Page 176 of The Glass Girl

I’m sifting through theboxes of Laurel’s things that my mother put in my room. There are beautiful velvet pouches filled with vintage jewelry. Books of poetry with her handwriting in the margins, which makes me think of José and Patty’s Place and the snippet of poetry he recited to me.I am a watercolor / I wash off.He shouldn’t have given me alcohol at Patty’s, but I also shouldn’t have taken it, and I did. I’m not going to tell Patty, because like Gideon and Charlotte said, don’t be a snitch.

There are so many old photographs of Laurel, so many when she was young—my age, I think. In her school uniform on the Upper East Side, an A-line skirt with a crisp white shirt, a boxy-looking camera strapped around her chest.

In the last box, I find our Scrabble game, everything neatly put away, the letters mixed together and the last words we made gone forever. I run my hand over the worn cardboard box.

I get up and go to the living room. My mom is in the bathroom, her laptop open in the kitchen. Technically, I’m supposed to be doing schoolwork while I’m on suspension, but I’m so far behind and will have to do summer school anyway, I’m not trying to stress out about it.

I position myself at one end of the vintage blue velvet couch and begin pushing. It’s heavier than I thought, and I’mgrunting a little by the time my mother emerges from the bathroom. I’ve essentially blocked her in the hallway.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asks.

“I think I want this in my room,” I say.

“All right,” she says. “Let me help you, then, so you don’t hurt your back.”

It takes a lot of time and maneuvering for us to get it into the hallway, me pushing and her pulling, and then to figure out how to get the couch on its side and angle it through my doorway.

When we finally finish, it’s sitting in the middle of my room. I tumble over the back of it and heave my desk under the window next to my bed, and my mother and I push the couch into place.

She flops down on it.

“You were supposed to be doing homework,” she says. “You don’t want to fall further behind.”

“I know,” I say. “But I was looking through her boxes and then I just wanted her couch in here.”

My mother places her hands on her stomach.

“It still smells like her,” she murmurs. She gets up abruptly. “Well, I should get back to work and so should you,” she says.

“Maybe we could take a break,” I suggest. “My brain feels a little mushy at the moment.”

I lean down and pick up the cardboard Scrabble box.

“Do you want to play a game?”

She looks at the box for a long time.

“You know how old that is, don’t you?” she asks. “It’s from when I was little. I used to play by myself all the time, or with some of the other kids at the compound. She was always too busy, or off working.”

The box feels suddenly heavy in my hands. My mother’s voice sounds lonely.

“I was a little jealous, you know, that you two spent so much time together and got on so well. The only time she really noticed me when I was growing up was when she put me in front of her camera.”

Her eyes look far away; then she snaps back, blinking at me.

“Let’s do it,” she says suddenly, her voice strong. “Let’s clear off the kitchen table. I want to play some Scrabble with my daughter.”

If It Isn’t Working, Fix It.

My mother sets thepiece of paper in front of me on the kitchen table.

“The rules,” she says. “Tracy says we need clear rules.”

I look down.

Wake up.

Go for a run. Take Bart.

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