Indigo

6

Later that night, I lay on my bed, sharpening my sketching pencil. I thought of Mia-Joy. I glanced at my phone on the nightstand. I knew I should call her. A memory hit me, clear as day. Sixth-grade summer. Mia-Joy had been all limbs and teeth, so skinny. Bossy and loud, with frizzy hair. But then something had happened the year of seventh grade, because when I came back that next summer, Mia-Joy had blossomed, grown into herself. She’d become a swan. So then she was tall, thin, striking. Bossy and loud. Still herself. But what I most admired, and didn’t realize until later, was that she hadn’t really changed. Not inside. She had become the most beautiful teenager, the most beautiful girl most of us had ever seen in real life, and she didn’t change.

She was obsessed with modeling, sure. She forced me to make audition tapes of her for every last reality TV modeling show in the world. But she still laughed that same loud bark of a laugh. She still kept the same friends.

At that moment, I looked up from my pencil and sighed. I realized how much I liked and admired Mia-Joy. How much I missed her. She never shut up. She watched only reality TV. She talked more and louder than anyone. She read only fashion magazines and apologized for nothing. God, she was fun.

She reminded me of Annaliese. Just a more brash, real version of Annaliese, without the ridiculous collection of cowboy boots and love of all things country-western. I had a sudden flash of Annaliese and me doing the line dance at the sophomore spring fling. She had worn that belt buckle with the bull horns. Oh God. I smiled and flopped back onto my pillow. It made my throat tighten a little bit. I thought of the old comics that Annaliese and I had been drawing right before the day with Sophie. Thinly veiled comics about our teachers at school. Poking fun at Mr. Vergara with his skinny jeans. Mrs. Temperance and her ’80s perm. I laughed out loud.

It sounded so sad as it echoed off the walls of my room.

It hurt to remember how easy things used to be. I had been on a trajectory. My life was going in the right direction. It was clean and uncomplicated. How I missed it. How much I had taken for granted.

I flashed back to the memory of Cody telling me how my hair was the exact shade of a Hershey’s Kiss. I used to love that. I would tell people that story. I thought it was so cute. Now, when I thought of that, of Cody and me together, I wanted to punch him. Just punch him right in the jaw. I knew it wasn’t fair. But it all just seemed so … innocent, so self-indulgent. Our stupid surface romance. I wanted to scream at my former self: You don’t even know what’s important! You have no handle on things! Wake up! I cringed when I thought of how our biggest fight had been over how he hadn’t texted me when he told me he would one night. Not over anything actually important, like when he became frustrated with me when I tried to talk to him about music, about deeper things, about dreams and the future, about life and what it meant to me.

I thought of the concert when I had first played Requiem. It was my debut with the Chicago Junior Symphony. When I got offstage, Cody had met me with one red rose, and he looked all handsome and preppy in his khakis and collared shirt. “What did you think?” I asked, still a little out of breath and existing on that other plane, the one where I didn’t just play music, I played emotion, life, possibility.

“Great,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. He bounced on his heels. He checked his cell phone. I still had goose bumps, feeling the magic of the music, right there, coursing under my skin. “We can still meet up with everybody downtown if we hurry.” He yanked on my elbow.

“Oh,” I said, “yeah.” I forced a smile and hurried out with my friends.

Because I knew he was just being Cody. He was popular and hot. A good prank partner. For his senior prom, we won king and queen, and we went up to the podium wearing those goofy glasses with the big noses and mustaches. We dressed up as Fred and Daphne from Scooby-Doo for Halloween. We sailed on the weekends on Lake Michigan with his parents. We went to all the fun parties. He made me cooler, more popular, and, fluck, he was fun.

But he didn’t get me. I knew that even then, and it made me feel shallow.

I shook the memories away. Annaliese had tried after Sophie. She had tried. Cody had given up easily. And I had not been surprised. I had pushed them both away. I had pushed everyone away.

I grabbed my phone, finally working up the courage to call Mia-Joy. When she answered, I broke down. “I’m so sorry, Mia-Joy.”

“I know, Corrine. It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t speak to you at the funeral or that I—”

“Really. It’s okay.” And Mia-Joy sounded so fine. She sounded honest and forgiving. She always was.

“At the cemetery, we shared stories about her. Celebrated her life,” Mia-Joy said. “I missed you there. You would’ve liked it, I think.”

“Celebrated her life,” I repeated. And I tried to hold on to that phrase.

Mia-Joy told me some of the funny stories that people shared about Granny Lucy when she was younger, teaching high school typing, how she used to slap kids’ knuckles with a ruler if they weren’t paying attention. How she used to wear her hair in cornrows, enough beads at the ends of them to make music every time she turned her head. I laughed with Mia-Joy and let her talk. She went on and on, and I listened, glad that I could at least do that for her.

“I should go,” she said after a long while, sighing into the phone. “It’s super late.”

But I had one more thing I wanted to ask. “Mia-Joy, tell me what you know about Rennick Lane. Are you guys friends?”

“Why?”

“He knows things about me,” I said.

“Corrine, he’s Ren from the Pen. From school.”

I backtracked in my mind a little bit. Liberty was a big place, and it was true that I had gotten in the habit of purposely not looking into people’s faces, but I heard things. Rennick Lane was Ren from the Pen? The kid that everyone talked about last fall when he came to our school? That seemed crazy.

“Penton Charter?” I asked.

“Got kicked out. Had to go to public school. It’s no big secret.”

“And what was it for?” I had heard things. And I could conjure the memory of Rennick’s silhouette now. Always alone, that movie-star rebel look about him. Leather jacket in the winter. Jeans and a T-shirt. Too cool.

“I don’t know. Nobody really does, Corrine. Fighting, I heard. But he doesn’t really seem the type, does he?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“He seems like he knows you. Acts like it. I thought you knew him.”

“I thought you knew him.”

“I’ll tell you what. I watched him stick up for that boy with Down syndrome, Jarvis, you know who I’m talking about?”

“I do.”

“Kids were being awful to him in the cafeteria. That one greasy kid, Pollack? He actually shoved pudding in Jarvis’s face. It was ugly. Rennick took that douchebag by the collar and made him apologize to Jarvis. It was something.”

“Yeah?” I said, feeling something for Rennick now. Pride?

“He eats with Jarvis once in a while now. He seems nice enough. I don’t like to believe the gossip.”

“Me either,” I said, thinking of what kids probably said about me, what I knew they said about me. “Thanks.”

“Corrine?”

“What?”

“No one, and I mean no one, thinks that the death of a ninety-year-old lady is your fault.”

I swallowed hard. “Thanks,” I said, and hung up quickly before Mia-Joy could hear the tears in my voice.