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By Root 1037 0

a jack-in-the-box that would horrify these girls. Plus today Victoria wasn’t walking in between her sisters since she’d gone to the clinic earlier with Mae, and Shern and Bliss could feel the spaces in their conversations that Victoria usually filled. When Shern said she’d been threatened again by that gang of girls who insisted that she thought she was cute, Bliss said they should organize their own gang and take them on. No Victoria to say that Shern should maybe smile once in a while, at least say hello back when people tried to be friendly, go to the vice principal about the threats. And when Bliss told Shern how the whole science class laughed when she whispered out, “Mrs. Potato Head,” when her classmate walked to the front of the room and her feet flopped out of her loafers and showed holes in her socks around the heel, Shern said, “That’s so corny.” No Victoria to remind them how hurt their own mother used to tell them she would feel when she was teased about things she couldn’t control. And now when they were at the corner of Addison Street and the holy girls who lived on the corner dangled their rope pleadingly, said they were trying to jump double Dutch but they needed somebody else to turn the rope, Bliss begged Shern, said it had been so long since she’d jumped, but Shern said, “No!” She had to go to the bathroom, and she didn’t want to leave Bliss on the corner by herself. No Victoria to tell Shern to go ahead, she would wait while Bliss played rope.

Bliss continued to beg, though. “Please, Shern, I never have any fun, please let me stay and play rope.”

Then Shern noticed the holy girls’ mother on the porch looking down at her almost as if to say, “You can go. I’ll keep an eye on your sister.” Shern gave in then. Really didn’t want to keep Bliss from the rope game, didn’t want to hear Bliss’s mouth about Shern never letting her have any fun. And Bliss was actually having fun; Shern could hear her laughing out loud as she started down the street to Mae’s. At least one of them should have a few moments of fun.

She carried Bliss’s book bag and her own; the two bags together were heavy, and she was panting by the time she got up on Mae’s porch, and dancing too, she had to go to the bathroom so bad. She reached under her collar and retrieved the key around her neck and burst through the door just in time to shoot upstairs and make it to the bathroom. She went straight to the bedroom the three girls shared after that, peeped in, figured Victoria was napping. That’s when the stillness in the house descended on her like a blue-black cloud bringing up a storm. Just those two twin beds with the beige-ribbed bedspreads, the plastic carnations in the clay pot on top of the radiator cover, the sinkable velveteen couch under the window, their footlocker in front of the couch as if it were a coffee table, with a bottle of peroxide and a spool of cotton gauze sitting in the center like they were crystal figurines. No Victoria, though. Mae and Victoria were not here.

She thought surely Mae and Victoria would be home from the clinic by now or she would have asked the holy girls on the corner if she could use their bathroom. She didn’t realize, though, that Philadelphia General was not like the private doctor they usually saw in the mansion of a brick house that had been converted into a doctor’s office, where the receptionist and nurse knew them by name because they’d had the same doctor since they were born and where their wait to get examined was never long. Had she realized where Victoria had to go—a reception room crowded with the hobbling, the bleeding, the fevered, severely infected, vomiting, burned, blistered, wheezing, and otherwise stricken, all needing to fill out a thousand forms to have their clinic cards validated just to wait in line for a seat at the table to explain their symptoms to a nurse’s aide—she would have certainly known Victoria and Mae wouldn’t be here by now, and she would have certainly not come in here alone.

She tiptoed to the top of the steps, was anchored by fear at the top of the steps.