I decided to start with the obvious. I looked under the pillow I’d just slept on, felt underneath the mattress, still warm from my body. Nothing.
I lay down on the floor to look under her bed. It was too dark to see much, so I stuck my arm underneath and swept a cascade of clutter into the center of the room.
All told, it was pretty disgusting. Unwashed socks; dusty, dog-eared books; pens and pencils. Some of the pens had bite marks from her habit of chewing on them.
After saving a couple of the nicer, unchewed pens—most of which I was pretty sure had been mine to begin with—I pushed everything else back under the bed.
On her end table was a lamp and a framed picture of us. I was trying to be efficient, clinical, about this process, but I couldn’t help picking up the picture.
It was one of my favorites of us, taken back when we were eight. We lay in the backyard grass, our heads touching, our hair swirled together, and our eyes closed, the light around us the perfect hazy gold of perfume commercials. Mom had taken it, thinking she’d captured us napping in the afternoon sun. We’d never told her that she was wrong, that we’d actually been wide-awake, trying to communicate without words, to project our thoughts to each other, concentrating so intently that we hadn’t noticed her walk up and take the photograph.
In the photo, Anna’s lips were curled up slightly, and mine were curled down. She looked like she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I looked like I was trying to translate a foreign language.
A tearing sensation started inside me, so I put the photograph back down, carefully placing it at the same angle to the lamp as it had been before, and opened the drawer. More pens. Several tins of breath mints. A couple of cardboard coasters with bright patterns, which was ironic considering that she—like our dad—never remembered to actually use a coaster. And that was it.
In her closet, I didn’t find anything remarkable other than a rumpled hooded sweater with blue stripes that at first I couldn’t place. It looked familiar, but it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t hers either. I looked at it more closely. Then I remembered Anna coming back from cross-country a few weeks earlier, soaking wet from an unexpected rainstorm, and Lily careening in behind her, laughing. Lily’d been wearing this sweater. Anna must have hung it up to dry and then forgotten about it. I made a mental note to give it back to Lily.
Next, I sat cross-legged on the floor with Anna’s backpack and pulled everything out, starting with her notebooks, looking for anything that might be useful. The first three contained only notes for school and the occasional abstract doodle.
The fourth, her English notebook, was more promising. In the back were pages of notes between her and Lily. One page started off with Lily writing a paean to her boyfriend, Charlie (I mean, those eyelashes of his—they go on for miles! SO CUTE!! And he brought me flowers on Friday! FLOWERS!). I tried not to imagine Anna smiling as she read it, laughing.
Farther down on the page, Lily wrote: You like anyone? It’d be so fun for us to all go out.
Unfortunately, Anna’s response was vague: I’ll think about it.
Fine, Lily wrote. Better do it soon or I’ll come up with a list. Make you pick one.
I flipped to the next page, but it was blank.
Two sheets later, the notes started again.
Lily: Oh my God, half the class is asleep, but you’re so into this. You and Mr. M should just get a room already.
Anna: Not funny.
Lily: Tell me about all the great books, you bespectacled man hunk. Tell me about them slow.
Anna: You’re an idiot.
Lily was an idiot, I thought.
The rest of the notes weren’t anything special, mostly complaints about it getting cold, having too much homework, and being sore from cross-country. So I set the notebooks aside and I moved on to Anna’s bookshelf. My books were organized by genre, and then alphabetically by the author’s last name. Anna’s didn’t seem to follow any system.
On the lowest shelf, there were some sheets of paper, folded small. I gently unfolded them, and on the open pages I recognized Anna’s handwriting.
It was poetry. I hadn’t known she wrote poetry.
I’d seen her sitting in the bleachers, waiting for cross-country to start, a notebook in her lap and a pen in her hand. She’d write and then pause, considering her next word. I’d assumed she was doing work for class, or maybe writing a story.
The poems were all about nature. The changing colors of the leaves and the promise of snow, the sound of dry grass, the feel of damp earth.
At least until I got to the last one. The last one was different.
It wasn’t about nature—it was about a person.
It was a love poem.
It lacked any concrete details, such as names or physical descriptions, but it was obviously about someone she knew well. About a relationship that had been going on for some time.
I’d missed even more than I’d realized.
THERE WERE DECISIONS TO MAKE.
Green sweater? No, she’d worn that for her school picture.
Gray turtleneck? No, she’d borrowed it all the time. It probably even smelled like those mints she’d been obsessed with. I picked up the turtleneck and breathed in. Yes, mint. It was hard to put it down.
Today was going to be my first day back at school after four weeks away, and it was important, I thought, not to wear anything people might associate too closely with Anna. I’d made that mistake a few days after the funeral, when I’d worn a red sweater of hers and Mom immediately started crying when she saw it. I’d forgotten she’d knitted it for Anna—that they’d picked out the pattern and the wool together. There were land mines, I
