34 Pieces of You (4 page)

“Serena” is what Dad says. “Be patient, please. She’ll come around. She needs space—”

“You’re only home for a few days at a time. You don’t know what it’s like for her, for the girls to see her like this. You don’t know what it’s like for me. All she does is lie in bed and watch TV. She doesn’t bother with her home-school assignments. Glenn, she won’t graduate this year if—”

“Is that so important?”

Mom is quiet. I imagine she’s trying to reel in her rising panic because Dad doesn’t like scenes. But soon she’s back on it. She says, “Look, she won’t—”

“
Please
, I just got home. I haven’t even showered.”

And here I remember how tired he looked when he walked through the door, his work boots caked with mud. But Mom does not seem to recall this. She snaps, “Well, when? When will we talk about it? It’s been months. We have to do something—” Her voice breaks mid-sentence, and now all I can hear is the much quieter sound of her crying.

Mattie tugs my hand to remind me of her existence. I pull her close, kiss the top of her head. She continues reading, but I do not listen.

* * *

“Dude.” Tommy rocks back on a chair beside my bedroom window. It is my favorite place to sit and stare at the world outside. “You know you’re in bad shape when your mom keeps asking me to come over.”

Tommy is my friend, neighbor, former classmate. He’s also a burnout, smoker, blunter, whatever. He’s known me since before I was labeled difficult, required constant surveillance, and turned Mom’s blond hair partially gray. “C’mon, girl in the moon, don’t just sit there staring outside. Talk to me.” Tommy smoked before he came over. I see it in his eyes.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask with little interest. It’s been one of those long days where nothing happens, so it seems even longer.

“I don’t know, man. You want me to tell you about school?” Tommy laughs. “Wow. I sounded like I cared. You know”—he clears his throat seductively—“caring is sharing, unless you’re sharing herpes.”

“Fuck you, Tommy,” I say, and think about Ellie and how she loved Tommy’s fucked-up sayings.

Ellie would say in her very best Forrest Gump voice:
Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get.

And Tommy would respond in a TV-announcer voice:
Mom, I’m worried. There’s an intergalactic burn in Uranus.

And then Ellie would do something ridiculous, like the pee-pee dance, and say in a very melodramatic, Shakespearean way:
To pee or not to pee, that is the question.

And then Tommy would sing:
Oh, say can you pee, by the dawn’s early light. What so proudly we sprayed at the twilight’s last whizzing . . .

And through it all they’d laugh—Tommy because he thought he was funny, and Ellie because she was making fun of him—and sometimes I felt like an outsider just watching them.

“Don’t you miss her?” Despite how I feel on the inside, my voice is steady.

“Huh?” Tommy shakes his head, like he doesn’t know who “her” is. His eyes narrow, and his gaze seems strictly focused on my toes.

Ever since I left school, ever since I stopped existing in the outside world, Tommy has visited every Sunday, but not once has he mentioned Ellie. “Ellie. Don’t you miss her?”

“C’mon,
Sarah
 . . .” Tommy’s feet drop to the polished wood floor. He picks at a string that slowly unravels the hem of his shirt.

“I’m not trying to bring you down.” My heart beats faster as I remember that night, the way those purple capsules rained down on us and how Ellie’s voice followed:
Catch up, Sarah. Catch up.
I take a deep breath. “I just want to know if you miss her.”

Tommy grabs me, pulls me close enough to hear his heart, so fragile beneath his skin. He kisses me, gently caresses my back, and says, “I miss her so much, you know.” Then he says it again: “You know that.” And I do know. And I feel bad for making him tell me, for putting this between us. And in my guilt, I wrap myself around him. I kiss him clean. I pray for his hands to transcend my disappearing skin to free what hides inside.

* * *

An hour later, we are on my bed—all tangled feet, messed-up sheets, and my head cradled on his chest. His hands trace the faint scars across my stomach—scars from a few years ago.

The first time I caught Ellie cutting herself, she stood in
the supply closet of our middle school’s art room, pressing an X-ACTO knife to the pale flesh of her inner thigh.

“It’s not a big deal,” she said when she saw my surprise.

I stepped over the boxes of supplies and watched the blood trickle down her leg. “Why do it at all?”

We were fourteen, and every month we became a greater danger to ourselves and each other.

Ellie licked her index finger and used the tip to blend a streak of blood into her skin. “I don’t know. You tell me.” She held out the blade, still slick with her blood. “There’s time,” she said when I glanced anxiously at the door.

I didn’t want there to be time. But I also didn’t want there to
not
be time. Ellie had this way of pushing me past what felt logical into some other realm of what felt good because it was so wrong. Like together we’d escape to a place that had nothing to do with being good or in control. A place where we could make mistakes and know that at least they were our own.

I took the blade, feeling instantly light-headed, the room suddenly blurry around the edges. Slowly, I lifted my shirt, aware of her intense gaze, and found a spot below the lip of my panties.

“It’ll be like we’re blood sisters,” Ellie said. She watched as I made that first incision, laughing softly when I gasped. My skin
gave way to a trickle of blood that seeped into my cotton underwear. Slowly the room came back into focus, but my breathing remained erratic. Ellie smiled and said, “Forever sisters.”

It was the biggest lie she ever told me.

Tommy burrows his chin into my messy hair, and I bring myself back to the present. “Your house is so quiet,” he says. And it’s true, the house is so quiet when my dad is away and my mom has taken my sisters out for an afternoon movie. That’s what Mom does when Tommy comes over on Sundays. She clears the house, hoping, I bet, that Tommy will perform a magic trick in her absence. That I’ll return to that other version of myself—that version that she didn’t exactly like but that is still better than the one she has now.

Tommy wraps his arms around me, clears his throat nervously. “There’s something I want to tell you about Ellie.”

“Okay . . .” I look up at him, take in his anxious expression. I give him some time, but after a few minutes I ask, “Are you going to tell me or what?”

“Yeah, just give me a sec.”

“What’s the big deal? Go on.”

“Um, well.” He sighs. “Remember how you and I got into a fight a few days before . . .” He pauses. “You know, before . . . Ellie died?”

“Yeah.” We were always going back and forth—never quite sure if we liked or hated each other—but our fight that night was the worst we’d had yet. And I was convinced we were finally done, but then everything happened with Ellie.

“Well, after that, Ellie texted me and asked if we could hang out. She’d had a really bad fight with her stepdad.”

“About what?”

“She didn’t tell you?” He bites his lower lip.

“No.”

He sits up, all crossed legs and poofy hair. This is how he frequently looks after our make-out sessions. “It was weird. She didn’t really say anything. I mean, she came over around, like, ten. She was, like, really, really trashed,
and
she wanted to get high.” He shakes his head, sighs. “She was a fucking train wreck. When she finally did talk about it, it didn’t make much sense.”

“Well, make it make as much sense as you can.” It’s a lot to ask. When Ellie crossed the line of
not exactly there
, interpreting what she thought or felt was nearly impossible.

“Well . . . I’m not trying to be creepers, but did you ever notice that Ellie could be weird with her stepdad?” Tommy asks.

“Like how?” My voice is casual, but inside, my stomach twists into a knot.

“Well, like . . . um . . . you know . . . kind of flirty.”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. I had witnessed this before, but I’d told myself it was because she was drunk. That she was just being Ellie, pushing the boundaries as far as she could.

“I guess he finally freaked out on her, said she was trying to ruin his marriage and maybe it’d be better for everyone if she went to live with her dad.”

“Wait . . . what?” I sit up, holding the blanket to my chest.

“I know.” He slides up the bed frame, stretching out his long legs. He looks out the window, like he’s thinking about things. I follow his gaze. When I look back at him, he’s biting his thumbnail—really ripping into it.

“Stop!” I pull his hand from his mouth. The skin is raw. He looks at me. His eyes are watery. “Hey.” I move closer. I hold his hand in my hand. “What’s going on?”

“You don’t know, then?” He glances around the room like he’s taking in everything: the mashed-up sheets, his rumpled shirt in the corner, and our pants, which are unbuttoned but still on.

I hesitate, unsure. . . . Finally, though, I say, “Know what?”

“I wondered but I didn’t know . . . I thought . . . I thought maybe she told you but you decided to let it, you know, go . . . because of everything that happened.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about.” And I don’t, but I can tell that whatever he’s leading up to isn’t good.

“Oh.” Tommy presses my hands to his bare chest, but I resist. I put them back in my lap.

“Hey, come here.”

“What should I know, Tommy?” I ask firmly.

He starts biting his nail again. This time his skin tears open and starts to bleed.

“Crap, Tommy.” I grab a box of Kleenex from my dresser and hand it to him. He wraps the thin sheet around his thumb, the blood like a shadow pushing through.

“That night,” he says, “we got really drunk—”

“You already said that—”

“Just give a me a sec, okay, Sarah? Just . . .” He starts pacing the room, working on his other thumb. I watch, trying to figure it out, and then it’s done. I know. And inside, that ball of anxiety that’s been building in my belly becomes this shaky thing that bounces around. He stares at me, the tears cresting.

“You slept with her,” I say slowly. “Right?” My voice rises. “That’s it. Right?”

Again, he nods. “I thought that fight we had . . . It was so bad, and you said you were done with me—”

“Yeah? I’ve said that like a thousand times—”

“Sarah,
c’mon
! You said this time was different.
You said
you couldn’t stand to look at me anymore! Don’t say that’s not true,” he pleads. He sits down, grips my shoulders.

I push him away. The last thing I want is any part of him touching me. “We
are
done.”

“Sarah, you’ve never wanted me to be your boyfriend. . . .” His torn-up hand circles my biceps, but I continue to resist. He squeezes my arm, says, “Stop, just listen to me—”

“Let me go.” I dig my nails into his wrist, pushing so hard I’m convinced I’ll break skin here, too.

“God!” He stands, looking at the half-moon imprints. “Don’t be like this. We weren’t hooking up anymore. I thought . . . 
Sarah
, don’t act like you don’t have things you don’t tell me! We all have secrets.”

I slide back against the headboard. I pull a pillow protectively in front of me. “I’ve never kept a secret from you or Ellie.”

We both know this is a lie. We both know I’ve hidden things about Jake. But Tommy’s never brought that up, and he doesn’t do it now, either. He comes around the bed, takes my chin in his hand, and forces me to look at him. “Sarah, please don’t be like this. Don’t ruin this. You and me—this is all that’s left.” He holds my stare. “It’s not like you love me, right? Not
like that.” He waits. When I don’t respond, he squeezes my chin.

“Tommy, you’re hurting me.” I try to pull away, but I can’t, because he’s getting worked up again, and when he’s worked up, it’s never good. “Please, Tommy,” I say gently. “You should go. My mom’s going to be home soon.”

But he doesn’t seem to care about that. He says, “Just say it, Sarah. Just say it.”

“What? I don’t know what you want me to say!”

“That you don’t care about . . .” He struggles for a moment, his deep breaths filling the room. “That you’ve never—”

“Tommy, please!” And then I’m crying. And it’s my tears that do the trick. Finally he lets me go, and I scoot to the far corner of the bed as fast as I can. “I don’t know what you want from me.” My voice washes away. I stare at the ceiling. I go somewhere else in my head. I see another Tommy. The one who’s been my friend since the sixth grade. The second guy I ever kissed, as an experiment in Ellie’s basement when I was thirteen. And, when I was fourteen, the first guy who ever held me—even if it was because I was so freaked out on acid that I thought the sirens from my sister’s toy police car were actual sirens and the police were coming to take us away. And, when I was fifteen, the first guy I ever fell asleep with, even if it was
because we were too drunk to move from Ellie’s bedroom floor. I see
that
Tommy, not this one. And suddenly I hear him crying. And I feel sad for him. I feel so incredibly sad for us both.