“What do you mean?”
“I meant what I said—they’re assholes. And now I’m done playing twenty damn questions, Jess—move already so I can get changed.”
Slowly, deliberately, I moved aside.
—
WHEN I GOT HOME, MY mom’s car was in the driveway and the door was unlocked. I wandered into the kitchen and then through the living room, expecting to see her camped out with a book, waiting to tell me about how a bunch of people had canceled their appointments at the last minute. She wasn’t there.
I headed up the stairs to find my door open and Mom sitting on my bed, a basket full of laundry at her feet. Next to the basket was Anna’s box, and she was holding Anna’s cardigan.
“Mom?”
She looked up, startled, the cardigan falling out of her hands and into her lap.
“What are you doing in my room?”
“We had some cleanings canceled,” she said. “I was going to do laundry and I thought you might have some socks under your bed. And I found this.” She gestured to the box.
I said nothing. She had come into my room without permission, I thought reflexively. She should never have found the box.
“How long have you had it?” she asked.
“A while.”
“How long?”
“A couple of weeks. A policeman brought it over.”
“Were you ever going to tell us about it?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t planned on telling them. Not really.
She waited, her eyes searching my face. I didn’t know what else to say.
“I know that you…” She looked down at the box. “I know that your relationship with Anna was special, but we miss her too. We lost her too. And I don’t—”
Her voice cracked and she stopped. She got up quickly, leaving an impression in the quilt. She brushed past me as she left the room, her eyes never reaching my face.
I straightened the quilt and returned the cardigan to the box before I went after her. I found her sitting on the couch, rigid against the cushions.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her back. “It wasn’t personal.”
She inhaled slowly and then breathed out.
“It is personal. It’s very personal. And right now, I need to sit here by myself for a while.”
“I—”
“Jess, please leave me alone.” Her back looked small, even frail. She had lost weight. I hadn’t noticed. I had spent so much time noticing things and yet I’d missed it. “Please.”
“All right, I’ll go.”
I thought that would be the moment when she’d relent and tell me it was okay, that she knew I hadn’t meant anything by it.
That was what she always did. Always had done.
Instead, she remained motionless on the couch, staring straight ahead. She didn’t so much as glance back as I left the room.
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I liked the sensation of running my hand over a wire mesh fence. Liked the feel of the cold metal, the bump of it against my fingertips, the bumps coming faster and harder as I began to run, dragging my hand across it.
Once, I cut myself pretty badly on a raw edge. Anna helped me clean it, and neither of us said a word to our parents about it. We’d handled the situation, we thought. No need to bring them into it. No need for me to get a lecture about being more careful in the future.
The bandage gave it away. Mom had promptly dragged me to the doctor and he’d given me a tetanus booster, which hurt.
That night, she and Dad sat me and Anna down and gave us a lecture about the importance of not keeping things from them. We’d both nodded seriously and sworn we would never do such a thing again. But we knew: the real take-home message was that we should be more careful in the future not to get caught.
That was my initial reaction to Mom’s discovery of the box. That I should have hidden it better. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about her on the couch, unable to talk to or even to look at me. And I felt like maybe I hadn’t hidden it to protect Anna. Maybe I’d hidden it to protect myself.
It wasn’t Lily’s fault that the man asked for my photo, not hers.
It wasn’t her fault, yet it felt incredibly unfair that I alone was paying the price.
So I took a photo of myself in the bathroom of the bar that night—angry, refusing to smile—and sent it to the man.
And then, before I went back out to the parking lot, I sent it again. To a different number.
I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN people hover. Which was exactly what Mona was doing as I sat in the computer lab, trying to print out my English paper. When I’d come in ten minutes before, we’d nodded at each other and I thought that would be it. But then she’d gotten up, and I could feel her behind me. Hovering.
Reluctantly, I turned around in my chair to face her.
“Hey, Jess,” she said. “I wanted to…” She paused briefly and then started again. “I wanted to ask if you ended up finding anything.”
Finding anything. I’d been looking for so many things, yet hopefully no one, Mona included, knew about any of them.
“Finding anything?”
“On the phone?”
“Oh.” I thought of the selfie. There was no way I was telling her about that. “No, not really. I mean, it was really helpful, though. Thanks.” Then I thought of the phone from the quarry. “Nothing you can do about a phone that’s been submerged in water, I suppose?”
“In water? Probably not. You could try putting it in a bag of rice to dry it out and see if that helps. But it’s probably a brick at this point.” She smiled. “Did it fall into the bath or something? Don’t tell her I told you, but that totally happened to Lauren.”
“Something like that.” A few seconds in a clean bathtub. Untold amount of time spent in muddy quarry water. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
Mona smiled again. When
