Page 54 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Hey, before you go? Could you try getting the ring for me? I wouldn’t care if it was some dumb ring I bought, but my mom gave it to me before she died. She wanted me to have it for the right girl.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

“For all the nasty things Harmony said about you, you don’t seem so terrible.”

“I have more bad days than good days.”

CHAPTER

16

August 18th

2:46PM

I CAN’T STOPseeing it. The inside of the closet.

The memory gathers dust in the far-flung recesses of my mind. Some memories I return to frequently because the triggers are impossible to avoid. A crying dog, a police cruiser, footsteps outside of my apartment door. Nothing ever forces me to return to the linen closet. It comes to me now in jolts like flashbang grenades. The single spiral lightbulb flickering overhead. The cold vinyl floor sticking to my skin. The smell of my sisters’ breath, stale from two, six, ten hours without water. Baby Grace cocooned in my arms, unleashing deafening cries more beast than child.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.

By the time I get back to the sheriff’s office, my hands are destroyed. I look like I lost a fight with a barbed wire fence, the skin at my knuckles completely torn away, dried blood smeared down the lengths of my fingers. I’ve never attacked my hands so viciously before.

The deputy who confiscates Harmony’s medication crinkles his pug nose at my hands. “Miss, do you need a bandage?”

“Can I see my sister?”

“Wait here. Sheriff Eastman wants to talk to you.”

I start suckling the dried blood from my fingers to clean myself up, but it only adds to my humiliation. The frizzy-haired receptionist gawks at me from across the room. She hovers one hand over her desk phone.

“I’m having a bad day,” I say to her before I can stop myself.

“Sure.”

“My sister was arrested.”

“Okay.”

I wait for her to pull her hand away from the phone, to give an indication she sees me as a person and not a nuclear reactor on the brink of a meltdown. “You know—you know, most people would say ‘I’m sorry’ when someone tells them something like that.”

Nothing. She returns to whatever mind-numbing work her computer and her file cabinets have in store, and I focus on the rage frying a hole in my guts, the envy I feel for this ugly woman, her meaningless job, the microscopically small diamond on her wedding band. What has she done to earn this perfectly ordinary existence? The only thing separating me from her are shades of circumstance.

“Miss Byrd?” Josiah pokes his head out of his office. “Back here, whenever you’re ready.”

I am steps away from his door when the frizzy-haired woman speaks, her eyes glued to her computer screen. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve heard about you and your family. I think it’s horrible, the things that happened to you. But you could have made something of yourself. You didn’t have to end up this way.”

“End up what way?”

“Like trash.”

My mind churns out a string of insults to kneecap this woman. You’re supposed to take the high road, but sometimes you cannot resist the temptation to counter cruelty with more cruelty, like scratching an itch you’ve been ignoring for hours. If everyone takes the high road, no one gets their comeuppance. Maybe that’s what Grace was trying to tell me when she asked why I didn’t reprimand the loathsome woman in the principal’s office.

I smile at her. “When you die, I hope your husband brings a date to your funeral.”

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