Lucas, Beetlejuice, Heathers, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, Edward Scissorhands, Little Women. I especially loved Heathers because my name was Heather. And sometimes when I was in front of the mirror, Crystal would point to me and my reflection and go, look, Heathers! It was a dumb joke we loved. Sometimes everything about my life felt like a dumb joke to love. Amber’s death drew us closer to one another, and we were already close. But now, we never even spent a weekend apart. We watched the Winona movies in Crystal’s room with the door closed because it bothered Crystal’s mom the way we watched them over and over again. Crystal’s mom thought Winona looked like Amber too, but it wasn’t comforting for her like it was for us. Crystal had a big bedroom with her own bathroom and a TV and a VCR and a stereo. We could do whatever we wanted in there, like it was our own apartment. At my place, we could watch the Winona movies in the living room because my parents didn’t mind. And my dad’s best friend worked at the video store, so he would hook us up and give my dad sweet deals when we bought the VHS tapes. I had them on a shelf in my bedroom because they were as precious to me as my books. Crystal and I shared the collection, but the movies stayed at my house. We had a pact that we’d never watch the Winona movies alone, only together. And even if one of her movies happened to be playing on TV, if Crystal wasn’t with me, I’d close my eyes and change the channel or leave the room completely.
Crystal and I would write WINONA FOREVER on our arms sometimes. Sometimes on our feet if it was warm enough to wear sandals. The boys we liked asked us what it meant, but we wouldn’t tell them. WINONA FOREVER was ours and ours only. We liked boys and we liked each other too. Crystal and I kissed when we slept in the same bed. We kissed until we couldn’t kiss anymore, but that was all we did. Kissed. We kissed and kissed until our sticky-lipgloss mouths tasted exactly the same. Like cherries or strawberries or pink or grape or blueberry or lemon or Dr Pepper and then we rolled over on fire. Burning and burning before we fell asleep. We didn’t tell the boys about this either. Not even when they were being pervs and wanted to get off on asking us if we ever made out. We were coy when we said no, stop it, no.
We started kissing after Amber died. It was summer and Amber and her boyfriend had been out celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday. It was summer when Amber and her boyfriend went missing for two whole days until the cops found the car in the river. It was summer when Crystal’s family had to bury Amber. It was summer when Crystal and I went and bought all the yellow roses we could find at the grocery store and put them on Amber’s grave because yellow roses were Amber’s favorite. And we each kept a yellow rose for ourselves and came back to Crystal’s room and watched Mermaids because Crystal said she wanted to watch something cozy so I went home and got my tape and brought it back. A lot of Crystal’s family was still over at her house, in the kitchen, eating and cooking. Her dad was out on the front porch, drunk with his brothers. Her mom was in the kitchen smoking and crying with Crystal’s grandmother. Crystal and I went to her room and closed the door and turned the movie on. I put my head on her shoulder and I’d already cried so much I didn’t think I could cry anymore, but I sobbed. Again. And Crystal was playing with my hair. I got up and went to the bathroom, blew my nose, washed my face. My eyes were all black and streaked from my makeup afterward. Crystal had taken off her black velvet dress and I took mine off too. We were in tank tops and panties and when the movie was over we got in bed. We could hear her family in the rest of the house, on the front porch, in the backyard. Everyone was being quiet, but the house was somehow loud because it was full and alive, something Amber wasn’t anymore.
Crystal looked at me and put her hand on the side of my face and it was both of us. Both of us leaned forward and kissed and kept kissing. My stomach, our tongues—pink cotton candy, swirling. We touched feet in her cool sheets and I don’t know how long we kissed with the windows open. When we were finished, we cried some more before Crystal got out of bed and went into the kitchen to steal a cigarette from her mom’s pack. Her mom had drank a lot and took some pills and passed out on the couch in her black dress; her dad was out there staring at the TV. Crystal’s uncle was at the sink, sniffing and quietly doing dishes with the wet spoons clinking and catching the zappy kitchen light.
I had a headache from everything, but I smoked with Crystal anyway. She peed in front of me, put the seat down and sat there with her knees under her chin. I let my cigarette hand hang out the window whenever I was holding it. Crystal pulled a half-empty bottle of peach schnapps from underneath the sink. We’d absconded with it that morning from Crystal’s parents’ liquor cabinet. We’d learned the word absconded in English class. It was extra credit on the vocab quiz. Cherry schnapps was my favorite, but I liked the peach too. Crystal’s favorite was peach. I thought it was important for her to have her favorite that sad night. And I wanted to be there for her, for whatever she needed or wanted. After we finished our cigarette, we went to Amber’s abandoned bedroom, touched her stuff, hugged her stuffed animals and cried some more. We didn’t sleep much that night and when we ended up in Crystal’s room again she and I kissed some more, and I was genuinely surprised when the sun rose, like the night should’ve been extra-long since everyone was so devastated. The gravity of Amber’s death was weighing us down, so why not the sun too? Crystal and I cut ourselves together in the morning. Same spot on our upper thighs, stinging and bleeding; we put on fresh Little Mermaid Band-Aids and watched Mermaids, finishing off the bottle of schnapps in her room and getting drunk pretty fast because we hadn’t eaten. And when we puked, we barely had anything to puke up. We both took showers, washing our hair with the same Herbal Essences shampoo every girl at our school used that fluffed up against the boy-smells of gym, weed, and matte Drakkar Noir.
“My breath smells like a funeral,” Crystal said. “Winona Ryder looks so much like Amber,” she said again before she fell asleep in full afternoon sun. I brushed my teeth twice before I went home.
* * *
I was jealous of the boy Crystal liked, but that wasn’t fair because I liked a boy too. Crystal liked Jamie and I liked Tristan. Jamie and Tristan were best friends. They lived in the same neighborhood, so we’d drive past their houses sometimes to see if they were home, to see what they were doing. Crystal’s mom hadn’t let Crystal get her license even though it’d been two years since Amber died. She didn’t like her riding in the car with me that much either, so we didn’t let her know how much we drove around. My parents had gotten me a little white hatchback I loved and Crystal and I called it the white rabbit after one of our favorite songs. I kept our flower crowns hanging around the rearview mirror and we’d put them on whenever we drove past Jamie and Tristan’s houses. We thought it was good luck, that it would help us be able to see them, that they’d be out in their yards. Sometimes it worked. We went to school with Jamie and Tristan, but we got a special thrill when we saw them outside school. Once, we had our flower crowns on and Jamie and Tristan were out in Tristan’s driveway skateboarding and listening to Nirvana. The whole thing was so nineties, so grunge. Jamie even had a flannel shirt tied around his waist.
“Hey,” Jamie said, walking over to the white rabbit. He stuck his head in a little and was so close to Crystal I thought she was going to die. Her shorts were really short and we weren’t cutting ourselves anymore, so there were no Band-Aids, just a couple pale, smooth scars. I looked down at her pretty legs, her purple-glittery toenails and flip-flop feet on the floor of my car.