In this town, silent and cold with its trucks and rotting fish, every building the color of dead seagulls, nothing much ever changes. But every year when the thaw begins, like clockwork, something does change—it starts to smell a bit worse. And for some reason it stirs something within you, and feels almost inspirational. Almost. That’s what I experienced on my walk home—the smell of frozen fish bodies softening in the sun carried to me on a wayward breeze. And it almost stirred something within me. I noticed a tiny sapling doing its very best to push a leaf out of its way so it could get a look at the featureless gray sky above. I wanted to say, Why bother, little guy, go back to bed. 

It reminded me of earlier. Our bio teacher had been trying to do a bean seedling project for weeks, but it wasn’t working out. Those seedlings weren’t nearly as industrious as this one. My friend Danny was watering them but he zoned out and started watering the table instead. I screamed and grabbed the watering can out of his hands and started laughing in a wild way where I thought he was laughing too, so it took me a second to realize he wasn’t. I stopped laughing and felt horribly out of touch. But it was Danny who was out of touch. He wasn’t laughing at all, he was just staring off into the distance, and then he came to and sat down without mentioning it. If you’re gonna act stoned, you have to at least be funny about it. For the rest of the class, I drew things with my finger in the giant puddle he’d made. I drew a million eyes. I drew a tree with a million roots. 

*

Back at home, I found a fur trapper hat on the table and put it on, which made me feel like a hot ticket. My dad came in and started joking around and yelling at me. He got it online, he said, he wanted people to think he was rustic. We lived in Maine, but not the way he wanted to live in Maine. He had some pretty inspiring ideas about becoming a lighthouse keeper. 

He tried to grab the hat off my head, and I ducked under the piano in the middle of our living room. The piano was full of dust because we only used it occasionally as a prop for comedic effect. I was covered in dust and I had a fur trapper hat on. I got it in my mind that it would be my new thing, and that I would never take it off. It’s important to occasionally put some effort into your personal brand. 

Anyways, you probably want to hear about the interesting stuff, so here goes. My best friend Helena died exactly five months ago, on the first day of November. Everyone was talking about her drug problem and Oh, why didn’t someone help her! but it wasn’t really the overdose that killed her. If she wasn’t so hotheaded, she wouldn’t have done it in the first place. It was probably a spontaneous decision. What she really died from was lack of entertainment. And here’s my most current issue: even in death, she isn’t quite entertained enough, so she has decided to spend her time haunting me. 

Not in a cinematic way, standing at the end of my hallway with a sheet over her head, but in a way that makes me think I am going crazy, like I am cursed to always be looking for her, always trying to find her. 

But every Monday I have teletherapy, so I guess that could be a good place to unpack that kind of thing.

“Helena was cruel and irresponsible,” I deftly explained to Lisa, my teletherapist, after I logged on to get this week’s argument started. Lisa spends every session telling me I feel guilty for Helena’s death. 

Lisa shook her head at me. 

What Lisa doesn’t get is, I don’t have time for this kind of back and forth. I’m only going to be a teenager for so long. I have beautiful pictures to paint. Potential to fulfill. But then Lisa got me on a rant about the whole Dilaudid thing. I said something like, “I am so mad at her for that. Out of all the things to overdose on, she had to pick Dilaudid. Fucking Dilaudid. Some prescription bullshit. The woman who raised you doesn’t want to see you cold on the floor when she barely saw it coming. You disappear for a few months. You give her a warning. And then, nice and neat, she gets a call from the police and they say, So sorry, ma’am, there’s nothing you could’ve done. She was on four different synthetic drugs and her feet had rotted off. She was huffing lighter fluid and smoking cigarettes and she overdosed and exploded at the same time. She was gone just like that, probably didn’t feel a thing. But getting loaded in the next room? To your sleeping mother? When you could have just not done that? There’s nothing more messed up. She’s gonna think about that forever, what she could have done. Helena was a terrible person.”

Lisa never lets me talk for long, and she hates it when I try to be funny. So I knew something was up when it became terribly quiet in my bedroom. The Wi-Fi had gone out. I could tell she was cut off right before interrupting me because her red lips were pursed.  

Anytime it gets quiet, I start thinking about the morning of the day Helena died. She had poked her head into my English class and shook the bottle like a rattle, showing off. She was wiggling her eyebrows like, Sophie, let’s go, what are you doing, wasting your time with How to Kill a Mockingbird, or whatever. But I happened to really like that book. It made me want to read other books and see what they had to offer. 

Helena got so messed up that day. She laughed at everything I said. She sang me Christmas songs and made up the lyrics. She held my hand down the hallway. She fell asleep at our school gathering. We were sitting on the gym floor and she put her head in my lap and then took my hand and put it on her head, like she wanted me to play with her hair, like she had forgotten that I wasn’t her mom, and she wasn’t a child anymore, and that we were in the middle of school gathering, and then she passed out. So I drove her home and put her to bed. She was awake when I left—she was smiling, she had that steamed-up look in her eyes, and I knew she was blacked out and wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow. She grabbed my hand and kissed it. And then she must have taken more, because she was with it when I left. I remember that. She must have taken more, because later that night she walked out into the woods and died under a tree like an outdoor cat. She wasn’t wearing a coat. Her mom found her with her eyes closed. It just looked like she was sleeping.

Lisa came back online. We stared at each other for a moment. I was thinking about asking if she believed in ghosts, to bait her a little bit. I used to pretend I was a little bit schizophrenic to my old therapist. Not enough to get institutionalized, just enough to stir the pot. But I didn’t. I just hung up.

*

I had been thinking about Helena in art class earlier that day, too. Maybe that’s what put me in a weird mood, overthinking the fish smell, staring at unremarkable foliage. In other classes, we’re supposed to act smart and pay attention, but in art class it’s different. We just look around for inspiration. At each other, at the stuff on the walls, and then we end up looking at ourselves in the portrait mirrors a little too closely, with a little too much attention, and it makes everyone a little depressed. 

My teacher Mrs. Kelly is friends with Helena’s mom. I haven’t really checked up on Helena’s mom, because we weren’t really close. Aren’t. Helena’s mom and Mrs. Kelly are the kind of women that believe everyone in the town is either bad or good, and they stay up all night on the phone deciding who’s who. If you know the kind of woman I’m talking about, it’s a very specific kind of woman. I’m pretty sure they decided I was the bad influence in the whole situation. I know this because when everyone else is looking at each other, looking around, looking in their portrait mirrors, Mrs. Kelly is sitting behind her desk looking at me. Helena’s mom must have told her I was the bad egg. That it was me who got me and Helena into messing around. But it was a joint effort.

Everyone thought Helena was hot shit. And let me tell you, it wasn’t because she was actually a passionate, helpful human being. She was a loser, but the kind that had so much unearned confidence, that she made it seem like you were a genius for hanging out with her and doing nothing. Like she had invented being a loser and nobody had ever thought of being an apathetic shithead before. Like no one had ever tried smoking weed and getting takeout. And when you were doing it together, it was like it was your secret. Sometimes though—this is what our friends at school had no idea about—being with her was embarrassing as hell. Like when she had been high for days and hadn’t changed her clothes, partying with some guys she met on the docks, and she called me from some gas station twenty miles out of town, and I had to go and get her and say, Yes, that’s my best friend, the girl sitting on a milk crate covered in her own vomit, the girl you can smell across the room. That’s who I hang out with, all the time. We’re actually probably gonna hang out after this. 

What I liked about Helena is that she always had something new going on, something different. She was always coming up with interesting things to do. Even looking at her was interesting. She would come to school wearing neon pink skinny jeans, knee-high leg warmers, crocs, and a hunting jacket. Even when it seemed impossible, even when you looked around and saw a thousand gray buildings and cars and sidewalks, there she was in a ridiculous outfit, making someone scream in laughter. 

Anyway, that’s what I ended up thinking about in art class, instead of getting any better at art. Even though Helena ruined art class for me, her death opened up a lot of time in my life. I started drawing way more on my own. All the time I used to spend getting high and doing stupid shit was now open for the taking. My schedule was totally freed up. 

What do I like to draw? That is the kind of question I wish Lisa would ask me. I like to get high and draw flowers. There’s nothing like eating a bunch of Oxy and looking at flowers. I like to draw the ocean too, because it’s so beautiful in the winter, steaming with sea smoke, glittering like it’s full of crystals. I can never get it right. When I come down, my drawings look like shit. I still put them on my wall. I have shitty, ugly, inaccurate pictures of the ocean all over my wall. 

There are paintings of Helena up there too. Parts of her, nothing too complete. I’ve never been able to capture her. She’s slippery like that. There’s a painting of her hiking shoes, kicked onto the ground and left behind. There’s a blurry one of her standing on a dock, based on a picture I took. I was laughing at her because she had done a terrible job dying her hair but it turned out to be a nice picture. There’s one of her left eye, brown and sooty with mascara. There’s a painting of her hands from when I was trying to learn to paint hands. She is all over my room in bits and pieces. A bunch of little squares into alternate universes, where she comes and goes on her own terms.

*

I learned I’m failing algebra because Helena has been doing my math homework for the past five years. My math teacher stares at me just like my art teacher does, because this whole time she’s been suspecting that I don’t do my own homework, and now that Helena’s out of the picture and my grades are sliding, she has her proof. She should have realized sooner. Helena didn’t only do my math homework, she did everyone else’s. That was something she was truly incredible at. She was the only person in the entire school who really had a handle on calculus.

Even though Helena was smart, I was never shy to remind her that she was terribly irresponsible, even as we drank vodka out of our Nalgenes in the dugout shed during second period. I told her she had incredible potential if she could just summon a scrap of ambition. I told her that her hair looked terrible and that she needed to take a shower. No one else talked to her like this.

Helena tried to explain calculus to me when we were sitting outside the gas station drinking the vanilla lattes that came out of the machines. I wish I had paid more attention. She was drawing it on the fog in the window. Steam from the coffee spilled from her mouth like she was some kind of oracle. Her plastic spikeball earrings were the only pop of green in the entire world. In her big hunting jacket, she looked like an elder wizard, but I knew she was just some skinny jackass. And now I can’t do algebra. If I don’t pick up the slack, I’ll need to do the class over. And on top of that, I can’t get those lattes from the machine anymore. I tried to once, but the steam coming from the cup looked like some kind of cartoon ghost and all I could taste was calculus, so I poured it down the drain.

*

At lunch the next day, I was thinking about Danny’s lab accident and staring at him. I wanted to throttle him for no reason. He was in a focused mood so he didn’t notice my silent rage. He was rolling joints as fast as he could because our lunch break was only twenty-five minutes, and a teacher could turn the corner any second. Danny prided himself on rolling perfect joints, but even when he tried to go fast, it took forever. 

Ever since Helena died, he’d been selling joints to eighth graders. That’s what all my friends were doing, packing up joints with a supernatural focus and cutting them with oregano. They smelled like oregano all day when they did this. They made the whole lunchroom smell like oregano. 

I don’t want teachers to feel bad for me, or give me any excuses. But after lunch in algebra class, I ended up falling asleep, which didn’t help my case. I told my teacher I was coming down with something and I needed to go to the nurse’s office. She squinted at me like I was blurry. And I think she was right. That’s a good word for me lately. Blurry. 

I’ve been feeling like I shouldn’t complain at all, like I’m not allowed, because Helena’s mom has it so bad. When Helena was fourteen, her dad overdosed too. Her mom used to rag on us all the time and ask us when we were gonna have babies. She wanted grandkids, she said. She wanted her house to be filled with babies. She wanted to take them to the pool and put them in little floaties and float around with them. That was her dream. 

I wonder what she thinks happened to Helena. You’d think someone capable of inventing calculus could figure out that a bottle of Dilaudid to the face would make your heart stop. But I guess not.

When I found out Helena was dead I didn’t even cry. I screamed my head off. I went outside with my dad’s ax and I hacked up a tree that had fallen down. It was just like her: wasted, indifferent, pale and skinny and passed out in the backyard. I cut it into hundreds of pieces. We had made plans that weekend. We were going to drive to the flea market and buy paintings. We were going to smoke under the bridge and try to catch fish with our hands. She didn’t give a shit that we had plans that weekend. She didn’t give me a heads-up. 

After the nurse gave me some ibuprofen and stared at me for a while, all I wanted to do was go home. But I’ve been on a watchlist lately so it’s getting quite difficult to just walk out like I used to. So I just waited in the lobby for the day to be over. There’s a spot next to the vending machine that’s nice to hide in, so I sat there with my legs splayed out and slipped in and out of consciousness for a while. The bricks on my back were a distant pressure I could puzzle over until the bus came. I had taken what I think was Gabapentin at lunch. I stole it from my aunt a while ago, which wasn’t my best moment, because she has cancer. I wasn’t very impressed with its effects. It was just at the bottom of my backpack, tossing around with some other miscellaneous, dirty pills. I’ve been making an effort to use up all my nondescript pharmaceuticals. Waste not want not and all that. 

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, the bus had appeared outside the double doors. I’ve never been able to catch the bus because Helena always distracted me after school. It never occurred to me how easy it was. How this is what everyone else did, every day. 

I clambered on and settled in with my hood up. I was charmed by the way it hummed around me, the coolness of the window on my forehead. I started looking at the grass swaying in the breeze. Maybe it was because I ate the rest of what was in my backpack a half hour before but it was so beautiful. So beautiful. I know if Helena were here we would run up to the front of the bus and demand to be let off, so we could run through it, so we could feel it between our fingers, and it would just be the funniest thing. 

I wanted to paint her in that field. Standing in it, laughing, like she might have if she was really there. But I had never painted all of her. It had been impossible so far, to trap her all on one page. She was always jumping off of it. So I didn’t try. 

Instead, I went to 7-Eleven to get soup for me and my dad. Sometimes I feel like we’re trapped in some kind of Victorian era period drama. Our house is so old and creaky, and we float around it eating buttered bread and soup for every meal. We always eat the same two kinds of soup, and the 7-Eleven around the corner always has it. He also loves Irish butter. When he opens the fridge, if there’s new butter, he moans in pleasure and pats it lovingly. He leaves me a twenty in a glass jar so I can go to the corner store and get butter and bread and soup. 

A lot of my dreams are set in that 7-Eleven. It’s because I only go at nighttime and it swims around in my brain before I go to bed. It’s a problem because whenever I go there it feels like I’m in a dream and I can do whatever I want and nothing will happen.

That’s why it was weird when I got there and Helena’s mom was in the soup aisle staring at me like a rabid coyote. She was all bristly, her mousy hair scraped into a bun, her parka falling off one shoulder, her boots scuffed with dirt, her hands full of jars of tomato sauce. I felt like I got punched in the chest because I had been doing everything in my power to not think about how alone she was, in her house, and how all her family is in California, and how she moved here for Helena’s shithead dad who went and died in their bathroom, and how they made a shithead daughter who went and died under a tree, and now she was alone, in the soup aisle with me, and we both had to remember at the same time exactly who we were and what was happening. 

She dropped the thing of tomato sauce. It fell to the floor and it became the only spot of color in town, there on the 7-Eleven floor. A thousand rosehips bloomed at once. Blood welled from a thousand pinpricks. It smelled like lunchtime, it smelled like a summer that was stolen from somewhere else, and it was a pond of red between us that neither of us knew how to cross. She wanted to kill me, I thought. Or maybe she wanted me to move in with her, and take me to the pool, and put me in a floaty. I couldn’t figure it out. I turned on my heel and went home without my soup. I don’t know why I always run away from situations where I really have to be in the moment to figure out how to respond. I like to be wrapped up in things, distracted. It’s truly embarrassing. But there was nothing there to take me away from Helena’s mom in the soup aisle beside my own two feet. 

Dad was working so I sat alone in the kitchen. I’ve been crying here and there since Helena died, but this time was different. I fell to my knees in front of the piano and I cried. I raked my nails across the wood of the floor and I cried. I thought of tomatoes and rosehips and blood and all the color that drained from the world after Helena died and it all broke my heart so I cried, and cried, and cried. 

And then I put on my coat and the fur trapper hat that I had forgotten about and a headlamp on top of that, and I went to the paint store. Helena’s mom wouldn’t be at the paint store. 

It was there that my shopping cart became a garden. A wonderful garden, the kind from fairytales, that a witch might guard with an evil fervor, that a poor pauper might sneak into and get smited for trying. I was the witch, I decided. I get to be the witch. 

I put green in there because it wasn’t quite May and I was trying to summon the pea shoots from the earth. I was trying to coax the fiddleheads from the snow. I was now asking those sprouting, unborn things to tap on the ice and beg to be let out so they could reach their tiny green arms up to the white spring sky. I was trying to resuscitate the dead. 

I put orange in there because of what me and Helena did in the summertime. We would buy shrooms from the lobstermen and eat them in the afternoon and go to the hill and watch the sun explode. We would watch it burst into sweet running rays and we would taste it on our tongues and listen to the birds cry in ecstatic joy. We get to do this tomorrow too, the sun keeps going around and around. 

And I put red, of course, because when we went to prom together her dress was the color of chili peppers and she looked like a supermodel. I had red because she would wear lipstick sometimes, only when she felt like it, and in the strangest of moments, like when we were in the car headed to the drugstore in the middle of the night and she would be putting lipstick on, and it was such a surprise, that her lips were the color of cranberries in the most inconsequential moments, like opening a book and finding a rose pressed between the pages, secret and fragrant and laughing at you for thinking books were supposed to be black and white. And I had a shade of red for every traffic light she had blown through in her Volvo. I had a shade of red for every time her nose bled, spattered on the bathroom sink, dripping onto my sweatshirt, smudged across her skinny dry hands, her white smiling teeth. I had enough red to fill her back up again, I thought. It just might be enough.

I chose the wall behind the 7-Eleven. I was worried about Helena’s mom still being there for some reason. I was afraid to see her because I thought I’d get in trouble. For what? Lisa would ask. I would say it doesn’t matter now, because Helena’s mom has no business being out here so late at night, and it’s just me and all this paint I spent all my money on. Me and this big brick wall. 

I hoped that my shivering delirium, the terrible lighting, and the biting headache from the lack of substances in my system would all contribute to a sort of trance state, something from which I could produce commendable art. I was hoping that I could actually get it right if I couldn’t see what I was doing, if I gave up my free will to gravity and God and whatever else is out there to guide my hand. Maybe I had failed so far because I was painting in conditions that were too perfect. Maybe I needed a little rustic inspiration. Maybe I needed to paint like a caveman in rapture, by the light of my battery-operated headlamp.

I knew Helena was already in the paint, because there was nowhere else in this town she could possibly be. The rosehips were dried up on their branches, rusted and withered by the winter air. The grass in the fields had been chewed up by the snow, mashed into the dripping earth. The tomato sauce in the soup aisle had been cleaned up by now. And Helena was certainly not underground. She was in the shopping cart I rolled all the way here. She was in the paint cans. She was lost in there, swirling and unrecognizable, out of control, shapeless and impossible to pin down, just as she preferred. But this isn’t about her, I thought. This is about me and my art teacher and her mom and the rest of this town. 

I stood on a bunch of milk crates, and I painted for a really long time. I didn’t have a plan. I wanted her to be wearing every color. I wanted it to look like she had just gotten back from the paint store. I wanted it to look like she had erupted from my enchanted flowerbed.

I heard footsteps behind me. A policewoman stopped at the edge of the curb. Her arms were folded and she was watching me. It looked like she was standing at the edge of a parade waiting for some boy on a bicycle to act out. But it was just me in the dark with my stupid hat and my headlamp and my aching arms and my paintbrush. The streetlight was a spotlight on that policewoman, and when I looked at her it was like she was the only thing that existed. She probably knew Helena, I thought. And me. We were never well received by the police department. But we just looked at each other for a while and she did nothing, so I turned back around and kept painting. 

I was in the middle of giving Helena some flowers to hold. I was giving her peonies and roses and daffodils. I didn’t hear the policewoman leave, but when I turned around an hour later, she had turned into a fire hydrant. 

And then, it was done. 

I hopped off the milk crates and turned off my headlamp immediately. I did it so quickly I scared myself a bit. I didn’t know how afraid I was of seeing it until I did that. I was plunged into darkness. It was so late, so quiet. It was just me and Helena at 7-Eleven. Just like old times. 

I squinted a bit, but the streetlight wasn’t bright enough to show me what I’d done. I could make out a dim shape, black bricks.

“Hi,” I said to her. 

She didn’t say anything. It occurred to me that maybe she had been hiding so much because she was shy. She was embarrassed about how badly she messed up. 

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not mad anymore.” 

It struck me that she might not care if I was mad at her. That she might have other things to worry about. It struck me that she had died. 

The ocean churned softly in the distance, beyond the bridge. I thought about the fish stirring beneath it. A chill crossed my shoulders.

“I’m failing algebra,” I added. 

And then I walked home. 

*

In the morning, I went to see it, pretend I had nothing to do with it. I turned the corner, and right on the 7-Eleven wall, there was Helena in the gray morning light. It was a bit abstract. Blockish. But it was her, I had done it. I felt myself smiling. My teletherapist was wrong. She wasn’t gone, she had just been hiding in the paint store, and here she was, in all her glory. All the good parts, anyway. Her colors, her laughter. The parts I wanted to remember. 

But then I saw Helena’s mom was there too, standing, looking. I froze, and my heart started thudding. I thought I was gonna throw up. I wondered how long she had been standing there. If she had been on a walk trying to distract herself and this giant mural of her dead daughter wasn’t helping at all. If she was on her way to the 7-Eleven to get more tomato sauce because she hadn’t gotten any more after she dropped those jars, when I didn’t even think to help her clean it up. I wish, in moments like those, I could just calm down and be kind. And present. But I stood a little bit behind her, thinking about myself. Waiting for her to notice me. She didn’t. 

I wondered what would happen if I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault that Helena died. Or hers. If I said, don’t cry, mama, it was all the fault of your shithead daughter. We had nothing to do with it, I would say. Some people are just difficult to entertain. Some people just don’t think about anybody but themselves. 

Then, I stepped forward a bit. I stood next to her. I looked at her, but I didn’t say any of those things. I waited for her to say them first. 

The hairs escaping her bun were waving in the wind like the grass I had seen from the window of the bus. They were so beautiful. A heartbreaking kind of beautiful I only thought was possible to see if you took a bunch of painkillers. But there it was, the softest of hairs floating on a mother’s head, trembling, and I wanted to take her head and put it on my shoulder. I wanted to climb inside her parka. It seemed like if I pulled her close to me it would be the right thing to do, but I didn’t. Even the thought of her turning her head and looking at me made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t know what she would do. Beat me senseless. Chastise me. Make me go to school. Women like her are unpredictable sources of intense power. 

Someone had left a red rose under the mural, right on the cement. It looked like it had fallen out of the painting. Me and Helena’s mom stood there waiting for anything else to fall out. One of Helena’s earrings, maybe. She was wearing her spike ball earrings. They were easy to paint. Electric green, like leaves in the sunlight, flashing and alive. We waited for them to fall, but they didn’t. We waited and waited and nothing fell. 

My dad stepped out of the 7-Eleven. He didn’t notice I was standing there, he just stepped off the curb and walked across the parking lot. He looked older in this light. I realized it had been a long time since I looked at him. I watched him stop. He took a deep breath in, and then held up his palm. 

The sky glowed white, and I brought my palm up to it as well. Something very small dropped into my hand. The air smelled like a garden. It had started to rain.