Watch Me Disappear

setting it back in the box.
    “Let me help you put it on,” she says, taking the bracelet and opening the clasp.
    I hold out my arm and she secures it, and then she leans forward and gives me a hug.
    “I’m so glad we met,” she says. “You are the best friend I’ve had since starting high school.”
    What reply can I give except to echo the sentiment? But all I can think about is Maura, and what I mostly feel toward Missy is resentment. She’s too perfect. She’s too sweet. And she is trying way too hard to make up for the fact that she stole Paul from me.
    When I get home that afternoon, I put the bracelet in its box in the back of my closet. It isn’t my style at all.
     
     

Chapter 16
     
     
    My brother finally arrives home late on December 23 rd . I thought I would have the pleasure of his company—the pleasant buffer between myself and my mother, the comfort of being able to be completely myself with someone—for a couple of weeks until he had to head back to school, but it turns out he and Jen have plans for New Year’s. He is leaving again on the 29 th to spend the end of his break with her and her family. On top of all of my other grievances, to learn that I can’t even count on my brother is too much. Everyone sucks.
    On Christmas Eve we drive to Gram’s to trim her tree. She has some superstition about the tree that includes waiting until December 24 th to decorate it, even though that means it will hardly be up for any time at all. Each year we arrive around four o’clock, the afternoon already dark with the short days of winter, and decorate the tree while eating her amazing cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to oldies versions of Christmas carols. It is my favorite part of Christmas. Sometimes neighbors drop in with more goodies, and it feels to me the way Christmas is supposed to feel—people coming together to fill the dark, cold, gloomy days with light and laughter.
    But this year my heart isn’t in it. I haven’t managed to get back on a normal sleep pattern after my all-nighter at Missy’s, and I am annoyed at Jeff for making plans that messed up my vision of our vacation time together. The gap between me and Jeff has grown in the past year. When he first went to college, I still talked to him a couple of times a week on the phone or online, and he used to come home to visit more often, but since we moved in June, I’ve barely spoken to him once a month. I’m not sure what the connection is between our move and my sudden distance from Jeff—sure, the physical distance between us is greater, but even before we moved, we lived a full day’s drive from Jeff’s school. Really, I suppose, the problem is that he is a junior in college, a half step from independent adulthood, while I am still just a kid in high school. Besides, he has a girlfriend, and he’d rather spend time with her than chat with his sister online or call home.
    While Jeff talks Gram’s ear off, my mother fusses over the antique ornaments, cautioning us on how to handle them and where to hang them so they won’t fall and break. My father wanders in and out of the kitchen where he’s making deviled crabs and all the fixings, a job that always falls to him and the only time of year he ever cooks anything. I eat cookies and half-heartedly hang ornaments. Hang a star, eat a cookie; hang an angel, eat a cookie; hang a ball, drink some eggnog, eat a cookie. Maura and I have decided we are going to go on a diet right after the holidays, so I eat like it is my last supper. By the time we’re done with the tree and ready for dinner, I am so full I can barely stand to look at the food before me.
    After dinner, as always, we watch It’s a Wonderful Life and then walk down the block and around the corner to St. John’s Cathedral for midnight Mass. We have to get there about an hour early to get a seat. It is hot in the crowded church, and I sit there, stuffed and bleary-eyed between my grandmother and my brother, trying not to fall asleep. I can see the girl in the pew in front of me texting and I am jealous, both that her parents seem not to mind that she is ignoring the Mass and that she has someone to send messages to at midnight on Christmas Eve.
    Missy and her family have gone to visit Anna’s family in Virginia for Christmas, and I haven’t talked to her since I left her house Saturday morning. It is a relief, not having to talk to her, not having to pretend I am happy for her and Paul, and not