we grew up together: postcards for parents and cigarettes for fireplaces we were best friends.
year twelve //september//|||| “welcome back, boys and girls.” knees together. shoulders back. chins up. welcome back, she means, to the routine of eight am target practice, courtesy of the handbook. they get to dolly first “immaculate as always, dolores. how is your father?” then hermia “i see you failed to purchase proper burgundy over the summer” i hold my breath “mary dear, my how you’ve grown” and let it out as they move onto “good heavens, alice, put on some clothes.” she rolls her eyes.
in the bathroom i tie my shoes to a soundtrack of gagging and spray perfume down the toilet when she’s finished.
she locks our pinkies like we’re back in year nine don’t tell dolly
//october//|||| the lower the sun sets the more we’re in dolly’s room
she brews coffee in her contraband *** -- she won’t smoke with us, but coffee is worth breaking rules for -- and tucks us into her bed to tell us fairytales
yet somehow, it always ends up being hers
she talks about him like prince charming like he doesn’t have a face of zits and a weird haircut like she can see a future in him
alice gags under the covers this time not out of self-hate but disgust and dolly laughs like a grown up you’ll understand one day.
she does a little spin into her bathroom to fix her makeup; “seeing him later” and alice whispers “if she weren’t dolly i’d swear she was on the hard stuff” i find myself trying to remember what it’s like to be so happy i could pass a drug test.
//november//||| we’re smoking by the pier when it happens with some sad boys hermia seduced for cigarettes
she smokes the prettiest and we’re convinced she doesn’t swallow but a cigarette is a cigarette
alice always smokes like its her last and i guess the boys like the way she lights theirs for them
i’m not much of a smoker but a boy from alice’s algebra class -- math for future ivy dropouts, as she likes to call it -- lights one for me anyway and tells me his name but both are forgotten within minutes
partially due to my adhd [diagnosed by alice] and partially due to the security guard that rounds the corner algebra snuffs our cigs and alice’s clan snuffs theirs, but hermia isn’t so lucky after a streaking incident last year she’s been convinced they’re out to get her and i guess she was right. we offer her the coffee *** as a goodbye present but she pierces our ears instead -- what she promised to do for christmas -- and tells us where she hid her lighter.
//december//||| it’s just alice and i over break since dolly has family that actually comes home for holidays
i get a card from my parents and alice doesn’t get anything but when we walk into town she treats herself to some hair dye after all, it’s a five-fingered sale
my heart doesn’t beat in my chest when we pass the security cameras but i find myself wishing it did wishing i remembered guilt
an hour later alice rinses the dye out and emerges from the shower the stretch marks on her legs reminding me why i let myself go numb
//january//||| it’s new years and we’re in somebody’s dorm room watching fireworks on tv
everyone’s paired up; dolly with her prince alice with the same dude hermia slept with, rubber in his pockets and me with the sad boy from the pier laying in the dark
he smells like the boy i lost it to and i want to be sick but when he kisses me at 12 i let him
some ******* pulls out a sparkler i hear the fire alarm then suddenly we’re drenched and screaming, wet rats in the street
they call roll no dolly no prince
we wait for her in her room alice falls asleep until she comes in sobbing a mess of it was perfect until the fire alarm went off and they’re shipping me out tomorrow and, the quietest he says there’s no point in long distance.
//february//|| there’s snow up to the windowpanes and everybody’s depressed alice stays in my room and they let her knowing she has a history when it comes to february’s
i.e. if they make her get out of bed she’ll call her father
nobody has to know that she lost her phone in the snow last week or that even if she hadn’t he hasn’t picked up in months.
she likes to talk to boys instead when she’s lucid she brushes her hair and opens the window and hollers back at them when they whistle
nobody has to know she’s wearing her pajamas.
//march//|| when the sun comes out, so does she “i’m going for a walk” she says, in her pajamas she borrows my phone to make a call
but that’s the morning and soon it’s noon and i wonder how long one phone call could possibly take?
when she isn’t back by dark the school’s 911 call only takes a second.
//april//| they find her body at the bottom of the lake.
//may//| “and what legacy have you given back to the academy?” i put on my graduation cap and wonder if the cigarettes the sparklers and ***** in the bathrooms aren’t quite enough.