The day Shaila died, the cops took us all to the station. They handed out stale crackers and Styrofoam cups of sugary orange juice before asking a few softball questions. Then they called everyone’s parents to come pick them up. First Marla, then Henry and Quentin, and finally Robert. Nikki’s parents werein Singapore, so Mom said she could stay with us. She didn’t yell at us for lying about where we’d gone. We had promised we were staying at Nikki’s. Instead, she was silent in the car.
When we got home, Mom made grilled cheese sandwiches, demanded we shower, and split a Xanax in two, placing half in my palm and half in Nikki’s. “Call your mom, dear,” she said.
“They’re staying over there for another week,” Nikki said to me when she hung up. “Slumber party until then?” She smiled weakly. We were sitting on the couch in my living room side by side, stiff and awkward. We had never had a sleepover just the two of us. Shaila was always there. I hugged my arms around my stomach.
“I haven’t cried yet,” I said, and closed my eyes. But then everything came rushing back. The shut door. The bewildering darkness. The moment we realized we were all on our own.
Bile formed in my throat and before I could cover my mouth, my hands were coated in a sticky, green sludge. Tears finally formed in my eyes and I smelled like how I thought poison tasted.
“Shit, Jill.” Nikki went and got a roll of paper towels, dropped to her knees, and started wiping the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice thick.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were no longer sparkly and rimmed in pink eyeshadow, like they had been the night before. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
I turned away from her on the couch and wondered if we were allowed to grieve what we had lost, or if that right was only reserved for everyone else. Were we being punished for what we had done, too? We were complicit after all, weren’t we? Nikki must have wondered, too, because she shivered and curled up next to me. Her bare feet pressed up against mine so our bodiesformed the shape of a heart. We stayed that way all day.
Nikki was so different from Shaila, hard where Shay was soft, in her collarbones, her hips. She’d cower in fear at the times when Shay would laugh in hysterics, during horror movies and while she was stoned. But they had two similar traits. They were both stubborn and loyal like puppies.
Being with Nikki was like looking in a funhouse mirror where one minute she was me and the next she was Shaila, until she finally morphed back into her own self, no longer the Nikki I knew in the months before. It was jarring but tender, like a dog with only three legs. I was fascinated in a way that made me only want her presence more.
She was a constant presence in our house, and we got in the habit of sleeping like spoons, alternating at hourly intervals so that her knees were pressed into the backs of mine, and then mine would be against hers. I slept with my fists balled against her, and when we flipped, I could feel her little hands in the middle of my spine. Whoever woke first would retreat a few inches to her side of the bed until the other stirred and it was time to turn over and face each other.
In that first month without Shaila we spent the early mornings whispering while the summer fog rolled in, warm and weighty. We talked and talked until our voices grew hoarse, about how Nikki was desperate to apply to fashion school, which of Marla’s brothers was the hottest, and how to get the best possible tan by September. I traced the constellations on my skin, drawing imaginary lines from freckle to freckle until Nikki would say, “Do mine. Do mine.”
But there were unspoken things, too. I didn’t tell Nikki about the nightmares, how visions of Shaila haunted me more nights than not, or that I often woke in the middle of the night,sweaty and panting, a scream caught in my throat. And she never knew that I could hear her crying in the bathroom to her mom, begging Darlene to come home from whatever business trip she was on.
Neither one of us could admit that we were scared of forgetting Shaila. Sometimes we would start sentences with “remember how...” just to test our memories.
“Remember how she walked like she was on a mission? Or how she always farted when she sneezed? Remember how she she ate her pizza backwards, crust first?”
We were desperate to recall the details of her, but we were also desperate to move on. The forgetting was nice sometimes, because we started laughing again, too, first by accident at stupid reality TV shows, then on purpose, until our stomachs ached.
That was the odd summer, the black mark on our perfect records, the one three-month span we just had to push through so everything would be all right when it came time for college applications. Just get through this now, everyone said, and you will be fine.
And so, I had been given the summer off for the first time in my life. No science camp, no job tutoring middle schoolers, no girls in STEM program at the community college. At the advice of Headmaster Weingarten, Mom and Dad just let me be, and that is how I learned what boredom was, and how it mixed so devilishly with grief. Together, they became a thick, silky slime that was only remedied, it seemed, by vodka cut with splashes of flavored fizzy water, and joints as thick as my pinky finger, rolled by random Cartwright boys who claimed to have thedankestshit in the tristate area. What an enormous relief to realize that everyone else’s parents had also agreed to this non-treatment of trauma.
Together the six of us were quarantined to the beaches of Gold Coast. Only Henry had a job, being a stringer for theGold Coast Gazette. Instead we felt likenormalkids, riding bikes over rocky gravel and searching for horseshoe crabs stranded on the sand. We would beat this infectious disease, everyone decided, and by September we would return to Gold Coast Prep bright-eyed and ready to ace our AP classes. And even though we had suffered such a loss—What a tragedy! What a terrible, terrible horror!—this was all we needed. One summer of dicking around with no consequences and no stress.
Just get it out of your system, Nikki’s mom said to her when she finally returned from Singapore. Then we would be back on track and ready to grab the futures that dangled in front of us. All of us but Shaila.
Adam had been in London that summer, studying at the National Theatre with some Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright I’d never heard of, but he came home for a week before leaving for Brown. He said I was his first call when he touched down on American soil.
“Such bullshit,” he said. “Expecting you all to justget over it.”
I mumbled my agreement, but turned away. We were stretched side by side on the pebbly beach next to the Bay Bridge Lighthouse, where the coast makes a hard right angle before it retreats into the brush. The waves in front of us were more like gentle ripples and the water was so clear, you could see tiny fish from where we lay.
“Come on.” Adam stood and pulled his shirt off in one motion. Little rocks rained down. He held his hand out to me and I grabbed it with reluctance.
I peeled off my shorts and tank top, leaving no time to be self-conscious of the rumpled bikini I’d thrown on thatmorning—or to ogle his clearly defined six-pack. I staggered behind him to the water. Within seconds Adam was gone, sinking below the surface.
“Screw it,” I said out loud, and waded in, dunking my head completely.
The water was warm like a bath from the August sun, and for the first time since Shaila died, I was alone. It was exhilarating. I opened my mouth and screamed into the silence, letting moss and dirt and sediment flow in and out of my body. I imagined Shaila there with me, clenching my hands in hers and shaking her head back and forth, shrieking with rage and delight.
When I bobbed to the surface, Adam was already back on the beach, the sand around him damp and dark.
“Feel better?” he called out.
