The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters. Timothy Schaffert

to know her a little bit. I just want to get to know her.”

      Mabel pulled her hand away and stood from the table, brushing cake crumbs from the front of her dress. Silent, she walked toward the door of the bus. “Mabel,” Lily said. “Mabel, don’t be like that.” Lily didn’t go after her because she knew Mabel only ever needed a little bit of time. Mabel didn’t like to cause worry for anything more than an hour or two. But when Lily saw that the Joan Armatrading album lay, still wrapped, beside the cake, she felt miserable for always disappointing poor Mabel. Lily tore off the tissue paper; she’d wrap it again later. She felt like hearing “Cool Blue Stole My Heart,” so she unplugged the Christmas lights from the extension cord and plugged in the portable record player. In the near dark, she squinted at the turning record, looking for the right groove that started the song. As she set the needle down with a thump, Lily heard tiny stones tossed against the glass of the bus windows.

      “Are you through being an asshole?” Jordan said, when Lily came to the window. Lily nodded, as pleased as always with Jordan’s ease. She reached out the window for his cigarette, and he handed it up to her. She took a puff and handed it back. “Is Mabel mad?” he said.

      “Yes,” Lily said. “I want to go soon, Jordan.” But she didn’t trust that Starkweather’s Packard would make it anywhere near Mexico.

      Jordan reached up again and took Lily’s hand. “We’ll get the Packard tuned up,” Jordan said, “then I’ll take you to see your mother.” Lily closed her eyes, liking the sound of that. Jordan, though skinny and wounded, could look after her very well if he set his mind to it. Feeling a buzz from the Manhattan and from the sugar of the cake, Lily was ready to believe in whatever Jordan told her.

      “Come inside,” Lily said.

      Jordan returned to Lily’s side at the table, and they ate some more cake with their fingers, ignoring the plastic forks and paper plates. “I ruined Mabel’s birthday,” Lily said.

      “She’ll be lonely when we’re gone,” Jordan said.

      “Mabel will be fine,” Lily said, and she really believed it. It would be best for the both of them to have some time apart. “We’ve always been fine. We’ve been lucky, really. We’ve always had a roof over our head.” Jordan glanced up to the ceiling of the school bus with a skeptical half grin. “You know what I mean,” Lily said.

      Jordan leaned toward Lily to lick the frosting from the edge of her lips, then went back to sit on the bed to pull off his boots. Still at the table, her back to Jordan, Lily decided to finally ask him some questions she’d been avoiding. The questions, the most obvious ones, seemed like things she should have asked months before, on the third or fourth date or something. But it had been much easier not to, to let his steps toward suicide remain nothing more serious than a vague mystery.

      “Did you hope to die that day?” Lily said, just said it, sitting in the dark not looking at him. “When you cut your wrist?” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Lily wondered if he was looking down at his scar, touching at it gently with his fingertip, tapping at it, uncertain it was his.

      “Did I hope to die? Did I hope?” He said it snide, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “No. No, I didn’t hope to die. No. Fuck no.” When Lily didn’t say anything, Jordan continued, less peevish. “I was really young,” he said, though the slashing of his wrist had only been a year or so before. “Everything seemed like a little more trouble than it was worth.”

      “You loved that girl,” Lily said. “Kate.” Lily wasn’t bothered by Kate or by the creased picture of her he still kept tucked in a pocket of his wallet. In the photo, Kate sat in a bay window in an outdated white dress that had to have been hand-me-down. The black braid of her hair lay across her shoulder, and her silver heart-shaped locket was open at her throat. Lily had never met Kate, but she respected her as part of Jordan’s heartbreak, part of why he was the way he was.

      “When she said it was over,” Jordan said, “I thought about dying and thought about how if I died, I’d at least be something important in her life. It would change her forever, wouldn’t it? It got so I liked thinking of myself as a pretty girl’s dead boyfriend. I figured I’d be some ghost, and I’d watch her grow old and sad. I’d see her never quite getting over it all.” Jordan sighed, then began tapping his fingers to the song on the record. “But hell, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t die. She was kind of a toothy girl, really, and, you know, she didn’t really dance as well as she thought she did.”

      Lily imagined telling her mother exactly what Jordan had said about not wanting to die, as they had one of those long breakfasts that last past lunch, as they talked about their days apart.

      She went to sit beside Jordan on the bed. She pictured him wet and sleepy in the tub, his arm flung out in tragic gesture, his cheeks tear-streaked. A beautiful waste, Lily thought, feeling dramatic imagining his blood drip drip dripping into a puddle on the peeling linoleum floor. A wasteful beauty.

      Lily took Jordan’s hand and touched at the scar, and she knew that it was a bright pink declaration of life, no matter what he said about death and becoming a ghost—he’d cut only one wrist just minutes before his mother was expected home from work. Not only did Jordan not want to die, Lily realized, but he wanted to be begged to live.