into the goal.
I remember seeing their tiny hands gripping the fence
during the semifinals, noses peering through,
and wondering if they realized that this wasn’t normal.
People didn’t show up to watch soccer.
People didn’t show up to watch
high school women play anything.
But during the semifinals, the stands were packed.
I overheard the owner of the diner on Main Street
seated on the bleacher in front of me explain
to the owner of the hardware store about offsides.
A group of senior guys had brought cardboard cutouts
of players’ faces. My sister’s head bobbled around.
Out of the woodwork, everyone who ever wanted to feel
like they could be worthy of something
showed up to the games.
Because we all wanted to see for ourselves
what it could be like to be so good at something
that other people noticed.
Maribel and Dad showed up looking flustered.
The half was just about to end.
“I can’t believe we’re late. The appointment ran over.”
Maribel rubbed her belly, the small
noticeable bump starting to show.
She leaned over to me as we watched the team
jog off the field and huddle around the coach.
“It’s a girl,” Maribel leaned over and said.
It was this type of world that I wanted a sister to grow up in.
One that could celebrate her accomplishments
not because she was a girl but because she was worthy.
But I wasn’t the one on the field.
I wasn’t the one with the cardboard cutout of my face.
I wasn’t doing anything to create a type of future
that I wanted for a future sister,
because I wasn’t doing anything
to create a type of future that I wanted for myself.
I had no clue what to do.
A whistle blew and the second half started.
I watched the game descend into a slog of possession.
The crowd was rapt with every play.
Every corner. Every turnover.
I watched Row go after the ball.
Targeting a player. Legs pounding against the field,
and I saw something that I didn’t know how to have.
But even there, surrounded by hundreds of people,
all chanting Row’s name, I couldn’t help
but drift away and think about Mom.
How she would be so proud of Row.
She would have loved to be here, to see someone just like her.
Someone who could attack life the way she did.
But what would she say about me?
The daughter in the stands who doesn’t
have any real hobbies or talents to speak of.
The daughter who is supposed to grow up and be something
but has no idea what that something is
or how to find it and pursue it
the way that Row pursues a player.
The daughter who can’t seem to let go of her mother.
The daughter who still wishes that she could be held forever.
Row
Ten minutes later
Kennedy texts again.
Do you want
to build a
snowmaaaan?
I am not
your Elsa,
I text back.
Well, then,
ask your sister.
Row
I type and delete
and type again
and let the words
sit on the screen
like turtles on a log
sunning themselves
in springtime.
Ariana’s not here.
Ariana
I once saw Row talking to Rory from Studio Art;
Busy, the girl who invited me to her house in seventh grade,
the girl with the magazines and a friendship I thought
that maybe I could have had; and Paola,
the girl that everyone thought was Row’s older sister,
because they’re both brown and play soccer,
and except for the whole different-parents,
different-last-name thing, people still assume that they are.
Row and I haven’t been at the same school together
since California. Since before Mom died.
We haven’t had to occupy the same halls,
interact with the same people.
Row hasn’t had to see me, in my world,
and now she was here, and it was her world.
It was like suddenly my sister was different.
Not my little sister. But one of them.
One of the normal, well-adjusted girls
who could walk down the hall
every day and talk to people.
One of the girls who had a lunch table to sit at,
friends who texted her, a whole team of people
who called out her number down the hall.
I didn’t recognize her.
I didn’t recognize myself.
It was senior year and I didn’t even have
a regular table to sit at in the cafeteria.
Like all the years before I snuck bites of food
in the library during lunch while doing homework,
and for all these years it has been fine. I even liked it.
But I watched Row talk to Busy, Rory, and Paola.
I didn’t want her to know that after all these years
I hadn’t moved on. I hadn’t found my place
in this world like she had. I hadn’t figured out
who I was, and it scared me. Because someday
I needed to leave, and what was I supposed to do
with an entire future?
What would Row say if she found out
I wasn’t a good model to follow? I wasn’t
a sister who would pave the way. That she
didn’t have a mother or an older sister around to guide her.
I didn’t want her to see me, so
I slipped around the corner and disappeared.
Row
Why would anyone
go outside in this weather?
Kennedy texts back.
There’s, like, seven inches of snow
and it’s fifteen degrees out at best.
I look out the window again
and see ice crystals swirl into snowdrifts.
Where is she?
I try to push aside the feeling
of being left behind.
So, you wanna come over here?
I text. I feel a small pang of guilt
immediately after pushing send.
Like I’m trying to replace
Ariana with Kennedy.
I don’t know.
Maybe I am.
Maybe I should.
You heard me, right?
Why on earth would I want
to trudge through this weather
and hang out at your house?
Because we’re friends.
Then I drop in an emoji
of two girls dancing.
Ariana
The bus stops at the next station an hour later.
A kid about eight sits down next to me, while his mother
and baby sister take empty seats a few rows forward.
“I’m Edward,” the kid says, unprompted,
pulling out a stack of books.
Volumes about animals. “What’s your favorite animal?”
I don’t answer. I try to tune him out by pulling down
my knit hat and resting my head against the window.
But he keeps talking, and asks me again,
“What’s your favorite animal?”
“A jellyfish,” I finally a
nswer, because
when I think about jellyfish, I think about silence.
“Whoa. That’s cool.” Edward flips
to a page in his animal encyclopedia.
“Did you know that there are certain
kinds of jellyfish that can live forever?”
He starts to read an entry.
“ ‘Once the immortal jellyfish reaches adulthood,
it transforms back into its original juvenile state.’ ”
“I hate to break it to you, kid,
but nothing lives forever.”
Row
Kennedy stands inside our front door
twenty minutes later,
unraveling the layers
of clothes wrapped around her.
The snow on Kennedy’s boots
begins melting
on the tile floor,
yet I still feel cold
standing here
in wool socks.
“For real. It’s a blizzard out there,
and my mom is less than thrilled
about me leaving the house,
but I said that I was worried
about you guys.”
She’s looking around the kitchen
and starting to notice that no one
has turned on any lights
this morning.
She notices
the recycle bin overflowing
with milk cartons
and yogurt containers
that no one has touched
in three days.
“Um. No offense,”
Kennedy begins,
“but it feels a little
like a cesspool
of sadness in here,
and something is
literally rotting.”
It’s like she can see
all of our emotions
out on display.
I don’t want to
have to explain to her
right now what’s going on.
I don’t want to share
with her about Maribel,
or the baby, or about how it feels
when grief seeps back
under your skin,
like a roof that leaks
one drop at a time.
Instead, I wish I just had
the foresight to clean.
Ariana
The bus rumbles into the college town of Loganville,
and there’s a line of students clutching to-go cups
and overnight bags for the city.
In the distance, grounds crews with snow shovels
and vehicles outfitted with plows scrape away
ice and snow on tree-lined walkways in front of red brick dorms.
This is exactly how college looks in the glossy catalogs
that Maribel had sent to our house. I get it.
It’s like the perfect interlude in a song. Like sun breaks
after a long spell of rain. Like the day after it snows,
and even though it’s freezing, you wouldn’t trade anything
for the way the world glistens, untouched.
But it’s like I have an aversion to this level of a stylized future.
Everyone with their Bean boots and quilted totes.
“I think you’ll be surprised to find people
who you relate to,” Maribel once said to me.
She held out a stack of brochures.
“They may have different life experiences,
but there’s something about lying around a dorm room
and bonding, the collective hardship of challenging classes,
the shared yearning to be someone better,” she said.
How can it be better? How can it be so perfect?
The experiences of our lives cannot be reversed.
“It’s not about the best school. Private or public.
In state or out of state. Two-year or four-year.
It’s about who you show up as
during your college experience.”
A girl stands alone, waiting to board. Checking her phone.
In the distance, across the quad, I see a group of brown girls
in sweatpants and bundled in oversize jackets.
Laughing. I wonder what is so funny. I wonder
what it feels like to laugh so hard that your breath
looks like clouds coming out of your mouth.
I want to believe Maribel, because maybe she is right.
Because she at least knows what it’s like. She’s Filipina,
like Dad. She’s brown, like us. She knows what it means
to be and have been a young brown woman,
to exist in our skin.
She knows how to believe in a future.
She knows how to make one.
I want to believe, because Mom isn’t here,
and Maribel is trying.
Row
“Are you going to help?”
Kennedy empties
an overflowing recycle bin.
I follow her into the garage,
where she dumps the contents
into a large blue canister.
someday,
will have to haul
the recycle bin
out to the street.
Preferably after
someone,
someday,
shovels the driveway,
but I didn’t want it to be me,
the only member of this household
who is around to notice
the chores to be done.
Besides, Dad was the one
who loved shoveling snow.
It must be an adult thing.
The satisfaction
of clearing the way
for the inhabitants
of a home.
Of providing something
as small as a pathway
out to the rest of the world.
Excavating trenches
in a battle against
Mother Nature.
Except for the imprints
left behind
by Kennedy’s snow boots,
no one has cleared a pathway
to the street.
No one scraped the driveway bare.
No one has ventured outside
since the snow started falling,
except my sister
who left at some point
in the middle of the night
when the snow fell the hardest
and her longing to escape
overwhelmed her.
Ariana
A girl with a guitar case strapped to her back runs for the bus.
Someone is trailing behind. I hunker down low in my seat.
But as soon as she enters the bus, she sees me.
“Ariana?” She stops a few rows ahead of me,
holding up a line of passengers behind.
“Hey. Alex.” Of course. After all these months.
Alex gets on my bus. After all these months
of trying to forget her.
Alex looks a little flustered too. Like she’s not quite sure
she wants to see me either, but someone brushes her bag.
She glances over her shoulder and points to the girl behind her.
“This is my roommate,” Alex says.
Her roommate looks normal. The way a well-adjusted
college girl might look. Clothes draped over her body
in effortless layers. Skin that is hydrated and blemish free.
She probably uses toner. She probably knows why
one is supposed to use toner.
“We should grab those seats,” the roommate says,
pointing to the remaining pair toward the back.
There are so many things to say to Alex.
Even the small things like, how are you?
How’s the band? How’s college and life and your future?
Maybe she wants me t
o ask her one of those questions.
Any question. Because she lingers a moment longer.
“Okay, sure. It was good seeing you, Ariana.”
The bus shifts into gear. Alex wavers down the aisle, and I watch
as she finds her seat and pulls a muffin out from a jacket pocket
and starts eating, spilling crumbs onto the floor.
Row
“So, is Ariana just gone?
Or like Gone Girl gone?”
Kennedy asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Should I be worried?”
Kennedy says, but she’s already worried.
I don’t know why people always think
that worrying will resolve anything.
Like when Mom died,
our parents’ friends
were always like,
“We are so worried about you girls.”
Ariana would respond,
“What good does that do?
She’s not coming back.”
That always shut people up.
“Something’s not right, Row.”