LEO ALWAYS THOUGHT that New Year’s was the most depressing holiday, mostly because it usually heralded the end of their holiday break and the thought of going back to school after two weeks of gift-giving, Christmas lights, and no early morning alarm was, quite frankly, depressing. She never looked forward to it the way some people did, clinking glasses at midnight and wearing party store top hats and silly New Year glasses. Nina, who would have had a party to celebrate Groundhog Day if their parents had let her, of course loved it. She used to come in and wake Leo up right at midnight, and Leo remembers how she used to bat her sister away, how Nina always succeeded in planting a kiss on top of her head while fondly calling her a party pooper.
But not this year.
This year, Leo actively sat up and looked through Nina’s phone, waiting impatiently for the digital numbers to turn to 12:00 a.m. When they did, she cried a little, even though nothing felt different, even though it was only a second’s difference between the new and the old. This was the first year of her life that she would spend entirely without her sister, and Leo wanted to rip the Band-Aid off, to move on into a new beginning even though she had no map, no plan, and no energy to do any of it.
School in January was depressing, all of the holiday decorations now removed, leaving bare cinder block walls and boring window displays in the library. Even the teachers and staff seemed grumpier than usual, everything and everyone just a little bit grayer than they had been two weeks earlier. The weather was uncooperative, too, giving them dark skies and buckets of rain for three days straight. The neighboring cities worried about mudslides, and Leo spent most days slugging through puddles of water, soaking the Converse shoes her dad and Stephanie had given her for Christmas.
It hadn’t been the easiest day, but by the time they made it to Christmas afternoon, Leo felt like she could breathe a little easier. Leo and her mom had recovered from Christmas Eve, Christmas morning was over, and by the time she got to her dad’s and Stephanie’s house on Christmas afternoon, Leo felt like someone was waving a checkered flag at the end of a race. You’re almost through the worst holiday season ever!
She and her dad and Stephanie exchanged gifts, including a little board book version of Goodnight Moon that Leo had gotten for the new baby. It felt generic, but Leo had seen it in a bookstore and found herself picking it up, reading through the words, and taking it up to the cashier. Stephanie and her dad loved it. “It’s their first book!” Stephanie had said. She was getting rounder everywhere, her cheeks and belly and even her hands, her fingers looking swollen, and she seemed tired but happy. Her dad, though, just looked tired, and Leo recognized that lost sort of look in his eyes, the one he always managed to blink away whenever Stephanie looked up at him.
She recognized it in his eyes because she spent so much time seeing it in her own.
After they opened gifts, they went for a walk and then had turkey chili, Leo and her dad serving it up while Stephanie rested on the couch, scrolling through her phone. She had hired a new social media assistant who was taking care of replying to comments, and Leo could hear her annoyed tsks as she read through them.
“You should hire me!” Leo yelled out to her. “I can comment with the best of them!”
Stephanie laughed. “You’d write a whole paragraph every single time!”
“Nina would have responded to each one with just the puking emoji,” her dad said as he cut up the onions. Leo was grating cheese and trying very hard to not grate her fingers at the same time. “Even when you tried to text her, you’d be lucky to get a thumbs-up from her.”
“She preferred in-person contact,” Leo agreed, but then set down the cheese and went over to her dad, wrapping her arms around his waist, hanging on in a silent question of Are you okay?
Her dad let her hug him, and Leo felt the shudder through his spine as he worked through it. Before, it had been so strange to see her dad cry or be sad. He wasn’t some big manly, stoic, “only girls cry” type of guy, but he was reserved and protective of his feelings, the complete opposite of how Nina had been.
“Stephanie’s been such a trouper,” he said.
Once he was better, he wiped at his eyes and said, “Damn onions.” Leo went back to her cheese and when her dad reached out to stroke her hair in a silent thank-you, she didn’t duck away.
At dinner, Stephanie asked the question that had been floating around them all afternoon. “So, how was Christmas Eve with your mom? Was it . . . ?”
Leo thought of everything that had happened just one night earlier.
Her hair still smelled faintly of ash and smoke.
“Fine,” she finally replied. “It was fine.”
At school on the first Monday of the new year, Leo plods through the hall with her books hugged close to her chest, even though she’s wearing her backpack, her new sneakers squeaking on the floor. The kids around her are shouting hellos to one another, and Leo says hi to a few of them as she makes her way to her locker.
“Leo!” someone shouts, and Leo looks up from her lock to see Madison bounding toward her. It’s raining, not exactly freezing out or anything, but she’s wearing both a scarf and a hat with a pom-pom on top and a giant heart knitted into the front. “Hey! How was your break?”
Madison had texted Leo a few times over the break, and Leo had politely responded, once with just emojis, something that she’s sure would have made Nina proud. Madison had even tried to get together, but Leo had finally said, Thanks, but I think I need to spend some time with my family right now, and Madison had replied with TOTALLY get it OMG and then a row of pink hearts.
But here she is, looking like the human equivalent of a stuffed animal you could buy in a hospital gift shop. Nina would have rolled her eyes behind Madison’s back, maybe made a snide comment about a forest missing its Bambi, but Leo finds herself liking Madison more and more. She keeps showing up and that, in Leo’s mind, is no small thing.
“Hi,” Leo says now. “Cute hat.”
“Oh, thanks.” Madison reaches up and gives the pom-pom a gentle pat. “My nana knitted it for me for Christmas. She has arthritis so, you know, a big deal.” She smiles again, softer this time. “How was your Christmas, for real?”
“It was fine,” Leo says. In one of the grief workbooks, right before it had burned up, she had seen a passage that talked about the word “fine” standing for “fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional,” and Leo has decided to embrace the acronym.
“Oh, good,” Madison says, and the relief on her face makes Leo feel guilty, like she’s somehow responsible for all of the eye-rolling Nina would have done. “How are your mom and dad doing?”
The last thing Leo wants to do is talk about her parents and their feelings while, three lockers away, Jamie Masterson is making out with Evie Engels like they haven’t seen each other since Thanksgiving.
“Um, they’re good, you know,” Leo says, and Madison just nods in sympathy.
“Totally,” she says. “Oh my God, did you hear? Alice got into Harvard early decision.”
“Wow,” Leo says, even though she doesn’t know who Alice is.
“Yeah, the guidance counselor is giving everyone high fives like she’s the one who’s going to Cambridge.” Madison rolls her eyes a little, and it’s ten times sweeter than Nina’s eye rolls ever were. “But isn’t that awesome? Alice is soooo nice, too.”
“I’m really happy for her,” Leo replies, and the weird thing is that she is, kind of. She’s not against good things happening to people. Nina used to say, “It’s nice when nice happens to nice” and Leo thinks of that now as she and Madison walk toward their English class. Good for Alice!
But by lunchtime, it hits Leo that a) she hasn’t seen East all day, not even in their shared calculus class, and b) he hasn’t said anything to her about his early action college applications. Wasn’t he supposed to apply to a bunch, RISD and NYU and Pratt? Hadn’t that been his plan, or more accurately, his and Nina’s plan? Maybe it was bad news. Maybe he had gotten rejected from all of them. Or maybe he was just sick after the holidays and Leo was doing the brain equivalent of doom scrolling? She sends him a quick text: You ok????
Leo checks her phone in between classes, but he hasn’t responded. There’s a picture from Stephanie, though, of a crib halfway set up and her dad sitting amid the rubble, looking both frustrated and amused. My hero, Stephanie had texted, and Leo quickly sends back the laughing/crying emoji, even though she doesn’t feel like doing either one of those things.
As soon as Leo gets home from school, she drops her bag on the kitchen table and walks over to East’s house.
The rain has stopped but the skies are still puffy and gray, filled with warning that they could start dumping water at any time. The hills that surround their neighborhood are usually sun-scorched and overgrown, but today they’re a brilliant green from the rare storm. It seems like she can almost feel the color in her lungs, it’s so vibrant.
Her shoes, of course, get wet again. She doesn’t even want to know what her hair looks like.
She knocks twice on East’s front door before he finally opens it. He’s got sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt on, and a deep sleep crease on one cheek. “Hey!” Leo says. “You didn’t answer any of my texts today.”
“Oh, sorry.” He lets out a breath as he runs his hand back and forth over his hair. “Yeah, my phone must have died.”
Leo frowns a little. He could have easily texted her back from his computer. “Uh, okay,” she says instead. “Do you feel all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
Leo’s ears perk up.
“You sure?”
“Leo, is there a reason . . . ?” He trails off, waving his hand in front of him. Behind him, the house seems eerily quiet in a way that rattles Leo. She’s been in a house that quiet before, in the days after Nina died, and the way everything seems so tense that it gives her a chill. She doesn’t want to be there anymore. She doesn’t want East to be there anymore.
“Want to walk to the park?” she says instead.
East looks pained. “I can’t really . . . oh fuck it,” he says once Leo’s face falls a little. It’s like they’re in a fight, but they’re not. He brought her a Christmas gift, hugged her mom. People who are in fights don’t do those things . . . right?
“Give me a minute,” he says, and then he’s shutting the front door in her face before Leo can even respond. She looks down at her wet shoes and sighs. Maybe she should have asked for rain boots instead.
It takes a few minutes before East finally opens the door again. He’s wearing actual pants now, plus the ever-present pink hoodie, and has a baseball cap pulled low over his tangled hair. Leo can barely see his eyes and once he’s locked the door behind him, he starts walking without even waiting for her.
Once, right before her mom and dad finally split up for good, the four of them did a puzzle as a family. The Grand Canyon, 1,000 pieces. They worked on it at night after dinner at their coffee table, but it turned out that Denver had worked on it during the day while they were all at work or school, and by the time they finished, they realized that he had eaten a few center pieces. “That was the most expensive puzzle we ever bought,” her dad had sighed once they got Denver—and the bill—back from the vet. And even though it was still clearly the Grand Canyon, the missing pieces gave it a jagged, almost malicious look.
That’s how Leo feels now as she trots alongside East, like she can kind of tell what’s going on, but there are key pieces she doesn’t have. His steps are long and fast, and she feels like a circus pony trying to keep up with him. It’s not a great feeling. “Why are we running?” she teases him and he slows down after that, but even from under the brim of his hat, Leo can see that he’s stone-faced.
“Where’s Denver?” he asks as they wait at the crosswalk.
“Oh, he had a previous engagement,” Leo says. She’s trying to make him smile, but all she succeeds in doing is making herself feel stupid. Nina, for all of her bluster and chattiness and brouhaha, always knew how to stay quiet when it mattered.
Leo wonders why she can’t seem to do that now.
The park isn’t too crowded since school just got out an hour or so ago. There’s an elderly couple toddling around the path near the playground and East and Leo follow them. They do an entire lap before Leo finally stops. East is so set on walking that he goes right past her and has to double back. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“You tell me,” Leo says. “You don’t respond to any of my texts for days, you weren’t in school today, and now you’re acting like you’re mad at me or something!”
East closes his eyes for a brief second. “I told you, my phone—”
“Your phone did not die,” she says. “Don’t even. And we’re actually face-to-face now. You don’t need a working phone to talk to me.”
East looks away. “I didn’t feel well this morning. How was school?”
“It was school,” she says, then decides to poke a little bit. “Some people got their early action acceptances over the break.”
East nods. “Did Alice get into Harvard?”
“Yes! How did you—Does everyone know Alice?”
“She’s been talking about Harvard since kindergarten. Or her mom and dad have been, anyway.” East looks away again, almost like he’s searching for a distraction or an escape. “Anyway. I’m not mad at you.”
“Well, then, what the hell?” Leo opens her arms and then lets them slap down against her sides. “You give me this amazing Christmas gift and then nothing?”
“Leo,” East says, so quietly that Leo can barely hear him. “It’s not about you, okay?”
It stings and Leo suddenly feels small, a bratty little sister forever chasing after the older kids. “East,” she says, and hates the tiny whine in her voice. “What happened? Did you . . . Did you not get in anywhere?”
East laughs a little, but it doesn’t make Leo feel any better, and he collapses down onto a bench and puts his head in his hands. “No,” he finally says, his voice muffled against his palms. “I didn’t get in anywhere.”
The weight of his words hits Leo, making her drop down next to him. She thinks of the photo he gave her on Christmas Eve, the video she watched him film up on the fire roads, him and Nina talking about college and the future, all of it done with such care and talent and love. Leo had seen a lot of amateur photographers on Instagram, especially boys like East, but there was nothing she had seen that matched what he could do, the way he could make people feel with a photo.
“Not anywhere?” she asks before she can stop herself. “Really?”
East looks at her. “Yeah, that’s what ‘I didn’t get in anywhere’ means, Leo.”
“No, I know, I just . . .” No matter what she says next, Leo knows it’s going to be wrong. She says it anyway. “East, you’re so good, though.”
“Leo.” He presses the heels of his hands against his forehead, making a low growl that reminds Leo of Denver whenever the mail carrier approaches their front door: a completely empty threat.
“Leo,” he says again. “I didn’t get in anywhere because I didn’t apply anywhere.”
“Well, that’s not true,” she says. “You were working on your portfolio. I saw you.”
“I did work on it.” He looks at her and his eyes are red and tired. “But I didn’t send it in.”
“But why?”
“Because!” he shouts, and that’s when Leo realizes that she’s been shouting, too. “Because I don’t know, what if they say it’s shit? What if they looked at everything and said, this guy’s a fucking idiot for even trying?” East mimics an imaginary critic. “Wasn’t his mom Sloane Easton, the photographer? Why is his stuff so terrible then?”
“They wouldn’t say that!” Leo cries, thinking of East’s mom’s photos, the ones that line his bedroom wall, a quiet shrine to her. She doesn’t know when she stands up, but now she’s towering over him, trembling in her damp shoes but ready to fight all of East’s imaginary enemies for him. “But it’s not too late, right? You can just apply with everyone else. It doesn’t have to be early action.” This soothes her, the idea that they can finally fix something that went so wrong.
But East shakes his head. “No, Leo. I’m not going to apply. I don’t want to anymore.”
Leo’s deeply angry all of a sudden. She hasn’t felt like this since the incident at the party, that white-hot pulse pushing up under her skin. “But that was your plan—”
“No, that was our plan,” he says. His voice is quiet, but not in a soothing way. It’s quiet like the hospital after Nina died, quiet like Leo’s mom passed out in Nina’s bedroom. It’s quiet not on purpose, but because it simply doesn’t have the energy to be anything else.
“It was our plan,” he says again. “Nina at UCLA, me in New York. We talked about it all the time, how we’d make it work. And now if I do it, it’s like, fuck, I don’t know, like I’m leaving her behind.”
Leo feels her fingernails pushing into her palms and realizes that she’s clenched her hands into fists. “No,” she says. “It’s like you’re going forward, East! It’s like—”
“You don’t get to tell me how I feel, Leo.”
“But you have to go!”
“Look!” East shouts, and now he’s standing up, too. “I don’t have to do anything, okay, and especially something that you want me to do just because Nina can’t do it anymore!”
His words are a kick in the shin, but Leo doesn’t flinch. “You’re right!” she yells. “Nina can’t do it! But you can! I thought that’s what you wanted!”
“What I want,” East huffs, “is to finally sleep at night without seeing Nina’s body crumpled on the ground! What I want is to stop seeing you lying on the ground next to her, Leo! Fuck, I thought you were both, I thought that you had . . .” He’s making terrible gasping sounds now, and Leo can see his hands shaking before he shoves them into his hoodie pocket.
“I miss her so much and I can’t just go and do all the things we were supposed to do together because all it does is remind me that I’m doing them alone! You said it yourself that night after the party, that I’m the only one who remembers,” he continues. “But I don’t know what’s worse, remembering it or not, because it’s so fucking lonely being the only person in the entire world who remembers that moment.”
He pushes his hood back and yanks his hat off his head, then smooths his hair back, and pulls it down again, grunting a little with the effort. “All I want to do is leave and stay at the same time and it sucks.”
Leo’s breathing hard, like she’s the one who’s just been shouting. The elderly couple who were walking around the park are now shooting worried glances in their direction. “Well, I’m sorry to be such a disappointment to you,” she spits back at him. “I’m sorry that my brain is so fucking broken that I can’t remember the worst moment of my entire life.”
“Wait, what? We talked about this, Leo!” East cries. “That’s not fair!”
“No, it’s not fair,” she shouts. “Nothing has been fair since that night, and it’s not going to get better by just staying here!”
“Well, then, fine,” East says. “What are you doing, Leo? Besides staying home all the time and going through Nina’s phone?”
“I don’t just ‘stay home’ all the time!” she yells, and oh yeah, the couple across the park now look officially worried, and there are a few moms at the playground who are glancing up at them, too.
In retrospect, the park was probably not the best place to have this conversation.
“I go out!” Leo insists. “Did you already forget the Christmas party? Where I had to bail you out? The party that you told me not to go to, remember?”
East’s cheeks are flushed a deep red, the tips of his ears a dark pink. “I told you—!”
“Nina won’t get to do anything ever again!” Leo yells. “Not ever again, East!”
“Do you think I don’t know that?!”
“And here you are, you can do so much, you can do anything, and instead you do nothing? That’s such bullshit!” Leo stomps at the ground even though she knows it makes her look about three years old. “She would not want to hear this. She—she’d be angry. She’d be disappointed.”
Across the playground, a mom starts to walk over, tentative steps that make her look like a deer about to walk into a hunter’s trap. Save yourself, Leo thinks.
“Leo.” East is so close to her that she can smell his laundry detergent. “Don’t. You’ll fucking break me, Leo. I can’t hold both her and you up at the same time.”
Leo starts to cry. “Fuck you,” she says. “You’re in so much pain? You think I’m not?! And the one thing I’ve ever asked you for, you refuse to give me. You won’t help me remember. And now, you won’t do the thing you know Nina wants. You—you’re ruining everything!” and she hates that she says it because she doesn’t mean it at all. She wants to hug East around his waist, hang on to him, the one solid thing she has, but it feels like they’ve both blown it up into pieces that can never fit together again, their broken puzzle writ large.
“Everything okay over there?” the mom calls, and both East and Leo give her a thumbs-up even though there are tears on both of their cheeks. She doesn’t look reassured.
“I’m going home,” Leo says. “You can stay here, go there, do whatever you want. I’m out.”
“Leo.”
“You’re wasting it!” she shouts at him, and she’s not even sure what she means, but she feels both heavy and light-headed at the same time.
When she gets home, she’s drenched from the clouds that finally opened up again, and her mom is in the kitchen, cleaning out the refrigerator, storage containers littering the countertops. “What happened to you?” she says, glancing up from the produce drawer.
“Forgot an umbrella,” Leo mumbles, then goes into the laundry room for a towel.
“Hey, have you seen East lately?” her mom calls after her, and Leo freezes. She has no idea if there’s a right answer to that question.
“Yes,” she finally says.
“His dad called me today.” Leo’s mom holds up her phone like it’s evidence. “He said that he got home after work and East wasn’t there, didn’t leave a note or anything. And that his phone was off.”
“He probably just forgot,” Leo says.
“Did you know that East didn’t apply to any colleges? His dad just found out yesterday. He’s really worried about him.” Her mom pulls a plastic container out of the fridge and looks at it critically. “When did we last have spaghetti and meatballs?” she mutters to herself, then throws the whole thing in the trash. When she turns back to Leo, her eyes widen in alarm.
“Sweetie!” she says. “Why are you crying?”