How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

My mom is calling everyone she can, trying to get you to stay with us.” “I can’t,” I say matter-of-factly. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone. Well, the state, I guess.” I don’t even really understand what that means.

I kind of picture a piece of paper with my name on it in big black block letters being passed around by a bunch of serious-looking people and finally somebody stamps the paper Orphan, slides the paper in a drawer, and closes the drawer.

My feet are like lead. My feet are like bricks. My feet are like cement blocks dragging along the floor. I can feel everyone’s eyes on my back. What do they think about my weird dress? What will they say later about the crazy girl who wore a dirty, wrinkled, bloodstained old dress to her mother’s viewing?

Maybe I’ll turn into one of those mad girls from the Gothic novels I devoured all last, hot summer, the fan above my bed in my room whirring the hours away. I spent hours in a T-shirt and underwear, reading, my mother napping on the couch in the front room.

she would nap, and I would read and read, the storms and dark weather in the books cooling me off.

Those girls wandered cliffs in heavy dresses and moaned a lot. Their faces flushed scarlet when the man they loved was near. They turned ghostly when love was ripped from them.

Do they wipe out the plain pine casket after, or vacuum it or something, and save it for the next person with no money? Do they burn the box, too?

There are just too many details involved in dying. And the after. Maybe both. My head is spinning. It’s strange to see her again, and scary, because she’s really, really gone. It’s not a joke, or a nightmare, or a bad dream. There’s no portal. It’s all right here.

I don’t know why I’m going outside, except that teenagers are chemically drawn to other teenagers, and when another one appears, we’re compelled to huddle together, like a pack of angsty and acned lemmings.

Kids at The Pit smoke pot, and do other things during their parties, but not me. Mom always said that sort of stuff is no good, and that it turns you into a different person, and if you do those things long enough, pretty soon you’ll get too far away from who you used to be, and it’ll be hard to find your way back. To tell the truth, that’s always kind of scared me. Not being able to find my way back to something.

I lower myself onto the jelly. It’s nice to lean back, and to breathe, and look up at the stars, which I feel like we always forget to do, you know? Even me, on my bed in my old room in my old house, scrolling my phone or reading a book about characters who look at the sky, instead of actually going out and looking at the sky myself.

“That sucks about your mom.” I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the sharp knife that runs down my spine when people say they are sorry. Or that it sucks. I’m sorry to hear about your mom. I must have heard that a thousand times today.

“Are your parents alive?” I ask. I’m not sure exactly how this foster thing works. We can’t all be orphans. Maybe some of us were abandoned?

Fourteenth home. I guess I’m going to meet a lot of kids like Thaddeus from now on, kids stitched together with unmatched thread, trying their best not to fray.

I want to ask why his little sister is there and he’s here, and what the deal is with his zombie mom and zombie stepdad, but I don’t. I feel heavy enough right now, and a little selfish with my own pain, and I’m also kind of afraid of what the answer might be.

I look up at the sky. How many stars are there, anyway? It seems impossible to comprehend all those tiny flares of heat and light. It’s too complicated to think about, so I close my eyes.

I think of the favorite way she liked to fall asleep, when the two of us shared a bed: back against back, “like bookends,” she said. Our spines pressed together, warm and firm. I always fell asleep right away when the two of us did that.

There’s some shuffling, and then Cake starts playing a variation of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” If you haven’t heard that piece played on solo violin, then I urge you to head over to YouTube right now and start listening, because it’s beautiful, and sad, and then happy, and perfect in its own confusing way.

You know what best friends do? They know what you need without you having to ask, so when Cake finishes, she just starts again. And I listen to her play that piece over and over, the music an ocean that washes the bleakness away and rocks me to sleep, far, far away from the black hole.

“People mourn in their own ways,

“It means she’s the saddest in her heart that she’s ever been in her life, now that her mom is dead,” Thaddeus answers. We read a Charles Dickens novel in class once and the mourning women wore heavy black dresses made of something called bombazine. They wore those dresses for two years, until the sad period was over. But that was mostly for husbands, I think.

I don’t know how long they wore the bombazine dresses if their mothers died, or their children. Maybe years. And back then, people were always dying, one after the other, kerplink, kerplunk, because everything was dirty and hard, so maybe some women lived their whole lives in heavy black clothes, grief turning into a permanent kind of perfume.

Sometimes Kai and I would share earbuds in the school library, sitting on the carpeted floor between the stacks, and that was nice, the way our heads were so close, like the music went through his body into mine.

I can barely remember what he and I used to listen to together, now. I guess it doesn’t really matter. I probably would have listened to trees being cut down if it meant I could be that close to Kai Henderson.

She takes a breath. “It could be a disappointment, too, Tiger, and you need to prepare yourself for that. But if it’s disappointing, it doesn’t have to be devastating, does that make sense?

Life has this, life has that, and then something else comes along again, like a wave. We ride the waves. You go down, you go up, you go down, sometimes you just drift.”

Thaddeus kneels down in front of Leonard. “Be strong, buddy. You remember what we talked about? The bad stuff?” Leonard whispers, “All superheroes were sad kids. The sadness made them strong and then they rose up and helped people.” “You’ll rise up, Len. You’ll find your power. We’ll see each other again, I just know it. Brothers always find each other, right?”

Leonard sniffles and nods. He keeps his eyes on his shoes. Frayed, plain sneakers. I hope someday Leonard has millions of sneakers that are brand spanking new, so clean they squeak. LaLa hugs him, but he’s gone stiff; there’s a flatness to his eyes. Thaddeus ruffles his hair.

And then they’re gone. Thaddeus’s shoulders sag. He walks away quickly, to his bedroom. In a few minutes, he turns his music on, loud. “What the fuck.” I try to catch my breath. “They just…come like that?” “Language,” LaLa says, sitting down on the couch and stroking Sarah’s hair.

“It is what it is. Kids are moved around, sometimes with no rhyme or reason. They’re great kids, but they also have great big issues that can’t be resolved in a week or a month, and it’s hard to find families who are in it for the long haul. Leonard’s going to some people who have experience with his issues, and can help him, much more than I can.”