ONE MORNING, YOU WAKE up in the backseat of a small white car, surrounded by empty soda cans and crumpled plastic bags and all the other dirty shit that never gets cleaned out of the backseat of a car. Straw wrappers. Sticky old bags of fruit gummies. Flip-flops. Scrunched tissues. Single winter mittens and Styrofoam coffee cups and movie tickets from months ago. How did the movie tickets end up there? Slipped from a pocket. Fallen from a wallet.

You’re on your side in the duct-taped backseat, cheek stuck to the vinyl, staring down at those movie tickets. Three little stained stubs amid a heap of trash.

You finger them. They’re gummy from the last dregs of coffee that dripped from some Styrofoam cups. Things flip in your brain, like a movie reel: the Amsterdam teenage sex movie.

Why does remembering this stab you so hard? Why?

Through the window, the sun hits your face like a hot rock. You blink and wonder where you are, why you are in the backseat of this car, cheek plastered to vinyl, and then the world splits open again, wider than you ever thought it could, sucking your breath away.

Now you remember, now you know, now you know everything, like why the movie memory stabbed so much.

Your mother is dead.

You get out of the car and the sun hurts and the ground hurts and even the stupid air hurts.

You feel skinned. Like whatever held you together has been peeled away. You half expect to look down and see your heart hanging out, a slow-beating, nearly dead thing.

Your legs wobble and your mouth tastes dry and your mother is dead. They were all staring at you, in that too-bright room, silently willing you to say that the person on the table was your mother and she was dead so they could move on with their lives, while yours had just been stopped short.

You were kissing a boy when your mother’s brain exploded.

It’s very early and yet it’s already so hot. The summer is going to be so brutal, you can tell already. Your body feels light, which is weird, because last night you felt as heavy as wet cement.

If you looked at yourself in a mirror right now, could you see pieces of bone close to the surface? Is this how it will feel every day from now on?

That you’re walking around with barely any skin, your bones and heart open to everyone, now that your mother is dead?

Bits of the night before, just hours ago really, seep back into your skin. The frizzy-haired woman telling you she was taking you somewhere. Cake cried, and she grabbed onto you, and wouldn’t let go, and finally the woman relented, and made Cake’s mom and dad sign a piece of paper, and she had a nurse photocopy their driver’s licenses, and said you could come here, and pack a suitcase.

“Just one, though,” she told you sternly. “You can’t take a lot of things. We won’t know your permanent residence for quite some time. We’ve a lot to sort out.”

You are to be, as the woman put it, “remanded to the custody of the State of Arizona by one p.m.”

You slept in the car because the house was too empty and too full all at once. Her things were everywhere, bits of her in everything: the washcloth hanging from the shower faucet, the oatmeal soap in a brown, gritty puddle at the side of the sink. Everywhere you went, there she was, but she wasn’t, and it was too much, and so you went to the car, a tiny, tight space that seemed somehow better.

Your friend Cake is still inside the house. She’d gone to bed with you, but you got up after you heard her start to snore. You were more tired than you’d ever been in your life, but you could not sleep in that bed, in that house, at that moment. You practically ran out to the car, avoiding the couch, where you think it must have happened.

Above you, doves shuffle in the cottonwood tree.

What was her name, the frizzy-haired woman?

Cathy? Kara? Karen.

Her name was Karen.

She’s in charge of your life now. A total stranger. Your stomach coils in knots. You try to walk, to move, maybe even to run, but to where? To whom?

You can’t move. Is this how it will be? Will even lifting a leg require great effort, and cause so much pain, all at once?

The blue door to your house opens and your heart quickens; maybe it was a lie, a stupid bad dream, and your mother will appear, blinking in the harsh morning light, a hand shading her face.

“Hey, you, what are you doing out here, talking to the doves? Come in and have breakfast, silly.”

That’s a thing your mother would say.

But it isn’t your mother who opens the blue door.

It’s Cake. She looks like a sad panda, her black eyeliner smudged in half-moons under her eyes. Her black cotton skirt is wrinkled.

She puts your pink suitcase at your feet. Her voice is soft.

“I packed you some stuff,” she says.

“I was in the car,” you answer. Your voice sounds muted. Girl-bug behind glass. Can Cake see you, trapped in there? Scratching your wings against the glass.

“I know. I came out earlier when I couldn’t find you, but I didn’t want to wake you up. I cleaned up a little inside. I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

Your friend looks so frightened. You think she is a little afraid of you now.

You think this might be the case. That you will scare people now.

Your friend says, “My mom’s coming back soon. She’s bringing coffee. Are you hungry? I think she’s bringing muffins, too.”

Your friend bites her lip. “Maybe you should change clothes,” she tells you. “Before we go to that place.”

You look down at the scrub shirt. Beneath it, your T-shirt is caked with vomit.

In the driveway of the small house where you have lived since the day you were born, you pull the scrub shirt off. You pull off the barf shirt.

Some of the dried-up vomit falls in flakes and chunks to the ground.

Cake says, “Tiger, hey, no,” but you don’t stop, you don’t care that you’re standing in front of your house in your giant bra that holds your giant boobs, the ones that Cake says aren’t as big as you think they are, the ones your mom says will feed babies someday. She always adds, If you so choose, that is.

You kick the shirts into the dirt, pull down the too-long hippie skirt and kick that into the dirt, too. Your underwear is loose; the elastic is broken. You meant to tell your mom you needed some new ones, but you were waiting until the last minute. She’d find a sale, or scour Ted’s Threads for a two-dollar package of unopened women’s underwear. If the size was too big, she’d just say, “We’ll wash them in hot, and shrink them!” If the size was too small, she was an expert at washing them in cold water, and then stretching them out by hand, and pinning them up on the line in the backyard to dry. You didn’t like that, though. It made the underwear stiff and flat, like an unseemly cotton cracker.

“Granny panties,” Lupe Hidalgo liked to whisper in PE as you tried to change out of your clothes and into the red-and-white shorts as quickly as possible.

Cake’s face is so scared. You push past her, into the small house, close your eyes as you pass by the couch, where you think it happened, open your eyes when you reach your bedroom. You know what you’re looking for and where it is. Your mother treated clothes she loved well. She never just threw them on the ground.

It’s there, just like you thought, hanging in the closet, carefully wrapped in a zippered bag. She’d been so excited for you to wear it to the dance and you’d hated it and yelled at her. And then she died.

Ivory-colored, pearl buttons down the front, high lace collar, and the goddamn sash. On the phone she was so happy about the dress. “You’ll look so lovely and authentic at the dance, not all glossed up and plastic-y.”

But the thing was, after years of wearing clothes from dirty boxes on the side of the road, you wanted plastic and gloss. You thought you should have had a chance at plastic and gloss, and shopping for a brand-new dress at Park Mall in Tucson, in one of those cute stores with blaring music and pouty girls behind the register, and kissing a cute and nice boy, even. All of it.

You will never forget the hurt in your mother’s voice after you said the bad thing.

The way she said your name before you hung up on her.

In your bedroom, you pull the dress off the hanger and slip it on.

She was right. How did she know that it would fit so well? That the torso was cut to be somewhat loose, so your breasts wouldn’t strain the fabric. It’s billowy, and then drifts into the sash.

You will never take this dress off. It was all she wanted, for you to wear it, to look beautiful. And she didn’t get to see you in it.

You hear footsteps and turn. Your friend’s face is wet with tears.

She says, “Is that.” No question mark.

You nod.

“Okay. If that’s what you want to wear.”

She blinks, considering.

She says, “Actually, it looks really good on you,” and bursts into fresh tears.

She sniffles, “I swear we’ll get through this.”

You are silent. Whatever words you might have had left are drifting away. Inside the glass, the girl-bug drops her eyes. She’s tired now.

“I love you,” Cake says.

She’s crying hard. It kind of makes you angry, that she would cry. Like you should comfort her.

Her mother is driving somewhere in a nice silver car, with coffees in a cardboard tray, and warm muffins in a bag, and will arrive at any moment. And when your friend goes home tonight, and needs clean clothes, or someone to watch a movie with, someone to buy her the kind of underwear a sixteen-year-old girl would love to wear, someone to make her favorite food, which is homemade pizza with artichoke hearts and pineapple and garlic, that person will be there to do it.

Her mother is alive.

Your friend says, “I’m so sorry, Tiger. I’m so sorry. I’m here, Tiger. You aren’t alone.”

You wish you could speak, so you could tell her she’s a goddamn liar.