I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW GRAFFITI existed in Carson, North Carolina. I saw it by accident yesterday morning when I was at the gas station filling my eternally deflating bike tires with free air. I usually rode there in front of the store, so I hadn’t seen the back of the building until then.
A car pulled up to one of the gas pumps, music blaring. When I looked, I saw that it was all my friends, piled into Hayden’s mom’s old-ass Ford Escort, laughing and shouting with the windows rolled down. They were going to the beach, to the carnival we went to every summer.
They had invited me. They always invited me; they were good friends that way. I said I was sick. I wasn’t sick, though. That’s why I ducked behind the building with my bike, heart racing, waiting there until they left. And when I looked up, there it was: one of Mallory’s photographs, except in real life.
I loved my sister. Even when I didn’t understand her, even when I hated her, I still loved her. Which I guess is the reason I woke up early today to be here, staring at the graffiti on the back wall of the only gas station in town.
I returned this morning with Mallory’s camera hanging around my neck. There was this one sharp thread in the strap that poked into my skin, and I wondered if it had bothered her the way it bothered me.
Part of me also wondered if Mallory had spray-painted the wall herself and then taken a picture of it—that seemed like the kind of thing she might do. But in person, I could see that the letters were worn, faded from years of grime and weather. I brought the camera up to my face and squinted through the viewfinder.
My fingers fit into the smooth places that her fingers had worn into the body of the camera over the years. I took a step back, and then sidestepped to the right, back again, and a little to the left. And there it was. The picture my sister had once taken, framed exactly how she’d framed it. I looked down at my feet and adjusted my toes so they were pointing ever so slightly inward, the way she always used to stand. I was in the exact spot she was in when she took this picture.
I waited to feel something.
I don’t ever take pictures myself—that was Mallory’s thing. And I am nothing like Mallory. There wasn’t even film in the camera, but I pressed the shutter release so that it made that sound—that clap-click-snap sound that always seemed to accompany Mallory wherever she went.
Mallory had had a way of seeing things that no one else saw. But after our parents divorced four years ago, when she was in ninth grade and I was in eighth, she became serious about photography. We were only eighteen months apart, but it may as well have been eighteen years, for all we had in common. She had plans to become a famous photographer, vowed to travel the world after she graduated from high school. She wanted to work for National Geographic and see her photographs in art galleries and stuff like that. She was going to do it too; she had a fancy internship all lined up in Washington, DC, with some up-and-coming magazine that was going to pay to send her overseas on assignment.
People in Carson just don’t do stuff like that.
Most of the time I thought she was snobby and pretentious. This town, her life here, our parents, me . . . nothing was good enough for her. Even though she already had everything—grades, talent, friends, the adoration of our parents and teachers and classmates, beauty, brains, magic—still, she always wanted more.
I never understood it. Never understood her.
Which I guess is why I’m trying now.
I gazed at the words melting in hasty cursive script, studied the handwriting of the vandal, their capital letters mixed in with lowercase, the messy lines stacked like blocks one on top of the other. Not anything like Mallory’s scribble handwriting. Besides, she would’ve taken up the whole damn wall if it was her.
wE doN’t
sEE thiNgs
as thEy aRE,
as wE aRE.
—aNaïs NiN
I lowered the camera and tried looking through my own eyes instead. The words must’ve meant something to Mallory. But to me it just felt like a riddle. One I wasn’t smart enough or edgy enough or creative enough to understand.
“Screw you, Mallory,” I whispered.
I pulled the strap back over my head and stowed her camera in my bag, picked my bike up off the pavement, and glared at the wall one last time before pedaling away.
Off to Bargain Mart, my summer job, the one my parents said would be good for me. Not that they knew a damn thing about what was good for anybody. Not me, and especially not themselves. They’ve been divorced for four years, yet still live together. They say it’s because of financial reasons, but I think it’s more that they can’t figure out how to actually leave each other. Because if they really left, then they couldn’t make each other miserable anymore, and if they couldn’t make each other miserable anymore, then they might have to actually feel the effects of all that has happened.
I had no choice but to pass my school to get to Bargain Mart. I had no choice but to pass my school whenever I wanted to get anywhere in this town. And when you pass my school, you can’t help but notice the giant boulder perched out on the front lawn: the Carson High School, Home of the Gladiators, Spirit Rock. It had always been decorated with birthday wishes or sports messages like: WIN! GO! NUMBER ONE!
Six months ago the senior class repainted it in Mallory’s honor. They let me help too, even though I was only a junior. Because, after all, I was her sister.
We decorated it with bright colors and pictures of white birds and feathers and hearts and crosses and flowers and teardrops, and one of her fellow art student friends even painted a picture of a camera and a volleyball. People wrote out messages like WE LOVE YOU, MALLORY; NEVER FORGOTTEN; TAKEN TOO SOON; and FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS.
The thing was, I didn’t even want to help. I’m sure that makes me a terrible person, but what would I say, what could I say?
If you’ve always been defined not as a full-fledged person but solely as another person’s polar opposite, and that person no longer exists, do you also cease to exist?
Those were the words I really wanted to paint on the surface of that rock. That was the question that had been on my mind, the one I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask out loud. Not that I was some kind of loser, or anything. I was just average. Not popular, not disliked either. Not short or tall, thin or heavy, ugly or pretty, smart or stupid. I’ve always just done what was expected of me—no more, no less. So I grabbed the paintbrush that someone was holding out to me. The instrument was clumsy and foreign in my hand, and I smeared out a big, crude, blob-shaped heart. Average. Mediocre. Unremarkable.
They patted me on the shoulder and said I was strong and brave and such a good sister, and all kinds of things that weren’t really true. It made them feel better to think certain things about me. They were the ones who needed to feel better, after all—they were her friends. They wanted to make me their friend too, like they could hold on to something of her through me. But it didn’t take them long to see I was no substitute, no connection to the friend they loved.
Sudden death. That’s what they call it when someone just dies and there’s not a good explanation as to why, or at least not one that makes sense.
Apparently she was on fire in gym class that day—they were playing volleyball, and volleyball was always her game. She spiked the ball over the net perfectly time after time, they said, scoring point after point. We were told she was laughing when it happened, right before she suddenly stumbled and went down.
Fainted, they thought.
But she was already gone by the time the school nurse got there. She was gone before the ambulance came blaring down the road, before it came to an abrupt stop at the south entrance of our school. Already gone, as the paramedics rushed inside with their equipment. Gone as I watched it all unfolding from the row of windows in fifth-period chemistry—the whole class, even the teacher, had gathered to see what was happening.
Because nothing ever happens in Carson.
Sudden cardiac arrest. The autopsy showed that she’d had an undetected heart condition, an electrical problem. Her heart just stopped. It’s extremely rare, they told us. Of course it would be.
• • •
I was late to work again, so I was assigned to the clearance aisle.
Crouched in the overcrowded lane of miscellaneous junk no one wanted, armed with a pricing gun, I was retagging all the spring merchandise that was never going to sell. Sickening amounts of after-Easter candy, chocolate eggs and bunnies, marshmallow chicks, and egg-painting kits: marked down from 75 percent off to 90 percent off. Then the Mother’s Day leftovers: cards, boxed chocolates with the fillings no one likes but for some reason they keep making anyway—like strawberry cream and that weird liquid cherry stuff that tastes like cough syrup—all marked down from 50 percent off to 75 percent off.
For hour after mind-numbing hour, I was at it. The sound of the pricing gun was nicking away at my concentration, never letting me think but never letting me really rest. Every last cell of my brain was emptying out into the monotony of the task, slipping from me and spattering to the shelves of unwanted holiday-themed leftovers.
This was going to be my whole summer.
When my lunch break came, I realized I had rushed out of the house, leaving the brown paper bag containing a cheese sandwich with mustard and a baggie of goldfish crackers sitting in my refrigerator back home. But thankfully, since Bargain Mart sells everything imaginable, from house paint to tires to toys, and makeup and cleaning supplies and food, I bought one of those Styrofoam cup-of-noodle soups, a banana, and a bottle of Dr. Bargain (Bargain Mart’s very own Dr Pepper imposter) before heading back to the break room.
I was standing in the microwave line when three kids from my school came in and sat down at one of the big tables, talking loudly about a party that was happening on Friday. I knew all of their names—in a town of only 5,479 people, you tend to know mostly everyone’s names—but I didn’t really know them. They knew me, the way everybody knew me, as Mallory’s sister, the sister of the girl who died last year.
I caught bits and pieces of their conversation: “Bonfire, in the woods,” one guy said. “At Bowman’s?” the girl asked. “Yeah, at Bowman’s, where else?” the second guy answered. “Kicking off the summer right,” the first guy added, clearly trying to impress the girl.
They talked about Bowman’s like Bowman was a linebacker on the football team. But Bowman’s isn’t a person, at least not anymore; it’s a place.
“Oh, hey, Maia,” the girl offered when they saw me standing there.
“Hi!” I smiled my big fake smile, and I raised my arm to wave, gestured to my Styrofoam lunch, then the microwave, so they’d know I wasn’t just standing there eavesdropping.
“So did you hear about the party at Bowman’s?” the girl shouted across the break room.
“I think so,” I called back.
“You should come,” she said, then quickly looked to her right and left, as if she was silently asking permission, as if she had forgotten what happened the last time I was invited to a party.
No one said anything for several seconds, and then the first guy chimed in, uncertainly, “Sure, I mean, come if you want.”
“Thanks,” I managed, also pretending I didn’t remember about that party last spring. “I’m pretty sure I’m busy that night, though.”
“Bummer,” the girl replied, but I could see them exhale a collective breath of relief. It wouldn’t do for a trio of underclassman to invite an unwanted guest to a party thrown by our newly graduated senior class.
“Yeah,” I agreed, and sighed like it really was a bummer.
Thankfully, the microwave beeped just then, the person in front of me retrieved their food, and I could finally extract myself from this conversation. I turned away from them, placed my cup of noodles on the rotating glass tray, shut the door, punched in three minutes, and stood there, watching it spin around and round.