In Her Skin(22)

*

I lay the clothes out on my bed. I’m trying hard to imagine the girl on the bus, how she would have acted if she saw me in one of these outfits. Her admiring looks, how we might have talked about her family in Boston, or she might have shown me what was in her suitcase. Instead, I see not empty clothes, but skinny, sprawled girls with busted limbs.

You knock and I jump. It is nearly nine p.m., and you’re just getting home from a day that started with cello, moved on to back-to-back tutoring sessions, tennis, and finally, fencing. Yet you glow. You thrive on these overscheduled days, I am learning, and you did not spend the afternoon thinking about what you planted in my pocket.

You glance drily at the clothes. “Well, at least now you have the preapproved uniform.”

“Why did you do it?” I ask.

“And the hair is a lot better.”

I’m not biting. “The poem, Temple. Why did you steal it?”

You scan me, looking for anger you can react to, but I cleansed my words of it. I am better at this game than you, and it’s time I proved it.

“Consider the poem my ‘Welcome home, Vivi’ gift,” she says. “You don’t like it?”

“We have to give it back.”

“You can’t give it back. But it doesn’t matter. They can never track you down. We used a fake ID, remember?”

“You used a fake ID.”

Your lip curls. “Fine, I used a fake ID.”

“We can never go back to the library again.”

“So we don’t.” You flop down on the bed, crushing an eighty-dollar T-shirt that says something in French. “Who cares?”

I do care. I can’t let myself miss Momma, or Wolf, but I can miss the long table with rows of green lampshades, and my old spot in front of the fireplace among the busts of Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Thomas Gold Appleton. I can miss the gold seam in the floor that divides the tiles cracked in patterns that I memorized. I can miss the high arched windows or the colorful flags whipping in the wind outside them. I can miss the carved white roses in the corners of the ceiling.

It’s fine. I am safer here. I am safer here. I am safer.

(make it so)

I move to my underwear drawer and take the poem out. The delicate paper is stained and charred at one edge, like Dickinson tried to burn it. I perch on the bed’s edge and read. “‘A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become. Who had they lived, had died but when they died, Vitality begun.’”

You scoot closer. “You didn’t say if you liked it.”

Vivi is simple. Vivi admits to not understanding things. “I’m not sure I understand it,” I say.

You take it gently from my fingers. “It’s here in the first line. A death blow is a life blow to some.”

I think of Momma and her broken face. I think of Cold John, who, when everyone hauled over to the Father Bill’s shelter one night last winter, stayed in his tent and never woke up. I think of when someone stole Keloid Kurt’s rat and stuck it with a stick and roasted it over the fire. I think of the dead things I’ve seen, mothers and men and rats, and I know what dead is. The only people who talk about dead like it’s something pretty and fanciful are people who haven’t seen it up close.

“Isn’t dead dead?”

“Not always. For some people, it’s their first big shot at living. At least that’s what Dickinson is saying.”

You may be smarter than me at most things, but this is a topic I know way better than you, and I can’t help myself. “Blow. She says ‘death blow.’ That’s death by violence. How do you recover from that?”

“She also says ‘life blow.’ A life born from violence.”

I shake my head. “She’s talking about people who become more famous after death. Maybe she was thinking that would be her story.”

“It was the case for Poe,” you say as you rise. “Anyway, I thought it would speak to you. Because, you know, everyone thought you were dead.”

Despite myself, I am touched. You are generous, it’s true. You give things that mean things. Even if they can get me in trouble. Maybe this is what Vivi loved about you. Maybe you pushed Vivi into living on the edge.

Still. I need to pretend stealing is scary, me who has seen and done way worse. Jaded at sixteen, playing the innocent. I can do this.

“Thank you,” I say. “It was wrong to steal. But it’s the thought behind it that counts, right?”

You look at the floor, cheeks slack. “Give it to me and I’ll take it back.”

“You said there’s no way,” I say in a rush. Now I feel bad.

“There’s always a way.”

“They know you. I mean, by sight, anyway.” Careful, Jo. Don’t start giving advice from experience. “What if they call you out?”

“Narrow escapes are kind of my thing,” you say, flashing a wicked smile. “Maybe I’ll even use a disguise.”

Oh my God. I picture you in a black bob wig and big sunglasses. It’s so cute when a regular girl tries to play the con.

You study the clothes on my bed for a moment, those girls with their flung body parts. “On the topic of costumes, what are you wearing to the police station tomorrow?”