THEN
Frances Downie was an average teenager in every sense of the word. She was pretty but not beautiful; well liked but not popular; bright but not gifted. She was the middle of Joyce and Bob Downie’s three girls. Mary Anne, older than Frances by four years, was the athlete. Tall, strong, and competitive, the eldest sister had won a volleyball scholarship to Rice University. Younger sister Tricia, just eighteen months Frances’s junior, was the smart one and the pretty one. School, popularity, beauty—all seemed so effortless for Tricia. With these admirable attributes assigned, Frances was left to be the good one: dutiful, compliant, cooperative. Frances did most of the housework and cooked dinner regularly. Her family appreciated it, even if they forgot to explicitly show their gratitude. The Downie parents loved all their girls, but Mary Anne was her dad’s favorite, and Tricia was her mother’s. Frances couldn’t even blame them.
Their home, in a middle-class suburb of Spokane, Washington, was a modest three-bedroom bungalow. Frances and Tricia shared a room until Mary Anne left for college, when Tricia moved across the hall into the vacated space. When Mary Anne came home for the summer, Tricia moved back in with Frances. Frances would grumble about her privacy, but she was comforted by her sister’s presence. She slept better when she could hear the girl’s soft breathing across the room. Bob Downie worked for the city, in the permits department. Joyce was a dental hygienist. The Downies had enough, but no extra. Their marriage was companionable, but not overtly affectionate. Frances’s entire teenage existence would have been typical, middling, run-of-the-mill . . . had she not walked into the girls’ bathroom during third period that day in eleventh grade.
She was in Mrs. Chamberlain’s English class when she felt a dampness in her underpants. Her stupid period had arrived early. The elderly teacher was strict about not excusing kids in the middle of class, but when a sixteen-year-old girl grabbed her purse and asked to go to the restroom, the woman knew enough not to refuse. Frances walked through the empty halls, her shoes squeaking on the waxed linoleum. When she reached the swinging door of the main bathroom, she pushed her way inside.
There were six toilet stalls, a bank of sinks, and a wall of mirrors. Perched on the pink Formica counter was April Sutcliffe. The girl was Frances’s age, but more mature, more edgy, more rebellious. Teachers branded her trouble. Her peers labeled her badass. She wore thick foundation and black eyeliner, skintight jeans and low-cut shirts. She was tough and cool and she didn’t give a shit. With her was her blond doppelgänger, Rhonda Mullins. Rhonda was holding a plastic bag. April had a can of spray paint.
“Shit,” April said, hiding the aerosol can behind her back. When she recognized Frances, she relaxed. “Oh. Hey.”
Rhonda said, “We thought you were Chapman.”
The principal, Mrs. Chapman, had been known to pop into the girls’ bathroom to look for skippers, smokers, drinkers. And, likely, whatever it was April and Rhonda were doing.
“What are you guys doing?” Frances asked.
“Huffing,” April said, casually. Rhonda held out the plastic bag, and April sprayed the paint—an iridescent gold—into it. The blonde bent her head to the opening of the bag and inhaled deeply. She closed her eyes and her whole body relaxed, became buoyant and rubbery.
“Cool,” Frances said, like she was familiar with the process, like maybe she’d even done it herself, which, of course, she hadn’t. She made her way into a stall.
As she sat on the toilet, affixing her maxi pad, she could hear April taking her turn. The tough girl inhaled deeply, then let out an almost sexual moan. Frances emerged to find the two of them leaning against the countertop, smiling beatifically.
She was washing her hands when April said, “Want to try?”
At sixteen, Frances had attended a handful of parties where alcohol and marijuana were abundant. Her strategy was to hold a room-temperature beer, pressing it to her lips infrequently, then tipping it into a plant or down a sink when an opportune moment arose. When offered weed, she had a mild case of asthma as an excuse. Of course, she would politely refuse April’s offer.
“As if,” Rhonda snorted, her glassy eyes falling on Frances.
Something, some tiny kernel of teenage rebellion, flared inside of Frances. She hadn’t even known she harbored such seditiousness, but there it was. It occurred to her then that she could redefine herself. She wasn’t smart, pretty, or skilled at sports. But she didn’t have to be the good sister, the compliant, dutiful, doting sister. She could be the bad one.
“Sure,” Frances said, with a casual shrug. The shock on Rhonda’s face was satisfying.
April smiled. “Right on.” She held the can at the ready as Rhonda passed the plastic bag, now colored gold on the inside, to Frances. She held it open and let April fill it with paint. Putting her face to the mouth, Frances inhaled the fumes, then held her breath like she’d seen Rhonda do.
Stars flashed behind Frances’s closed eyelids, and for a moment, she was afraid she might collapse. Then she opened her eyes and exhaled, a flood of euphoria coursing through her.
“Fuck . . . ,” she murmured, and April and Rhonda shared a smile, like they were proud of her. Suddenly, Frances was not average, bland, dull. She was strong and confident, pretty and popular, wild and free. It was Frances, not Mary Anne or Tricia, who was the most loved Downie girl. Of course she was. She was spectacular. The high lasted roughly fifteen minutes.
She didn’t go back to class—Mrs. Chamberlain would assume cramps, or some embarrassing menstrual mess. Frances followed April and Rhonda to the mall, where they ate fries, looked at shoes, and huffed two more times—once in the bathroom, and once in the loading bay behind a department store. When Frances went home, around four-thirty, she couldn’t wait to tell her younger sister about her adventure.
Tricia, despite her looks, brains, and popularity, was sweet and grounded. She was two grades behind Frances, but still, the sisters were best friends. Tricia was the only one who looked up to Frances, who made her feel cool, and smart, and savvy. Today’s escapades, with April and Rhonda, would solidify the younger girl’s admiration.
“It makes you feel amazing,” Frances explained. “Like you’re the most perfect person in the world.”
Even though Tricia already was the most perfect person in the world (at least in Frances’s world), she was enthralled. “It sounds fantastic.”
“It was.”
“I can’t believe you tried it! You’re so brave!”
Frances smiled and shrugged, basking in the compliment.
“You don’t even drink,” Tricia said. “You don’t even smoke pot.”
“This is different. It only gets you high for a few minutes, so you can’t really get into trouble. Like, we could do it right now, before Mom and Dad get home, and they’d never know.”
Frances saw the apprehension on her sister’s pretty face. Tricia was a good girl, too, but she already had so many other attributes that Frances had tried to claim the label for herself. Corrupting her sweet, innocent sibling suddenly felt like a personal challenge. “There’s spray paint in the basement workshop,” Frances said, a dark glimmer in her eye. “Mom won’t be home for over an hour.”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“It’s fun. You’ll love it.”
“I have a lot of homework.” Tricia’s cheeks were pink. “Are you sure it won’t mess me up?”
“You’ll feel totally normal in, like, fifteen minutes. Trust me.”
The younger girl did. Frances was her big sister, after all. The siblings scurried to the kitchen to grab a plastic bag and then rumbled down the stairs.
Their dad’s “workshop” was just a storage room for the remnants of household repair jobs. Boxes of nails, screws, tubes of caulking, tubs of spackle, and a few tools lined the wooden shelves. The girls found a can of silver metallic spray paint left over from a school project Tricia had done in sixth grade.
“I made that satellite model for the science fair,” Tricia said, sounding nostalgic for elementary school. Frances realized that was only three years ago. Tricia was in ninth grade, fourteen years old. Normally, she seemed older than her years, more mature and composed. But right now, she seemed young, nervous, and intimidated. Her sister’s insecurity made Frances feel older, worldly, wise.
The girls sat on a scrap of carpet covering the concrete floor. There wasn’t a lot of paint left, so Frances mimed a demonstration. “You just breathe in like this,” she said, holding the bag to her mouth. “Hold it in as long as you can, and then breathe out.” She felt like an expert: knowledgeable, experienced, blasé. . . . It was a new feeling for her and she relished it.
“Okay,” Tricia said. “I’m ready.”
Frances shook the can, the glass pea rattling against the metal of the container. Tricia held open the bag and Frances precisely sprayed, filling the bag with silver. Her younger sister obediently held it to her face and inhaled.
She watched Tricia breathing in the poison, her eyes closed, her face blank, waiting for the chemicals to hit. Then the girl exhaled, her body slackening, face paling. Her sister’s eyes opened, but they were blind, unseeing. A small, hesitant smile curved her lips as the feeling hit her.
Upstairs, the front door opened.
“Shit,” Frances muttered.
“Girls?” It was their dad, home early from work. Why? Bob Downie was old-school. He’d go nuts if he caught them. There would be slaps and yelling and swearing. The sisters would be grounded for months, the entire summer probably: no TV, no friends, no swimming pool. . . . That was if he caught them.
“Oh my god!” Tricia whispered, and the panic in her eyes was real and visceral.
It’s okay, Frances wanted to say. Dad won’t know. I’ll cover for you. But her sister was already running for the door. Where was she going? What was her plan? But Frances would never find out, because Tricia collapsed.
A fatal ventricular rhythm disturbance. That was what killed her sister. Frances wouldn’t hear the term “sudden sniffing death syndrome” until years later, when enough kids had dropped dead from huffing for it to garner media attention. Inhalants are cardiac depressants, she learned. When that combined with the adrenaline surge Tricia experienced when she heard their dad come home, her heart was thrown into dysrhythmia. And then it stopped.
Frances admitted it all. She had introduced the fatal act to her younger sibling, had provided detailed instructions on how to inhale the toxic chemicals that stopped Tricia’s heart. She was not criminally responsible: the police deemed the death an “accidental overdose.” But Tricia would never have tried huffing if Frances hadn’t cajoled her into it, hadn’t assured her that it was fun and safe and basically harmless. Frances, alone, shouldered the blame. But she never told anyone how she’d felt as she took her sister through the deadly motions: cool, older, superior. It made her hate herself even more.
After Tricia died, Mary Anne stopped coming home for the summers. And then she stopped coming home for midterm breaks and Christmas. She said she was working, training, spending time with friends, but the Downie home had become a dark and dismal place, like grief had sucked all the light from the house. Bob and Joyce kept working, kept breathing, kept living, but their sadness and resentment permeated the air, the furniture, their rapidly aging bodies. They functioned for their remaining dependent daughter, Frances—already their least favorite, now the one who had destroyed their family, destroyed their lives.
Frances endured high school as a pariah, a monster, a murderer. She applied for college, more as an escape than a quest for further education. When she packed up for her move to Bellingham to attend Whatcom Community College, there were no tears. At least her parents had enough guile to hide their overt relief. Her dad helped her carry an overstuffed suitcase to her secondhand Honda hatchback.
“We still love you, Frances,” he said, without emotion. Frances nodded, the lump in her throat blocking a response. As she drove away, she let the tears come: tears of loss, grief, and relief.
Her parents could pretend they had forgiven her, but they hadn’t. How could they, when Frances could never forgive herself?