When I went back inside the bar, it took me only a few seconds to find Lauren. Her teal hair, which fell in loose curls around her shoulders, was like a spotlight in the dim room. She was talking to two guys in button-down shirts, each of them holding a beer, and when she saw me squeezing between the crowds of people, she began to laugh.
“Here she is!” she said, her voice straining to be heard over the music. “See, I told you the birthday girl exists!” She handed me a drink, something frothy and blue.
“Listen . . .” I started.
“Oh no you don’t!” Lauren interrupted. She looked at the guys. “This is classic Sylvie. Watch. She’s gonna try to go home early.”
“I’m really tired,” I said, moving so that I was standing between Lauren and the two guys. “Just—please. Don’t make a big deal out of this. Looks like you’ve already made some new friends, and you said Jake and Jenna are showing up in a little while.”
Something must have shown on my face. Lauren narrowed her eyes, and then pulled me away, using her elbows to create a space for us among the groups of people in the bar.
“What is it?” she asked, her forehead nearly touching mine. “Who was that call from?”
“My aunt. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired, like I said.”
She held my gaze before responding. “So you’re not upset about something?” Her mouth fell open, as if she’d figured it out. “Is it about your cousin’s baby? Is it okay?”
I forced myself to laugh. “No, no, the baby’s great. I’m serious, Lauren. I’m fine. I just think those shots were a little much for me.”
Lauren pursed her lips in thought, and then she nodded. “Well, that I believe. You’re such a lightweight, it’s embarrassing. Fine, okay, whatever. You go home and be eighty, and I’ll stay here with Rob and—hey! Where’d they go?”
She looked back at the space we’d just left, the two guys lost behind a group of college students wearing purple fraternity shirts.
“You’d better go find them,” I said. Reaching out to hug her, I added, “Be careful, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, Mom,” she said, and we went our separate ways—me back to our cramped but cozy apartment, and Lauren back to the nighttime buzz of Providence, Rhode Island.
• • •
It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I was even still awake when, sometime after two o’clock, our apartment door opened. Lauren’s heels clicked across the floor, followed by a thud as she tossed them off her feet. At the distinctive sound of chip bags opening, I considered getting up, putting my head in her lap on the couch, and telling her everything—or half of everything, anyway.
When we first met during orientation our freshman year at RISD, I was eager to detach myself from the person I’d been in high school. For those years at Spring Hill High after Persephone died, I stopped being Sylvie O’Leary. I was known instead, through whispers in the halls, as “Persephone’s sister.” Even as a senior, three years after everyone in my sister’s grade had graduated, I still heard that phrase. It hissed from the crowd when I won Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts at awards night, and it followed me, weeks later, as I crossed the stage to get my diploma. Some days, “Persephone’s sister” was a comfort, a reminder that, no matter what had happened, I’d always be tethered to her. But most days, when I heard those words, it took everything I had not to buckle, not to see my fingers locking the bedroom window over and over, the click of the latch echoing in my head.
So in the early days of our friendship, when Lauren asked me about my family (first telling me all about her two “spoiled, obnoxious” brothers and her “embarrassingly boy-crazy” sister), I found myself giving her only the faintest sketch of my life: I had an alcoholic mother, I’d lived for several years with my aunt and cousin, and I had an older sister who’d died.
“Whoa,” Lauren said back then, “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”
For a moment, my stomach tightened and my skin felt instantly cold. But then, as if my voice belonged to someone else, I heard myself reply.
“Car accident.”
I thought of my grandparents’ fatal crash—the crumpled Honda, the faulty airbags that hadn’t deployed when they spun out on a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Persephone could have easily been in the car with them that night. They could have been taking her to get a hot chocolate at Spring Hill Commons. She’d have been seven at the time, and I, only three years old, might have stayed home with Mom, already blinking toward sleep at seven o’clock.
“But I was really young when it happened,” I added. “I barely even remember her.”
I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if Lauren could sense the lies that hovered in the air, but she only frowned a little, said “I’m sorry” again, and that had been it. End of conversation. End of “Persephone’s sister.” As I exhaled, reveling in my revised history, my lungs felt lighter than they had in years.
After that, Lauren and I lived a thrifty but comfortable life together. We became roommates at RISD our sophomore year. “More like Rhode Island School of Detours,” she quipped, but I, having scrambled for my scholarship, having painted some nights until the tips of my fingers bled, didn’t view it the same way. She’d wanted to be a tattoo artist from the start (going to RISD was her parents’ dream, paid for by their six-figure salaries), and when she got the job at Steve’s she came alive in ways I’d never seen before. She designed new tattoos feverishly, leaving them on sticky notes around the apartment—on the toilet lid, an elephant with a trombone for a trunk; on the refrigerator, a light bulb with a ship inside; on the peephole of our door, a stained glass anatomical heart. Then she made me rate them, using a simple rubric of “Would you get this, yes or no?” It didn’t matter that she knew I would never get any tattoo (a brief point of concern when she later convinced Steve to hire me, saving me from the monotony of art supply stores); she just wanted a chance to talk about what she was doing, because she loved it with a pure, uncomplicated passion—and I envied her that.
When I started my apprenticeship at Steve’s, I came to understand what she liked about the job. It was creative, it required thought and skill, and it generated a considerable feeling of power; the tattoo artist, I soon learned, was not only the inflictor of pain, the drawer of blood, but also, on a good day, the fulfiller of dreams. None of that was why I kept up with the apprenticeship, though, or why I accepted the full-time job when I got my license.
After Persephone died, I kept on painting. At first, I wasn’t sure why, given how the chemicals had begun to smell like bruises to me, but it became something I loved and loathed in equal measure. I loved it because of how easily you could hide your mistakes—one wrong shade of red, and you could just cover it with another; one leaf that didn’t fall into place on a tree, and you could simply paint right over it, start all over. But still, there was always a catch. Even though no one would ever see your error, you never forgot it existed—a thing that haunted, a thing that whispered and gnawed at you beneath the paint. Tattooing was different, of course, but in the ways that mattered—bruise-scented chemicals, the masking of something old with something new—it was the same.