Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

by Margo Rabb

Dyna flew home. Her mom died eight days later. The night Dyna returned to school, I woke up in the dark in our dorm room and she was crying. Her shadow shook above her narrow bed, across the room from mine. I sat beside her and held her. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell her, Everything will be okay and It will get better, but the moment Nana had died, I’d lost my whole life. I knew it sounded melodramatic. Don’t be a drama queen. No hysterics, my dad would say. But after Nana died, the person I used to be disappeared. And when Dyna left Thornton, it had unearthed the old grief again. I wanted to go back in time, to find some portal where I could be the girl again who’d sat on our back porch after school reading Anne of Green Gables while eating warm biscuits on a green polka-dot plate. Back then, in my old life, I stacked stones to make a hospital for ladybugs with injured wings. I took my stuffed hedgehogs for walks in the doll stroller, making sure each got a fair turn. I hid in our old redbud tree and observed the world. The girl who’d done those things was gone now, and I wasn’t sure who’d taken her place. Nobody had told me that it would feel so painful to think of Nana that I’d have to snap those feelings shut inside me like closing a book, or how my mind would focus instead on the things I’d lost that I hadn’t even realized were mine—every corner of our little purple house, its windows with their white wood panes and windowsills deep enough to hold stuffe...