The Pink Hedgehog

I find the pink hedgehog figurine in a flea market. Spiky, spunky, and improbably fuscia, it reminds me of Gracie.

Gracie loves hedgehogs. If my parents weren’t diametrically opposed to any animal smaller than an Australian shepherd, we’d probably have five or six of them, with names like Bartholomew or Hazelnut or Jamie.

Her room is an eternal junkyard, the bane of my mother’s existence - dirty clothes littering the floor, candy wrappers peeking out of every crevice, books she’ll never read stacked twenty high. Anna Karenina on top of the entire Magic Treehouse series. The permanent smell of stale salt and vinegar chips.

But the walls? Hedgehogs. Hedgehog paintings, hedgehog posters, hedgehog string lights. She made the lights herself because that’s too niche even for the depths of Amazon.

The way some people are obsessed with boybands - that’s how it is.

The flea market is on the edge of campus, just a couple of tents with hand-painted signs, tucked behind a forgotten residence hall, and I'm the only one there besides the merchants. It's the kind of place my dad would love.

I’m nothing if not my dad’s daughter. I have his goofiness, his addictive personality. His love for the Green Bay Packers. His nose.

Genes are funny that way. I’m my dad’s daughter through and through but I got just enough of my mom to balance out the darker bits, the anger and the impulses. The sadness.

Gracie didn’t.

*

The first time was a Tuesday afternoon.

It was the winter of my senior year. Gracie was in eighth grade. I dreaded the end of the school year, when both of us would be shuffled on to the next academic stage, because I didn’t know how she was going to survive high school without me.

This was during a particularly horrible stretch in the dead of January. January in Wisconsin is already the ninth circle of hell, but especially when your dad is on military assignment in Texas and your sister has an eating disorder. She was eighty pounds on a good day and despite my mom’s best efforts to banish sharp objects from the house, it seemed like every morning she had fresh, angry red zigzags up and down her arms.

We couldn’t trust her to be alone, not even for the hour and seventeen minutes between her bus and mine, so my mom usually worked from home. When she couldn’t work from home, she made Gracie stay at school until I could come pick her up.

The air was thick with spice and vanilla when I walked in that day, my mom’s favorite incense. She only burned incense when she was stressed.

Sure enough, her voice drifted angrily from the office.

I didn't really know anything about her job beyond the somewhat obscure title of “project manager,” but a good bit of it involved yelling at people over the phone.

I was about to sit down and work on an essay that was due the next day when I heard a frenzied whining from upstairs. Our dog was pawing my sister’s closed door with an out-of-character desperation.

As I walked up the stairs, a trail of wrappers littered the way to Gracie’s room. At first I was irritated - until I realized the absurd amount of chocolate bars meant she was probably on a binge. Which meant she would soon be on a purge.

Her door was locked.

Gracie had a very strict no-locked-doors policy.

“Mom!” I yelled. Maggie echoed me with a sharp bark.

No response. She hated when we disturbed her conference calls.

“Gracie, open the door.”

No response.

“Mom! It’s an emergency!”

I heard a pissed-off grunt from Gracie’s room, indication that she was at least alive. Fear was starting to carve itself a place in my breath.

The door slammed open.

She was hysterical, mascara running down her cheeks, pink curls disheveled, chocolate smeared across her mouth. It was the type of image that could have been funny in another world, another life, but in this one it was horrifying. She shoved me aside and stumbled into the bathroom, throwing the toilet seat up. Retching soon followed.

For just a moment, just one second, I contemplated leaving her to her toilet. Telling my mom never mind, I was mistaken. No emergency here.

I don't know why that was my first instinct, but every time I think about it now, my stomach turns in something like shame. I’d like to say it was a kind of natural revulsion - the desire to look away from that which disturbs. But there was a calculation in it; a coldness. A voice whispering that this wasn't my problem.

I thought about my essay.

I followed her into the bathroom anyways. Knelt beside her, feebly patted her back.

“Gracie.”

Her hand had disappeared down her throat, swallowed itself whole. The snake cannibalizing itself. Ouroboros.

My stomach clenched and I cast my eyes away from her tiny, quivering body.

“Gracie, stop.”

My mom barged into the bathroom, finally, and I moved out of the way. She started screaming and hollering and flapping her hands.

The mess in the toilet had an acrid, bitter smell. I’d caught Gracie purging before and this was different. Chemical, almost.

Fuck.

I ran back to her room, wading through even more empty chip bags and candy wrappers, and found exactly what I was scared I would. Empty pill bottles - Tylenol and Oxycodone.

“Mom!”

She screamed something back at me, something I didn't understand. I don’t know if it was babble or if my brain had gone so hazy I couldn’t process words.

I never thought I would be good in a crisis. Maybe I’m not good so much as my mom is spectacularly bad, but either way I was the one who called 9-1-1.

My hands were shaking so violently I dropped my phone three times before I hit the call button.

My voice didn’t shake.

Hi. Yes. My name is Ava Allen. My sister just swallowed a bunch of pills. Tylenol and Oxycodone. I don't know how many. Yes, intentional. Fourteen. 5"4. Eighty pounds. 706 Kettlestone Trail.

Sirens. Police officers, firefighters. A straightjacket.

She stopped breathing in the ambulance once or twice. I never knew your ribs get broken during CPR. It’s a common thing. I guess broken ribs aren’t really anything compared to broken hearts, broken lungs.

I wrote my essay in the waiting room.

*

My second week of sophomore year I find a flyer advertising a Shakespeare theatre somewhere in downtown Madison. Auditions for Hamlet, September 17. There’s a black-and-white picture of a gangly, acne-scarred teenager dressed in a ridiculous hat and Shakespearean ensemble, lifting his arms in dramatic monologue.

I never wanted to be an actor growing up but I loved the theatre, so I was always in the school musicals. Something about the environment - the way it feels scampering around backstage in the dark - is intoxicating. Like you're a cog in a beautiful, messy machine.

I bring the flyer back to my dorm and pin it to my bulletin board, and promptly forget about it.

A week later, I'm studying with Gabriel, a guy from my Econ class. We've been hanging out enough that I consider him a friend. A friend with potential for maybe more-than-friends.

He wanders over to my desk for a phone charger and sees the flyer.

“Hey, Hamlet. I love that play,” he says. This makes my stomach flutter, because until he has shown zero literary interest, and I like boys who like books.

“Yeah, it’s one of his good ones.”

“Aren’t all of them?” he asks, his mouth sliding into one of those sexy half-smiles that come easily to boys like him.

“I have strong opinions on Romeo and Juliet.” I’m all hot and bothered by his half-smile to say this with any sort of conviction.

“But the poetry, come on.”

“It’s so ridiculous.”

“Cynic.”

His gaze lingers on mine, and I notice for the first time that there are dark flecks in his green eyes.

“Auditions are Tuesday. We should try out. We can be Hamlet and Amelia.”

I don't even correct him.

*

I lived alone for a while after the first time. My dad was stationed in Texas for a year and couldn’t get out of his contract, and Gracie got shipped to a “mental health medical center” in a town outside Baltimore. Sheppard-Pratt. The first in a series of double-named hospitals with websites that seemed to be advertising peaceful weekend retreats in the woods.

My mom stayed in a Ronald McDonald house nearby. She became good friends with the family in the room next door - got coffee with the dad and went to movies with the mom. Family of five from North Carolina. Three-year-old girl named Ellie with glioblastoma, being treated at Johns Hopkins. The parents swapped weeks, and their other two kids came up with them on weekends. Three beautiful little girls with strawberry-blonde ringlets, my mom told me.

“Her treatment isn’t working,” she said one night. “It breaks my heart.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s only three. She should have her whole life ahead of her.”

“Yeah.”

I could feel her sigh through the phone, could picture her lips pursed in concentration, holding the phone with her shoulder while she painted her toes.

“I just. I don’t know what to say to them,” she said, her voice breaking. “Their child gets this freak disease, and mine just - just starves and cuts herself.”

“She’s sick, Mom.”

Another sigh. “Yeah. I know.”

We had this conversation a lot.

*

Gabriel and I show up an hour late to the auditions because we missed the first bus. The theater is in a strange part of Madison, far enough away from campus that we couldn’t walk. There is a three-story Trader Joe’s across the street and a luxury coffee shop kitty corner, so I know we have crossed into upper-middle-class suburbia.

The theater itself isn’t much to look at. It’s an old church, evidently, judging by the rusted steeple and a peeling sign on the side of the building proclaiming, “Jesus is Risen! Hallelujah!” The building has clearly survived a couple too many Wisconsin winters without renovation, because the wood is cracking and bending in places. Breathing. A fence halfheartedly circles a yard overrun by knee-high weeds and wildflowers.

We look at each other and laugh.

“After you,” I quip, gesturing to the heavy double doors.

“Ladies first.”

“Fine. Scaredy cat.”

Inside is even stranger. The lobby is cramped, occupied by a spiral staircase that seems entirely too big for such a small building. A heavy musk permeates the air.

A paper sign on the theater door has, “Auditions this way, ye who dare,” scribbled in black Sharpie.

We push our way into the tiny black box theater. There are hardly more than 100 seats in the audience, but the stage is set up with a decent amount of scenery. From the forest and twinkling lights, I’m guessing leftovers from a performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

A girl is stumbling through her monologue. I think it’s maybe the Ophelia madness scene, but I honestly can’t tell between how quiet she is and how many times she mixes up the lines. She can’t be older than fourteen.

The age range in the room is comical. The youngest-looking is a little boy who’s maybe eight, and the oldest a man with a thick white beard and feathered hat. We sneak in as quietly as we can and hide in the back row.

After the girl finishes to feeble applause, the old man jumps up on stage. He looks like the kind of person who would be in charge of a place like this.

“Alright, then, does that conclude the female-identifying portion of auditions?”

I shrink low in my chair. Part of me hadn’t actually believed I would make it here, let alone audition, and I haven’t had enough time to mentally prepare myself. Even though there are maybe twenty people in the room, that is twenty people too many.

Gabriel shoves me playfully. “Scaredy cat,” he whispers, rubbing his thumb on the inside of my wrist in a way that makes my body tingle with hunger for him.

I stand up and raise my arm. “I just got here. Sorry.”

The man shields his eyes from the light and squints in our direction. “All right, lass, come on then.”

I stumble down the aisle, beginning to regret my choice of outfit. The cutoff shorts and crop top don’t feel appropriate in this theater-that-was-once-a-church, and the air conditioning sends goosebumps crawling up my arms.

The old man helps me up.

“Who are you reading for?”

“Reading for?”

“Which character? There aren’t altogether too many options for the ladies, as it be. So you may end up one of the men.”

Ophelia seems the obvious option, but also. Well.

“Um. The queen, I guess.”

He looks me up and down, pursing his lips.

"No, you're reading for Ophelia."

“But - ”

“You have that crazy sorta glint in your eye.”

Reluctantly, I accept the script he's handing me, and he hops off of the stage.

I stand shivering under the spotlight.

“Pray you, let’s have no words of this; but when they ask you what it means, say you this . . .” my voice trails off because there marked in the stage directions is to sing the next lines, and I am starting to get the feeling I really did not sign up for this. But I can't go back now, so I clear my throat and sing a song that is maybe about losing my virginity on Valentine’s Day. I even throw a little dance in, mostly to dispel the anxious energy in my legs.

When I finish, the old man gives me a standing ovation, and I know I am probably about to be cast as the girl who commits suicide. Wonderful.

Gabriel goes up a few people after I do. He auditions for Hamlet - of course he does - and I am surprised by how stilted he is, reading straight from the page and shuffling around awkwardly.

A couple of days later, the cast list is posted on Facebook. I am Ophelia, and Gabriel is Laertes.

My brother.

*

The second time was after everyone came home - my dad in April from Texas, Gracie and my mom in May. Four months shuffled between different hospitals. Four months of my mom living out of a suitcase, four months of me shoveling snow from the driveway and watching the Harry Potter movies over and over.

At first none of knew what to do with each other. The house was full again and it felt smaller than before. We were puzzle pieces that once fit together seamlessly, but our edges were now jagged. My dad and I had both gotten too good at being alone, and so now we curled in opposite corners of the house. My mom felt like she had control over her life again and was too happy about it - euphorically, hysterically, isn’t this wonderful everything’s normal, happy. It drove me insane.

Then there was Gracie. We treated her like she was our little glass doll. We whispered to each other when we talked about treatment, and if I ever got irritated that my jeans were too tight, heaven forbid I say anything at all about it. Heaven forbid anyone mentions the S word.

She was different, but I couldn’t tell if she was better. She was fifty pounds heavier and looked more like my sister than the paper skeleton who had left me four months ago, but her smiles and laughter felt forced. Empty.

It was a night in June. My parents and I were watching some stupid romantic comedy.

“Fuck,” my mom said suddenly. “I have to give Gracie her night meds.” We paused the movie so she could run them upstairs.

I had a feeling.

I don’t know what it was. But my parents and I were there on the couch laughing, and it was like she was already gone somehow. Like it had always just been the three of us and always would be.

I wasn’t surprised when the door was locked.

My mom started banging on the door, trying to break in.

“Charlotte, calm down. You’ll wake up the neighbors.”

I shushed him. I had never in my life shushed anyone, let alone my own father, but I knew and my mother knew what he didn’t yet. He hadn’t been here the first time. He had no idea.

I hated him for it.

Remembering the spare key to the upstairs bedrooms, I grabbed it from the office desk. My mom was already in tears by the time I ran upstairs.

I thought I had seen enough, been through enough, that I could handle whatever was behind the door.

I was wrong.

*

Gabriel and I are intertwined in bed on a rainy Saturday morning. Winter comes fast in Wisconsin. Soon it won't be warm enough for rain.

We’re watching one of the old Hamlets for research, and Ophelia has just died.

She is surrounded by flowers, floating down the river like an ethereal being. The Lady of Shalott, on her way home to Camelot.

I remember the blood on the floor, the gashes up her arm, the note on the bed. I’m sorry. I love you. Ava, please forgive me, I know I promised. She was so pale, so still.

I’m half sick of shadows.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something about shadows?”

“Nevermind. It’s a quote.”

“Ava Allen, you are one of the strangest girls I’ve ever met,” he says with a laugh, and usually I would just laugh back, and it would be so easy to just laugh back, and today I don't.

“It’s just - my sister. She tried it once. Twice.”

“Tried what?”

“Suicide.”

The word hangs in the air between us.

And then, finally - “Wow. I didn’t - didn’t know that.”

“Yeah."

*

There is always a split second when I see my mom’s name pop up on my phone at weird times, like when it’s really late at night or she knows I’m in class, and my stomach drops.

This is it, I think.

“Hey, Mom,” I answer, scrambling out the back of my Econ hall.

“Hey, honey,” she says, and my stomach unclenches at the lightness in her voice. “Just wanted to call and see how you are.”

“I’m good. I’m actually in class right now.”

“Oh, fuck,” she says, and then apologizes again for swearing. “Wow, it’s eleven. I thought it was later. I’m sorry, honey.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s just Econ, I can talk for a little bit.”

“You sure? I can really call you back.”

“No, seriously. I even read the chapter this week, I’m set.”

I didn’t read the chapter. But it’s November now, past two of my three midterms, and rehearsals are getting into the final stretch. I don’t really care about Econ.

“How is everything? How’s life, how’s school?”

“I'm good, everything's good. Busy. How’s Gracie?”

“She’s good. She’s Gracie.”

I want to tell her about the play. I don't.

*

I wake up before Gabriel the last day of dress rehearsals. He is sound asleep, his arms wrapping around me like a boa constrictor. He looks younger in his sleep, eyelashes long and thick, like a doll’s. Lips a little too perfect.

I know he’s sleeping with other girls, and that’s okay. He thought Ophelia was named Amelia, and now that we’ve been having mediocre sex for a couple of months and I’m no longer spellbound by lust, I’m pretty sure he only pretended to like Shakespeare to get in my pants.

*

For a couple of years straight, Gracie had really bad nightmares and kept peeing the bed, and she was too old to seek refuge in my parents' room. My dad was really concerned, or maybe embarrassed, and I would catch him whispering to my mom about it, when will she grow up.

So I started sleeping with her most nights. We would cuddle under the covers, the dog between us, and watch Rated R movies.

“Don’t tell Mom,” she would say, and I never did.

*

My Hamlet, a gorgeous albeit very gay sophomore named Nic, gives me a vodka tonic to "settle my nerves" on opening night.

I peek out from behind the curtain. I’m not on until the third scene.

I’m surprised how many people are sitting in the faded theatre seats. A lot of the cast have their whole families here. The front row is bursting with beaming parents.

I remember how my mom used to run alongside the pool during my events when I was on swim team, cheering and hollering even though I barely scraped third place. I remember how my father - my father, who couldn't be on time to anything - used to be an hour early to my orchestra concerts just to get a good seat.

And Gracie - I remember the way she watched me. In everything I did, her eyes were pensive, observant, adoring.

I should have been that for her. I should have been the observant one. I should have seen her.

I should have told them about the play.

Gabriel finds me and pushes me up against a wall in the dark, his hands sliding underneath my dress, and I kiss him back as hard as I can muster.

It is an empty kiss, punctuated by salt water. I don’t think he notices I’m crying.

*

On stage, I am radiant.

It's not that I give Laurence Olivier a run for his money. But I am a pretty girl in a white gossamer dress, and my heart is aching ever so slightly, and that’s exactly what Ophelia needs to be.

Beautiful, and sad.

*

When I stumble back to the dressing room after curtain call, a little bit drunk, I have eight missed calls. Gracie, Gracie, Gracie, Gracie, Gracie, Mom, Gracie, Gracie.

The fear monster returns to curl up in my chest, claw at my lungs. No no no no no no no.

I think I scream because Gabriel is there, and he looks scared, like I’m an erratic stray dog he doesn’t know if he can touch.

My fingers are trembling as I dial the phone, and it rings so many times I think my brain is going to short-circuit.

“Ava?”

Her voice is so young, so sweet. My dad has a recording of her on his phone from when she was six and called him to sing happy birthday. Happy birthday daddy I love you, giggling, and sometimes I swear she hasn’t changed at all, she’s still the little girl with pigtails and cowgirl boots and a gap-toothed smile, doing cartwheels and climbing trees.

“Hey,” I say, my voice hoarse, choked. “You called?”

“Yeah. I wanted to know if you took my purple shirt with you to college.”

I sink to the floor, my legs shaking under the thin dress. I want to reach through the phone and strangle her.

“The crop top? Yeah, I think I have it.”

“That’s my favorite shirt, you know,” and she is not that sweet little Gracie anymore, she is saucy and demanding and thorny.

She’s my Gracie.

“I’m sorry. I’ll bring it back soon.”

“You better.”

“I will.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

*

I found the pink hedgehog in a flea market. Spiky, spunky, and improbably fuscia, it reminded me of Gracie.

I was going to give it to her for Christmas, but the edges were made of wood. Sharp.

Dangerous.

So instead I bought it for myself, and put it on my desk, next to a picture of my parents at their wedding.

One day I’ll give it to her.

Some day.