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The yellow caution tape blocks the door, but I put my key in the lock and bend under the tape and step inside. The door closes with a click behind me, and the air in the apartment smells stale and uncirculated. Dust has settled on the coffee table in the days since I was last here. I walk past the room that was my mother’s and go into my own. It has been gone through—the blankets on the bed are tossed back—but everything is essentially where I last remembered it. My backpack is the only thing missing. I search with a rising panic; it isn’t in the closet or under the bed.
I run through my mind the things that happened before I found her, and I make a hasty retreat to the living room. My knees go weak when I see it, sitting where I had dropped it, just on the other side of the couch. I open it and riffle through the items, feeling a cold calm when my hand lands on the fat envelope under the bottom flap, all the money I've been saving since I started working. That money is a car, or a ticket out of this town and away from everything that is my history. I go back to my room and fill the remaining space in the pack with my own underwear, bras, shirts, and jeans. Charlotte’s clothes are similar to Leslie’s—big and gaudy—and I can’t wait to wear a simple shirt again. I strip out of Charlotte’s clothes and into my own. I have stepped out of a cocoon, going in reverse, from butterfly to caterpillar.
The door leading to my mother’s room is closed, and I stand outside of it for a very long time, breathing, hearing my heart beating in my ears, feeling my blood sluicing through my veins. I am alive, breathing and beating and sluicing, alive. My hand rests on the doorknob, feeling the cold metal. I want to go in, to face the ghost of my mother. I need to face her ghost.
The coroner released her body to me Sunday, and I had agreed, with Leslie sitting beside me, to have her buried in a pauper’s grave at the cemetery. I refused to have anything put in the newspaper. There had already been a notice in the police blotter, and I imagine the town was already talking and whispering about her, about us. They didn't need anything else. There was no funeral; there was no service at the side of the grave. Except for me, there is nothing left of her. It is as if she never existed.
I let my hand fall off the doorknob and turn away. I am not yet ready to face her ghost. I am certainly not ready to face my own demons. I shoulder my backpack and exit the apartment. Someone is coming up the steps as I turn to go down. It is the girl who lives in the apartment at the end. The girl who let me use her phone the night it all happened. My eyes slide off her face as if I don't know her, as if I have never seen her before in my life, and I make my way past her, down the stairs. I can hear that she has stopped, and if I were to turn and look, I am sure she would be standing there, watching me go. I step out into the night, through the pool of light from the street lamp, and set to a lope toward Leslie’s house. My backpack slaps against my hip as I jog.
Nobody is home when I get there, so I sit out on the back deck and stare up at the sky, at the moon, rounding to full, but not quite there, listening to the all the insects chirping and humming from the dark. I am not one to sit still often. I stand, I fidget, I walk, but I almost never just sit. Even now, my legs are itching to move, but I force myself to stay still. Still. Unmoving. I try to understand who I am, this new person, this person with no people of her own.
The lights finally come on in the kitchen, and I turn to see them moving into the room: Leslie in her mauve and green floral tunic and tights, and behind her, beelining for the fridge, are Tommy and Jay. Jay doesn’t live here, although you would be hard pressed to know. He is here any minute he is not required in his own home or at the campground. I tap on the glass of the back door, and it is Jay who sees me, his smile breaking a line in his face. “There she is,” he says. I see relief on Leslie’s face and realize that maybe I shouldn’t have left graduation without letting her know that I was going. He springs the door open wide, and I step inside.
Leslie closes her hand over my cheek. “Don’t do that to me again.” I see worry and care stretched across her forehead. She drags me into a quick hug, and I feel awkward and made of too many corners until she lets me go.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I know she needs me to say something. “I didn’t realize that you would look for me.”
“Of course I’d look for you,” she says. Those blue eyes melt a little as I think she realizes that I have not had much of anybody looking for me in my life. “I will always look for you.” She holds my gaze, trying to make me know this truth. She squeezes my shoulder and moves away. Tears tickle the back of my eyelids, and I blink them away. “Next time, just let me know you are going.”
“I will. I’m sorry.”
She smiles at me and just shakes her head. It’s nothing. No worries.
“So, come with us, now that you’ve been found,” Jay says, and he stuffs a tortilla chip whole into his mouth.
“Where to?” I ask. I feel on edge and restless, and I don’t want to try to pretend to go to bed. I want there to be something more, something to take away this night.
“Summer Grove. Couple of us are staying over in the barns.” The “barns” I know is actually just one barn where Jay’s parents store a variety of lawn equipment and tools, but the upstairs loft is empty with two great doors in the roof that can be opened to the night sky.
“Is that okay?” Staying out all night seems like something Leslie would maybe not condone, but Tommy nods.
“We’re supervised,” Jay says, glancing at Leslie. “My parents are there.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. I want to go.” Absolutely I want to go.
We leave with the remaining tortilla chips and are out the door, piling into Jay’s car. Tommy offers to let me sit up front, but I climb into the squashed back seat and let the music, something techno with a heavy beat, close off my mind. The music is repetitive, synthetic, and I think we’ve only heard one song the entire drive to Summer Grove.
The party has started without us, and I am relieved to see that it really is just us oddballs. I don’t see anybody from the football team or any of the cheerleading squad in the pool. I see Anna Champaign, from PE, and I’m relieved to have somebody comfortable to sit with. We’ve had a lot of classes together since sixth grade. Her mother writes romance novels, and they live in a big estate outside of town. I’ve always thought that if anybody should have led the school, it was her; she is smart and funny, but she’s so homely and badly put together that her money doesn’t matter. I wave to Anna and she smiles her tin-rimmed smile, then I make my way to the locker room, where I’ve already claimed a locker for the summer.
I put on my bathing suit, then pull my shirt back on over the top, not quite confident enough to walk through the crowd so exposed. When I get to the pool, I yank off the shirt and splash into the water with Jay and Tommy. The water is cool without the sun, and soon I am sitting out by the side with Anna and the others as odd and misfit as I. We watch as several people attempt to gain the title of best, most intricate, or most insane dive. A tall redhead named Grant seems to be winning for insane. He has no fear of injury. Tommy and Jay follow suit, but they both have at least the sense of a goat and steer away from some of the more extreme flips.
I live. I breathe in the night. Thank God for summer.