“You don’t have to do that.”
“What about some of your other friends from school? When was the last time you spoke to Courtney? Maybe she’d want to go.”
“Maybe.”
I didn’t want to get into it with my mother. She didn’t have to know I’d fallen out of contact with most of the people I went to middle and high school with. The few friends I’d kept were from college. Because in college, I was able to reinvent myself. I was able to act as if the girl I’d been in middle school didn’t exist. It made things easier.
Courtney, well, Courtney was one of the only friends from the original middle school clique I’d stayed friends with into high school. Even when she’d gotten pregnant and dropped out, we’d kept in touch. Until the summer after graduation, right before I’d flown out to California. I hadn’t spoken to her since.
My mother shook her head, wiping at another tear. She picked up her cup and sipped her tea.
“This is so good. Are you sure you don’t want some?”
And because I didn’t want to disappoint her any more than I already had, I forced a smile.
“I’d love some.”
3
The town house Daniel and I shared was always meant to be temporary. Maybe it still was, but we’d been living in it for three years already, and it didn’t seem like we were ever going to move.
Senior year of high school, I’d applied to colleges as far from home as possible. I’d been accepted by most of the schools but had ended up deciding on one in California, which had put a decent three thousand miles between me and my past. I would come home on break, visit my family, and fly back. I’d known early on what career I wanted, so I didn’t waste any time. I took the right classes, shored up the appropriate number of credits, and applied for the best internships.
I loved California. Having grown up with the unpredictable seasons on the East Coast, I welcomed the steadiness of the weather. I had planned to stay. Go to grad school. Get a job. Settle down. I’d dated throughout college, but nothing serious ever came of it. When things did start to become serious, I pushed whoever it was away.
Then my father got sick with cancer.
I started making more trips home, but the cost got to be too much. I vowed to transfer to a closer school, but my parents told me no. They wanted me to finish where I started. They wanted me to be happy.
I transferred back home my last year anyway and managed to get into the state college a half hour away. I lived at home and commuted. Part of me was afraid I’d run into old high school classmates, but while I saw a few, none of them were close enough to have been considered friends.
For my internship, I worked as a crisis worker at the local emergency room. When somebody came into the ER with thoughts of harming themselves or others, it was my job to assess them and determine whether they were okay to return home or if they needed psychiatric hospitalization.
That’s where I met Daniel. He’d just graduated from nursing school and was working as an ER nurse. To say he was handsome would be an understatement. Dark blue eyes, an even tan, slightly mussed-up hair, and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow—the first time I saw him, I was immediately attracted to him.
And there was more. Daniel was patient with the people who came into the ER, even the combative ones, and he was sweet, especially to the kids. I learned that on his days off he volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club. We would see each other often in passing, and sometimes we would talk. Then one day Daniel asked me out for coffee, and I said yes. A year later, we were engaged.
By that point, my father was in remission, and it looked like he was going to pull through. He was thrilled about our engagement. He really liked Daniel. So did my mom. Everybody liked Daniel.
I started spending more and more time at Daniel’s apartment, but it was cramped, so six months after he proposed, we decided to lease a town house together. It would be for only a year or two, we told each other, until we got married and started looking at houses. Assuming we even wanted to stay in the area. Part of me wanted to head back out to California, though I didn’t want to leave my family behind, especially with my father being sick. Daniel, who had no family to anchor him to one location, said he would be happy wherever we ended up, just as long as we were together.
We set a date and started planning the wedding, a small outdoor ceremony. Only a few family members and friends. Nothing over the top. But then my father had passed away. Almost two years had gone by since then, and we were still living in the town house.
Daniel wasn’t home. For the past couple of months, he’d been working doubles. The money was good, and Daniel loved what he did, though it seemed like we rarely saw each other.
I’d become accustomed to the empty town house. Our neighbors on both sides were quiet. Jim and Tom, the couple on our left, always grabbed packages left out on the stoop so that nobody driving past could steal them. Andrew and Barb, the older neighbors on our right, had a Jack Russell terrier that sometimes yapped too loudly, but mostly they kept to themselves.
I changed into some sweats and a T-shirt and headed downstairs to the kitchen. A few dirty dishes cluttered the sink; I loaded them in the dishwasher, wiped down the counters, checked to see if the trash can needed to be emptied.
In the living room, I settled onto the couch, remote in hand. A yawn hit me hard. Fighting it back, I tapped the button for Netflix, scrolled through the movies and TV shows Daniel and I had each added to our queue. Nothing looked appealing.
I kept thinking about Olivia. About how she’d taken her own life.
I hadn’t thought about her in years. Hadn’t thought about any of my friends from middle school. Our special clique. The popular crowd. Harpies, we called ourselves, after Courtney overheard Mrs. Cochrane, our seventh-grade English-lit teacher, use the term to describe us to another teacher. Courtney, unfamiliar with the word, had immediately consulted a dictionary to learn that harpy meant “a bird of prey with a woman’s face.”
We all thought the name made us seem tougher than we really were, but Mackenzie took the term most personally, as her last name was Harper. Mrs. Cochrane, Mackenzie reasoned, was clearly targeting her, because she was our leader.
The rest of us knew Mackenzie was just being her typical egotistical self, but we did like the name. It was cool, we decided, and so the Harpies we became.
I remembered their names, of course—Elise and Mackenzie; Olivia and Courtney and Destiny—but I’d successfully blocked them from my mind. Or at the very least I’d opened up a box, shoved the memories inside, locked it, and thrown away the key.
I turned over my left hand. Looked at the scar along the palm. It was so thin that you could barely see it if you didn’t know it was there. Daniel once commented on the scar, asked what had happened, and I had given him some line about accidentally cutting myself when I was young. Which wasn’t technically a lie.
Another yawn hit me, this one too strong to ignore.
Settling on an HGTV home-improvement show, I lowered the volume and got comfortable on the couch. I closed my eyes, thinking a small nap wouldn’t hurt. Just a few minutes to clear my head of the ghosts.
The bell rings, an obnoxious blatting sound, and the kids in the hall disperse into classrooms.
I stand in the middle of the hallway, unable to move. My backpack hangs off my shoulder. A textbook is clutched to my chest; the mold-scented pages key me in that it’s for eighth-grade science.