Alton

By Kat W, Excerpt from Novel

Lizzie’s locker is plastered with stickers and old photos, about half of which are of our short-lived trio. In each one, Mary Ellen clutches Lizzie as if she’s the most precious gift, as if the sheen of her curls is some priceless element melted and woven into a person just as pure. She never holds me that way, despite my steadfastness in our own grades-spanning history, and it aches to see the fear I found withheld in Mary Ellen seep into the photo developer and tarnish the public product, even if it was never present in private. Instead, I hover by her side like an afterthought. I don’t begrudge Lizzie that unrestrained affection, and I never would, but there’s a mourning for the simplicity my friendships could have carried if I looked like her. I’ve loved Mary Ellen as a sister, so plainly as a sister, so why does the world watch me so closely?

Lizzie is piling in an armful of hefty-looking textbooks, far heftier than my share. When she spots me approaching, she pulls her head from inside. Her left cheek is pristine, pale cream, but her right is shrouded in shadow in the corner of her locker door.

“Let me see you,” I say, gesturing to her face. She reluctantly surrenders her locker door shield, but still conceals her cheek from me with her hand. I gently move it.

“Is it bad?” she asks.

“It’s not terrible,” I say. “Not at all. Still a little red, a little swollen, but it should be okay.”

She nods. “Thanks.”

A miniature handheld mirror catches the fluorescent lights of the hallway from inside her backpack, which has been rolled and stuffed above her mountain of textbooks and composition notebooks. She pockets it immediately, but I’ve seen what I needed to see.

“You’ve been checking up on it?” I gesture to the pocket now containing the mirror. “Some,” she says. “Not consistently.”

“Good. Keep doing that.”

I nearly offer to apply pressure to her cheek, to help myself to understand where specifically it hurts, but her photos catch my eye again, and I decide against it.

I’m not a mother, and I’m hardly a friend. The silence between us hangs as a guiding hand to where we stand with one another, the thoughts and questions of the past year left unsorted, only signaled to. I don’t have the strength nor the will to make sense of it all.

Regardless, I’ve done my duty. I came to check up on Lizzie, and she’s okay. She’s kept her composure, held the light in her eyes despite all that should have dimmed it, and I don’t think I’m quite proud, but an emotion like a cousin to pride rests itself beneath my ribs. Her jaw is still tender, but her neck is steeled with a resolve I didn’t know she possessed, let alone to this magnitude, and I’m impressed.

As soon as I spot it, she crumbles.

“Thank you for last night.”

Her eyes well up, and she begins to cry, loudly.

I knew I shouldn’t have expected too much. I should know by now I won’t receive any more than what makes a chore for me and a spectacle of me.