Pictures of You (5 page)

             
Just as quickly as my laughing episode began, I began crying. Three weeks worth of stored up tears poured out of me. Snot, too. Rose leaned across the desk, resting a hand on mine. Another hand slid a tissue box over. I grabbed fistfuls and started wiping, blowing and tossing them aside until, like giant popcorn kernels, white balls encircled my ankles on the floor.

             
“Tears,” Rose said, frowning sympathetically.

             
At the end of our fifty minute session (which ended up being two percent talking and ninety-eight percent crying), Rose scribbled something on her notepad, ripped out the page and slid it across her coffee-stained desk. “Your homework for this week.”

             
Express your anger in constructive ways.

             
“Like how?” I said as worked my way out of the spongy couch.

             
“Go somewhere private and scream. Beat a pillow. Break something,” she said as she opened the heavy office door. A man with wet hair, a crooked tie and plastic grocery bags covering his feet sat in the waiting area.

             
“Hello, Steve,” I heard Rose say as I swung the glass door of the main entrance open. Hamster-sized drops of rain greeted me outside.

5

              Twinkies. I love them. Too much, maybe. But you see, Twinkies and I have a love-hate relationship. So you may or may not be surprised to hear that, for the past three years, Twinkies and I hadn’t been on speaking terms. While I allowed myself a
respectable
portion of dessert on special occasions—a sliver of cake at a birthday party, three bites of rich cheesecake at a wedding, two or three red vines at the end of a long day—I vowed to give up Twinkies when I reached a size fourteen my freshman year of high school. It was the only time I ever struggled with weight. It was the same year my parents separated for eight months and my next door neighbor, Adam Christensen, turned into a vegetable after bashing his head in a skateboarding accident. You see I love Twinkies, but Twinkies don’t love me. I’m allergic to them. They make my thighs swell.

             
So there I sat on Abby’s bed, armed with a box of Twinkies. Although my happy-go-lucky size four jeans screamed in protest, my longtime lust for creamy, spongy goodness forced me to succumb. I carefully opened the box and laid out all ten oblong shapes of heaven in a neat row. I squeezed, poked, prodded and lifted one to my nose to inhale the sugary vanilla scent. Prudently, I placed it back on the bed.

             
Looking around me, I noted the room was exactly as Abby had left it. Her neatly made bed clashed with the tornado-hit room. She’d made her bed every morning, but rarely touched the dust-collecting crap on the floor. “It gives me a sense of order. Having all my stuff laid out in clear view,” she’d once explained when I questioned her. Rumpled clothes, chunky boots and
Rolling Stone
magazines camouflaged every inch of the ancient orangey-brown carpet. Dripping candles, odd knickknacks and guitar picks covered every surface of furniture in the room. Postcards, magazine clippings and posters of rock stars dotted plum-colored walls. Her favorite poster of the ‘80s Goth band, The Cure, hung on the ceiling directly above the pillow on her bed. She would gaze into singer Robert Smith’s heavily made up face as she drifted off each night. April said a face like that would give her nightmares, but Abby loved her men moody and weird. A younger version of Robert Smith was Abby’s dream boy.

             
Actually, we were both huge ‘80s music fans, which is pretty rare for people our age. We both got a real kick out of the big, teased hair, the heavy eye makeup, the melodramatic vocals, the robotic synthesizers. We liked most of the stuff from the era, but considered New Wave the best. We loved to mimic some of the over-the-top fashion we’d see in music videos on YouTube. We’d go to ‘80s theme parties wearing thrashed-and-safety-pinned t-shirts, florescent leggings and fedoras or big obnoxious bows in our hair. We watched
Pretty in Pink
and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
more times than I can count. We had several lines from
The Breakfast Club
memorized. Molly Ringwald was our hero. Abby would often joke we were born in the wrong era.

             
I ripped the Twinkie wrapper open just a tad to get a better whiff. Three years of self-control dissolved as I took my first bite. Sticky sweet love exploded in my mouth. I savored the first cake, but barely noticed my rebellious hands tearing through the plastic barrier of cake number two.

             
It didn’t make sense, how Abby’s material stuff carried on, life as usual, while her lifeless body was stuck in a box, buried deep in the earth. Shouldn’t her earthly treasures disappear in a poof like she did? Even her alarm clock acted as if nothing happened, obnoxious and perky, stating the time in bright red numbers. I grabbed the gloating machine, ripping the plug out of its socket and threw it across the room. I was pleased when it hit the wall and tore one of Abby’s Morrissey posters. There. Now something was different. The room needed to know Abby was not here. That she would never be here again.

             
              I began to nibble on cake number three. The experience brought me back to scorching summer days, Abby and I sprawled on her living room floor, like cats, too hot to move. A vintage fan blew cool relief, the breeze running its fingers through our sweaty hair. Twinkie wrappers ever encircled us.  Like dozens of other times, we played our favorite game,
Would You Rather…?
Go a week without makeup or a month without shaving your legs? Lose your hearing or become paraplegic? Make out with the young version of U2’s Bono or have the perfect boyfriend?

             
When we wore that out Abby said, “What’s your greatest fear?”

             
“I don’t know. Maybe going blind. Not being able to see the beauty around me. Not being able to take another photo. Why?” I rolled onto my side to study her face. She was beautiful even at fourteen, with unlawfully clear skin, chopstick thighs and silky orange hair.

             
“I don’t know. Just wondering.” She bit her lip.

             
“What’s yours?”

             
“Losing you,” she said without hesitation. She was gazing at the ceiling then, playing with the charm bracelet on her arm, the one I gave her on her twelfth birthday. She did that—looked away when things got too sentimental, too gushy.

             
“You won’t lose me,” I said, but I knew it was a promise I couldn’t keep. Even then I knew life was unpredictable, like the weather on a spring afternoon. There were no guarantees. “What else are you afraid of? Besides spiders and country music,” I added, jokingly.

             
“I don’t know…well actually…promise you won’t tell anyone?” she asked, her eyes cutting into mine.

             
Surprised by her sudden intensity, I laughed. “Sure, I promise.”

             
She hesitated before saying, “I’ve always been afraid of dying young. And…I’ve always thought that maybe—”

             
“What?” Again, I laughed. “Of course you won’t die young. You’re not allowed to. We’re growing old together, remember? We’re going to be each other’s maid of honor and our kids are going to be best friends…You’re going to be a rock star, just like you imagined. And then someday we’re going to be the coolest old ladies around.”

             
She tugged her brows together and bit her lower lip. “I guess you’re right.”

             
“You’d better not die on me,” I threatened. “If you do, I’ll make you eternally miserable, I swear it. I’ll put spiders in your casket. Lots of spiders. And I’ll play country music at your funeral. I’m not kidding.”

             
She raised her hands, stick-‘em-up style. “Okay, okay. I get it. I’m not dying young.”

             
“That’s right. And never forget it,” I said before throwing a Twinkie at her face.             

             
As I came back to the present, I was shocked to see half of the Twinkies gone. High on a sugar buzz, I took the remaining five and hid them under the bed. Maybe the cat would find them and finish them off. I stretched out on the bed, upside-down and hugged her pillow against my chest. I noted her scent of Jasmine and Suave shampoo and her natural Abby scent in her bedding. The smell filled my throat with cotton balls and caused my insides to ache. And then I felt a crushing feeling, like a brick wall fell over onto my chest.

             
              I sobbed fiercely, the kind of sobbing that causes your whole body to tremble. And then, without fully realizing it, I kicked Abby’s headboard. One swift blow punctured the flimsy wood. A strange noise escaped my throat. A sound so alien, it scared me. But seeing the hole somehow filled the void in my heart—just a little. I kicked some more and some more and laughed a bitter, angry laugh. The kicking /laughing/crying felt oddly therapeutic. Cleansing. I stopped kicking when a splinter pierced the sole of my shoe, the sharp edge poking through my sock. I only felt a tad guilty for ruining her bed frame—she told me once it had been her grandmother’s—but overall I felt relieved to have damaged something.

             
              So much for expressing anger in
constructive
ways
.
I rolled up into fetal position, smashing my face into the pillow.

             
“Why did you leave me?
Why?
” I whispered.

             
Despite my sugar high, grief yanked me down into a long but restless sleep.

***

              In the morning I had a throbbing headache. A Twinkie hangover. Realizing I should take some aspirin and go to work, I called in sick instead. On the phone Janice sounded unconvinced. I was lucky she didn’t fire me right then and there for lying. But I wasn’t being totally deceitful. I felt completely trashed—physically and emotionally. Hit and flattened by a steamroller.

             
I tumbled out of bed and peeled off my strangling clothes. There were seam marks in my skin where my jeans had been. I raked through Abby’s drawers and pulled out a massive vintage Depeche Mode tee and a pair of plaid boxers and dressed myself. Her essence engulfed me, giving me the impression I was being hugged. My eyes got all leaky again.

             
As if she had psychic abilities and sensed I was coveting Abby’s things, Hannah, her mom, called to say she was coming over tomorrow afternoon to collect Abby’s things and will I please leave a key under the doormat for her?

             
Crap. The bed frame.

             
“What are you going to do with her stuff?” I asked, an ice-cold panic washing over me. I picked up her favorite guitar, a Yamaha acoustic-electric and pressed it against my chest. She can’t take the guitar. That thing was a part of Abby. Like an appendage. It still had her fingerprints all over it. It was proof she was once here.

             
“Keep a few things that are sentimental. Donate the rest to Goodwill,” Hannah said absently. I heard Abby’s brothers wrestle in the background.

             
I wanted to say, “How can you get rid of her stuff like that? She died like
three weeks
ago. Are you really that anxious to put her behind you? Maybe you should scratch her face out of all the family photos while you’re at it. She was only your
daughter
. Shouldn’t we leave things be? Leave her stuff the way it is? Maybe even consider opening an Abby museum?” But instead I said, “I’ll be here. Come over whenever you’d like.”

             
I looked around Abby’s room and suddenly felt like hoarding. My inner pack-rat began scheming.
I
wanted her stuff. All of it. I’d lusted after her music collection for half of my life. Although she was a size smaller, her clothes were baggy and I often borrowed them. And her scrapbooks. I could not let Hannah take those. They meant the universe to me. Untidy and swimming in graffiti, those scrapbooks sandwiched our dearest memories. Dozens of photos of us spanning eleven years of friendship. Her crazy poems and lyrics and memorabilia flat enough to stuff under a plastic sheet protector overflowed the binders. Not to mention the hundreds of concert ticket stubs. Like me, she kept each one.

             
Like a winner of a thousand dollar mall shopping spree, I began grabbing fistfuls of stuff, shoving whatever I could into a Washington Apples cardboard box. First I snagged the scrapbooks, then some of my favorite clothes: her band tees, her punk-rock plaid pants with zippers, her military-style jacket with a Siouxsie and the Banshees patch sewn on the back. Next the CDs. I considered taking them all, but then realized Hannah would be suspicious. So I took the most coveted ones. The imports, the bootlegs. The rare ones: Cuddly Toys, Freur, Dali’s Car, Celebrate the Nun.
The Top
album signed by Robert Smith himself.