Girl in Snow(38)

I like this photo because we don’t look happy. We’re both frozen in motion, stuck there. Years later, from the floor of my bedroom, it’s like Zap will move his hand from his face to hike up his backpack straps, and I will yell at Ma about how I hate having my picture taken. This photo is the middle of something. I can always pick it up and dip a toe back in, testing the temperature of my own memory.

I carefully followed the rest of the steps. The pentacle necklace, which I bought at a garage sale, went in the middle of the altar. I sprinkled salt from the kitchen table shaker (a ceramic cow). Clockwise, three times. Repeat with the thyme from Ma’s spice cabinet. I arranged the candles an inch apart and sprinkled “holy water” from a Dixie cup.

They don’t tell you what to do once the circle is made.

So I sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, candles flickering around me, hoping I had remembered to lock my bedroom door. Manufactured TV laughter echoed up the stairs, and faint pop music pulsed from Amy’s room. I tried to meditate on one thought, and I tried to make that thought something useful. I wanted to pray that I’d be nicer to people, that this year wouldn’t suck as much dick as the last. But I got lost in the circles of my own head and ended up where I always did: thinking about that night with Zap and Lucinda, trying to forget her sweet dough hands.

That’s how it happened, I guess. In that sweaty circle, I prayed to some unspecified force that Lucinda Hayes would simply disappear.

I wanted her gone.

Even though I’d gotten this all from a book, and there’s no such thing as real-life death spells, and I never believed it would work, I didn’t, I swear I didn’t—when I opened my eyes, it was there. Fear. Singular and inexplicable.

I didn’t properly disassemble the circle. I jumped out instead, childishly scared, and flicked on my bedroom lights. The scene looked almost casual in the glow of the overhead lamp. As I blew out the candles, wax dripped into herbs and everything seeped into the carpet, thyme and salt and hot wax all tangled in singed plastic fibers. I kicked down the altar. Shoved everything into a black garbage bag, which I stuck under my bed and immediately tried to forget.

This sick sinking overcame me, like I’d proven to myself what Zap had already said: You are a disposable girl. Temporary. A mess of skin and lard over thinning, brittle bones.



Two hours after the dream, I’m eating cornflakes cross-legged on the couch, listening to Ma and Amy fight about Amy’s eye makeup. Just a little darker on the top lids, Ma is saying, and Amy’s saying, Do you want me to look like a slut? Mornings like these, I’m thankful that I am not Amy. Amy is Ma’s Barbie doll, a mannequin for Ma’s regret about her worry lines and all those cigarettes she smokes.

Miracle is, no matter how Ma dresses me, I’ll never look how she wants.

In fact, she has never even tried.



It has been like this for as long as I can remember: Ma sipping wine from three o’clock onwards. Me and Amy tiptoeing around upstairs, daring to come close only when Ma calls for us, a predator luring in her prey.

When we were little, it was only me. Now, reliably, it’s only me. But when Amy was in the second grade, she gained weight—the usual little-girl pudge around the middle. And for those few years, it was her, too.

It was always worse after we’d been at Lex and Lucinda’s house. The place turned Ma into a raging, spitting monster: the Hayes girls and their golden hair, the Hayes girls and their Popsicle-stick thighs, the Hayes girls and the Lysol house they inhabited, with hospital corners and dimness settings for the dining-room chandelier. Ma would pick us up, chatting amiably with Missy Hayes in the front hall as we tied our shoes. She’d bring us home—back to the kitchen floor covered in Saltine crumbs from her own midnight snack, to the triangles of hardened microwaveable pizza, to the half-full glasses of wine she’d left on the counter for days, rotting sticky. Ma would look down at us, her flabby little offspring, the both of us round and bucktoothed—even Amy, with her pretty red hair.

Ma would pour herself an afternoon glass, stewing and fuming while Amy and I huddled upstairs, awaiting the shrill screech of her call. Girls! she’d finally yell. Get down here!

One Saturday, Lex Hayes won the third-grade gymnastics tournament. The judges released the scores, and Lucinda clapped and hollered while Mrs. Hayes filmed, both of them teary when Lex came down from the podium with a heavy plastic medal around her neck. They were so proud. Amy and Lex jumped around and hugged, like winning a third-grade gymnastics tournament was equivalent to an Olympic gold.

When Ma called up the stairs that day, Amy was tense under the blankets in my bed, still wearing her expensive, rhinestoned leotard, hair pulled into a rock-solid hairspray bun. Clumpy mascara lashes. Girls! Ma shrieked.

“Stay,” I told Amy, and I locked the door behind me before easing down the stairs, a doomed boxer walking into the ring.

“Where’s your sister?” Ma asked. She’d polished off half the bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay, and she swirled the stem of the wineglass along the grainy faux-marble counter.

“Upstairs,” I said.

“Go get her.”

“She’s tired.”

When Ma stood up, I took a few criminal steps backwards. Instinct. Of course Ma noticed: she wasn’t quick, but she was strong, and since I’d locked Amy in my bedroom, there was nowhere to go. Amy’s door didn’t shut all the way, and the bathroom didn’t have a lock. So when Ma said, Stop right there, I did.