The kids at school must think I’m making a list—Everyone Who Ever Spoke to My Sister. I’m not, obviously, but they insist on giving me every chance to start one anyways. A senior stops me in the hall, says Maddie borrowed my teal skinny jeans. I nod and walk away. She doesn’t want them back, she just wants me to know, just wants to point out that she did her part. Two weeks after the whole thing, when a girl first mentions a collection of Hemingway stories Maddie borrowed, I go home and search my sister’s room for it. When I try to give it back, though, the girl smiles kindly, folds my fingers around the slim spine, says no, it should stay in her room. I slip it back into my bag and curl Maddie’s fingers around it the same way. I squeeze her hand, wait for the return squeeze, but it doesn’t happen.
Her hand has grown. I don’t know how, since it’s not like she can eat, it’s just five fingers, a palm and a mostly healed stump, but still, she grows. Her hands were tiny when she was still alive, but now this one, the left one, is about the size and weight of a dachshund. It’s mostly healed, but I still have to redo the bandages each day because they get too tight, and sometimes, if I’m not careful, I rip them off too rough and it starts the scabs oozing again.
After Maddie died, my mom stopped eating meat. A month or so later, she started smoking those American Spirit cigarettes Maddie drove the forty-five minutes to Cortez for. She found a couple of half-smoked packs in Maddie’s room when she went in to borrow a skirt to wear out. I hid the last one from her, though, and now my sock drawer smells like tobacco. My mom tries to get me to go with her to Cortez, she grabs my hand and laughs and whines, like a mother-daughter trip to the smoke store is something no one in their own right mind misses out on.
Daddy doesn’t go in Maddie’s room. About a week after she died, he started going to church, the old one in the middle of town with the giant stained glass window of Jesus in a white dress. That’s where Maddie would get high on Thursday afternoons while her best friend, Chris, was supposed to be vacuuming the stale carpet. She always said the milky light coming through the paint made her feel blessed, which I said was bullshit, since she also claimed she was a practicing vegetarian Hindu and shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose, but Daddy doesn’t know all this. He goes just to go.

Kids at school grab me, say Maddie dumped milk on my hair once, Maddie copied all my dissection diagrams in Biology, Maddie and I both loved the Flaming Lips. Everyone wants a piece of her now that she’s up for grabs.
See, when Madeleine decided to go, there was no note, no pills and tears and silence for her. She had to go and suicide-bomb our high school. I think she meant to take a few people with her, but her Hinduism won in the end, karma and reincarnation and all, so she waited and did it right after the last bell, in the grass between the front doors and the parking lot. Still sent a message, still scarred a few kids for life, but at least now she probably won’t come back as a mosquito.
Everyone was leaving then, some people saw the whole thing. People screamed, yelled to call 911. The front hall was stuffed with noise and running students and teachers trying to look competent. When I finally pushed out the door, everyone was just standing around in a wide circle, my sister nothing but a gory, burnt star in the center. I sat on the curb a ways off. No one noticed me. The three o’clock sun leaned hot against my back and made me light-headed. I stared around and saw something under a car. I scooted closer. It was one of her hands, covered in blood and dirt, most of the skin along the length of her thumb scraped off by the asphalt. I held it down behind my knees so no one would see. It had been blown off just below the wrist and it was still bleeding. The fingernails were chewed. Maddie had tried so many times to stop chewing them, and I thought she had finally beaten it a while ago, but it looked like I was wrong. I wrapped the hand in my cardigan, tying the sleeves like a tourniquet, and lay it softly in my purse. A teacher spotted me and waddled over to ask if I was okay. When I just stared, she squatted down, fatly, and asked me what year it was. I poked my middle finger up at her, the other fingers bowing at the knuckles just like my mom had taught me, and this woman made a huffing sound, waddled back. Someone called my parents, the cops, an ambulance. I got sent to the emergency room for shock.

Later, at the funeral, this man I’d never seen told me a story he’d heard about Jewish people in Israel, after a loved one dies in a bombing. He said they try to collect every shred of their relatives after a bombing, weeping and crouching down with tweezers and a plastic baggie to get every last crumb of cartilage and bone, each curling hair, so they can give their loved ones a real burial, one in their religion. I don’t think he actually knew who I was, so I just nodded and walked away. My parents aren’t religious, but my mom still tried to make the police leave the blood splatters and filthy clumps of flesh and denim and purple t-shirt in the school parking lot, screaming and clawing at them when they tried to calm her down. You fuckers don’t touch her, you don’t even touch her, she yelled, crying when Daddy yanked her away. She got sent to the emergency room for shock, too.

When someone finally took me home, hours later, I went to the kitchen and washed her hand in the sink. She was still warm. I held her and turned her over. She used to show me how even her tiny fingers could wrap around her wrists and still overlap. I can’t wear watches, she’d say, sighing, or bracelets. They just slip right off. Okay, I’d always say, sitting on my own hands. The wrist-end was puffy and chewed-looking, swollen almost twice as big now. I carefully bandaged the stump with a tea towel, though it looked like the blood was starting to clot. I sat there on the floor, slumped against the kitchen cabinets, holding her hand, our knuckles locked tight like a zipper, the way we did when we were kids so we wouldn’t get separated in the supermarket.

Two weeks after, when all the casseroles are gone, my mom stops eating meat and starts ordering in Chinese tofu every night. She also orders a yoga mat and DVD set off of eBay, but when it comes, she opens it and never once uses it. It just sits politely on the carpet in front of our living room TV

We were lucky. You hear stories about the fear, the wild paranoia that can take down a whole city after a school bombing and rip out its throat in no time, but it wasn’t like that, not for us. Our town is pretty small, pretty rural, and everyone basically knew Madeleine and knew what a kook she was. Aside from the general disbelief that a student would bomb her own high school, there wasn’t much in the way of mean feelings, and our school was only closed until that next Monday. They held a forum on bullying and depression and getting help a couple of weeks later, but Maddie definitely was never bullied and no one knew she was depressed but me, so the whole thing was mainly a gesture. What else could they do?
I go back to school after three weeks or so, and each period, the teacher leads the class in a round of supportive applause when I walk in. Of course, I never say anything, I just smile as grimly as possible and sit in the closest chair to the door. Apparently I am now considered a hero for surviving fifteen years with a certifiable nut for an older sister and not only coming out unscathed but also for doing so without complaining too hard. Seems like no one is really too surprised that Maddie killed herself, except for me and maybe my parents, and since she didn’t manage to kill anyone else while she was at it, people seem pretty ready to forgive her.
The first day I’m back, I stand at my locker, staring at the things I left in there. I hear some boys across the hall talking about the bomb-day. One of them is telling the other he saw the whole thing, since Economics got out a little early that day. There I was, he says, halfway down the steps and I see her with this weird backpack thing on backwards, like in front of her, and then, boom, she turns into like, this blood geyser. And I’m already halfway down the steps, right in the splash-zone, you know?
At this I burst out laughing. I can’t help it. I get a flash mental picture of Shamu suicide bombing his sticky-faced, fanny-packed audience. Right in the splash zone.
The boys stare at me. I’m not laughing extra loud or anything like that, but the one talking looks scared and the other one looks offended.
I’m sorry, I say.
The second boy stares at me. Your sister sat with me at lunch sometimes. I always gave her my mashed potatoes, he says, like that means I should have considered his feelings.
I didn’t mean to laugh, I start to tell them, I know I shouldn’t, it’s just that…
They are already down the hall before I get to the part about Shamu.
I reach into my bag but Maddie is curled into a fist, sleeping.

That night I go to bed later than normal, later than I’m allowed even, and I still can’t sleep. I think about sneaking into my mom’s bathroom and snitching a couple of her Ambien’s, but sometimes when she takes those she’ll wake up smack in the middle of making a cake or a lasagna or even once, chopping carrots, so I decide to just close my eyes and not think about anything. It works for little bit. I mean, I’m not not thinking about anything, since they say that’s impossible, but at least I’m not thinking about school or Madeleine or my parents. I’m thinking about whether I should buy a new dress for the spring semi-formal or if I should just do the pink cocktail I wore to my cousin’s wedding last fall. I had just decided that I should at least try it on to see if it fit still when I hear a scratching noise and turn over. Maddie, who I had wrapped in her blanket and laid next to me on the bed and then forgotten about, is picking at her own fingernails. She’s almost frantic, digging at her index finger’s cuticle with her thumbnail, ripping off strips of cracked dry skin. Some of her other fingers are already bleeding. I sit up and touch the back of her hand.
Hey, hey don’t do that, I say, you’re bleeding.
She can’t hear me, of course, she just keeps on, nervously raking at the jagged edges and the bleeding pits in her skin. I pick her up and lace her fingers with one of my hands, stroking the skin between her knuckles with the fingertips of my other hand. She doesn’t struggle or anything, she just kind of goes limp, like a sigh. I notice her fingernails have grown back long and jagged. I get up, still cradling her, and dig around in my desk drawer for my nail clippers and emory board. I sit back down on the bed with them.
I’m going to clip your nails for you, okay? I tell her. I know you were never good at this whole fingernails thing, you’d get them grown out sometimes, but you always let them stay snaggy ‘til they broke off. I finish clipping her nails down, straight across, and I start filing the corners round, tapering the edges like my mom taught me.
But of course, I say, rolling my eyes, you never let me show you how to fix them. You always had to know better. I squeeze her hand. You should have let me help you.

Three weeks after, Daddy takes me to church with him. He has his own pew, or at least, it looks that way since he’s the only one sitting there. We sing along with the hymns, him tunelessly, me silently, mouthing the words because my voice is pretty squawky from never being used. The window glows for a minute, a break in the clouds outside, and Daddy feels for my hand. I reach into my bag and hold Maddie’s hand, too. I am a link in a chain, I tell myself, I am the middle, not the end. I picture Maddie sprawling under that window, staring at the painting through a haze of smoke and dusty church light. Being blessed. Being alive.

A month after, I start leaving school later and later each day, but I always still beat my parents home. My mom leaves notes—Wont b home 4 dinner, el chicko is in the freezer. Exclamation point. Winky face. She never mentions where she is, of course, but the notes always sound like she left in a pretty great mood. Frozen chicken dropped from eye level sounds like a Pyrex glass bowl hitting the granite counter top, but it never actually breaks.
Here’s what I do on most school-day afternoons:
I drag my book bag and a bag of potato chips into the living room and set Maddie out on the couch beside me. Sometimes I lie there and watch her creep around the cushion, pulling herself along like a thirty-pound pale pink lobster, no shell, looking for something to pinch. Sometimes I hold her, one of my hands wrapped around her huge thumb, so I can pretend I’m watching TV with someone. Sometimes I just lay her on her back so I can watch her fingers curl and flex, open close, open close, like a flower looping back and forth between beginning and end.
Sometimes I eat two-thirds of a bag of chips. Sometimes I eat all of them. Maddie would be so grossed out if she saw this. Her hand doesn’t seem to notice though, and sometimes I wish she would push my hand away or something like she used to do.
I almost always ignore my bag and the books inside it.
I usually try to doze off, but can’t.
Sometimes, I watch movies on Lifetime about girls that get raped and overcome their past, or about women that fall in love with terminally ill men.
Then, usually, I still can’t fall asleep.
I stare out the window, hold the little plastic wand that twists the blinds open and close. I pull it back, let it go, let it bounce against the aluminum blinds that my mom hates so much, no matter how practical they are. It bounces, tap tap tap, the kick-back getting smaller and smaller each time, tick tick ticking quieter and quieter for the rest of my afternoon. Outside, nothing is moving, no one is home from work, nothing is alive on our street.

A month and a half after, a pimpled, hair-gelled boy comes over to my locker.
I gave Maddie gum every day in fourth period, he says. He laughs nervously, like the bad guy’s minion on a cartoon. I guess she must’ve owed me at least ten packs by now.
I touch my bag to see if Maddie recognizes this voice. She doesn’t move. She’s forty-two pounds, now, and still growing. Sometimes, I catch the fingers curled all the way around, picking at the scab end, so I keep wrapping it, to keep her safe from boredom. She’s gotten big enough that I have to leave my textbooks at home. I guess I could get a bigger book bag, but it’d still be too heavy, and besides, I don’t mind. I’d rather have her with me all day than some stupid literature book I never even read.
The kid is still there. Why didn’t you say no, I ask him. You could have said no.
His eyes go wide. Oh no, no I didn’t mind. I just wanted to tell you.
I blink at him to show I don’t care. Okay, I say. Okay.
Did you know people are just like goldfish, I ask. You get up one morning and they’re floating upside down and there’s nothing you can do but flush them. Everyone, like this whole stupid school.
He backs away. I shout, get it? You’re a goldfish too! Maddie claps against my leg, open-palmed, pleased with my boldness.
For just a second, I fantasize about cutting off tiny pieces of her fingers and giving them to these people who won’t leave me alone about her. Maybe even just fingernail clippings. Or maybe I will just gift her as a whole, sort of, to my mother, whenever she gets brave enough to leave us for good. I will put her in a giant cardboard box with a blanket and wrap the whole thing in bright pink paper. Don’t open it ‘til you get there, I’ll say. I wonder if she would even know what it actually means. Maybe she would figure out why Maddie keeps growing. Maybe for her, Maddie would go back to normal size, or even shrink until she was gone completely.

I wouldn’t ever do any of this, though. Maybe one day I will wrap her in a soft, warm blanket and bury her in the backyard next to our gerbils. I’ll have to wait ‘til no one is home for hours, though. She’ll probably be a hundred pounds or so by then. I’ll have to straddle the long hole I’ve dug to lower her down slowly in her blanket, and I’ll have to be careful not to fall in too. I’ll find a book with some Hindu religious sayings, in English of course, and I’ll read something about blessings out of Daddy’s Bible. I’ll give her a real burial, but not yet. Not for a while, I’m pretty sure.