I showed Olive an inappropriate movie that I’d found in my mom’s room and she sat still on the pleather couch, her hair fanned out over the head cushions.
My older sister, Destiny, was on a formless sack of polystyrene beads next to us.
“Actually,” Olive said, two minutes after I’d asked her if she was okay, “can we stop?”
“Oh, yeah” I said.
“It’s okay,” Olive said. “I just don’t think that I’m allowed to watch things like this.”
“We’re home alone.”
Our middle school was named after a local man who’d petitioned, ninety years ago, for children to remain in school until they were at least sixteen, which was controversial, because our town had been a rural area, and most kids would drop out to work on their families’ farms. We were in seventh grade.
“But you still don’t want to watch it, right?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I walked over to the DVD machine to eject the disk and place it in its plastic cover, staring again at the woman it depicted. Her bare legs covered almost everything.
–
I wrote a note to Olive apologizing for my mistake the next week and fed it into one of the slits of her locker at school. She had been slowly funneling her energy away from me—not really talking or looking at me in class.
For a week, I doubted that the two-digit number on Olive’s locker matched the number I remembered putting the note into. There was no evidential video or picture. My motor control was not perfect either—I could have misaimed, embarrassingly positioning my hand in front of a different, nearby locker.
On the backside of the note, there was a haiku I’d written in English.
Is there any way
to take the hourglass in
my hands and flip it?
–
I’d wake up to mine and Destiny’s bedroom engulfed in an otherworldly shadow—I couldn’t see Destiny, but I could hear her low, boyish voice from across the room, where her bed was.
“Eli.”
She would call out her boyfriend’s name from a tent-like area she’d created by propping up her sheets with her kneecaps, and keep me awake for hours.
I searched her things for proof of sex in the morning. I pulled her dresser drawers open and peered into her collection of bootcut jeans and weird, graphic t-shirts. There was nothing new, not until I examined the books stacked on the shelf of her nightstand.
Destiny read manga—comic books where people were drawn in Japanese cartoon-style and yelled, melodramatically, in speech bubbles. I picked the books one-by-one and flipped the pages. Two of them exclusively portrayed lewd images of naked girls.
–
“What’s this about a ‘personality stone’?” the school psychologist asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I had started bringing sea glass to class in a small, satin bag that tightened to a close with navy drawstrings. I kept the bag in the interior of my desk (where I could fidget with it), and when boys asked me what I was keeping in the bag, I told them that those were my ‘personality stones.’ I’d bought the glass and its bag from a gift shop one summer, when Destiny and I stayed with my mom in a rental house by the shore.
“This one is for my intelligence. This one means that I am witty, and this one means that I’m shy,” I said, recalling common traits from personality tests I’d taken online.
“Can you change them?”
“Avia’s a witch!”
The psychologist sent out a blast email to the parents in the district that all ‘spiritual objects or relics’ would not be tolerated, regardless of whatever religion or belief they belonged to. When my mom got the email, the notification physically rattled her cellphone from the inside out. She looked down to read it and, later, told Destiny and I at the dinner table that she would probably talk to the principal the next day, while we picked at chicken patties and green beans.
“Do you think she’ll actually go to the school?” I asked Destiny from behind her while she sat at our home computer.
“No,” she said, insouciant, “do you actually think that?”
“I just wanted to know what you thought.”
–
I tore a hole in the music room’s acoustic wall-padding and stuffed the bag of sea glass inside, pushing it downward into the itchy, fibrous hole.
–
“I can’t hang out with you anymore, Avia,” Olive said. We were standing in the outdoor courtyard, watching other kids play wall-ball and listening to the sounds of tennis fabric meeting brick and skin, alternatively. She had never acknowledged my note.
“My mom says that you’re holding me back from meeting new people,” Olive continued.
After I nodded and said ‘okay,’ Olive walked away from me forever.
I stood alone—leaning against the brick wall, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my jeans—and started to imagine what my boyfriend, if I ever had one, might say to me.
“How do you feel?” He’d ask.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how you feel?”
“No, I’m sorry,” I’d say.
Then he’d turn around and walk back into the school, probably, through those glass doors over there.