How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

My mother thinks finding clothes in boxes on the side of the road is creative and fun and interesting and environmentally conscious (“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure!”) and not actually a by-product of our thin finances, but sometimes I wish I went to school dressed like any other girl, in leggings and a tee, maybe, with cute strappy sandals to highlight pink-polished toenails. Instead, I mostly look like a creature time forgot, dressed in old clothes that look like, well, old clothes.

Then, like I always do, I allow myself a minimum of three seconds to wonder: Who the hell is that? Where did she come from? Because the dark and straight hair is nothing like my mother’s short, light mop. My freckles look like scattered dirt next to her creamy, blemish-free face. So much of me is from The Person Who Shall Not Be Named. So much of me is unknown.

My empty stomach is blaring like a five-alarm fire, so I scrape some Life Savers from the bottom of my backpack. Maybe lint and dust have some calories and I can last until lunch.

Why does one stupid normal thing have to be so hard?

As soon as I take my seat in zero period, the texting starts, my phone buzzing insistently inside my backpack, starting a little war with the chaos happening in my unfed stomach. Those Life Savers weren’t very lifesaving after all. The noise alerts Lupe Hidalgo, much like the smell of tiny, frightened humans alerts sleeping giants in fairy tales.

Lupe Hidalgo is an eclipse. She slides over everything like a glamorous shadow, and even though you know it’s going to hurt, you look anyway. And I accidentally do. In an instant, my heart is in my shoes.

Lupe slides her glistening eyes up and down my body. Instinctively, I fold my arms across my chest. You never know when somebody, usually a guy, but sometimes a girl, is going to make a crack about your breasts. You have a beautiful body, Mom always says. Stop slumping. It’s easy enough for her to say. Her boobs are like tiny overturned teacups on her chest, delicate and refined.

Now, you might not be aware of the golden goddess of seventies music, the muse of a weird band called Fleetwood Mac, one of the strangest and most ethereal singers ever to float across a stage in six-inch heels, layers of velvet, and shimmers of lip gloss and fairy dust, but here in hot-as-hell Arizona, birthplace of our golden girl, we all know who Stevie is.

My face burns, an instant heat that I know everyone can see. I’m awful at not blushing or being embarrassed, or not showing that I’m furious or frustrated. Mom calls this “a passion for life,” but then again, my mother is the reason I’m being mocked at 7:25 a.m. in Room 29 at Eugene Field High School in Mesa Luna, Arizona.

Every day I go to school dressed like a miracle ticket hopeful from a Grateful Dead concert, and if you don’t know who that is, look it up, and you’ll see lots of confused people in tie-dyes and velvety skirts with bells at the hem trying to see a band made up largely of stoned dudes in dirty T-shirts and holey jeans who look like they haven’t washed their hair since the sixties, when they started this nonsense in the first

Kai Henderson is reading the Your World and You textbook like nobody’s business when I slide onto the rickety stool next to him in Biology. His “brow is knitted,” as they might say in one of the books we read last fall in Lit class. I learned a lot of cool words in that class, like provenance and skulduggery and mordant.

And when I say It, I mean IT. The thing you read about in books or see in movies. I always thought that it would involve something hokey like moonlight. Or fingers accidentally touching inside a popcorn bag in a crowded movie theater, buttery skin on buttery skin. I did not think it would happen in a Biology lab room that still stank of the cows’ eyeballs we’d dissected a few days before. Cows’ eyeballs are surprisingly springy and full of fluid, which spurts everywhere. In case you didn’t know.

But it did. Something happened when I met his eyes. Suddenly they were no longer just brown; they were instead a gemlike and transfixing shade of beyond brown with dazzling tints of mesmerizing yellow.

He said, “The heart’s really cool, isn’t it? Like this beautiful and weird engine,” and his breath had just a touch of mint toothpaste and he smiled this contented smile. Education is Kai’s happy place. His warm breath fluttered across my cheek, and for God’s sake, I suddenly wanted to taste it. I mean, I had serious thoughts about those lips, and my whole world detonated in the space of three seconds.

I don’t understand the body and how it works, at all, but right now I know my heart is like a giant, colorful bird, flying right out of my chest and into the world.

We have some books here that are so ancient they still have those little cards where the librarian hand-wrote the name of the person checking the book out and then ink-stamped the due date. The books even have slots to fit the cards, which I think is very cool. I like sliding the cards out and looking at the names and dates and thinking stuff like, Well, whoever Tammy Frimpong was, she really liked Island of the Blue Dolphins. She checked it out thirteen times in one year.

I’m not very smart at school, but I do like books, and reading, and maybe I get that from my mom, since she was a librarian before she had me. She was the special kind, though: an archivist, which is a person who figured out the history of things from old stuff found in boxes.

She worked six floors underground at a university in Albuquerque, fitting spare pieces into stories. “You might see just a postcard, a photo, and a matchbook from a bar,” she told me once. “But if I put those things together and do some research, I could find a love affair between famous writers, or political intrigue.” My mom was good at putting the stories of strangers together, even as she was refusing to tell me any details about hers. Like the identity of my dad: The Person Who Shall Not Be Named. The person I think about all the time.

If The Person Who Shall Not Be Named was shown a clip of “Confuse-A-Cat” or had to sit through George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue, would he laugh? Is a sense of humor a viable component of DNA? How about avocados and kiwis? One I like, the other I despise. These are the things that often consume me as I stroll the stacks at the library. That and kissing Kai Henderson, of course.

I don’t know what to do with my hands, I type. It’ll be okay, she answers. Just remember to breathe, and to relax, because kissing is a fun and essential part of your adolescent development.

It’s plush. You just fit, somehow. It’s warm, and you feel like you’re falling, but in a good way. Your body kind of figures things out for you. Don’t worry.

The late afternoon is my favorite time in Mesa Luna. It’s when the sky starts ever so gently changing its colors, shifting into the prettiest thing I think I’ll ever see in the world. Here, the world around me is messily alive. You haven’t seen a sky until you’ve seen our moon hanging at night. It’s how we got our name, in fact. A couple of miles out of town proper, there’s a flat mesa, and if you’re driving, or just out and about walking, on the right night, it looks like the moon is resting on the edge of the mesa, like a white plate on its rim on a table. Our big, white, beautiful moon hangs so low in the sky it’s like you could reach out and touch it.

I’ve never forgotten how free I felt, those moments I was lost in the air, before my board smacked down on plaster again. Before the very last time, when I landed and my arm shattered. Lightly, I tell Grunyon, “Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.”

His lips tasted like sugar from the cookies, which seemed perfect, and the way a first kiss, and all the kisses after, should taste. I’ve figured out where to put my hands, how to press against him slightly, how to breathe, all of it. I never want to open my eyes again or come up for air. I want to spend the whole summer kissing him.

There are things happening inside me that I don’t even have words for, and I usually have words for everything, even if I don’t say them out loud.

I turn away, touching my lips with my fingers. I can still feel the heat of his lips on mine. I feel like people do in old books, you know, like when the writer says, “She was stirred by his actions,” or some such thing. I feel stirred by Kai Henderson. Plush and Stirred.

The body on the table isn’t my mother, but he needs me to say it is. All of them do. And I hate them all for trying to make me say it. For wanting me to say it so they can move on, and save people who can be saved, while I can never move on, not now, and she will never, ever, ever be saved. My eyes water. My eyes turn into lakes of water, but still I don’t make a sound. I’m like that person on the bed in front of me: a machine, an automaton.

My mother smells good, like the oatmeal soap she uses in the shower. Like patchouli. Like the cinnamon she sprinkles in her morning coffee. This person is different. This person died alone and has bruises, and must have been so, so frightened at what was happening, and she was alone when it happened, and I would never, never, never, not in a million years, have left my mother to die alone. That’s the sort of thing a bad daughter would do.

I don’t understand what’s happening. Your mom can’t be alive one minute and then the next…not. Those things, I’m like those things you use to stoke a fire, what people used to use, those things with handles that kind of look like water bottles. Bellows. My chest heaves up and down, like a bellows. I want my mom to get up off that fucking table and hug me as hard as she can, even if it hurts me. She doesn’t.

I live with my mother, June, and it’s just us, and it isn’t perfect, but it’s ours, and I want to yell, You can’t have me, I belong to her! But her isn’t her anymore. My heart, it turns black. A cold, wet chill falls over my body. Everything, all the sounds in the hospital, the clicks and beeps and squeaky gurney wheels, get very echoey all of a sudden. “I’m drowning,” I say. The social worker doesn’t bat an eye, but Cake’s dad looks alarmed.

I am cold, I am hot, I am every possible feeling and temperature you can have at once. All I know about foster care is from movies and books, and it never ends well. They make you cook drugs and beat you and keep you in closets.

What time was I kissing Kai Henderson and what time, in that time, did my mother’s brain betray her, and me? A brain aneurysm. Sub-something, the doctor had said, but I couldn’t really hear, because my heart was exploding. The doctor had used words like rupture and instantaneous. My legs feel like cement, walking to the chairs. Will I always feel this way when I walk from now on, like something heavy?

I fit myself between two of the carts and cry. At first, I’m embarrassed, but after a little while, I realize that if anyone comes by, like a nurse or a doctor, they’ll think nothing of it. Hospitals are filled to the gills with teary people, after all. I’m not any different. I need my mother to come get me, to save me from the fact that my mother is dead. I start to laugh, because that’s terrible, and awful, and all my bones are shattering inside me and it feels like being stabbed from the inside out.

I’m a splitting atom, a human fissure, things I don’t even have names for leaking out. Shit I should have studied in school, but didn’t. I can’t feel my body, I can’t feel my heart, I’m rising out of myself, watching as I separate into the girl before and the girl after. “This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.” I’m whispering it, over and over and over, even as I know it is happening. Truly and definitely and terribly.

Everywhere you went, there she was, but she wasn’t, and it was too much, and so you went to the car, a tiny, tight space that seemed somehow better.

She’s in charge of your life now. A total stranger. Your stomach coils in knots. You try to walk, to move, maybe even to run, but to where? To whom? You can’t move. Is this how it will be? Will even lifting a leg require great effort, and cause so much pain, all at once?

The blue door to your house opens and your heart quickens; maybe it was a lie, a stupid bad dream, and your mother will appear, blinking in the harsh morning light, a hand shading her face. “Hey, you, what are you doing out here, talking to the doves? Come in and have breakfast, silly.” That’s a thing your mother would say. But it isn’t your mother who opens the blue door.

Your voice sounds muted. Girl-bug behind glass. Can Cake see you, trapped in there? Scratching your wings against the glass.

Your friend looks so frightened. You think she is a little afraid of you now. You think this might be the case. That you will scare people now.

Cake’s face is so scared. You push past her, into the small house, close your eyes as you pass by the couch, where you think it happened, open your eyes when you reach your bedroom. You know what you’re looking for and where it is. Your mother treated clothes she loved well. She never just threw them on the ground.

She sniffles, “I swear we’ll get through this.” You are silent. Whatever words you might have had left are drifting away. Inside the glass, the girl-bug drops her eyes. She’s tired now. “I love you,” Cake says. She’s crying hard. It kind of makes you angry, that she would cry. Like you should comfort her.

Her mother is driving somewhere in a nice silver car, with coffees in a cardboard tray, and warm muffins in a bag, and will arrive at any moment. And when your friend goes home tonight, and needs clean clothes, or someone to watch a movie with, someone to buy her the kind of underwear a sixteen-year-old girl would love to wear, someone to make her favorite food, which is homemade pizza with artichoke hearts and pineapple and garlic, that person will be there to do it.

I’m a file folder now, a case, someone’s job. My breath comes in hiccups. Cake whispers, “It’ll be okay.” “No, it won’t,” I tell her. We stare at each other. Cake drops her eyes. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I try to make sure to at least seem like I’m hugging Cake and her mom, but the truth is that I really have no strength. My arms feel like licorice whips, loose and floppy, and I’m empty inside.

The thought of eating now makes me remember that book about the little girl named Sal and her mother who went blueberry picking and ran into the bears on a hill. Every time Sal’s mother dropped a blueberry into her tin pail, it made a sound like kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk.

I used to love it when my mother would read that book to me. That’s what it would sound like right now, if I ate. Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk. Empty and hollow, because I’ve been carved out.

Cake and her mother leave. On the way out, Cake asks if they can stop for lunch somewhere and my heart aches; I want to go with them so much, and be normal again, and stop somewhere for salty fries and greasy burgers and sodas so cold and icy the outside of the cup sweats.

I’ve read those books in school, like Dickens, or whatever. Kids whose parents die and no one wants them. Bad things happen to them. They go to houses and the foster parents there are evil and beat them and starve them and make them rob and steal.

I never knew it was possible to cry this much, ever. “I told you last night at the hospital, I’ve never met him.” “That’s an awfully long time to keep a big secret like that. You were never curious? Never snooped around the house?”

Of course I’d asked my mom over the years about The Person Who Shall Not Be Named, but she always got squirrelly and shut down, and no kid wants to make their mom angry or sad, and she was all I had, so I just stopped asking.