Saving June

I know what she wants me to do. She wants me to come over and put my arms around her and tell her it’ll be all right, but I can’t. I can’t because I don’t know if it will. I can’t because the thought of touching anyone right now makes me sick inside. Why is it so hard?

Eventually I say, “Yeah. I guess so.”

Her throat works as she takes a long swallow of wine. When she sets the bottle back down, I wrap my fingers around the neck and gently pry it away from her.

“You should get some sleep,” I say. I walk around the table to help her stand. “Here. Come on, let’s go.”

She doesn’t fight me on it. With my arm around her waist, I lead her to her bedroom, peel back the covers and carefully roll her onto the mattress. She makes a soft sound as I pull the comforter over her, blinking up at me, already half-asleep.

“Harper,” she says, voice slightly slurred. “I’m sorry about the eggs. I wanted you to have something to eat.”

It’s sweet, really, that she almost burned down the house in a drunken stupor for the sake of my appetite. Fucked up, but sweet. I hope this doesn’t become a habit, though. She drank a lot after Dad left. I thought we were done with that.

“Go to sleep, Mom,” I say softly. Her eyes flutter, her gaze vacant again, and a minute later I hear her breathing deep and even, so I know she’s out.

The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it’s less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has. I consider going downstairs to clean up my mother’s mess, but the thought alone leaves me drained, so I start for my room, only to end up in front of June’s. It’s like I’ve stepped into wet cement; my feet stay rooted in place.

I stand outside the door for a while, until I feel stupid enough for being scared of a freaking door to force myself to open it and go inside.

This time I look for the last signs of life. One of her pillows is askew; a gray sweater is draped over the back of her desk chair. Other than that, nothing. I go to her desk and pick up one of the plastic bags. Again I notice the blank CD. There’s no case for it, just the disc. As I slip it out of the bag, I realize that it must’ve been playing in the car stereo when I found her.

I turn the CD over in my hands. It’s a normal blank disc, silver, with the words Nolite te bastardes carborundorum scratched across the bottom in black marker. I don’t recognize the phrase—Latin, maybe?—or the handwriting. It’s definitely not June’s, which was round and loopy and girlish. I wonder if it’s a mix Tyler had given her, back when they’d dated, but that’s doubtful. Tyler’s not bright enough to quote another language, and promise rings aside, his romantic gestures don’t usually go beyond big talk. His idea of chivalry is coming to the door to pick a girl up for a date rather than honking from the driveway.

I switch on June’s stereo, slide the disc into the tray and flip it to the first track. There are a few seconds of silence, and of all the things I expect to hear from those speakers, it most definitely is not the startling guitar riff that comes blaring out. A backbeat chimes in, an echoing bass, accompanied by a man’s voice—rough around the edges and with a certain swagger to it.

I turn the volume up a few notches and stretch out on the floor, my back on the carpet, and feel the bass thrumming through me, vibrating. You make a grown man cry. This is not June’s music. When we were younger, she plastered posters of manufactured boy bands on her walls, bought the albums of teen pop princesses. As a teen she listened to girls with guitars who didn’t really know how to play, mainstream hip-hop hits, whatever generic pop medley was currently in high rotation on the Top 40 station.

The rock song ends and another by a different band comes on, slower, sort of bluesy. The singer is almost mournful, talking about a girl who had nothing at all.

I stay on the floor and listen to one song blend into the next. Some I can place—after all, everyone knows “Stairway to Heaven,” and Laney had a Billie Holiday phase that lasted long enough for me to recognize her distinctive velvety croon—but most of them I don’t recognize. Each one is different, ranging from amped-up rock to jazz refrains, strung together in a way that feels like it should be schizophrenic, but somehow the transitions work. It’s not jarring. The music rises and falls in the way a conventional story is supposed to, building up and hitting the climax and then easing into the conclusion.

I close my eyes and try to feel whatever my sister had felt in this. Which song was playing when she carefully, purposefully, popped sleeping pill after sleeping pill, those last moments of awareness before she slid into dark, permanent nothingness? More important, who made it in the first place? And what did they mean by it?

Did anything mean anything?

Aunt Helen comes over the next morning, as promised. She and Mom sort through the crazy amount of flowers and cards covering every spare inch of our living room. I stay in my bedroom, listening to June’s CD on the neglected Discman I recovered from the depths of my closet. I can’t stop thinking about it.

This isn’t June’s kind of music, and it’s not my kind, either. My iPod is loaded with recommendations from Laney, all of the underground rap she likes, and some of my favorite indie artists, like the Decemberists and Cat Power and Sufjan Stevens. The songs on this CD sound more like something my parents would’ve listened to when they were my age.

I listen to the music and stare at my walls. They’re covered in pictures I’ve taken ever since I got my Nikon SLR for Christmas and started taking photography more seriously. The only blank wall is the one nearest to my bed. I’ve been saving it for something special, but I don’t know what.

I’m still staring at the empty white space when Aunt Helen comes up to my room with a sandwich and a glass of milk. I take out my headphones and sit up when she enters. She doesn’t knock or anything, of course. Just barges right in and looks at me a little suspiciously. I think she does this because she wants to catch me in the middle of something. She probably thinks I sit up here carving emo poetry into my wrists with a razor blade. It’s like I’m on suicide watch, by mere association.

“I made this for you,” she says, thrusting the plate into my hands. “You should eat something.”

I look down at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I hate jelly. I also hate when people come into my room without knocking.

“Thanks,” I mumble. She stares at me, frowning, until I take a bite. God, with the way everyone’s carrying on, you’d think I’m anorexic or something. I know I’m on the scrawny side, but seriously, this is getting ridiculous.

Satisfied, she takes a step back and surveys my room. Her frown deepens when her eyes land on the Reservoir Dogs film poster tacked up over my dresser. Jesus probably wouldn’t approve, so of course, by proxy, Aunt Helen doesn’t, either.

She tears her gaze away from the poster and looks at me again. “I know this is a difficult time,” she says. “It’s going to be an adjustment for all of us.”

An adjustment. Talk about your understatement. I put down the sandwich and take a drink of milk, waiting to see where she’s going with this.

“Your mother and I are worried about how you’re coping,” she continues. “She says you haven’t … been very emotional.”

It’s true. I can’t deny it. I haven’t cried at all, not once. Even when I try to summon tears, it’s like the well inside of me is bone-dry. There’s just … nothing.

I glance away and shrug. “Maybe my mom should be worried about how she’s coping. I’m not the one getting drunk off my ass, am I?”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Aunt Helen snaps. “Your mother is doing her best. She only cares about you.” She sighs, the tension easing from her shoulders. “Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you.”

A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn’t understand. She can’t. If she did, she’d leave me alone instead of trying to force me to talk about this.

“You just have to take comfort in the fact June is with God now,” she tells me.

I stare at her coldly. “Don’t Christians believe people who kill themselves go to hell?” I ask.

Her eyes widen. “I don’t think—”

“Get out. Please.”

“Harper—”

“Just go, okay?”

Once she’s left the room, shutting the door hard behind her, I lie down on my side. I hate Aunt Helen. I hate her stupid your-sister’s-in-a-better-place crap. Like she could somehow know that. The anger bubbles up again, white-hot, and I lash out one closed fist and punch the wall. It doesn’t make me feel any better, just hurts the hell out of my knuckles. My eyes burn like maybe I’m going to cry, but no tears come. Dammit.

Neither Aunt Helen nor Mom bother me for the rest of the night; I don’t know if I should be upset about that or not. Instead of thinking about that, or my weird, inexplicable inability to cry, I choose to focus on the CD and what it might mean.

So June liked classic rock. It should be an inconsequential detail. It’s not like it matters. But part of me feels like if I listen hard enough, I’ll decode some secret message, put together the pieces of a puzzle that will shed light on some aspect of my sister’s life I have no insight into. If I was in the dark about something as simple as her musical taste, what else was she hiding?

Examining that thought keeps me up all night. After hours of obsessing over it, I finally crack. I set the disc player aside and reach for my cell phone on the nightstand. Even in the dark, I can punch in Laney’s number by memory. It rings about six times before she picks up.

“Hrrrmph?” I figure that’s her version of hello at this hour.

“It’s me.” My voice comes out just above a whisper, too tight, and I don’t know why my heart is beating so fast.

“Harper?” she says. There’s a pause and the rustle of bed sheets. “What’s wrong?”

Of course she would think something is wrong. Nobody ever calls in the middle of the night with good news.

“Nothing,” I assure her hastily. “Nothing’s wrong. I … Sorry, were you sleeping?”

“It’s two in the morning. What do you think?” She yawns, and I can hear her shifting around like she’s settling back against the pillows. “So what’s up? You’re sure everything’s okay?”

I tell her about finding June’s CD, how it had been playing in the car when I found her, how I know the handwriting on the disc isn’t June’s, and it isn’t Tyler’s, either. Laney goes quiet for a long time, and I start to wonder if she’s fallen asleep somewhere in the midst of my rambling when she speaks.

“What does it say on the CD?” she asks.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” I recite it from memory. “I think it’s Latin or something.”

“Huh.”

“You ever heard of it?”

“I don’t think so. But that’s what the internet is for, right?” I can practically hear her grinning on the other end of the line. “I’ll come over tomorrow after school—we need to talk about how the hell we’re going to pull off this California thing anyway, so we can look into it then. Unless you want me to come over right now.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to, but I will. If you need me to. Just give me five minutes—”

If I know Laney at all, the muffled noises I’m hearing are probably the sound of her getting dressed and grabbing her car keys. That’s the kind of person she is.

I quickly say, “No. Don’t. If you fail your exams due to sleep deprivation, your parents will never forgive me. It can wait.”

I don’t have to worry about exams this year. Two days after June and the garage and the pills, an emergency phone conference was conducted between my parents, the superintendent, the principal, the assistant principal and the guidance counselor, who all came to the conclusion that it would be best for all involved to allow me to skip the remainder of the school year and leave my grades as is.

As far as silver linings go, this one is really inadequate.

It turns out I was right: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum is, in fact, Latin.

“Well, not exactly,” Laney corrects me. “I guess it’s, like, bastardized Latin? Kind of like a joke. It translates roughly to ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”

I raise my eyebrows. “All this from the internet?”

“Google is so my bitch.”

We’re in June’s room, on Laney’s insistence that there might be more clues to the identity of the mastermind behind the mix CD. She drapes herself across June’s bed, hanging off the edge upside down, her long wavy hair dangling to the floor. I feel sort of weird about her making herself comfortable on my dead sister’s furniture, but it’s not like everything can stay perfectly preserved in here forever.

I open one of June’s desk drawers and ask, “How were your exams?”

“Precalc can just fuck right off,” she moans, flinging an arm over her eyes.

“It went that bad, huh?” I wince sympathetically, then shoot her a sideways look. “So, um. What’s it like?”

“What’s what like? Precalculus?”

“No. You know. School.”

School is a subject neither of us has broached. Mostly I haven’t even bothered to consider the situation at Grand Lake High since everything went down, but now a sort of morbid curiosity gnaws at me. Laney pulls herself back onto the bed, sits with her knees under her and her hands in her lap, hiding behind a shroud of blond hair.

“It’s … really weird.” She clears her throat and glances at me nervously. “There was this assembly, for the whole school. All these girls crying who didn’t even know her. I swear I wanted to kick them in the face. Oh, and they postponed graduation by a week. The guidance counselors made everyone quote, unquote ‘close to the situation’ have, like, an hour-long debriefing on our feelings. The administration is totally freaked out.”

“Really?”

“I think they’re afraid it’s contagious, and one day they’ll walk in and find the whole school drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid or something,” she says. She studies me carefully for a moment. “Are you okay? Like, generally speaking? I feel a little weird talking to you about this.”

I look away and shrug. “You shouldn’t. I wanted to know.”

“Yeah, but …” Laney looks ready to say more, but she just sighs again and lets it drop, much to my relief.

I open the next drawer, pawing through the mess of papers there. It’s more of the same—old homework assignments, class notes, a flimsy old binder project now falling apart. Nothing of importance. I wonder what my mother is going to want to do with all of this stuff. Throw it away? Or keep the room intact out of sentimentality, like some kind of shrine dedicated to June’s memory?

Okay, that would be totally creepy.

“Hey,” says Laney. She’s leaning over and digging stuff out from under the bed. “I think I found something.”

She resurfaces with a brown paper bag in hand. I sit on the bed next to her as she dumps its contents out onto the bedspread. Two CD cases tumble out. The first case cover has a painting of a man with a cigarette in his mouth, standing in the night under a neon sign, a woman in a fancy dress to the side gazing straight at him. The second cover has a man’s head in black-and-white, overlapped by a series of squares and diamonds and circles, the lettering done in a light blue.

“Tom Waits,” Laney reads off of the first CD’s front, picking it up to examine it more closely. “Hmm. Never heard of the dude.”

“What about the Kinks?” I question. I pass her the other CD.

“Actually, I’ve heard of them. Do you remember that guy? Colin Spangler?”

“Didn’t you date him a few months ago?”

“Yeah, if by date you mean ‘made out with in the back of his mom’s minivan that one time.’ Anyway, he was really into them. They had this one song about, like, a transvestite or something? I’m pretty sure Colin was super-gay. I mean, I’m not judging. But. Definitely gay.”

Did my sister really listen to this stuff? I keep trying to make it fit with the image I have of her in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.

“Where’d she even get these?” Laney asks, shaking the bag like there will magically be an answer inside. Nothing but a receipt flutters out. She smoothes creases from the bag with her hands, and then stops abruptly. I follow her gaze to the black logo emblazoned on the side.

“The Oleo Strut,” I read aloud. “Where is that place?”

“It’s way off on Kilgore,” she explains. “By Stowey’s Pizza. I drive past it all the time, I just never knew what it was.”

She picks up the receipt as I scan the back of the Tom Waits album.

“A clue!” she shrieks, so loud I nearly topple off the bed, then springs to her feet frantically. “Harper, where’s the CD?”

“It’s on top of the stereo,” I say. I watch as she practically dives to snatch it off the desk. “And what kind of a clue?”

“A handwriting sample!” she exclaims. She jumps back onto the bed and hands me the receipt. “Look on the back. That T is unmistakable.”

“You’ve been watching way too much CSI.” I roll my eyes, but flip the receipt over anyway. There’s a note scribbled on the back in faded blue ink.

J.—

Hope you like my picks. Let me know what you think.

—Your Favorite Person in the Universe

It’s the initial that bothers me most. That single letter. No one has ever shortened June’s name like that. And the tone of the note, the signature—it suggests an inside joke, some kind of casual closeness. I crumple the receipt in my fist and toss the balled-up wad over my shoulder.

“You know what we should do?” Laney springs off the bed again, bouncing on her toes. “We should go to this Oleo place!”

“What for?”

“Uh, hello? To see if they might know who bought these? Don’t you watch television? You always start at the scene of the crime.”

“Last time I checked, buying music is not a crime,” I point out. “Actually, they kind of encourage that, with all the illegal downloading these days—”

“Work with me here, Harper.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, aren’t you curious? This could really lead to something.”

Of course I’m curious. It’s driving me crazy, not knowing. It’s why I called Laney in the first place. I don’t even have to say anything and she can see it, written all over my face.

“Go put on your shoes,” she says, pushing me off the bed, “because we’re totally going, right now.”

Grand Lake is a town split into two sections, with the namesake lake as the epicenter. There’s the east side of Grand Lake, where Laney and I live, primarily consisting of well-kept houses in quiet suburbs, and then there’s the west side, generally considered lower income and populated with more apartment complexes. The east and west sides have two elementary schools and one middle school each, and after that, the kids are shuttled into the town’s sole, centrally located high school.

The whole town centers around the lake. “Grand” is something of a misnomer, since it’s pretty small, and the only stretch of beach is the man-made one behind the iron gates of the Grand Lake Yacht Club, where the town’s upper crust keep sailboats and pontoon boats and have a dining hall for club dinners. The area by the lake was an amusement park in the fifties, with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster and everything, but they tore it down long before I was even born. Now there’s just the park and a few businesses and restaurants, including the waterfront Sterling’s Steakhouse. Laney’s father, Richard Sterling, owns the joint, but we never eat there because Laney doesn’t eat meat, much to her family’s chagrin.

To get to the west side, you have to drive past the lake and through this strip called Windermere Village. Windermere is a shopping area, purposefully kept antiquated with a cobblestone road, the streets lined with gaslights and outdoor sculptures. There’s an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Duncan’s, a bunch of old family businesses and other little shops. It’s the kind of place where mothers amble with their baby strollers and golden retrievers, and older women wearing fluorescent headbands power walk in pairs.

I don’t usually have much reason to go west past Windermere. As we speed by in Laney’s piece-of-crap car, I watch the newer housing areas give way to dated apartment buildings. She turns down a side road, passing a gas station and a liquor store, and continues down to a two-story building made out of dusty red brick. That’s when I see the sign, lit up in neon-green over the doorway of a store on the bottom level: the Oleo Strut.

A bell above the door chimes as we walk in. There’s a guy behind the counter, looking like he’s in his twenties, sporting Buddy Holly frames and an eyebrow ring. His brown hair is short and spiky. He scrawls something onto a notepad at rapid-fire pace, pausing every so often to fiddle with a calculator—it’s one of those old-fashioned ones, with a ribbon of receipt paper churning out with each button pushed.

“Can I help you?” the guy asks, distracted. He punches a few more numbers into the calculator and scratches the top of his head.

Laney looks at me expectantly, but I’m not sure how to even begin, so she jumps in without missing a beat.

“This is going to sound so weird,” she starts, “but we’re trying to find out the identity of someone who made a purchase from you a few months ago. We know what was bought, but that’s it. Maybe if we gave you the date, you could, like, look back through security tapes or something?”

Now he looks at us, bemused, tapping the pen cap against the countertop. “Yeah, we don’t keep track of that.”

“Well, you look like the type who has an amazing photographic memory.” She pushes herself up against the counter, bending so far over I’m sure her boobs will spill out of her top, and gives her most charming smile. I roll my eyes behind her back. “The Kinks? Tom Waits? Any of that ring a bell?”

“Sorry, kid, my memory is for shit,” he says with a grin, and I’m impressed with the fact he doesn’t even give her chest area so much as a second glance. He jabs the pen in our direction in mock seriousness. “That’s why you should stay away from drugs.”

As he starts to walk toward the back room, Laney throws her hands up in frustration.

“A walking PSA,” she mutters under her breath. “How helpful.”

Suddenly he turns to face us again. “Hey, you know, you might have better luck with my brother. He works the register sometimes and he’s good with faces.”

“And where would he be?” I ask.

He nods his chin in the direction of the back of the store. “Stocking. I think he’s doing vinyl.”

With that, he disappears. Laney and I exchange glances.

I shrug. “Worth a shot.”

The store is so crammed with music that it’s difficult to squeeze through the aisles. Everywhere are carts filled with CDs and cassettes, handwritten signs plastered on the walls categorizing them by genre, and even those have subcategories. The rock section is split into classic rock, garage rock, glam rock, soft rock, psychedelia, alt-rock and indie rock. Punk contains anarcho-punk, garage punk, hardcore and riot grrrl. New Wave has an entire cart to itself.

We’re turning a corner when Laney says, “That must be him.”

I look in the direction where she’s pointing, and suddenly I can’t breathe.

“Oh my God,” I gasp. I grab her arm, haul her around the corner and safely out of sight.

It’s the boy. The boy from the wake, who leaned up against my house and smoked cigarettes and glared a lot. The boy who obviously had some connection to my sister, but at the time I’d been too preoccupied to even consider his, like, existence, never mind what that connection could be.

Well. Now I know. Sort of, anyway.