I WAS STANDING AT THE stove, making myself a box of mac and cheese—the orange-powdered kind—when Dad came up from the basement holding his sad microwave dinner.
“She gone?” he asked me, lurking in the doorway of the kitchen.
Mom had just left for her weekly Friday night dinner and drinks with the women’s group she had met online. It was supposed to be some kind of support group, either for losing a child or for cheating husbands, I was never sure.
“Coast is clear,” I called over my shoulder, doubting he heard the sarcasm behind my words, doubting he got that I thought he was being ridiculous, hiding from his ex-wife, sneaking around his own house, trying to make me his lookout.
With his back to me, he stood in front of the microwave, carefully ripping open the cardboard box, pulling back the corner of the plastic. I turned back around as he hit the start button. I could feel him looking at me, wanting me to turn toward him and say something, anything. He needed me to constantly assuage his guilt, every moment of every day.
Sometimes I could do it; other times it made me resent him almost as much as Mom did. Because he gets to have his basement purgatory where he can be both victim and villain, and get away with feeling shitty all the time. And Mom gets her women’s group and her alcohol and self-righteous indignation, and she’s also allowed to feel shitty all the time. Me, I get to supervise them both, sitting here in the kitchen so they can talk at me and not each other, so their cold war can continue into eternity. Didn’t they think I’d like to have permission to feel shitty all the time too? Couldn’t they give me a day where I could sulk around and behave like a child and let go in front of them, and they both would be stuck mediating my mess?
I focused all my attention on stirring macaroni noodles—I’m not open for business, Dad. So we stood in silence for the full four minutes and thirty seconds it took for his dinner to cook. He used the bottom of his shirt to bring his steaming plastic tray to the table and sat down, the odor of artificially processed Salisbury steak, and mashed potatoes and gravy, wafting through the kitchen while I drained my pasta and stirred in the cheese mix and butter, along with a splash of Mom’s fat-free half-and-half.
I knew he was waiting for me to sit down with him at the table, so I took my bowl to the living room and turned on the TV. I only got in a few bites before I realized that the whole encounter with Dad had made me lose my appetite.
I looked at the wooden clock on the mantel. It was one of those vintage mechanical clocks that you have to wind up once a week—that’s been my “job” for as long as I could remember. I wondered what would happen if I just stopped doing it, if Mom and Dad would even notice, or if they would just let time stand still forever.
It was just after seven thirty.
I ran back into the kitchen and dumped my mac and cheese into a plastic container and stashed it in the fridge. I glanced at my dad and said, already walking away, “I’m heading out.”
The gray wooden barn sat in the shade of the tree line like a secret. I made my way along the side of the house, stepping on the circular paver stones Mom put in because Mallory had kept tracking a path from the house to the barn that was killing the grass.
The door creaked as it opened easily beneath my hands, the wooden handle worn and soft from a century of oily fingers and palms. I flipped the light switch, and one by one the grid of fluorescent lights that hung down from the ceiling flickered to life, illuminating the giant, open room. Her old wooden worktable in the center was just the way she’d left it—papers and pencils and markers and erasers and sticky notes and even a ceramic mug whose contents had long dried up scattering the surface. I walked the walls lined with photos pinned up like haphazard, chaotic wallpaper.
I was looking for one photo in particular—I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t remember where it was. After three laps around the barn, I finally saw it—the corner of it was tucked right under the graffiti picture, directly in the center of the wall.
I knew exactly when and where she’d taken it.
• • •
I got there first. I hid my bike farther down the road, buried under the cover of leaves and branches, where it wouldn’t be seen. I knew everyone would be arriving soon, so I hurried down the familiar overgrown path. I stepped up onto the concrete foundation, walked over to the chimney, and pressed my palms against the soot-stained bricks. I swore I felt a pulse, like a heartbeat, under my hands. But I guess that had to have just been mine rebounding off the old masonry.
A car door slammed. Then another. Voices. Footsteps.
I hopped down and quickly tried to guess which tree Mallory must’ve been in when she took that picture. Then I carefully climbed the rungs of low branches, up into one of the nearby trees, and waited. I looked down at the lot. The first partygoers had begun to assemble with supplies: wood and cardboard for the fire, cases of beer, ice, coolers full of probably more beer, and plastic Bargain Mart bags full of snacks.
The sun was going down, and from up here I could hear so clearly, as more and more cars pulled off into the grass along the side of the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing, but then I imagined Mallory sitting with me, waiting, and I remembered how she’d once said that the most important thing about being a photographer isn’t the camera or skill or genius ideas; sometimes it is just being there at the right time.
How would I know the right time when it came?
All the people from my school I never talk to and who never talk to me filed into what was left of the Bowman House in droves. Someone started building a fire near the fireplace, dousing the logs and crumpled newspaper with lighter fluid. They cheered as it roared to life.
I smelled the weed before I saw who had it—that unmistakable sticky, sweet, earthy scent I had come to know so well. I closed my eyes and pictured Mallory in her bedroom, kneeling in a nest of pillows on the floor by the window, her elbows perched on the ledge of her windowsill, blowing a long, thin stream of smoke outside.
Mallory still had a spell on me back then—I was only thirteen, fourteen, maybe. She seemed so much older than me, so much wiser. So when she’d drag me into her bedroom, and tell me to talk to her, tell me she didn’t like to be alone while she smoked, I was more than happy to oblige. Except she knew I never had anything worthwhile to say, so I was her perfect captive audience.
I could close my eyes now and see her face so clearly, the way the drug would relax her into this lazy way of speaking. She’d tell me all kinds of deep thoughts and dark secrets I’m sure she’d never have shared otherwise, like her philosophies about art and how she couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and leave this all behind. I felt special when she would let me in, like I was worth something. But then we would always fall asleep, and in the morning she’d kick me out of her bedroom and it was like those conversations never happened.
Eventually I wised up and realized she didn’t actually need me. I could’ve been anyone. And I finally stopped coming when she called—that was the most radical thing I’d ever done in my life. Up until now, anyway. I guess that’s when she replaced me with Neil, whom she’d always referred to as “helmet head Neil” before they became real friends, back when he was just the guy who supplied her with pot. Neil was someone who could keep up with Mallory, offer her the unwavering adoration she craved, someone who would come every time she called and constantly remind her how much of a fucking genius she was.
He managed to stick around long enough to become her best friend, despite the fact that everyone knew he wanted it to be something more. I think she liked leaving people wanting more. Maybe that’s why she stopped liking me—I didn’t want anything from her. Except that wasn’t the whole truth. I did want something from her: I wanted her to go back to the way she was when we were younger, when we were best friends, when our parents were just our parents and hadn’t become flawed, broken, angry, sad people.
Almost as if he could tell I’d been thinking about her, Neil arrived onto the scene—we had never been friends, real or fake.
The last time we spoke was at a party over spring break, the one I’d only been invited to out of pity. He sidled up to me, brought me a drink—something real and strong, not the cheapo beer everyone around us had. He said we were drinking to Mallory and that deserved the good stuff. We tapped our red plastic cups, and the brown liquid sloshed around, the toxic smell burning my nostrils and the back of my throat as I brought the cup to my lips. He said “To Mallory,” and I repeated “To Mallory” and took a sip.
I coughed and choked as I tried to swallow it down, and he laughed but told me everyone does that at first. We sat down on a couch that I sank into like quicksand and pretended to make small talk—people had been wanting to talk to me so much after Mallory died, I was starting to get the hang of it: Keep things on the surface, never say anything you mean. I took tiny sips at first—this stuff was floor cleaner, I was convinced. But the warmth that was spreading through me was unlike anything I’d ever felt, like butterflies in my stomach, except it was butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in every cell of my body.
He built up to it in stages, working up the nerve to speak the question he had been waiting to ask for the three months since she’d died. First he just said he wanted to come over sometime—he kept it casual, innocent. My sips grew longer, and the butterflies stopped batting their wings so fast.
“To the barn,” he added.
I took another and another, and thought, hey, maybe these people were onto something with the whole getting wasted thing, because I was starting to feel pretty good.
“To look through Mallory’s photographs.”
I finished off my drink. He wanted to take some of them—he knew which ones were her favorites; he knew the most important ones. And as he refilled the empty cup between my hands, I was feeling both powerless and powerful all at the same time. That was when he said the words that twisted into my heart like a corkscrew and flipped some kind of switch inside me:
“It’s what Mallory would’ve wanted.”
Now I looked down from my spot high above the partygoers and molded my back into the crook of the tree—its branches and trunk cradling me. I let my legs dangle on either side as I sat, watching, listening. The sound of the bonfire hissed and crackled like whispered secrets, its sweet smoke rising up into the canopy of trees. The laughter and shouting and pounding music was somehow amplified as it rose above all the sound-absorbing things on the ground.
I had to stop thinking about that night. I brought the camera up and looked through it. I was here to do what Mallory had done, to find the hidden stories between the lines—at least, that seemed like something Mallory would say—but all I saw was that the kids from my school were the same as they’d always been. Last year’s party was nearly interchangeable with this year’s. The same faces, the same fire, but the picture wasn’t the same. Mallory’s picture had mystery, like it was something ritualistic and meaningful, and not just a bunch of drunk kids from Bumfuck Nowhere with nothing better to do on a Friday night.
There were no hidden stories to see; I already knew all of theirs, just like they knew mine.
But then I saw Chris. I watched his face as he stood there in the crowd. From here I couldn’t really see the crooked smile or the dimple at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t fully let go of me for days. Neil offered Chris the little glass pipe that he was holding between his fingers, and I couldn’t hear what Chris said, but he smiled and looked down, shaking his head. And just like that, he was absorbed by the crowd.
After the first hour, the party was in full force and everyone was deteriorating, getting rowdier and sloppier. That’s when I began to watch Chris more closely—that’s when he began to stand out; he had slowly become the calm point in all the chaos.
I knew everyone’s stories except for his. And then I thought about the three-pack of erasers and the shoelaces and the lobster claw oven mitts. How I’d found them in a pile, hiding in the cookies and crackers, when I was straightening at the end of my shift earlier this week.
He sat with the others around the fire, not drinking or smoking, seeming neither interested nor bored. He did a lot of polite smiling and nodding, a lot of gazing into the fire. He didn’t say much to anyone. I was beginning to think maybe he was watching too, like I was, but in a different way.
After a while, he stood and picked up a broken tree branch that was on the ground. He kept stoking the fire with it, moving the logs and random tinder, sending the sparks flying upward. I was scared the glowing embers would catch the leaves on the low branches or that someone might look up and follow the embers’ path as they ascended toward me.
If things were different, maybe I’d climb down and go talk to him, do a little flirting, or maybe we’d even have a drink together, share a laugh—all those normal, sweet little moments. But things weren’t different.
I brought Mallory’s camera to my eye, twisting the lens so I could see him more clearly, look at him more closely. “Hold still.” I breathed the words my sister was always saying, to people, to objects, to animals, to places. I moved my whole body, shifted just half an inch to the right, cropping everyone else out of the frame. Sure to keep my arms and hands and fingers exactly as they were. I could imagine her in this very spot, doing all of these same things. The tip of my index finger slid against the button, wanting to press down.
Looking through the camera made me dizzy, like I was that night at the party over spring break. I moved my left hand cautiously, my fingers against the tree bark, and I tried to brace myself as I lowered the camera from my face, its weight tugging at the strap around my neck like an anchor trying to drag me down.
My left foot was all pins and needles. I shifted my leg, and the branch beneath me winced and swayed gently, shedding a few stray scales of bark. They fell to the ground soundlessly, unnoticed. But I’d lost my balance. I had to think fast. I reached for the branch above me to steady myself, but it cracked, then snapped.
My hands grabbed for anything to hold on to, getting scraped as the branches slid right through them, leaves slicing my palms, like paper cuts. I caught myself before falling all the way down, but in the commotion I’d been spotted.
“Hey, who’s up there?” someone yelled.
I could see the shadows of several people on the ground, coming closer, heard someone else saying, “What the hell?”
One of them shined a flashlight on me. “I see you,” he said, and there was no mistaking that voice, no getting out of this now. Clumsily, I used my arms and legs to maneuver from branch to branch—the rough, jagged tree bark opening up my knees and elbows along the way.
When I jumped down, I stumbled, unsteady on my feet, and was face-to-face with Neil. He turned the light off and just stared at me, silently. But somehow I still heard those words echoing through my head as if he was saying them again, right now: It’s what Mallory would’ve wanted, what Mallory would’ve wanted, Mallory would’ve wanted.
As more and more people crowded around us, I was transported back to that moment again, standing up in the middle of Neil’s cousin’s living room, shouting over the music, gesturing wildly with my drink. It had all been too absurd, all the pretending, all the tears and solemn words, the sham of mourning. If anyone had had a right to be sad, it was me. If anyone was going to proclaim what it was Mallory would’ve wanted in the case of her dropping dead in the middle of gym class at the age of seventeen, shouldn’t I have been the one telling them, and not the other way around? People were gathering—their faces were serious, I remember that—and I thought, Wow, maybe people really want to hear what I have to say.
And with my first-ever audience, I had told Neil exactly how stupid and pathetic he was for loving Mallory. “Because everyone knows she was only ever using you, Neil,” I had said, looking around at all the faces with their eyes glued to me. “She was just stringing you along. Don’t you know, even if she’d lived a hundred years, she’d never have loved you back?”
I don’t know what I thought would happen. In my mind I was expecting people to cheer me on, realize how wise I was, commend me for telling such hard truths.
“Mallory wasn’t some angel,” I continued. “She was the most utterly self-centered, self-involved person on the planet. She cared more about her precious art than people!” I shouted, laughing, crying, spilling my drink.
Not that I actually remember much of what I said, but I was able to watch it later when someone posted a video of it online. It was titled “DRUNK GIRL LOOOSES HER SHIIIIT AT PARTY.”
I thought I had been so eloquent, but I was just screaming, barely intelligible. I stuttered and slurred through the words. And in the final seconds of the video it showed me taking a few steps toward Neil. I said something as I stumbled into him.
You can’t hear what it was because I was talking too low, but I remember that part. I said: “There are no more photos—I burned them. They’re all gone, okay?”
I still don’t know why I lied. In the video, Neil’s face went blank and pale—he looked like I had just told him Mallory died all over again. But then his face changed quickly, turning red and hard and clenched in places you wouldn’t think a face could clench. A part of me wanted to immediately backpedal, to tell him it was just a bad, mean, drunken joke. But I knew right away, there was no taking it back. The video ended then, and I don’t know what happened next. I don’t remember how I got home, how I ended up in my bed that night.
That look on Neil’s face, the hard, angry, clenched one from the video, that was exactly the way he was looking at me right now.
“What the fuck is that?” he said, not looking at my face but at the camera around my neck. “Give it to me,” he demanded, reaching toward me with both hands.
I backed away from him, and I tried to sound strong when I said “No!” but my voice was shaking.
“Give it to me before you destroy that too!”
People were already surrounding us, just like they had that night all those months ago. Except this time, Neil was the one who was wasted—likely a combination of weed and alcohol and grief. This time he was the one who stepped in close to me and said, so low that no one else could hear:
“Mallory hated you. Did you know that?”
It was like a snakebite—I was too stunned by the initial strike to feel the poison in those words at first. Maybe he could see that it didn’t quite hurt enough, so he added, “She fucking hated you.” Yes, there was the sting. I could feel the burn of the venom working through my veins. And while I stood there, incapacitated, my back up against the tree, Neil grabbed on to the strap of the camera, nearly choking me as he wrestled it from around my neck.