3 days, 10 hours, 9 minutes
ALL THE WAY DOWN the hall, I can hear the little boy and the skinny girl fighting at breakfast. LaLa scolds them and they get quiet. Where is the other boy, the one LaLa said was older?
My jaw feels sore, like I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. How long have I been sleeping this time? What day is it? I check my phone.
My mother has been dead for 4,929 minutes.
I guess…I should go to school? 4,929 minutes ago was a Monday, wasn’t it? It’s hard to remember now. Sarah’s dresser drawer is open, her plain cotton underwear, plain cotton T-shirts spilling out. Who buys her clothes now that she’s here? Where does the money come from?
Such plain clothes. Little kids, they should have fun stuff. Sequined owls or something. Baseballs on their skirts if they want them. Jeans. My mother never liked me in jeans. She always said pants for girls were designed in a sexist way.
I finger the lace sleeve of the dress. I hardly even notice it now. It’s like I’ve grown a new skin.
I text Cake.
Don’t know what to do.
OMG I’m so glad it’s you. I was so worried yesterday when you didn’t answer. Are you okay? Where are you?
I don’t know. Some house. A lady. LaLa. Some kids.
LaLa? Sweet name. Are they all cool?
I stare at my phone.
I’m not sure that’s at the top of my list of priorities right now, but yes, I guess.
Sorry. I miss you.
I miss you.
I’ve never had a pair of jeans, I type.
That’s a weird thing to say, but…I think you’re right. You aren’t missing anything, tho. They never fit right anyway.
Then, Are you okay?
My heart surges with anger. How can I be okay? There isn’t any okay anymore. What a stupid question. I almost type that, but I stop myself, and feel guilty, and take a deep breath, then, just:
NO. I’M NOT. REMEMBER??
Right. Sorry. I’m sorry!
Am I supposed to go to school? I don’t know what to do.
I think probably you don’t have to go. I miss you. 
I type, I miss her, too, and then walk down the hall quickly, before I start crying again.
In the kitchen, they all stop eating and stare at me. I hold my phone to my chest.
There are oranges in a blue bowl, and a box of cereal, and a jug of milk on the table.
“Are you hungry?” LaLa asks.
Sarah has splotches of milk on her lips. My stomach twitches, remembering Georgia and the sour milk.
Sarah says, “It’s good, and you can eat as much as you want, right? Even thirds! LaLa?”
The boy says, “Yeah. The last place I was at, they kept a lock on the fridge and there was a paper, too, that said what you could eat and how much. Like, just half an apple for breakfast, or one glass of soda for lunch.”
Maybe the boy was at Georgia’s, too. And who gives little kids soda for lunch?
Sarah nods vigorously. “One lady I had counted the food in the cabinets every night, and if something was missing, she’d make you sit all night at the table until you confessed.”
LaLa says, “That’s enough. Eat.”
She rubs the boy’s shoulder. “You can have whatever you want, Tiger. I can make you eggs and toast if you don’t want cereal.”
“I don’t know how to get to school from here,” I say. “Can someone take me? Is it a school day?”
I don’t know what days are supposed to be anymore. What I’m supposed to be doing. Because a mom tells you that, usually.
Get up. Eat. Pack your backpack. Brush your hair. Do you have homework? Stop texting and do your math. Should we have pizza for dinner? Look at you, you’re getting so beautiful. Why are you so grumpy? Am I not allowed to call my own daughter beautiful?
Behind my back, I twist my fingers together, hard, where LaLa can’t see. The pain helps keep my tears in.
LaLa’s hair is wound in a big, braided bun on top of her head, like some exotic pastry. “Don’t worry about school, Tiger. We’ve got some other things to take care of. I’m going to drive the munchkins to school and then I’ll be back.” She starts putting lunchboxes in backpacks.
The little boy sticks out his tongue at me, so I stick out mine. He scowls.
When they leave, I peel an orange, press a wet wedge to my lips.
Nothing. It tastes like nothing.
Under the sink in the cloud-door bathroom, I find tampons and pads. Towers of toilet paper. De-licer. Band-Aids. Bags of brand-new toothbrushes. Hair picks and combs and barrettes and hair oils and creams. I drink some water from a Tweety Bird paper cup. Brush my teeth. Spit out the toothpaste, rinse the sink. I’m following the routine in my head, all the stuff I’m supposed to do, but it feels like someone else is doing all these things and I’m just watching her from a distance.
I inspect LaLa’s bedroom. She has a batik sheet spread across the wall over her bed, which is a thin futon on the floor. A record player. Lots of records on a shelf. A tiny table with candles on it. On the wall above the table she’s pinned dozens of photographs of kids. All different colors, sizes. Some smiling. Some not. I wonder if I know any of them. Maybe I do, and I just never realized it, because I only ever really hang out with Cake, and Kai, and some of the guys at The Pit, and my mom.
My life was small, but it was mine, and now it’s gone.
The other bedroom is the older boy’s, the one who isn’t here.
The first thing I see in there is a huge, dark poster. The face of a man, half-hidden, his dark skin floating from dark shadows. John Coltrane, it says. A Love Supreme. Another poster: KISS. Makeup, wild black hair. Probably Cake’s dad would love these posters. They have a virtual record store they run out of their house, with loads of records and CDs and posters and memorabilia in a special room.
The blue bedspread is messy with earbuds and headphones and paperbacks, science fiction-y things with purple aliens and flying saucers on the covers. An electric guitar is in the corner. The floor is littered with boots and socks and flannel shirts and boxers, which makes me look away, embarrassed to see his underwear.
My room at home looks like this, too: stuff everywhere, piles of my mom’s old records and CDs, underwear and bras on the floor. My mom always says, “This room is a veritable pigsty.” She has to nag me to do laundry in the little shed behind our house.
I would do the laundry forever, all the time, if I could get her back.
I leave the boy’s room, shutting the door tightly.
In the kitchen, I sit back down at the table, listen to the silence, which isn’t really silence at all, because there are little things making noise that you never really notice. The hum of the refrigerator. The clock hands moving gently. A drip from the kitchen faucet.
Everything is happening outside of me and sounds very far away.
I pick at my cuticles until they turn pink and bleed. When the front door opens, I swipe them on my dress before Lala can see. The bloodstain from my lip on Tuesday, when I was at Georgia’s, has dried to a pinkish streak on my sleeve.
“I’m back.” LaLa looks at me curiously. “What did you do while I was gone?”
“Nothing.”
LaLa’s voice is gentle. “Tiger, would you like to change out of your dress? We have some appointments today. You might want to wear something else for them.”
I blink. “This dress is fine. Where are we going, exactly?”
LaLa fills up a travel mug with coffee from the pot. It smells good. I’m so exhausted, and I want some, but I don’t ask.
She sips from the mug. Her skirt today is long and brown and loose and she’s wearing a pink tank top. “We have to go to the funeral home in Sierra Vista to make arrangements. For your mom. That woman, your friend’s mother, Rhonda. She’ll be there to help us. You.”
My heart falls all the way down my body, past my knees, through my feet and toes and exits my body. Arrangements.
The girl-bug in the jar can barely breathe. She covers her face with her wings.
LaLa’s old brown Volvo is hot and she apologizes for the broken air conditioning. She plays some Eastern music, the kind people listen to while they meditate, or get a massage. I suppose it’s meant to be soothing, but the plucky strings and all that humming make me feel angry and sad, all at once, so I jam my thumb against her iPod and turn the music off.
LaLa doesn’t say anything.
Rhonda’s waiting for us inside the funeral home. The lobby’s so quiet I can hear the soles of my Vans squish against the soft blue carpet.
Rhonda’s eyes are red. She wraps me in a giant hug. “Tiger, sweetie, this is going to be hard, okay? Do the best you can.”
Do the best you can.
Like this is a spelling bee and not a meeting about burying my mom.
The three of us sit in a room across from a man with pale, thinning hair and a turquoise bolo tie. He pushes brochures and papers at LaLa and Rhonda, who inspect them and ask questions I don’t really understand. The air conditioner makes the sweat from being in LaLa’s hot car dry on my body in a particularly itchy way.
LaLa tells Rhonda, “We need to make sure Tiger understands everything today. They haven’t been able to find her an advocate yet, so I’m going to do my best.”
I guess we are all supposed to do our best today.
Rhonda answers sharply, “Of course. I know that. She’s like my own daughter.”
I know Rhonda is trying to be nice, but the “daughter” part…it stings. And…are they arguing about me? What is that about?
Now the three adults are staring at me, but I don’t quite understand what they want me to do. I’ve noticed that since I became a teenager, adults respond to you in one of two ways: they wait for you to make the decision, like you should be happy they’re allowing you a choice they’re probably going to change anyway, or they just make the damn decision themselves because they don’t trust you.
Right now, I can’t quite tell what direction they’re leaning in.
“Tiger.” Rhonda’s voice is soft. “Tiger, a few of the parents have gotten together and we’re going to help out with the cost of the arrangements. So, we need you to take a look at these and let us know your thoughts.” She nudges a heavy binder across the table to me.
The balding man taps the binder. “We have several options for all kinds of needs. Do you know what our deceased would have wanted?”
Our deceased. “She wasn’t yours. You didn’t know her.”
“Of course.” His face gets very pink. “My apologies. That was crass.”
The binder is full of photographs of mahogany caskets and oak caskets, large, opulent steel caskets with puffy satin bedding inside, and plain caskets that just look like refrigerator boxes. Everything seems very expensive. Where is this money going to come from? I flip the pages, getting queasier and queasier as I see how much everything costs. As I think about who goes in these things.
There are caskets with monogrammed initials and caskets with slots for photographs on the side and on the top. There are caskets made of poplar and bamboo. There are even double caskets, which means two people died together and will be buried together. There are caskets tiny enough for babies, with plump velvet pillows, and when I see those, my heart sinks in a way that feels hopeless and permanent. I push the binder away.
Rhonda asks, “Do you like any of those? We could do a simpler one, I think.”
She points. “Like here. This?”
I try to imagine my mother inside that plain pine box, the lid closed, flat on her back.
That is the cheapest one in the whole binder. Four hundred and seventy-five dollars plus tax. More for bedding.
A thought occurs to me.
“Is she here?” I ask the man. His nose is shiny. “Right now?”
He nods carefully. “Yes. And we need to discuss that. If you’d like the option of a burial casket, or a service—a funeral—then we would need to start preparing the body now. And, of course, that has a cost, too.”
My mother, well, her body, is here. She has a birthmark on her hip in the shape of a crescent moon and once she told me, “It’s my superhero mark.” When I asked her what her superpowers were, she said, “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” And then she chased me, and tickled me, and held me.
I’ll never see her crescent moon superhero mark again.
It seems wrong to put her in a box and shove her underground and walk away. She made jams and jellies and grew irises and sunflowers and told me about periods and breasts and bras and how to properly wash my face and she brushed my hair and let me watch inappropriately sexy movies, because, she said, “Make love, not war, and the world will be an infinitely better place.”
Thinking of all that makes my body swell with pain, and to keep it in, I actually hold my breath. The balding man meets my eyes. He must know that I’m about to cry.
He must see this all the time.
His voice is very gentle. “Cremation, too, is a very accessible way to honor our…your loved one. The remains go home with you, and you may decide later how to honor your person. In this situation, cremation may be our best path.”
Rhonda explains, “Like scattering ashes, you know? This roadie friend of ours. He got cancer. His wife made pots. She put his ashes into a glaze and now he’s a pot holding a rhododendron.”
LaLa nods. “My friend Speedy died when I was fifteen. She was a real tough punk rocker chick. She was riding trains. Fell and got crushed. We hopped a train and scattered her ashes all along her favorite line.”
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.” The balding man crosses himself, which makes Rhonda frown. She likes to say she’s a firm believer in the Church of Nothing. That used to make me smile, but it doesn’t anymore. Not now.
“I can see June being okay with that.” She clears her throat. “And that’s…doable.”
I’m not stupid. I understand that “doable” means money. Now that my mother is dead, she’s a price tag, which she wouldn’t have liked, but I don’t have much of a choice about that.
It’s a funny word, rhododendron, and it ping-pongs in my head. I say it out loud, and everyone frowns at me, so I stare at my lap and fret some lace on the dress. I’m starting to get the wet cement feeling again, from having swallowed down my tears.
Before all this happened, I never knew trying not to cry would be actually, physically painful, but it is. My bones strain with the effort to keep all my tears in, because the last thing I want to do right now is cry in this stupid funeral home in front of this pink-faced man. In fact, the thing I most want to do, besides go home-home, is go back to that crappy, uncomfortable bunk bed in LaLa’s house and stare at the ceiling and be left alone.
As everyone stares at me, waiting for me to decide, I begin to wonder what happens to bodies when people die, before they get put in silky caskets, and then into the ground, or in furnaces. Do they just…sit in a refrigerator? Is that where my mother is at this very moment? Being gently chilled inside a wall somewhere, like a packet of ham or wedges of honeydew?
Is it padlocked, like Georgia’s fridge? The thought of a giant refrigerator filled with dead people, people we love, rips through me, and I laugh even though I don’t mean to, because it scares me shitless, and everyone stares at me some more.
“She’s overwhelmed,” murmurs LaLa.
The photographs of cremation containers—urns—in the binder blur in front of me. There are plain vases, and elaborate vases, and fancy boxes for the ashes. There are so many.
Images of my mom, and fire, make me close my eyes tight. LaLa puts her hand on mine.
I close my eyes. I just want this to be over.
I snap my eyes open and point to the first box I see on the page, a white one, with a swirly red-and-green dragon on it. It’s the cheapest one on the page.
“That one,” I say.
Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, except for me.
“Can we go now?” I whisper. “Can we please just go?”
The funeral home was in Sierra Vista, about fifteen minutes from Mesa Luna, but a good thirty from where LaLa lives. On our way home, before we pick up the kids at school, LaLa stops at a café. It’s cool inside. The walls are the color of mud. LaLa puts her purse, a big colorful bag, on the table. “I’m going to order us something simple. You haven’t eaten in almost two days, Tiger. You need some protein.”
The tabletop is cold under my hands. My skin is so dry I imagine it cracking and flaking off, bit by bit, until I’m just bone and gristle, and a great wind comes, and blows the rest of me away, until I’m nothing, not even a speck of a person.
That doesn’t sound so bad. Disappearing. Not feeling.
The girl-bug in the jar flutters, nods her head. She taps her fingers on the glass. Yes, she seems to say. What a good idea.
Tears flood my eyes. I’m exhausted, and I can’t hold back anymore. Hush, hush, baby. Coconut shampoo, her soft hair against my face. A bad dream.
My mom, burned to bits, stuffed in a small box. It’s all a horror.
I don’t want anyone in the café to notice me, but I’m powerless to stop it. So I do a kind of thing where I hunch my shoulders and lean forward and tip my face to the table. It’s a complicated kind of breathing, but I manage not to make a sound or sob. My tears splash on the table.
“Oh God.” LaLa sets two soup bowls down, finds a soft cloth in her bag, and wipes my face. “It’s okay,” she says gently. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” I choke out. “It isn’t.”
I meet her eyes. She doesn’t try to correct me, or give me some crappy saying, and in that instant I understand. LaLa knows, but she doesn’t want to say it out loud.
My life is going to be shit from now on. In ways I never could have imagined.
When we pick up the little boy and the girl, Sarah, they argue in the backseat. Sarah calls the boy Leonard. Leonard, stop poking me. Leonard, stop picking your boogers.
Leonard says, You stop.
LaLa looks at them both in the rearview mirror. “Guys, turn it down. Tiger’s had a rough day.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t care. I really don’t.”
Truthfully? They can be as noisy as they want. Fine with me. Their noise just fills up all the empty space around me. Areas my sadness can leak.
When we get back to LaLa’s, I walk straight into the house and down the hall, Leonard calling after me, “Where are you going? Where’s she going, LaLa? And when is she gonna take off that weird dress?”
LaLa shushes him. From the top bunk, I hear the sounds of television, and clinking pots and pans as she starts dinner.
I text Cake, but she doesn’t answer. Then I remember, Oh, she’s at band practice. She’s at school, still. There’s school, and life, and that’s where everyone is. They are going on, and I’m just stopped, a girl-bug in the dirt, upended and pathetic.
I roll over, press my body against the cool wall. I’d like to become this wall, burrow in it, let the termites get me, ravage me from the inside out.