The stench of stale cigarette smoke hit me, and a rising sense of dread clawed at my insides.
Someone’s in the house.
I stepped through the doorway, and the wrongness of the scene closed in on me.
My mom lay on the bed, motionless.
Elvis crouched on her chest.
The lamp in the corner flashed on and off like a child was toying with the switch.
The cat made a low guttural sound that cut through the silence, and I shuddered. If an animal could scream, that was what it would sound like.
“Mom?”
Elvis’ head whipped around in my direction.
I ran to the bed and he leapt to the floor.
My mother’s head was tilted to the side, dark hair spilling across her face, as the room pitched in and out of darkness. I realized how still she was—the fact that her chest wasn’t rising and falling. I pressed my fingers against her throat.
Nothing.
I shook her roughly. “Mom, wake up!”
Tears streamed down my face, and I slid my hand under her cheek. The light stopped flashing, bathing the room in a faint glow.
“Mom!” I grabbed her shoulders and yanked her upright. Her head swung forward and fell against her chest. I scrambled backward, and her body dropped down onto the mattress, bouncing against it unnaturally.
I slid to the floor, choking on my tears.
My mother’s head lay against the bed at an awkward angle, her face turned toward me.
Her eyes were as empty as a doll’s.
FOUR WEEKS LATER
4. GRAVE JUMPING
My bedroom still looked like my bedroom, the bookshelves crammed with sketch pads and tins filled with broken pencils and bits of charcoal. The bed was still positioned in the center like an island, so I could lie on my back and stare at the posters and drawings taped to my walls. Chris Berens’ Lady Day still hung on the back of my door—a beautiful girl imprisoned in a glass dome floating across the sky. I had spent more than a few nights inventing stories about the girl trapped inside. In the end, she always found a way out.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I had two days to take this place apart and box up everything that mattered to me. The things that made this room mine—the things that defined me. I’d tried a hundred times over the last month, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I enlisted the only person left who loved this place almost as much as I did.
“Earth to Kennedy? Did you hear anything I said?” Elle held up one of my sketchbooks. “Do you want these in the box with art stuff or in the one with books?”
I shrugged. “Whatever you think.”
I stood in front of the mirror, pulling out the faded photos tucked around the edge: a blurry close-up of Elvis swatting at the lens as a kitten. My mom wearing cutoffs at about my age, washing a black Camaro and waving a soapy hand at the camera, the silver ID bracelet she never took off still dangling from her wrist.
A nurse at the hospital had handed me a clear plastic bag with that bracelet inside the night my mom was pronounced dead. She’d found me in the waiting room, sitting in the same yellow chair where the doctor had spoken the two words that shattered my life: heart failure.
Now the bracelet was fastened around my wrist, and the plastic bag with my mom’s name printed at the top was tucked inside my oldest sketchbook.
Elle reached for a picture of the two of us with our tongues sticking out, mouths stained cotton candy blue. “I can’t believe you’re really leaving.”
“It’s not like I have a choice. Boarding school is better than living with my aunt.” My mom and her sister hardly spoke, and the few times I did see them in the same room, they had been at each other’s throats. My aunt was just another stranger, like my father. I didn’t want to live with a woman I barely knew and listen to her promise me that everything would be okay.
I wanted to let the pain fill me up and coat my insides with the armor I needed to make it through this. I imagined the dome from Lady Day lowering itself over me.
But instead of glass, mine was made of steel.
Unbreakable.
I didn’t explain any of that to my aunt when I refused to move to Boston to live with her, or when she had spread out a stack of glossy boarding school brochures in front of me a few days later. I had flipped through the pictures of ivy-covered buildings that all looked frighteningly similar: Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut. In the end, I picked upstate New York, the coldest place—and the farthest from home.
My aunt had started making arrangements immediately, as if she wanted to go back to her life as badly as I wanted to get her out of mine. I had forced a wave when her cab finally pulled away from the curb yesterday, after I persuaded her to let me stay at Elle’s until I left for New York.
As I pulled the picture of Elvis off the mirror, another photo fluttered to the floor—my dad standing in front of a gray weather-beaten house with me grinning from his shoulders. I looked so happy, like nothing could wipe that smile off my face. It reminded me of a darker day, when I learned that a smile can break as easily as a heart.
I woke up early and tiptoed downstairs to watch cartoons with the volume muted, the way I usually did when my parents slept late on weekends. I was pouring chocolate milk into my cereal when I heard the hinges of the front door groan. I rushed to the window.
My dad had his back to me, a duffel bag in one hand and his car keys in the other.
Was he going on a trip?
He opened the driver’s-side door and bent down to climb in. That’s when he saw me and froze. I waved, and he raised his hand as if he was going to wave back. But he never did. Instead, he closed the car door and drove away.