Useless Dresses

I’m not so good with apologies.

I mean, I don’t have a problem with the whole “I’m sorry” phrase. It’s just meaning it, I guess. Or proving I mean it.

I decided to make things up to Milly—to prove to her I really regretted yelling at her—by telling what she wanted to know in the first place.

That was my decision. Going through with it was another thing altogether.

“It was in my mom’s closet before we moved,” I explained as I pressed some gauze to my cut. It was deep and snarly and would break open again when I stretched my palm out, but it would heal. I just needed to be patient.

“What was?” Milly asked, laying out on my bed and eyeing the blood soaking through my bandages.

“The box.”

“What box?”

“You just can’t make things easy, can you?”

Milly stayed silent, still glaring at the red soaked bandage. I caught her eyes and nodded toward my closet.

“Oh. Yea.”

“Yea.”

Again, the tiny girl slipped into an uncharacteristic silence. She’d become much more subdued the past few minutes, between the time she pointed out my new wound and the moment I made it back upstairs with the Neosporin and bandages.

“So…what do you want to do for the rest of the day?” I wasn’t really sure what to say next, my original goal blurred by Milly’s unusual actions.

Still, silence. My friend rolled over and stared at the ceiling.

“Listen, Milly. Hey. If you’re still mad—”

“Where is she?”

“Huh? I don’t know,” I said automatically, though I regretted the statement the moment they sprang from my lips.

“Don’t know?” Milly asked. She looked like she wanted to say more, but instead closed her mouth in a tight line.

“Y-yea. I don’t know.”

“Like she left?”

I made a little sound like uhn, and I guess Milly took that as a confirmation.

“She walked out on you guys?”

“Um…she left.” It was an honest statement, technically. I had no idea why I stopped myself from telling Milly the truth. She lost her brother to suicide—if I wanted to tell anyone, it should be her. Yet I stopped myself. “S’why we moved.”

“Oh, Kate, that’s really awful.”

“The box is the only thing we have left of hers,” I continued, ignoring Milly’s apologetic gaze. I thought about her brother again, wondered if she thought about him very much. But then I felt stupid for wondering—I thought about Mom all the time. I maybe hated her sometimes, she maybe hated me, but I thought about her. Constantly.

It killed me.

“And you’re afraid to open it.” It wasn’t a question, but Milly’s voice broke and squeaked at the end of the sentence.

“Yea.”

“You don’t know what’s in it?”

“I think I know. I’m pretty sure…absolutely sure,” I said eventually. Before we moved, I knew the exact details of every item in that stupid box. As time passed, I grew unsure. I don’t know why—things don’t just appear in boxes without anyone putting them there. “Or I used to be sure. Now, what if I open it and things aren’t the way I remember them? I think, ‘What if they’re different?’”

“You won’t know if you don’t open it,” Milly said, breathing her words out like in a forced breath, slow and shaky. “Things might be just as you remember.”

“I think that’s what’s stopping me, though.”

I wrapped a new strip of gauze over my palm—the bleeding finally slowed enough to where a bandage would last a few hours. I wondered whether I need stitches, but then decided a trip to the hospital would send Denny over some kind of edge.

“Let’s go to the library,” Milly suggested and sat up as though she’d just waken up from a long nap.



“These are the books you’re reading?”

“Yea. Ms. Flour said that as long as I put them where they belonged when I finished them, I could keep them here. I don’t think she really likes them there, but I guess she’s nice because I’m here all the time. But anyway, yea…I’m reading this one right now, about this girl in Ireland. Something about a magic forest.”

The shelf hid half empty at the bottom corner of the Reference Section, where dust piled across most of the heavy hardbacks. The bottom shelf—Milly’s shelf—was neat and dust free, though the odd collection of genres and topics seemed out of place.

“Why don’t you just check these out?” I asked, crossing my legs and leaning my back against the wall. Milly already made herself comfortable in the little corner, laying down on her stomach and thumbing through the pages of her latest venture.

“I don’t have a library card.”

“They’re free, you know.”

“I know.”

“So then…” I trailed, feeling an odd turn in the conversation and not wanting to push things. “Well, the librarians are nice for letting you have a shelf.”

“They’re very nice.”

I looked around for a few more minutes, feeling slightly awkward in the low light. Then I picked up a book at random and started flipping through it. It was some book about Napoléon, filled with illustrations and paintings of the man and a lot of text I felt too impatient to read.

I wondered briefly why Milly would be interested in this kind of book, but eventually concluded that I would never know what went through Milly’s thoughts because, as much as she liked to talk, she could never talk long enough to reveal them all.

“Millicent, I didn’t see you come in. Hello dear.” An aging lady peeked at us through a shelf. Her mouth was too small for the rest of her chubby face, and her lipstick matched the hot pink color of her glasses, but she smiled sweetly as us and waved.

Milly did nothing. She turned a page in her book, took a deep breath—a ritual I noticed she performed before beginning a new page—and continued her book. I turned back to the lady to say hello for Milly, but the librarian disappeared.

We stayed in the library for several hours. I got bored with the Napoléon book within several minutes, and spent most of my time exploring the library or attempting to surf the dial-up on one of the PCs. Eventually I made my way back to Milly, who stood staring at the now closed book in her hand.

“Finished already, Mills?”

“My mom burns them.”

“Wh...what?”

“The books, I mean. We used to have this whole room full of books that Mom collected from when she used to travel all the time. She burnt them all last month in our fireplace. I’m afraid, if I check a book out from here, she’ll burn that one too.”

I slid down to sit by Milly, who still lay staring down at the novel. Her revelation surprised me so much I wanted to get up and walk out of the library, back home and back into my closet with that ugly old cardboard box.

But I held myself to the ground, hardly breathing to keep myself there. We stayed in silence, this time brought on by me, for a long minute.

“Milly?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re my best friend, I think.”

Milly shifted and rolled over to place the closed book back on her shelf.

“Yea well, you’re my only friend.”