Kelsey’s mouth, which had opened to tell her, closed. She didn’t know Peter’s last name. The person who knew his last name was now nothing more than disintegrating dust and molecules, sitting in a tin can.
All she could do was shake her head.
“You don’t know it,” the woman said. She wasn’t being mean. It was just the truth.
“Nope,” Kelsey said shortly.
The woman took her hands away from the keyboard, and they hovered for a second, not knowing what to do.
Kelsey pictured herself from the woman’s view: a morose teenage girl in Victoria’s Secret sweatpants, refusing to take off her sunglasses, asking her to search the entire army database for a boy named Peter.
A laugh escaped the woman, but she wasn’t mocking Kelsey. She could tell by the way her eyes wrinkled when she laughed. It was just funny, that’s all.
“Pretty ridiculous, right?” Kelsey stood up. “The whole thing is just goddamn ridiculous.”
The woman stood with her. “I’d help you if I could.”
Kelsey turned. “I’m gonna go now.”
“Just a minute,” the woman said. Kelsey paused in the door. “Eat something, all right? You look like you need to eat something.”
Kelsey nodded. Something was rising in her throat that she had to push down. She sped home with the radio turned all the way up, not really hearing the music. The brown tint of her sunglasses made everything look like an old-fashioned movie.
When she came in the front door, her father was standing in the middle of the circle of sad adults. They were all holding hands like a bunch of preschoolers. Tears were running down her dad’s face, through his beard. Though the room was completely silent, no one had noticed she’d come in. Or that she’d left, for that matter.
Kelsey’s eyeballs felt on fire.
She ran up the stairs as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t un-hear her father’s voice. “This is part of a poem I’ve memorized. It helps me. If you’d like, you can repeat it after me. Okay. ‘As there is muscle in darkness’…”
A chorus of voices. “As there is muscle in darkness.”
Michelle’s room stayed dark, even during the day.
“‘There is cowardice to holding on.’”
“There is cowardice to holding on.”
He continued, “‘A cottonwood flare’…”
They echoed, these strangers. “‘A cottonwood flare’…”
Kelsey kicked open the door to her room. She could still hear their voices. There were cottonwoods lining her street, lining the highway where her sister veered off the road, lining every street in Kansas.
“‘A hand to straighten her collar’…”
She slid open the screen to her porch. Her and Michelle’s porch. She kicked over the potted trees that were meant to be a barrier, cursing them.
“‘A bravery in good-bye’…”
She collapsed on Michelle’s side, putting her cheek to the wooden slats still splattered with the outlines of paintings, her palms pressing where the two of them stood not long ago.
By this time, Kelsey was crying. Her sobs shook every muscle in her body. Every new breath could not come fast enough, and with each exhale, she said her sister’s name.
Not out loud, but speaking it with every ounce of her being. She was putting it into the air, and realizing, then, that each time she said the name was another time Michelle would never hear it. Each time Kelsey said it, a little more of Michelle was gone, and she would never come back.
CHAPTER SIX
It was basketball season. Kelsey had to make changes in the Lions Dance Team halftime routines in order to accommodate the wooden court. Their newest dance was to a mash-up of a popular indie song and its hip-hop counterpart: a lot of shifts in speed and general tone. Sexy but innovative. Tight formations with subtle movements, all in sync. With ten minutes left in practice, they still hadn’t gotten the timing of the final cancan line. Kelsey and Gillian paced in front of their team, chests heaving, their red practice shorts soaked in sweat. Ingrid, who could never seem to get in shape, was practically purple in the face.
“I’m not mad at you guys,” Kelsey announced. “Just totally focused. I promise you, if we do it again, it will be perfect for Friday.”
“And it has to be perfect,” Gillian added, tightening her sleek black ponytail.
“This could be the one we use for competition, ladies. Okay, Ruben?” Kelsey lifted a hand to the scraggly junior who was in charge of sound. “One more time. Cue it to 2:57.”
Kelsey stopped in front of Hannah T. “Hannah, try your part a beat faster. Cool?”
“But won’t that throw everyone off?”
“Try it.”
Kelsey took her place in the center with a bowed head, hands extended. This portion of the routine required total concentration. She would begin by completing a backflip into a split, and move directly from there to the standing line.
The music started and Kelsey was lost in her body, exactly how she liked it.
It had been six weeks since she returned to school. People had finally stopped randomly touching her on the arm, looking for signs of watery eyes or suicidal tendencies.
The backflip was smooth, though it could have used a little more bounce.
It had taken her several weekends home drinking sugar-free Red Bull to catch up on her missed schoolwork, but Davis had helped her fill out useless biology worksheets and copy and paste Spanish essays into Google Translate.
The splits were seamless.
The University of Kansas Rock Chalk Dancers weren’t holding tryouts until May, but Kelsey had memorized their requirements: quadruple pirouettes, fouetté turns, leaps (right, left, center), turning discs, kicks, fight song. She would learn the jazz combo online, which would be posted two weeks prior. She would also be taught a short hip-hop combo at tryouts.
Kelsey pulled her legs together into a stand, and when the wave of legs came her way, she kicked straight, high, head up with a smile, like she had always been taught.
Hannah T., toward the end of the line, hit her mark. A full bow by all of them at once, then the finish: arms up and crossed with one another at a perfect diagonal. They had nailed it.
The Lions Dance Team burst into triumphant shrieks and high fives. Friday was the first home game, versus Blue Valley North. They were so ready.
Kelsey gave her girls a thumbs-up, told them what time they should show up at the locker room, and went straight to the bleachers to find her stuff. She didn’t like to linger. Lingering meant memories, and she didn’t like those. She had to keep moving.
Gillian and Ingrid caught up with her.
“Whatcha doing now, Kels?” Ingrid asked, awkwardly poking her in the bare stomach.
“Oh, my God,” Gillian said, staring at her phone. “Check out this guy who friended me on Facebook. He is so cute. Let’s go stalk him.”
Ingrid grabbed her duffel bag. “Let’s go get frozen yogurt and stalk Gillian’s boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Gillian replied.
“FroYo, Kels?”
“I can’t,” Kelsey said automatically.
“Why not?” Gillian said, furrowing her brow.
“I have to—” But Kelsey didn’t really have anything to do. She had hurried through all her homework in free period, and probably wasn’t going to study for her finals that much, anyway. “I have shit to do.”
Ingrid grabbed Kelsey’s wrist. “Can you let us be friends with you? For once? It’s been a long time.”
Gillian caught Ingrid’s eye and shook her head, as if to say, Let her be. “Text us if you feel like it, okay?”