Saving June (4 page)

I switch on June’s stereo, slide the disc into the tray and flip it to the first track. There are a few seconds of silence, and of all the things I expect to hear from those speakers, it most definitely is not the startling guitar riff that comes
blaring out. A backbeat chimes in, an echoing bass, accompanied by a man’s voice—rough around the edges and with a certain swagger to it.

I turn the volume up a few notches and stretch out on the floor, my back on the carpet, and feel the bass thrumming through me, vibrating.
You make a grown man cry.
This is not June’s music. When we were younger, she plastered posters of manufactured boy bands on her walls, bought the albums of teen pop princesses. As a teen she listened to girls with guitars who didn’t really know how to play, mainstream hip-hop hits, whatever generic pop medley was currently in high rotation on the Top 40 station.

The rock song ends and another by a different band comes on, slower, sort of bluesy. The singer is almost mournful, talking about a girl who had nothing at all.

I stay on the floor and listen to one song blend into the next. Some I can place—after all, everyone knows “Stairway to Heaven,” and Laney had a Billie Holiday phase that lasted long enough for me to recognize her distinctive velvety croon—but most of them I don’t recognize. Each one is different, ranging from amped-up rock to jazz refrains, strung together in a way that feels like it should be schizophrenic, but somehow the transitions work. It’s not jarring. The music rises and falls in the way a conventional story is supposed to, building up and hitting the climax and then easing into the conclusion.

I close my eyes and try to feel whatever my sister had
felt in this. Which song was playing when she carefully, purposefully, popped sleeping pill after sleeping pill, those last moments of awareness before she slid into dark, permanent nothingness? More important, who made it in the first place? And what did
they
mean by it?

Did anything mean anything?

Aunt Helen comes over the next morning, as promised. She and Mom sort through the crazy amount of flowers and cards covering every spare inch of our living room. I stay in my bedroom, listening to June’s CD on the neglected Discman I recovered from the depths of my closet. I can’t stop thinking about it.

This isn’t June’s kind of music, and it’s not my kind, either. My iPod is loaded with recommendations from Laney, all of the underground rap she likes, and some of my favorite indie artists, like the Decemberists and Cat Power and Sufjan Stevens. The songs on this CD sound more like something my parents would’ve listened to when they were my age.

I listen to the music and stare at my walls. They’re covered in pictures I’ve taken ever since I got my Nikon SLR for Christmas and started taking photography more seriously. The only blank wall is the one nearest to my bed. I’ve been saving it for something special, but I don’t know what.

I’m still staring at the empty white space when Aunt
Helen comes up to my room with a sandwich and a glass of milk. I take out my headphones and sit up when she enters. She doesn’t knock or anything, of course. Just barges right in and looks at me a little suspiciously. I think she does this because she wants to catch me in the middle of something. She probably thinks I sit up here carving emo poetry into my wrists with a razor blade. It’s like I’m on suicide watch, by mere association.

“I made this for you,” she says, thrusting the plate into my hands. “You should eat something.”

I look down at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I hate jelly. I also hate when people come into my room without knocking.

“Thanks,” I mumble. She stares at me, frowning, until I take a bite. God, with the way everyone’s carrying on, you’d think I’m anorexic or something. I know I’m on the scrawny side, but seriously, this is getting ridiculous.

Satisfied, she takes a step back and surveys my room. Her frown deepens when her eyes land on the
Reservoir Dogs
film poster tacked up over my dresser. Jesus probably wouldn’t approve, so of course, by proxy, Aunt Helen doesn’t, either.

She tears her gaze away from the poster and looks at me again. “I know this is a difficult time,” she says. “It’s going to be an adjustment for all of us.”

An adjustment. Talk about your understatement. I put
down the sandwich and take a drink of milk, waiting to see where she’s going with this.

“Your mother and I are worried about how you’re coping,” she continues. “She says you haven’t…been very emotional.”

It’s true. I can’t deny it. I haven’t cried at all, not once. Even when I try to summon tears, it’s like the well inside of me is bone-dry. There’s just…nothing.

I glance away and shrug. “Maybe my mom should be worried about how
she’s
coping. I’m not the one getting drunk off my ass, am I?”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Aunt Helen snaps. “Your mother is doing her best. She only cares about you.” She sighs, the tension easing from her shoulders. “Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you.”

A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn’t understand. She can’t. If she did, she’d leave me alone instead of trying to force me to talk about this.

“You just have to take comfort in the fact June is with God now,” she tells me.

I stare at her coldly. “Don’t Christians believe people who kill themselves go to hell?” I ask.

Her eyes widen. “I don’t think—”

“Get out. Please.”

“Harper—”

“Just go, okay?”

Once she’s left the room, shutting the door hard behind
her, I lie down on my side. I hate Aunt Helen. I hate her stupid
your-sister’s-in-a-better-place
crap. Like she could somehow know that. The anger bubbles up again, white-hot, and I lash out one closed fist and punch the wall. It doesn’t make me feel any better, just hurts the hell out of my knuckles. My eyes burn like maybe I’m going to cry, but no tears come. Dammit.

Neither Aunt Helen nor Mom bother me for the rest of the night; I don’t know if I should be upset about that or not. Instead of thinking about that, or my weird, inexplicable inability to cry, I choose to focus on the CD and what it might mean.

So June liked classic rock. It should be an inconsequential detail. It’s not like it
matters.
But part of me feels like if I listen hard enough, I’ll decode some secret message, put together the pieces of a puzzle that will shed light on some aspect of my sister’s life I have no insight into. If I was in the dark about something as simple as her musical taste, what else was she hiding?

Examining that thought keeps me up all night. After hours of obsessing over it, I finally crack. I set the disc player aside and reach for my cell phone on the nightstand. Even in the dark, I can punch in Laney’s number by memory. It rings about six times before she picks up.

“Hrrrmph?” I figure that’s her version of hello at this hour.

“It’s me.” My voice comes out just above a whisper, too tight, and I don’t know why my heart is beating so fast.

“Harper?” she says. There’s a pause and the rustle of bed sheets. “What’s wrong?”

Of course she would think something is wrong. Nobody ever calls in the middle of the night with good news.

“Nothing,” I assure her hastily. “Nothing’s wrong. I. Sorry, were you sleeping?”

“It’s two in the morning. What do you think?” She yawns, and I can hear her shifting around like she’s settling back against the pillows. “So what’s up? You’re sure everything’s okay?”

I tell her about finding June’s CD, how it had been playing in the car when I found her, how I know the handwriting on the disc isn’t June’s, and it isn’t Tyler’s, either. Laney goes quiet for a long time, and I start to wonder if she’s fallen asleep somewhere in the midst of my rambling when she speaks.

“What does it say on the CD?” she asks.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
I recite it from memory. “I think it’s Latin or something.”

“Huh.”

“You ever heard of it?”

“I don’t think so. But that’s what the internet is for, right?” I can practically hear her grinning on the other end of the line. “I’ll come over tomorrow after school—we need to talk about how the hell we’re going to pull off
this California thing anyway, so we can look into it then. Unless you want me to come over right now.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to, but I will. If you need me to. Just give me five minutes—”

If I know Laney at all, the muffled noises I’m hearing are probably the sound of her getting dressed and grabbing her car keys. That’s the kind of person she is.

I quickly say, “No. Don’t. If you fail your exams due to sleep deprivation, your parents will never forgive me. It can wait.”

I don’t have to worry about exams this year. Two days after June and the garage and the pills, an emergency phone conference was conducted between my parents, the superintendent, the principal, the assistant principal and the guidance counselor, who all came to the conclusion that it would be best for all involved to allow me to skip the remainder of the school year and leave my grades as is.

As far as silver linings go, this one is really inadequate.

It turns out I was right:
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
is, in fact, Latin.

“Well, not exactly,” Laney corrects me. “I guess it’s, like, bastardized Latin? Kind of like a joke. It translates roughly to ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”

I raise my eyebrows. “All this from the internet?”

“Google is
so
my bitch.”

We’re in June’s room, on Laney’s insistence that there might be more clues to the identity of the mastermind behind the mix CD. She drapes herself across June’s bed, hanging off the edge upside down, her long wavy hair dangling to the floor. I feel sort of weird about her making herself comfortable on my dead sister’s furniture, but it’s not like everything can stay perfectly preserved in here forever.

I open one of June’s desk drawers and ask, “How were your exams?”

“Precalc can just fuck right off,” she moans, flinging an arm over her eyes.

“It went that bad, huh?” I wince sympathetically, then shoot her a sideways look. “So, um. What’s it like?”

“What’s what like? Precalculus?”

“No. You know. School.”

School is a subject neither of us has broached. Mostly I haven’t even bothered to consider the situation at Grand Lake High since everything went down, but now a sort of morbid curiosity gnaws at me. Laney pulls herself back onto the bed, sits with her knees under her and her hands in her lap, hiding behind a shroud of blond hair.

“It’s…really weird.” She clears her throat and glances at me nervously. “There was this assembly, for the whole school. All these girls crying who didn’t even know her. I swear I wanted to kick them in the face. Oh, and they postponed graduation by a week. The guidance counselors
made everyone quote, unquote ‘close to the situation’ have, like, an hour-long
debriefing
on our
feelings.
The administration is totally freaked out.”

“Really?”

“I think they’re afraid it’s contagious, and one day they’ll walk in and find the whole school drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid or something,” she says. She studies me carefully for a moment. “Are you okay? Like, generally speaking? I feel a little weird talking to you about this.”

I look away and shrug. “You shouldn’t. I wanted to know.”

“Yeah, but…” Laney looks ready to say more, but she just sighs again and lets it drop, much to my relief.

I open the next drawer, pawing through the mess of papers there. It’s more of the same—old homework assignments, class notes, a flimsy old binder project now falling apart. Nothing of importance. I wonder what my mother is going to want to do with all of this stuff. Throw it away? Or keep the room intact out of sentimentality, like some kind of shrine dedicated to June’s memory?

Okay, that would be totally creepy.

“Hey,” says Laney. She’s leaning over and digging stuff out from under the bed. “I think I found something.”

She resurfaces with a brown paper bag in hand. I sit on the bed next to her as she dumps its contents out onto the bedspread. Two CD cases tumble out. The first case cover has a painting of a man with a cigarette in his mouth,
standing in the night under a neon sign, a woman in a fancy dress to the side gazing straight at him. The second cover has a man’s head in black-and-white, overlapped by a series of squares and diamonds and circles, the lettering done in a light blue.

“Tom Waits,” Laney reads off of the first CD’s front, picking it up to examine it more closely. “Hmm. Never heard of the dude.”

“What about the Kinks?” I question. I pass her the other CD.

“Actually, I’ve heard of them. Do you remember that guy? Colin Spangler?”

“Didn’t you date him a few months ago?”

“Yeah, if by
date
you mean ‘made out with in the back of his mom’s minivan that one time.’ Anyway, he was really into them. They had this one song about, like, a transvestite or something? I’m pretty sure Colin was super-gay. I mean, I’m not judging. But. Definitely gay.”

Did my sister really listen to this stuff? I keep trying to make it fit with the image I have of her in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.

“Where’d she even get these?” Laney asks, shaking the bag like there will magically be an answer inside. Nothing but a receipt flutters out. She smoothes creases from the bag with her hands, and then stops abruptly. I follow her gaze to the black logo emblazoned on the side.

“The Oleo Strut,” I read aloud. “Where is that place?”

“It’s way off on Kilgore,” she explains. “By Stowey’s Pizza. I drive past it all the time, I just never knew what it was.”

She picks up the receipt as I scan the back of the Tom Waits album.

“A clue!” she shrieks, so loud I nearly topple off the bed, then springs to her feet frantically. “Harper, where’s the CD?”

“It’s on top of the stereo,” I say. I watch as she practically dives to snatch it off the desk. “And what kind of a clue?”

“A handwriting sample!” she exclaims. She jumps back onto the bed and hands me the receipt. “Look on the back. That
T
is
unmistakable.”