Full Moon

It was one of those mornings where spring came swinging to remind you of its arrival. The gray snow banks lining the roads, normally looking like peppered piles of mashed potatoes, were all melty and dripping. The grass underneath was hazy green and muddier than a pig sty. Recess would be fun.

Winter may have been dying, but Dad still drove like a glacier. The SUV crawled down familiar pot-hole riddled streets while my backpack jiggled in my lap. I fidgeted with the safety pins I had haloed around the zipper while he chattered away.

“Oh, silly people already putting out chairs for the parade. It’s not going anywhere, you know!” He laughed. “You excited, Sweetie?”

“I dunno.”

“Right, I forgot. You’re thirteen now. Can’t feel enthusiastic about anything!”

“Dad!” My face was red. 

He turned the radio up. 

By the time Maroon 5 had finished their song, he dropped me off at the Circle in front of St. Catherine’s.

“I love you, Sweetie!” He waved through the window as I slung my backpack on. “Have a good day!”

I was glad the cold was still just a little too much, so no one was waiting around to see. I nodded at him, shouldered my backpack and hopped the curb— towards the door, where he couldn’t see my embarrassment.

St. Cath’s was a small school of only two stories. It was old enough to be broken-down, but not old enough to be respectable. It was all glass and metal, but in an aged, 1970s chic sort-of-way. The walls inside were painted bright colors, coral on the ground level and turquoise on the second, and the entire school was built, like a Lego brick construction, around a courtyard that no one ever used. They didn’t even plant flowers there.

On cold mornings, most kids were stuffed into the cafeteria, crowding around tables and playing board games. I hated it. Usually though, Diana got to school before me and we would hang out in the bathroom or classroom until the bell.

I rang the buzzer, staring at my pallid face in the door’s reflection. 

“Who is it?” the Office Lady's voice crackled. 

“Lauren Krepshaw,” I said. “Grade 7.”

“Come on in.”

I decided to still go to the classroom. I would take the dead quiet over a K-through-8 sardine any day. Alas, luck was not with me. As I entered Ms. Wood’s classroom, Sydney was sitting at her desk. Alone.

I froze in the doorway. 

Sydney glanced up from her smartphone. “Morning.”

With a deep breath, I readjusted my backpack strap. The belt buckles on my boots jangled with each step as I marched inside.

Sydney and I were opposites in many ways. While she was all prim and proper, I was a dirty troublemaker. Sydney had slick blonde hair in a bob. I had just dyed mine black, and not-so-successfully attempted a haircut that ended up as a mullet. While Sydney’s skin was clear of all but the cutest freckles, I had been plagued with acne from the first day of my teenage years. 

I may have been a pain in the a**, but I took a small amount of pride in the fact that I wasn’t fake like Sydney was— no sickly cherry lip gloss smiles here. The sweeter Sydney pretended to be, the more worthless she considered you.

We didn’t have lockers; instead, there was a walk-in closet where each student was given a hook to hang their coat on. I took my time doing so, head down and grumbling. I set my lunch box on the shelf above with a soft thud. I pulled up my stockings, pulled the loose thread on the hem of my jumper. Finally, I had no excuse.

I hadn’t even finished sitting down before Sydney started. Across the classroom she stared at me with the conviction of a holy paladin. 

“Those shoes are against uniform policy.”

Why do you care? I thought. I reached down to tug on the tongues. They were such a small victory— a lucky Goodwill find, hardly worn. I wasn’t going to be giving up so easy. 

“No,” I said. “They’re black shoes.”

“You can’t wear anything with heels, Lauren.”

Where most people kept feelings of love and affection, I suspected Sydney only had piles of memorized rulebooks. I shouldn’t have even opened my mouth. 

I remembered, during a long late night chat, I had told Eris about my persistent bully. Eris was my internet friend, a girl in high school, and she had years of experience on me. She knew how to laugh it off. She’d told me, people like that should be removed from the gene pool lmao.

I smiled, repeating that sentiment over and over in my head. 

Sydney must’ve noticed my expression, because she continued, rather crankily, “Well! I’ll have to tell Ms. Wood about them.”

She has eyes, doesn’t she? I held my tongue. It was going to be a long day. . .

. . . made even longer by the fact that Diana never showed. I was tasked with collecting her work. By lunch, word had spread. Mrs. Porowski passed me double math worksheets without prompting.

At recess I sat on the wall, kicking my heels against it. My attention was split between the kids playing in the Circle and the ones playing kickball in the park, mud up to their calves.

When the teacher supervising us had her back turned, I pulled out my phone and sent Diana a painstaking text.

After school, I trailed the pack through the Social Center and out to the parking lot. Dad’s scratched maroon SUV waited underneath a still-sleeping cherry tree. I braced myself for an influx of Dad-speak, the wave of how-was-your-day?’s and nything-interesting?’s.

Instead, as I slid into the passenger seat, I got nothing. Dad was staring at the dashboard, both hands on the wheel.

“Dad,” I said.

“Oh!” He jumped. He turned to smile at me; it was a bad smile, one I hadn’t seen since fresh after the divorce. He rested a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go for ice cream, okay?”

“. . . Dad?”

What should have been a welcome surprise was curdled by the anxiety blooming in my stomach. All the way to Friendly’s, and walking inside, I felt like a prey animal staring at Dad’s back. I probably wasn’t in trouble, but something else was wrong.

Dad attempted to do his usual after school script once we settled into our sticky booth, but neither of us were able to carry it through. All I had to say was that Diana wasn’t there, prompting him to hail a waitress. I got a scoop of mint chocolate chip. He got a cup of water. We were right next to the kitchen, our painful silence intermingled with the clanging of dishes.

But after my ice cream came, Dad’s front crumpled. He squeezed his eyes shut, grabbed a fistful of napkins, and hid his face. Was. . . was he crying?

The mint in my mouth tasted like ash. He removed his glasses, wiped his eyes until the table was littered with used napkins. I waited.

“Lauren. Sweetie,” he said. He looked me in the eye. Took my hands. “Eleanor went to heaven this morning.”

Someone in the kitchen dropped something; there was a lot of swearing, the banging of a pot. A cloud of steam billowed out from under the door.

“She collapsed before school,” Dad continued. “They rushed her to the hospital, but. . .”

I tried to think back to the last time I had seen Eleanor. Even on days I went to Diana’s after school, her presence had been felt but not visible. Her door was always closed. The only thing we heard, sometimes, was the wailing whenever she plugged her guitar into the amp to rile Mrs. Colón.

“What was wrong with her?”

“We don’t know, honey,” Dad said. “It’s only been a few hours.”

The steam— it had to be the steam— was making me break out in a cold sweat. When had I last seen her? Was it as far back as New Year’s, telling us stupid kids to leave her alone?

I slipped my hands out of his, staring at the ice cream slouching down the side of the silver sundae dish. “I’m done.”

Dad nodded, blinking fast again.

The rest of the day escaped me. I stayed in my room, half-conscious. I couldn’t even try and distract myself; it all felt undeserved. I laid on my bed and stared at my walls.

In the corner across from me was my desk, my face reflected in the dirty computer screen. Dad had let me keep his old laptop in my room on strict condition that I only use it for school work.

I rolled over, only able to stand my face for so long. Sheets twisted around me as I raked my eyes over the bookshelf. The contents were sparse, and the few books I had on the bottom shelf were spilling forth onto the floor. On the top row, Pinkie Pie gave me a bland pony smile.

The day I had bought her, Eleanor had made me cry.

Closing my eyes, all I could see was her slouching against the wall, arms folded. A recent growth spurt had turned her into a towering force of attitude, red flannel and snapping gum. Out of nowhere, she’d become a teenager. And she hated the both of us.

She wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be showing Diana.

I’d hidden the toy behind my back, and insisted, “It’s not just for little kids.”

“You would know.”

Diana touched my arm. “It doesn’t matter who it’s for, if you like it.”

“But I’m not a little girl. And she’s trying to say I am!”

“I didn’t say anything.” Eleanor was smirking.

At night, after coating my pillow in angry tears, I had taken to messaging Eris over and over until she came online to commiserate. She’d laughed at me, too.

My eyes snapped open. A sudden spike of anger brought me to my feet. This was not a time to even consider laughter. Eleanor was fucking dead!

I snatched the toy up and launched her at my door. She ricocheted, making a plastic clunk against the scratched hardwood floor.

“Hah. . . hah. . .” My breathing was heavy. My fists uncurled. “I’m sorry, Pinkie.”

A chunk of paint from her eye was now missing. I knelt down to pick her up. I brushed her hair back into loose curls with my index finger. My curtains were pulled back, enough so that I could see the warm glow of the apartment windows across the street. I turned to my alarm clock. It was long past my bedtime.

Downstairs, Dad was “watching” the TV. He was certainly looking at the screen— remote in hand, flipping through channels too fast to process.

I stopped on the stairs with my hand on the railing.

He noticed me before I spoke, fixing another smile onto his face. “You okay, honey?”

“ . . . I can’t sleep.”

He nodded.

“Can we. . . take a walk?” I asked, feeling very small.

“That’s a wonderful idea, Sweetie.”

It was a full moon. It seemed to follow us over our ill-decided path. Dad kept his hand on my shoulder as we shuffled down sidewalks made alien by the dark. I had my hoodie zipped up to my ears, hands stuffed in my pockets.

We passed apartment buildings and little houses, lit windows snuffed out one-by-one as the hour ticked on. Dad steered us onto the main street, passing by the 24 hour convenience gas station. Behind the bushes, caught on the breeze between the hot dog grease and gasoline, a lucky skunk prepared for mating season.

Somehow I managed to focus on this, and I spent most of the walk complaining about the bad smells and worse homework waiting at home. But it meant nothing once we passed the park.

My steps slowed. It also seemed strange in the moonlight, but I knew that scrap of grass too well to not recognize the leaning swing set or the chipped red monkey bars. I had spent countless hours there with Diana and Eleanor, when we were little kids. A long time ago.

I broke off from Dad to draw closer. My fingers curled through the holes in the wire fence. My eyes trailed down the pink slide. Somewhere underneath it was the leg of a Barbie that Eleanor had broken, Diana's favorite. Eleanor had pleaded innocent, claimed that it was an accident, though I'd never believed her. Me and Diana, in our grief, had conducted the funeral rites there, littering the burial mound with dandelion heads.

Oh, I was crying again.

Dad stood beside me, fingers carding through my coarse hair. He pulled me into a hug. I clung to his jacket, quivering like a rabbit while I buried my face away. There was an acute shame coursing through me. I’d never gotten along with Eleanor in the first place. What right did I have to cry like this?

“I want to go— inside,” I said. “To say goodbye.”

Dad boosted me over the fence. Barbed wire caught on the hem of my jacket, leaving a spat of charcoal threads behind. Dad made the leap over less gracefully, tucking and rolling across the thin lawn.

My Converse sank into the damp wood chips, so wet they looked and smelled like a swamp. Squelching, I sat on the swing. My toes just barely brushed the shallow well underneath. Dad sat next to me.

Overhead was the full moon, cresting the buildings, the trees, even the mountains. It seemed to meet me head on, staring back with its own jagged face. It rose above the earth, seeing all that troubled the world. All that troubled me— and it didn’t care.

I looked away.

“Dad. . .” I stuck a fingernail through the chain. “What’s going to happen?”

He sighed. It was an action that felt so vulnerable it gave me the chills, like he was going to crumple into dust even as he spoke.

“Well,” he said. “There’ll have to be a wake, then a funeral. Maria will probably need help with all that. And the. . . cemetery plot, then. . .”

“That wasn’t what I meant, Dad.”

“I know, Sweetie.” He held his forehead for a moment. “No, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s all uncharted territory. It’s. . . horrible.”

His voice broke, so again I looked up.

I said, “When are things going to go back to normal?”

“Honey. . . they never will.”

I bit my lip.

He placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “What I mean is. . . things will never be the way they were before. But that doesn’t mean they won’t fall into place eventually. It’ll just be a new normal.”

I nodded.

“You’re going to have to be supportive for the time being,” Dad continued. “Diana’s a nice girl. You both are. But there’s a lot put upon her right now. Grief will change people. She might not always be perfect.”

“Okay.”

“Lauren, I know how you are,” he said, prompting me to look up. “Please, be gentle. Don’t go playing pranks, don’t tease her. Stop when she tells you to stop. And no matter what happens, do your best to stay by her. Your friendship is strong enough. Remember that.”

I sniffled, nodding.

“I’ll be a good friend,” I said. “I promise.”

At home, several messages were waiting for me. I changed into my pajamas by the screen’s blue glow. When Skype booted up, I had four notifications from Eris.

It was late, but that made it all the more exciting. I leaned over my desk, not bothering to sit down. Seeing the concern expressed through her messages, that she even gave me the time of day, made my stomach flip.

Srry!! i had a bad day, I wrote.

Eris’s reply was immediate. what happened?

i dont want 2 talk abt it. I pulled out my chair, settling down. I brushed out my hair as I waited for her to respond.

ok ophelia, Eris wrote. anything u do want to talk about?

I blinked, considering. I didn’t want to talk to Eris about school; it always made me a bit embarrassed, feeling like a little kid. So, instead, I told her about the big parade coming up.

What were the chances? My hands quivered over the keyboard.