Every Secret Thing

“Well, you may have a job one day, and you’ll need to drive to work.”

Alice thought about this. “I can take the bus.”

“Sure, for now. Depending on where the job is. But don’t you want to learn to drive?”

She should say yes. Yes would be the normal answer, and Alice was so keen to do and say the normal things, the expected things. Which were not, of course, always the truthful things, or the things she really wanted to do. She was back on her ice floe, looking for a place to jump. Or maybe a conversation was more like a game of Twister, which Helen sometimes played with Alice and Ro

“I like those new Volkswagen Beetles,” she offered.

This pleased Sharon for some reason. She squealed with delight, bobbed her head. “Me, too.” Then her gaze shifted and her eyes widened, a sign that Sharon was about to become Very Serious. “What are you not going to do, Alice?”

It was true, Alice thought. Almost no one’s eyes are the same size. And Sharon ’s right eye was a lot bigger than her left.

“ Alice?”

“I’m not going to do anything…bad. Never again.”

“I know you won’t. But specifically, what’s the one thing you should not do?”

Not kill anyone? But not even Sharon would ask Alice such a question. Sharon believed in Alice, always had. You didn’t have to understand a person in order to believe in her.

“I’m not going to”-she struggled, trying to figure out what would be the worst thing she could do-“be idle.”

“That’s a good idea. Idle hands…” Sharon laughed, an apologetic bark, although Alice couldn’t see what was fu

Alice looked up, amazed. How could anyone think she wanted to see Ro

“Her family moved. My mom said.”

“Yes, but they’re not that far away. They’re just off Route 40 now, in those row houses near the old Korvette’s.”

“Korvette’s?”

“It’s a Metro now. But when I was a kid, it was a discount department store, like Kmart or Target. I bought my first record album there.” Sharon seemed on the verge of going off into one of her long stories about her childhood, stories that mystified Alice, for they seemed to be told to show how much alike Sharon and Alice were. Yet they always ended up proving the opposite.

Luckily, Sharon didn’t succumb to one of her odd reveries this time. “Look-Ro

“Harkness.”

“What?”

“She went to Harkness, right? The one near D.C.” The old grievance still gnawed. Ro

“She started out at Harkness. She finished somewhere else. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she deserves a new start as much as you do. But I don’t think you two can be friends again.”

“We weren’t friends,” Alice said. After all these years, she couldn’t let this pass. She didn’t always mind when people got it wrong and said she killed Olivia Barnes, but she wasn’t going to be known as Ro

“Right,” Sharon said, with a bright, placating smile. “Now, are you sure you don’t want a sundae?”

“I guess I will. After all, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be walking a lot.”

“You are? Oh, that’s great, Alice, just great. Really.”

Was it great because walking was good for her, or great because it was Sharon ’s advice? Alice had learned long ago not to ask such questions out loud. But she had never stopped thinking them. Sometimes, she felt her fat was like a cave, and she lived far inside it, watching the world with glowing eyes.

Saturday, April 11

6.

Ro

She had been home for almost a month, for her birthday was in March, a few weeks before Alice ’s, a fact that almost no one ever remembered: Ro

On this particular Saturday morning, she awoke with a desire for honeysuckle, but it would be another two months before the first blossoms appeared, longer still before they could be sucked. She decided to look for a substitute at the convenience store at the foot of the long, winding hill where her parents now lived. She had the day off, so she walked straight there as soon as she was dressed. After surveying her choices through the fogged glass, she selected a Mountain Dew. She knew it wouldn’t taste like honeysuckle, but the color was close.

The dark-ski

“Seek,” he said angrily, pointing to his forehead. “Seek.” Seek what, Ro

Ro

Familiar furnishings marked the new place as “home,” whatever that was, and it was clearly nicer than the old one. Her father used to say the town house on Nottingham was built of cereal boxes-it was damp and frail, the walls yielding easily if someone happened to bump them hard, or even throw a punch. And with three boys around, those things happened. Bumps. Punches.

On that hot March day, it hadn’t occurred to Ro

“Try not to jostle it too much,” the counselor had said.

“Is it fragile?”

“Not exactly. But-well, you’ll see. When you get home.”

The counselor liked Ro