Fireworks

Your bones collapse and fold unto themselves like matchsticks, or playing cards you spent the last three hours trying to tower. Does your mother know you spilled jacks and queens and kings and numbers all over her patio table? Your mind screams helplessly and is drowned out by the sound of your lungs gurgling, filling up slowly and dragging the diaphragm heavily to take another breath, please take another. Won’t you please fill me up with sweet oxygen and nitrogen and pollution and carbon dioxide? Your intestines slither to the ground like snakes, eating themselves inside out because you hadn’t wanted to feed its gaping teeth and tongue. Your brain unravels its imprints and memories and cavities until its many fingers turn out not to be fleshy tissue at all but octopus tentacles swimming in front of your midnight vision. There are no stars where you are, just the flutter of oil-grease feathers as the vultures shift their position to get a better strip of ligament, their golden carotene beaks clicking with the song of another successful feast.

I wake up.

Sunlight beams in through the squares of my window, making a slanted checkerboard pattern on the edge of my navy sheets and white snow floor. It’s greedy, taking the dust particles suspended in midair and half of a half of my wall in its grasp. I look around, but I’m no longer blind and the sound of scavengers isn’t anywhere to be heard.

The clock reads 9:43. I sink further back into the pillows. Another day I’ll be late to school. I can hardly remember the time when I arrived early to homeroom and scored straight A’s – it wasn’t even that long ago. When Rachel used to wear regular clothes like regular people like me. When Dad hadn’t yet gotten that new job that required him to be at work by five-thirty in the morning and left me to wake up myself.

Finally I drag myself out of bed and into the bathroom down the hall. The birds chirping sing through the walls as if they’re made of cloth, not sheetrock. They twist and turn in East Australian current up the stairs and into the bathroom with me, bouncing off the mirror and swirling down the drain.

I slowly scrub away at my teeth, at the calcium pearls embedded into pink gum fields. I wonder, if I cut away a chunk of my gums with a bone-handled knife, can I chew it and taste the fruity tang?

I wash my face and dry my skin.

Luckily, Dad is not home and cannot nag at me to eat more than the toasted half slice of white bread and glass of ice water that sloshes around in my cave of a stomach. For lunch, I take a water bottle from our Sub-Zero and a pack of long-lasting Trident. I am amused as I grab my Converse messenger bag from beside the front door and exit the silent house. I bet I will lose if I sue Trident for false advertising. I bet Dad will be angry if I cost him five hundred thousand dollars in court.

Rachel is one of those girls. The ones that you put down in your mind after you walk past because you can never measure up, not because they are fake and snotty like you tell yourself. Rachel says I am one of those girls, too. All the other girls in school light up a smile as I walk past. They tell me I am so skinny, they ask me how do you do it? I merely glue on a pair of curved lips with Tic-Tac corn kernels filling the spaces and reply thanks so much and I’m not sure. But I know their envy is pure, their innocence is as unblemished as their faces, the doves have taken refuge on their shoulders. They are wishing for the world to pass between their legs.

Rachel is draped in Alice + Olivia and Theory, MAC and Chanel, Citizens and DKNY, Gucci and Marc Jacobs. Her nails are always burnt red or cast-iron black to clash magnificently with her dirty blond hair that crashes like a waterfall down her back. She likes to wear short-shorts over brilliant patterned tights and have her feet swallowed by her low-top Chucks of every rainbow color. She likes the winter so she can tie scarves around her neck but never attach the other end. She likes the way you can walk on other peoples’ graves in cemeteries, would like to be sung to sleep by ghosts because they know her favorite songs.

Underneath it all, she is cutting herself to pieces.

When I finally make it to school from walking, my feet are dragging turrets into the ground and I feel like sitting down on the concrete. Fourth hour has just blended into lunchtime. The seniors are traipsing off campus to the nearest grease factory and giving me cocky stares. I wish the earth would open its jaws and serrate them until only red-rimmed strips of jerky are left for the dying wolf species.

I meet Rachel in the lunch line, where she’s piled a bag of baked Lays, an apple juice, and a slice of steaming pepperoni pizza onto her tray. The thing about Rachel is, she can eat all she wants and never gain a pound. She’s got a naturally fast metabolism.

“What took you?” she asks me as she hands over her freshman ID card to the lunch lady, who swipes it through the register. It beeps resolutely.

“I woke up late,” I answer. We make our way to our usual spot: the edge of the fountain in the heart of the school. Everywhere else, students mill and mob and mingle in corners and patches of grass and under overhangs. The human race is just like ants at a meal. Cluster, take a bite, and follow each other back home.

“Again?” Rachel digs into her pizza. To distract myself from wanting a bite, I uncap my water bottle and sip. Zerozilchnothing slides down my throat. I can drink all I want of this. “Your dad needs to invest in an alarm clock.”

I wait for passersby to finish their daily routine of saying hi to Rachel before I respond. “I already told him I’d toss it in the trash if he ever set one up for me. The sound drives me nuts.” The fountain splashes merrily away behind me, apostrophes and commas of water shows, never sending a droplet in my direction.

“Oh, then can we hire Robin Macarthy to do it?” Rachel teases, tossing her empty carton of apple juice and oil-stained parchment paper in the nearest recycle-marked bin.

I know my cheeks are changing to the color of cherries on a summer day, but I also can’t stop the idiotic smile that pulls itself wide. Robin and I are only friends. We’d gone to the same middle school and had some classes together, even though he’s a year older than I am, but I know he’s not like most other guys. He didn’t laugh at me when I needed help with my geometry homework in eighth grade during chapter four in the beginning of the year. He’d cried when his parents went through their divorce.

A shrill ringing erupts across campus and bodies instantly begin to move towards their fifth hour class. Rachel checks for lint or stray hairs or maybe even blood on her sleeveless white Miss Sixty top, but she finds none.

“Am I still giving you a ride after school?” I usually go to Rachel’s house every day after school, supposedly until Dad can pick me up at ten. Six days out of seven he doesn’t make it until the next morning.

“Yeah, I’ll see you then,” I say, because she can’t suffer through biology or PE with me.

What we do have is a truly twisted bond.

“Sara, did you borrow my eyeliner again?” Michelle yells down the hall. She’s seventeen minus five equals me in her electric-blue prom dress, ready to take on the world and formality for a night. Her hair is in its half-updo and every time she blinks I catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s predicted weather of clear skies.

“Oh, it’s on top of my nightstand.” I’m in the kitchen, eating a deck of pancakes drizzled in maple syrup, alone at the counter while Mom, who has come back for the event and is actually speaking in clipped tones to Dad, who is shuffling awkwardly around.

Mom sets down a pair of turquoise kitten heels where the tile meets the carpet. “Don’t touch these,” she warns me.

“I won’t,” seventh-grade me replies. “Is Michelle going to wear them?”

For a moment the stressed-out Mom face fades away into a glorious, beautiful Mom moment where she is basking in the happiness of her eldest daughter going to prom for the first time. She lights up the corners of the kitchen we haven’t seen in months and makes me wonder if the last few years really happened at all.

Then it’s gone.

Eight o’clock settles back into place and the composed cold lines are etched back into her skin.

“Yes,” she says and abruptly leaves.

I eat the last doughy bite laced in syrup and coated with butter and wash my plate and fork in the sink. Past the window I can see the last rays of sunlight peeking past the backyard trees of the house across the street. The sky is a fragile navy and orange and yellow, can be broken any minute by my sister’s date not arriving or Mom’s self-restraint towards Dad snapping like tension and compression Robin from physical science told me about. I smile a secret smile as I think about Robin.

“Sara-Bear,” Michelle’s voice says to my back, “what do you think?”

The loose tendrils of her honey-brown hair frame her face like I want to at that minute. Frame it in a gold frame and hang it up on the wall in the middle of the living room, capture her beauty in a memory stick so this moment will never age and time will not go on. She’s standing in the kitten heels but her skinny legs and knees are sure. She’s got the ocean for eyes and the sky is sewn into her body.

“You look amazing,” I whisper, for need of a better word because my throat has closed up and I can’t say much else.

Her eyes are shining. “Thanks.” She turns her head and glances at the microwave liquid crystal display. “Is Todd here yet? It’s past eight.”

And just because she is so magical, as soon as the sentence leaves her coral-colored lips we all hear the hum of a car park at the curb and the footsteps of Todd Ruway climbing the steps and pausing at the front door, taking a deep breath and reaching out a nervous finger to push the doorbell. The musical sound wraps itself around our hearts and squeezes reassuringly and it takes a few moments for Mom to break away from Michelle’s side and answer the door.

Her pleasant face for greeting guests and meeting friends flies on. It reminds me of a camera where you put your eye to it, push the button, and the picture you see clicks and changes to a different one on the wheel.

“Todd!” He steps past the threshold shyly and shakes Mom’s hand. Somehow Dad has appeared in the room and he leans forward with a sincere smile to have his hand shaken as well. Todd looks past Dad’s shoulder and catches sight of Michelle.

“Michelle, you look beautiful,” Todd says genuinely. I process how strange it is to have the word ‘beautiful’ leave a boy’s mouth and notice Dad’s nod of approval.

“Thanks, don’t you look classy,” Michelle responds, grinning. I know she’s beyond ecstatic behind her cool exterior.

Todd glances at Mom and Dad. “Should we go now? I’m riding with some people in the car.”

“Yeah.” My sister sweeps towards the door, a vision of elegance, beauty, perfection of tonight. She’s always been nice, moody, pretty, skinny, my sister, but tonight she’s more than that, and tonight I am jealous, proud, awestruck, her sister.

“Have a wonderful time,” gushes Mom in a voice I haven’t ever heard her use.

“Wait!” cries Dad, disappearing from the room and reappearing with a tripod and a camera. “Gather for some pictures!”

Twenty minutes pass with clicks and flashes and self-timer and rapid flashes and good-natured groans. I am even pulled into a few photos and Michelle wraps her arms around me. Todd is lucky to be my sister’s date to the senior prom.

At eight-forty they are off in the polished Mercedes Todd rented with Jillian Rensley and Max Walswood. At eight-forty I am back up in my room, wondering what to do. At eight-forty I wonder who else is in the car with Todd and Michelle. At eight-forty the navy part of the sky eats up the orange and yellow and blankets my window so I can’t see anything else.

At eight forty-five I am listening to music on top of my sheets. At eight forty-five Mom and Dad are attempting to carry on a conversation downstairs at the dining table. At eight forty-five Todd has had a few drinks and doesn’t see the red light or the golden lights from the opposite direction. At eight forty-five no one can see how Michelle flew into the windshield, her beautiful body cracking spider webs into the glass. At eight forty-five no one breathes. At eight forty-five no one is expecting a call home, no one knows Rachel Rensley is out on the streets, her bags packed and running away from the home she doesn’t like to call home. At eight forty-five Rachel watches the impact, the crash, the shattering of glass, the bodies being disposed by fate.

It’s not even nine and Michelle never makes it to her dance. It’s not even nine and Michelle’s expiration date has come, decked in a custom-made dress and kitten heels and icy blue eyeshadow. It’s not even nine and Rachel Rensley has just watched her sister die. It’s not even nine and I am falling asleep, hoping Michelle is having the best night of her life and will come home to tell me all about it.