“What is it?”
“It’s her things, your sister’s things,” he said. He flushed, his pink skin turning a deep shade of salmon. “They should have been returned earlier but they got misfiled.”
I wondered if misfiled was simply a polite term for their having gotten left in some random room or shoved under someone’s desk, slowly getting buried beneath a layer of papers and miscellaneous office supplies.
“Fine,” I said. “I can take it.” I reached for the box.
He seemed unclear as to whether this was an acceptable option and continued to hold the box close to his body.
“Give it to me,” I said.
He didn’t so much hand it over as reluctantly allow me to free it from his grasp. I gave him a few extra seconds in case there was something he needed to add. He said nothing, just continued standing there with an uncertain look on his face. I gave him a small wave, for politeness’s sake, and then closed the door.
I took the box up to my room. I sat on my bed and held the box tight to my chest. I thought about Anna, about how wrong I’d been about what we were to each other, about how little she’d wanted me to know about her life.
I wondered if I had any right to look at what was inside.
I sat for a long time before I opened it. I felt guilty, like a thief, as I took out each item and laid it on my bed.
First, her phone, the screen smashed. I tried turning it on. Nothing. I put it aside.
After her phone came her shoes, tights, dress, cardigan, underwear, and hair clip. Everything she had been wearing that night, neatly folded. The idea of a policeman, or even policewoman, touching her socks, her underwear, made my stomach clench. It was difficult to accept how after her death nothing had been private anymore.
I ran my hands over her cardigan. I remembered her wearing it after she first got it, just months earlier, how I’d been envious of how warm it looked. In my arms, it was heavy and soft, but when I raised it to my face it didn’t smell like Anna; it smelled like detergent. Not even the detergent we used. They must have washed it. I didn’t want to think about why they’d have done that.
I left the cardigan draped over my lap as I unfolded the dress. It was a deep, dark purple—eggplant, I guess it would be called. Toward the bottom edge a button was missing, only a scrap of thread left behind. I searched the box to see if it had fallen off inside, but it wasn’t there. It must have fallen off that night. When she fell.
I laid the dress on my bed and then I went outside, to the back of our house, to the stretch of grass beneath Anna’s window. I got down on my knees and searched the grass, the dirt and stones beneath it, looking for the white button, for that glint of pearl, planning to sew it back onto the dress. I wanted to make one small thing of hers whole again, the way it should be.
I couldn’t find it, not even after I expanded the area I searched, trying to account for its being moved around under layers of snow and ice. I kept searching, though, until I heard my parents’ car coming up the drive. Only then did I dive back into the house and run upstairs to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my hands so they wouldn’t question me about the layer of dirt under my nails.
And before I went downstairs for dinner, I refolded the dress and cardigan and tucked them back in the box. I was about to add her phone as well, but I hesitated. I ultimately set it aside, and then gently slid the box, with the rest of Anna’s things, under my bed, out of sight.
I didn’t want anyone else touching her things. They’d been touched too much already.
USUALLY WHEN I SAT DOWN on the bus, I got a nod from Sarah and not much more. Sarah was not exactly a morning person. But the very moment I sat down the next day, Sarah whipped off her headphones and treated me to a long rant about driver’s ed. It seemed she’d been storing up all her feelings and frustrations about it, and I was, apparently, the lucky recipient. I waited it out as best I could.
“Are you done now?” I asked, after she’d finally paused for longer than a brief second to draw another breath.
“For the moment,” she said. “But if I fail the test, there’ll be a whole other round, I promise you. And if the instructor tells me again that it’s ‘cute’ how nervous I am, then you’ll need to bring me a cake with a saw in it while I’m in jail.”
“Noted,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to ask—do you really have a ‘phone guy’?”
“Yep. Phone girl, actually.” Then she paused and considered. “Or maybe as a feminist I should say phone woman?”
“Is she good?”
“Yeah. I used to take it to the place where I bought it, but they’d usually try to get me to buy a new one rather than repairing it—somehow none of the stuff I do is ever covered under warranty. Mona’s managed to keep it limping along for years.”
“Mona? Mona Addle is your phone woman?”
“Yep.”
“How did that happen?”
Sarah raised her eyebrows at me. “You see, I’m not one hundred percent sure whether you’re surprised because you don’t think she’s capable of fixing people’s phones, or because you don’t understand what a girl like Mona would have to do with the humble likes of me.”
I considered these two choices. Honestly, I was a bit surprised by both.
Sarah laughed. “Wow, you need to work on your poker face. Mona is a secret nerd. It’s not even like it’s a real secret—it’s just, between all the curls and the cheerleading, people manage
