It’s seven a.m. and Winona hasn’t slept since she saw Jay’s posts.
She tried to hack his account to delete them, to stop him from haunting her feeds but she can’t figure out his passwords and so there he is commenting from the afterlife, wishing her a happy birthday and posting throwback pics. People from school have been screenshotting the posts, adding them to their stories with ghost stickers and exclamation points. Every year he spammed her, going to great lengths to get the timing just right, writing and scheduling posts in advance, so he could be there to watch her reaction unfold. Mostly she acted annoyed but he knew that secretly she liked that he remembered. She hadn’t celebrated her birthday since her mom died. Though her dad tried to keep up the ritual of birthday cake for breakfast and breakfast for dinner, it wasn’t the same as when her mom did it. Her mom filled the kitchen with streamers and sat her down at the table like she was royalty. She played music and they’d dance around the kitchen, making up their own lyrics to popular songs. Her dad was usually there, camera in hand, recording it for posterity but never really participating.
Her tenth birthday was only a few weeks after the funeral and her dad tried, but it was obvious that he was trying. Trying to celebrate and trying to forget at the same time. When she turned thirteen she told him that she was too old for dumb birthday parties. She mocked his attempts to plan a slumber party and returned the gifts he bought her for cash. She was mean about it on purpose. She can still see his face, how he had to look away when she said, “You’re the worst dad ever. I wish you had died instead of Mom.”
“I wish that too. Every day,” he said.
After that, he surrendered, giving her cash or over-the-top guilt gifts. She got what she wanted; nothing would replace her birthday memories with her mom. The bright white kitchen, the glare of morning sun, time so slow that she could see particles of dust float in the rays. It couldn’t possibly have been how she remembered it. Jay thought she was being dumb for not celebrating. He never bought into what she said she wanted and saw through her lies. Ever since he died she’s all tangled up in them. Unsure. A mess, and here he is, still counseling.
“Chill. It’s your birthday.”
She repeats this to herself when she’s at school, when people point and whisper, when randoms say “Happy birthday” with mock cheer. She keeps her head up.
Ash walks toward her. “Hey, birthday girl!” She expects him to keep walking but he stops right in front of her. “You doing okay?”
She nods, aware of the double takes and head-craning around them, people wondering.
Ash doesn’t seem to notice or care and keeps talking. “I saw the Snaps.”
“Yeah.”
“Intense.”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t think you’d be at school today.”
“Can’t keep missing. My dad’s on high alert since the thing at group.”
“Does that mean you can’t skip?”
“I probably shouldn’t.”
“Too bad. I was thinking we could go do something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why you being so nice to me?”
“Am I not supposed to be?” He backs up and makes some awkward face, an on-purpose this is my weird face look. “Just thought it’s your birthday and all.”
They head out and walk down the street toward the 7-Eleven, where they load up on sour keys, gummy bears and Slurpees. Sugar-high, they cross the field and sit down on the skate park bleachers and toss gummies into their mouths.
“Have you ever skated before?” she asks.
“Nah, not my thing.”
“Brian,” she yells and stands up to get his attention. He skates over. She introduces them. He was a friend of Jay’s. “Can I borrow your board?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, looking up at her and then at his scuffed-up Chucks.
“Come on, just for a quick one.” She smiles the way other girls do when they want something.
“Alright.” He hands her the board. “Just a few minutes.”
Ash watches as she pushes off, gathering speed and skimming the bowl. After a few turns around the course, she pops back up and over the rim, handing the board back to Brian who high-fives her before pushing off.
“You should try it sometime. It’s such a high — unless.” She digs through her backpack, retrieving a plastic bag. “Unless you prefer a different sort of high.” She opens the bag and hands Ash a brownie. “I made them.”
“I don’t know. That shit messes me up.”
“Come on, you have to. Think of it as my birthday cake.” She holds it out to him, singing a few bars of “Happy Birthday.”
“Okay, okay.” He takes a bite.
They lay out on the bleachers, until the sky seems fuzzy and the clouds form pictures at will. Winona’s arm is extended, moving to and fro as if she’s conducting a symphony. She points at the cloud-layered sky.
“It’s a cake!” She pretends to blow out candles. “Have you seen that movie?”
“What movie?” Ash is laughing. He can’t stop.
“That ’80s one. Sixteen Candles. It’s got that girl with the red hair in it — Molly somebody.”
“You watch a lot of old shit.”
“My mom’s movie collection. It’s funny. It has this guy; his name is Long Duck Dong. Jay and I watched it last year when I turned sixteen. Long Duck Dong — see if you can say it ten times fast,” she says, trying to string it together, her tongue tripping. She’s laughing so hard she rolls off the bleacher and onto the step. She’s still laughing but now it’s soundless and after a few seconds it turns into ugly crying. She repeats Long Duck Dong between sobs.
Ash tries to help her up, but she won’t move. She just lies there crying until the high softens and deflates. She wipes her eyes and sits up next to him, both of them staring out at the park.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me.”
“It’s okay. It’s just the brownie.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“At the airport when we were watching planes you said everything was your fault. What did you mean?”
“I don’t know. It just feels that way.” She pauses, eyes window-glazed. “Like, I can’t do anything right. Not at home, not at school — I wasn’t even there for Jay.”
“You were.”
“Not when it mattered.”
“You didn’t know. No one did.”
“I should have. He’d been talking about it. I should’ve gotten help.”
“How could you have known he was serious? People say shit all the time.”
“Yeah, but he was different. He’d been different for a few months — you know the whole blue whale thing?”
Ash nodded.
“He actually wanted to do it. He’d been looking for a way in, trying to find the game curator. He got mad at me for not going along with it. I let it go because the game was probably just a hoax. I figured he wanted to find it just for something to do, another adrenaline hit, you know.”
“You can’t blame yourself for what he did.”
“No? Then who can I blame?”
“Everyone else. The world.” Ash pauses for a minute and stares out at the boarders weaving and popping. “Yeah, blame the world for spinning like one of those fucking metal playground roundabouts. You know the ones?”
She nods.
“When we were little my brother and I went on one, and some fat fuck pushed it really fast. All of the kids were screaming and some jumped off, scraping their knees and bumping their heads in the process. But Anik and I, we just hung on, white-knuckled, until my mom saw what was happening and stopped it. Both of us staggered and tripped off, all dizzy. Anik threw up in the bushes and I just stood there, the world spinning. My hands were cramped up from holding on so tight,” he says, making a fist, “and when I unclenched them, they were pulsing, as if the metal and sweat of holding on had turned into an electric current.” Ash is quiet for a moment. “You hear that,” he says, gesturing toward the transmission towers beyond the park. “That buzzing . . . close your eyes and listen.”
Winona closes her eyes. A cool wind brushes over her. She’s calm, almost meditative, as she listens to the current, its linguistic clicks and zips.
“I figure that’s the sound the world makes when it’s humming along. That’s the sound of all of us holding on as we go around and round.”
She turns to him, her stoned face cracking with laughter. “That’s so fucking deep.”
“I know, right?” He shoves her and she shoves him back until their laughter softens.
“So what do you want to do now?” Her high feels thick, the fuzzy feeling turning into a low-grade headache. She rubs her temples and takes another bite of brownie.
“You decide. It’s your birthday.”
“Jay and I would have gone shoplifting for my gift. You know, like in true Winona Ryder style.”
“Why? Your dad’s loaded. You can have anything you want.”
“For the thrill of it! Come on.” She grabs his hand and starts running across the field, flapping her arms as she races toward the gulls pecking by the overturned trash cans.
The dollar store is wall-to-wall jammed with made-in-China crap, each aisle sign categorizing clutter: Baking and Food Storage, Party Planning, Housewares, Beauty, Candy and Food. Ash avoids looking directly at the security cameras but stares at his distorted reflection in the large surveillance mirrors in the corners of the shop. “Maybe we should just go?”
“Rookie,” Winona says, pulling him along, leading him down the toy aisle where she pulls a plastic sword from a bin and stabs him with it.
She laughs and says, “En garde, you swine!”
“Huh?”
She looks annoyed. “Sword fight.” She hands him a knockoff lightsaber from the same bin. He presses the button on the handle and it glows green.
“Game on,” he says, imitating the sound the saber makes as he strikes her. She grabs a nearby plastic shield and holds it against her chest. They pivot back and forth, up and down the aisle, jabbing each other in the ribs, slicing shoulders and arms, part sword fight, part Jedi battle.
“Hey, no playing with the toys unless you buy them,” yells the cashier from the front of the store. She’s staring at them, her arms crossed over her uni-boob, and if it wasn’t for her apron that says How can I help, she’d be a deterring force or at least someone to avoid, the same way you avoid the weird aunt who pinches your cheeks and hugs too hard.
“Sorry.” Ash puts the lightsaber down. Winona follows suit and they proceed down the cramped aisle, checking the surveillance mirrors as they drop random stuff in their backpacks and jam candy into their pockets. Just as they’re about to leave, Winona runs back to the toy aisle and grabs the lightsaber.
“Run,” she says to Ash.
They push through the doors as the cashier yells, “You have to pay for that!” Winona glances back as the cashier bolts through the door. “Stop, thief!” People in the parking lot look up, noting the commotion, but no one intervenes.
“Come on!” Ash is still running.
“It’s okay,” Winona says, her run slowing down to a jog and then a walk by the time they clear the parking lot. “No one even cares.”
When Winona gets home, Trish is asleep on the couch and the twins are in the playroom on their tablets. She likes it when they’re quiet like this, sedated by the lure and glow of screens and interactive games. She’s glad they’re over the Caillou phase. That cartoon kid was a whiny brat and what was with his bald head — it’s not like he had cancer or something.
“What’s going on, Thing One and Two?” Neither of them looks up from their device. “Hello!” she says, raising her voice.
“Mom was acting funny when she picked us up from school and then she came home, ate all the snacks and went to sleep.”
“She’s been sleeping since three?”
They both nod in their weird twin way that always makes her think of the little girls in The Shining.
“I’ll go check on her,” she says, trying to stay calm. She walks normally until she’s out of sight and then rushes to the living room, where Trish is sprawled out. “Trish, wake up.” When she doesn’t stir, Winona shakes her. “Wake up, wake up, wake the fuck up!” She pulls out her phone and dials her dad. No answer. “Shit, shit, shit.” She kneels down, her face next to Trish’s and listens to her breathing. “Good, still alive.” Winona tries to wake her again, shoves her, pokes her, pulls her hair, but nothing. She calls 911 and waits for the paramedics to arrive.
“Is Mommy dead?” Thing One asks. For a minute Winona disappears into the past, remembering when her mother was taken to the hospital for the very last time. How she watched from these very steps, her face looking out between the slats. Thing Two starts to cry.
While Jon is at the hospital with Trish, Winona orders pizza, plays I spy with the twins and watches Frozen for the millionth time. At nine o’clock, she tucks them in and reads them stories until they fall asleep. It’s the most time she’s ever spent with them and as she looks at their identical pale moon faces she thinks they’re not so bad.
She’s binge-watching when her dad finally comes in. “How is she? What did they say?” She turns off the TV and waits as he hangs his jacket up. “Well?”
“Tests came back positive for drugs.”
“What? That’s got to be a mistake.”
“That’s what I thought, but then she told me she ate some of the brownies you made.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Yeah, fuck is right. What the hell were you thinking, making that shit and leaving it around. What if the twins ate it?”
“I didn’t leave it around. I put them in the basement fridge. I didn’t think she’d go in there.”
“Yeah, well. She did.” Jon sits down across from her. “What even possessed you to make them? Isn’t your life messed up enough?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Well?”
“I thought it was a rhetorical question. Didn’t realize you wanted an answer.”
“Well, I do.”
“I don’t know. I just felt like it, I guess.”
“You felt like it?” He pauses, his jaw tightens as if he’s holding back. “Where did you even get the marijuana? Never mind, it doesn’t even matter. What matters is that you’re fucking up your life and you’re fucking up everyone else’s too. You know, if she hadn’t told me that she ate those brownies, the doctors would think she’s a user and could even report her to child protection or something.”
“You’re overreacting. Doctors are so used to seeing rich white women using way worse than that. Besides, edibles are practically legal now.”
“Can you even hear yourself? For God’s sake, Winona. Your mother would be so disappointed in you if she were alive.”
“Nice one, Dad. Real nice.” She gets up to leave.
“Sit down. We aren’t finished.”
“Then let’s skip to the end where you tell me that I’m a fuckup and that I’m grounded and then I’ll nod, take your bullshit and apologize.”
“Aren’t you the least bit sorry?”
“Of course I am. But you’re acting like I did it on purpose, like I force-fed her. How was I supposed to know she was going to stuff her face with my birthday brownies? Yeah, that’s right. It’s my birthday today. Happy birthday, Winona!” She runs up the stairs and slams her door. She just stands there, back against the wall for a minute, trying to get a grip, trying to keep herself from spiraling but nothing works, not the breathing techniques and not the mantras. She reaches under the bed and pulls out her cut box. She looks at the knife, runs her fingers along the blade and without thinking makes one quick swipe, striking the blade on her forearm as if she’s striking a match. She stares at the shallow cut, the dotted blood line, and palms it, applying pressure until she’s filled with the sweet relief of feeling on the outside instead of on the inside.
Her phone pings. It’s another message from Jay. A picture of a tiny gift-wrapped box captioned “Hope you liked it!” She wonders what was in the box and accepts that she’ll never know. There’s so much she’ll never know.
She scrolls back to his first message. “Chill, it’s your birthday.” She hurls the phone across the room.