“What? You’ve never been blood sisters with anyone before, Lily? My goodness, where have you been hiding all these years?”
“There’s no one to be sisters with, Carol Ann. You know that.” I felt vaguely superior for a moment, but she ended that.
“We need a knife.”
“Why?”
“My Lord in heaven, Lily, how do you think we’re going to get at the blood?”
So I snuck out of my room, slunk down the stairs, gripping each with my toes so the wind didn’t whisk me away when it tore the roof off the house. The storm was loud enough that Mama didn’t hear me go into the kitchen, get a knife from the rack next to the stove, and make my way back up the stairs into my room. Carol Ann’s eyes lit up when she saw the knife, the five- inch blade sharpened to a razor’s edge.
“Give that to me.”
I did, a sense of wrongness making my hand tremble. I think I knew deep in my heart that Mama wouldn’t want me becoming blood sisters with anyone, no matter what the course of action that led me there. But that was Carol Ann for you. She could always convince me to see things her way.
Carol Ann took one of my sheer cotton sweaters, a red one, and laid it over the lamp, so the light fragmented like a lung’s pink froth and the room became like thin blood. We sat in the middle of the floor, Indian-style, facing each other. She made sure our legs were touching. I was scared.
“Okay. Stop fretting. This will only hurt for a second, then it will be all over. You still want to be my blood sister, right?”
I swallowed hard. Would this make us one? I didn’t want that. No, I didn’t want that at all. A tiny corner of my mind said, “Go find your Mama, let Carol Ann do this by herself.”
“I think so,” I answered instead.
“You think? Now Lily, what did I say about you thinking? That’s what I’m here for. I do the thinking for both of us, and everything always turns out just fine. Now quit being such a baby and give me your arm. Your right arm.”
I didn’t want Carol Ann to think I was a baby. I held out my arm, which only shook for a second.
Carol Ann was mumbling something, an incantation of sorts. Then she held up the knife and smiled. “With this blade, I christen thee.” She ran the blade along the inside of her right arm, bright red blood blooming in the furrows created in her tender flesh. She smirked, a joyous glow lighting her translucent skin, and took my arm. The point of the knifed dug into the crook of my elbow. “Say it,” she hissed.
“With this blade, I christen thee.” My voice trembled. She drew the knife along my arm and I almost fainted when I saw the blood, dark red, much darker than Carol Ann’s. Then she took my arm and her arm and held them together. We stood, attached, and walked in a circle, eyes locked, blood spilling into each other.
“Our blood mingles, and we become one. You are now as much Carol Ann as I am, and I am as much Lily as you are. We are one, sisters in blood.”
Redness slipped down my elbow. Spots danced merrily in my vision.
Carol Ann’s eye sparkled. “Quick, we need to tie this together, let our blood flow through each other’s veins while our hearts still beat.”
She grabbed a sock off the floor and wound it around our arms, dabbing at the rivulets before they splashed on the floor of my bedroom, then beckoned me to lay down next to her. I put my head in her lap, my arm stretched and tied to hers, and she held me as our blood became one. I felt at peace. The ferocity of the storm seemed to lessen, and I felt calm, sleepy even.
“LILY!” The scream made me jump. It was Mama. She saw what Carol Ann and I had done. I didn’t care. I was tired. It was too much trouble to worry about the beating I was going to get.
I didn’t get to see Carol Ann the rest of that muggy summer. Mama sent me away to a white place that smelled of antiseptic and urine. I hated it.
I came back from the white place in the fall, quieter, more watchful than before. The leaves were red and orange and brown, the skies were crisp and blue. I was worried that Carol Ann might have moved away; the drive was empty across the street, the window dark. When I asked Mama, she told me to quit it already. No more talk of Carol Ann. I wasn’t allowed to see her, to play with her, anymore.
I went back to school that year. Mama had been keeping me home before, teaching me herself, but she figured it was time for me to leave the nest. I needed to be around more girls and boys my age. I was so happy that she sent me to school at last, because Carol Ann was there. She had moved, but only a couple of streets over. She was zoned to the junior high, just like I was.
We didn’t exactly pick up where we left off. Carol Ann had many other friends now. But I’d catch her watching me as I stood on the periphery of her group of devotees, and she’d wink at me in welcome. Those moments warmed my heart and soul. She was still my Carol Ann, even though I shared her with my classmates.
The school year progressed without incident until Carol Ann came up with a new game. The pass-out game. Every girl in school wanted to be a part of it. We’d line up in the bathrooms, stand with our backs against the wall, and hold our breath until the world got spinny. Carol Ann would cover our hearts with her hands and push. Hard. We’d pass out cold, some sliding down the walls, some keeling over. Carol Ann reasoned that it stopped our hearts for a moment, that in that brief time we could see God. That’s why the teachers got so upset when they found out.
Of course, they found out when
They rezoned us for the ninth grade; decided we were big enough to go to high school. I had to take the bus, which I normally hated, because it drove past the Johnsons’ farm, and their copse of pine trees with the hanging man in them. I knew it wasn’t a real dead man, but the branches in one of the trees had died, and they drooped brown against the evergreen-arms, legs, torso, and broken neck. Mama used to drive me to Doctor Halloway this route, ignoring my requests to go the long way past Tappy’s place. I hated this road as a young girl; just knew the hanging man would get out of that tree and follow me home.
When the bus would pass it by, I’d try not to look. Since I was a little older now, it wasn’t so bad in the daylight. But as winter came along and the days shortened, the hanging man waited for me in the dusky gloom. He spoke to me, the deadness of the pine needles brown and dusty like a grave.
The next year, Carol Ann started taking the bus. Life got better. She was only on it some days, because she had a lot of dates now. Some days, after school, I’d watch Carol Ann riding off in cars with shiny, clean boys, throwing a grin over her shoulder as they faded into the gloaming. But there were times when she’d come out of the school, clothes rumpled, mouth red and raw, scabs forming on her knees. She’d jump on the bus just before it pulled away from the curb and wouldn’t want to talk.
But mostly, we sat together in the back, in those idyllic days, talking about boys and teachers, the upcoming dances and who was doing it. I knew Carol Ann was. You could tell that about her. I was fascinated by sex, though I’d never experienced it. Carol Ann promised to tell me all about it.
She snuck vodka from her parents’ house and slipped it into her milk some mornings. She’d share the treat with me, and we’d get boneless in the back of the bus, giggling our fool heads off. She taught me how to make a homemade scar tattoo, using the initials of a boy I liked. She took the eraser end of a pencil and ran it up and down her arm a million times until a shiny raw burn in the shape of a J appeared. She handed the pencil to me, and I tore at my skin until a misaligned M welled blood. I have that M to this day. I don’t remember which boy it was for.
The bus driver, Mrs. Bean, caught us with the vodka-laced milk. Carol Ann wasn’t allowed to ride the bus anymore. I didn’t see her as much after that. I think the school and Mama really did their best to keep us apart. It was probably a wise decision. But I felt incomplete without her at my side.
Now that I’m grown, away from Mama’s house, away from Carol Ann, I remember the little things. Spilling on Carol Ann’s bike, scraping the length of my thigh on the gravel. The year she pushed me into the cactus while we were trick-or-treating. The day I nearly drowned when I fell through the ice on Gideon’s Lake, and she laughed watching me panic before she went for help. Carol Ann did nothing but get me in trouble, and I was happy to leave her behind as an adult.
So you can imagine my shock and surprise when the doorbell rang, late one evening, and Carol Ann was on my front step. Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew something was dreadfully wrong.
