperate not to disturb any of the empty water bottles, receipts, or loose hair ties on the floor, lest I rupture the perfect set of circumstances that allowed me to be there.
Kat was less affectionate with me in the car than she was at home. She didn’t compliment the fit of her old clothes on my breasts, the color of my nails (dark, like hers), or any of the things she always said looked so much better on me than on her sister. She stayed mostly quiet, fidgeting with the music while she drove and occasionally jolting the vehicle to a hard stop, one hand pressed hard into the horn, the other flipping a middle finger while she berated another driver for cutting her off. I was rapt, regardless, intent to remember every song she seemed to like so I could download it that night and eager to add an affirmative “asshole” after every altercation. I studied the paraphernalia on the floor of her car. There were cups everywhere; she must have gone to Dunkin Donuts often. A balled up and highly red-penned quiz told me she was taking pre-calculus, but didn’t care for it.
On a Thursday, Kat drove directly past my street.
“I’m actually off tonight,” she said. “But I thought we could go to the mall.”
My stomach burned as if I guzzled half a dozen tequila pops. Kat’s eyes were fixed on the road in front of us, her knuckles white, wrapped tight around the steering wheel. A pop song started playing on the radio and she squashed the power button quickly, like a bug, as we approached the highway. I wondered whether she had ever driven on the interstate before. I wanted to rest my hand on the frayed gray denim of her thigh, to do something to relax her, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to touch. I attempted my best imitation of casual.
“What are we shopping for?”
“We’re not,” she said, risking a quick look toward me and momentarily veering onto the shoulder of the road. She swerved back hard and my seatbelt locked against my neck. “I just needed company. I’m meeting someone.”
The guy she was meeting was named Cody, she told me. They both hated the new Fall Out Boy and thought college was for rich pussies. He rode BMX and lived in Massachusetts, about an hour away, but he was going to move to California when he graduated, to bike. They met in the chatroom, exchanged nudes. I thought back to the catalog of dicks Kat had shown me over the last few months, some erect and angry, others smaller, filtered in sepia-tone. They were all self-shot, backlit in strange rooms with stained tile ceilings or vertical blinds in the background, sometimes even trees, the faces of their photographers rarely visible. I imagined which one might belong to a Cody.
“I don’t think he’s like a rapist or anything, but I don’t know. I just thought I should bring someone.”
I nodded. Of course, she wasn’t stupid. The car drifted outside our lane again, rumbling on the rough shoulder until Kat jerked us back inside the lines. I wondered where she had taken her nudes.
*
We were fifteen minutes early, apparently, but the food court had a Burger King and Kat ordered us each a Diet Coke and fries while we waited. It was six dollars. Kat lay three singles on the counter and looked at me. The cashier looked, too. My face burned.
“Oh, um, I didn’t bring any money.”
Kat groaned. “Right, because you’re a fucking kid.” She pulled three more singles from a wallet of chipping red pleather and slid them across the counter.
“Sorry,” I said.
We sat in silence, Kat taking short sips of her soda every three or four seconds. “I’m gonna get a job this summer,” I said, peeling open a ketchup packet. It was sort of true. There was a dog up my street I sometimes walked, a few neighbors with toddlers I thought would probably let me babysit. Kat ignored me. I felt myself starting to sweat.
I didn’t know whether I wanted Cody to show up or not. When he arrived, Kat would undoubtedly want me gone, wouldn’t she? Then again, if he didn’t come, she would be devastated. Worse, with no Autumn here, she would take the devastation out on me. I could see myself already devolving into a symbol of the day for her, no longer the admiring doll for her to dress and paint and show off in front of Autumn, certainly not a peer, a mature, hot friend. I would be another fucking kid in her room, a witness to her humiliation. I wondered if I should try to figure out another ride home.
But I couldn’t look away from her. Her chin had sunk into the palm of her hand and her leg jiggled at high speed under the table, making it shake. I couldn’t help myself this time; I slipped my arm beneath the table, cupped her knee in my palm and squeezed it. She kept jiggling but didn’t pull away. We bounced together, the food wrappers crinkling from the unseen below.
*
After half an hour, a bell rang through the mall speakers; the food court was closing soon. Kat flinched and started ripping half-inch strips from the paper wrapper of her straw, her leg still jiggling with my hand on top. No one in the food court looked like a rapist or a BMX rider to me, nor like the kind of the guys I imagined Kat might be into, though admittedly I had little information to go off of. She seemed to think of most of the men from her chatrooms as jokes and losers. She never brought anyone home with her. She liked Bam Margera from Jackass, but that didn’t seem romantic.
Most of the people there were families. At the table to our right, a young couple was arguing at an elevated whisper while a baby slept in a stroller between them. To our left, an ancient looking woman was peeling pickles off her Subway sandwich, leaving them in a pile on her husband’s tray. The only other group that looked about Kat’s age were all girls, preppy ones, giddily engrossed in pulling clothes from each other’s shopping bags and holding them up to compare.
Soon, most of the other diners had cleared out. Inside the food stalls, I could see workers starting to close down for the night. Kat had barely spoken, but at some point placed a clammy hand on top of mine, securing it over her knee. I wasn’t sure she’d even noticed doing it. She startled every few minutes when a man walked by, but so far, none had stopped. A dweeby Sbarro worker waved from behind the counter and offered us the day’s leftover pizza. Kat buried both of her eyes in her free hand.
“Go pop your pimples, dickwad,” I said, rising as I whipped around to face him, furious at the invasion. He stepped backward into the kiosk but didn’t say anything, untrained as he was in the Horton rules of communication.
Kat grabbed my hand again as I sat and replaced it on her knee. So she did know it was there. She sighed and chewed at her lower lip. She had asked Autumn and I to help her pierce it the day before. For Cody, I now supposed. Autumn had held Kat’s head in both hands and rested it face-up beneath the desk lamp in the basement. I pressed an ice cube firmly to Kat’s lip with one thumb, two fingers inside the warm wet of her mouth. I felt the faint pop of her skin as I pushed the sewing needle through. A dribble of her blood and saliva had smeared on my fingertips, which now I burrowed underneath the frays of her jeans, stroking a few stray prickles of leg hair she had missed shaving.
Her lip looked swollen now, the skin below it purple with irritation under the fluorescents. She kept dragging her teeth across it as though to itch. The metal stud itself was poking out a little further than it was supposed to—we had used an earring. There was a pile of dry, yellowish puss encircling its base. I wanted to pick the scab off for her. She shifted in her seat, her eyes darting back and forth down both ends of the long mall, searching once again. The unnatural blue of her contacts gave her the look of a Siberian Husky on the hunt. One of the lenses had shifted slightly in her eye, revealing a mismatched sliver of brown around the edge. I was about to suggest we take a walk to the Piercing Pagoda before it closed to get her a proper lip ring when she finally spoke.
“Fuck this,” she said, jumping to her feet so that my hand slammed into the underside of the table. “I have to pee.”
*
Kat peed a steady, angry stream in the stall behind me for almost a minute. The mirrored wall was soap-stained from the day’s shoppers, but I could see Kat’s feet reflected beneath the stall door through the scum, her gray jeans bunched around her ankles with a streak of violet that must have been her underwear tangled in the middle. I felt the deep pull of the church bell vibrate in my gut again as she flushed and her hands appeared below the door to dress herself. I wet a paper towel to look busy and dabbed at the shadow of sparkly gray that had accumulated under my eyes throughout the evening. The old woman from the food court washed her hands beside me and shuffled back into the mall, leaving us alone.
“Kat?”
“Just shut up, you ugly fucking lesbo.”
The great bell in my stomach stopped ringing. Had she seen me looking again? God, what was wrong with me? And how was I going to get home if she finally decided she was done with me? I held my breath and stared at my face in the mirror, my skin pockmarked and powdered too light, my eyes small and unevenly painted. When she opened the stall door, her face was frigid, her alien blue eyes unreadable. My first instinct was to fight back, to call her a dumb bitch, remind her that it was she who had been stood up, who had had no one to bring here but me, the ugly fucking lesbo. She was the one with no friends and a crusty face. It was what any self-respecting Horton would have said. But my well-practiced insults, usually so available, felt too cruel even before I could properly think the words. I wasn’t a Horton, after all. And they had never been meant for Kat.
She took an angry step toward me from the stall, her face as close to mine as when she shocked me with her fingertip in the basement, her expression the same one she doled out in fits of road rage. She looked like she was about to hit me. Her lower lip bulged in a bloated scowl, the stud barely hanging on to it. It looked painful. I wanted to soothe it, to hold her. I couldn’t help myself.
I felt my thumb on her lip first, easing the stud back into place. She froze, not blinking. The skin inside her mouth was already healing over the small hole we had made; I felt it resist the push of the metal. I slid two fingers across her sticky lip gloss and inside her mouth, as I had done the day before, and held a finger flat against the newly formed skin inside. She didn’t move. I pushed again, but felt the piercing stick in place. Kat let out a shaky breath as I leaned in closer to her mouth. I rested my cheek against hers, then turned into her mouth and pressed my tongue into the front of the round stud, pushing back on the other end with my finger until I felt it finally poke through. I let the crust of infection dissolve on my taste buds like a snowflake.
When she didn’t stop me, I closed my mouth around it altogether, kissing her bottom lip, then the top. Kat stood still, her head lowered and her arms hanging limp by her side. I kissed her chin, pressed my nose into her ear, inhaled. When I touched the hair splayed across her shoulders, she grabbed my arm with her full strength and guided me roughly beneath her shirt to the curves of her chest, the peach fuzz of her belly. She pressed on my shoulders until I dropped to my knees, the rips in my pants lining up horribly with the tile of the bathroom floor and soaking in the water and whatever else was puddled there. I slid my hands around her knees as I had in the food court, the fray of their fabric manufactured into exactly the same rips as the ones I was wearing. I leaned my face into her stomach. My lips closed once more, this time around the tiny jewel above her belly button. I finally exhaled, emptying the air of the house, the car, the food court into Kat’s skin as she started to cry above me. When I looked up, her eyes were tightly shut.
We stayed in the stall door for minutes while Kat sobbed and my pants grew more and more drenched from the floor. I remained on my knees and skimmed my hands across her torso, her legs, her feet, until finally the motion sensing lights went out and she kicked in surprise, as though she had forgotten I was there. I fell backward as she stormed from the bathroom without washing her hands. I stumbled to my feet to follow.
*
The door of the minivan locked itself before I could pull it open. “No way,” said Kat from the other side of the car, her keys swinging in her outstretched hand. “You’re going in the back, you fucking perv.”
I said nothing, my eyes fixed on the ground, and slipped into the backseat. It was as littered as the front. I counted three more Dunkin’ Donuts cups under the sporadic streetlights of the interstate, plus a few broken bobby pins and an empty tampon applicator, which rolled out from beneath the driver’s seat. We rode the whole way in silence, the van fixed in the center of the lane, until we reached the far end of my street and Kat double-parked, refusing to get any closer to my house. I fingered the tears in my jeans, her old ones, still damp from the bathroom floor.
“If you tell anyone about any of this, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be at my house tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
I stepped outside and she peeled away. I was unsure what had happened, if any of it had been real, but a tight ball of thin paper towel remained crumpled in my fist as I fumbled for the spare key my mother kept under the flowerpot. Mom was asleep on the couch, thank God, though it was early. Her glasses had slipped and hung at an odd angle on her nose, magnifying one closed eye to twice its size and leaving the other completely uncovered. I took the stairs to my bedroom two at a time and on tiptoe, certain that if anyone—even my mother—saw me, they would know immediately that I had changed. I had done something strange, something unforgivable, something incredible. In my bedroom I removed Kat’s old jeans. I placed the balled up paper in the back of my sock drawer. I stared at myself in the mirror, hardly recognizable.
There were still a couple of hours left before Kat’s shift at the pizzeria usually ended and, as far as any of the Hortons knew, she had dropped me off at home hours ago. I wondered what she would do with the extra time. If she, too, would spend it alone—I pictured her in a parking lot in the van, her bare knee bouncing beyond control. Or, perhaps more likely, she’d be back in the basement, the house already so full no one bothered with explanations.
*
Despite my certainty, Autumn didn’t seem to notice any difference in me the next morning. I passed Patrick, too, in the hallway and we ignored each other as we always did at school. I breathed easier by lunchtime, but I knew I couldn’t continue at the Horton’s house as usual with Kat hating me. Soon it would be summer, and in the fall we’d be in the same school. If I wanted her to like me again—if I wanted our old equilibrium—I would need a new way in. I had never meant to upset her, only to comfort her, to show her that she didn’t need some Cody—if he even existed—to be the perfectly designed person I already knew she was. None of the rest of it—the lip ring, the kissing—had been part of the plan. I got on my own bus in the afternoon. I needed to buy myself some time.
My mother’s house was quiet, the fridge full of ingredients but functionally empty. I checked the closet by the back door, where she kept the booze. There was just one bottle of white wine, still sealed. This was her fault, I thought. If she were different, if I’d had my own sisters, if I’d had anyone else to teach me how to be—well, it wouldn’t have been like this. I felt exhausted. I flipped through the usual channels and found nothing on but Viva La Bam, which made me want to cry. Then I went back to the fridge and compromised with one of my mother’s Greek yogurt cups. Peach.
At 5:50, I looked out the window just in time to glimpse Kat’s minivan hurtling past in the direction of the pizza shop. I felt my stomach sink. Maybe she would decide to pretend nothing had ever happened. Maybe I could promise never to step foot in the basement again, maybe Autumn could move into Christina’s room. Or maybe that night would be the last I ever saw of her. Maybe Autumn would start to hate me, too. I felt the yogurt in my mouth clog my airways like glue and let it sit, suffocating me, until I thought I might faint. Then I remembered that later in the night, she’d come hurtling back the other way. A chunk of peachy mush shifted in my throat and I forced a giant swallow.
The family desktop issued a stagnant hum from the corner of the living room. In it, I thought, folders full of photos my brother had digitized for Mom’s birthday, outdated versions of The Sims and Zoo Tycoon in which, on the rare occasions we ended up at my house, Autumn and I had drowned the people we created, had let lions loose on visiting families. Was that what we were doing while Kat took photos of herself for Cody? I pictured her, riveted as ever by the desktop monitor, so that the perpetual whir of the fan cooling the motherboard inside of it began to sound like silence in the basement bedroom. I thought of my brother at UConn, of how he spoke to his friends on the phone.
yo, I might begin, perhaps as a skateboarder from Florida or a drummer in Pennsylvania. a/s/l?
sup, she might answer, and we could talk all night.
