Page 19 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Harmony? No, I’m talking about Grace.” He interprets my pause as permission to elaborate. “How fast can you be at the high school?”

“Ten minutes if I floor it.”

“If you floor it in this weather, you’ll be getting here in a body bag.”

“Well, I’m assuming she’s in trouble.”

“We can talk about it when you get here,” he says.

On the horizon, a sliver of white sunshine promises respite from the storm. I resent the position I’ve been thrust into. I am wearing a costume tailored for someone else, designed for a role which I am unqualified to play. In the last ten minutes, I have depleted what few reserves of sisterly love remained after so many dormant years.

I drive twenty over the limit until I’m in the parking lot, where the final students trickling out greet me with pinched smiles and wary glances. I can’t tell if it’s the tattoos making them nervous or my manic energy.

I expect Grace to be charged with a minor infraction. Dress code violation. Plagiarizing an essay. I can handle that. Anything more serious requires maternal skills I lack.

After crisscrossing the campus in search of Connor’s classroom (a group of boys dressed for football practice took pity on me and pointed me to Mr. Keaton’s old room), I am out ofbreath, agitated, and shivering in my wet clothes. I’ll get in and out, quick as possible. I’m less interested in Grace’s misbehavior than I am in the opportunity for us to talk on the car ride home, which she’ll certainly need with the bus long gone. We can stop for pumpkin ice cream at the fifties-themed parlor back in Tyre. We can talk. Really talk.

That modest fantasy is my carrot on a stick. I ease the classroom door open and feel my heart plummet into my stomach when Connor is the only person in the room. Am I too late? Is it worse than I imagined? What if they called the police? What if she had a weapon? What if—?

Connor writes furiously on the whiteboard. His words are so illegible, he may as well be writing in hieroglyphics. I glance around the room and try to get my bearings. The walls are decorated with framed copies of infamous American news headlines.OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES. DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.A life-size cardboard cutout of Barack Obama waves at me from behind the rows of desks. George Bush peeks out from the storage closet.

Connor’s voice tears my attention away from the former presidents. “Remember when I asked you not to speed on the way here?”

“Where’s my sister? How bad is it?”

“Let me finish—”

“Damn it, Connor, just tell me what’s going on!”

He underlines a word that looks vaguely likejusticebefore turning around. He winces at the mere sight of me. I must look more feral than I feel. “I don’t know how to sugarcoat this, so I’ll come straight out with it: she punched another girl in the face. Probably broke her nose, from the looks of it. They’re in the principal’s office now.”

“What’d the other girl do to deserve it?”

“Jesus, Providence.”

“She’s not a delinquent. She’s not going to punch someone in the face unprovoked,” I insist. My defense of my sister is asimpassioned as it is disingenuous, because everything I’ve learned about Grace suggests that she is, in fact, a delinquent, a bad seed, damaged irreparably, stealing cars and throwing punches and God knows what else.Human hurricane.But I remember being denigrated with the same labels at her age, and I remember most clearly the pitiless sting of silence when no one came to my defense.

He riffles through a desk drawer for a pill bottle. He swallows the giant tablet with no water. “This whole ordeal is giving me a migraine,” he says by way of explanation. “Come on, let’s walk and talk. They’re waiting in the principal’s office.”

Our cross-campus trek winds around dingy portable classrooms and through the withered courtyard grass, where a troupe of theater students are woodenly reciting lines that sound vaguely Shakespearean. Connor fills me in on the details as we walk: his students were turning in an assignment at the front of the classroom when another student grabbed Grace’s shoulder from behind. Whether it was a deliberate provocation or a clumsy way to ask Grace to move is unclear and, frankly, ceased to be relevant the moment she introduced her fist to the girl’s nose. To anyone else, it’s a violent overreaction. To me and my sisters, it’s an act of self-defense. Nothing good ever happens when someone grabs us like that.

I reach for my face. My fingertips rest along my reconstructed cheekbone in a loose constellation. I had been making a grilled cheese, slathering both sides of the bread with mayonnaise like Gil taught me. My father seized my shoulders. I swung around and hit him. He cracked me across the face with his pistol.

The principal awaits us behind a massive mahogany desk. She looks more like an aging Hollywood starlet than an education professional, bedecked with ornate jewelry on her fingers, wrists, and ears. Her silver hair is wrapped into a chignon, her mouth a slash of peachy lipstick. Disgust flickers across her face as she assesses my appearance. As she recites a schoolboard-approved spiel about violence on school grounds, she crunches her nose every time our eyes meet.

Four chairs sit before the desk, two to the left and two to the right. Judge, prosecution, defense. Grace’s victim, bloody tissues hanging out of both nostrils, and a middle-aged woman I assume to be her mother, occupy one set of chairs, while Grace sits on the other side with the empty chair reserved for me. Connor slips into the background, shoulders against the wall, far from the fray.

Grace mouthsI’m sorryas I take my seat. She wears a red Rosie the Riveter style scarf around her head, fastened at the top with a bow. It used to be mine. In a box deep in the attic, where the few Byrd family photos are preserved, there is a picture of me, then a reedy thirteen-year-old, with my hair wrapped in the same scarf as I rock baby Grace in my arms. You cannot tell I’m holding a baby. Grace was only hours out of the NICU in Scottsbluff and still impossibly tiny, despite the exhaustive medical intervention which made her existence possible. I’m not smiling at her. Instead, I’m scowling into the setting sun, cursing the heavens for forcing me to open my life to another sister who, once my mother’s tenuous sobriety buckled, would become my responsibility.

“For Christ’s sake,” my mother said as she tinkered with the camera, “at least pretend like you’re happy to meet your new sister.”

“Let’s take her back to the hospital. Please, Mom. I’ll never ask you for anything again if you take her back.”

The principal’s monologue has yet to stop. “… and frankly, I think it’s shameful that this incident occurred at all, much less in a classroom, much less in front of your teacher and your peers. When we look at our code of conduct, we—”

“What does the code of conduct say about punching innocent people in the face?” cries the girl with the tissues.

“You grabbed me from behind!” Grace counters.

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