She cut open my palm with a letter opener and blood dropped from my hand onto the carpet like a fistful of rubies. I thought I was going to be sick as she cut herself in the same place. Her motions were violent and had a force behind them that I didn't know how to cope with, and I couldn't stop staring at the jeweled blood that collected under our clasped hands. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly in hers, our bodies facing one another's, each an entity on its own but at the same time moving, changing, metamorphosing into one. We were two impoverished halves, adjacent. We'd be perfect as a whole.
That was the start of the summer.
And yeah, we whiled most of it away watching reruns of bad TV shows in her air conditioned living room, sitting on her sofa, wasting time. That's all. Her house was enormous and was more of a well-lit, central-heated, artfully decorated mausoleum than a home. Maybe that was just because there were still cardboard boxes out, half-emptied of possessions but still half-packed up, suspended in time. Even though it was big and open and deflated like dead lungs inside, it smelled strongly of dog. I remember how it smelt, and how much I hated it, and I hated how her dogs would roll at our feet, and I hated how there was hair everywhere. How it made my eyes sting and run with tears, my nose itch. I spent those months pretending that I had a cold so I could just stay there with her, in those moments. Imagine- we were licking ice-cream off each other's sticky arms, peeling ourselves off the garden furniture that stuck to our thighs, sweating into the blankets we shared at night, and the whole time I was pretending to have a cold. It was stupid. I know. Whatever.
It was the summer when everything was like everything else. The feeling that ran underneath us, underneath it all- I can't describe it. In retrospect those days and nights pool together into a spill of hot sun and it seems like it all happened at once, all at the same time. That sun was so hot my tennis teacher cancelled two of our classes because she was at home sick with sunstroke. I remember wondering why it's called sunstroke when it strikes with such violent malice, and ruthlessness. I can't put my finger on what it was. It was like a gas station at midnight in the dry nothingness of the Dust bowl, silent; it was a drum beat heard at a funeral, sombre, and something ominous. I don't know. It's stupid to say that about something you can barely even remember.
We were avoiding children at the lido when she suggested it. Or did I? I think it was her. I like to think it was her but that whole chunk of time is so blurry At some point, maybe the same moment she was cutting our hands open to close around one another's, she whispered in my ear, 'We're sisters.' I thought, 'But this isn't what sisters are like.' Still, I would have torn my whole arms off if that had been what she wanted so of course I said yes, yes, yes.
It started off with reasons. Then it was just people she decided she didn't like, or people who looked at her in a way she deemed wrong. I got better at it over time. It was quicker, quieter, cleaner. In between we went back to our long lazy days, our TV shows again, putting on stupid accents for one another, sharing ice cream cones and wrapping ourselves around one another while we nodded off trying to read the books on our reading list for the next year of school. We didn't wear anything at night because it was so humid, fabric clinging to skin was unbearable and suffocating. Mostly I just remember the monotony of the sluggish days. That's how I blocked out the rest.
Then it all went too far because she said it would be better if she were gone and I said yes, yes, yes, and then it was just her blood dripping onto the floor. Suddenly everything was noiseless and unmoving. I looked for my blood there too but it was just hers. I was alone, and I realised I could never be whole now. That was my completion.
And it was the end of summer.
