I’m in bed with a near-stranger when my phone rings. The first time I ignore it, but when the call is instantly followed by another, I worry it might be important. The area code is my own, but the rest of the numbers mean nothing. Debt collectors contact me from generated 417 numbers constantly, but it’s 2 a.m. in Seattle, which means it’s 4 a.m. in Missouri, which means it definitely isn’t a debt collector.

“Hello?” I ask, assuming it must be a drunk ex. 

“Cheyenna?” It’s my stepsister’s voice. “It’s me, Sierra.” Her speech is distant and slow, which means she’s on heroin. “I met the man of my dreams,” she tells me. “Say hi to my sister.” 

With Sierra, it’s always the man of her dreams, her next husband, the best thing that’s ever happened. Sometimes they pimp her out and sometimes they just keep her high. The only constant is they never stick around. 

“Hello?” The man sounds middle-aged, confused. 

“Hi.”

“Are you Cheyenna?”

“I am.”

“So you’re the good kid, huh?”

Having Sierra for a sister made it easy. I had a stint with Oxy at 12, began smoking weed at 13, and lost my virginity at 14, but compared to Sierra, I was the perfect child. I never got caught.

“I guess,” I said. “Everything’s relative.”

“Huh?” 

The man I just slept with looks concerned, then squints at his phone, pretending to text. I tap his hand and mouth “my sis-ter” and am disappointed to learn he does not read lips.

“What’s your name?” I ask Sierra’s dream man.

“Kenny?” He seems unsure.

Sierra is hard to track down. She floats from “bando” to “’bando” to sleep on their collapsing wooden floors. She shoplifts pre-paid phones while tweaking then calls to ramble about the cyclical nature of everything, how the same people are always lurking around every corner trying to get her high, trying to coerce her into sex. “Like the fuckin’ Truman Show,” she says. She’s onto them though. She sees the camera flashes in the trees and can identify the static of a tapped line. 

“Hey,” Sierra says, reclaiming the phone. “Sorry, he’s still pretty high.”

I force a laugh. My strategy has always been to reserve judgment. Sierra needs that. Otherwise she would disappear entirely and I wouldn’t know she had died until springfieldmugshots.com stopped posting her picture for anyone with the internet to see. When I was 10 and Sierra was 14, the court ordered family therapy. Sierra told us that her stepdad before my dad was a child porn addict, that he did unspeakable things to her adolescent body. The lightest offense had been giving her drugs. Our therapist listened like our parents never did, taught us to regulate our emotions through visualization techniques and breath.

“Where you at nowadays?” I ask.

“Oh, here and there.” She laughs and it feels genuine, even nice. 

I recall with sudden clarity her beat blue Chevy Cavalier, how she’d drive to the parking lot of the community college where she was a first-year. In the sweltering car, we rolled joints. With the windows up, we got high. She found it funny when I crossed into “cartoon mode,” how I’d sing along with Nelly Furtado on the alternative rock station, appreciating, for the first time, my own voice. That was right before she got skinny, so skinny I worried she would disappear. When she did, her bedroom felt both haunted and empty. 

Sierra rattles on about Kenny, how they met at AA then relapsed together. She says he’s serious about getting sober, that he’s gonna help her get back on her feet. He knows a good female sponsor, someone who won’t abandon her for making one tiny mistake. She says after this bag they won’t buy another. As a couple, they are committed to cleaning up. She’s gonna get her kids back and he is too. That way, their kids will be stepsiblings. They’ll grow up better than we ever could.

Nothing she says is new. I don’t let myself have hope. Instead, I locate the frustration in my body. It’s in my chest. If I could give it a color, it would be red. If I could give it a texture, it would be wet yarn unraveling from the ball. What would eliminate yarn? Fire. I visualize the strike of a match. I watch the yarn burn, curl, then crisp. I grant my blood permission to carry away all the ash. I trust that my body can process the residue of my pain.

The man I’m with tucks a lock of hair behind my ear then slips under the sheets. Sierra is mid-sentence when I turn my phone off. I want her to stay awake and wonder if it died.