The day we met, we died. I have to start there. Or Flora said she died, and I said, Me too. Pretty much whatever Flora said, I said, Me too. That was what we called it: the time we died together. Kids at school asked what it was like to die, and Flora said it was like becoming the sun. I made it up completely because I couldn’t remember at all. I said it felt like being a stray cat slinking along through a dense fog.

I noticed Flora that day because she had bright red hair and she dressed like a boy. Which was not so remarkable at school or the park, but at the Scarborough Community Pool it meant wearing boys’ bathing trunks and nothing on top. She had tiny, pointy brown nipples that matched her freckles. If her mother told her to put on a swim top she would flatly refuse. “That is not acceptable,” she liked to tell adults who told her what to do.

Mom had gone to the bathroom and forbade me to swim until she came back. She says that before Flora and I became friends, I was a very obedient child. I suppose I was sitting on our pool chaise in my strawberry tankini—which I loved, and begged Mom to let me wear to school with jeans—staring at Flora. She said she saw me looking. She said she met my eyes and stared back, hard. She was convinced she remembered everything that happened that day. But Flora will insist she has a perfect memory of something and it’ll turn out it happened before she was even born.

Flora said the way I was looking at her was actually what made her do it. Even though she didn’t know how to swim. And maybe it was because I realized I was somehow implicated that when I saw her struggling to float, I jumped into the deep end after her. Even though I didn’t really know how to swim, either. I mean with a floatie, in the shallow part, sure. Mom and I were practicing. But I was afraid of putting my head underwater.

Flora said she kept her eyes open the whole time, so she watched me charge in after her, paddling madly before I started to sink. She said I had my arms stretched out towards her like a bear lumbering through a blueberry patch, and my hair was sticking out every which way like a cartoon of someone who’s been electrocuted, and my bathing suit was a bright bubblegum pink, and my eyes were open, too, and when they met hers we exchanged something profound and absolute about how absurd this life was, and how deep its waters. She said in that moment there was no distinction between us, and she knew— because in that moment we were each other—that I felt it, too.

Flora was there with her babysitter. She had three or four babysitters on rotation and they all seemed to be gum-smacking high school girls with an infinite supply of juicy, dramatic stories about their charming, no-good boyfriends. In my earliest memories with Flora, we’re sitting on her floor with her babysitter Yazmín, who’s showing us photos of the girl she thinks her boyfriend’s cheating with based on some texts she read on her boyfriend’s phone. Flora always considered these situations very seriously and gave thoughtful, well-reasoned advice.

This babysitter wasn’t paying attention because she was too busy flirting with the lifeguard-on-duty, and the lifeguard wasn’t paying attention either, because he was busy flirting back. One of the older kids at the pool actually had to tap him on the shoulder to get him to realize we were drowning. After that he dove into action. I guess he saved our lives. We both had to get rescue breaths and chest compressions, first from him, then from the EMTs. They broke two of Flora’s ribs trying to get the water out of her lungs. For years afterwards, I had this ringing in my left ear. Other than that, we got away fine. One day, the ringing stopped. By that point I had gotten used to it, the way people who live next to an airport get used to it. It was so quiet in my head when it stopped. For a time, it was unbearably quiet.

Mom took us all—me, Flora, the babysitter—to our apartment, where she gave us orange juice and cheese sandwiches and swaddled us with blankets, though it was July, and really hot out. The babysitter was in shock and she got a blanket, too. Mom reprimanded me for jumping into the deep end when she had told me not to, and when I hardly knew how to swim. If you get yourself killed, she said, I swear I will absolutely never forgive you.

While she was talking to Flora’s mom on the phone in her bedroom, I asked Flora if she was a girl or a boy.

“A girl,” she said. “But I think it’s fun to dress up in boys’ clothes.”

Mom had given her one of my t-shirts to wear. She hadn’t objected. It was pink and had a picture of the characters from Pebbles, which I had never watched.

“Sometimes it’s fun to dress up in girls’ clothes, too,” she added.

“Does that still count as dressing up?” I asked.

“Don’t you think so, Natalia?”

For some reason I had introduced myself with my full name even though everybody always called me Nat. I was only ever called Natalia when Mom was very angry with me, which, to be fair, was not so infrequent. It had sounded strange coming out of my own mouth, and it made me flush with pleasure when it came out of hers.

I decided I did think so. It was a fun thought to have.

*

“Why do you think it’s called monster cheese?” Flora asked, picking at her sandwich. I would learn that she always did a full dissection of whatever she was served, shredding it into something much more gruesome than the original, before deciding whether to eat it.

“I think it’s muenster.”

“What’s that?”

I didn’t know. “Maybe it’s like a type of a monster.”

“I feel bad for my babysitter,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. Her babysitter had left by that time.

“Because I feel like that was really traumatic for her.”

“What does traumatic mean?”

“It means like when a bad thing happens that you never forget for your whole life.” “Oh,” I said. Flora knew all sorts of things that seemed impossible for a five-year-old to know. “Well then I feel bad for my mom,” I said, trying to keep up.

By the time Flora’s mom came to retrieve her after work, we had decided that drowning in the Scarborough Community Pool was the best thing we had ever done, because it brought us to each other.

We started at Scarborough Elementary that September, and people believed us when we said we were sisters. Even teachers believed us, though we looked nothing alike. By that time, we were spending all our time with each other. How could it have been any other way? We had gone to another world and returned from it together. We knew things most kids didn’t even think to think about.

And it turned out we had a lot in common. Almost a creepy amount. We had both lived in Scarborough our entire lives and wanted to move to New York City when we were old enough. We were both born in the springtime. We had birthmarks on our right legs, but Flora’s looked like strawberry sprinkles and mine was a small brown whale. Her grandmother was named Claire and mine was named Clara. We thought crust was the best part of pizza. Our fathers were absent, though Flora’s brother lived with hers, and she went there sometimes on weekends and holidays. Mom had made it clear that my father was someone she never intended me to know. She refused to even tell me his name. I still don’t know his name, but now I know the reasons for not knowing.

In second grade, we made up a game where we switched off asking questions about whether we liked things and we had to write down Yes or No without looking at the other person’s paper to make sure there was no cheating. When we read down our lists they were always the same. I mean, exactly the same. Likes: pineapple on pizza, REALLY sour candies, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey, cats, Chex Mix, soccer. Dislikes: soda, the boys in our grade, guinea pigs (as a pet), ice in water, vinegar, the army, basketball. Maybe we liked or disliked something to a different extent. But no matter how obscure or specific the items we named, our yeses and nos matched up precisely.

I would hide my shoes when Flora’s mom came to pick her up so she wouldn’t be able to leave. The trick didn’t work the other way because my mom really would take me home barefoot and would thunder about my insolence in the car. As if I have nothing better to do than shuttle you around, Natalia.

We watched My Super Sweet Sixteen and Say Yes to the Dress. We read each other sex tips from Cosmopolitan: let your hair tickle his balls when you’re pleasuring him with your mouth, slide an ice cube down his chest to make him shiver all over. We got Flora’s babysitters to take us to the mall, where we overflowed the shopping cart with stretchy, neon clothes, the kind Mom said made kids look like kid-prostitutes, and tried them on shamelessly, making faces at ourselves in the fitting room mirrors, even though we knew we wouldn’t buy them.

In fourth grade, Flora discovered Dating Ariane, and we huddled over her computer to play it. Flora had her own laptop. We embodied a hunky, middle-aged guy who we only saw piecemeal: his arms, when we reached out to dance with Ariane, the crown of his head when we bent down to kiss her. The focal point was Ariane, who wore blue jeans and a tight red top. We picked her up in our silver Jeep. We drank a glass of wine at home, and recited poetry, or played Smooth Jazz on her stereo. We took her to an Italian Bistro. We went to a museum. We danced at a nightclub. We shopped for lingerie. We paid for everything. We had to answer all her questions correctly: who painted this one, what constellation is that, which underwear set makes me look best? We stopped at the gas station on the way home to buy condoms and a six-pack of beer. If we didn’t buy condoms, she wouldn’t let us have sex with her later. The goal of the game was to have sex with Ariane. If we did everything right, we got to lean down and kiss her neck, and take off her tight red shirt to reveal her perfect breasts, and then we got to fuck her, first in missionary, then doggy style, our big, manly hands spread against her round, animated ass.

We had sleepovers almost every weekend. At my house, we shared my bed; at Flora’s, we put all the pillows and blankets from the whole apartment on the bedroom floor and slept in the sea of them. After we turned out the light, we turned towards one another and breathed really hard. I thought her breath smelled kind of funky sometimes, but I could get past it. We lay really close, so we could feel the other person’s breath coming in through our noses and flowing out through our mouths. My mouth always got so dry that way. It was really uncomfortable. Actually my whole body was extremely uncomfortable. It was a terrible thirst.

By then, we had a plan to move to New York City together. We’d do it as soon as we turned eighteen. We’d live in some shitty apartment (we loved the word shitty). We’d paint the walls bright colors—turquoise! burnt orange!— and have at least two cats. What would we do? I wasn’t sure. We’d roam around the city in flouncy dresses getting picked up by handsome men. We’d have jobs. All adults did, which made the prospect of having a job sort of exciting. It was slowly starting to occur to us that basically everything that existed was the result of an adult having a job. It was weird to think about a chair, or chapstick, or a box of pasta that way. I worried there was nothing I was particularly passionate about. It didn’t occur to me that my mother’s passion might not have been being a hospice health aide, but that that didn’t stop her from working sixty-hour weeks.

Neither Flora nor I had any friends besides each other. This didn’t bother me. Actually it gave me a powerful sense of validation that our friendship was no typical friendship, that there was nobody in the world who could understand it—or understand me —besides Flora.

In eighth grade, I tested into the gifted and talented program at Carlton, the magnet high school two towns over. Flora didn’t. She was probably smarter than me, but she didn’t work as hard at school. I thought that meant she had a better sense of perspective. I knew I was probably wasting my intelligence on my ninth grade classes but I had no idea what else to do with it. Also my mom demanded to see all my quizzes and tests and would ground me when I got below a B. Flora’s mom didn’t know anything about how she was doing in school. She wouldn’t have minded if she’d known Flora fudged her signature on report cards.

Even though I was the one getting bused thirty minutes out to a high school that offered electives like screenwriting and computer science with a hundred new classmates that neither of us had ever met and Flora was just moving one building over with the same old kids from Scarborough, I was still the one who feared she would leave me behind. Flora made me promise we would still see each other every day. She said we had to. It was a quick bike ride between our houses. It would be no problem. We sat on her bedroom floor and kissed the knuckles of our thumbs while we pinky swore, to seal it.

We didn’t see each other every day. She started spending more of her weekends with her Dad. She was excited about how their relationship was developing, and was feeling close to her brother. “That’s great,” I said, trying hard to mean it. But I worried that the fact that neither of us had Dads was one of the things that bound us together.

And she made a new friend, who she saw after school as often as she saw me. The friend was named Becca, a totally unremarkable girl who had been in our class since kindergarten. There had never been anything interesting about Becca. People said she was very chill. I didn’t really get what it meant to be chill. I suspected that I was not chill, but I wasn’t positive. Becca was pretty good at playing piano. Really good, even, for our age and for Scarborough. But not good enough for it to mean anything.

“What do you guys do when you hang out?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Flora said. “We just chill.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like we listen to music.”

“That’s all you do?” I asked. I thought of music as something that happened in the background of another activity you were doing, not as the activity itself.

“Yeah, usually we just listen to music and lie on her bed or whatever.”

“What music do you listen to?”

“Alternative R&B I guess.” I didn’t know what that was. “It’s like, a lot of female vocalists who have their roots in Soul and Motown and whatever. It’s all Becca’s. You should ask her about it. She knows like everything about music.”

“What do you talk about?” I asked.

“Mostly we don’t really talk.”

“Is that OK?”

“What?”

“Like is it awkward, not to talk?”

“Not usually,” she said. “I guess it is what it is.”

“You should come sometime,” Flora offered.

“Chill and listen to music with you guys?”

“Yeah. I think you’d like Becca.”

“I don’t think I’d get it.”

“What’s not to get?”

I didn’t know how to express my suspicion that there was something very obvious I was missing that everyone else just understood. I thought maybe, for example, that I didn’t know how to listen to music. Not because I didn’t like music— I walked everywhere with my earbuds in, smearing whatever song I was listening to onto whatever unsuspecting scene I came across: one chipmunk chasing another around a stump, a woman bending down to tie a child’s shoelaces, a group of teenagers gulping bright blue energy drinks from plastic bottles, so they were all scored with the soundtrack of my mind. But if somebody asked me what music I liked, that would make me extremely nervous. If they asked what I liked about music, I would shut down completely. I guess I had this suspicion that everybody else knew how to just be. I constantly felt like I was waiting for my life, for my self, to happen to me. But I didn’t even know what it would look like when it did.

*

I went to Becca’s. It was really nice. Not like really, really nice, not like the way Arman Vivay’s house was nice. Arman Vivay was one of my new classmates. He threw pool parties in his backyard and he invited our whole grade. Mom made me go to one, and I pretended to get lost when I was coming back from the bathroom so I’d have an excuse to wander around more. There was an actual atrium with frescoes on its domed ceiling. Mom said I needed to make friends at my new school. “Flora’s not going anywhere,” she said.

We passed through Becca’s kitchen, where she grabbed a bag of veggie straws, and continued on to her bedroom. The walls were teal, like they would be in our apartment in New York, and covered with concert posters and playbills from Broadway shows. Becca knelt thoughtfully before her shelf of CDs before choosing an album by Erykah Badu. Becca was white but all her favorite singers were black women. The music was really good. It was like Flora said: we just lay there and listened. I looked at her but she was looking at the ceiling. So was Becca, so I did too. There was a fan there, which was not spinning. I thought, What if it came loose right now and crashed down on our heads and crushed us? A part of me wished it would happen. Just for the drama. Just for something to do.

“I just remembered that social studies assignment,” Becca said.

“Oh that’s gonna be a bitch,” Flora said. Since when did she even talk like that? “Which one are you gonna do?””

“Probably the second.”

“I think me too.”

Becca was singing under her breath. I couldn’t tell if she had a good voice, but I knew I was too embarrassed to sing aloud in front of other people, even quietly.

“I love how much more you can hear when your eyes are closed,” Flora said. “It’s like amazing how much better my sense of hearing becomes.” She had her eyes closed. So did Becca. I was the only one still staring at the fan.

I went to the bathroom, more than anything for something to do. I stayed staring at myself in the mirror for a long time. I could look at my reflection for five minutes, no problem. Or longer. I could do it for the entire duration of an episode of Adventure Time, or for the time it took my mom to cook dinner. Though she was an especially speedy cook. She called herself a “preparer,” actually, as if cook was too lofty a word, but what she made was always very tasty.

When I looked in the mirror for a long time I felt like I was tilting, as if off the ledge of a cliff, into my own face. My disgust for myself sharpened. My cheeks were smattered with soft, pink, pus-filled bumps, my nose was unwieldy, my right eye was smaller than the left. Squintily, scarily smaller. It offset the symmetry of my whole face. It made me want to spit at me. But after a while I softened. My face separated into segments. A swath of forehead like a vast dry plain. Eyebrows rough and fine as a deerskin coat. The tip of my nose was like a target and my features circled up around it. I thought this kind of looking was probably weird, unusually self-absorbed, but I wasn’t sure because I was too embarrassed to ask anyone, not even Flora, if they did the same thing.

When I came back into the room, Erykah Badu was singing I’m an orange moon/I’m an orange moon and Flora and Becca were kissing. Becca’s arms were around Flora’s waist and Flora’s hands cupped Becca’s cheeks with movie-boy tenderness.

“Hi,” I said, finally.

Becca pulled her hands back so suddenly it was like they were on a quick-release spring. Flora left her arm flopped against Becca’s shoulder. She smiled at me. “Hi,” she said.

Maybe she thought I hadn’t seen. Because I had responded so calmly. And I did feel calm. Which maybe you’re surprised to hear, considering everything you now understand, but I really did feel utterly, scarily serene.

I considered that Flora had wanted me to see. That that was probably the whole reason she had invited me to come chill at Becca’s. She’d probably jumped at the opportunity when I went to the bathroom and waited intentionally until I came back to pull away. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to tell me, but at least it was better than imagining the kiss had nothing to do with me at all.

“Wanna come back on the bed?” she asked.

I sat down.

I wanted something to focus on, so I closed my eyes. I went inside the music. Time stretched out that way. Every lyric was its own house. Some were strange gothic mansions, eerie and cobwebbed. Other were airy glass rooms by the sea, or A-Frames in snowy forests. It was very zen.

I said, “People always think, because I’m kinda quiet, that I’m thinking something really deep and profound. But actually I’m not. Actually most of the time when I’m sitting there silently I’m not thinking of anything. It’s amazing to me, actually. Like there will literally not be a single thought inside my brain. It’ll just be a complete blank.”

Neither Flora or Becca said anything, and I wondered whether I had really said that out loud; it seemed too brave a thing to have done.

When I got home, Mom asked if I had eaten already, and I said yes. I guess that was the start. I sat at the counter while she reheated leftover pasta and dressed a salad and then I watched her eat. I was really hungry—I hadn’t eaten since lunch—but I didn’t say anything.

I asked Mom about her day and she told me all about it. She was pleased, I could tell, by my questions. She had stories about her client, the ancient Henrietta, who had grown convinced that someone came in the night to exchange all her things for worse versions of themselves. All day, Mom told me, she insisted that she could detect no difference in Henrietta’s glasses, or in the mattress, or the teapot.

If I had known what I was going to do, I think I wouldn’t have done it. Because I would have known how much pain it would cause Mom—or at least known a little. But I was fifteen. I was powerless to look outside myself.

So began my sickness.

Not eating was easy enough at school. I had people to sit with in the cafeteria, but nobody who would miss me if I wasn’t there. Carlton had an open campus so at lunchtime I took to taking walks past the athletic fields and into town, along Main Street, up the hill past the cemetery, back along the railroad tracks. It took 45 minutes exactly, and when I got back to school I had to rush purposefully to biology. It was fall and the leaves piled brightly on the sidewalks and crunched under my sneakers. I wore Converse high tops every day. Everyone did.

It was less easy being hungry. Hunger had a persistence that I envied. I walked at lunch because I knew the hunger would catch up to me if I stayed still. Keeping ahead of it was a resistance of superhuman proportions. I really felt like I was finally reaching my full potential. I was hungry, but there was a satisfaction to not satiating myself that was better than food was.

Flora didn’t reach out for two days after that afternoon at Becca’s. When she did, I ignored her. It wasn’t that I was mad. I was calm as I had been in the moment after the kiss. I just didn’t want to talk to her.

At home it was harder to starve myself unnoticed. I tried wandering at night, too, so that I could say I’d already eaten when I got home, but it got so suddenly, terribly cold when it got dark, and the cold cut right through me. It didn’t seem to matter how warmly I dressed. It was that time of year. After a couple evenings of this, I told Mom I wasn’t feeling well and went to bed before dinner.

The next night, she made me chicken soup, and glared while I sipped the cup of broth as if I was just doing all this to be difficult. I wouldn’t eat the chicken. The gooey fat of it repulsed me. I decided if I ever started eating again, I would be vegetarian. The hunger was much worse after drinking the broth. My body, which had been on its way to a state of catatonic peace, remembered nourishment.

“You’re not eating enough,” Mom said.

“I’m sick,” I spat back.

“Well if you’re so sick, you’re not allowed to go to school.”

“Okay,” I said. That was fine with me.

I don’t know how those days passed. I stayed in my room and did nothing. I listened to music. I understood music better when I was starving. I thought about calling Flora to relay this to her, but I didn’t. I was light enough to float along the music, and it was rich enough to fill me. I thought of nothing. When a thought came along, I banished it. I pictured a white, infinite light. I imagined that I was breathing the light in, and breathing out what was cloudy and gray inside me.

Mom tried to be understanding. “I know there are a lot of pressures, when you’re a girl—especially when you’ve just started at a new school— to look a certain way,” she said. “And especially to be skinny. And you feel—even if you don’t realize right now that you feel this way—that it’s important to have control over something, and food can be one of the things that y0u try to control. But you are skinny, Natalia. And it’s what’s inside that counts.”

Which I thought was pretty ironic, considering that Mom had been on some diet or another for pretty much my entire life. If she wasn’t counting points or cutting out carbs, she was doling out unsolicited tips for how to stay slim: drink your coffee black, never eat after 8pm. When we had dessert, or went out for dinner, she would make up for it, she always said, by working out the next day. But I didn’t say any of that. I said, “You don’t understand me at all.”

At some point during my fast, there was a knock at the door that wasn’t Mom’s. “Nat,” Flora said, “Nat, it’s me.”

“Who?” I asked, as if I wouldn’t have recognized her voice from a coma, or on Mars.

“Flora.” She sounded hurt. “Will you let me in?”

There wasn’t a lock on my bedroom door—none of the rooms in our apartment had locks—and Flora knew it. After a minute, she turned the knob and appeared in the doorway. She looked good. She wore a huge pair of work pants that she had belted around her tiny waist and a choker made of seashells.

“How did you get in?” I asked, narrowing my eyes like a heroine in a superhero movie.

“Your mom opened the door for me.” Obviously.

She took out a bag of sour candies and plopped them on the bed next to me, then, more gingerly, sat down there too.

“She told me you haven’t been feeling good,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“She says you haven’t been eating or going to school and that you’re being a real jerk.”

“Thanks, mom.”

“She didn’t actually call you a jerk. But it was implied.” Flora smiled. I didn’t. She said, “Nat, I know this is stupid, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with this, but I just wanted to say, just in case it like—I just wanted to say it’s not a big deal what’s happening with Becca. It’s not like we’re in love or something. Not even close.

It’s like, it’s fun. I like hanging out with her, and I like the music we listen to, and I like that we don’t really talk. And yeah, I like kissing her. It’s funny how fast time passes when you’re kissing. I used to think it was something you just did and then it was over, like when your parents kiss you goodnight, but actually it can go on for hours. Isn’t that weird?

See I’m not trying to keep anything from you. I’m really not. I’m sorry if you felt like I was. I thought it was nice when we all hung out together.”

I let out a little laugh at that.

“I really don’t want it to be weird with us, Nat. You’re my best friend.”

“Did my mom like beg you to come over?” I asked.

She bit her lip. I didn’t like looking at her face. It was such a strange and angular face.
I thought it could have been interesting to punch her but I just didn’t have the energy. Also I had never punched anyone before. “I called and texted you like so many times,” she said.

“Well you’re right,” I said.

“What?”

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“Okay?”

“You’re so full of yourself,” I said. “You think whatever I do, it has to be about you. Like I don’t have my own life. I don’t give a shit about you and Becca. I don’t care if you hang out with her every afternoon. I don’t care if you guys cut school so that you can spend the whole day kissing.”

“Okay,” Flora said.

After her visit, I decided to stop talking. It just seemed right. I had this little whiteboard that mom had gotten me when she made me go to the Boys & Girls Club for math tutoring in the seventh grade. Flora had done worse than me in math class, but her mom didn’t think she needed to be good. If there was anything I wanted to say, I wrote it down on the little whiteboard. Of course all this meant that I said very little. That whenever I contributed something it had to really be on purpose.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Mom asked. She was angry at me now, I could tell. I shook my head. Dying might have been convenient, but killing myself would have been too willful. The scariest thing about my sickness was that I didn’t want anything. The most feeling I could muster was a vague interest in what would happen if I kept it up. What would it be like to die? What would it be like to live? When long stretches of day or night went by without Mom coming to check on me, I wondered if I was still real. Don’t perceive me, I thought at her when she did come in.

I kept drinking water. I guess there was something inside me saying it wanted to stay alive. A person can survive for up to two months without food but only three days without water.

First it was the white plaster dots on my stuccoed ceiling. They seemed to be crawling around after each other like mad inchworms. I watched in fascination from my bed. Then it was the sunlight that filtered through the slats in my shades, which rotated like a magnificent sun kaleidoscope against the opposite wall. Which was covered with a collage of magazine pictures Flora and I had pasted up about a million years ago. The moon in the telescopic moon image seemed to pulse, and Zac Efron smiled and pouted and smiled and pouted, and the great white whale in the cutout from National Geographic sliced into the green water with a profusion of foam. Was this really the room I had lived in nearly my entire life? There was so much to look at.

There was even more behind my lids when I closed my eyes. There was a darkness that vibrated like the core of a planet. There was a flock of geese flapping skywards and becoming clouds. The clouds formed one huge, heavenly trickster’s grin. I wondered if this was what it was like to dream. I had never dreamed before. Flora used to roll her eyes at this idea. “Everybody dreams,” she’d say, “You just don’t remember yours.”

Next thing I remember I was in the hospital. In retrospect, it’s sort of surprising this took so long. Either Mom didn’t realize the extent of what was going on or else she was trying to protect me from the fucked-up-ness of hospitalization. Or, I thought later, was trying to protect herself from any accusations, like by the state, that she was failing to parent her own child.

I remember a needle deep inside the vein of my right arm and a huge, blue-black bruise around it. Liquid traveled steadily from a half-filled pouch, through a plastic tube and into the vein, which plumped up greedily with it. It was strange to see liquid moving through me, though I suppose it always was. I slept fitfully. Sometimes Mom was beside me when I woke; sometimes it was night and strangely, mechanically peaceful.

“Are you so angry with me?” I asked Mom at least once upon waking. She hadn’t brought my whiteboard along to the hospital.

She shook her head very slowly. But I could tell that she was.

Once I was well-nourished enough that I was in no imminent physical danger, I was transferred from that first hospital of the body to Macon, a hospital of the mind. Macon was the most terrible place I’ve ever been, to this day, though it’s true that downtown Las Vegas and the welfare office in Kingston come in as close seconds.

Some of the kids had been in and out of these places for years, and everyone thought Macon was among the worst. Those who’d spent time in private rehabs spoke longingly of the old Victorians-cum-residential facilities with their healthy food, outdoor space, and adequate staffing. There were so many things Macon could have done to make the physical space less depressing. They could have painted the walls or laid out rugs. The only room that wasn’t bright white with sticky linoleum floors was the chapel, where people went to fuck, since it wasn’t as supervised as everywhere else. The tiny double rooms were like jail cells. The showers were matted with hair and every toilet seat always seemed to be splattered with blood.

We all wore cotton scrubs and shoes without shoelaces. At each meal, we lined up for pills, which came in paper cups, and slung them back with gulps of orange juice. The pills sent us into strange stupors. Or maybe time just moved slower there.

Everyone was a lot more fucked up than me. They were all so raw. They did all sorts of drugs and had all kinds of sex and competed over whose habits were unhealthiest. I’d never smoked weed, or really gotten drunk, or kissed anyone on the lips. I felt like the opposite of them. I was as tightly wound as a ball of rubber bands.

I made one sort-of friend, a boy named John who couldn’t unclench his fist. That was his whole problem. Something about this was hilarious to me, and he agreed, and that was how we formed, if not a friendship, an alliance. It didn’t matter if he was sleeping or medicated or hypnotized or if someone tickled him or if he was carrying something with one arm and it would have been convenient to open a door with the other. His hand had been fine, and then one day he had gotten very angry, and had punched his bedroom wall, and that had been over a month ago, and it didn’t hurt anymore but he still wasn’t able to unclench the fist. He said it was like the orders from his brain just couldn’t make it to his arm. In group, one girl, Miranda, rolled her eyes at him. We weren’t allowed to chew gum but she gave off the impression of chewing gum whenever she talked, even though she wasn’t. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” she said, “Maybe you should go see a hand doctor.”

John was really excited. He was like, “Oh shit, I never thought of that, that is such a good fucking idea,” and he was allowed to make some phone calls, and then he got released, and I never heard from him again.

I guess I felt the same as Miranda, in that it seemed obvious to me what everybody else’s problem was. Miranda needed to get out of her abusive relationship. Archie needed to stop exercising. Sammy needed to slow down and chill for a goddamn second. I wondered if everybody else could see what was wrong with me.

Was it about being in love with Flora? Was my jealousy at seeing her kiss Becca Lucas something I would literally die over? It seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it? It seems absurd. It seems like the real story has to be somewhere else. And yet. Don’t you remember the crushes of adolescence?

Or was it about my mom’s anger, which seethed inside her, and for good reason, but which she repressed so unforgivingly that when it shot out, I shrank into myself? Was it possible that her anger could wound me so badly when I also knew she loved me more than anyone else in the world?

Or was it about my father, who I would learn had been abusive to her, then years later, would learn he was schizophrenic, and years after that, that the abuse only came during episodes of psychosis? Each new detail required a full narrative revision. Was this something I had inherited from him, and if so, was it genes or was it trauma? I tried to remember anything about him. I stretched my mind, I did acrobatics for whatever smidge of memory—mundane or loving or horrifying—might be lodged there. I invented the shade of his eyes, the tone of his voice, the shape of his figure. But my mother had left him when I was an infant, and he’d long stopped trying to get in touch. I couldn’t find any memory of him at all.

Or maybe I was worked up about being a lesbian. Was I a lesbian? Was I even bothered by the idea that I was?

Or was the problem more existential, that I didn’t know who I was? Or if I was? Or if I was, what I was? The doctors and the other kids at the hospital seemed much less satisfied with that explanation. “Figuring out your identity is the normal, essential process of adolescence,” one doctor told me, which I guess was supposed to help.

Being in that awful place finally made me want something: it made me want to get out. I wanted to wear my forest green Converse laced all the way up with their bright white laces. I wanted to finally tear that embarrassing collage off my bedroom wall. I wanted to watch anime and sit on our tiny balcony and eat the sour candies Flora had brought, which I’d stowed under my bed.

I was a model patient. I didn’t know how to be anything else. Like I said, I’d always worked hard at school. I’m sure that if I ever end up in prison, I’ll be a model inmate as well.

Eventually, I got out, and things went pretty much back to normal. Except I kept taking meds, and Mom was in some sort of therapy program, and she stopped exploding so much, and when she did, she seemed afraid, as if the explosion had happened outside of her and she was blinking in its smoke. And I stopped seeing Flora. When I got back from the hospital, she’d left a banana bread for me. She had gotten into baking at some point after I’d transferred to Carlton. She kept calling and texting for a long time. I didn’t respond. The idea of seeing her filled me with a burning sense of shame. Or I guess the idea of her seeing me.

Do I think that Flora might have been in love with me too? Well, quite possibly, yes. And if she was, I think she probably had come to terms with it better than I had. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that my disappearance might have been really hard for her, that it must have felt at least as inexplicable to her as it did to me, and that in the end (though it hadn’t felt this way to me) I had been the one to leave her.

Time passed. She stopped texting. Mom seemed relieved that we didn’t see each other anymore. She got a new job in Carlton and we moved out there, into one of the houses that I had passed on my lunchtime walks. I fell into a group of friends that she really approved of, though there was a lot she didn’t know. I finally smoked weed, got drunk, had my first kiss. My brain filled up. I liked school, honestly, even if it was a waste of my intelligence. Especially social studies, and biology.

*

The next time I saw Flora we were sophomores in college. We met at a coffee place in Scarborough that had opened up after Mom and I moved away. I tried on six outfits that morning before I found one that looked good and didn’t seem like it was trying too hard. Maybe Flora had done the same but she looked effortless, a hot butch sipping an Americano. We filled each other in on the factual details of the past couple years. It felt like a first date with someone from a dating app where the texting had been good but there was no real-life chemistry. We both sat with our arms folded over our chests. We were doing well, really well. Even when we reminisced, there was an edge to it, an unwillingness to give into softness.

“The day we died in the Scarborough Community Pool,” Flora said. “Do you remember?”

“I don’t know if I do,” I said, which at least was honest. “I’m not sure if I’m remembering a memory or a story.”

There was a sense of teetering. Teetering, but not jumping in.

“We have to do this again,” we agreed, when I left Flora at her new red Honda and headed towards the bus. I think we both knew that we wouldn’t.

During my sickness, I asked myself: Would the world be any different if I didn’t exist? Which made me try to disappear But I realize now it was the wrong question. Because of course the answer is, Not really. But I would be missing out on a lot. I mean, on everything.

The self, as I’ve come to think of it in the years since then, is an external thing. One that, I think, if it exists, exists between us, in the links of everything we are and ever have been to each other. And not just in our human relationships, also in our relationships with nature, and art, and every living thing—and everything is living, even rocks.

But I’m getting carried away. You should stop me when I get like this. Philosophizing. I’m no philosopher. I’m just a lowly employee of the Horticultural Society of New York.
I’m telling you all this because it might happen again. I figure if I was sick like that once, there’s no telling, really, whether it might one day come back. I don’t anticipate that it will, but I know that it’s in me. And as weird as it sounds, there’s something comforting to me about remembering that.

I have a good, simple life. On the weekends I like to go dancing, and during the week I wake up early to tend to the plants in the learning garden, where children come on field trips. I don’t pity the teachers. The children are always trying to sneak off. I don’t think I’d ever have one of my own (though who knows how much time is left for that anyway), not when I remember what my mom had to put up with with me. She’s doing OK. She was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a couple years ago, and has already outlived her prognosis by six months. Esophageal is one of the bad ones. Everybody dies from it. But maybe not my mom. She’s really a very determined woman. I don’t doubt that she could hold on a while longer and die from something entirely different. If I get sick again, it can’t be before that. I owe her at least that much.