Parts

The night before Lissie comes back, I am up late at the kitchen table, cramming for a biology test. I've been staring at the drawings for so long that the bodies don't make sense anymore when I hear wobbly clomping down the stairs.

Taylor clacks into the kitchen in her ivory satin pumps, her hair tied up in an elaborate bun, stray curls loose around her neck. She yanks the fridge door open and stares in, her face drained in the blue-white glow.

"You look insane," I inform her. She whips around, almost slipping on the tile. "What are you doing up?"

I hold up my textbook and make a face. She shakes her head, tromps to the sink, fills a glass with water.

"Well, I'm practicing." She takes a big gulp of water and twirls, almost slipping.

"You look like a poodle in stripper heels."

She stares at me, her eyes huge in the late-night kitchen, her cheeks puffed with water. And then she explodes, spitting water, her arms clenched over her stomach while she laughs, and she slides to the ground with her back against the fridge, slow and halting so she won't slip on the wet floor. She keeps laughing and I catch it too. I go over and sit with her, both of our shoulders shaking, neither of us able to speak.

"So, is Trevor walking around in his tux all the time too? Practicing?"

Her smile flickers. "Trevor's different."

"Like how he leaves?"

She shrugs. It's become a family joke—how when he's frustrated with Taylor, with anything, he just leaves: out of the room, out of the house, to who-knows-where. Sometimes for just a few minutes, sometimes for hours. When he comes back, he pretends nothing happened, and so does she, so we do too. "I just don't understand it," my mom sighed, once, when neither of them were in earshot. It's not the funny kind of joke.

"Yeah," Taylor says, reaching up and gripping the fridge door handle, ready to pull herself back up.

"Why?"

She lets go and slumps, sighing and pulling a loose thread from the cuff of her shirt. "I don't quite know, Jackson. Some people are afraid of themselves."

"No, I mean: why are you marrying him, then? He doesn't seem—" I look around the dark kitchen, hoping the right word will blink into frame. "Happy."

She is quiet, her eyes cast down. The faucet drips.

"Just because a story isn't happy all the time," she says, "doesn't mean that you don't want to hear it."

"That's a shitty reason."

She smiles quickly, like a spark about to catch. "It's being a person," she says. "It's hard."

I nod. I rub some of the water into the tile, spreading it across the floor in such a thin layer that it dries immediately, becoming nothing. She smiles closed-lipped and smoothes an errant curl behind my ear. "Your pretty hair," she says. "I spent two hours getting mine to curl. Why'd that have to be the one way we don't look alike?"

I shrug.

"Plus," she adds as if in afterthought, her eyes bright and tired, her own hair falling out of her bun, "it's not like he's the only important person I have in my life."

I look at her.

She smiles, winks, and points at me like a cheesy movie star would. "I've got you."

________

Today, I wake up thinking about weddings, Taylor's wedding in specific but also just wondering what it might be like to let another person see you whole. I stumble to the bathroom, already feeling the regret stir in my stomach. I hoisted the full-length mirror out of my room months ago to make these moments less convenient. But I can't turn off my eyes, and on some days, some twisted part of me wants to see.

I used to take scalding showers and only look in the mirror after, when the steam still blurred my body...