The Bone Princess

Chapter 1: Dead Mother's Club

My guidance counselor, Mr. Greensboro, said you can only have a memory once. After that, you're apparently recalling the last memory you had of the event rather than the event itself, and each time you cycle through the memory, you're subconsciously altering it. The changes are so subtle you don't even realize you're overwriting your former reality. Mood. Music. Indigestion. The temperature of the room. Police sirens wailing in the distance. The scent of the baking pie-any number of factors could impress upon that memory, stamping it, transforming it. If that was true, then, by the time you got to the end of your life, everything that came before was just a fantasy.

I'd thought about my mother so many times over the past year, she may as well be a goddamn unicorn in my head.

I held a butter knife in front of my mouth, using the reflective surface like a mirror as I applied bright purple lipstick. The shade was so unnatural against my pale skin and pale hair, which was dip-dyed mint-green, that I didn't look real. I looked more like a doll than a seventeen-year-old, small town girl. But that was the point of my heavily smoked eyes and neon-blue nail polish, the diamond stud in my left nostril, and the ripped black tights under my ragged cut-off shorts: I didn't want to look like myself, because myself looked too much like her.

My dad didn't seem to mind all of the modifications. I think, in a way, he was also relieved to not have to stare back at his dead wife's face every day. Not that I ever saw him for more than the twenty minutes each night, when he ate dinner with me and my sister. My friends, however, weren't so fond of my new look-I'd pretty much been banished from the popular table in the cafeteria, and from the pom squad, and from the Friday-night-after-football bonfires.

Mr. Greensboro didn't like it either. He says I should find a more productive outlet to exercise my feelings. I smacked my lips together and capped the tube of lipstick with a loud click. Mr. Greensboro didn't have to stare back at his dead mother every time he looked in the mirror.

I opened the fridge and peered inside despite knowing its contents. I'd stocked it myself, but still, I double-checked that Tabitha would have everything she needed after I went to school and she was left with the sitter. On the shelf, perfectly stacked, were three identical sandwiches: Bunny Bread, mayo, and ham. No crust, cut into two triangles. Never four. It's not that she would throw a tantrum if there were four-no fits or freak-outs. It's the total opposite. You cut her sandwich correctly for your own sake, because cut any other way and you'd have to endure the sadness.

My six-year-old sister's eyes were like large crystal orbs that either lit up like sapphires or glossed over like the rolling seaside tide. Great, bluish-green waves of sadness that eroded your soul like a sand castle. The kind of sadness born from grave injustice. Seeing that sadness in her eyes killed me. So two triangles, never four.

Purple Kool-Aid (sugar-free). Green seedless grapes. A drawer full of string cheese. I moved to the pantry, completing the inspection: graham crackers, check. Goldfish, check. That completed the list of things the kid would consume. No amount of begging, screaming, or pleading was going to change it. At dinner she'd eat a mountain of Brussel sprouts. Who does that? The kid only eats ten food items if you include mayo and one of them is Brussel sprouts. They were mom's favorite, too.

The scent of something burning wafted, and I and sprung to the toaster, popping the lever just as a little plume of smoke spiraled out. Pop Tarts, breakfast of champs. Only strawberry. Only the kind with white icing and pink sprinkles. Shit, I thought, seeing the scorched edges. It doesn't matter; she only eats the middle. I scraped off some of the char anyway, poured her a glass of milk, and took both down into her basement lair.

#

"Tabitha?" I called as I hopped down the stairs, careful not to let the milk slosh over the edge of the glass. The basement had been re-finished ages ago, but it still felt creepy and dank. And it was dark. Tabby did her crafts in tiny pools of low-watt light scattered here and there throughout the cluttered gloom.