Chapter 21
I stay in my bubble with Alex for the next couple of days. I don’t go to class, even though only two are officially canceled. I make up a transparent lie about being sick, which none of my teachers call me out on. It’s officially the time of year when no one wants to work.
Alex is a wonderful distraction, but no distraction could keep me from wallowing over Madison. My self-pity causes me to be lousy company. Alex notices something is up, but he doesn’t push me to talk, just checks in that I’m okay and promises he’s here for me.
I leave our bubble only once, to sneak into my dorm in the middle of the day when I know Madison should be in class.
She’s mercifully absent when I arrive, and I spend all of five minutes rifling through my stuff, throwing everything I need to bring home with me in a duffel.
I’m on edge the entire time, bracing myself for a turn of the doorknob, desperate to avoid a confrontation.
I keep imagining what I’d say if she walked in.
Where to even begin? I feel like the aggrieved party, but I know I owe her an apology too.
Then I wonder—would she even want one? According to her, we’re just roommates.
I know how to make up with Madison, my best friend.
I don’t know where to begin in trying to fix things with Madison, my distant roommate.
I get in and out seamlessly, the anticlimax of it a weird letdown even though I should feel relieved. I know I’ll see her eventually—we still live together—but when I make it to the beginning of Thanksgiving break without running into Madison, it feels like I might never see her again.
On Wednesday, I sleep in too late and wake up to Alex nudging my arm and informing me that I’m getting a call.
It’s my mother, and it goes to voicemail before I can answer.
I scroll through my notifications and find a string of texts from both her and my father asking me my ETA and wondering if I’m on the road yet and, hello, am I alive?
I send my mom a Leaving now! text and reluctantly part ways with Alex, whose flight to New Jersey isn’t for hours.
The drive to San Diego takes twice as long as usual, partly because of the stop-and-go holiday traffic and partly because there are two incidents where someone in front of me slams on their brakes and I get so anxious I take the nearest exit and sit in a rest stop, breathing deeply until I can get myself back on the road.
Having all this time with just me and my thoughts allows me to spin out about both what I’m leaving behind and what I’m heading toward. I don’t want to think about Madison or Ellie or how much I’ve fucked up. But if I focus on what lies ahead of me, it’s even worse.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, aka the Holiday of Family Fights, and on the off chance I get through it without screaming my head off at Sierra or having Sierra scream her head off at me, we still have to make it all the way to Saturday night, when Sierra flies back to Baltimore.
The sun is setting by the time I roll up to my parents’ Mission Revival home in La Mesa, a town on the east side of San Diego.
Coming home brings on a flurry of mixed emotions.
I’ve always kind of hated how plain and beige and blah my childhood house is, especially in contrast to the colorful Talavera decorations filling the lawn with life, a loud presence that always felt like my parents were overcorrecting for the house’s architectural plainness, resulting in a strange, disjointed image.
Still, my heart almost hurts at the fondness I feel for this sight that is as familiar to me as my own face.
It looks the same now as it did the first time I saw it, when I was seven, and the last time I saw it, when I was in my thirties.
My father comes out to greet me when I’m halfway to the door, and the sight of him pulls me up short.
He’s so young.
It’s funny how you never notice aging as it’s happening. Never has that felt more true than it does right now as I stare at my father.
At forty-eight, he has deep-brown skin and salt-and-pepper hair, only unlike the last time I saw him, it’s more pepper than salt. The smile lines that frame his mouth and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes will get much more pronounced over the years.
I start to choke up and take a deep breath to pull myself together.
I’ve never been a very emotional person.
My dad always made offhand comments about me being his “rational, levelheaded” child, which pleased me when I was younger until I realized that my sister’s irrational, dramatic ways tended to yield more desirable results.
If I cry, my father will know something is wrong.
“It’s not that heavy,” I say when he reaches for my bag, but I hand it to him all the same.
“There’s my little gordita,” my father says affectionately in a tone that would have you thinking he’s paying me a compliment when he’s actually calling me chubby. “Right in time for dinner.”
I roll my eyes, ignoring his problematic term of endearment.
“Josephina, look at you,” my mother exclaims once I get inside. She walks around the kitchen island to wrap me in a hug, then backs up with a frown, eyeing me up and down. Here it goes. “You’ve lost weight. Are they not feeding you at school?”
One day, I’ll sit my parents down and teach them that comments about weight are inappropriate greetings when seeing someone for the first time in a while. But not today.
Instead, I take in my mom the same way I did my dad.
My mother always hid her age well. Even when I last saw her, at sixty-two, she dyed her hair regularly, so it was always a shiny chestnut brown.
It’s the same now, as constant as the facade of our home.
Her copper lipstick is immaculate, and I know from experience that it will somehow magically stay that way throughout dinner.
I see differences only once I look closely.
I think she has more fine lines than I remember, which bolsters my sneaking suspicion that she started getting Botox in her fifties and lied when we asked her about it.
Those lines are emphasized by her matte foundation, which she will trade for a dewier look in time.
I have to admit that my mother always has been and always will be the most beautiful woman in the world to me.
When I don’t respond, she continues, “Dinner’s almost ready. Go put your bags in your room and grab your sister, would you?”
I want to protest, but there’s no point in delaying the inevitable.
It’s strange to step into my childhood bedroom.
Next year, my parents will convert it to a home office with a Murphy bed for guests.
I remember throwing a fit when I came home for Thanksgiving sophomore year and found my stuff in boxes, the change well underway, without any heads-up.
It had felt like such a betrayal, like I was no longer welcome in my own home.
Here and now, the room is a time capsule of my teen years.
There’s a teal accent wall that my dad painted for me the summer after I finished seventh grade.
The accent wall has poster after poster tacked to it, nearly all of them of the Jonas Brothers, except for one of One Direction, added to the wall in the spring of my senior year of high school.
I turn to my dresser, which is covered in trophies, ribbons, and medals.
I wince in embarrassment at the veritable shrine to myself that I had forgotten existed.
I pick up a silver debate trophy and turn it in my hands.
I go to the next. A bronze debate trophy.
A few medals from decathlon tournaments.
Some ribbons from Future Business Leaders of America.
I take in each one, none of which I remember winning. I have a vague recollection of going to academic tournaments, but they’re foggy memories at best. My mom insisted that I join the debate team as well as Future Business Leaders. Good preparation for law school, she said.
What I find surprising is the number of science-related medals. I had forgotten I was good at science and that I’d liked it. It had never been this all-encompassing passion or anything, but it was my favorite subject in school.
It makes sense, the more I think about it: Science was Sierra’s thing, and I never wanted to put myself so solidly in her shadow like that. So even if I was good at science, even if I liked it, I never would have pursued it in any real way.
I consider the awards with a tilt of my head.
Maybe I’ll try some STEM classes next semester.
I turn around and gasp. Sierra lurks in my doorway, eyebrows arched in judgment.
I haven’t spoken to Sierra since I’ve been back, and we hadn’t spoken in years before I died, but it’s not the time and distance that make the sight of her so strange.
It isn’t even the fact that my sister—my older sister, who I always looked up to and feared and resented in equal measures—is so young, standing in front of me at the tender age of twenty-two.
No, what’s strange is that she looks so miserable.
I don’t remember this misery.
Was I so in my head I just didn’t notice?
She has bags under her eyes, her hair is a mess, and her mouth is contorted in a deep frown. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and I get the sense that if I don’t speak, she won’t either, and we’ll have a long, tense, quiet weekend ahead of us.
I think of the Sierra I left behind when I died.
Did she feel guilty that we hadn’t spoken for so long? I wonder. Did she regret not swallowing her pride and apologizing when she had the chance?
I regret it, I realize. Maybe I always have. Every single day we didn’t speak, every time I was reminded of her, every time I thought of calling but didn’t—was that regret?
I can’t go back. I can’t apologize to that version of Sierra. I can’t sit with her and have a rational conversation and try to get to the bottom of why she insists on always bringing me down.
But I can work toward something better with this Sierra. Maybe.