“Couldn’t you try?”
“I could, but…” She shook her head. “Look, I know she was your sister—”
“She wasn’t just my sister; she was my twin.” I closed my eyes tight, embarrassed at how suddenly they’d begun to flood. Don’t cry, I thought. Just take the phone and get out of here. This was a bad idea. The phone is obviously ruined; it was only going to be a dead end anyway.
“Okay,” Mona said quietly. “I’m sorry. I— Phones are just really personal things. But I get that this is different, especially since—”
Especially since Anna’s never coming back.
“—you guys were twins,” she finished awkwardly.
“Thanks,” I said, pinching my arm hard to keep the tears from spilling out.
“Do you think there’s any way you might be able to fix it?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” Mona said. “I’d like to try. I’ve never seen a phone this messed up before, though. Not in person.” She stared at the phone. What she said next was so quiet I barely heard her, so quiet I wasn’t even sure she knew she asking it aloud. “Two stories, right?”
I nodded. “Two stories.” Two stories and the weight of my twin sister. This is what your phone would look like, Mona, I thought, if you had jumped. And when I looked up at her again, as she moved her fingers softly over the shattered screen, it seemed like she was thinking that same thing.
The three of us were silent for a minute. Then Mona closed her fingers around the phone and gave me a single decisive nod.
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do my best.” She stood up, tucked Anna’s phone back into the bag, and placed it in the front pocket of her backpack. Sarah’s phone she left on the table.
“Hey, what about mine?” Sarah asked.
“I changed my mind,” Mona said. “It’s time for you to get a new one.”
LATER THAT WEEK, I SAT outside Mr. Matthews’s house, looking into his living room. He’d been quieter than usual at track practice, distracted. He’d claimed to have a cold, but when one of the girls told him he should take vitamin C, he’d given her a blank look before smiling weakly and promising to stock up on orange juice.
After he arrived home, he’d hung up his coat slowly. I waited for him to go to the kitchen as he usually did. Instead, he stood in the middle of the room, staring at the window. I worried that he’d seen me, careful though I was, and then I noticed that his gaze was unfocused. He walked over to the couch, his gait unsteady, and lowered himself onto it. There, he crumpled in on himself and started to cry.
The only grown man I’d ever seen cry before was Dad, the day Anna died. Dad’s tears had seemed almost painted on his rigid face, like rain on a statue. This was something altogether different. Mr. Matthews gave himself over to it completely, crying the way you cry when no one is watching, when there’s no reason to try to keep it together. Ugly, heartbroken crying. His whole body curled up and he shook.
It was hard to watch, yet I was mesmerized, unable to look away.
I didn’t know that he was crying about Anna. He could have been crying for any number of reasons—a sick family member, a bad teaching review, anything. The weird thing was, at that moment, I wanted it to be about Anna. I wanted him to be crying for her. I wanted someone to have been so in love with her that it broke their damn heart she was gone, that pressure built up inside them every day she wasn’t there. I wanted her to have had that. Not some guy who’d already forgotten about her, who never realized how special she was.
Also, more selfishly, I wanted there to be someone else who knew the specific grief that was no longer having her in their life. Who wasn’t sure how they were supposed to make it through the rest of their days without her. Because the thought of there being someone else like that made me feel, for a brief moment, less alone.
I thought I’d never be the kind of girl who changed because of a guy. Yet I did. When he said he liked my hair down, I started wearing it down more. When he said the perfume I was wearing was too strong—even though I wasn’t even wearing any—I switched to an unscented deodorant. When he told me not to think too much, to cancel plans, I did that too.
I made those changes.
But then, after a month, I decided it had to end. Whatever it was. Whatever he and I were.
UP TO MY ELBOWS IN warm, soapy water and worn-out from a particularly grueling track practice, I felt relaxed. Very relaxed. So relaxed that I pondered aloud about the theoretical appropriateness of relationships with older men, right as I was handing my mom a sharp knife to rinse off and place on the drying rack.
The knife slipped in her hand and the tip grazed her palm. “Excuse me?” she asked.
“I think the knife got you,” I said as I watched a dot of blood blossom on her hand.
“I’m fine,” she said, not looking at it. “Did you just ask me whether I thought a relationship between a teenager and an adult could work out?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what I said. And you really should put a Band-Aid on that,” I told her as the dot grew larger. “If you don’t, you’ll get blood on the dishes and I’ll have to redo them.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated. “I’d really like you to tell me why you brought that up just now. Why you think that kind of relationship might be a good idea.”
By now I was pretty clear that she was not a fan of the concept, but her tone made me want to dig in. “There was that
