Open House(18)

“You’re cold,” Chris said, his gaze darkening, angry now.

Haley shrugged. “Emma was the nice one,” she said. “Should I take those?” she asked, pointing to the brochures he still held.

“Yeah, okay,” Chris said, flustered. He passed them into her waiting hands, and she was thankful. It made it easier, really, to pretend their meeting hadn’t been about something else entirely.





TEN

Emma

Ten years ago

I wake to darkness.

I can still feel the pressure of Chris’s hands on me from the dream I just had, and I try hard to fully wake up. Sometimes after I get too drunk, the memories flood back with nebulous shapes and blurred edges, but after that night with Chris, there were no memories, only these dreams I keep having where he kisses me and tells me I should be with him, not Noah.

I feel pain in my temples like I’m hungover, even though I’m not. I pull the covers tighter around me, and Josie shifts in the bunk bed below mine. I can tell she’s awake by the way she’s breathing. The only time she and I can really sleep is during these early evening naps. We climb into bed when it’s still light out, and then wake hours later from a syrupy sleep to a pitch-black sky. When I wake, I don’t know where I am or how I got there, or if something terrible happened while I was unconscious. But the feeling melts away quickly enough that I forget and sleep again the next day. It’s too easy to forget about the despair that follows something that feels so good in the moment.

“Sister?” Josie whispers. We started calling ourselves sister because Josie doesn’t have a real one, and we like how it makes us feel when we say it, like we’re tied by something greater than ordinary friendship.

“Yes, Sister?” I echo back. Of course, I’m careful not to call Josie that in front of Haley because she would probably take it as a diss.

I lean my head over the side of my bunk, and my long, inky hair drapes like a curtain. Moonlight splashes across Josie’s pillow and silhouettes her like a halo. I’m pretty sure Josie lied back in August when we moved in together. Getting the top bunk sucks—everyone knows that—but Josie told me she fell out of the bed sometimes, which meant she really needed that bottom bunk to be hers. I’d shrugged and said, “Then let’s debunk the beds,” but instead of being easy—sure, fine, swell idea—Josie had said, “But then we won’t have room for a sofa and a mini fridge.”

So we did what she said. She’s sort of the boss of us. I wish I could be stoic and matter-of-fact the way she is, but there are so many little decisions with their potential for big outcomes, and it’s paralyzing, really: to think that any one choice could be the thing that does you in. You could die based on a whim, or some flippant choice you make, or careless thought said out loud to the wrong person. Last year I tried to be good and volunteer at a homeless shelter, but one of the homeless women followed me back to my dorm and started screaming nonsense stuff about Prada bags. (I wasn’t carrying one or anything like that. I don’t even own one, and even if I did, I would never be rude enough to carry it to a homeless shelter.) You have to watch your back, Josie said to me as the woman was carted off by campus security. Josie was the one who had the common sense to call them—she’s an expert at taking care of unpleasantness.

Now she sits up so her eyes are even with my upside-down ones.

“You’re not sleeping anymore, Sister,” she says, and her blinking lashes are still so black with mascara I can make them out even in the moonlight. “So let’s go out. Yes?”

“Let’s go out,” I echo back. Our bunk creaks as I kick off my sheets.

We’re juniors, and about half of our class still lives on campus, but the other half moved off. Josie and I stayed on campus because we thought it would be a surprising move, and we liked to be surprising. Not that we really had that many friends asking us to live with them. We’re a packaged duo, everyone knows that, and other girls mostly shy away from Josie because she’s that beautiful and intimidating. Plus, staying on campus was cheaper, and we were broke.

“Noah’s place?” I ask, descending the ladder, thinking once again about how Josie’s never fallen out of her lower bunk.

“Do you have money?” she asks.

I turn on my desk lamp and dig in my top drawer. We probably won’t need money tonight, but my mom taught me to carry an emergency twenty dollars, so I open my wallet and stuff a ten into my back pocket and another into Josie’s sweaty hand. The only time she gets hot is when she sleeps. She also has nightmares and screams out stuff like He’s right there!

I flip the switch, and light floods our room, illuminating my canvas propped against the door of our closet. I feel sick seeing it there, but I can’t take my eyes off it: the small dog next to the immaculate hunting pony, which I thought was ironic, now looks flat and boring and too classic in the worst way.

“The shadows are all wrong,” I say, my voice wavering.

“The light’s terrible in here,” Josie says. She knows I’m not talking about something the light in the room can fix, but she doesn’t want me to get upset. You’re so emotional, she’s always saying, like it’s a curse. Getting depressed seems to be a grave fault of mine, at least according to my mom and Josie. Last year my mother took me to a psychiatrist and said, “He’ll know what to do with you,” but he didn’t. Or maybe I didn’t say the right things. I wanted him to give me medication to stop everything that felt so very sad, but he recommended therapy first, and somehow the idea of that exhausted me so much I told my mom he said I was fine. She believed me.