Kathleen Hale - No One Else Can Have You

Mrs. Fried grimaces. “On the way over here I probably saw a dozen bleeding bucks strapped to the roofs of cars,” she says. “I hate hunting season.” She makes a spitting sound and puts the shoe box down on one of the double beds. Seeing her without anything in her hands makes me want to crawl between her arms, fill up the empty space—not just because I feel bad for her, but because other than the bloodshot eyes and matted hair, she looks exactly the same as she did when Ruth was alive, and that makes me want to hold on to something.

I take a step toward her. “I hate hunting season, too.”

“Please don’t touch me,” she says in a crackly, flat voice, like she can read my mind. She plops down on the bed beside the shoe box. “I’m so tired of hugging people, I could self-immolate.” She looks straight at me. “That means set myself on fire. All day the neighbors have been bringing meat loaves. I hate meat loaf.”

“Okay,” Dom and I say in unison.

“I’m so sorry.” She covers her face with her fingers. “I’m not myself.” She takes a long, shaky breath. “Dominic, could you get me a candy bar or something from the vending machine?” She sighs, drops her hands into her lap, and looks at Dom with tears in her eyes.

“Of course.” Dom pats his pockets for his wallet. “Whatever you need.” He shoots me a reassuring smile and hustles out of the room.

As the door latches behind him, she turns to me. Her face looks like it weighs a hundred pounds. I can feel mine getting hot.

“Hi,” I say.

She gestures to the shoe box. “I brought this for you. Take it.” I walk over and pluck it from the bed. Inside are some pictures that Ruth and I were going to use to make a collage: us at eight years old, wearing boxers on our heads and crawling through her backyard on our elbows like soldiers. The two of us at the third-grade Halloween parade: Ruth as a princess and me as an “animal on TV,” wearing cat ears and a cardboard television on my head with a square cut out for the face.

“I can’t have them,” Mrs. Fried says blankly. She seems mad at me. Does she wish it had been me on my way to her house Friday night, instead of the other way around? Should I apologize for being alive?

Everyone grieves differently , I remind myself. Dom’s only told me that about a bazillion times.

I pick up a photo of Ruth and me with our arms around each other, smiling so big that you can see the matching rubber bands on our braces—green and gold, Green Bay Packers colors. We didn’t even follow football. We were just trying to fit in with the boys at school.

I catch myself accidentally bending the photo. When Mom died, Dom and I hid all the pictures of her for almost a year, not because we couldn’t stand to look at them but because we were afraid to destroy them. The urge was to hold on too tightly—accidentally crumple every photo in our fists because we wanted to absorb the image. I put the pictures back into the shoe box and replace the lid.

“How is the eulogy coming?” Mrs. Fried asks quietly, reaching into her gigantic purse.

“Oh, you know. Fine.” I squat down next to my suitcase and dig through the underwear and socks, tucking the shoe box securely into one of the corners.

She exhales. “There’s something else.” I hear her rustling in her bag and turn to see her tugging out a notebook. “It’s Ruth’s journal. I thought—I don’t know—I thought there might be something sweet in there you could quote at the service.” She bends over and slides it across the carpet. “I can’t handle it right now.”

“Okay.” I pull it toward me. “Thank you.” Quoting from it is a good idea. It’s all I have to go with, at the very least. I turn the notebook over in my hands. “I didn’t know Ruth kept a diary.”

She stands and clears her throat, smoothing her shirt against her belly. “I’d like to read it eventually, her journal, I’m just not ready right now. Not to mention her handwriting.” She takes a step toward me. “Kippy, it’s not just about the eulogy. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything.” My heart is pounding. I get up off the floor.

“I need you to censor it for me.” She licks her lips, which are so dry I can hear her tongue slide across them, and takes another step toward me. “I thought maybe you could make it so that when I’m ready, none of it will . . . offend me.” She grabs me by the elbows so that my arms are stuck at my sides.

“Mrs. Fried?” I can feel her cold, bony fingers through the fabric of my T-shirt. Her breath smells like fish.

She stares at me with those bloodshot eyes, glancing around nervously like Dom might walk in—and then leans into my hair and whispers, “I need you to redact the sex parts.”

I open the cover of the journal—just some regular composition notebook—and feel the closest thing to a thrill since Ruth said yes to sleeping over last Friday. It’s kind of exciting to read your best friend’s secrets. I mean, hopefully you know all of them already, but it’s still kind of cool to think, “Ooh, what sort of nice things did she think about me that maybe felt too romantic to say out loud?”

Except then I remember Ruth’s handwriting, which is indescribably terrible. There are no spaces, for starters, and the penmanship looks like letters written on top of other letters—like graffiti that’s been scrawled over existing graffiti, so you can’t tell what either thing said.

I flip through, looking for my name, and am able to recognize a few Ks. It takes me about ten minutes a sentence—just to recognize each letter and then retranscribe it onto a separate sheet of paper, so I can read it—and this is what I end up with.

Ruth here. Kippy is so pathetic it makes me nauseous. She just told me that sometimes she gets lonely before bed and talks out loud to me like I’m there, like a fucking prayer, like I’m some god or something!!! If we lived anywhere else, like any place remotely interesting, I’d have way more options, and she and I wouldn’t even know each other .

I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. What did I even do to make Ruth so mad at me that day?

A door slams. “Hello?” Dom calls. “Honey, are you back in the bathroom again? Where’s Mrs. Fried? I’ve got that candy bar—did she leave already? I didn’t know which kind she wanted so I got a bunch.”

“Just a second!” I call.

Today I told Kippy to get a hobby so it’s not so obvious she’s crushing on me. I flat-out said, “You’ve got too much time on your hands. It’s like the corners of your mouth get wet whenever I’m around.” I can’t fucking take care of her anymore .

I don’t even remember her saying that.

Personally I don’t even know who she’s more jealous of—me for having a boyfriend, or Colt for having me. Like, whenever we try to include her in things all she does is stare at us while we make out. We’ll be bowling and I’ll be on his lap not even doing anything, and all of a sudden Kippy will be all, “Hey, I thought we were having a sleepover?” Seriously, girl, what a buzz kill .

I get off the toilet seat and stretch out on the bathroom floor, pressing my cheek against the cool tiles, waiting for something to happen. But for some reason there isn’t any urge to cry, just a silent weight behind my stomach, near my spine, and a hardness in my jaw. Everything feels okay, empty even, and I suddenly can’t remember anything about Ruth except for that cocky look in her eyes every time she told me to grow up.

“Chicken?” Dom says. From the sound of it, he’s pressed up against the door again. “I’ve got a Mars Bar, Snickers, a thing of M&M’S—”

“I’m not hungry!”

I’m going to transcribe one more sentence and if it isn’t something nice I’m setting the whole thing on fire.