“You can’t smoke in here,” Leslie said meekly from the other side of the room as I pulled out a Spirit.
“Well, maybe I’ll just head out, then,” I snapped.
“No—you don’t have to—”
I glanced at her. Leslie closed her mouth and crawled over to wrestle with the window, pulling the blinds to one side, but it wouldn’t open. She groped her way over to the door and yanked it open. The noise of car horns and descending airplanes rushed in.
“I feel sick,” Leslie said suddenly, as I lit up. She tried to sit down on the bed and almost missed, scooching her torso up until the rest of her made it onto the mattress.
“You’re just drunk. You’ll be fine.”
She shut her eyes. “I don’t think so.”
I looked at her lying on the bed. Half of her tow-colored hair had fallen over her face, and her makeup in the lamplight highlighted the ruts and creases on her skin where it had begun to age. She was a mess. Part of me wanted her to pass out.
If she did, would I leave?
Across the room, the door hung open.
“Leslie,” I said, reaching across the empty space between our beds and poking her in the shoulder. “Leslie?”
She sighed. “It’s almost four in the morning,” she said, opening her eyes. “We should go to sleep.”
I nodded, lifting my cigarette.
“Do you want me to turn off the television?”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I like it on.” I went over to the gaping door, taking a few last pulls, then tossed the cigarette onto the walkway outside and shut it. In the freezing room I pulled off my leggings, letting them puddle on the floor, and yanked up the covers. Leslie got into bed and reached for the light. Then she rolled over in the other bed, still fully clothed, her back a lump in the dark.
I listened to the noise of the television for a long while, my brain feeling too sharp, buzzing.
At last, unable to sleep, I said, “What was she like?”
Leslie’s body under the covers was still, and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. Then she said, “She was…you know, she was the baby of the family.” She rolled onto her back, eyes closed, speaking to the ceiling. “She liked attention. She had my dad wrapped around her finger. She ran away when she was a teenager, but she used to call him up for years after that. Tell him lies about her life, how she was getting a business degree, ask him for money, then spend it on drugs. She was pretty and charming and everybody who knew her thought she was going to grow up and do something big. She would get these—I don’t know if they were crushes, these things about other people that she admired, and then she would try to be just like them, then forget about it the next week. She would take my things and deny she’d done it. She could be really sweet sometimes, though. Really thoughtful. Mostly not toward me, though.”
“Do you miss her?” I asked. When she didn’t answer right away, I added, “I’ve never known anyone who died before. I can’t imagine it being, like, my sister. Is it weird for you that she’s dead?”
Her chest rose and fell in the dim light. “I haven’t talked to her in ten years,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like much has changed.”
9
Robin
It was April. Plastic luminarias and string lights persisted here and there despite the Easter crosses in the yards below, from which Jesus lolled woodenly. That night it snowed, shockingly late in the year for Albuquerque. Leslie and I dragged blankets over to the window and watched it come down. From beneath the snow, the lights in the neighbors’ bushes gave off an unearthly pink-and-green glow.
In the morning the television said school had been canceled for the day. My father had left for work already; my mother was asleep, stretched facedown across the bed in the silk nightie I coveted and stole to dress up in whenever she left it on the floor. Leslie and I carted our snow boots out of the closet and wandered outside. It was forty-eight degrees already and climbing; the sun gave the snow a permanent glare. We tramped all the way across the packed-down sidewalks to the arroyo by Indian School Road. There were barely any cars out, and no other people. It felt like we were the only ones alive, which was how I liked it.
The runoff from the Sandia Mountains was enough to fill the arroyos in any ordinary April. With the snow melting, the water reached nearly to the concrete rim of the gully. A Styrofoam Wendy’s cup bobbed on the current, its straw flopping out like a tongue.
We clung to the railing, watching the cup go by, boots slipping on the rungs. Leslie had to yell over the sound of the water. She told me a kid my age had died here, right here. He’d fallen in and been sucked underneath the current before he could call for help. His body surfaced all the way in Los Lunas. That was twenty years ago now. They said that every twenty years the water took a six-year-old just like him. A sacrifice.
Leslie waited until I was looking wide-eyed at the water before she poked me in the ribs. I shrieked and fell backward off the railing, pinwheeling my arms as I went, and landed in the snow with my arms spread like Jesus Christ. She dissolved into giggles.
I don’t want to die, I told her when I stopped crying.
You won’t, she said. I’m sorry.
I savored it. What she meant was I love you. She never said it to me, so I always said it twice for her.
I love you. I love you, Leslie.
She held my mittened hand on the way home.
10
Mary
I woke up just as the sun began to press in at the edges of the blinds, casting long hot stripes across Leslie’s face. She was completely passed out, mouth open, arm hanging off the mattress. I lay there across from her, staring at her face. Prickles of sweat rose on my skin underneath the covers, like ants crawling up my stomach.
When my brain came back online I got this thick jolt of adrenaline. I sat up, sending the springs wild, creak creak creak, and froze in place as Leslie frowned in her sleep at the sound.
There had been something not right about her. That strong, sick smell she’d given off last night, clutching my arm. I could still taste it in the back of my throat.
It was gone now, whatever it was. Asleep, Leslie was just another drunk upper-middle-class lady on her Vegas weekend, crashed out in her wrinkled Ann Taylorwear. Her throat rattled as she drew in a dry breath through her mouth, and her chest rose and fell slowly.
She wasn’t my friend. Not really.
I thought suddenly: I could pick up her purse. Put it over my shoulder, walk right out to her car. I’d be halfway to LA before she noticed I was gone.