Sharp_Objects

on my skin, like a puppy spotting a bigger dog), which was jammed with juices and casseroles, fresh fruit and white bread, and I was suddenly touched by this innocent, healthy family refrigerator, so oblivious to the debauchery occurring elsewhere in the house.
    “Let’s go, I’m so excited to swim,” Amma declared wildly, pulling at my arm like a child. Which she was. I am doing drugs with my thirteen-year-old sister, I whispered to myself. But a good ten minutes had passed, and the idea brought only a flutter of happiness. She was a fun girl, my little sister, the most popular girl in Wind Gap, and she wanted to hang out with me. She loves me like Marian did. I smiled. The X had released its first wave of chemical optimism, I could feel it float up inside me like a big test balloon and splatter on the roof of my mouth, spraying good cheer. I could almost taste it, like a fizzy pink jelly.
    Kelsey and Kylie began following us to the door, and Amma swung around laughing. “I don’t want you guys to come,” she cackled. “You guys get to stay here. Help Jodes get laid, she needs a good fuck.”
    Kelsey scowled back at Jodes, who hung nervously on the stairs. Kylie looked at Amma’s arm around my waist. They glanced at each other. Kelsey snuggled into Amma, put her head on her shoulder.
    “We don’t want to stay here, we want to come with you,” she whined. “Please.”
    Amma shrugged her away, smiled at her like she was a dumb pony.
    “Just be a sweetie and fuck off, okay?” Amma said. “I’m so tired of all of you. You’re such bores.”
    Kelsey hung back, confused, her arms still half outstretched. Kylie shrugged at her and danced back into the crowd, grabbing a beer from an older boy’s hands and licking her lips at him—looking back over to see if Amma was watching. She wasn’t.
    Instead, Amma was steering me out the door like an attentive date, down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, where tiny yellow oxalis weeds spurted from the cracks.
    I pointed. “Beautiful.”
    Amma pointed at me and nodded. “I love yellow when I’m high. You feeling something?” I nodded back, her face flicking on and off as we walked past streetlamps, swimming forgotten, on autopilot in the direction of Adora’s. I could feel the night hanging on me like a soft, damp bedgown and I had a flash of the Illinois hospital, me waking up wet with sweat, a desperate whistle in my ear. My roommate, the cheerleader, on the floor purple and twitching, the bottle of Windex next to her. A comedic squeaking sound. Postmortem gas. A burst of shocked laughter from me, here now, in Wind Gap, echoing the one I’d loosed in that miserable room in the pale yellow morning.
    Amma put her hand in mine. “What do you think of…Adora?”
    I felt my high wobble, then regain its spin.
    “I think she’s a very unhappy woman,” I said. “And troubled.”
    “I hear her calling out names when she takes her naps: Joya, Marian…you.”
    “Glad I don’t have to hear that,” I said, patting Amma’s hand. “But I’m sorry you do.”
    “She likes to take care of me.”
    “Great.”
    “It’s weird,” Amma said. “After she takes care of me, I like to have sex.”
    She flipped up her skirt from behind, flashed me a hot pink thong.
    “I don’t think you should let boys do things to you, Amma. Because that’s what it is. It’s not reciprocal at your age.”
    “Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. “Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.”
    “Amma, I just…” But she was already burbling ahead.
    “I like our house,” Amma interrupted. “I like her room. The floor is famous. I saw it in a magazine one time. They called it ‘The Ivory Toast: Southern Living from a Bygone Time.’ Because now of course you can’t get ivory. Too bad. Really too bad.”
    She stuck the sucker in her mouth and snatched a firefly from the air, held it between two fingers and ripped out its back end. Wiped the light around her finger to make a glowing ring. She dropped the dying bug into the grass and admired her hand.
    “Did girls like you growing up?” she asked. “Because they’re definitely not nice to me.”
    I tried to reconcile the idea of Amma, brash, bossy, sometimes scary (stepping on