I don’t know how to tell her that she’s all I have without it sounding like a trick to get her sober. All that’s left. But we aren’t in the same orbit, anymore.
My sister spends most of her time in bed, curled onto her side. She thinks I don’t know about the other pills, the new ones, but I do. Her purse was in the hallway after school yesterday, open, and I saw a mini Altoids tin and she hates those mints, so I knew there must be pills in there. I was right. Different pills from the ones I already took. Percocet. I was going to take them, but then Aunt Nora came up and I couldn’t. The next time I was in the hallway, the purse was gone.
Where is she getting this Percocet? Dad had Vicodin. Did she steal the pills from my aunt and uncle? Because if she did, they are going to find out, and when they do, they will have to deal with this, and they already have enough to do, taking us in. I mean, that is a real violation, stealing someone’s medicine. Uncle Tony said the vodka is missing, in addition to his bottle of bourbon. Nate took the blame for that, but he said it’s the last time he’ll cover for Nah. And then I had to lie to Nate when he asked what was going on with her, the drinking. I made it sound like it’s a new thing.
When I told her I knew about the new pills, the old Hannah—sober Hannah, who is sweet and likes to dance around the kitchen with Mom—was gone, and this Hannah told me to mind my own fucking business and leave her the hell alone.
And I can’t do that, obviously. But the way I’m going about it is all wrong, I think. I don’t want to push her away even more. Then we’ll never get back to each other.
Her grief, it’s an ocean. It’s a wave. Mine, I think, is a glacier, floating in that water. I can feel it in my chest, this ancient, cold mountain of grief. It’s all in one place, but you can only see the tip. It’s so much bigger than people realize.
I spend most nights on the trampoline in the backyard, staring up at the stars, wrapped in a sleeping bag. It hurts too much to use the telescope Dad bought me for my birthday last year. It seems wrong to look through it without being able to tell him what I see. It’s strange, how instinctual it is to search for dead people in the sky. Perhaps it’s a biological imperative our psyche needs to make sense out of the sudden disappearance of the people we love. I always knew my parents were not going to live forever. But my brain never told my heart that.
They’re not up there, gazing down on me. But I can’t stop looking.
I don’t remember what it was like being in foster care—I was too young. But my bones know what it’s like to be abandoned, and I feel that deep inside, like you’d have to give me an MRI to see it. It’s an ache that won’t go away.
Everyone I love leaves me. I don’t know why.
I wish there were math for that. To figure it out. Or an abandonment supercollider, where you could take all the leaving particles and throw them in there and understand how they work, why they work. Maybe abandonment is necessary for certain species to thrive. Such as astronauts. Being alone is a big part of the job. You can’t relocate your whole family to the ISS just because you have a job there. And then, of course, that job site is four hundred kilometers away from most of the human species.
Dad always said that our greatest hardships end up giving birth to our biggest strengths. Maybe everyone leaving me is a sim. Getting me ready for being alone in those fighter jets, alone outside the ISS in my space suit, fixing a broken part. Maybe it’s a good thing.
But.
If I don’t die on a mission, if I die when I’m old, then I don’t think there is any way to prepare for that. I will be all alone because everybody leaves, they all leave, and it will take ages for anyone to find me, to know I’m dead. And the paramedics will open the door of my house, my orphan house, and the smell will be horrific.
This loneliness, a deep pit. A grave.
It’s the thing that will kill me next.
I have to work this problem. And this means keeping my sister alive. Because I want to be an old lady with her. I think that would be fun.
By Friday of our second week at school, I decide it’s time to stop being afraid of her pushing me away. Better to have her mad at me than be dead from an overdose. I will confront her. If this doesn’t work, I will have no choice but to enlist the help of others.
The bell rings at the end of the day, and I find her waiting for me in her usual spot, sitting on the low wall in front of the brick-and-ivy building. She’s talking to that vampire-looking boy, and when he sees me, he squeezes Nah’s shoulder, then walks off.
“He’s the guy from your math class, right?” I say.
“Yep.”
“What’s his name?”
“Drew.”
“Like, Andrew or—”
“Just Drew, Mae.”
She tilts her head up, looks at the sky. Blue, not a cloud. My favorite kind of day because it means great visibility for stargazing once it’s dark.
“It’s good. To make a friend,” I say. “Maybe he can come over sometime and—”
“Yeah, no. We’re not friends. Just friendly.”
It’s not fair, her being angry at me. It wouldn’t even be fair to be angry at the wave—even though I am—because the ocean can’t help what it does when there’s an earthquake under it, but if she’s going to be irrational, I’d prefer her to channel her anger in that direction.
“Good day?”
Nah’s wearing sunglasses, but I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “Sure, Mae. Fantastic.”
I sit next to her on the low wall, but I’m quite short, so my feet dangle, whereas her long legs stretch onto the sidewalk. We are quiet. She doesn’t move, and so I don’t either, which is just as well because what I have to say to her isn’t really a conversation for home. It doesn’t take long for the students to clear out, and soon it’s just us.
“Nah, are you…” I never have the right words for her. I know I can’t be too exact. That will make her angry. If she’s using, she could get mean and call me professor, which really annoys me. “What I mean is, right now, are you currently—”
She knows what I’m asking, but makes me say it. “Am I what?”
My sister shoots me a truly ferocious look, as though we’re not on the same team, the same side, anymore. If she’d take off her sunglasses, I bet her pupils are tiny specks, like extremely distant stars across the galaxy. She’s taken a pill today—I don’t know what, but it contains opiates. At lunch, all she did the whole time was stare at a spot on the floor. She wouldn’t eat—of course, the pills make you nauseous. But people were around, and I couldn’t say anything. A high school cafeteria really isn’t an appropriate location for an intervention.
“Are you on something?”
There are other ways to express this—the vernacular particular to drug use is quite varied, and you really could write a linguistics paper on it—but I choose this general, less loaded term (loaded, of course, being a colloquialism favored by many). The whole situation is crass enough.
“No, I’m not, actually.” She stands, towers over me. Her jeans and sweatshirt—one of Micah’s old surfer ones—hang too loose on her tall frame. “Are you trying to make me feel like a piece of shit?”