Page 56 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

She only accepts the offer once she sees we are alone. Since I last gave her a cigarette, she is more polished, crossing the boundary between casual and compulsive smoking. I can tell because she has a style now. She splays her fingers like the legs of a spider, inhales long but exhales short.

“Are you stealing Dad’s cigarettes?”

“Ew, no. Why would you ask me that?”

I motion to her cigarette with my own. “Last time you coughed like a cancer patient. You’ve been practicing.”

“Karishma bought me a vape. I lost my last one.”

“Don’t vape, Grace. They’re terrible for you.”

“Harmony said the same thing. She made me listen to her rant and rave about how much worse vapes are. Whatever. It’s going to destroy my lungs all the same.” She rolls her eyes. The cigarette fits perfectly between her gapped front teeth. “When did you start?”

“After prison.”

“What was prison like?”

The same way you don’t ask someone what they went away for, you don’t ask them what it’s like inside. I can’t hide how much the question offends me. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

Grace shrinks into herself the way the dog would after my father kicked her. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s not … you don’t have to be sorry.”

Her eyes twinkle with ghoulish hope that I can be cajoled into divulging the details she seeks. I have those stories, of course. I can tell her about Sara teaching me how to fashion a toothbrush into a shiv my first week inside. I can tell her about being groped by the guards, male and female alike. I can even tell her about the week I spent in solitary for biting another inmate.But those horrors I have left behind. Their aftershocks have faded. It’s the little things I can’t free myself from.

“The worst part is it’s never quiet,” I say at last, ignoring how Grace’s face falls when she realizes this is all I will give her. She doesn’t understand how something so mundane can be so nightmarish. “You never have a second of silence, and then you get out, and you realize the real world is always quiet, but you can’t live without the noise anymore.”

Grace turns away to hide her disappointment. She still sees me more as a fascination than a sister—a bizarro exhibit in a museum rather than a human being—and when I fail to live up to those expectations, she doesn’t know what to respond. I cannot indulge her with prison horror stories right before I tell her about Harmony. It would be unimaginably cruel, crueler than telling her the news itself. I could let her find out another way and relieve myself of this burden, but no one else will talk to her like an adult. They will sugarcoat it or lie about it, and she deserves more. What she decides to do with the information is her choice.

“We have to talk about something, Grace.”

She meets my eyes reluctantly. She brings a spoonful of ice cream to her lips but cannot open her mouth. “I could tell.”

“I don’t … I’m going to say it all wrong, and I’m so sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things, but mostly I’m sorry I don’t know you and I don’t know how to talk to you.”

Grace releases a tiny exhale. “Okay?”

“I talked to Harmony a little while ago, and she’s …” I stop myself from softening the blow with a euphemism. “She’s in jail right now.”

“Jail? For what?”

“She went to the police this morning and she told them she killed Mom.”

“No.”

“Grace—”

“No!” She springs to her feet. “No!”

“I’m just telling you what I was told, okay?”

“Don’t tell me! Tell them!” She points in no particular direction, punching at the air again and again. “Tell Josiah Eastman that Harmony didn’t do anything.”

“I—”

The tears come hard and fast like a burst pipe, and she wipes them away with her wrist. When she thinks the valve has shut off, another torrent gushes forth. “What is wrong with you? Why didn’t you stand up for her?”

“Because I don’t know the truth,” I stammer.

---