Mouse felt her way to the toilet. By the grace of God, the lid was already up. She didn’t have to risk making noise by lifting it.
Mouse pulled her pants down to her knees. She set herself so slowly on the toilet seat that it made her thighs burn. Mouse tried to control her urine, to let it seep out slowly and inaudibly. But she’d been holding it for so long. She couldn’t control the way it came out. And so instead, once the floodgates were open, the urine came rushing out of her in a way that was turbulent and loud. Mouse was sure everyone on the whole block might’ve heard it, but especially Fake Mom, who was right across the hall in her father’s bed.
Mouse’s heart started to race. Her hands got all sweaty. Her knees trembled so that, when she was done on the toilet and pulling her pants back up to her bony hips, it made it hard to stand. Her own legs wobbled like the desk legs when she tried to climb over it to avoid the hot lava spewing into her bedroom. They shook beneath her, threatening to break.
With her bladder emptied and her pants pulled up, Mouse stood there in the bathroom for a long while with the lights turned off. She didn’t bother washing her hands. But she wanted to make sure the sound of her pee hadn’t woken Fake Mom before she left the bathroom. Because if Fake Mom was in the hall, then she would see Mouse.
Mouse counted to three hundred in her head. Then she counted another three hundred.
Only then did she leave. But Mouse didn’t flush the toilet for fear of the noise it would make. She left everything inside the toilet bowl where it was, urine, toilet paper and all.
She opened the bathroom door. She skated back out into the hallway, grateful to find the bedroom door on the other side of the hall still closed tight.
In the kitchen, Mouse helped herself to a few Salerno Butter Cookies from the cabinet, and a glass of milk from the fridge. She rinsed her glass and set it in the dish rack to dry. She gathered her cookie crumbs in her hand and threw them in the trash. Because Fake Mom had also said,You pick up after yourself when I’m here, you little rodent, and Mouse wanted to do as she was told. She did it all in silence.
Mouse climbed the steps.
But on the way up, her nose began to tickle.
Poor Mouse had tried so hard to be quiet, to not make any noise. But a sneeze is a reflex, one of those things that happens all on its own. Like breathing and rainbows and full moons. Once it began, there was no stopping it, though Mouse tried. Oh, how Mouse tried. There, on the stairs, she cupped her hands around her nose. She pinched the bridge of her nose. She pushed her tongue all the way up to the roof of her mouth and held her breath and begged God to make it stop. Anything she could think of to stop that sneeze from coming.
But still the sneeze came.
SADIE
The space is typical for a cemetery. I drive along the narrow graveled path and park my car at the chapel. I open the car door as a gust of wind rushes in to greet me. I climb out and walk across the graded land, sliding between headstones and full-grown trees.
The plot where Alice is buried has yet to be covered with grass. It’s a fresh grave, filled in with dirt and scattered with snow. There is no headstone, not until the land settles and it can be installed. For now, Alice is identifiable only by a section and lot number.
Imogen sits on her knees on the snowy earth. She hears my footsteps approaching and turns. When she looks at me, I can see that she’s been crying. The black eyeliner she so painstakingly applies is smeared across her cheeks. Her eyes are red, swollen. Her lower lip trembles. She bites on it to make it stop. She doesn’t want me to see her vulnerable side.
She looks suddenly younger than her sixteen years. But also damaged and angry.
“Took you fucking long enough,” she says. Truth be told, there was a moment on the way here that I thought about not coming at all. I put in a call to Will to let him know about the photos Imogen sent to me, but again the call went unanswered. I was headed back to the ferry when my conscience got the better of me and I knew I had to come. The bottle of prescription pills remains closed, lying beside Imogen on the ground.
“What are you doing with those, Imogen?” I ask, and she shrugs nonchalantly.
“Figured they had to be good for something,” she says. “They didn’t do shit for Mom. But maybe they could help me.”
“How many did you take?” I ask.
“None yet,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe it. I move cautiously toward her, lean down and snatch the pills from the ground. I open the cap and look inside. There are pills still there. But how many there were to begin with, I don’t know.
It’s thirty degrees out at best. The wind blows through me. I raise my hood up over my head, plunge my hands into my pockets.
“You’ll catch your death out here, Imogen,” I say, a poor word choice given the circumstance.
Imogen doesn’t wear a coat. She doesn’t wear a hat or gloves. Her nose is a brilliant red. Snot drips from the tip of it, running down to her upper lip, where, as I watch, she licks it away with a tongue, reminding me that she is a child. Her cheeks are frosty patches of pink.
“I couldn’t be so lucky,” she says.
“You don’t mean that,” I say, but she does. She believes she would be better off dead.
“The school called,” I tell her. “They said you’re truant again.”
She rolls her eyes. “No shit.”
“What are you doing here, Imogen?” I ask, though the answer is mostly clear. “You’re supposed to be at school.”
