Fragments

ss: The Rosalind Peninsula

0 days before.

I can pinpoint the exact moment Lindy and I stopped being friends. She had her fairy lights plugged in, and the box of tissues she kept on her bedside window was missing. After seven years of being best friends and neighbors, I'd learned that the lights and tissue box were her Bat-Signal. Under other circumstances, I would've played Rosie the Hero, come to her rescue with cookies stolen from the glass jar on top of my fridge and a book of poems she'd always leave on my coffee table. The pages of This Way to the Sugar remained uncrinkled by Lindy's tears, and the snickerdoodles unswallowed by our ravenous mouths. I pulled my blinds shut and let her cry until her fairy lights drowned in daybreak.

One week before.

My nine-year-old brother, Marky, was the only person in the Carmichael household willing to talk real with me about the Lindy Situation because Lindy was part of the family. Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn't badmouth Lindy in case she came back into our lives, but I didn't know what Marky thought about it. He'd grown up with Lindy's constant presence. It took months after her family, the Truongs, moved fifteen minutes from Cato to St. Brooks, home of the most Babes, Wilburs, and Gordos in Peewee County, for Lindy and me to realize we were neighbors. Before Lindy started riding home from school with me, she took a Dial-A-Ride to Happy Nails, where she'd spend four hours every school day‒ten hours on weekends‒cooped up doing homework and reading in the break room. She'd occasionally wander about the tiny strip mall in the commercial district of St. Brooks, flipping through brochures at Campus Tanning or buying chocolate mini muffins from the bagel shop, both on either side of Happy Nails.

Marky saw me hide under the burgundy throw on our couch and promptly handed me a sheet of our select-a-size paper towel roll. "Here," Marky said, poking his skinny arm under my blanket. I peeked out and saw Marky's dark, gangly body looming over me. For someone with such a round baby face, his body was ridiculously long. He wore one of Dad's old St. Brooks High School sweatshirts. "Tissues are no match for your fat tears."

"Thanks, Marky."

"If it makes you feel better, she smelled weird."

I stuck my head out, adjusted my thick tortoise-shell glasses, and tucked the slippery blanket tighter around my body. I stuck my upper lip out and nodded, my messy, brown bun flopping up and down. I didn't know if I wanted Marky to leave me wallowing or to try to cheer me up via insults. Throwing me paper towels was the second nicest thing my brother had ever done for me, the first being a brown-bag valentine he'd made me that said, "Ur ok" in red Sharpie.

"Mom thinks you should go talk to her."

"Like I haven't tried," I mumbled, scrolling through our single-sided conversation. The last text Lindy had sent me was three days ago. "Can't talk," it'd read. I knew how isolated Lindy could be, but she was never just Lindy Island. Always the Rosalind Peninsula.

"Try harder," Marky said. "When I'm mad, Dylan always punches me until I push him and then we're friends again."

Friendships were more complicated at seventeen than they were at nine, but I didn't expect Marky to understand that. "Yeah, maybe." I was tired of trying. Singlehandedly keeping the Rosalind Peninsula afloat was exhausting. Lindy was draining.

Marky padded across the room and up three carpeted steps before turning back and adding, "And, Rosie? If you go over there, take a shower. You stink."

That was when I knew I had to get my life back on track. If your kid brother tells you your hygiene sucks, you've went beyond rock bottom. You've buried yourself beneath rock bottom, only to be crushed by layers and layers of other people who hit rock bottom. Lindy and I used to make fun of those people‒we called them St. Brooks deadbeats. They were the idiots who skipped class to smoke or fuck in the high school parking lot, got busted for running basement meth labs in their twenties, and died tragically because they broke into a gun owner's house or overdosed in a Walmart bathroom. Was that how I was going to go? Overdosing in a public restroom? At least nobody'd have to clean up my excrement.