It was the middle of July when I first met Griffin Tomlin, and I was wearing a sleeveless shirt with white and gold daisies overlaying a teal fabric background and a pair of neon yellow shorts with worn Disney Princess flip-flops adorning my feet, the dark impressions of my small toes almost concealing Jasmine, Cinderella, and Ariel with only a blue gloved hand waving to me. My lips were still purple from suckling on a grape popsicle until the joke about donkeys and piano keys became visible, and the popsicle stick was now neatly wrapped in its juice stained, papery sleeve. I was sitting on our front lawn, crouched in front of our sandbox that was in the shape of a dented, plastic, green turtle with weather-worn smiling eyes and lips. I was scooping the dry grains of sand with my cracked pink, plastic shovel and into a bucket that was shaped like the tower of a castle while simultaneously keeping an eye out for bugs that had buried into the sand or a piece of cat poop that my sister Nora had the misfortune of finding a few days ago while trying to dig a moat for her dead lady bug collection—when she was twelve, she thought she could be a lady bug doctor and save the shriveled, dead ones that she inevitably ended up burying after many unsuccessful attempts of reviving them—and I heard the rumbling roar of a moving truck as I watched each grain of sand fall over the plastic edge of my shovel, and I looked up just in time to see a white and orange U-Haul driving down the street of our cul-de-sac.
I slowly placed down my shovel into the half-empty pail of sand as I watched it park in front of one of the larger, newly renovated homes on our street, one of that had been vacant for nearly a year after Mr. and Mrs. Browning and their twins moved out and left for Arizona to be closer to Mrs. Browning’s ailing father. The “FOR SALE”sign had been pitched at the front of the lawn for months, with snowflakes collecting on the top and the wind of summer storms having knocked it down a few times but a few weeks ago, mysteriously, it was removed, much to my father’s curiosity. He noticed it one morning just as he had opened the driver’s side door to go to work, tossed his briefcase into the backseat, and just happened to glance over the warm rooftop of his car and saw the hole in the lawn and that that the FOR SALE sign had been taken down. He left the car door open and ran back into the house, his tie and the edge of his jacket flapping, and I saw my mother glancing over at the closed refrigerator door, as if wondering if he had forgotten his packed salad and granola bars, and he opened the door with a grin. “Hey, did you see this?” he said, pointing behind him, meaning the absence of the FOR SALE sign but technically pointing toward another neighbor’s house where the rocking swing of their swing set on their lawn nodded in agreement. “Someone bought their house!” He looked at me and my sister, sitting at the table, her eating her cereal nicely while I was trying to create a tower with my Cheerios successfully. “Hey, girls, maybe they’ll have some friends for you to play.”
And those friends came strolling down the street a moment after the U-Haul, in a black minivan that gleamed and sparkled, as if it were freshly washed and wanting to make a good impression on its fellow neighbor cars, and on the back window there were those white stick people families bumper stickers—a woman, a man, and two boys in baseball caps—and a Buffalo Bills bumper sticker that looked as pristine as the rest of the car. The windows were gleaming and un-smudged, and there wasn’t the yellow glimmer of a Wendy’s fast food burger wrapper on the dashboard smushed against the windshield, and it neatly parked in the paved driveway of the vacant house as the U-Haul not-so-neatly parked on the side of the road, near a drainage and their mailbox with their name TOMLIN engraved in cursive on both sides that I hadn’t noticed until then.
A moment later I heard the whoosh of the minivan’s side door opening, quickly, and then the abrupt stop of the door, and the smacking of the soles of sneakers hitting the beige pavement of the driveway, and the muffled sound of the radio in the car, forecasting the weather—sunny, it said, with highs likely in the eighties until tonight—and then the driver and passenger doors opened, more slowly than the sliding doors, and that was when I saw Griffin’s brother, Brandon, for the first time. He was older, maybe around Nora’s age, and he wore a Buffalo Bills shirt with a worn blue buffalo over his chest and the sleeves bunched around his biceps as it were too small for him, and there were wheelies on his Nike shoes. He was playing a game on his Nintendo DS when he emerged from the minivan, almost unsteadily as he almost lost his footing as he jumped from the car, never taking his eyes off of the small screen as he scratched the little stick across the screen, rapidly. I remembered thinking how I had wanted a Nintendo DS as I watched him and then, as I wondered just how much allowance money one of those would cost, Griffin Tomlin jumped out from the inside of the minivan.
He was almost ten then, with little knobby knees that were crisscrossed with healing scabs from playing baseball because he was on the team at his old school, and he wore a pair of cargo shorts that shook around his thighs as he jumped down and his flip-flops made a smacking noise against the beige pavement. He had black, curly hair with short ringlets around his ears and, even though I couldn’t see from across the street, dark blue eyes that sparkled like ocean water underneath a glimmering sun on a perfect day. His shirt had Buzz Lightyear across the chest with the words TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! stamped underneath his feet. Griffin was holding a Nintendo DS game chip in his hand, his fingers long and tanned, and he was reaching for the Nintendo DS from his brother, Brandon, and I saw his lips moving, and even though I couldn’t decipher what he was saying, I heard the faint pitch of a whine emanating from across the street.
I saw the shoulders of the woman I assumed was their mother slouching as she sighed, gazing over her shoulder at her arguing sons as Griffin stood on the tips of his toes and shouted while Brandon evaded him, simply holding the game higher and walking away without even taking his eyes off of the screen, the little stick in his hand still skating back and forth. “Can you two learn to share?” I heard her exhausted, annoyed voice say from across the street, her shoulders falling with another sigh as she glanced over the hood of their dark minivan at the man I thought must have been her husband, who instead of returning the gaze or looking at his children, stared at the house with his hands on his hips. He let out a whistle as he looked at it, one that was drawled out, and he scratched the side of his head, finally glancing over at his tired wife. He had black hair, just like Griffin. “Look at that. Couldn’t have done a better job fixing up the place if I did it myself.”
Quietly, I heard her mutter, “You did do it yourself, dear.” And he laughed, throwing his head back, almost as if in agreement, and then, when Brandon finally shouted at Griffin to leave him alone and sulked toward the front porch, flopping down on the second step with his knees close to his chest and the faint glow of the screen illuminating his slender, freckled nose and lips, his father looked over to them. And then glanced over his shoulder, to where I was sitting, with my legs crossed in front of my turtle shaped sandbox with a half empty pail of sand in front of my bare knee, and I blinked. I grabbed the handle of my pink plastic shovel and buried the tip into the sand and scooped up the grains and poured it into my pail as I heard Mr. Tomlin say, “Griffin, why don’t you try to make some friends instead, huh?”
Griffin looked away from his brother sitting on the front porch, little electronic sounds emitting from the game device in his hands, and glanced in my direction, eyeing the green plastic turtle and the cracked pink, plastic shovel in my hand and then sighed. Fine, I saw his lips saying as he walked, kicking the toe of his flip-flop into the pavement, and his mother smiled at him and then me, waving slightly, and then told Griffin to be nice, to be polite, and that ladies always go first. He responded with yeah, yeah, yeah, as if this had all been told to him before.
“Hey,” he said to me when he was reaching the middle of the street, the sound of the soles of his flip-flops smacking against the road alerting me to his steady approach, and he nodded a greeting in my direction as he stepped one flip-flop clad foot onto the neatly trimmed grass of my front lawn—my father took great pride in how well and frequent he was at mowing the grass—and he crouched down in front of me, placing both scabbed knees onto the grass, and he tilted his head to the side as he looked at me with sparkling ocean blue eyes as he asked, “Can I play?”
I looked at the sparkling ocean for one more moment before I replied, “Okay.”
.
My parents don’t know it, but every day I’ve been driving Emily’s car to school.
Before she was arrested, Emily used to always drive me to school with her since she was still a senior and I a junior, and we would stop at Starbucks and order some mocha lattes and maybe a chocolate chip muffin to split if she found enough crumpled one dollar bills in her neon pink, faux leather wristlet with a bow that she kept in the pocket of her driver’s seat. And then after she was arrested, it seemed to be a common rule that no one touched anything that belonged to her. Her bedroom door remained closed and secluded, her car was left idling in the driveway, and her granola bars were still in the cupboards, pushed to the back and hidden behind cans of Campbell’s Soup, Pop-Tarts, and fruit roll-ups. But every morning, after my father and mother would leave for work, I would reach into her box of s’more flavored granola bars where I had hidden the keys of her car and I would drive it to school, always hurrying home to make sure that it was parked in the exact same position on the driveway before my mother got home from work.
It still smelled like her in her car, of Country Chic fragrance mist from Bath and Body Works and of fruit flavored Spearmint gum that she always had with her, in her pockets or her wristlet, and there was a half empty bottle of Aquafina water in the cup holders on her side with a bright pink lipstick mark on the white plastic ring underneath the cap. There were a few copper pennies on the floor mats that had muddy shoeprints in the patterns of her TOMS shoes because it was still late summer when she was last driving this car, her bare feet clad in canvas shoes with musical notes on them instead of her Ugg knockoffs. The CD in the CD player was still the same—still another one of Carrie Underwood’s albums, an older one, because Emily said it felt more retro to listen to—and on her dashboard were other CDs, an orange highlighter, the cherry flavored Baby Lips, and a PocketBac hand sanitizer from Bath and Body Works in the scent Dazzling Diamond. Everything there was Emily.
My parents thought I was taking the bus to school instead of Emily’s car, and sometimes, I wondered what they would do if they realized that I had been secretly stealing Emily’s car five days out of the week to drive myself to school. I guess that would make two of three of their daughters criminals—and left Nora, surprisingly, as the good, non-criminal one. Sometimes, I wondered if my excuse would be, “At least I didn’t kill anyone.” Maybe stealing my sister’s car would seem like nothing to them now. Maybe they wouldn’t even care. Maybe they would expect that Nora and I would eventually commit our own illegal crimes and were just thankful that it didn’t involve another homicide.
When I pulled into the school parking lot, which was littered with multicolored cars and trucks with glistening, fresh snow covering the roofs and hoods, and brown hued slush scattered across the dark pavement of the lot, there were still a few kids idling in the comfort of their cars where I imagined their heat was blasting their bodies as they gazed down at the screens of their oversized iPhones and used their manicured thumbs to scroll down, tribal print hats tugged over their heads and texting gloves on their hands. The heater in Emily’s car had broken, along with the air conditioning, last spring mysteriously and since then we either drove with the windows rolled all the way down or with parkas, scarves, hats, and gloves concealing every glimpse of ivory skin to prevent frostbite. I sat in Emily’s car for a moment after I shut the engine off, reaching one gloved hand across the console to the passenger’s cup holder and grabbed my latte, feeling the warmth against my fingertips and the liquid sloshing around in the cup as I brought it to my lips, my clear lip gloss leaving a faint gleam on the lid, and as I brought the cup from my lips, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Kolby Rutledge trudging through the slush and the piles of dirtied snow left by the snow plow-er earlier that morning.
He wore a black, puffer vest that had a collar that reached his jawline and the lobes of his ears, and a pair of jeans that were a little worn in the knees from sliding into home plate so many times in unofficial baseball games with Griffin Tomlin and a few of their other teammates and whoever else they would persuade to play with them. His tanned knit beanie was pulled over his head and the tops of his ears, concealing his brown hair, and his Timberlands were glistening from stepping in so many slush and snow, and I could see that his cheeks were rosy and that he was sniffling from the cold. I felt a pang of guilt, staring at him as I lowered my drink from my lips and watched him jog across the short distance from where he was in the parking lot to the steps of the front door, yanking one of his gloved hands out of the pockets of his puffer vest to grab the frosty handle. Griffin Tomlin used to give him a ride to school every morning after Kolby totaled his car last winter on New Year’s after a drunk ran into him on his way home from the New Year’s Eve party Griffin’s parents were throwing. I was there when Griffin got the text from Kolby saying that some random guy plowed him off the road and I remembered him swearing underneath his breath as he grabbed his keys and coat to go pick him up.
Kolby couldn’t afford to replace his car so Griffin just kept driving him to school.
Until now, anyway.
I reached across the console, my elbow grazing against the white bottle cap of Emily’s abandoned Aquafina water bottle, and grabbed my backpack from the passenger seat, feeling the weight of my textbooks within the material as I curled my fingers around the handle of my sister’s car and propped open the door. If anyone at school had noticed that I had been driving my incarcerated sister’s car, they never said anything to me about it or egged it, like I was slightly afraid that they would after I began driving it here but they ignored it just like they had when Emily was in the driver’s seat and I was in the passenger’s, where we both belonged, instead of her behind bars and me in the driver’s seat. Maybe they just assumed that it was naturally mine, now, since I was the youngest and my sister Nora already had a car—a convertible, actually, that was blazing red with fuzzy, blue dice hanging from the rearview mirror and a BABY ONBOARD sticker in the shape of a hazard sign that she couldn’t scrape off after she bought it used. I locked the car manually because this car, too, was bought used, and I swung the backpack over my shoulder as I slid the keys into the pocket of my peacoat as I walked across the parking lot, avoiding the melting, brownish puddles of slush dispersed across the lot as I made my way closer to the entrance.
A few kids, still behind the steering wheel of their cars with the blast of the heater fluttering the ends of their curled hair slightly, glanced up over the glowing screen of their phones as I passed by the bumpers of their cars, their golden license plates dirtied and glistening with snow, some of the edges bent and dog-eared like the page of a good book. I expected them to treat me a certain way after my sister’s arrest, to shove me around and mutter sneers underneath their breath as I walked past them in the locker aligned hallways, torturing me in lieu of my sister, but they didn’t. They mostly just stared at me, whispered—not sneered—when I ambled in the hallways and spun my locker combination, and a few even asked if I knew why she did it or if my sister was always a little pyscho or if they were thinking of giving her the death penalty. But this was somehow almost worse than if they were bullying me for what Emily had done because maybe I would’ve deserved the bullying. I prepared for it. But instead, they just seemed to pity me instead.
But they wouldn’t if they knew what I knew.