13 days, 10 hours

SHAYNA IS STILL ASLEEP when I leave for school the next morning. I thought she might wake up in time to take me to school, but in the end, I texted Cake. Don’t know what she did last night, but my sister isn’t getting up. Give me a ride?

In the car, she says, “Maybe she parties or something. I mean her FB was full of beer shots.”

“I haven’t seen her drink one thing while she’s been here.”

“Well, she’s only twenty. Maybe she went to a meet-up or something. Somewhere. To…meet people of her own…ilk.” Cake laughs. “She seems cool. I think this is gonna all work out. Probably just growing pains. Like when a person has a baby and has to learn how to understand which cry means what, like hungry, sleepy, change me. Your sister has to learn all that stuff.”

“I’m not a baby,” I say. I smooth the lap of my dress and adjust my hat.

No, says the girl-bug. You’re a mess to clean up, remember?

Cake frowns. “This cowgirl slash butter-churner outfit? How much longer is it going to last?”

“I don’t know,” I say lightly, looking out the window. “Maybe my whole life. You’ll leave and go away to camp or college and I’ll still be here, forever, a loser, wandering the streets of our dusty town in my musty old dress and Clint Eastwood hat.”

Because I’ll spend my whole life missing my mom, and so I should dress like it, just like the women in Dickens’s books. Dirty and sad and hollow.

“That’s a weird thing to say,” Cake says slowly.

She pulls into the Eugene Field parking lot. “What do you mean by that, anyway?” She looks at me, her face hurt. “I’d never leave you like that. You’re my best friend.”

“Everybody leaves,” I mumble. “But I’m just being dumb. Forget it.”

Tentatively, she says, “You seem mad at me or something.”

“Just forget it.”

We walk the lot in silence, enter the hallway in silence. I feel shitty for saying that, but I also feel shitty for thinking Cake should stay with me forever. Or that I’m holding her back somehow.

Her poor, orphaned friend.

Cake says, “Well, see you at lunch, then, I guess.”

I watch her go, her shoulders slumped, her skull backpack swaying against her hip.

I open my locker and see the photo of my mom on the door. A little slice of pain runs through me at the sight of her smiling face. My eyes start to feel hot, and wet. I press myself against the wall of metal.

Oh my God, her clothes.

She’s still in that dress.

I’m going to die.

Don’t say that word!

Giggling.

Oops. My bad.

Slowly, I turn around, my heart on fire.

Ellen Untermeyer is standing with a group of her friends, and Kai Henderson is next to her, looking down at the ground. He mumbles something, and tries to take her elbow, but she shakes him off and whispers in her friend’s ear.

Ellen Untermeyer was Kai’s girlfriend in the eighth grade, the only other girl he ever kissed in the world besides me, a girl he claimed slobbered like a teething baby, and if I had to describe my feelings at this moment with emojis, they would be:

And his face would be this and Ellen Untermeyer’s face would be this .

“What did you say?” I try to keep my voice from shaking.

Really, the whole world, at least the world inside the hallway, stops. Like, needles screeching across records and car tires skidding across blacktops in an endless movie-montage loop kind of thing. I mean, kids stop walking and start clustering around us.

“Girly fight,” some guy in a leather jacket says, and laughs.

“What did you say?” My voice sounds hard, and faraway.

“Oh my God, Grace. Please. You can’t take a joke? I mean, have you looked at yourself?”

Ellen Untermeyer called me a jackass freshman year in front of the entire English Lit class for pronouncing hyperbole incorrectly, and even though I always felt her eyes burning into my body whenever she’d catch me standing with Kai in the hallway at Eugene Field or on the knoll at The Pit, I never much paid attention to her after that.

Her beady little eyes are exactly like mean raisins, if raisins could be mean.

I look at Kai.

Kai keeps his eyes on the ground.

I’m so furious at him. Hurt and filled with fury, that he would…just stand here. Like he just left me at the hospital.

“You just left me there,” I say.

It’s out before I can stop it, my voice small, almost pleading.

He looks up. “I said I was sorry.”

“My mom died and you just left me there.”

Oh God. My voice cracks. Some girl in the growing crowd of kids covers her mouth like she feels sorry for me.

“Graaaaace…”

Ellen Untermeyer’s voice is like a slice of lemon in the air, tart and sharp as she drags out my name.

“Grace, get over it, already. Move on.”

Ellen Untermeyer tosses her amber-colored hair over her shoulder. She’s that type of girl: smart in school, and never lets you forget it, but it’s also kind of her curse, because people hate her for it, so she doesn’t have too many friends, and she acts like she doesn’t care, but you know she totally does, and that just makes people like her even less.

Something about the way her lips purse in that moment tears through me like a lightning bolt. I realize she’s never been touched by true harm, or she wouldn’t give me that look.

She’s never felt carved out, hollow, weighted down.

She’s never felt the way I’ve felt for the past thirteen days.

Standing there in the middle of the hallway, smug in her unsmudged life.

I walk over and slap Ellen Untermeyer in the face as hard as I can.

And then, astonished, I hold my palm up and look at it, like, Hey, what are you doing here, you crazy, face-slapping piece of flesh?

I’m almost more astonished at how good it felt. To hit her. To hit something. Anything.

I’m breathing hard. I want to hit everything now. Kick everything with these kick-ass boots. Because it felt good.

Maybe this will be my lifesaver, my grief talent: I’ll be a world-famous girl boxer, fighting her way out from her mom’s death by reducing horrible people to pulp.

Awww, shit, says the crowd. People start clapping. Fight fight fight. Kids hold up their phones.

#griefgirl #schoolfight #girlfight #madgirlwalking #dangdogyoufiercegirl

I have so much adrenaline I can barely see or hear anything, blood pumping through me thickly, urgently. I think I hear Cake shout, Tiger, no.

Because I have my hands up, and I want to go after Ellen again.

Ellen, who is cupping her right cheek with both hands like it’s a Fabergé egg, which are these intricate gold eggs made for Russian royalty a long time ago, one of which even had a teeny tiny replica of a royal coach inside, something I learned about while watching Antiques Roadshow with my mother, who is now dead, and whom I am supposed to get over.

Ellen Untermeyer wails and calls me a bitch. Her friends close ranks around her, cradling her like a lost kitten. Kai stares at me. Jesus, Tiger, what’s wrong with you?

That makes me even more mad, because now I’m a mess and wrong, so I shove him as hard as I can, which sends him reeling backward into the crowd, his glasses flying off and skittering on the ground. There’s the sound of glass crunching.

Someone in the crowd says, Oopsie.

And then Walrus Jackson is there, pushing kids aside and shouting, “Oh, no, no, not in my school, no, uh-uh, and Tiger Tolliver, you will stop with all this right now, do you read me?”

But I’m all hands and nerve and blood and shame, all the kids staring at me, Kai Henderson on the floor, feeling around for his glasses that kids keep kicking away, because kids are shitty like that, and that makes me feel even worse, so I fight Mr. Jackson, my fists crashing against his white button-up shirt, until he moves behind me and wraps his arms around me and picks me up and carries me down the hall like a wild, kicking doll.