Time sped by after I broke up with Tommy, zipping before my eyes in little more than a blur. Before I knew it, February had turned into summer, and Jackie had turned 18 and graduated from high school. I found it hard to believe that I would be 21 in a few short months, that Jackie would be going to college, and that truly nothing would ever go back to how it used to be. Mostly, I could barely fathom that it seemed as though we were finally starting to seem normal again.
Jackie did anything and everything to try to escape our neighborhood. Our house grew pitch dark by midnight, Dad snug in his bed, comforter pulled up tight below his chin to keep away the chill of the cool night air whipping in through his open window. He believed his daughters were doing the same. He didn’t see Jackie through the same eyes that I did; he believed that she could overcome her months of grief from her best friend Brian’s death in a night, and suddenly snap back into happiness, but I knew better. I saw the clouds in her eyes. I saw her changing.
I heard a creak down the hall, coming from Jackie’s bedroom. I knew she must have been opening her door. It was followed by a quick pitter-patter of feet and the jangling of the key she always wore on her belt loop. The footsteps trailed down the stairs, softening as they moved further from my bedroom, through the kitchen, and into the backyard. She was leaving the house.
When I looked out my bedroom window, I saw her long brown hair streaming behind her as she ran barefoot across the patio from our sliding glass doors. She climbed over our brown, rotting fence, and continued running, her hair twisting around itself. And she kept getting faster and faster, as if the cool, damp, summer-night air was giving her new life. My chest rose and fell hard, as if I was panting alongside her. When she was finally so far out of sight that I couldn’t spot her head bobbing out of the brush behind the houses on our street anymore, I swore I heard her laugh.
A couple of nights later, we sat on the front porch, our legs stretched out in front of us, and Jackie stared dreamily up at the sky, twisting the bottoms of the strands of her thick, wavy, dark hair between her fingers. She chewed on her bottom lip as if it was covered in a candy coating.
“Where do you go at night?” I asked her. I felt as if she should have known that I see her leave the house, that at almost twenty-one I found these behaviors strange. I was trying to grow up, as she’d been telling me to do for so long. It was hard to believe that for once I actually felt like I was falling into my role: the older sister.
“What d’you mean?” Her words blurred together, and she couldn’t stop smiling.
“After Dad goes to sleep,” I said, “I hear the door creak, and then watch you run out the back door. You go running somewhere past the fence. Where do you go? What do you do?”
“Come with me tonight, and I’ll show you,” she said. She looked away from the sky and at my face. She still had the dimples I remembered from when she was genuinely happy as a little girl. Her glassy blue eyes twinkled only when lights shined on them. They were hard to trust. Still, I agreed to go with her.
We went in the house shortly after that conversation, about the time our neighbors started turning off their porch lights and their dining room windows went dark. I laid in my bed with my comforter wrapped tightly around me, pulled all the way up to my neck, just like Dad, though I was still wearing my jeans and t-shirt. I watched as the seam around my door faded from a golden crease to black, then listened for my family’s voices to fade.
The moon highlighted the pale-yellow walls of my room, allowing me to see the sun bleached spots where I left posters and photographs hanging for far too long. I could remember who was in each and every one of them, the way they were posed, and what size clothes I was wearing. I tried to pinpoint which picture it would have been when I started layering them so that I could cover myself up.
Jackie tapped on my door four times in quick succession, quietly whispering my name near the crack. I glanced at the blue twelve that blinked repeatedly on my alarm clock and realized that I had no idea how long I’d been staring at the blocks of discoloration.
I threw my comforter off of me, letting it drape over the footboard of my bed, then ran to the door. I opened it quickly, and though it was only a few paces across my room, I felt I should be out of breath. My heart beat hard, rattling against my ribcage, making me feel jittery. Did I really want to go? Did I really want to know where she went?
Jackie stood with one hand perched on the door frame and the other resting on her hip. Her hair fell in a loose braid over one shoulder, and her bare feet barely peeked out the bottom of her long, loose jeans. She was still sucking on her bottom lip, and wearing that glassy-eyed smile from when we sat on the porch.
“You’re not going out in just that, are you?” Her eyes rolled up and down my body, drawing the goose bumps out of my arms and neck.
I tugged at the bottom of my shirt, and surveyed it, checking it for dirty spots. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “It’s not dirty or anything.”
Her chest bounced as she chuckled, silently. She was about to talk down to me, as if I was the younger sister. “No, dummy,” she said in a whisper, glancing over her shoulder at Dad’s bedroom door. “Bring a sweatshirt or something; it can get chilly out there. You haven’t got that much meat on your bones!”
I studied her outfit again and noticed that even though the bottom of a tank top hugged her waist and the top of her pants, she did have a long-sleeved top over her chest and arms. I grabbed the first hooded jacket out of my closet, and we left.
Just like I’d heard her do two nights before, we tiptoed quickly and quietly down the carpeted stairs and ran to the kitchen. She held her keys to her hip as our bodies bobbed, and when we finally made it to the sliding glass door, she flicked the lock with one finger, then tugged the handle to the door.
On the patio she wrapped her hand around mine, clumping my fingers together, and dragged me toward the fence. I didn’t even see whether or not the door closed all the way, and wondered how many times she’d started running without checking. Her bare feet hardly seemed to slap against the pavement compared to mine; it was as if they were made for this kind of thing, escaping.
Her braid flew back over her shoulder, and swung around behind her back, all the different tones of gold, red, and purple highlighted in the moonlight as they folded into different parts of the braid. The little tendrils that had already fallen out were wispy and wound around each other, and made her look like some kind of angel illuminated in the white, reflective glow. I was so transfixed by her that I almost forgot that we had a giant turtle sandbox in the yard from when we were kids, that we’d have to dodge branches of the willow tree, and that the lawn chairs would shimmer as they collected dew in the night.
She bent down on one knee as we got to the fence, making one of them into a step. “Use me as a boost.”
I stepped on her knee, wedging my hands between two of the upright slats of wood, and pulled myself up. My arms shook, rattling the boards that had almost entirely broken loose over the last several years. Just as I was straddling the fence, I saw Jackie hopping it. It really had been a long time since I’d done something like this, probably ten years. No wonder she looked happy. I coughed out a laugh as she reached a hand up to me; she beckoned me with the other.
Before I knew it, I was back on the ground, and my hand was interlocked with my little sister’s. We were racing through the dry, tall, grasses in the back of our house. Our footsteps turned into thumps, and the grass whispered as it brushed against our clothing, but everything else fell silent.
“Look behind you,” she said, “but don’t stop running.” When I turned around, all I could see was the top half of our house, the off-white siding, the gray roof, my bedroom window. A smile swept across my face. It wasn’t like I’d never left the neighborhood before; I had, plenty of times. This was my first time escaping it, though. Suddenly I understood what Jackie wanted, what she had been searching for. She didn’t want permission to leave. She wanted to get out to somewhere that she desired to be. She wanted to go somewhere without having to tell anyone where to find her.
We ran until the sky had a hazy lightness on the horizon, and I could feel a tightness in my chest from inhaling large gulps of cool air. Her hand was still interlaced with mine, and I could feel her heart pounding in her fingertips, but her hands weren’t clammy like I expected them to be.
We were running straight toward a light blue house with tufts of grass hugging all the parts of it where the paint was peeling. Clusters of people ranging from sixteen to Jackie’s age were standing outside in the grass, with that same dreamy daze that she had in her eyes before we left the house. They were all staring at the sky as if they were searching for flying saucers, their arms outstretched.
Jackie walked up to a boy with shaggy dark hair that hung into his light brown eyes, making them wet and red. He reminded me of Alex, but this wasn’t a boy from our neighborhood. Even though her hand was still in mine, she wrapped an arm around him and pulled him toward her, pressing her hips into his. They breathed each other in before she let go of my hand, and pressed their lips together. Even from five feet away I could smell stale cigarettes that he tried to mask with cologne all over his clothes.
She fluttered her eyes and her cheeks went red. Even in the moonlight, you could always see when Jackie blushed.
“Is there a thing going on in the garage tonight?” she asked. Her shoulders bounced as she spoke.
He looked at me as he nodded.
Jackie turned around, quickly, checking to see who was behind her, then smiled. “Oh, that’s my sister, Whitney. She’s cool. Don’t worry.”
She poked her thumbs through holes that were in the cuffs of her sleeves, and waved for me to follow behind her and this boy. She didn’t bother to tell me his name. She interlocked her fingers with his instead of mine, and wrapped her other hand around his forearm. I didn’t even know she had a boy she was interested in, or pretending to be.
We walked to the side door on the building, and the boy she was hanging off of opened it. Scratches framed the doorknob and its keyhole, tearing off lacquer and paint. Fog hung from the ceiling and rested on her friends’ shoulders. It was really the first time I ever saw her engaged with anyone that I didn’t know.
Even if it was only for a second, she gripped the arm of every person that was in between the doorway and the corner of this garage that we’d entered. Music played so loud that I was sure that none of them could hear a single word she said to them, or the other way around.
When we snaked through all of the people in the room and finally made it to the corner, she bent down to the person who was sitting at the table there, and said something in their ear, her body wiggling back and forth, almost dancing.
The girl had a thin, hooded jacket on that that was lined with fur, and she looked over at me and grinned. Her puffy pink lips shimmered, and her eyelids were heavy and happy.
Jackie dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out some crumpled money, sliding it gently over to the girl at the table. She patted the chair next to her, and Jackie sat down. She waved the boy who came in with us away, and pulled the braid over her shoulder, twisting its ends between her fingers, before rolling her head toward the table and the girl, suggesting that I step forward.
She picked up a pair of plastic-handled scissors that were sitting in front of a party-sized bag of colorful straws. She walked the silver blades across the table, and I watched Jackie’s lips move in slow motion as she asked the fuzzy-hooded girl a question. The strobe light in the middle of the room made everything move in slow-motion.
The girl said something back, and Jackie shrugged her shoulders and nodded. I saw her mouth the words “like normal,” as she pulled a blue bendy-straw out of the bag, and cut two straight tubes of equal length out of the longer part.
The Beatles’ song “We Can Work It Out” started playing, and I realized it was the first time I ever heard it with a strobe light on. As the music slowed down, the people around me seemed to gel and stretch, moving in ways that only seemed to happen in fun-house mirrors.
I stopped glancing around the room and focused on Jackie; she grinned at the fluffy-hooded girl. That girl pulled a big plastic baggy of blue pills out of her jacket pocket, and dangled it in front of my little sister’s face. Jackie’s eyes grew wide and, even in this darkened room with only the pulsing glow of the strobe light illuminating it, I could swear that her pupils dilated as she nodded again.
The girl dumped two pills out of the baggy and into Jackie’s hand, then handed her a Calculus textbook and a garden rock.
Jackie piled all of it on the table before sliding her driver’s license out of the pocket of her jeans. She cozied the two pills up against each other, then set the license directly on top of them. Next, she pounded the rock down on the ID’s back until it was practically flat against the book. A halo of blue dust cascaded out around it.
She lifted the license up and swiped her finger down the side. Her smiling face with bright, light blue eyes, sat in between two thick sheets of spiral curls, her cheeks full and rosy, were now coated a light blue dust. It seemed so permanent. I wondered how many times she’d used her license to do this. The way her teeth dug into her lower lip made it seem as though it was the only way she could keep drool from pouring down her chin.
The fluffy-hooded girl pocketed the twenty while Jackie prodded the pile of powder with her pointer finger; she was checking it for lumps and clumps and hard spots.
And once she was satisfied, she took the slim end of her license and started breaking the powder up into lines, 4 of them. That was at the same time that the fluffy-hooded girl popped two pills out of the bag and under her tongue, sucking her saliva so hard I could see every vein as it bulged in her throat.
She pocketed the baggy again, and Jackie held out one of the pre-cut pieces of straw in my direction, wiping her license against her tongue with her free hand. Once it was clean, she shoved it deep in her pocket, so hard the skin on her stomach showed for just a second.
I took it in my hand as I leaned forward, pressing my lips to her ear and said, “I don’t know how to do this. Sure, I’ve smoked weed, but I don’t know what to do with this kind of shit.”
I pulled away from Jackie then, getting a full picture of her. Her face was bunched up as she studied me, as if she didn’t know me. Her eyes were squinty and small, mouth turned to the side, nose wrinkled, eyebrows huddled together; it was as though she’d chewed on something bitter and sour.
She grabbed my left forearm, her hand wrapping all the way around it, and pulled me close to her. My ear was so close to her lips that I could feel bits of spit spraying into it and my hair, collecting like sea-foam.
“It’s not that hard. We can work it out together.” She giggled as her words “we can work it out” lined up with the music.
She put the straw in her left nostril and motioned for me to mimic her. She pulled me in again, then said, “This will get it to the brain quickest.” She pressed a finger over her right nostril, flattening it and sealing it shut, and balanced the straw with her other hand. Then, in a sweep, she inhaled and dragged the straw over the line all at the same time.
She pulled the straw from her nose and I could see little bits of blue powder clinging just inside the rim. She was smiling, though, and I supposed that was what was most important.
She stood up. “Now you go,” she told me.
It wasn’t long before I was sure that I could feel the dust sticking to the sides of my nostrils, and I started to feel sick. I told Jackie I was done, that I didn’t want anymore, and she sucked up the last two lines.
Still, this dust was magic. It made the music dance in my ears. It made my body sway in ways that I didn’t know it could. It made me feel that the way my hips and shoulders kept time with the music was natural and beautiful. All the people around me had half-opened eyes and smiles that told me they could feel the same mysticism in the air around them. Everything around me was sweet: sweat, the thick, skunky air, the way the sticky bodies clung when they bumped up against me. We were all one.
Again, I understood Jackie.
And I wanted to try one of these magic pills the way that the fuzzy-hooded girl had had one. I saw her again; she had on glow-in the dark nail polish. Trails of neon yellow flew behind her hands every time she moved them, and her hips swayed as if she was rising out of a basket for a snake charmer. I wanted to be something that alluring, that crowd gathering.
It was the first time I felt as though it was okay to be outgoing with people, that it was okay to let my body move in the ways that it wanted to, naturally. It was the first time I didn’t feel as though I needed to wrap my arms around my stomach and hide my body. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not there was skin peeking out from underneath my shirt. I didn’t need to worry about if my clothes rolled up and wrapped the wrong way around my skin, if they were sticking to me. I just felt happy being me.
I gripped the ponytail holder I had wrapped around the messy bun sitting atop my head. I shook my head violently as I let it fall around my face, and started to jump up and down, rubbing my hands through my hair.
The songs played on a loop, and it wasn’t until that Beatles song played its second time that I thought about Jackie again. My forehead became sticky with beads of sweat from all of the moving, the dancing, and letting the music run through my veins. Even though I tried to pull my hair up in a ponytail, I could feel wisps of it sticking to my forehead, cheeks, and neck.
I twirled around, expecting to see Jackie, still sitting at the table where I last saw her, with a straw in one hand, blue dust sprinkled above the inside rim of her nostrils.
No one was there. And when I looked at the people around me, none of them looked familiar.
I didn’t see the tall smoky scented boy with the dark shaggy hair.
I didn’t see the fluffy-hooded girl with the glow-in-the-dark nails.
I didn’t see my sister.
My heart banged against my sternum, and the sweat rolled from my jaw down my neck, running along the sticky hairs, pooling in the hollows of my clavicles.
I breathed hard, pushing my way through the teenage boys pressed against the teenage girls. My hands stuck against their sweaty skin. I felt trapped. I just wanted to get across the room, back to that side door we came inside through. The strobe light was hurting my eyes.
When I opened the door, the ground was cold and wet, covered in dew. My feet were bare, and it felt good to let the moisture soak in between my toes. I fell to my knees to place my hands in the grass and run my fingers through it.
The moon was still out, and so were the stars. The light pink glow of twilight was swelling over the horizon, and that was where I found Jackie. She was spinning out in a field, her head tilted back, arms stretched out on either side, hair pulled out of the braid and swirling wildly around her.
Tears streamed down her face, but she was smiling. All of her teeth were shining white in the moonlight. And her eyes were sealed tight. And she was taking breaths so deep that her chest heaved. She kept going and going, and none of the other people outside noticed that she was the only one twirling. They all kept staring up at the sky.
They didn’t take their eyes off it, till she finally stopped, her legs wobbling, knees crumpling underneath her, and she fell onto her back, arms splayed out wide on either side of her.
“Jackie!” I couldn’t help screaming as I stood up and ran over to her.
Her cheeks shined pale in the moonlight, and she was still smiling. I swatted the side of her cheek with my open hand; panic set in.
Her eyes opened in a small slant; I could barely see the ring of light blue around the large disc of black. Her thick, curly eyelashes fluttered, and a rush of pink filled her cheeks.
“Have you seen things my way?” she asked me. Her voice sounded weak, as if she’d spun for so long and so many hours that she’d worn her body ragged enough to belong in a hospital.
I fell back from my knees and sat next to her, tucking my feet under my knees and folding my hands in my lap. I searched the field around the house we were at, studying all of the people who’d stopped caring about Jackie the second they saw me get to her. None of them would have checked to make sure she woke up. None of them cared that she fell.
My eyes landed back on her face and I finally answered, “I’m not sure.”
She opened her eyes wide, staring straight up; she picked one spot in the sky to focus on, maybe one star. She slid her hands across the grass before folding them underneath her head.
“Did you stop hating everything for just one second? Did you kind of forget what made you that way to begin with?” It was as though she wasn’t even talking to me, like maybe she was talking to the sky instead. She smiled, and bit her lower lip. Thinking this way must have been what made it taste so sweet.
“When I was inside dancing,” I said, “I felt that way for a little bit. Everything felt pretty. It might have been a few seconds, or a few minutes. Either way, it was fast, but it happened, and it almost seemed like magic.”
She blinked hard, and all the wetness that had been collecting on her lower eyelids rolled down her cheeks. She turned her head to face me. When she opened her eyes again, they were the clearest I’d seen them in a long time, even if they were obviously inebriated.
“I only ever feel like dancing when I get out of the neighborhood. I only ever see anything as pretty when I escape. I don’t even need the pills to do that. It just makes it easier to forget that I have to go back.”
I chewed the insides of my cheeks, realizing that every time she’d talked about how badly she wanted to leave, we’d all shot it down, telling her she wasn’t ready. We’d told her she needed more time at home to heal. I never considered that escaping might be the best medicine for her.
My throat grew tight, recognizing that if she left, I’d be left there alone; all of our friends had moved on, and she was all I really had left there. I didn’t even have Tommy anymore. Still, I couldn’t hold her back. She’d find a way to escape some way or another.
By the time Jackie said she was ready to head back home, a thick layer of fog had settled just over the grass, shining a bright white in the lowering moonlight. Our clothes had dampened and clung to our skin from sitting in the grass for so long.
She pulled the bottom of her shirt down, gripping the fabric just over the fresh grass stains, layering it over the top of her jeans. She said, “Ready?”
I nodded my head.
Her shimmery eyes–with still giant pupils–stayed focused on me. She smiled every few seconds until she started walking toward the road. It was as if she’d forgotten all of these people we’d spent the night with, the ones who were supposed to be her friends.
I knew we could get home the way she was walking, but it was a way longer route than we’d taken to get here.
The fog folded around the trees and around her body. The further she got away from me, the more she seemed to float.
“Why are we going this way?” I asked. I tripped over my feet, trying keep up with her steady gait. She stayed silent and kept facing forward, looking at the street sign for the main road.
She had to be going this way for a reason.
She breathed hard and heavy, sucking air in through her nose before she turned. “I just want some fresh air,” she said. Her voice was quiet and gentle, like it ached to force the words out.
For the first time, this main road was quiet, quiet enough to hear my sister’s breath, the chirping of morning birds, the hem of her jeans dragging against the sidewalk, and the pads of our feet slapping the concrete. I was used to this four-lane road humming with traffic. Darkness spread through the fog over the black asphalt road, dimming it, turning it gray. It created a barrier between our misty path, dotted with trees, and across the road.
Jackie’s pace slowed. She dragged her thumb up and down over the teeth of her house-key, dangling from the side belt-loop on her pants. She scooted closer and closer to the road until her feet were off the sidewalk. She tottled through the patch of grass, her upper body tipping back and forth above the fog, rocking the way a small child does.
I hadn’t realized how close we got to home until I spotted where her eyes were glued: her gaze was focused across the street on the tall, iron gates of the cemetery and a giant, green, stone angel sitting over her best friend Brian’s grave. It surprised me every time I realized he was buried only two blocks from our house, just across the road.
I stopped in my tracks, my mouth opening and closing as I tried to force words to come out.
She peeked over her shoulder, catching my eyes on her.
“You satisfied now?” she asked.
“Huh?” I glanced away fast, up at the streetlights, trees, fences, anything to look away from her.
“Now that you’ve seen where I go, are you happy?”
She turned her whole body and planted her feet in the grass. Her hands rested on her hips. Her eyes were wet.
“Well, are you?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were safe.” I stumbled over my words.
She crossed her arms. “Did you get what you were looking for? Am I safe?” Her cheeks blushed, rushing pink against her pale, glowing skin.
I nodded at her, recognizing that, again, she was making me feel as though I was the younger sister.
“Then why the fuck are you still here? Why can’t you go home? You know how to get home from here. Why do you need to wait and walk slowly? Why do you need to walk with me?”
Her arms flew up, moving all around her, sending wisps of the fog into the air surrounding her in trails, dissipating as it climbed higher.
“I thought you wanted company.”
“You’re not the company I want. You’re not what I need, Whitney.” She bounced back and forth from foot to foot. She hugged herself, then turned, glancing over her shoulder at the angel behind the gate. Her hands slid up and down along her sides, rubbing as if she were trying to soothe an ache. When she turned back to face me, she was chewing on her lower lip again. “I need to talk to my friend,” she said.
The coolness of the fog ran up my body, licking the back of my neck. I ran my hand over the loose hairs that had fallen into my face, pulling them back, then nodded at her.
She smiled. Her lips were closed, and she looked sad. But she smiled.
She ran across the street. Her hair whipped around in the wind, twirling around itself. Her arms stretched out on either side of her, fingers splayed wide apart. And for a second, I expected to hear her laugh.
On the other side of the road, she pressed her head against the iron gates, reaching her arm through and rubbing her fingers against the wing of the angel.
She tilted her head back, facing up toward the sky. She spoke, but her words were muffled, whispers, only a hum from this far away. She laughed. She smiled. She gripped the bars with both hands, leaned back, and swung back and forth. Then, she got close again, pressing her forehead to them and touched the wing. She watched the sky the whole time.
The glow of the moon kept fading, and the color of the sky rotated into its purples and oranges.
She ran back over as the sun peaked over the trees we’d walked past only a little while earlier.
We walked back toward the house in silence, passing all our neighbors two-story houses that looked just like ours. Jackie stayed several paces ahead of me, staring straight at our front door. It wasn’t until we got to the end of our driveway that I stopped her.
“So was that party all a lie?”
“No.”
“You do that every night?” I grabbed her arm, just above the elbow, turning her around to face me.
She smiled. “No, only on the nights that I really need to hear Brian talk back.”
“What about talking to him? Do you do that every night?”
“Always.”
I wanted to ask her what he said to her, what she said to him. But I had a feeling I knew. That need to leave never existed until he was gone. Sometimes, I even think I’m hearing him, telling me to get out before I end up just like him, too. And after that night, I didn’t worry when I heard her door creak in the middle of the night, or her feet pitter-patter past my door, at least I knew where she was. At least I knew who she was going to spend that time with.
Aimee Stahlberg is a MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. She is a tutor in the Fiction Writing Department at CCC and a teaching artist with Storycatchers Theatre where she leads the writing portion of Teens Together.