“But it’ll actually save money if I get a good pair and you don’t have to keep paying for cheap ones that break all the time.”
“If we had two hundred dollars lying around I’d use it to pay the bill for the damn phone you’re using to listen to the music. Besides, we have to start saving in case you don’t get any scholarships.”
“Alright, but don’t get mad if I keep asking you for ten dollars every month to get new ones.”
“Oh, I’m still gonna get mad, and I’m gonna stop saying yes. Until you can get yourself a job, I’m gonna make sure you at least work for the money.”
“I can’t get a job for two more years. I’ll save until I get the money dad left me…”
“You’re gonna use that money for school.”
Holly shook her head and went back to her room. She mistimed her proposition. She knew that asking her mom for money when she came home between shifts was a risk, but not having music on her walk or bus ride was worse than not trying. She collapsed onto her bed and two missed texts buzzed in her pocket.
Her bedroom wall was covered in drawings, pictures, album artwork, concert posters, and art collaborations from the few friends at school she timidly made during their freshman art class. Photos of her eighth grade graduation were freshly added among candid photos she pulled from online. It was the last weeks before high school started, and Holly lamented that all the friends she jammed with were going to the magnet high school on the opposite side of town. They had won the attendance lottery and Holly had to feign excitement for them and ignore a sea of smug parental posts that hinted that they were glad that she wasn’t attending as a bad influence.
Maya, her sister, had won the lottery two years earlier and quietly knocked on her door the night she didn’t get in as she lay in her bed on her phone. She told Holly stories about how mean all the kids were there and how they teased all the kids who had to get in through the lottery rather than pay the exorbitant tuition. She cried and said how none of the guys wanted to date her because all the other girls teased her about her hand me down clothes. She was even more worried about Holly and told her to keep her head down. Their oldest sister Mary had left for Arizona State last fall and Maya and Holly still remember waving to the rear view window for the first hundred yards of her two thousand mile road trip. Holly listened to everything Maya said carefully before promising that she would be here for her as much as possible and that everything would be alright.
Holly hung out in her room until her mother went to the kitchen to start dinner so she could tip-toe down the hallway to her mother’s room and dig out the only two framed pictures of her father in a shoe box in her closet among the other physical photos. There was a parade of photos uploaded to family members’ Facebook pages, but they were filled with forced smiles. Holly couldn’t remember her father smiling organically. She hated looking at pictures of her childhood and her mother refused to post anything in the last year and a half, but it was the only time she could see her father with a semblance of happiness. Holly’s mother also refused to post anything about Martin Sr. It was only in these quiet moments that she would try to record every detail of a man whose features were fading from her memory. She had to keep looking at the photos, even if the disapproving eyes made her feel guilty. She figured that it would be sadder to forget than to remember with a dormant pain. In one of the photos, a cousin had taken a picture of one of her father’s first sermons and Holly could see herself in the front pew, but quickly put the picture back. Scenes from her early childhood would come back in a few second bursts in his mind, but they only became clear and extended when she started kindergarten and her mother walked her alone to the school’s entrance surrounded by an arena of sullen frowns that couldn’t decide between condolences for her father’s sudden death or to stay stitched in muted respect. Every once in a while, Holly would find herself lost in thought walking around her neighborhood, then absentmindedly take a shortcut down a side street only to see the spire of the church cut through the horizon line of trees and roofs. The spire’s shadow would fall somewhere in the distance like a warped sundial and Holly would turn back and resume her route.
Eventually, Holly went back to her room and nodded out with headphones just before her phone buzzing woke her up.
“Hey… my parents are gone. Do you want to come over?”
She smiled when she saw Jake’s heart emojis, and texted back that she’d be there in about 45 minutes. He was a year ahead of her and assured her that high school would be better because there were more people who only cared about their own lives.
She told her mother that she was going out for dinner, left her place, and walked down the three flights of stairs and into the July heat. Puddles had gathered along the curb from yesterday’s sudden rain and moistened the sparse patch of green among the pale, ghostly blanket of dead grass in front of her building, but Holly dodged them getting to the sidewalk heading into the streets beyond.
She didn’t want to waste money on the bus fare, so she decided to walk a couple of miles and listen to the dollar-fifty in quarters rattle in her pocket, almost calling out to transubstantiate into a drink from the coldest coolers at the Sunoco four blocks away. She slipped in each ear bud and scrolled through her phone as she walked. Holly liked most music, so she scrolled through Spotify playlists and usually chose her soundtrack by the name of the playlist. She went to a playlist of 80’s songs to see if he could find any interesting tracks to sample for later. Her single Midi keyboard and pirated software were pushing the limits of her cheap laptop, but she had a few tracks that she was working on and she thought that they were pretty good first drafts. She flashed back to jamming with her friends on the guitar that she got two Christmases ago; her mother still paid for it monthly. She dreamed of being able to leave school and form a band, but her sister warned that if she didn’t get into college, her mom would kick her out.
Around 15 minutes into her walk she started looking at the ranch style houses on both sides of the street, nodding her head to the music and smiling whenever someone working on their lawn made eye contact with her. She made sure to move at a good pace so that they knew she had somewhere to be, and she cut across one of the streets so she could walk along the football field and park near the other kids practicing. She stole glances at the football game and noted their strange movements. Her father had tried to explain football to her, and when she feigned enthusiasm, he tried to sign her up until her mother protested, but it never stuck. She was only drawn to the patterns and would watch quietly every Sunday. She watched the practice briefly, admiring the sinewy strength of her future classmates, then kept walking after only a few seconds.
The field gave way to an old graveyard entrenched in crooked, half-entwined branches that were allowed to flourish by the town’s desire to use it as cover for what they considered an aesthetic abomination. Chipped, charred gravestones held themselves at jagged angles to the already warped tree roots that weaved through the rusted iron gate. Holly stood for a second and tried to make out the names and she thought the stones looked as if the people who placed them down had used them to exercise their grief against the last tangible sign of their lost loved one. She thought about the years between then and now and about how abstract they seemed. She tried to think about what must have been happening when they lived, but drew a blank. It made her not want to think about the past at all; she pictured the numbered years blending into some amorphous blob being locked in a doorless room for someone else to discover. A wave of relief slackened her tendons, but she got scared of the relief, so she looked down at her phone and kept walking.
It took Holly about two blocks to go into autopilot, walking without realizing how far or what was surrounding her. She knew her route well and decided to look at the dormant Snapchats in her feed until a group of elongated shadows caught her eye and she looked up to see a group of guys from her school.
“Sup, Marty.”
Holly kept walking with her ear buds still in. One of the guys, a tall slim boy with bleach blond hair, extended arms that grew faster than the rest of his body and pulled back Holly’s shoulder.
“Hey, what the hell’s your problem?” Holly shrugged off his hand and kept walking. The boys ran back and blocked her. Holly stopped and pulled out her ear buds and put them in her pocket.
“What’s up?”
“You didn’t even stop to say hi!” The blond boy said through a forced, gritted smile and his friends watched with matching scowls. “What’s the matter you don’t like us, Martin?”
“I never said that, Kyle…” Holly’s face started pulling back in fear and she backed up a step.
Kyle’s face stayed stern until a cold grin lifted his lips. “Whatever. Keep walking, you’re too busy with your dumbass music and you’re gay ass clothes…I saw what you posted the other day. Shit sucks.” The other boys giggled, except one, whose face was pulled back in horror. Their voices vacillated between high pitched squeals and brief, bastardized previews of baritone or alto laughter.
“Shut up,” Holly spat out as her heart skipped a beat.
“What’d you say?” the blonde boy growled back. His friends started moving closer to Holly with unsure steps; all pocketed hands removed.
“Nothing.” Holly said back and Kyle started walking backward.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you little bitch…I can’t wait until school, then you won’t be talking so much shit…you’re so sad…you’re just trying to get everyone’s attention like your dad.” His braces flashed against the sun, hiding his giant, uneven teeth. He turned toward the main road, deciding against throwing a punch and risking trouble. He started walking in the opposite direction where they were originally headed, and his friends followed. Holly stood for a moment to make sure that they didn’t try to jump her. Her eyes followed them for a few blocks and she silently made her way back to her route.
Holly felt her face flush with anger and clenched her fists. She thought about the rest of school and how happy everyone would be in the new fancy building and she wanted to scream and tell them about Kyle and all of the other guys that teased her in the bathroom she was forced to use and took photos of her and posted memes about it. She got even more angry that she didn’t say anything. She thought about the time that Jose and Xavier cornered her in the bathroom and forced her to post on Twitter that she had a crush on Kayla and to write that she was still the ugliest girl in school or they wouldn’t let her leave the bathroom. She lost count of how many times she apologized to Kayla. Then she thought about the last weeks of school. She hated class, but Kyle was right, there was no avoiding confrontation. Her only comforting thought was being able to stay inside and make music in the month left before school. Holly turned down the side street as a shortcut to get over to the next main road. She looked over to the second house on the right and noticed a pile of packages on their door between two hanging pots of bright pink azaleas. The well manicured lawn was small and wrapped around rhododendrons to a sloped patch of grass.
Holly stopped for a second and saw the uneven stack of packages, some labeled with corporate logos and others unmarked between them. A thought slid into the back of her mind. It gathered into a viscus pool in the back of her skull and a voice, unrecognizable and monotone, arose and said, They won’t miss one package out of all of those, will they? She needed money for new recording equipment that would let her demo her songs, or at least one good pair of headphones. Holly looked back at the house, and the two car garage. Her heart pounded and her mind flashed back to Kyle, his words still ringing through the aether. She looked around and saw no one. Her eyes darted to the house’s front door, painted red against the newly coated white siding. There was no camera or Ring device near the door or above the door frame. The curtains were closed and the reflection of the neighborhood flashed in the windows without inside lighting.
The next thing that she knew she was running full speed across the lawn toward the walkway and the cement patio in front of the door. She reached down and grabbed a package small enough to take with one hand, and without stopping, Holly kept running in the same direction. She sprinted until the end of the street and turned down a side street. She could cut through yards to save time. After a few minutes, she paused between houses and behind a fence to catch her breath. She put the package behind her back to obscure it from any possible witnesses, and after a few seconds, she kept jogging as fast as she could manage. For the last stretch, she cut through backyards until she saw her apartment building, fumbled with the key from her pocket, and then let herself up, taking the elevator to the third floor.
She heard the sound of her mother behind her bedroom door on the phone with someone as the television dialogue swirled together with her words. She went down the hallway and into her own room and shut the door. Her hands were shaking and she placed the package on her bed and then paced around his room for a second to catch his breath. The package was the size of a laptop case or a shoe box, but it was way lighter. The cardboard was slightly bent from where her fingers gripped the side.
Holly pried some of the tape off but had to go into her desk to get her pocket knife to get the rest. When she opened the flaps and saw the bubble wrap, she thought it was excessive. Underneath was a piece of pink cloth that she removed and held up to the light. At first she thought that the clothing belonged to a doll or a small dog, but she noticed the black lettering on the plastic hanger labeled “0-3 mo”and tiny cloth legs fell from the backside of the top. Tears began to well up in her eyes. Identical white pajamas lay underneath the pink one and she let the pink pajamas fall back onto the box. Holly put her hands to her eyes and she knelt down at her bed, crying silently.
Suddenly, her phone vibrated in her pocket and when she looked at the screen she saw the text from Jake: “Kyle and his friends just showed up at my house and said they ran into you. Can you meet up later to talk?” Holly threw her phone a few inches onto the floor and sat there for a moment in silence. Her face began to heat up after a wave of guilt descended from her temples. She got up and started putting the pajamas back in the box. She thought about her own mother wrapping her in pajamas after a bath as a child. She thought about the night her father died. She thought about his funeral and her mother acting like everything was okay.
She remembered the night she told her mother who she really was. She remembered the horrified look and the extra classes she had to take and how much she got beat up before her mother saw that it wasn’t a temporary feeling. She thought about the last year when she realized that every time she told everyone how she felt, they would get mad, so she stopped talking. She remembered finally talking again to keep up appearances while she poured herself into her music. Happiness returned in pieces, flickering into being, then floated back to the dark edges of her mind when she was reminded of the outside world.
She went to the kitchen to grab packing tape from the drawer, holding back sobs so that her mother and Maya wouldn’t hear. After a few minutes, her hands went through the motions to tape the package back up. All she could think about were the parents coming home and wondering where the package had gone. She wondered what they were like and if they were in love. She wondered what conditions would come with their love. She left the apartment and walked the package back to the house and on her return home she realized that she didn’t care what happened to her that summer. Jake kept texting, but she didn’t answer. She would have to talk to him eventually, but for now, she needed to focus on her music again. She didn’t care about the equipment. She would let the songs pile up and she would write them down and record them when she could. She took the main road home and heard the bells for afternoon mass ring in the distance.