Albatross

Mist settles over the graveyard in a fine haze as Fred arrives; the sun, barely visible on the horizon, adds little light or warmth and casts everything in dim twilight. The tombstones rise from the long grass in ominous shadows, jagged teeth of concrete and stone. Fred weaves through them with expertise until she finds a little plot in the corner of the graveyard. The blanket of unkempt grass that grows over it is dotted with limp dandelions. Fred eases down to her knees--her old bones creak and pop with the effort, and the dew soaks her pants.

The headstone has a green-yellow growth of lichen creeping across its face, but though it obscures a few of the letters, the engraving is still readable. Fred reaches out to trace the letters with the devotion of a blind woman finding meaning in touch; the swirl of an E, the sharp upsweep of the V, the gentle curve of an S.

"I'm here," she tells the grave. Words struggle in her throat, fighting so hard to be said that they all die there; a more personal graveyard. She coughs to clear their corpses away. "Finally."

Fred's legs are pins and needles, ankles jelly, and her joints have stiffened--she can move, if she wants, but it will be more trouble than it's worth. She hates being here to face the accusing stare of the tombstone, but she can't leave now. She lowers her hand from the headstone and fists her fingers in the grass and she's--

--seven, impetuous, and Father's infuriated because she won't stop asking why she doesn't have a mother. He grasps her forearm, his eyes dark and face red, but she slaps him across the cheek before he can yell at her again. It's more of a pat than a slap, and it doesn't make a dent in anything but his pride, but he lets her go.

For a long, breathless moment all they can do is stare at each other; his mouth is slack, words gone, but she knows he'll recover. Before he can speak, she runs. As her small legs pump, she wishes she could go to the other side of the world, but she only makes it as far as the gardenia bushes in the backyard before she collapses, breathing hard.

Tears build and the world blurs, but she blinks them away; Father says Dolans don't cry, and in this, at least, she will be a good girl. Instead she kneels in the even grass and begins to pull it up by the handful. The physicality of it gives her the same sort of satisfaction she gets when she picks at the scabs on her elbows.

Father finds her in an hour--by then, she's pulled up nearly everything around her, leaving torn up dirt behind. Father curses, but she doesn't look up.

"Winifred," he says, sounding exhausted. "Can you come back inside, please?"

Winifred pulls viciously on another chunk of grass and ignores him. Father squats down by her side, puts a hand on her shoulder. His palm is heavy there, a weight holding her in place.

"I'm sorry, Winifred," he says. "You just made me so angry." He pauses. "Your mother is gone. She had to leave so you could make it into this world, do you understand?" Winifred's hands curl into fists in the dirt. "Please don't bring this up again. It makes daddy too angry, and then he does things he doesn't mean to do. Do you understand, Winifred?"

Winifred doesn't really, but she nods and doesn't protest when he takes her by the hand and leads her inside. She keeps turning to look back at the ruined lawn as they walk.

#

As she grows up, Father doesn't let her go out unless it's to school or family parties where she has to wear shoes that pinch and dresses that make it hard to breathe. The house is empty except for them but it's still better than her private school, where the other children mock her hair, the shape of her lips, the way her skin sits so dark next to theirs. Father, pale and untouchable as a distant star, says nothing when she comes home every day: not crying, not speaking, but so ballooned with hurt and rage that it sometimes feels strange to breathe.

She learns to watch Father's moods--the way he turns angry as her birthday approaches and kinder as it leaves, a type of moon cycle. She cleans up the empty whiskey glasses and puts them away, covers his prone form on the couch with a heavy quilt.

Sometimes when Father goes to work in the morning, briefcase clenched in his fist, Winifred creeps downstairs to stare at Mama's portrait. Father keeps it in his study, right above his desk, and he locks the door every morning when he leaves. Fred can still see it through the keyhole, if she squints, and when she gets older she learns how to insert her hairpins in just the right way to make the lock click open.

In the portrait, Mama's white-gloved hands are folded in her lap, concealing dark fingers. Fred drinks in every detail--the curve of her smile, the angle of her chin. There's a knowing look in the her bright, dark eyes, and sometimes Fred's sure that she and Mama share secrets just like they share hair and chins and skin color. She daydreams sometimes about what it would be like if Mama were alive and Father had died instead.

She's careful to never let Father catch her sneaking a look at the portrait. Sometimes she glimpses him touching the edge of it with the same reverence people at church brush the statue of Virgin Mary. To Father, the portrait is a holy object, her mother a blessed saint, and she is not meant for Winifred's eyes or devotion.

#

Fred turns fourteen, and Father sends her to boarding school in Maine, four states away. He says that she needs to become a proper young lady, but Winifred knows the truth: he can't bear to look at her anymore. People have begun to whisper when she passes by at the uncomfortable parties. Father wants the embarrassment gone, tucked away.

Father packs her up and sends her off with a sharp lecture on decorum, a warning of what will happen if she lets her grades slip or if he gets any reports from the teachers.

"Don't you dare embarrass me," he says.

He doesn't have to tell her not to embarrass her--Winifred's mother is a constant afterthought in every conversation, a ghost neither of them can exorcise. Father gives her a rough hug as he sees her off, tight enough to make her ribs creak--comfort or warning, she can't tell which.

When she's alone on the train, Winifred doesn't cry. Instead she breathes deep from the bottom of her lungs, as if she's about to sing or scream, and stares out the window until the trees are a blur of green.

#

St. Mary's, a private school tucked in the countryside, has towers spiraling toward the sky and big, wide-eyed windows. As she settles in, Winifred begins to hope that this place will be different. She feels like she's burst out of a cocoon that had begun to suffocate her.

It doesn't last long. Her classmates sense her insecurities like sharks scenting blood in water. They whisper as she walks by, mocking her. Winifred keeps her head high, clutches her books to her chest like armor, and wonders why the titters of these smug, bored children can hurt her. Father is important, Mama was beautiful, and her family is grand. She has nothing to feel ashamed of, and she repeats that mantra with every step.

Once she goes back to her room and screams into her pillow until her throat is raw, then throws everything breakable she owns against the wall until her floor is littered with their shattered corpses. It helps her breath again, makes her feel in control.
One of her roommates reports her for it and she spends three weeks in detention. When she speaks to Father on the phone, his voice is weary, resigned.

#

She fails two classes that year and when she goes home for summer Father barely speaks to her for three months. He ignores her in the hallways and over the dinner table. She spends a lot of time outside, sitting in the shade under the big apple tree in their backyard. She reads and reads, fills up her silences with words.

An hour before she's due back on the train, Father grabs her in the hall. His hand is thick against her bird-boned arm.

"I expect you to do better this year," he says, voice flat. "No more phone calls home, Winifred. You need to work harder. Think about my reputation, your mother's reputation."

He uses her mother as someone might use a treat on a bad dog--command and entreaty and bribe rolled up into one. Winifred stares up into Father's pale face, his slicked-back dark hair. His expression is bland, mouth set, but his grip is tight enough on her arm that she thinks she can hear her bones grind. His eyes are so colorless that they look clear in the morning sun, and for one long, dizzying moment, she hates him so much she can't breathe.

"I will do better, Father," she whispers, and he lets her get on that train and go.

#

The school lawn, nearly a year later: Winifred reads Jane Eyre under the wide branches of an oak tree on the school lawn. She's just reached the part where Mr. Rochester takes Jane out to the woods when the book is ripped from her hands mid-sentence. She grasps for it before she realizes it's in the hands of someone else, an older boy from the upper classes. He sneers down at her as he flips through its pages.

         "Pretending to read again, Dolan?" he asks. "Why bother? We all know you can't."

Her hands tighten into fists. "Give it back," she says. "Please."

The boy laughs. "Y'hear that?" he says. "It's learned manners too."

He takes the book between his big paws and rips it in half at the spine. He tosses its corpse at her feet and grins at her.

"There you go," he says. "Now, say thank you."

Winifred stares at it. Her eyes begin to burn, but she can't move, can't run, no matter how much she wills her legs to move.

"D'you hear me?" the boy asks, all good humor gone. "Say thank you." He makes an obscene movement with his hips. "Or I could give you something else to do with your mouth, if y'like."

"I think you'd better say I'm sorry I'm such an asshole, Lockwood."

Winifred's head jerks at the new voice and she turns, and there's--

A girl with eyes like thunderstorms, or pits of a deep, dark well. A bruise rings her right eye and her lip is split, barely healing, a bloom of scarlet in the pale moon of her face. Her hair, more tangle than ponytail. Winifred stares, hardly dares to breathe.

"Why're you even here, Hayes?" Lockwood says. His sneer is back. "Don't you have a bar to start a fight in? A class to fail?"

Hayes bares her teeth at him, a parody of a smile. "I took some time out of my busy schedule just to come and tell you you're a dick, Lockwood. You should feel pretty special."

"Just go away," Lockwood says. "This doesn't involve you."

Winifred's so focused on Lockwood that she jumps when an arm drops heavily onto her shoulder and Hayes leans into her. She smells of blood, iron.

"It involves me when you harass my good friend here," she says. "What's the matter, Lockwood? I know Missy Perkins finally getting rid of you must've hurt but--"

"Just shut up," Lockwood snarls. "I don't have need an excuse to teach this bitch her place--on her knees, sucking my--"
"Do you want me to kick his ass?"

Winifred turns at the question and suddenly she's sharing breathing space with Hayes. Her eyes are an extraordinarily dark shade of blue, clear and cold as a winter night's sky.

"You're just a girl, Hayes," Lockwood says. "What're you gonna do? Throw a doll at me?"

Winifred looks back at him and his self-satisfied cocky grin. She wants, with viciousness she hadn't known she was capable, to see that smirk wiped from his face. When she turns back to face Hayes, she nods--a single, sharp motion of her chin that makes Hayes grin, wide and wild and thirsty as a shark who's scented blood on the water.

Hayes takes her arm off of Winfred's shoulders and pushes her back and behind, her body a solid wall between Winifred and Lockwood. Winifred watches the flex of shoulders as she moves forward. This girl is dangerous, she thinks. But for one of the first times in her life, she isn't afraid.

"I would say sorry," Hayes says. "But I'm not, really."

Lockwood sneers. "You little--"

The punch is fast enough that Winifred doesn't even really see it's happened until Lockwood's howling on the ground, clutching his nose. Hayes stands over his body, smile widening until the wound in her lip re-opens. Blood trickles down her chin.

Looking at her, Winifred's heart grows hummingbird wings that beat against the cage of her ribs, struggling for freedom.

#

They sit in the headmistress' office, after. Across from Winifred, Hayes cracks her knuckles with the same delicacy she might use to scoop an oyster out of its shell. Her hands are bruised from where she punched Lockwood.

Winifred doesn't ask any of the questions she wants to--why did you help me, what were you thinking, why did you punch him and why did I tell you to? Instead, she stares at the whitewashed wall across from her and tries not to think about what Father will say. She rubs at her wrist--the last time she got in trouble like this, the bruise there took weeks to fade.

"You know--" Hayes says, drawl thick as molasses, and when Winifred's gaze snaps back at her, is staring down at the spread of her fine-boned, bloody fingers. "The thing is, some people can't be reasoned with, or ignored." She balls her hand in a deliberate fist. "Some people just need to have the stupid knocked out of them." She looks over at Winifred. She's not smiling now. "You got me?"

The door opens to reveal Headmistress Longstead before Winifred can give any sort of answer. The pinched line of Longstead's mouth offers no smile and no forgiveness as she gestures to Winifred to follow her. Winifred stands, but looks over her shoulder as the door closes behind them. Hayes has gone back to cracking her fingers, one knuckle at a time.

#

The next day, lunch: Winifred sits alone, whispers clinging to her like spider webs. It's a good thing she's practiced at ignoring them.

A tray bangs down across from her, and Winifred looks up to see Hayes. Her hair is still a mess and the bruise panda-rings her eye, but she looks clean. Her hands are bandaged.

"Call me Roni," she says as she slams into her seat. She munches on her fries, attention fiercely focused on Winifred. "I'm calling you Fred, Winifred's horrible."

Winifred stares. Roni bites into her fries, eyebrow raised in challenge. Winifred swallows, hard. The people around them are staring and her knees ache with a desire to run, but--everyone else watched Lockwood harass her. Roni didn't. The choice is easy.

She extends a hand and Roni pauses, incredulous, before she shakes it. She has a firm grip and dry, cold palms.

"Fred's all right," Winifred says, tasting the name on her tongue. She likes its weightlessness, like a ship that's dropped cargo to ride higher. "Thank you," she adds.

Roni--

--stares down at Fred behind her tombstone.

"Didn't think you'd come back," she says.

From anyone else, it might sound plaintive, but Roni clips each word off in the tight, terse way she spoke when she was alive, as if they were forced through gritted teeth. As if speech itself was painful for her.

"I'm sorry," Fred says, drinks her in--the sharpness of her chin, a tiny mole on her right cheek. Her father grew hazy with age, but Roni sharpened, as if the moment she died she was cast in amber, preserved in Fred's memory forever. "I couldn't, anymore."

Roni's assesses her, eye as keen as a hunting eagle's. Fred is paralyzed under that stare.

"Got any vodka?" Roni asks finally and Fred relaxes.

She slips the bottle, originally meant for some liquid courage, from her coat and takes a swig. It burns down her throat. She offers the bottle to Roni, who rolls her eyes and looks at the tombstone. Fred takes the hint and pours the vodka directly on the marker instead.

"'s good," Roni sighs. "You miss vodka when you're dead." She considers the bottle. "Wanna play a drinking game, Freddie?" One eyebrow rises, sardonic.

"What one?"

"That college one. Listing off all the stuff you've never done."

Fred considers it. "I've never left the country," she says.

"Never been skinny-dipping," Roni counters.

Fred points an accusing finger at her. "You have too, you big liar! I've got pictures!"

"Can't prove it," Roni says, eyes crinkling as she smiles, the same shark-grin she wore when she bloodied Lockwood's nose. "I'll take you down with me, Freddie. Got pictures of you too, you know."

Fred's smile wavers. She remembers collecting those photos, one of the things Roni's grandmother let her keep after the funeral. They are tucked away in her house somewhere, another thing that Fred can hardly stand to look at.

"Freddie?"

The memory drains away, water in a sieve, takes all her humor with it.

"I never went to college," she says.

Roni's expression freezes over. "Never had a pet," she says, trying to deflect.

"I never got married," Fred says, a challenge.

A small, pregnant pause.

"I never got old," Roni says finally, eyes drifting to her tombstone.

Fred takes a long swig. The vodka burns her throat.

"I never died at eighteen and left my best friend alone," she says, her voice a whip.

Roni's eyes are unreadable. "Pour some vodka for me, Freddie," she says. "I've done that one already."

Fred--

--wakes to knocking on her dorm door. She tumbles out of bed, trips over her shoes and nearly brains herself on her desk before she can wrench the door open.

Roni's stands there, waiting, and Fred gasps at the bruises lining her cheekbone, the cuts weeping blood on her forehead. They stare at each other until Roni's mouth quirks, an imitation-smile.

"Fancy meeting you here," she drawls.
"Come in," Fred says, irritated, and Roni limps in after her. "Sit down, I'll get the first aid kit."

She turns to go to her closet. They're friends now, but they're both sixteen and taciturn and she's not sure Roni will listen to her. She's not sure that Roni listens to anyone. Fred turns back with the kit and freezes when she meets Roni's open stare. Roni stares at her from her place on the bed, eyes huge and glossy in the near dark, legs crossed at the ankle.

"Gonna get started, doc?" Roni asks.

Fred recovers, flips on the light as she returns to the bed. The fluorescence makes Roni stark, reveals the blood at her side, leaking through her shirt. Fred curses under her breath.

"Big mouth for someone so quiet," Roni says and extends her leg as Fred kneels by it. "'s not that bad. Guy went wild with a glass shard."

"Do you have a death wish?" Fred demands, then nearly bites her tongue in consternation. Roni laughs, a giggle-cough that ends on a hiccup, startlingly joyous.

"Manners, Freddie," she says. "Or you'll start a fight just by opening your mouth."

"I don't even have to do that most of the time," Fred mutters, more to herself. "Come here, let me see that cheek--"

"They don't leave you alone, do they?" Roni says, obligingly turning her cheek so Fred can dab antiseptic on it. She doesn't even flinch at the sting.

"They do now," Fred says. She can be frank here, in the privacy of her room, away from prying eyes. "Ever since you punched Lockwood, anyway."

"Good," Roni says, with such satisfaction that Fred almost drops the cotton swab. Her throat feels dry all of a sudden and she swallows hard as she dabs again at Roni's cheek.

"Why did you help me back then?" she asks.

It took her a year to gather the courage to ask. Roni's silent for so long that Fred thinks she didn't hear the question.

"Lockwood deserved it," Roni says finally. "I wanted a fight. You looked sad about your book."

They're all pathetic, stilted excuses. Fred glances up through her eyelashes, but Roni isn't looking at her. Instead she watches the window. Her cheek ticks, a bomb set to detonation. Fred swabs Roni's cheek again. This time Roni flinches, so Fred withdraws and tucks the swab back into her kit.

"All fixed," she says.

A lie, but there's been plenty of those tonight.

When she looks up again, Roni meets her eyes. They stare at each other: Fred on her knees, hand frozen in the first aid kit and Roni above her, considering.

"Thanks," Roni says, breaking the tension. She's on her feet and out of the room before Fred can respond.

#

Every few weeks, the scene repeats with few variations. Roni's bruises and cuts get deeper, more brutal. Fred's first aid kit gets bigger.

#

When she comes home after her junior year at St. Mary's, seventeen and on the cusp of adulthood, she finds her father waiting for her in her bedroom, surveying the pictures on her otherwise bare walls. Photos of Roni, none of him.

"Your Headmistress called," he says, not looking at her. Fred braces herself. "She says you'll need to repeat chemistry if you want to graduate on time." He turns to her finally, eyes blank with rage. She shrinks back, a turtle retreating to its shell. "I thought I told you that you would be at the top of your class this year?"

He's so much taller that Fred has to tilt her chin to look at him.

"I am, in history and literature."

He hisses through his teeth. "They don't count for anything--"

"They do matter--"

"Winifred, what you do is a reflection on me and on your mother," he says. "What would she think if she could see you today?"

Fred thinks of that portrait and its kind eyes. "She would be proud of me," she says, because she has to believe that.

Her father's eyes narrow. "No," he says, and she braces herself. She knows what's coming, she knew it the moment she came in and smelled the whiskey on his breath. "Your mother died because of you, Winifred, and every year it becomes more and more obvious what a waste that was. She would see what I see--a disappointment. A failure."

Fred can't breathe. He's never said this to her before, not like this. She'd always been able to tell--his constant, sullen silences, his deliberate refusal of comfort or even kindness--but he'd never crossed their deliberately placed line. Nausea bubbles in her stomach, but she forces the words past it.

"Screw you," she says.

His mouth narrows. She might pass out.

"Excuse me?" he says, dangerous, quiet.

Fred's body is an earthquake, built from tremors. "I won't do this anymore," she says. She can't believe she's saying it out loud. "Live in this house with you. Stay here. I can't. This is my last gift to you, father--an empty house and a daughterless life."
She turns on her heel and hurries out before he can say another word. As soon as she's out, she begins to run, tripping down the staircase and hurtling out of the door, breathing hard.  Her legs are shaky as a newborn colt's, but this time she doesn't stop at the gardenia bushes--she goes all the way out, past the gate, into the world beyond.

#

Roni's house is the only place she can think to go. She's standing on the doorstep, unsure if she should knock or run. There are things some friendships don't really cover.

The door opens, and a wrinkled prune of a woman stares up at her. Her hair is iron wire, wrestled back into a semi-respectable bun. Her eyebrows are similarly unruly, but she conquers them too, conveys disdain and surprise with one wriggle.

"Is Veronica here?" Fred asks. This doesn't look like a woman who appreciates nicknames.

The woman gives her a good, long stare.

"Winifred Dolan," she says. Fred jumps. "Yes, you must be--even if Veronica had not told me about you, I could have guessed. Nothing gets those other biddies on the Board all atwitter as much as a girl like you, m'dear."

Fred's hand clenches. "A girl like me?" she says through gritted teeth.

The woman smiles, exposes teeth wide and artificial.

"You," she says, "are black. A girl like you in the midst of their nice, respectable white babies? Well, that makes those ladies uncomfortable."

Fred folds her hands to hide their shaking. She doesn't know what to say, what to do.

"What about you?" she asks.

"You're a child," the woman says. "Children are all morons, no matter what color they are. But you are certainly more responsible than Veronica." There's frustration in her voice, but pity too. Fred's never thought of Roni as someone to be pitied. "And you get Ms. Feinstein in a tizzy, so that means I rather like you. Why are you here?"

Fred won't lie, not to this woman. "I ran away from home," she says.

The woman stares her down. Her eyes are gray slates, the color of river rocks worn smooth by water, and they are just as unreadable, immovable.

"I am Veronica's grandmother," she says, finally. "You may call me Ms. Hayes. You are going to need clothes, but there is room here and God knows that Veronica could do with some civilized company for once. You have managed to get her in line more than I ever have."

"I can stay?" Fred says, uncertain.

"Did I not just say that, child? I do not hold with stupidity so you had better learn to keep up. Ignorance is born out of laziness, as I always say. Even the most empty-headed trollop can learn to keep her wits about her with practice." Ms. Hayes steps back and aside, turning around. Fred hesitates on the threshold and she looks back, impatient. "Well? Come in before you let that draft inside. Drafts are deadly to old women."

Fred is bareheaded, empty-handed. She left everything behind when she ran and she's not sure if she'll ever go back to that giant, empty-eyed house with the white walls and open, drafty rooms. If she turns back now, her father might still take her back, with an apology. She could go back if she wanted. All she has to do is turn around and leave this house behind her.

She steps across the threshold.

#

Roni doesn't ask her why she needs a place to stay. They don't talk about it because they really don't talk about much--they spend time together in pockets of silence. Roni is a stray cat, drifting in and out of the house as she pleases, so Fred ends up spending more time with her grandmother.

Ms. Hayes is debonair in her own way, but frumpy too, insistent on twisted woolen sweaters that, from their girth and stolid lumpiness, are obviously handmade. Nothing store-bought is so intent on being functional over beautiful. She speaks candidly, sometimes with a mouth that reveals shades of Roni. Fred's always surprised when that happens--she had begun to imagine Roni had sprung out of air and a death wish. But Roni is not born from starlight and stubbornness after all--instead, she is a bit of wet clay, molded. Roni, malleable; rain might as well fall up instead of down.

Midway through July, Fred wakes to Roni crashing into her dresser, swearing heavily. Fred sighs and climbs out of bed, switches on a lamp.

Roni is a mess--tangled hair, bruised and bloody. She stinks of booze.

"How did you even get home?" Fred mutters as she takes Roni's elbow, steers her toward the bed.

"Friend," Roni slurs and slumps on her covers, stares at her shoes like she's never worn them before. Fred sighs again and kneels to take them off for her. Roni rests a hand on her bent head, giving benediction. "Fighting," she says, more sigh than words.

"I can see that," Fred says, taking off the first shoe. "You ever think of not getting yourself half-killed whenever you go somewhere?"

Roni begins to laugh, wet hiccups that start to sound more like sobs.

"Can't," she says. Fred wrestles off the second shoe. "Had to do it, he called her a whore."

Fred frowns. "Who did?" she asks.

Roni's eyes are glassy, unfocused. She's half-asleep already.

"Couldn't stop him then," she says, so quiet that Fred has to lean in to hear, hand tightening on Roni's foot. "Couldn't--but can now. I can. And I deserve this, what I get, all the damage, because I couldn't do it then, couldn't-- So scared, I was scared and I let him hurt her, but this time I stopped him--"

"Roni," Fred says and Roni stops, stares down at her. She seems so small, hunched in on herself. A cornered kitten lashing out whenever someone steps too close. Fred squeezes her foot again, releases it. "Go to sleep," she says.

Roni lays back, doesn't bother with her dirty pants or shirt. Fred pulls the quilt up over her shoulders, enveloping her. For a long moment, she stares at Roni's face, wan in the electric light, the fan of sooty eyelashes against her cheek.

She turns around, switches off the light. Goes to bed, but doesn't sleep.

#

Fred wakes up to the steady beep of machines and white, featureless walls. The room whirls, dizzying and terrifying. Everything smells of antiseptic and her father sits in a chair next to her bedside, suited and pristine, his dark eyes trained on her face. She stares up at him, disoriented. She can't remember how she got there.

"You're awake," he says, rising to his feet. "I'll go get the doctor--"

"Wait!" Fred calls, but he's already gone.

She surveys the room with rising panic. She remembers going to bed in the hotel room she was sharing with Roni as they traveled across the country after graduation, before they tried to find jobs or schools. Everything that's happened since going to sleep is a lacuna in her mind.

A doctor comes in, followed by her father. The doctor is old, hard-eyed, pale as his coat.

"Winifred? I'm Dr. Baxa," he says, bending over her to study her face. He takes out a penlight and flashes it in her eyes, temporarily blinding her. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," she says, on automatic. "But I can't--why am I here? What happened?"

Baxa exchanges a look with her father. Fred's hands curl in her stiff, starched sheets.

"You don't remember?"

"The last thing I remember is going to bed last night," she says. "Or--Tuesday night, I guess. What happened? Is Roni okay?"
They look at each other again. Fred wishes they'd stop doing that--

"Your friend Veronica--" Baxa starts, then pauses, coughs. "I'm very sorry, but your friend Veronica died yesterday afternoon."
Fred learned at St. Mary's that space is entirely silent, a vacuum without noise. She understands what that means in the moment after Baxa speaks--can't hear anything, even the thud of her heartbeat. She can see Baxa's mouth moving, but his words filter through in pieces.

"--blow to the head was too severe," she finally makes out. "You were luckier."

Words are painful, razors in her throat, but she forces them up anyway. "What happened?"

"You were in a bar," her father says and Fred's eyes snap toward him. His face is expressionless, unmoved. He's never liked Roni. "Your friend started a ruckus and hit her head during the fight. The bartender said you probably slipped and fell as well, hit your head. That's why you can't remember."

"Slipped?" Fred says, nonplussed and nauseous. How had she--?

"In her blood," her father says.

Bile rises, so sudden and violent that Fred can't even gasp a warning before she's heaving over the side of the bed. Baxa runs out of the room, yelling for a nurse. Smooth, cold hands press to her forehead and Fred thinks it's the nurse until she turns her head, dry-heaving now because there's nothing left in her stomach, and sees her father sitting next to her. His eyes are trained on her face, and when he sees her looking, he withdraws his hand. Fred remembers that same hand on her forehead when she was seven and came down with a fever, one of the only times she can remember him touching her gently. She nearly asks for him to reach back out, but bites her tongue.

"It will be alright," he says.

Fred doesn't have the words for how wrong he is. She feels like a dried husk, emptied of everything as if she had vomited feelings and words along with food. He looks at her again and stands.

"I'll go get the doctor," he says and hurries out.

Fred--

--kneels in front of the tombstone, staring up at Roni's ghost. The sun dips below the army of trees beyond the graveyard, a sinking red eye.

"Back then, the doctors told me that they couldn't know when I'd recover my memories.  They said weeks, months," Fred says. "Guess they didn't think I'd ever get them back if it took longer, but two days ago I fell in my kitchen and hit my head. I--dreamed of that night, remembered it for the first time in forty years."

Roni watches her. Her features are fading, transparent. More and more a ghost.

"Does it help?" she asks. "Remembering?"

"I don't know," Fred says, because she has to be honest under that stare. "It was bad enough that you were--gone, but not knowing how it happened was almost worse. I've imagined it so many ways now that the truth just feels like another version I made up." She smiles, a little bitter. "Maybe it is."

"No," Roni says. "You know how it happened."

Fred sighs and they're--

--alone in a bar, a few months after graduation: it's seedy, rank with urine and sweat. The drinks are disgusting, but Roni knocks them back easily. It's nearly closing and they're the only ones left except for the bartender and a guy at one of the back tables. The bartender steps out to stock up in the back, leaving them with a bottle of vodka.

"We should leave," Fred mutters into Roni's ear. Roni shakes her head and when she turns, Fred can smell the vodka wafting off of her. "It's getting late."

"Can't leave until we're wasted!" She pinches Fred's shoulder, a touch too hard. "You're not even drunk. We're celebrating, remember?"

Fred rolls her eyes. "I'm driving tomorrow," she says.

"Well, now," someone drawls next to them, "didn't expect to see old classmates in a dive like this."

Fred turns and her eyes widen. The other man in the bar stands next to them, smirking. She recognizes that face.

"Lockwood!" she says, a little too loud.

Lockwood's eyebrow rises. "Dolan and Hayes, right?" he says. "Long time no see." After their last disastrous encounter, Lockwood had left Fred alone--when he'd graduated, three years before them, she hadn't seen him for months. "Why're you in these parts?"

Roni's too drunk-easy to do anything but laugh. "Celebrating!" she says. "Just graduated a week ago. We're having a little road trip."

"Both graduated, huh?" Lockwood says. His face is friendly enough, but it's a veneer coating over the malice. Fred shivers, uneasy. "I didn't think you had it in you. Sure you didn't sleep your way to that degree, Dolan?"

There's a long beat where Fred can't manage anything other than shock--she opens her mouth, sure she should say something, but not sure what, when Roni starts laughing.

"You think you can shit like that?" she asks. Everything about her is indolent--the way she lounges back on her stool, the arch of her eyebrow--but Lockwood doesn't see the tension in her arm, the white-knuckled grip she has on her shot glass. He grins, all teeth.

"I think we're not in school anymore," he says. "Nobody here to stop me from saying God's truth; your friend's a whore. All her kind are."

A long, tense pause follows. Fred's heart is in her throat, choking her. Roni takes an age to set aside her glass.

"I hated him in school," she says to Fred. Her tone is still mocking, but her eyes are chips of ice. "But he's even worse now."
She stands. Lockwood gets in her space, leans down into her. He's still grinning.

"You might have punched me once before, Hayes, but you're still just a--"

Roni punches him in the nose before he can finish. Even drunk, her strike is just as quick and precise as it was three years ago underneath that tree. Lockwood yells, grabbing his face.

"You little--" Lockwood reaches for Roni, knots his fingers in her hair and drags her to him. "How dare you!"

"How dare I?" Roni half-screams, eyes wild. "How dare you, you bastard--"

"Roni!" Fred struggles toward her, but Roni pushes her back, out of the way. "Roni, stop--!"

"She's twice the person you could ever be!" Roni screams. She's punching and clawing whatever part of Lockwood she can reach, and he has trouble keeping hold of her. Blood gushes out of his nose, drenches his shirt. "You're a pathetic scumbag and she's--"

"She's the mud on our boots, Hayes," Lockwood yells back, "and the sooner you get that, the better!"

Roni bites his arm and he swears, shoves her off of him. Fred pushes forward again and sees Roni pinwheel back, the spread of her arms like some great bird's--a swan's, maybe, or an albatross'. Before Roni can right herself, Lockwood shoves her again and this time she falls, hitting her head on the corner of a table and collapsing. Time slows until all Fred can hear is her heart thudding in her ears. She can't speak, can barely breathe. There's blood on Roni's head, soaking into the floor, and she's so still.

There's a long silence as Lockwood stares down at Roni's prone body.

"Shit," he whispers. Before Fred can stop him, he's running out of the door, into the night.

Fred's frozen, down to her fingers. Roni isn't moving, there's blood in her hair, Fred's seen blood in her hair so many times, but never so much of it, scarlet in the dim light of the bar--

Fred shakes herself, hurries to Roni's side and drops to her knees. Roni's so still. Fred reaches out with shaking fingers and touches the wound. It's so small, but there's blood everywhere, soaking up Roni's hair, spreading across the floor. Fred's hands are covered in it.

Fred presses her hand against Roni's head-wound. Her hand slips and she falls forward. Roni's not gone, she can't be. Fred's breath quickens, stomach rolling. Roni's the only one Fred's got, she can't be--

"No," she says. "No, she's fine, she just needs a doctor--" She looks up wildly, but they're still alone in the bar. In the chaos of the fight, she'd forgotten that the bartender was still there too. "Help!" she screams.

It takes a moment, but the bartender finally comes running out.

"What the hell--!" he demands, but he's already grabbing a phone, dialing. "I was outside, what happened?"

Fred can't answer. Her words are sludge, stuck tight in her throat; she can't do anything but stare at Roni lying there on the floor. Within minutes, she can hear the sound of sirens in the distance. The bartender comes up to her and tries to pull her away.

"Come on now," he says, like she's supposed to just leave Roni there on the bar floor, all alone.

Fred struggles away from him, grasps Roni's arm. It's still warm but oddly limp. Fred's mouth trembles and she doesn't know in that moment if she wants to scream or sob. Roni's head tilts as Fred pulls at her and her dark eyes are fogged over, wells of still water. The ambulance sirens grow louder.

"I'll stay," she whispers. "I promise." She can't force the words any louder, they're so lodged in her throat. "Oh God--"

She chokes on the plea. She tries to stand once, twice, slips hard in Roni's blood. Her head hits the floor with a crack, stars dangling in front of her eyes and the sirens ring in her ears, she can't think, everything is going black, so dark, and she--

--looks up and Roni's still there, watching her.

"They never found him," Fred says hoarsely. She hasn't been screaming, but her vocal cords are strained, raw. "Lockwood. I didn't remember him and neither did the bartender. He got away with it." She struggles to swallow. "He's probably dead by now."

"He better be, that bastard," Roni says. She sounds dreamy, far away. "He deserves it, for what he said about you."

Fred breathes in deep. "You shouldn't have done that," she says. Saying this out loud is like popping a balloon, hearing that rush as all the air gusts out. "You shouldn't have--"

"I did it for you!" Roni snaps.

"I didn't need it!" Fred snaps back, angry now. "I didn't need my honor avenged by some--some white knight savior swooping in to shield me! I didn't want that!"

"You heard what he said about you," Roni says. "How could I just--" Her hands ball into fists and she throws her head, stifled and furious as a trapped mustang.

"You wanted a reason," Fred says. Roni stares at her, but Fred can't stop herself from talking. "All those nights you would go out into those bars and pick a fight--I never knew why, but I can guess. You wanted to find someone there who would give you a reason to fight--to try and get yourself killed. "

Roni shivers, shakes her head. "No," she says.

Fred's laugh is a wet hiccup. "You threw yourself off cliffs just to prove you could survive the fall. But you know what? Even if you survive nine times out of ten, if you throw yourself off them enough you're going to hit the tenth one, the one that will kill you. You didn't know how to quit, Roni. You didn't want to quit until you were dead. I guess you got what you wanted, in the end."

Roni's nearly gone now--just her eyes remain, shining in the twilight, pale as the moon. This girl-child, unrepentant and razor-edged--she's as much Fred's imagination as the truth.

"I blamed myself for years," Fred continues. "I thought--if only I'd stopped her sooner, if only I'd talked to her more. But I was just a kid myself, what the hell did I know? I was never able to let you go because I kept thinking if only I'd done this or that." She shakes her head. "I'm done with that now, I think. I know what happened now. That's all I wanted, for all these years. To know."

Roni blinks once, twice, and disappears, mist on the wind. It's strange to miss a hallucination, but Fred aches, all the same.

She creaks to her feet, using the tombstone as a crutch. It's freezing under her hand. She looks down at the stretch of her fingers then curls them into a fist and knocks once, twice against the stone. Above the army of trees beyond the graveyard, the moon rises, its winking eye blotting out the stars closest to it. Fred turns, leaving the tombstone behind, and does not look back.