Abigail

When I was twelve I walked into my living room at the exact moment my sister stepped off a chair. The rope snapped up around her chin like headgear. She broke three of her teeth when her jaw hit the edge of my mother’s antique trunk.

“Are you alright?”

My lips were blue and sticky around a splintered popsicle stick. Pieces of my hair were stuck to my neck and my thighs touched in humid moisture under my pajama shorts.

She looked silly down there on the rug, curled around the end of the trunk like a rag doll. The curtain blew over the chair, still upright in the middle of the room. It didn’t belong there. It did not match. Mother would say something if she were here.

My sister spat blood at me in response.

“Hey Abby wanna see something cool?”

I looked up from my book into the hallway from my bed. I craned my neck a little but couldn’t see Eve in her room. I went cautiously into the hallway, poking my head into my sister’s room. She was on the floor in front of her desk, half under it like a little bear in a cave. On the desk above her head was a mirror and a straw, white dust spread thin across the reflective surface. Her hair was around her face, looking down into her lap. I closed the door and sat next to her, my knees pulled up to my chest. Her left forearm was in her lap, the pale underside up towards the ceiling. There was a single bloody cut from her wrist to the middle of her arm. I knew better than to have a reaction. I hoped this wasn’t another strange attempt at suicide like the chair incident a few months ago. A Bic safety razor was in several shiny pink plastic pieces next to her, the bent pieces of the twin blades on her thigh. She looked up at me, grinning wildly.

“Give me your arm.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be such a baby Abby.”

She grabbed my wrist and in one quick motion made a small cut above the pale blue veins near the base of my palm with one of the razor blades. I gasped a little at the sharp burning the metal caused. Eve watched my face carefully. She pressed the wound to the small red bubbles rising from her paper thin cut.

“Now we’re blood sisters.”

She smiled proudly, her eyes squinting a little.

“Okay.”

I thought we were already sisters.

I slid through the crack in my door, feeling the curve of my belly brush the wood. I sucked in my stomach with a panicked gasp, the rush of adrenaline in my ears like hearing the radio from the next room. There were no breaks in the voices downstairs, or in the soft clinking of wine glasses and light classical music my mother had stacked neatly into the multi disk player before pressing “random all.” I took seven well placed steps between the creaky parts of the wooden floor beneath the beige hallway carpet to my parents’ room. The pile of winter coats was a large shapeless shadow in the dim lamp light. I ran my hand over all of them, feeling the slippery faux fur and the prickle of thick wool peacoat.

The bed was high enough that I needed to hoist myself up with my arms to swing a knee onto the quilted bedspread. I buried my face into the perfumes and colognes that had been sitting on the highest bathroom shelf since the mid-eighties, dusted off for holiday parties and company dinners. I wondered about the children, if they cried when they smelled mommy’s going-out-perfume, or felt the sickening dread that accompanied the sound of the babysitter’s two door sports car in the driveway. If they thought lipstick looked as garish on their mother’s pencil thin lips like I did. Did they take an extra few moments after bath time to look at themselves in the mirror, turning sideways and holding a breath until their stomach looked concave like mommy’s? Did they sigh in defeat and watch their body morph back into itself? I covered myself with layers of foreign smells and closed my eyes, listening only to my slow breath.

“Evelyn!”

My father’s voice startled me awake. I was disoriented by the feeling of slight suffocation until I remembered where I had fallen asleep. I pulled a scarf off of my flushed face, breathing in the cool air like water. I laid perfectly still, watching shadows stretch across the hallway walls.

“What? Jesus, what is your problem?”

Eve’s voice sounded muffled, like she was trying to swallow a piece of bread soaked with soup. My father’s voice dropped into a hiss, as if the company downstairs somehow hadn’t seen him follow Eve upstairs when she came home. I lifted my head enough to see the red digital clock, blurred out of focus with each blink. 12:30 a.m. It was past Eve’s curfew. It was always past Eve’s curfew.

“Who was driving that car?”

My father frequently asked this, even though it was never what he wanted to know. I knew he was afraid to ask why Eve’s eyes were half closed and bloodshot, afraid to ask why she stumbled up the same stairs she had climbed without effort for the past 15 years, afraid to hear what she might say.

“A friend.”

I couldn’t see her but I knew Eve had her arms crossed over her chest, leaning into her door frame, hair across her face. I heard my father exhale.

“Your mother and I have had it, Evelyn. We deserve some respect goddamnit.”

I looked up towards the window above my head and listened to my father retreat back downstairs to apologize for his disappearance. To apologize for his fuck-up child. I stretched down off the bed and found Eve still in the hallway, staring absently at the floor, expressionless.

“Abby.”

She whispered my name with a lopsided smile, swinging her arms out and wincing as her purse slipped into the crook of her elbow. I knew what was under her sleeves. I hugged her, felt her shallow breath through her thin sweater. She smelled like stale cigarettes mixed with the hot, dry air from car vents. Eve ran her thin fingers through my hair, across my head as she pulled away and opened her bedroom door. She stumbled over clothes and school books she hadn’t bothered opening since the beginning of her senior year before she found her bed, climbing in without bothering to take off her shoes. I held her doorknob, mind racing for something to say to her.

“Goodnight, Eve.”

She didn’t respond, already unconscious.

I looked up from my book to the sound of screeching tires in the driveway and a car engine suddenly cutting. A door slammed. Another door slammed.

“Eve!”

A boy’s voice. It sounded scratchy, unused. I crept up to the window and looked over the lip, careful to not let them see me. Eve was standing in the middle of our walkway, hands on her hips, sweatshirt hanging down almost to her knees. The sleeves were pushed up and her elbows jutted out like kitchen knives. Her sun-starved skin looked almost blue in the morning light and her hair was a new shade of unnatural black. Eyeliner was dripping off her chin onto her ripped sneakers, her purse slumped over on the grass like roadkill.

“Leave me alone Adam.”

I could barely hear her hoarse words, coming more from her eyes than her chapped lips. I wondered why he had driven so fast to get here only to try and stop her from leaving.

“Eve, please. I’m sorry.”

Adam had lasted much longer than the others. I had never seen more than his silhouette at all hours of the early morning, the ember of his cigarette floating between his fingers and the windshield. He was tall and too skinny, stubble on his chin and purple bags under his eyes. He had a hat pulled down over matted dirty blond hair. He had a t-shirt on with a band I didn’t recognize.

“Blow me.”

Eve spat the words at him, teetering to one side as she tried to pick up her bag with an air of finality. Her sneakers slapped the worn pavers on her way to the front door, which she slammed into the ever growing dent under the banister. I watched Adam press the heels of his palms into his eyes before kicking his front tire and ripping the door open. I ducked down and sprawled convincingly across my floor, like I had witnessed nothing interesting in the driveway at eight in the morning.

“Abby, promise me something.”

Eve crossed the room, stepping expertly out of her shoes, and threw herself dramatically across my bed. I wrinkled my nose. She smelled like cigarettes.

“Who was that?”

She propped her head up on her hand, struggling to focus on me.

“My boyfriend, Adam. Ex boyfriend.”

She corrected herself, looking up at my ceiling and sighing.

“Promise you what?” I prompted.

Eve closed her eyes for a moment.

“Nothing.”

She got up suddenly and kicked her shoes down the hallway to her bedroom. She came back to lean into my room again.

“Knock on my door if I’m not up before Mom gets home.”

I nodded, as was our ritual. She was never awake before mom got home, and I could never wake her up. I would creep into her room and hold my breath against the strange mixture of smells; perfume, weed, something that smelled not-quite like used matches, and the lingering scent of sick near the garbage can next to her bed. I would open her purse and take out all the pill bottles and baggies and hide them in the designated shoe box under her bed, cluttered next to other boxes and dirty laundry to look inconspicuous. I would carefully take out the orange and white syringes from the front pocket of her bag, making sure they stayed in their plastic bag from the pharmacy and burrow them into her sock drawer. Last, but not least, I would pull her sleeves down to cover her arms; pock-marked with new holes, streaked with small lines of dried blood.

Dark purple scars traced all the veins from the inside of her elbows down her forearms to make a perfect map of the veins on the back of her hands. I would stare at them, sometimes trace them with my finger while sitting in the dark and quiet. Then I would pull up her sheets and comforter, tucking the top under her chin; sometimes she let out a small noise of comfort, other times she was too gone to do anything but snore softly. Afterwards I would make myself a snack, stick an extra plate in the sink with a smear of peanut butter to make it look like Eve ate lunch, and retreat back to my room, back to my stacks of books about knights and dragons and princesses that needed rescuing.

“Abby?”

I looked up from my lap. I couldn’t see who was speaking. It could be my mother. It could be anyone. The light clicked on.

“Abigail, why on earth are you sitting in the dark?”

My mother always said things like this. Why on earth. Like everything that everyone did was excessively absurd. I blinked at her like a chameleon.

“Reading.”

She was still stooped over the lampshade, her hand a spidery shadow through the fabric. Her face became pinched and uncomfortable. She spoke softly, even though I was the only person there. Or maybe I wasn’t.

“Abby. Abby, it’s dark in here.”

I looked about, the yellow bulb making everything look like scotch tape and glue.

“No it isn’t.”

My mother straightened her spine. I could hear every notch click into place, like a puppet. My eyes were dry from not allowing myself to blink.

“Your father said he had to bring you home from school today.”

“He picked me up. He didn’t bring me home.”

“Abigail stop it.”

“I was cold.”

She left me sitting on the couch and disappeared into the kitchen, sighing. I heard her heavy winter coat on a chair. It made a fabric noise. Zip.

“You were cold.”

She appeared again in the living room, running her knobby hands through her hair. I didn’t understand why she was telling me what I had just told her. I didn’t say anything.

“Abiga-Abby. You can’t leave school sick because you were cold.”

She sat down in the chair across the carpet from me. I stared at her black loafers.

“I didn’t leave sick. I left because I was cold.”

My mother put her face in her hands for a moment. She did it so fast I wasn’t really sure it happened at all. She went upstairs and shut a door. I heard her talking to my father. I knew it was him because her voice wasn’t nice anymore. I looked down at my lap to finish my literature assignment for my sophomore english class. It was upside down. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t read it earlier.

The next week I was allowed to visit my sister in the hospital. It had been four years since I had to sit in the dentist’s office, waiting for her to have teeth again. Four years since she dropped out of school and ran away from home, showing up unannounced when she ran out of money, drugs, or her newest boyfriend had stolen her car. After about a year of that my parents convinced her to go into treatment. 28 days turned into 3 months. Then another 3 months after a relapse. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Eve had become hardened after a few years in treatment and cookie cutter wings of hospital wards, a shell of the person who used to be my sister.

“Sup kid?”

Evelyn leaned over the table on her forearms and looked up at me through straight black bangs. I made myself look away from her arms, regardless of how curious I was if the scars had faded since I was in middle school.

“Hi, Eve.”

I twisted my hands in my lap.

“Mom let you come alone?”

“Dad, too.”

She laughed a smoker’s bark. Tipping back in her chair, she threw her head back to look at the ceiling. I could see the bandages on her pale wrists.

“Like dad has a say in shit.”

She ground her teeth for a moment while I stared at her. She made the tension disappear because she didn’t exist to make it in the first place. She wavered somewhere out of reality for me. Between life and death was too cliche.

“Don’t fuck up your life, Abby.”

“Oh-Okay.”

I leaned back a little. Her words were sharp. She let the legs of her chair slam down on the tile and stared into my face like she was trying to find something.

“Don’t be this.”

She drank a bottle of bleach the next day.

The only light in my basement office was the small green power button for the Dell desktop computer. I sat cautiously in the desk chair, wheels sliding a little to the side on the plastic floor mat. I pressed the small button on the monitor and closed my eyes to the flash of computer light. My eyelids were an electric blue background to the swirling color patterns. I watched them fade away before opening them and finding the mouse. I googled “bleach.” Pictures of Clorox Bleach popped up in the image results immediately. The plastic bottles looked so smooth. I reached out and touched a two dimensional handle, my finger indenting the screen into a black bubble. I edited my google search: “drinking bleach.” I clicked on the first link, a suicide forum: “Corrosion starts from the mouth, then taken down to esophagus and finally reaches the stomach. When the stomach is corroded, the acid present in the stomach will escape and reach to other internal organs and start dissolving them. The pain is simply excruciating. You will definitely say ADIOS to life.”

I felt stomach acid burst upwards as my stomach muscles contracted. I jumped up, the chair rolling wildly away on the smooth plastic and tipping over onto the rug. I barely made it to the toilet to throw up, my measly dinner of orange juice and cornbread burning my throat. Like bleach. I dry heaved again at the thought, falling to my knees on the cold, unforgiving tile.

“I’m so sorry Marilyn.”

“Such a beautiful girl.”

“If there is anything I can do-”

I pressed my stocking feet into the plush maroon carpet of the funeral home. The building’s first floor was broken into two rooms and a central hallway divided everything in half. One room had my sister’s casket. The other had me. It was dark, the only light coming from the gap in the doorway. The mourners were talking to my mother in the hallway. She was crying. I could hear her sniffling. Tearless. I picked up a red and white mint off the tray next to me.

“Oh. Hello.”

I turned, my hair whipping around my neck. A boy stood in the doorway, looking uncomfortable in a suit and tie. I didn’t recognize him.

“Hi.”

He turned on a table lamp and pulled a pea coat off the wall hook. He looked over his shoulder at me. I looked back at my feet.

“I’m Mark. I live here.”

“In a funeral home?”

He laughed at my incredulous tone. He explained the mortician-family living arrangement. I shivered at the thought of sleeping above cadavers.

“Do you smoke?”

Mark was holding out a cigarette to me. My sister used to smoke. I never did.

“Yes.”

I followed him to the back door in my stockings and without a coat. It was dark outside and there was a thin layer of snow on the black driveway. I lit a match with the small book Mark handed to me and took a drag of my first cigarette. The menthol went down my throat like a foil ball. I wiggled my toes when my head felt lighter than the frigid air blowing through my dress.

“Hello?”

I shifted my phone against my ear when Mark answered, squinting up at his house, chewing on my bottom lip and looking at the collage of reds and oranges the maple trees made over his house.

“Hey, I’m outside.”

I paced in my usual figure eight path in the back gravel driveway, worn down from time and several pairs of sneakers.

“I’m just finishing up in the basement, you want to come down?”

I pressed the end button before answering him and opened the back door of the house, taking the flight of stairs down to the basement. I shivered when I got to the last step, looking towards the stainless steel door. It opened a few moments later, Mark squeezing out through the crack it allowed him to pass through. He was in his scrubs, water stains where the pockets should have been from using them to dry his hands. He shook his head to move his hair out of his face and smiled at me.

“Hey, sorry, I was in there longer than I thought I would be–shit. I left my phone in there.”

He pivoted to open the door again.

“Could–could I see inside?”

I took a few steps toward the room, pausing when Mark looked back over his shoulder at me.

“I mean, if you want to. Do you want to?”

His dark eyes met mine with seriousness. I had never asked to see inside the embalming room and Mark had never asked me if I wanted to, assuming I didn’t. I hadn’t worked up the nerve to even go into the basement until a few months ago. I don’t know what possessed me at that moment with a burning curiosity to see what the room looked like. It had been almost a year and a half since Eve died, and I almost never thought about her anymore when I went over to Mark’s house after school. My parents didn’t know we were friends, they assumed I stayed after school for homework or some club I made up months ago. I knew they wouldn’t want to know my only friend was the boy who had handed them their daughter’s prayer card.

“Is anyone...out?”

Mark started to laugh and turned away to compose himself.

“What? I don’t know how else to say it!”

I started to laugh too, the two of us snickering between our fingers at the surrealism of being yards away from dead bodies.

“No, no one is out, I promise.”

He grinned and shook his head, pulling the thick door’s handle and letting me go in past him. The room was all white and stainless steel, a long table in the center and a floor to ceiling mortuary refrigerator with four square doors. I looked away from those and took in all of the closed cabinets and sterile countertops. I started to look at the table and had to stop when I realized I was looking at what was essentially a person-sized collection tray. I don’t know what I was expecting, a few tools or scalpels maybe, but there was nothing out except Mark’s phone on a small cart next to the outlet in the corner. I tried to picture him getting a text message while working, or a phone call. Did he listen to music? Or did he just work in silence, standing in front of a body for hours, slicing and stitching, trying not to think about who they were and having to hand out their prayer cards to their family members after and direct them to the room on the left.

“Abby.”

Mark said my name like he had already said it once. I looked away from the spot on the wall I had been staring at and was suddenly overwhelmed by the sterility and silence of the room. I stepped backwards to get closer to the door and was suddenly hit with a wave of vertigo. I can’t fall in here. I can’t. Mark grabbed my arm, pulling me towards the door and catching me as I fell against him. We made it to the stairs out in the basement and I sat on the last step. I was trembling, my fingers numb and white, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps. I tried to apologize but my voice stuttered without my permission. What is happening to me?

“It’s okay, you’re okay, Abby look at me.”

He rubbed my back and leaned forward to see my face. I managed to take a few deep breaths and shook my head to clear the spots dancing on the wall in front of me.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I got really dizzy.”

“It’s okay, don’t apologize, I shouldn’t have brought you in there. That was stupid.”

Mark rested his chin on his knees and sighed, running his fingers through his hair.

“Do you want a cigarette?”

He checked my hands to see if I had stopped shaking and nodded, letting me go up the stairs first before turning the light off and following me out into the driveway.

What are you doing online?

Mark’s message popped up on the sidebar of my email. It was only nine at night. My window was open, warm May air blowing in the cherry blossom perfume off the front lawn. My parents were out to dinner with the neighbors down the street.

What do you mean?

Isn’t prom tonight?

I think so.

How have you been?

Okay. I got my acceptance letter to Boston today. And Tufts yesterday.

That’s awesome! Congrats!

I looked over at the manilla envelopes next to my laptop. I pushed them off and watched the papers slide off one another like the scenes of old movies with printing presses. Extra, extra. Read all about it.

Thanks.

I paused for a moment, looking at the paper on the floor and then out my window again. The wind blew through the screen again, my curtains swirling in the breeze. Goosebumps crawled up my legs and arms.

Do you want to come over?

Are you okay?

Yes.

I don’t know.

I’ll be over in ten.

My friends from school teased me about Mark. They thought we were secretly dating or something ridiculous. He was home-schooled until he graduated a year ago and now took online classes while training to be a mortician with his Uncle and his Dad. I liked spending time with him because he smoked pot and liked to read books. We never had to talk about anything. It had been almost three years since Eve died and Mark was the only one who knew enough to never ask about her. I leaned back until my chair was only supported by the back two legs and reached behind books on my shelf for a small tin box. I set my small glass pipe on the table and pinched a little weed out of a bag to fill the little bowl.

“Hey.”

I looked up from my computer. Mark was in my doorway, face flushed from the wind. He ran his hand through his hair and unzipped his black sweatshirt. He sat on my bed, turning to try to make some sense out of my nest of unmade sheets and pillows.

“Hey, how are you?”

I tossed him my Bic lighter and sat cross legged next to him, handing him the glass bowl.

“Good, a little stressed from finals. How come you didn’t go to prom? I thought you and your friend Justine were going. Thanks.”

He put the glass to his lips and went slightly cross-eyed as he lit it. Smoke curled out of his nose and I moved to let him press his mouth to the screen of my window to exhale. I jumped off the bed and stuffed my damp bath towel under the crack in the door. Pot was one thing my parents weren’t too concerned with compared to what Eve used to do, but I still liked to keep it to myself out of courtesy. I answered Mark after taking a hit.

“Yeah, but the guy she’s liked since middle school asked her a few days ago. I didn’t want to go anyway.”

I watched my smoke blow away down the side of the house.

“I would have taken you.”

“You hate suits.”

Mark laughed, leaning back on the bed and looking at the ceiling.

“Fair enough. How about some ice cream then? Cliff’s just opened up for the season.”

“I’d like that.”

I stared at my face in the bathroom mirror. It was after four in the morning, most of the residents in the dorm building had been asleep for hours. I was going on three days of no sleep. Insomnia had started creeping in, vivid nightmares waking me up constantly during the night. I always woke up just as Eve’s face came out of the darkness, eyes wild and mouth corroding away. My pupils were gigantic discs even in the dim bathroom. Half the lights didn’t work anymore and the tiled room always smelled faintly of soap and vomit. My lips were chapped and peeling into raw pink skin around my mouth. The area under my nose was bright pink and burned whenever I touched it. I stared at myself until I reached the dissociative state of not recognizing me anymore. My face was just parts, floating separately around a pale oval. My hair blended into the black background behind me.

“Abby, what are you doing?”

A girl from my floor, Katie, was rubbing her eyes in the doorway. She was wearing baggy sweatpants with fluffy white slippers sticking out the bottom. She shivered from sleep and blinked a few times at me. I pivoted and forced a sleepy smile on my face.

“I couldn’t really sleep, just washing my face.”

I forced the smile a little wider before leaving. I ran my hand down the cool concrete wall, flaking off the old white paint as I went. I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent coming from the laundry room at the other end of the hall. I felt myself sway and opened them again, catching myself before I tipped over. I slipped into my room, careful not to let the strip of hallway light wake up my roommate.

The first day I met Grace she was sitting in a pile of mostly unpacked clothes, drinking out of a bottle of tequila through a neon pink straw. She frequented the communal dorm kitchen in her underwear to make mac’ and cheese, and snored like a small turbo engine.

I sat at my desk and cut up lines of cocaine by the light of my laptop. I put one side of a rolled up twenty in my nose and held the other nostril shut while I breathed in. My throat and nose went numb, a tingling sensation rolling down from the top of my head down to my feet. I shuddered and wiped the remaining powder off the table with my finger and rubbed it on my gums. I opened my anatomy notebook and started copying down bone after bone after bone.

I packed my cigarettes against the steering wheel of my shitty Elantra. Snow streaked across my windshield, fragmented chunks sliding between the gaps in the rubber wipers. Dry heat from the vents made my throat burn. My cell phone vibrated bright blue in the cup holder, quarters jingling.

“Hello?”

“Abby, it’s Dad. Just making sure you’re okay. It started snowing here.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“It’s snowing. And I’m fine.”

I ripped off the cellophane from the box and lit a cigarette. I listened to my father for a few minutes before losing concentration in the yellow lights on the blurring pavement in front of me.

“I’ll be home in an hour.”

“Call if there’s traffic.”

I hung up and dropped my phone into the bucket seat.

“Merry Christmas.”

Mark stood on the porch of the funeral home, watching me walk towards him. His hair had gotten too long. It hung in his face like some kind of moody model.

“Hi.”

I hugged him, breathing in the formaldehyde off his coat.

“How was your first semester?”

“Shitty. How are your dead people?”

“Still dead.”

I sat on the sagging top step and lit a cigarette. I stared across the street into the tinsel framed deli window. Someone was scooping tuna onto a roll.

“Have you been home yet?”

“No, I came here first. My dad called earlier I told him I would be home in an hour. A half hour ago.”

Mark was looking at me from the corner of his eye. I became self-conscious of my appearance. The skin under my nose burned. I folded my arms across my stomach. My hipbones dug into my skinny forearms. I made a cognitive effort to blink normally.

“Your eyes are glassy.”

“Are they?”

“Abby...”

“I should get going. I still have to get Christmas presents.”

“Christmas is a few days away still.”

“I know. Bye.”

I stood up, hugged him again, feeling his palms on my shoulder blades, and got back into my warm sedan. I drove home without paying attention, letting my muscle memory drive the car. My palms were slippery on the plastic.

“Abby can you help me with this?”

I wandered into the kitchen. My mother was standing in front of the oven, a Christmas turkey steaming on the stovetop. The smell nauseated me. I stirred the pasta at her direction. She was talking to me but I couldn’t figure out the words. I wondered absently if she was speaking English.

“Abigail.”

“What?”

I snapped out of my blank stare. My mother was staring at me. Her face had defined wrinkles. She looked aged. When did that happen?

“I asked you how your classes were this semester.”

“Oh. They’re fine.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Well I would appreciate some more information. We are paying for it, you know.”

“Do you not want to?”

“Oh Abigail.”

My mother sighed and turned away from me, her lumpy Christmas sweater taking up too much space. I narrowed my eyes at it.

“Come on Abby, throw us a bone.”

My father spoke from the living room. I could hear the ruffling of tissue paper. Throw us a bone? I detested idioms.

“My classes are fine. They are requirements, so they aren’t very exciting.”

I strained the pasta, the steam beading moisture on my neck and cheeks. I shook the colander and dumped the noodles back into the pot. I left the humid kitchen and went back upstairs. It was darker and cooler on the second level of my house. I passed my sister’s closed bedroom door.

Don’t be this.

I stopped and turned. The door was painted white, the tape marks still visible from Eve’s warning signs. I reached out for the handle. Her room was empty, except for a box spring in the corner. The carpet was still indented from furniture. I breathed in the stale air, trying to catch any scent of her that still lingered in the fabric. There was nothing.

Don’t fuck up your life, Abby.

I jumped and spun in a full circle, goosebumps racing from my scalp down to my ankles. I darted out the door and closed it behind me, shivering against the cool wall in the hallway before going back to my room. My bags were still packed in the middle of the floor. I hadn’t unpacked. I didn’t want to. I liked pretending that my house was a bed and breakfast, that I was a returning customer who had grown to be a part of the family over the years. I sat on my bed and stared out the window until the sun set, a bright orange against the pale bedroom walls.

“I’m not, Eve. I’m not.”

I watched the reflection of my mouth in the frosted window.

“I heard Eve yesterday.”

Mark was bent over his stereo, sliding CDs into the multiple disc dock. He pressed play before coming to sit next to me on the floor.

“What do you mean?”

“I heard her say ‘don’t be this’ and ‘don’t fuck up your life.’”

“Like, in your head or out loud?”

“I don’t know.”

Mark sat down next to me in silence. “Dear Prudence” started its slow guitar introduction. He reached behind me and held up a cone shaped cigar. I smiled at it. An hour later the room was filled with smoke and the vanilla stench of cigar mixed with weed. We leaned against a pillow barricade that blocked the bottom of his bookshelf and let The White Album play all the way through. Mark put his hand on top of mine.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I pulled into the cemetery a few hours later, making tire tracks in the dusting of snow on the narrow path. I parked at the dead end and tromped through the inches of snow to my sister’s tombstone. I sat on top of it, letting my feet dangle above the frozen blanket of whiteness that expanded over the acres of death.

“Why did you do it Eve?”

I tilted my head back to the expansive grey that was the sky and thought about the last few things my sister had said to me. Don’t be this. Don’t be what? In a hospital? Alive? The last option was morbidly appealing. I had never considered killing myself before. Sitting on Eve’s remains seemed an appropriate place to start. Don’t be alive.

Christmas morning dawned with a mildly clear sky and hardened chunks of road salt lining every street. I sat in the living room with my parents, trying to appear interested in presents and holiday cheer. I wandered around my house in a daze until relatives filtered through the front door, bringing melting patches of snow into the house that I stepped in every time I changed my socks. I was showered with praise for school and my appearance, thinner than last time I had been with family.

“Grab me a beer will you, Abby?”

My grandfather barked from the couch, his voice full of phlegm and destroyed esophagus tissue. I handed him a bottle, frosted from the depths of the refrigerator. He motioned for me to sit next to him. We watched the antics of my family like a soap opera.

“You’re a good kid, Abby.”

“Thanks grandpa.”

“And I’m not just saying it. I know a lot of these assholes just bullshit you around, but I mean it. You’re a good kid. Don’t fuck up your life.”

The couch fell away and the living room spiraled into a black hole. It swallowed the Christmas tree and the presents and my family. It was just me and grandpa. Don’t fuck up your life. Don’t fuck up your life. Don’t fuck up your life.

“What do you mean grandpa? Please tell me.”

I had a burning somewhere in my chest. It spread like fire down to my fingers, which trembled on my knee caps. I needed this answer. It was more important than school and drugs and Mark. I stared into his face, the wrinkles around his eyes, the hard wall across his irises. He turned to face me.

“I mean don’t listen to these jackasses when they tell you how to live your life.”

He jerked his thumb towards the huddle of aunts, uncles and cousins filtering in and out of the kitchen.

“If you’re happy, you’re happy. If you’re not, do something about it. But nothing you don’t want to, you hear me? They tell you to stay in school but if you hate it, do something else. No one’ll look down on you for it. I won’t anyway.”

He took a long swig of beer, the top foaming as he put it down on the coffee table next to the coaster. I habitually moved the glass bottle onto the fabric circle. I sat back against the tan plush of my couch. Do something about it. Do what? What would make me happy? Sleep. I like sleep. My mind wandered back to suicide; eternal rest.

“Thanks grandpa.”

I hugged him sideways, his thick, calloused hand clapping down on the pointy tip of my shoulder.

“Grab me another beer, will you?”

I looked down onto my nightstand. The glass of water rippled slightly. A normal glass of water. I picked up the orange prescription bottle I had taken from under the sink in the bathroom. The label read Ambien amongst the warning labels, and my mother’s name and pharmacy information on the back. I upended the sleeping pills into the cup. I picked it up, the glass steaming instantly from contact with my skin. I stepped over to my window, knowing I only had minutes until the pills started to dissolve. I set it on the windowsill. The sun was setting, a bloody crescent over the hills surrounding my town. I looked back into my room. My bags were pushed into a corner, still full. My bed was made, pillows arranged in height order, and my alarm clock set on the exact minute from my cell phone. I looked back at the cup. The pills on the bottom of the small pile were beginning to disintegrate.

Don’t be this. Don’t fuck up your life, Abby.

Can’t fuck it up if I’m dead can I? I picked up the cup.

If you’re not happy, do something about it.

I’m not happy. This will do something about it. I set my lips on the edge of the glass.

You’re a good kid, Abby.

Fuck. I poured the glass on the carpet, cold water splashing over my bare feet. The pills landed in the spaces between my toes, lined up like tiny circle soldiers. I stepped on them, mashing their semi-solidness into the fibers of the rug. I picked up the last whole one and set it on my tongue, swallowing it dry.

Across from the window, I set my alarm for the next morning and crawled under my sheets, still in jeans and a t-shirt. I watched the neon red numbers on my clock change until I fell asleep.