Wishbone

“June is too early to start packing for college.” 

I’d declared this the second week of summer, after the zeal of summertime had worn off and I was ready to start being productive again. And I stood by that mantra the entire summer, until August 12th, when I realized I was down to 13 days before I left for Princeton and had narrowed down a grand total of 0 items that would be making the trip with me. 

I began by rummaging through my jumbled desk drawer’s lifetime of papers. Spanish final, highlighters, ACT practice workbook, calculus quiz…oil pastels…

Coloring book.

God, that coloring book. It was simple, 32 pages of outlined horses and tic-tac-toe boards, but something in me couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I flipped through the pages and inhaled their magical smell: years of desk-dust and waxy oil pastel and summer afternoons with Lila. My finger stopped on her name, running the tip over the smooth waxy letters of the coloring page she’d never taken home. 

Lila was my old neighbor, but to say she was my friend is an understated euphemism; we were like sisters, the way that we understood each other’s lives and complications inside and out. For as long as I could remember, she was right there next door to me. 

It happened on a warm Saturday that Lila first came over. I thought about this day as I sorted through my closet: the little girl I’d seen in passing—on bike rides, at the neighborhood pool—was suddenly on our front porch. 

“My dad said he’s having a young lady from work over today, and that I need to go find somebody to play with while she’s here,” she explained when I opened the door. 

“Oh, cool! My name’s Jenny. I’m—”

“We need to play over here. My dad said he needs the house alone for a few hours.”

“My mom says it’s not nice to invite—”

“Do you have any Barbies?” Lila had already started up the stairs. I followed her into my room. 

Just as Lila had instructed, we played Barbies for a good couple of hours. That was always how it went with her: even though she was two years my junior, she was always the one bossing me around. And I usually didn’t mind, being an only child just happy to play with a neighbor and all. She needed the control, I’d later learned; she needed somebody to make a decision for. 

It happened often, two or three times a week, that Lila would come over and play dolls for a few hours. We’d done it all, played everything there is to play with four Barbies and a plastic pink convertible, and yet Lila never wanted to leave. 

One hot day my mom had left the window cracked, and the summertime air carried in mockingbird songs and leafy breezes. Lila and I were interrupted by a loud crash coming from her house, followed by a shrill yelp. Illegible words rang through the air like a hateful, hidden language that our childish minds couldn’t decipher. 

And suddenly, the scrappy little diva Lila broke, laying facedown on the carpet as she kicked her legs up and down like a motorboat and covered her ears, whimpering and rocking back and forth and convulsing right there in the middle of my bedroom.

“Lila! What happened?” 

“Stop. Stop. StopstopstopstopstopstopSTOP!”

She kept repeating herself over and over again, writhing in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I heaved the window shut and seized the nearest distraction I could find: a pony-themed coloring book and a tray of oil pastels.

“Do you want to color something?” 

Between the closed window and my attempt to distract her, the earsplitting shouting from next door had drawn to a dull murmur.

“My-my mom and dad. My mom and dad. They yell at each other. They hurt each other sometimes.”

“I’ve…only colored two pages so far.”

Looking back, I think that a distraction was the only logical thing my eight-year-old mind could conjure up to calm somebody down; but, looking back, I think that a distraction was exactly what Lila needed. 

I’d never seen someone color like she did; the way she furiously scrubbed the glossy pastel over the docile pony’s face, battering the untouched paper with something so beautiful yet so destructive, like a wildfire searing across a bleak California horizon. 

This happened time and time again, more often as the months went on, that Lila would appear at my house for hours at a time, sitting and coloring and trying her best to drown out the shouts from next door, until one day, the shouting stopped.

The neighborhood went silent. 

The house went empty.

The “For Sale” sign went up. 

And just as quickly as she’d bombarded my bedroom, her complicated, unconventional, unruly life unfolding across the pages of my coloring book, Lila was gone. 

Neighborhood legend says she and her mom ran away to the city, and her dad followed soon after in the family car, but I guess that mystery would have to run away with me to the sleepless streets of Princeton.

As I peeled my sweaty bangs from my forehead and loaded the last Give Away box into the car to bring to the thrift store, it dawned on me that this was my new lap of luxury: my whole life jammed into one box that would travel thousands of miles to a 12x19 dorm that had housed hundreds of students before, and would house hundreds after me. A box to be unpacked and repacked in as little time as it had taken me the first time. Meanwhile, the skeleton of my room would rot away, ghastly shadows of the liveliness that once was breaking away like a wishbone. It was awfully artificial, the way that something so loved could become someone else’s in the blink of an eye. 

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Five hundred and seventeen dollars. Five hundred and seventeen dollars. 

God, all I could think of was the five hundred and seventeen more dollars I’d need before Sunday so that I could pay to have our sink fixed.  

I could pick up a few extra shifts. I could ask for money from my family (fat chance of that one working out). I could ask Brett for more money if he was sober tonight. I could slip some from the cash register when I shut down the store later. 

I groaned, attempting to distract myself with the new mandala coloring book Brett had bought me last week after yet another blowout. Damn, if I could get to him to use that money to pay the bill instead! I’d only colored two pages so far, and barely enough that I could still add some more color in between strokes, so I took the oil pastel and traced along the edges of the mandala. 

The customer service bell rang.

“Ma’am? I’d like to donate these clothes, please.”

Oh, Lord. She was a regular Mackenzleigh-Jane-Grace, matching athleisure and keys to a brand new Lexus and a fresh coat of makeup on her face—you know, the kind of girl that had no business being here with me. The kind of girl that popped into the thrift store once back in 2014 for the aesthetic, to take pictures and look for vintage designer clothes with her friends, only to find out that she wasn’t like us. She hadn’t bounced between two parent’s houses her entire life and moved in with a deadbeat boyfriend at fifteen and picked up a part-time job at the neighborhood thrift store to support his drinking problem and was struggling to pay the five hundred and seventeen dollar bill to fix her sink.

I knew that thrifting was a hobby for a lot of people that came in here. To them, I guess the thrift was a buffet of affordable but unique clothing where they could lavish in the feeling of being “quirky” while still being “sustainable” (descriptors I’d picked up from the influencer who came in here with a camera last week). And part of me understood that. But, me, I liked working at the thrift because it was where I felt the most at-home: disheveled pieces of clothing that were once loved before being surrendered to someone, anyone to be honest, who was willing to take it. Pieces of someone’s old life to be torn and patched and become somebody else’s problem, pieces that would rot and tear away from their original form just like a wishbone.

“Is there anywhere I can put them?”

My eyes snapped back into focus. “Yeah, I can take them right up here.”

“Thank you so much. I really appreciate it—”

She scanned my shirt for a nametag.

“—Lila!” 

She said it like it was a grand declaration, one she’d had bubbling in her chest for years to come.

“Do I…know…you?”

“Oh my goodness, where are my manners? I’m Jenny.”

I gave a blank stare.

“From Willowwood? We were neighbors?” 

Wait. Maybe I did recognize her. 

Memories of my childhood flooded my senses until all I could feel was resentment. Anger because my parents didn’t love each other, because that’s what parents are supposed to do. Hurt because neither of them had fought for me or for my future. Jealousy because Jenny clearly had so much of what I’d always wanted. Lonely because Jenny had never thought to check in or follow up once I’d moved away. 

Not that I expected her to. 

“Oh. Right. Sorry, Jenny, I’ve lived a lot of places.” 

“Gosh, I can’t believe I found you here. I was literally just thinking about you! Small world, huh? So, what have you been up to?”

I shifted my weight from leg to leg. “Just…hanging out, I guess.” 

I saw the pity flicker in her eyes. It was brief, just a spark of “I pity the fool,” but it was there, all right. It’s a look I’m all too familiar with, the one I get when someone blames it on the divorce, or me and Brett moving in so young, or dropping out of high school. It’s like all of these people who know so little about me are trying to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong. But the thing about a train derailing is that it’s moving so fast that you can’t ever find the exact point of no return, the point where it splits away and leads its own tragic path for a mere millisecond before the final crash and burn. There was something liberating about it, to be completely unchained for a fraction of a moment, before it all went to dust. 

“Well, let me know if you ever want to hang out and catch up some time. It was great to see you, Lila!” 

Jenny’s smile was full of prosperity. And a part of me resented her for it, that she could exist so parallel to me, when we were once so perpendicular. We started out just the same. How did we get this way? What had she had that was different from me?

“Thanks, but I…I don’t think there’s much we have in common anymore. You might want to find another neighbor to go out with.”

I saw the smile quiver on her lips. I was brief, just a spark of “that was rude,” but it was there, all right. 

“Well…take care, Lila. I’ll be thinking of you.”

“Uh, bye.”

And then Jenny disappeared, riding off into the shiny August noon, leaving me at the thrift as only a child in her rearview mirror, the broken fragments of the shorter end of a wishbone.