When You Were Here

of all instruments, so she quit. A few years later she quit us too. Laini was never around when my mom became sick. Fine, Laini was in college already, had been for a year before the diagnosis, but she didn’t even come home for the summer or for breaks, except for maybe one week a year. She was gone at the worst possible time, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the same as treating our mom like dirt. Suddenly I no longer want to hear her guitar. I want to destroy her guitar. I’m like a zombie, a living, breathing zombie who won’t stop as I clunk toward Jeremy, who’s jamming on my sister’s handmade Tortorici guitar that my parents special-ordered for her twelfth birthday, and I yank it out of his hands right before he slides into a howling riff.
    “I was just getting to the chorus.”
    “Go get another one and join me,” I say, because Laini has more acoustic guitars in her unused room. “Are you in or out?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    I tip my head to the yard and mimic smashing a guitar.
    He points to the Tortorici. “You know you can get a couple thousand on eBay for that.”
    I don’t need the money. My mom saved well and invested well. We don’t even have a mortgage anymore because she bought this house for cash when she sold off her lastbusiness a couple months before she was diagnosed. But not everyone is so lucky to have come into his parents’ possessions at the tender age of eighteen. Or to have to figure out what to do with everything, from the property to the personal effects. Like her clothes. Her books. Her wigs.
    I relent. “Take this one and do whatever you want with it. But get the others.”
    He thanks me, tucks the Tortorici under his arm, and races back up the stairs. Seconds later he’s joining me in the yard, stumbling through the open sliding-glass door with a guitar in each hand, a pair of soon-to-be victims. He’s followed by Ethan, Piper, and Trina, and we’re all at the edge of the grass where a low rock wall hems in my yard.
    I lift an ordinary wooden guitar high over my head, then nod at Jeremy. He can play master of ceremonies better than I can.
    “It’s not the end of high school until someone smashes a guitar,” he shouts, holding his arms up in a victory sign. “That’s a very famous saying, you know.” Then to me, “The floor is yours.”
    I proceed to whack the living daylights out of the guitar to the encouraging cheers of my fellow classmates. Jeremy and Ethan join in, and even Piper bashes an old, cheap acoustic against the rocks. Trina jumps into action, her hazel eyes alive with the prospect of destruction, because Trina was a wild child in high school, and a wilder child in college and medical school too, and an even wilder adult now that she is smack-dab in the middle of her residency.
    As I look down at the destruction—wooden shards everywhere, strings popped loose and languishing—I feel a trickle of endorphins, not like I just struck out the side but like I lobbed one good curveball. It’s a lift, a momentary, temporary lift, a rising above this hazy line I’ve been living on.
    But the problem is it’s not enough to blot this all out, to quiet the whole wide world. It’s not enough to bring back the sounds of Cole Porter being played, or flowers being planted, or of requests for a five-letter word starting with A or T or C or anything. Nothing is ever enough. Except Holland, who’s tattooed all over me, but who’s not here where I want her. I walk away from the carnage and return to the house. Trina follows, all lithe and pantherlike as she pads across the hardwood floors in her bare feet.
    “Let’s go to your room,” she whispers in my ear.
    I nod, take her hand, and lead her up the stairs. I hear the noises from outside, the splashing and the laughing, the sounds of cans opening and voices rising in the celebratory din of the end of an era, and then it fades when I close my door, crank up some tunes, and turn off the lights, leaving on a lamp by the side of my bed. Trina already has her top off, and she’s pulling off my T-shirt, and the room’s feeling fuzzy and warm, just the way I like it, because Dr. Trina gave me some new pills to try tonight. They’ve kicked in for me, and maybe for her, and everything, everything , just feels better when you’re doing it on PKs.
    She’s already pinned me, my arms stretched above myhead, her hands on my wrists, her black hair falling all around my face. I’m never on top