Too Bright to See: Prologue–Chapter 6

There’s an elaborately carved front door, peaked roofs jutting out in all directions, tall windows with shapes flickering behind them.

I’m suddenly, irrationally convinced that my bed is toppling over. Like it’s unbalanced, perched precariously on the top of a mountain and about to come crashing down.

I only occasionally believe my mom: When the sun is bright and I can explain away strange hands touching my neck or a mysteriously slammed-shut door as stray gusts of wind in a drafty old building.

I hold her tight, and breathe as shallowly as possible until her sobs subside.

She’s always been the type to put her arms around her other friends, play with their hair, a casual affection that has always seemed impossible to me.

I pretend to be a character in a book, sometimes an abused but brilliant servant girl, sometimes a spy at a seedy hotel, sometimes a princess mistaken for a commoner.

“You’d make a great scullery maid.”

I brake sharply, jump off, and walk back home, leaving my bike sprawled on the side of the dirt road, one wheel still spinning forlornly.

It’s a little dented, grubby, a word for it might be “battered.”

The door creaks open wide as soon as we step onto the porch. Mo jumps back and eyes it warily.

After my dad died, Mom says that she got frustrated with all the stupid condolence cards people sent, all sunsets and flowery messages about better places and how everything happens for a reason.

She started designing her own cards that were sarcastic and funny but also still sad, and started bringing them into little stationery shops around the area.

As far as I know she’s never even held a boy’s hand. Mo flushes, just a little.

“Well, maybe,” Mom relents.

I grudgingly shake my head, and Mom laughs.

The day after, most of the class, even the boys, had brought in stuffed animals from home. Our teacher said we could keep them on our desks if they weren’t distracting, so the next day I brought one in too. Except instead of an animal, mine was a fuzzy representation of the bubonic plague.

We would paint each nail a different shade of blue, or alternate Christmas colors, or a rainbow. Most of the time it looked like we dipped our entire fingertips into the bottle. This precise, methodical application is new.

“You might want to ask your mom to take you shopping,” she says, brow furrowed as she focuses on each nail.

She’s not trying to be mean, I don’t think, but there’s no nice way to tell someone that they’re doing something wrong. Which, apparently, I am.

My stomach starts to race, and my heart matches it thrum for thrum.

My stomach roils again, a stew of surprise and shame and curiosity.

One time he brought some man over for dinner, a prospective boyfriend named Parker.

I doodled on the knee of my threadbare jeans with a ballpoint pen until he left, and Uncle Roderick never brought him around again.

I don’t sound very convincing, but forge ahead.

Moira shakes her head vehemently.

She’s walking gingerly, limping a little.

Since camp isn’t happening this year, I’m spending whole days out of doors. Staring up at clouds, climbing trees, reading. Looking for minnows in the creek. Like a character in a book, some old-fashioned story about a wholesome childhood before the Internet existed.

I mean, it barely exists at my house, but I still know about it, and sometimes Moira will show me memes or videos or whatever. Knowing about the Internet but not having it is very different from it not existing.

When I do those things they’re just...the things that I’m doing. Not some plucky heroine, just a...just me. Even reading on the porch sounds more interesting when I pretend to be a character in a book doing it.

If it was winter it would be too cold to play outside, with clear, sharp-toothed icicles ringing the eaves.

A figure moves behind me in the mirror, I whip around to see who it is and suddenly I’m awake, gasping for air, sprawled on my bed, sheet twisted around my legs, fan blowing softly across my body.

The drawers have been pulled completely out of their sockets, the contents strewn all over the floor. The doors to my closet yawn open, my clothes pulled off the hangers and flung around the room.

Moira’s basement is like a second living room, fully furnished with couches and a bathroom and a huge TV, nothing like our dank cellar.

I thought about it, since I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with girls liking girls. But I didn’t want to smush my face against theirs, either. Maybe it’s something I’ll figure out when I’m older. But if I admit my indifference everyone will think I’m weird.

And I imagine myself floating past all of them, always on the outside, no one noticing me, because there’s nothing to notice. Like their groups form a complex molecule, a perfect organism, impenetrable and complete and I’m a speck of dust caught in the light, visible and alone and insignificant.