As I Descended. Robin Talley

ALL THE REST TO ME

      Lily watched Maria make her way shakily toward the bathroom. This might be the only chance the two of them got to talk all night.

      Lily reached for the dresser to steady herself so she wouldn’t have to deal with her crutches and hopped toward the bathroom on her right leg. Delilah reached out to help, giggling. “Give me your hand!” Delilah squealed.

      Lily slapped her away. Delilah and the others laughed.

      Lily smiled. They could think it was a joke if they wanted.

      “Princess is totally going to hurl, man,” Austin told the others. “At least she’s got her roommate to hold her hair back.”

      Good. Lily followed Maria into the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink and the shower full blast. Hot water—it was already cold enough in that tiny room. The others would think Lily had the water running so they didn’t have to hear Maria throwing up, and Lily and Maria could talk without having to worry about the sound carrying. Lily shut the bathroom door, turning the lock. The heavy brass bolt looked like it had been rotting in the deep brown wood for the last three hundred years.

      Maria sat on the edge of the bathtub next to the door. Lily lowered herself next to her, trying not to grimace as her muscles clenched.

      She was tired of everyone’s stupid stories. The obnoxious blind girl Lily roomed with before Maria used to talk about ghosts, too. She even dreamed about them. She’d wake up panting in the middle of the night. Once Lily had to hobble over to her bed and shake her until she woke up. She’d been gasping so much Lily was afraid she was going to stop breathing.

      Lily had been having nightmares all her life. People didn’t need to make such a big deal about them. She never had.

      She leaned into Maria’s shoulder and rubbed her hands together. Their room was always cold, and the bathroom was especially freezing. “Hey.”

      “Hey.” Maria looped her arm around Lily’s back absently.

      “Swell party.”

      “Tell me about it.” Maria took another swallow of beer.

      Lily took the can out of her hand and put it on the sink. “How many of those have you had?”

      Maria shrugged. Lily smiled uneasily.

      It had been Lily who’d suggested the two of them become roommates. That was the summer before last year, when her old roommate finally graduated. There were no other disabled students left at Acheron, so Lily could’ve had a single room, but she asked Maria to move in. They were only casual friends back then, because Maria was a jock with a string of popular ex-boyfriends and Lily was neither of those things. Even so, something about Maria had always struck Lily.

      It wasn’t just that Maria was gorgeous. It was more the way she looked at Lily. Like she was really looking at her. Really listening to what she had to say.

      Maria was the only one in their class who looked at Lily like she saw a girl who happened to be holding crutches. Not a pair of crutches that happened to be holding up a girl.

      Lily waited a full minute to see if Maria would start talking, but she didn’t say a word. Instead she played absently with the tail of Lily’s braid and stared straight ahead, as though mesmerized by the mildew forming in the cracks under the sink.

      It was eerily reminiscent of how she’d looked the night before. Staring into that empty corner of the ceiling, like there was something up there only she could see.

      “Can we talk about last night?” Lily finally said. “Please?”

      Maria shrugged again.

      “I barely even remember what happened,” Lily said. “Was that real? Because I know I didn’t move that thing myself. And I don’t speak Spanish.”

      Maria slowly turned to face her. “What difference does it make?”

      Lily laughed without humor. “It said something to you, didn’t it?”

      “So?”

      “So? What did it mean?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Please don’t lie to me, Ree.”

      “I’m not lying.”

      Lily took Maria’s hand and squeezed it. Maria squeezed back.

      Maria had a thing about holding hands. She could do it for hours and never get tired. Sometimes she even liked it better than kissing. When you were holding hands, she said, you knew it wasn’t about sex. It was about liking somebody and wanting them to know it.

      Last year Maria had been in charge of a fund-raising drive for the student council. They were supposed to raise $5,000 for a women’s shelter in Lennox. Maria started calling Acheron alumni and made their goal with her very first call, to a lawyer in New York who said she was delighted to hear Acheron was finally trying to do some good in the community. The lawyer wrote a $5,000 check then and there, and everyone celebrated the end of the fund raiser.

      But then Maria raised their goal to $10,000. She made more phone calls. She organized parent receptions and car washes. The council members grumbled about how much work they had to do, but no one worked harder than Maria, even though it was the middle of soccer season. They raised $12,000 for the shelter in the end—and the girls’ soccer team lost the league championship qualifier to Birnam. Maria said the fund raiser didn’t have anything to do with it, but Lily suspected that if the team had won that game, Maria would’ve looked a lot better to the Kingsley committee.

      Maria was sweet, no question. Sometimes, though, that sweetness got in the way of her getting what she deserved.

      “I looked up the Spanish,” Lily told her. “It said you were going to get whatever you wished for most.”

      Maria shook her head.

      “It did,” Lily said. “Didn’t it?”

      “Something like that.”

      “Then come on, Ree!” Lily squeezed her hand. “You should be happy! Whoever it was—Jesus or Satan or my great-grandpa James—it said you’re winning. We’ll get to be together next year!”

      Maria shook her head again. “You know how much I want that, but none of this means anything. It’s done.”

      “It’s not done until they announce the actual winners. That won’t be until after Christmas break. It’s barely even November. We’ve got time to change things.”

      “But it’s too late to—”

      “Don’t you want to come to the same school as me?” Lily shook her head. She loved Maria, but she could be so frustrating sometimes. So willing to accept things the way they were. When Lily always saw the way things could be. “Don’t you want to win, Ree? Isn’t that what you’ve wanted your whole life?”

      That wasn’t fair to say, and Lily knew it. Of course Maria wanted to win.

      The Kingsley Prize was half the reason Maria’s parents had sent her to Acheron instead of one of the day schools near their house in McLean. Everyone knew an Acheron senior always got a spot on the list, and it would look good for Maria’s mother if her daughter won the most prestigious scholarship in the state.

      Lily hated to picture Maria at some boring, lesser college, like Cornell or UVA. She’d be wasted someplace like that. Someplace where she wouldn’t be challenged.

      Someplace where she might meet someone she liked more than Lily.

      But it wouldn’t be that way. Lily wasn’t going to let it.

      “At least try, that’s all I’m asking,” she begged Maria. “Don’t make me go all the way to California without you just because you didn’t want to try.”

      “I tried.” Maria