Prologue
The last normal day of my life started with Stella Bellamy stealing my yogurt.
I heard the refrigerator open from under my pillow, and then the unmistakable sound of a spoon hitting the bottom of a plastic cup, and I sat up and said, "Stella," in the voice I reserved for her, which was the voice of a tired older sister who had never once been an older sister, and she stood in the middle of our kitchen in her robe with my Greek yogurt and said, "You were going to let it go bad."
"It expires tomorrow."
"Exactly. I'm doing you a favor." She took another spoonful and pointed the spoon at me. "Also, the gala committee group chat is already on fire, and you are the only person in this apartment who knows how to put one out."
It was eight-forty in the morning. The gala was tonight. The third annual Second Chance Prom, a charity gala for the children's hospital — grown adults paying four hundred dollars a plate to relive high school with better wine and worse knees, and I was on the committee as Stella's unpaid deputy, which meant the fires were mine whether or not I'd started them. That morning's fire was the valet company, which had emailed at six a.m. to say they were short three drivers and could we "self-park the overflow." I spent twenty minutes on the phone in my pajamas, standing in the cold spot in the kitchen tile, explaining to a man named Doug that four hundred dollars a plate did not include hiking across a service road in heels. He found the drivers. I told Stella, who said, "See? Deputy," like I'd performed a magic trick instead of basic logistics, and I felt disproportionately proud of it all morning. I got up, and my bare feet found the cold spot in the kitchen tile that had been there since freshman year, and Stella handed me back the yogurt, which now had exactly two spoonfuls left in it, and went to get dressed with the spoon still in her mouth.
We had been assigned to the same dorm room freshman year by a housing algorithm that must have been laughing. Stella was the girl who borrowed your eyeliner and returned it with a better one, plus a story about the boy at the counter. I was the girl who color-coded her planner and pretended not to care that nobody asked me to the spring formal. Three years later she was on a first-name basis with every event organizer in the city, and I was twenty-one and a third-year student with a planner that still had its color code, and somehow, against every law of roommates, we had never had a fight that lasted past breakfast. She had been campaigning for tonight's crown since September — not the desperate kind, the Stella kind, which was just being so relentlessly, specifically herself that voting for anyone else started to feel like a clerical error. I'd watched her work a room full of donors the way other people watched weather change: with total confidence it would go her way.
That morning's fight, such as it was, lasted eleven seconds and was about my dress. Or rather, about the fact that I did not have one.
"The emerald one," Stella said, emerging from her bedroom in a cloud of steam and perfume. "You're wearing the emerald one. This is not a discussion. You looked incredible in it at the fitting, and if you wear the black dress again people are going to start thinking you're in mourning."
"I'm the deputy. Deputies wear black. Deputies are invisible."
"Deputies," Stella said, "do what the queen tells them." She stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders and looked at both of us in the bathroom mirror, and for a second neither of us said anything, because we were both thinking it. She looked like the kind of girl galas were invented for. I looked like her logistics department. "You'll thank me at midnight," she said, and squeezed my shoulders, and went to blow-dry her hair.
I had classes until two. Organic chemistry had nearly killed me sophomore year — Stella had talked me out of dropping it, sitting on my bed eating my emergency ramen and saying, "You don't get to quit the hard thing in October, that's literally the rule of October," which wasn't a rule of anything, but I'd stayed, and I'd passed. That morning the professor spent forty minutes on reaction mechanisms and I took notes in three colors and understood maybe half of it, and my biggest worry, the whole lecture, was whether the cardboard yellow cab in the photo booth was going to survive the night. It had arrived with a dented fender and a suspicious lean, and the committee chat had been arguing about it since Wednesday. The theme was *Midnight in Manhattan*. You can't do Manhattan without the cab.
Between classes I sat in the library and worked on the wrap report, which was my job — the committee's post-gala summary, the thing nobody reads and everybody needs. I liked the wrap report. It was a list of problems that had already been solved, and there was something restful about that, on a day when my father was in a hospital bed two states over and the doctors had said two months, maximum, and the weeks had been keeping their appointments whether or not anybody else did. Kidney failure. That was the word the nephrologist had used, very gently, like it might bruise less if she said it softly. It hadn't.
He called at one-fifteen. He called every week, and lately the calls had gotten shorter, because the dialysis took so much out of him, and because my mother did most of the talking now, sitting in the corner chair of his room with her knitting. The oxygen hissed behind his voice like a tire with a slow leak. Somewhere in the background I could hear a nurse's shoes squeaking down the hall, and a television playing a game show, and all of it was so ordinary that it took me a second to remember it wasn't — that the ordinary was the thing that was ending.
"How are my classes," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Heavy," I said. "O-chem's evil twin. How was dialysis?"
"Oh, you know." A pause, and I could hear him deciding whether to lie to me, and then deciding not to, which was new and worse than the lying. "They're good to me here, Iris. Your mother's learning to knit a hat. It's going to be the ugliest hat in the history of hats."
"Send pictures."
"I love you, baby girl."
It came out of nowhere, the way it did now — not the end of the call, not a sign-off, just dropped into the middle like a stone into a pond. My throat closed. "I love you too, Dad. Tell Mom I said the hat sounds perfect."
"I will." Another pause. "How are your classes?"
"Heavy," I said again, gently, the same as before. "I'll call Sunday."
After I hung up I sat in the library with my phone in my hand and didn't move for a while. A girl at the next table was crying quietly over a textbook, and I thought about going over to her, and then I didn't, and then I felt bad about not going over, which was, I understood even then, the entire shape of my personality: a girl who color-coded her planner and felt guilty about strangers. I finished the wrap report. I went home. There were garment bags on every chair, a curling iron heating up on the bathroom counter, her phone playing a makeup tutorial at full volume, and in the middle of it all Stella herself, standing in her silver dress, holding her phone away from her face and saying, "I don't care what the florist says, the centerpieces were supposed to be black, *black*, I sent the email—" She saw me and mouthed *help me* and I took the phone and told the florist, calmly, that the contract said black and the contract was attached to my email of the fourteenth, and the florist said she'd call back, and Stella exhaled like a punctured tire.
"You," she said, "are the only reason I survive."
"Deputy," I said. "Invisible. Logistics."
She threw a pillow at me. Then she made me sit down, and she did my hair herself — pinned up, the whole complicated architecture of it — and when I said we should have paid someone she said, "The woman who charges by the hour is for queens, and tonight that's me, and you get the best friend rate, which is free and better." She was gentle with the pins. Stella was always gentle with the parts of me she was allowed to touch. It was the rest of me she bullied. When she finished she didn't step back right away. She looked at me in the mirror — really looked, the way she did when the performance dropped for a second — and said, "How's your dad? For real."
It was the first time anyone had asked me that all week in a way that wanted the real answer. "Same," I said. "The dialysis is — it's a lot. For him." My voice did something I didn't like, and she saw it, and she didn't make a thing of it. She just reached past me for her perfume and said, "He's proud of you, you know. Even if he's too doped up on hospital air to say it right." Then the moment passed, the way Stella always let moments pass, and she was shoving earrings at me and telling me to hurry or we'd miss the band's sound check. But I carried that sentence with me all night, tucked in next to the wrap report and the seating chart. *He's proud of you.* It was the truest thing anyone said to me that day, and I didn't know it was the last true thing I'd get for a while.
The emerald dress fit like it had been waiting for me. It was hers, technically — everything I owned that was gala-worthy was hers, technically, lent the way Stella lent everything: permanently, and with commentary. Stella stood back, arms crossed, and did the slow nod she did when she was right about something.
"Told you," she said.
"You're insufferable."
"At midnight you'll thank me."
The drive to the Harborline took twenty minutes, and Stella spent all of them on the phone, and I spent all of them watching the city go by with my hands folded in my lap so I wouldn't wrinkle the dress. It was raining a little, the kind of rain that can't decide, and the Harborline Event Center rose up out of it with its glass ceiling lit from inside like a lantern. Stella hung up, finally, and put on her perfume — two sprays, wrist to wrist, the one she'd worn since freshman year, the one that lived in the wool of her black coat all winter — and caught me watching. "What?" she said. "Nothing," I said. "You smell like the good part of every party I've ever been to." She laughed, and for a second she looked eighteen again, and so did I. Inside: black balloons. A ten-piece band tuning up. The cardboard yellow cab, leaning but standing, in the photo booth corner — I touched its fender for luck on my way past, and it held.
The next three hours were the best kind of busy. I checked in the band. I fixed a seating chart disaster involving two divorced donors and one round table. I stood on a chair and re-hung a balloon arch while a waiter held my ankles and told me I was brave, which was the funniest thing anyone said all night. At one point the emcee — a local news anchor with teeth like a piano — pulled me aside to ask whether he should mention the children's hospital kids by name during the auction, and I said yes, absolutely, the whole point of the four hundred dollars was the kids, and he went off looking inspired, and I stood there for a moment thinking about it. That was the part of the gala nobody joked about. The money went to the pediatric wing. Somewhere across town there were children asleep in hospital beds who would never know that a cardboard yellow cab and a balloon arch had anything to do with their new wing, and I found that unbearably moving, in the way of someone who spent too much time that year in hospitals herself.
Stella floated through all of it like it was weather she had personally arranged, stopping every twenty minutes to squeeze my arm and say, "Are you having fun?" and me saying, "I'm working," and her saying, "Same thing, if you do it right."
At eleven o'clock the emcee called her name over the microphone.
She hadn't told me she was going to win. Or maybe she had and I'd been too busy to hear it. There were three other nominees — nice girls, the kind who'd already started their thank-you speeches in the mirror — and when the emcee said "Stella Bellamy" the whole ballroom stood up and clapped like she'd won something that mattered, and I stood up too, and I was grinning so hard my face hurt. She took the stage in her silver dress and laughed with her whole face, and they set the little plastic tiara on her hair, and she held up both hands like a boxer. The crown caught the light every time she moved. It was cheap and gaudy and she looked radiant in it, the way only Stella could look radiant in something worth eleven dollars.
"My queen," I said, when she came back to our table, and she bowed so deep the crown nearly slid off.
"Don't lose this," she said, pressing a kiss to my cheek. "If it touches the floor, the magic dies."
"I'll guard it with my life."
Twenty minutes later she was dancing with a cardiologist from Spokane, and I was sitting alone with my dead phone and an empty glass — the phone had given up around nine, and I'd given up on finding an outlet — and for a while I just watched her spin, thinking about texting my mother. I wanted to tell her about the crown, about the cab holding, about the balloon arch I'd re-hung with my own hands. I wanted to tell her Dad had sounded good today, which was almost true, in the way things are almost true when you love someone. But the phone was dead, and the night was loud, and I decided it could wait until morning. There would be time. That was the thing I believed, sitting at that table with an empty glass: that there would be time. I thought about the wrap report, and the cab, and the balloon arch, and my father saying *how are your classes* twice, and I thought: this is a good night. This is a good life. Small, and full. I had a best friend who stole my yogurt and did my hair for free. I had a father who loved me even through the oxygen. I had a planner with a color code and a dress that fit like it had been waiting.
She leaned over mid-spin and mouthed *purse* at me, and pointed at the door.
Her clutch — the little beaded one with her lipstick and her keys and the tip money for the valet — was out in her car. The parking lot was across the service road, a ten-minute walk in heels I was already regretting.
"I'll go," I said, and she threw her coat over my shoulders — a long black wool coat that smelled like her perfume — and then, laughing, she took the crown off her own head and set it on mine.
"Stella—"
"You're the queen of the parking lot," she said. "Bring back my kingdom's treasure."
I should have taken it off. But it made her laugh, and it made the cardiologist laugh, and for about four seconds I liked being the one wearing the crown. I pushed through the service door and the cold came off the parking lot like something alive, and I wrapped the coat tighter and straightened the crown with one hand, and behind me the Harborline glowed through its glass ceiling, the band's brass bleeding faintly through the walls. Ten minutes, there and back. I'd be back before the slow songs.
