of a circle of senior girls
talking with confidence
about weekends and parties and classes.
I shifted my weight
from one leg to the other.
Tucked the short ends
of hair behind my ear.
“Great game last night, Twenty-four.”
“Uh-huh,” I said,
but I wasn’t really
paying attention.
I spotted Ariana.
Her thick and loose ponytail.
The yellow cardigan
that matched a pair of sneakers
I had in my closet.
I saw a girl who looked like me,
but wasn’t me.
I watched Ariana
duck around the corner
as soon as I caught her eye.
She saw me.
But it’s like here in high school
she didn’t even know me.
The senior girls were staring.
“That’s your sister?”
one of them said,
the blond one
people called “Busy”
and I never really knew
whether it was
a given name,
a nickname,
or a reputation.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Huh. I don’t recognize her,”
the one named Rory said.
The captain nudged her.
“She’s in our English class.”
“Really?”
“Isn’t she friends with that girl
from that band? You know, the band
that actually ended up making it,”
Busy said.
They all tilted their heads
peering into the vacated space
that Ariana once occupied,
then back at me.
Sometimes it’s like
Ariana disappeared
altogether.
I run into
my best friend, Kennedy,
without even trying.
I see half the team
every time I use the bathroom.
But I could go days on end
without seeing Ariana anywhere.
“But she’s so quiet,” said Rory.
I tilted my head and tried to see
Ariana the way her classmates saw her.
But I couldn’t.
She wasn’t a mystery, or a rumor,
or a quiet girl who sat in the back of class.
She was my sister, and that’s all I could see
in the vacated space.
A shadow once occupied by my sister.
Ariana
I glance down at the phone in my hand.
There’s a text from Row lighting up the screen.
What if she wants me to be sisterly and strong?
When Row scored the winning goal in the state finals,
Dad’s face literally glowed, like he was so happy and so proud
he didn’t know whether to cry or to scream.
Instead he reached out to me, to Maribel,
and pulled us in close. I wanted to feel happy
along with them, but the muscles that held my smile ached.
What would they say if they knew I was failing
because I couldn’t get my act together?
I lost track of time. I was supposed to
graduate and go on and be normal. Like Row.
I didn’t feel like anyone’s older sister. Not right now.
Maybe I could go to the art show. Get my passing grade.
Return home and then I would pull out the catalogs
of college choices. I would ask Row and Maribel for help.
We would sit down together
and pore over pictures
and no one would remember the day it snowed,
when I failed to leave a note, respond to a text.
When I disappeared for hours
because I was scared of them finding out
that I wasn’t well adjusted.
I wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t strong and sisterly.
I’m just me.
The light is starting to break through the trees.
The snow has stopped,
but the thick white clouds hover off in the distance.
The countryside disappears
at sixty miles an hour, and I lean my head
against a window with finger smudges
and nose prints, slipping the phone back into my pocket,
turning the ringer to silent.
Row
The baby must have passed away
just hours after Maribel returned home
from her doctor’s appointment
where our sister was said to be
a healthy weight and size.
Our sister’s heart stopped beating,
like our mother’s, unexpectedly,
on a day that was otherwise
normal.
I wonder what it was like for Maribel
to hold on to something
that had died.
I wish that I could see Maribel
to know that she will be okay,
even after the cramping passes,
the bleeding stops,
after our sister is exhumed
from her body.
I look over at the closed master bedroom
and hear nothing.
No television. No voices.
No crying. No shower.
I look down the hall at Ariana’s door.
The silence without her is deafening.
I go to my room, close the door,
and turn on a podcast about soccer
just to fill the room with noise.
But I wish it wasn’t just talking.
I wish there was someone around
who could listen.
Row
I remember our first snowfall together. Here
in my room Ariana and I watched
the way that snow tries to
seclude us as neighbors’
houses disappeared
among snow
drifts.
“I miss
her,” Ariana
said after twenty
minutes of soundless
gazing. I remember her
voice, the way it trembled
with uncertainty. I remember
the thick salty tears that welled
in my eyes and when Ariana brushed
her hand against my shoulder, I couldn’t
hold them back. Neither could she. Neither
could the sky that dumped clumps of snow. I
remember looking out at the landscape and back at
Ariana, seeing the extent to which people can change
so quickly. The way flakes could pile up one speck at a
time and transform the world before us into shapeless mounds.
I remember the feeling of us, together, letting ourselves cry over snow.
Ariana
We’re supposed to have a backstory.
We’re supposed to have a series of life experiences
that have brought us to this moment in time.
I’m sitting on a bus that’s headed away
from the place where I live, because I’m failing
art class, jeopardizing whatever future I’m supposed
to be having, and not even questioning how the hell I got here.
I’m just here. The product of a failed backstory.
In German there is a word for experience, Erlebnis,
which comes from the verb erleben,
and translates as living through something.
In English, we have no succinct word
for living through something.
Maybe it could have been different had I not been there
watching my mom fall to the floor at a Starbucks,
dropping her phone and clawing at her chest.
; The newspaper she held fluttered to the floor,
the way a heart might sometimes flutter.
Not because you’re nervous or falling in love.
But like when you’re sitting at your desk
in the middle of a trigonometry test
and your heart unexpectedly flutters.
I remember the wail of the steamer frothing milk.
The barista on her cell phone. The paramedics
scurrying around my mother. I remember I stood there
in silence, frozen against an immovable display case full of crap.
Like maybe if I stayed real still, time itself would slow down.
But time didn’t stop. The world didn’t slow down
with me. It kept on plowing ahead.
In the aftermath of death, those of us who survive
have little preparation for what we’re actually supposed to do
with our lives from that point forward.
Like the entire concept of having a backstory is erased.
There is only before your mother died, and now.
It feels neither farther nor closer to the moment she died.
It feels like another day, of actions and reactions,
but without anything to live through, without Erlebnis.
Row
I text all seventeen girls
from the varsity squad
to see if anyone is down
for a pickup game of soccer,
because when I’m on a field
people listen to me.
They pay attention.
My teammates. They see me.
My opponents. They see me.
The people in the stands.
Coaches. Scouts.
I am a player to be seen.
I know it’s not the right kind of listening
or the right kind of being seen.
But being noticed, even if it’s not
for the thing that you want to be noticed for,
still feels all right, like you matter
and there is someone out there who cares.
I’m not saying that Dad
and Ariana don’t care.
It’s just sometimes I think they forget
how to listen
because after Mom died it was hard
to hear anything other than silence.
Row
The snow is a real killjoy.
Absolutely no one
wants to leave their crackling fire
or the warm cup of cocoa
or the raucous game of Monopoly
they’ve entered into with their siblings
to lace up their cleats
and tromp through the snow
for a pickup game of soccer.
Seriously, you’ll be fine.
You’re definitely going to make
the premier team.
Just take a day off
for once.
You’re obsessed, 24.
Twenty-four.
My number. My identity.
It’s what I’ve led them all to believe.
I am Twenty-four.
Not Row.
Not Ariana’s little sister.
Not a girl without a mother.
I’m a number.
A position.
A series of county
and state records.
And I’ve done nothing to correct them
because a large part of me wants to believe
that this is who I am.
A seriously talented,
seriously obsessed
soccer player
who is singularly focused
on the game,
on the win.
Except,
with Ariana gone
I know that’s not true,
not even close.
I am a person
who is scared,
who is empty,
and who is alone
without her family.
Ariana
You were robbed were the words
a classmate once told me in eighth grade.
We flipped through magazines her mother
still subscribed to. Mostly about home decor
and living your best life. We scrolled through our phones
looking at photos of people we didn’t know,
and then she asked me what my mom did “for a living.”
“Nothing. She died.”
That’s when she told me I was robbed. Like I hadn’t noticed.
Like anyone who is robbed wouldn’t notice that their purse
was yanked off their shoulder or that there’s broken glass
by the back door and the flat-screen is missing.
It wasn’t helpful to be reminded of this.
Robbed of all the things my mother
was supposed to teach me.
I could learn from the internet the difference
between menstrual cups, tampons, and pads.
I could learn from a Google search home remedies
on how to relieve cramps, and my questions about sex?
There were plenty of sources for that.
But what the internet lacked were any real lessons
on how to navigate this world as a young woman
My classmate changed the subject to whether or not
I thought we were too young to date high schoolers.
“You should ask your mother,” I told her.
She shifted her body. Raised the magazine to her face,
and never invited me back to her house.
My grief makes people uncomfortable.
It reminds even adults that we’re all going to die.
That bad things really do happen to good people.
I am not a walking disease because my mother died.
I am not abnormal. I am not contagious.
I am a human with grief. Just like we all will be someday.
Because there is only one universal truth in this world.
That we and everyone around us will someday die,
and grief is all that remains in the aftermath.
Row
Snow,
I text Kennedy,
one of those friends
who is always down
for doing something.
Except soccer.
Because, as Kennedy puts it,
“My two left feet wouldn’t know
how to run down a field,
let alone kick a ball straight.”
“It’s not that hard,”
I’ve told her.
“It is for someone who has
no desire to play in the first place,”
she would always say in response.
Of course I know it snowed.
This house has windows.
They are used to see out into the world,
and sometimes reflections
of ourselves,
Kennedy writes back.
Deep,
I text.
She sends over a photo
of snow
through a window
with a faint reflection
of Kennedy
snapping a photo
of snow
through a window.
Meta, I respond.
But seriously.
I stopped by on Thursday
and the lights were on
but no one answered the door.
What’s going on over there?
Kennedy writes.
I thought about
writing something
meaningful,
maybe vulnerable.
People were real into
talking about being vulnerable.
I thought about sharing.
And then I send
an emoji
of a pineapple
and a snowman
and an upside-do
wn
smiley face.
Friendships are like plants.
They require care and watering,
Kennedy responds.
I snap a photo
of the houseplant
named Earl.
Friends.
I know your stepmother
waters that, not you.
Ariana
Snow blankets the low, flat ground
where underneath maybe there is land
to sow seeds in or fields to play on.
Maybe it’s land where kids play baseball
or soccer or get lost in a corn maze.
I wonder if my sister is just now waking up,
if she’s looking out her window and contemplating
what clothes she could wear in order to still
play soccer in all this snow. Like there’s nothing
in her life that will stop her from getting out there on the field.
I want that depth of determination. I want to feel
like nothing can get in my way. I want to chase after something
the way Row chases after the ball.
I remember watching the way younger girls
follow my sister on the field with their eyes.
The way they’d startle and then cheer when Row
cuts a ball left and taps one, then two