I hung up, hoping she would call me back before it was too late. Suddenly it seemed as if this would be the fate of every connection I’d ever had—that I wouldn’t get a chance to say good-bye. They’d wonder how I was doing at first, but after a while they’d stop thinking about me as much. They’d move on. And eventually they’d forget me altogether. Out of sight, out of mind. It was one thing to lose the people you love. That happens to everybody.
But it was another thing to lose them because you just… faded away.
I didn’t want to fade away.
I started to put my phone in my backpack but decided that if I was going to drop off the radar, I wanted to talk to Kolby once more. To thank him for being there when I had nothing. Or maybe simply to hear his voice. I missed him.
I dialed.
“Hello?”
I blinked. I had been expecting Kolby’s voice but was greeted instead by his little sister.
“Tracy?”
“Yeah? Who is this?”
“It’s Jersey. Is Kolby there?”
“No.”
“Oh. You know when he’ll be back?”
There was some clicking, and muffled noises of movement. I thought I could hear her mother’s voice getting softer and fading into the background, and then I could hear Tracy breathing into the phone. Finally, she said, “No, he’s in the hospital right now.”
That was not at all what I’d been expecting to hear. “What? Why? What happened?”
“It’s not really a big deal or anything, I don’t think, but he’s got some kind of infection on his arm. Where he got cut. The doctors said something about it being a fungus and they’re just wanting to be safe. It’s really gross-looking.”
I remembered how I’d tried to wrap his arm with that bandanna, to keep the wound clean, and immediately I felt guilty. I’d been calling to thank him for taking care of me those first couple days, and here he was in the hospital because I hadn’t taken good enough care of him.
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know Kolby,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call back. Tell him I said I hope he gets better soon.”
“Okay, Jersey.”
I hung up, thinking about how randomly we’d all been affected by the tornado. I’d lost everything. Jane was missing. Kolby was in the hospital. Dani was totally fine. It didn’t make sense.
I dropped the phone into Marin’s purse and pulled out a piece of gum. I chewed it, the flash of flavor making my mouth water, and thought about all the times I’d called Marin a nuisance, had made her feel unwelcome and unwanted, the same way I was feeling now. Not being wanted was the loneliest feeling in the world, it seemed, and if I could have had one more moment with Marin, I would have been sure to tell her I didn’t mean it. She wasn’t a pest. I loved her. She was wanted. More than she could ever know.
I didn’t have a picture to draw on this piece of foil. Only a message, so I wrote it in careful bubble letters: Marin is not a nuisance.
I folded the foil and stashed it in the zippered compartment, liking the way the pieces bounced against one another in the open pocket, glinting at me happily.
Unsure of what to do next, I pulled out Mom’s lipstick, rolled it all the way to the top, and smelled it. The waxy scent reminded me of Mom, who had given the lipstick to Marin one night out of the blue.
“Marin,” she’d said, holding out the little tube in the palm of her hand. “I don’t think this color really works for me. Would you like it?”
I didn’t wear lipstick and my mother knew that. But Marin lived to squish makeup onto her face. Anything to make her feel more grown up, more like Mom.
Marin, who had been sitting on the other end of the sofa, sat up, her thumb popping wetly out of her mouth as her eyes grew wide.
“Yes!” she gasped, and stampeded over me with her hand outstretched. Mom had placed the lipstick gently in her hand and admonished her, “Only around the house, okay?”
“Okay, Mama,” Marin had responded, pulling the lid off the lipstick and peering down into the tube earnestly. “It’s for special only.”
She’d run off and put it in her purse. She’d never worn it. Not one time. Marin, who loved lipstick like nothing else. She’d kept it special, like she’d promised.
Once I asked her why she didn’t ever wear it.
“It’s for special,” she’d replied. “I like it sharp.”
I knew what she’d meant. She liked the way the lipstick angled up into a tip. She liked how new it was.
I spread some on my lips and pushed them together, smearing it around. Then I capped it quickly, afraid that if I left it open too long I would lose the scent of my mom forever. With her face already receding from my memory, I couldn’t afford to lose any more pieces of her. I licked my lips, liking the way the wax felt smooth against my tongue, liking the way it tasted.
I dug around a bit more, then picked up the playing cards, spreading them out to play a quick couple games of Chameleon.
I played until the house was dark, except for the blue of the constantly running television flickering onto the porch from the living room. I stashed Marin’s purse and went inside.
As quietly as I could, I tiptoed to the bathroom, hoping to go unnoticed. But as I passed the living room on my way back, Grandmother Billie’s voice cut through the recorded laugh track of whatever sitcom she was watching.
“I don’t know if you think you’re gettin’ outta doin’ those dishes tonight because of that scene with the door, but you’re not,” she said.
With a sigh, I went into the kitchen and bellied up to the sink, which was positively overflowing with dishes. They must have had a feast. I filled the sink with water and started scrubbing, hearing Marin’s little voice in my head, singing the song she always sang in the bath. “B is for bubble. Bubble, bubble, bubble…”
I made a mental note to draw that on gum foil later. I didn’t want to forget the bubble song.
When I was done, I opened the fridge and took inventory. I had no idea what dinner had been, but whatever it was, there were no leftovers. Instead, I made myself a sandwich and cut up a few slices of cucumber. I didn’t know if the ingredients were spoken for, but I figured they couldn’t starve me. If nobody was going to take care of me, I would have to take care of myself and live with the consequences.
As I sat down with my food, I heard the sound of footsteps on the wooden basement stairs. Aunt Terry appeared at the top of the steps, holding the laundry basket I’d left behind earlier in the day. She extended her arms toward me.
“I brought your laundry up,” she said, setting the basket on the table next to me.
I swallowed. “Thank you.”
“I heard what happened this afternoon.” She pulled out a chair and sat down. “Clay’s all upset because he’s got to do a little work. It’ll be good for him.”
I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and set the sandwich on my plate. “I just wanted out of the basement. I kind of freaked. It’s stupid, I know.”
Terry waved her hand. “It’s not stupid. I get it. Listen, don’t take what they say to heart.” She ran her fingernail along the side of the basket, tracing the squares. “Lexi and Meg. They’re just jealous of you.”
“Jealous? Of me?” What did I have that they could possibly be jealous of? They were prettier, they had a mom and dad, and from what I could tell, they had everyone in the house—except for maybe Terry—eating out of the palms of their pretty little hands.
“Maybe I should’ve said they’re threatened by you. They think you’re gonna steal their daddy.”
I took a breath. “I feel like nobody wants me here.”
“They don’t,” she said. “But maybe they’ll come around. You never know. Weirder things have happened.”
But something told me that wasn’t going to happen. Even if Lexi and Meg found a way to completely ignore that I existed, they would never “c
ome around.” Not really. If I was looking for friendship, I was in the wrong place.
“I should probably get myself to bed,” Terry said, pushing up from the table with a grunt. “Hey, did you ever find out about the funerals? Are they sometime soon?”
I shook my head. “I missed them.”
She froze, and I nearly melted under her sad gaze. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And then, seemingly struggling with what else to say, she gave up and disappeared down the hall toward her bedroom.
I ate my sandwich in silence, hating how it seemed like everything in my life suddenly could be summed up by that one sentence: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
After I finished eating, I washed my plate and changed into a pair of Terry’s pajamas, then went back outside, staying on the porch like the family dog. The air felt crisp and cool, summer night air, and I rolled all of my new clean clothes into tight rolls and slipped them, one by one, into the backpack, which I shoved into its spot behind the couch with Marin’s purse.
I curled up in my blanket and listened to the night sounds around me—crickets and frogs and cicadas and barking dogs—and tried not to think about this being my new reality, even while I knew it was.
Nobody was coming to rescue me. Nobody was going to keep me safe. It was all up to me now.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Over the next few weeks, I slipped into a routine at my grandparents’ house. Get up, sneak to the shower, get dressed, wash the morning dishes, eat. Go outside, fold my bedding, play cards, think about Mom and Marin, and lie as low as possible until night fell, hoping nobody would bother me once I was asleep.
Ignore my half sisters.
Ignore my father and stepmother.
Ignore the grunts and orders of my grandparents.
Ignore, ignore, ignore.
I wrote a bunch of new foils.
Marin’s hair bounces when she runs.
I call Marin “Tippy” because she walks on her tiptoes.
Marin knows everything there is to know about dolphins.
Marin’s eyes sparkle when she dances.
Marin is a princess in orange-and-black velvet.
Marin sings in the bath.
Marin likes red Popsicles the best.
Marin can roller-skate.
Marin’s eyelashes are so long.
For every foil, there was a memory, so sweet and so clear I thought my heart might break in two. Not saying good-bye to them messed with me, made me mentally curl in on myself, made me pull away. I stopped checking my phone for texts. I stopped calling Dani. I stopped caring what happened to Ronnie or to anyone who wasn’t me. In my mind, even Ronnie wasn’t grieving as hard as I was, because he at least got to go to the funerals and I hadn’t even gotten that much.
Instead, I owned my grief. Turned it into something physical and ugly and carried it around in my gut.
“Hey,” I heard one morning while I sat on my couch, staring at the world sullenly through the wet ends of my hair. I picked at the dry skin on my heels, softened by the shower, and zoned out, the tiny squares of the porch screen getting bigger and bigger under my gaze. Aunt Terry stepped out onto the porch, sat in the lawn chair Clay had pulled out that first night and nobody had bothered to put back. “I haven’t talked to you in days. You okay?”
I tore my gaze away from the yard and blinked, her face shaded in purple where the light had been in my eyes a few moments before. “Not really,” I said.
“You seen your dad lately?”
I shook my head. I’d been avoiding him, and especially Tonette, ever since she’d screamed at me for “taking the last burger” the one night I tried to eat dinner with the family.
“You didn’t even think other people might want to eat, did you?” she’d yelled.
Why would I? I wanted to respond. Who is thinking about me? Who is making sure I get anything?
“Has he checked on you at all?” Terry asked, referring to Clay.
“No, but I kind of like it that way,” I said. “When he’s checking on me, he’s yelling at me. Tonette, too.”
I half expected Terry to argue about it, to tell me that yelling was Tonette’s way or that Clay was the kind of guy who didn’t show his feelings, or maybe worst of all, to say the same thing Dani’s mom had said, that this would take time. But she didn’t say any of those things. Because she knew I was right.
“You need a mama,” she finally said, very quietly.
I shrugged, numb, and pulled a hunk of dead skin off my heel, letting it drop to the peeling wood floor. Yes, I did need a mama. But my mama was gone. And nobody else could stand in. The end. “Whatever,” I said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t be your mama, you understand. I can’t even take care of my own kids most of the time,” Terry added.
“I know.”
“And Billie ain’t a good mama, take my word for that.”
I didn’t need to take her word for it. I’d already seen what kind of mom Billie was. “I know.”
“And Tonette spoils those girls. She don’t even know what they’re really like, she’s so blind.”
I shrugged again. It didn’t matter what Tonette saw or didn’t see in those girls. It only mattered what she saw and didn’t see in me.
“Listen, I don’t got a ton of money, but how about we go into town and get haircuts or something?” Terry asked.
“Haircuts?”
She shrugged, a sheepish smile crossing her face. “I got boys. Haircuts is the best I can do with a girl.”
It occurred to me that nobody was going to say one way or another whether I needed or didn’t need a haircut. Or a visit to the dentist. Or to study or to learn to drive or to eat regularly or do any of the things I was used to being reminded to do. It was all up to me now, a thought that was both empowering and frightening as hell.
“Okay,” I said, my hands searching the back of my hair involuntarily. “I could use a haircut.”
Terry left the boys with Grandmother Billie and we scooted into the car Grandfather Harold had picked me up from the motel in. It was the first time I’d left the house since I’d arrived there. I sat in the front seat, holding Marin’s purse in my lap, more out of habit than because I needed it for anything, and marveled at how close the main strip of town was. Out on my porch, I’d felt so very far away from the rest of the world. Five or ten minutes on foot would have had me at the first gas station, another five would have gotten me to the teeny movie theater. Another five would have gotten me to pretty much anywhere else I wanted to be. How odd to feel so isolated when civilization was literally all around you.
Terry pulled up to a strip mall and swung into a parking space outside a shop called Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor.
Inside, I was immediately swept away by the smell. Taken to so many different places in my past that I almost felt pulled apart. Times I’d been with Mom, nervously waiting for a color to set or for a new cut to be revealed. Times we’d taken Marin so she could get her tiny nails painted. Times I’d gone with Dani and her mom for pedicures or waited for Jane to get highlights done.
The last time I’d been in a beauty salon had been the weekend before the tornado, getting my hair fixed for prom.
Dani and Jane and I had decided to go as each other’s dates, even though Dani had been asked by three different guys and Jane had sort of started seeing a boy she’d met at an orchestra competition in April, and I probably could have talked Kolby into going with me.
But we’d made the decision that senior prom was for dates and romantic dinners and swanky nights out; junior prom was for fun. This was our “fun” year.
We’d gone all out. Big, floor-length poufy formals filled with tulle that ate us up when we sat down. Expensive mani-pedis and updos, sparkly shoes that we kicked off the second we hit the dance floor and ignored for the rest of the night, dinner at Froggy’s, where we played video games while we waited for our food.
It had been so much fun.
; And I had completely forgotten about it until I smelled the astringent odors of permanents and hair dyes and nail polish and remover and glue. My old life was that far away. Gone. As if the tornado’s damage would never be complete. It had destroyed my present, laid waste to my future, and was now busy eating up my history, too, as I forgot what life was like before.
“May I help you?” a pink-haired woman said, peering up at us over a massive marble countertop.
“We’d like to get our hair done,” Terry said. “Whoever’s available is fine.”
The woman ran her sparkly black-tipped fingernail down a schedule book, then called over her shoulder, “Jonas? You got time for two walk-ins?”
“Yep,” a voice called, and she motioned for Terry to head back to wherever the voice had come from.
“Come on,” Terry said, grabbing the sleeve of my shirt between her two fingers. “You can help me decide what to do. I haven’t had my hair done in a shop in prolly ten years. Always just have Billie cut it.”
We made our way back to the salon chair, where a man wearing all black and practically dripping in pomade assessed us over a pair of round-rimmed spectacles.
“Ladies,” he said. “Who’s first?”
I pointed at Terry, and she sat down in the chair, bashfully taking in her image in the mirror. Her hair was long and limp, hanging halfway down her back in split-ended clumps. Jonas ran his fingers through it appraisingly.
“What are we doing?” he asked, and Terry looked over at me, questioningly, almost panicky.
I shrugged. “What do you want? Short?”
She giggled. “I don’t know. I never did this before.” She turned back to the mirror and studied her reflection, twisting her head to one side, then the other. “Yeah. Okay. Short will work.” She glanced at me again. “Something fun, right? A change. A new me.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, the feeling so foreign I almost yanked it away, but caught myself. “We both need reinvention, don’t we?”
I nodded. Why not? She was totally right. It hadn’t been my choice to reinvent myself. It had been thrust upon me and it sucked. But here I was in my crappy circumstances. This was my life now. Why not make a whole new Jersey? Start over. Who was going to notice, anyway? “Let’s get color, too,” I said, squeezing back.