“Sorry, I’m waiting on an email.”
She turns over her shoulder, craning a brow at me. “From who?”
“It’s a school thing,” I say. It’s not a complete lie. It’ll be coming from an email with .edu at the end.
“When is it supposed to come?”
I wrestle the lump in my throat back down to my gut, where it belongs, cementing me to my bed like a paperweight. “I’m not sure if it ever will.”
“Oh.” For an uncomfortably long moment, she searches for the right words, but finding none, lands on, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not any more than this, no.” I slap my thighs, hoping it reads as a hard return at the end of this conversation, then roll off the bed and toward the Wall of Fame. How does one begin tearing down twenty-one years of memories? Well, closer to fifteen, I suppose. Back in first grade, it was mostly coloring pages or bulletin-board crafts we made in school. I must’ve taken a lot of them down at some point, although I only seem to remember putting things on the wall, never taking them off. It’s proof that I’ve done this before. I can take things down. I can start over.
I begin with the small pieces—a theater ticket from a Broadway-in-Chicago production ofRent, then a Polaroid from one of my last softball games. I squint at the Murphy in the picture, sunburn creeping along the bridge of her nose, smiling the way you would if you didn’t know that sting in your shoulder was more than a pinched nerve, and a life-altering injury was waiting a few weeks down the line. I place the first two memories on the top of the Sterilite bin, not that I know what I’ll do with anyof them, just that I know I’m not ready to throw them away. I dig a nail under a curling edge of thehands off our bodiessticker that a younger version of me stuck directly to the wall, cringing as I peel off a circular layer of paint with it.
“Are we going to repaint?”
Mom’s eyes narrow. “Do weneedto repaint?”
“Probably?”
“Just get it all down,” she says, then dives back into the closet, tossing clothes over her shoulder like a girl getting ready in an early 2000s teen rom-com. My vest from Girl Scouts, patches still not sewn on. A nightgown that matched my American Girl doll that now would sooner fit the doll than me. A black-and-teal floral-print dress we got on clearance at Kohl’s for Kat’s Bat Mitzvah. Why didn’t we clean any of this out sooner? Or rather, why didn’tIclean any of this out sooner? I guess because I didn’t really have to.
“You can just donate all of that.” I gesture to the heap of clothes Mom has piled behind her. “I’m not wearing any of it, obviously.”
The emotions on Mom’s face pass through her so quickly, it’s as if I’m watching them sped up. Sad, then surprised, then relieved. “Sure thing,” Mom says finally, then moves it all to the donation pile, hangers and all. “We’re making good progress, Murph.”
“Yeah, not bad.” I pull a ticket stub off the wall for a matinee showing of one of the X-Men movies, and a whole slew of memories comes with it, figuratively and literally. It’s like peeling wallpaper—one movie ticket is taped to a photo is taped to a colored pencil drawing of Kat and me as Disney princesses.Trying to take just one thing down proves almost impossible. You tug a little and you get a lot. “When does this need to be done again?”
“Yesterday.”
“No, seriously. ’Cause I’m thinking I might do, like, another thirty minutes of work and then switch to studying.”
“Could I quiz you while you work?” Mom offers. “Chess is coming by to stage the house tomorrow morning at ten.”
I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to mental math my way into more available hours in the day. It’s almost three o’clock now, and I need a full eight hours of sleep before working a double tomorrow. According to my incredibly lackluster math skills, that’s not enough hours to get this all done.
“Murph?” Mom says. “Do you have flash cards or something?”
I shake my head. “Not yet. Just a study guide. I guess you could quiz me from that.”
Among the half-packed plastic bins and piles of junk destined for Goodwill, finding my backpack is a game of I Spy on expert mode. After shifting some things, the little red Fjällräven fox winks at me from under my newly cleared desk. I dig through my backpack, smoothing down the curled edges of the packet before handing it off to Mom. “Most of the answers should be right.”
She frowns. “How are you supposed to study with answers that might not be right?”
“I don’t know, Mom! How am I supposed to correct all my answers if I have to spend the whole day packing?”
She speaks to me in a calm, unaffected voice that brings myblood to a boil. “I told you, you don’t have to make decisions on all of it now.”
“I know, I know.” Inhale, exhale. I focus on the things I can control, like the way I arrange my memories within the Sterilite bin. “A little more warning just would’ve been nice. I could’ve gotten this all done on Thanksgiving or something. I could’ve planned around it.”
“I’m sorry, Murphy. This isn’t entirely in our control.”
“It could’ve been,” I grumble. “You didn’t have to randomly buy a condo and decide to move.”
Mom’s face puckers, and the ground suddenly feels like it’s shifting beneath my feet. “I’m sorry,” she says, her tone razor-sharp in the way that means whatever she’s going to say next she’s 100 percent not sorry about. “Do you think this was a spur-of-the-moment purchase? Do you think I’ve been keeping the house in ready-to-sell shape for the last four years just because I want to? That we looked through the house listings in Florida just for fun? We never planned on retiring in Geneva. But when you opted to do your first two years at community college, we adjusted our plan, because that’s what good parents do. They adjust and they make sacrifices for their kids. We worked around what you wanted.”
Her voice breaks in the middle of a word, and I watch her eyes plead with mine, only I don’t know what for. I hate seeing her like this. Vulnerable and hurt and human.
