Girl in Snow(4)

I imagine how the shock must look on Zap, but I don’t dare turn around.

Zap has this way of sitting. He leans back in chairs, spreads his knees wide, lets his limbs do what they want. It’s not arrogant or lazy. It’s intentional. Comfortable. Zap leans back and lets his body occupy that space, as if he commanded the chair to assemble beneath him and it listened.

Today, Zap sits at the broken leftie desk by the window, three rows back. He wears a red sweat shirt and corduroy pants with holes in the knees. They’re too short at the ankles because Zap grew five inches last winter. His glasses are still fogged up from walking across Willow Square in the biting February cold.

These are things I know without looking.

The rest is up to my imagination—how the shock of Lucinda Hayes sits carefully on him. All wrong at first, loose on his frame. But it will sink in. The shock will move from Zap’s shoulders to his neck, to the birthmark on his second left rib. From there it will spread to all the places I can’t see.

Shock is just sadness that hasn’t reached the gut.



Of course, I already know that Lucinda Hayes is dead.

I find out before school this morning, over a naked Toaster Strudel. Ma throws away the frosting packets so we won’t get fat, leaving our strudels an unassuming brown, bare oven tracks running across their backs.

“Sit down, girls,” Ma says. She taps ash from her cigarette into the kitchen sink. A hiss. In the morning, the wrinkles on Ma’s face are canyons.

Amy totters to the kitchen table and swings her gigantic purse onto my chair. Amy recently decided backpacks were immature for a seventh-grader, so she carries a brown faux-leather purse instead. Her math textbook is so heavy she walks with a limp.

“It’s about Lucinda,” Ma says. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. She’s—she’s passed away.” Ma sighs in her pitying way (usually reserved for the post-office attendant and the boy in Amy’s class with recurrent cancer).

Amy’s bottom lip quakes. Then a shrill, gravelly cry. She stands dramatically and backs into the sliding door, spreading her pink-painted fingernails against the glass and suctioning them there like starfish.

Ma puts out her cigarette on a pizza-stained paper plate and crouches in her sweat pants next to Amy, who slides to the floor. Ma strokes her hair, unknotting the tangles inconspicuously.

“I’m so sorry, honey. They’ll make an announcement at school today.”

Ma is sorry for Amy. She is not sorry for me. I’ve never cried like that, so frantic and choked. I’m not trying to be brave or stoic or anything. I’ve just never liked anyone enough. Ma knows this. She glares at me, Amy’s head still in the crook of her elbow. A runny line of snot drips from Amy’s nose onto Ma’s freckled arm.

“Jesus, Jade,” she says, shifting her gaze to my stomach, which pudges out from the bottom of my Crucibles T-shirt, bare under my unzipped army parka. “Go put on a real shirt. You’re taking your sister to school today.”

I lean over the kitchen counter, resting my elbows on an outdated phone book.

Emotions shouldn’t have names. I don’t know why we bother talking about them, because emotions are never what they’re supposed to be. You could say I feel ecstatic, or guilty, or disgusted with myself. You could say all of the above. Amy sobs, but I identify only this foreign lightness: like someone has sucked the weight from my legs, taken the terrible thoughts out of my head, softened some sharpness jabbing at my ribs. I don’t know.

It’s so calm.



“Are you even human?” Amy asks.

Madison Middle School is a rectangle in the distance.

“Alien,” I say. “Surprise.”

“You’re not even sad.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re not. Ma says you have serious issues with ‘empathy’ and ‘self-control’ and ‘sad tendencies.’?”

“The word is ‘sadistic,’?” I tell her.

“Lucinda is dead,” she says, “and you don’t even care.”

Amy hitches up her purse and her leopard-print coat spreads open in the front. Amy wears a 32AA bra, and no matter how she is feeling, Amy is always quite cute. It’s the product of a fortunate combination: Amy’s red hair and the millions of freckles that dot her cheeks like grains of sand.

“It’s pretty fucked up, Jade,” she says. She pauses before the word “fucked” to consider. “We’ve known her our whole lives, and now she’s dead, and you’re not even pretending to be sad.”

I pump the tip of my tongue through the silver loop in my lip. I do this when I want someone to stop talking. It always works.

Amy stomps ahead, hugging herself close, shoulders bobbing as she stifles more sobs. Always the drama queen. She’s never been close with Lucinda, only Lucinda’s little sister, Lex. When we were young, Ma subjected us to weekly playdates—Lex and Amy would spend hours playing princesses in the Hayeses’ basement, while Lucinda and I were forced to sit there awkwardly until Ma came to pick us up. Lucinda would braid friendship bracelets, and I would read comic books, and we’d pointedly ignore each other while our sisters played make-believe. Lex and Amy used to be inseparable, but now they only hang out when Ma arranges it.

I wonder how Amy would feel if I died. Maybe she’d sleep in my bed some nights. Maybe she’d make a blanket out of my old T-shirts, which she’d keep in a box to show her children once they turned sixteen. Maybe she’d feel relieved. I’m suddenly aware of the ten feet of space between us, the four sections of sidewalk that separate Amy and me. I almost run to catch up with her. But just as unexpectedly as it comes, the desire passes again, leaving a faint, pulsing hatred somewhere I can’t touch.