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  I’d maim and strangle for that chance.

  Like I was their lifeline, their raft in an angry ocean.

  “I’m okay. I just was crying, and it got really hot in here,” Gray finally soothes his ache. She tries, in vain, to wriggle from his grasp, but he ends her rebellion quickly.

  “Let’s go.”

  He scoops her up and stands, never letting her go and never even sparing me a glance. She protests and wiggles, but his hold just tightens in response. He pounds the red carpet with a vengeance, getting her out of there.

  If I fainted, no one would even notice.

  They’d think I was some kind of contemporary speed bump—a piece of modern art.

  I pick up her tissues with pinched fingers and drop them into a golden trash container next to the altar, meant for matches. But as I turn to make my way back to my pew, I spot a rosary on the kneeling bench. I bend down to pick it up and feel it is still warm. It must be the girl’s.

  Looking at the turquoise colored glass beads, separated by silver ones, I snicker to myself. I’ve never believed in such things She’s lucky. At least she has something to believe in. I briefly look for the hip priest, but he was nowhere to be found. With the church empty, I light my own candle and look back to Jesus, hoping he wouldn’t mind if I didn’t speak the words.

  Tucking the rosary into my jean pocket, I return to my regular pew which has now grown cold. I find myself staring at the pew where Boyfriend once sat. I wonder how Gray looks in his eyes. I wonder if she’s more beautiful to me just because he looks at her like he does.

  Apparently, I spend my life wondering things.

  Looking down on my own form, I question my own appearance in contrast to hers. My hair is a faint red where hers is golden blonde. Her stature is lithe and lanky where mine is stout and curvy.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket, my mother. There’s no one else in the church, so I answer it.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, Aysa. I was calling to see if you’d be up for lunch at Landry’s tomorrow.”

  Lunch with my mom was never lunch with my mom. She always had a hidden agenda. And Landry’s only reminded me of my station in life.

  There is a vast difference in the way my mom treats me versus my sister. And I’m not the only one who notices. I don’t think, rather I hope, it’s not intentional. That would be cruel. She calls me when she needs help with housework or some labor intensive job. When we do go to eat together, she brings me to Landry’s or whatever other casual dining place she deems fit—or whichever one she deems I fit into. She and my sister say I talk too much in the movies, laugh too loud, gasp too dramatically. So, now, when they go to the movies, I don’t get invited—haven’t in a while. I go to the movies by myself. I express interest in a newly released movie and then find out later they went without me. I wonder if it’s all purposeful. And when Ariel and she eat out, they go to the good restaurants, the fancy ones. But I don’t think my clothes, or my manners, or maybe my face, are good enough for those places—or for their standards. Afterwards, when the anger and hurt’s typhoon has faded into a white cap, I begin to excuse them—mostly to make myself feel better. I clean toilets while Ariel paints her nails. I take out the trash while Ariel shops at the mall. I mow the grass and rake leaves while she sleeps in until noon. But I don’t hesitate when they call me.

  All in the name of pleasing someone—anyone.

  “I guess so, Mom. What time?”

  “Noon, sharp.”

  “See you then.”

  Slipping the phone into my back pocket, I look around again for a reason to stay there. I have no confessions left, and the place is empty. Gliding through the side exit, I let the humid air thaw me out from the frigid temperatures inside the church, regardless of the warm feelings it gives me. Taking a short cut through the cemetery, I head for the park, the next quiet place on my Friday night date with myself.

  The only swings available are the ones that resemble yellow plastic chastity belts, meant for toddlers, so they don’t fall out. Deciding on the see-saw, I bob up and down on my own, letting it unceremoniously plop to the dirt floor beneath me.

  I can’t help but wish there were someone on the other side pushing me up when I’ve come down.

  Wow, I’m using a see-saw as a metaphor for my life.

  What was that word I used earlier?

  Oh yeah—pathetic.

  The next morning, I wake up and try to pick something Aysa tested, mother approved, but settle on a gray and white tie-dyed maxi dress with matching gray gladiator sandals. She will say something about my cleavage, and she will also mention the dress accentuates my stomach ‘pooch’. But the tight jeans she bought me for my birthday make me feel like too much sausage in too little casing. Not to mention, the spackling of jewels and glitter ever present on the ass of said jeans—because I’m such a glittery kind of girl.

  Nope, that’s Ariel.

  I straighten my hair and put on minimal make-up simply because if I don’t she’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, Aysa, did you just roll out of bed?’

  I park my black Civic outside Landry’s and look around. She’s already there even though I am ten minutes early. And she’s probably already ordered me a Diet Coke even though I hate Diet Coke. And if I try to switch it out for sweet tea or regular Coke, she’ll duck face her lips and allow her eyebrows to plummet down in disapproval.

  I hate this.

  I grab my leather purse and head inside, instinctively turning the decorative side around so she couldn’t see the sugar skull carved into the leather. Sure, I could let her see it and argue with her about how skulls aren’t evil and how I’m not the demon worshipper she thinks I am—and no, Mom, I don’t need an exorcism.

  Wait, maybe I do. Maybe that’s why I am like I am.

  Maybe the world sees the demon inside me.

  The demon brought on by my skull purse.

  Damn you, sugar skull purse.

  She sits at the table directly behind the hostess station and close to the restrooms. I imagine it’s for a quick exit. Darla, that’s my mother’s name. Darla glances over the menu at me and waggles her eyebrows in an attempt to throw me off from what she’s really doing—hiding.

  Holy shit, that’s where I got it from—the hiding.

  “Aysa, you look—cute.”

  “Thanks, Mom. How are you?”

  She finally puts down the menu and makes a horrendous scowl after sipping the tap water from her glass, “I’m fine. I have great news.”

  The last time my mom had great news, she’d made me an appointment to get my hair done. I came out with a blonde bob identical to Ariel. It resembled Joan Rivers. If only I had the bass mouthed lip injections, I could’ve passed for a younger her.

  “What?” I feign some kind of excitement, but it translates more like I have ants in my pants.

  “We’re going on a vacation!” She exclaims while doing her quiet clap, reserved for restaurants and the opera. She touched the tips of her fingers together in a rapid fire action. It’s the country club answer to beatnik snapping.

  My heart leaps in my chest once, only once before I realize by ‘we’ she doesn’t mean me. It never means me. I can’t believe I allow myself to get worked up like this—every—single—time.

  “That’s wonderful. Where are you going?”

  “On a cruise, we need a vacation so badly. That’s why I asked you to meet me.”

  Held in suspense by the waitress approaching to take our orders, I do it again, I let myself believe for a split second that they’re gonna ask me to go with them. They want to spend time with me. They want me around for more than just to be their maid.

  She orders me a baked sweet potato and a side salad without even thinking to ask me what I want. I really don’t care. I need to hear what she has to say.

  “Why did you ask me here,” I eagerly prompted.

  “Well,” she smiles and straightens her paper napkin. “I would love for you to house sit for us while
we’re gone. We don’t want anyone to think the house is empty and rob us,” She grabs her chest like the thought of her possessions missing causes her coronary distress.

  And there it is, the letdown.

  I let the air out of my balloon, hoping the whining of the expelled air doesn’t make her privy to the deflation she’s inadvertently caused. My shoulders slump in defeat.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  When am I gonna grow up enough to say no?

  “Great,” she answers.

  As the waitress places her plate in front of her, I see her in a new light. She’s peeled before me, and the abrasion reveals a weathered interior of her own doing. The waves of dissension ripple into me. I realize something sinister, more devilish than just nonchalance or ignorance direct her paths.

  She hates me.

  She is and was everything I wanted to be when I was a girl and everything I strived for as a female. But as she inspects her perfectly decent food with a condescending eye, I see who she really was for the first time in my life.

  No, that’s not who I want to be at all.

  But if I’m not aspiring to be Darla, then who am I?

  “I think I’ve lost my appetite. Just text me when you’re going on vacation, and I’ll watch the house—or you could just hire someone like regular people. Maybe ask one of your many friends, or Ariel’s many friends. You know those ‘fantastic’ people you’re always telling me about.”

  I nearly get on my knees in the floor and apologize after the words come out of my mouth. That’s my first instinct when I tell someone what I really think. Instead, I feel a segment of backbone grow where before there was none, and I turn and walk out, smiling to myself.

  Ezra

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Gray shrugs me off and hit the fridge. She gets out milk and bangs the gallon jug on the counter, “I just passed out, Ezra. I didn’t have an aneurism. Calm down.” She rolls her eyes and gets a bowl from the cabinet above her and a spoon from the drawer. She clangs the spoon in the bowl and then reaches up, above the refrigerator, for a box of cereal.

  She eats cereal when she’s upset—like three or four bowls.

  Doesn’t she understand—I wouldn’t make it through losing her too.

  She was another piece of collateral damage.

  “But, why?”

  “I don’t know. It was hot near the candles?”

  Her tone tells me she’s blowing me off. Either that or she’s diverting me.

  “You’re lying.”

  Bracing both arms on the counter she tilts her head down. “I’m just tired. And tomorrow is—was—her birthday.” Her hand flicks and slings the bowl against the backsplash causing clanks and clangs to echo through our shotgun kitchen. She moves in slow motion, rewinding her previous actions. The cereal gets put back. The bowl and spoon are returned, and the milk is shoved back onto the shelf.

  It’s horrible how a date on a calendar can really do us in.

  “I wasn’t paying attention. I’m sorry. I lost track of the dates.”

  She slumps down in front of the fridge and bangs the back of her head against it. “That’s the thing. It’s been almost four years, Ezra. I mean, seriously, we were still teenagers. The way we live isn’t normal. We still live around someone who’s dead. Her birthday rolls around, and I get depressed for two weeks before the date and two weeks afterwards. I just robot around until the anniversary of the accident, trying to remember her. Then I start again. It’s like I’m only alive on the two days of the year when I’m most reminded she’s dead.”

  I knock my head on the door frame.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  There is no instrument in existence that could accurately measure how sorry I am. It is my fault she lives this way.

  “No!” she shouts at me, scrambling up from the floor. She gets in my face nose to nose and grabs the front of my shirt. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident. See what I mean? We can’t do this anymore, Ezra. We have to get some help.”

  I back away from her, “No, you do. I deserve every single second of this. But you don’t.”

  “Please, Ezra, please. You’re my friend, my best friend. For me, talk to someone—anyone.”

  Looking in her brown eyes, I couldn’t deny her. I wouldn’t deny her anything. I’d conjured her demons, and now I need to help her slay them.

  “Okay, fine. But only if you do. I can’t watch you be miserable anymore.”

  She collapses against me with a tremendous sigh.

  “We can do this,” she whispers. But she doesn’t sound any more convinced than I am.

  I rub her back with both hands in a wordless reassurance.

  “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  “Okay..”

  I hear her go into the hall bathroom, the one with the biggest tub and turn on the water. It wasn’t sleeping, but anything was better than watching as she rips at the seams. Gray, when we were kids, was a champion swimmer. She’d won bronze in the Junior Olympics and was labeled as the USA’s next big hope for a gold medal in women’s swimming. She’d chosen a full swimming scholarship to LSU instead. But sometime during senior year she’d just quit out of nowhere. She kept playing with starting it up again. Of course, after everything with Mara, she never went back to it, choosing instead to forever backstroke in the pool of guilt.

  I’m exhausted from working all day, but not enough to be able to sleep. So I pound the concrete until my legs evolve into goo. I open the back bedroom door and see Gray sleeping soundly surrounded by pillows. Closing the door, I take a quick shower.

  A memory of Mara picking on me about how many showers I took everyday thumps my cerebral. She sat in the passenger seat of my car, and all I could do was give her short, one word, answers, hoping she’d shut up. The faster she shut up, the faster we could make-out.

  I was such an asshole.

  Maybe I do need some help—just someone to talk to. But how long would it be before my confessions disgusted them to the point of turning me away?

  I cower in the presence of my remembrance. That one day, that one bad choice, that one cruel shift of fate, had ended her life and his—and most of me died along with it.

  I’d give anything to switch the circumstances around. To be in the passenger seat. To spin the roulette wheel of life just one more time, hoping it landed on black, like my heart was then. But no, the ball of death landed on her.

  I do remember the confluence of kindness in her eyes and compassion in her actions for other people. I remember thinking she was silly, raising all of those birds for nothing. I grumbled on Saturdays when she volunteered at the animal shelter instead of being with me. It seemed so polar opposite of who she was in school and with her family. I just wanted her with me all the time.

  Self-centered bastard.

  Knox had been less than comforting this time at confession. He sighed so many times, I thought he was hyperventilating. Knox was one of those modern priests. He was even chosen to be on one of those ‘hot priests’ calendar, but he humbly declined. I’d reamed him about it to no end. He’d professed during dinner, after our first catechism class, that he’d made up his mind. He wanted to be a priest. Even at the age of eleven, when he was ten, I thought he was full of it. Later that night we’d whispered back and forth through walkie talkies about school and girls when it hit me that my brother may never get married. I made some smart ass remark into my yellow squawk box about him never getting to kiss a girl.

  He never answered me, just simply turned off his side of our conversation. After that, he moved to the front of the classroom, right in front of Sister Marion. We didn’t cut up in class or make faces behind her back anymore. Instead, I sat and listened intently to my first real lesson on the power of sin and guilt. A lesson that, while Mara’s parents spoke of heaven and good deeds at her memorial, I recited in whispers, verbatim, in the shadows of the last pew on the right.

  Knox and I remained on different si
des of the maturity chasm for years after he announced he wanted to enter the priesthood. When I was at the lowest of the low, seriously considering just lying in my bed until I joined Mara, Knox dragged my ass from the bed, forced me to shower and eat. Since then, we’ve been inseparable. But even a humble priest gets frustrated and bored hearing the same old confession every Friday for years. I got tired of confessing the same sins.

  After a couple of years, he set me up on a date with a girl named Kylie. She was the opposite of Mara in every way. I think that’s why he picked her for me. We dated for a year, but I kept my walls up, only showing her the slightest of emotion, the minimum amount of tenderness. My plague wiped her out two months before the prom when I still hadn’t asked her to go with me or even mentioned the word prom to her. Kevin, some guy on the basketball team, had been paying her the attention she deserved under my radar. She outed me and my lack of affection at Easter dinner at my parents’ house after I’d failed to be thankful for her as we rounded the table. The only thing I’d said I was thankful for was Knox.

  I wasn’t purposefully being callous. Kylie was just a distraction.

  Before I hop into bed, I make sure I have a Last Hope t-shirt clean and my gross shorts. It doesn’t really matter anyway. I just clean cages and give baths to the dogs. It’s not like I’m there to impress anyone.

  As I lay in bed, I hear a quiet knock on my door, followed by Gray sticking her head in, “I can’t find my rosary. Do you have it?”

  “I don’t. You had it at church?”

  “Yeah. I wonder if someone picked it up; maybe that girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “The one that helped me. The one you knocked over.”

  I shrug, “Maybe. So, when I see Knox in the morning, I’ll ask if someone turned it in.”

  “Thanks,” she mumbles, slipping from the room.

  ~~~~

  Seeing Knox in regular clothes is strange to me now. Like he’d been in inappropriate clothing his whole life—the priest garb suits him.

  We start out scrubbing cages with glorified push brooms and soap. We work side by side. It doesn’t take us long to get into a groove.