All the Bright Places

Someone
needs to look after Mom
, she said.
49

---

Suddenly I’m hungry, and the two of us pass the bag back and forth, back
and forth. I say, “I thought you liked having time off from school.” I love her
enough to pretend along with her that this is the other reason she stayed home,
that it had nothing to do with her cheating high school boyfriend, the same
one she’d planned her future around.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not quite as ‘time off’ as I expected.
I’m thinking about going to Denver, maybe seeing what’s to see out there.”
“Like Logan?” Better known as the cheating high school boyfriend.
“This has nothing to do with him.”
“I hope not.”
I want to repeat the things I’ve been telling her for months: 
You’re better
than him. You’ve already wasted too much time on that asshole
. But her jaw
has gone rigid and she is frowning into the chips bag. “It beats living at
home.”
I can’t argue with her there, so instead I ask, “Do you remember Eleanor
Markey?”
“Sure. She was in my class. Why?”
“She’s got a sister.” I met her on the bell tower when we were both thinking
about jumping. We could have held hands and leaped off together. They
would have thought we were star-crossed lovers. They’d write songs about us.
We’d be legends.
Kate shrugs. “Eleanor was okay. A little full of herself. She could be fun. I
didn’t know her all that well. I don’t remember her sister.” She finishes the
wine from Mom’s glass and grabs the car keys. “Later.”
Upstairs, I bypass Split Enz, Depeche Mode, and the Talking Heads for
Johnny Cash. I throw 
At Folsom Prison
onto the turntable, fish through my
desk for a cigarette, and tell ’80s Finch to get over it. After all, I created him,
and I can take him away. As I light the cigarette, though, I can suddenly
picture my lungs turning as black as a newly paved road, and I think of what I
said to my dad earlier: 
There are different ways to die. There’s jumping off a
roof and there’s slowly poisoning yourself with the flesh of another every
single day
.
No animals died to make this cigarette, but for once I don’t like the way it
makes me feel, like I’m being polluted, like I’m being poisoned. I stub it out
and, before I can change my mind, break all the others in half. Then I cut the
halves with scissors and sweep them into the trash, sign onto the computer,
and start typing.