Her face was sticky. She wasn’t touching it, but she could tell there was something abnormally sticky about it as she lay on the rotting wooden floor. Her chest heaved for a moment. She knew why it was sticky, in a split second of an unnamed explanation that made all the sense in the world until it didn’t again.
She hiked her dripping shirt up and wove it through the strap of her damp bra. She closed her eyes momentarily. She was sweating. Maybe that’s why she was sticky. But it didn’t seem like it.
“I’m so glad you came back with me,” the words fluttered from her lips as she turned to face him. He smiled without teeth, but said nothing, and didn’t turn his head towards her. “I know you didn’t want to at first, but I think it was the right choice.”
She glanced around the room. It had been exactly one decade since she had left this place she once referred to as “the pit”. Bad things happened here. She knew that. She always knew that. They both knew it.
Bad isn’t the right adjective, the thought flitted through her mind. It’s too plain, much too plain. Bad suggests a boring heat, full of spiders and road kill. Ordinary things that might be unpleasant in a rural, stinking, decaying town like this. Things that were more than bad happened here. That’s why she had left in the first place, wasn’t it? She couldn’t take it, at the time. Birthdays ended in singed floorboards, family photos were torn into shreds until nails bled and doors slammed and hair was emancipated from heads, and summers turned into jail sentences.
“I think this was something we always needed to do,” she continued, breathing heavily in the heat. It seemed to be pushing down further onto her chest, infiltrating her lungs and igniting a small flame. She closed her eyes hard, choking back a cough. “Are you there?” She looked over once more, and for a briefly infinite moment, she could not see him. She looked through his hair, that brown mass matted to his head, and finally he was back, right there, in front of her, as if he had never been gone. As if she had never left him.
He had always been her favorite, and if she could have chosen she never would have left. But she had to. She knew that. She always knew that. They both knew it.
She was the golden girl. The girl full of promises and secret manifestos that propelled her to more golden and more happy. She was the golden thing, she was more than just a girl lying, sweating, on the floor of some rotted house in the middle of a flat, rusting town. She was so much more, whether they ever said it aloud or not.
So when she plucked the clothes from her tiny drawer and took the family photo from the cracked frame and hopped in the back of a chipped blue pickup truck with some boys from the garage down the road, no one could blame her--and no one did. Or at least, no one said they did. She was onto better things. She was onto more than cold showers and sometimes no showers and cramped beds and broken windows and black, blue, purple, yellow bruises. She was full of light and full of air and full of golden, she was a balloon of everything the rest of them had missed.
But that balloon had been inflated long ago, and now it was summer. Now she was home.
She took the back of her clammy hand and held it to her sleek forehead. “I swear it’s only gotten worse since I left,” she laughed to him. He grimaced. “What’s the matter? Is it the heat? C’mon, you should be used to this. We spent our whole life in this heat.” He heaved heavily. “I guess it is pretty damn bad, now…” she admitted. Unusually bad. As if this particular summer was making up for all the ones she had missed, and all the calls she had let go to voicemail.
She didn’t mind that the dirt on the floor beneath her bare, wet back was making imprints and muddying up her smooth skin. She was comforted by the smell of mildew that she had once let fade in the dusty rearview mirror of her memory.
“Where is everyone?” she asked him, as if he hadn’t left shortly after her and thought of this place even less than her.
He was silent.
He had never been her. He was the silver boy; sly, quick, clever, undyingly energetic. He was always there and never there. He had dreams, and he dwelled on them. He was the silver boy, but she was the golden girl. He couldn’t have followed her, and she knew that.
So she left. And she liked often to think that she had only fond memories of this place. The truth was not so simple—she liked to tell herself that when the fluorescent blue light outside her window would not rest, and the man prodding his horn on the anxious street below would not give his voice a break, and halt his shouting until the sun had risen.
She liked to tell herself that they would all be fine without her—after all, their mother wasn’t so bad when she couldn’t find her bottles.
She liked to tell herself that she had to leave, that there was no avoiding it. That they all knew it since the day she was born. She knew it. And he knew it too.
She rolled over, onto her stomach. A black bug she couldn’t name crawled across the molding floor for eternity. She decided she didn’t have the energy to swat it away when it crawled through his hair to reach the other side. He’s fine, she thought. He’s always been fine, hadn’t he?
“Where is everyone?” she asked him once more. He didn’t reply, but lay stewing in his own dampness. She reached across the floor and gave him a light tap, then a hard shake. “I said where is everyone?” She was growing impatient at his silence. She never did have much patience really, and that was a simple truth.
He finally turned his head to her, slowly, gradually, as if opening a door on a rusty hinge. Or maybe closing it. “You weren’t that good.”

The blood came sputtering out of her mouth with the breath she had just released. It flowered her white tank top and chest. Something was on top of her. She didn’t know what it was, she couldn’t find the source. Her lungs were crushed, she knew that much. Shriveled, dying, pitiful little pink shrubs, she could only imagine.
She gasped, hard. Her eyes fluttered, and she began to blink heavily. Her head was sticky. She couldn’t figure out what it was, but she knew it was sticky. It wasn’t water, it couldn’t be water. Had she been cooking?
She remembered her undying pain. She wiggled a toe, flushed with relief that she couldn’t explain. But she couldn’t feel her waist, or her abdomen for that matter. She heard coughing in the distance.
Someone called a name from far off, in the same direction as the coughing. Who’s name was that? She couldn’t put her finger on it for the life of her. The boy’s voice repeated it again.
With a start she remembered that those strange syllables were forming her name. “I’m…I’m here…” she murmured weakly to her companion, whose name she couldn’t place either.
She moved her neck slightly. She cried out while a sharp gust of pain overtook her body. She brought her chin in slowly, moaning, until she could gaze down her body. Except it wasn’t her body. She didn’t know what that mass on top of her was. She couldn’t name it. It was large, grey, and cracked. It was massive. It was bloody. “What…what?” she needed an answer, any answer.
“I’m trying…” the boy’s voice continued, this time closer. “I’m coming…just…wait…” he gasped.
Where was she? And what was this? Who was the boy who was climbing through smoke and rubble and an awful moment just to get to her? Would she have been able to do the same? Would she have even done the same? The last was a strange thought that struck her harder than the first surge of pain; the not knowing her full abilities, while also knowing wholeheartedly how much they lacked.
“I’m here, I got you…” the boy was finally next to her, his dark hair matted into his dirt caked face. It was the same boy from before, in the house.
She murmured the first letter of a name into his sorry eyes.
He fulfilled it with what she assumed to be his name, but which she forgot instantly.
She cried for a brief moment, before remembering the blistering sun that seemed to be moving its way around her intestine and pelvis.
With a mighty shove, he managed to move the gargantuan cement rock slightly, but not enough to ease her immense discomfort.  He gave it another heave. She block was halfway off, and she could see one mangled leg. She moaned in a high-pitched way, the kind of moan that she didn’t care if others heard because the pain was simply too great. The kind of pitiful moan that one might emit before a sad death.

“What do you mean I wasn’t ‘that good’?” she snapped curtly at him, not unlike how he remembered her.
“Are you really staying this time?”
“Of course I’m staying, I told you we were coming back because we’re here to stay. We have to. We can’t leave them again.”
He was silent at this. She stared expectantly at him, waiting for him to remember their agreement for their summer plans, and for him to agree with her. He remained silent.
“Why are you being so quiet? Where is everyone?” her voice was growing hopeless. His lack of rhetoric was eating little pieces of her sanity. She couldn’t stand this heat anymore. She couldn’t stand this house. She roared his name, as his eyes fluttered closed.
“I never left.”
“What do you mean? I saw you at…I was with you.” She couldn’t remember where she had gone to see him and convince him to come back with her. Everything before that moment seemed fleeting, except for her life before ten years ago, before she had left this place.
“You needed to be happy. But we all needed to be happy.”
“We were happy, we are happy! Where is everyone?” Why wasn’t he replying? Why was he avoiding the question?
“You know where they are. That’s why you left, isn’t it? So you wouldn’t have to go with them? You know, ten years is longer than you think in a house like this.”

She knew what it was. She was never more sure of anything, she was more sure than of any decision she had ever made. It was blood. A small drizzle dangled out of the boy’s mouth and onto his black T-shirt. Only it wasn’t him anymore. It was a man whose triangular nose and pointed mouth were as unrecognizable as where she was right then and there. He peered at her with one blue eye. The other was a large black dot where the blue and the pupil had been. It looked like what she imagined the earth to be in the center of the universe; not completely puny, big enough to matter something slight, but still not large enough to be enough. For anyone.
She realized with a start that he was holding her hand. He squeezed it gently and patted her head, like she was a wounded dog. She felt as though all her limbs had been detached maniacally. She couldn’t bear to look at her pulsing, mangled, writhing legs. Her white shirt was now red. She squeezed his hand hard. She didn’t want to be alone. She couldn’t be alone again.
“I have to go now,” the man said smoothly, evenly into her ear. She whimpered but could not muster out any words. She couldn’t understand how he could leave her there. Was help on the way? Was she going to be fine? Wasn’t he injured too?
She managed to ask why, the words meandering in the dull, smoky air between them. “I need to help myself,” he told her.
With that he had vanished. He was gone in an instant, but it felt like he was still walking at times. Sometimes he was the boy, sometimes he was just a man, sometimes he was her mother, or maybe one of her brothers or sisters. But most times, almost every time she caught a glimpse of him, as she watched him walk away, fading in and out of the last moments of her life, he was her ten years ago.
It was all going to end soon. That much she could tell. The plates had collided and had decided to take her tumbling with the rest of the earth they had demolished. It was fine. Except that everything was awful. She had been left to die, essentially. She wanted to understand how that man could leave her, for himself of all things. She remembered fleeting stories of selfless people sacrificing themselves for the good of other dying people. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to go? She was trying to understand so she could just go in peace, but she couldn’t first understand anything at all. Not even anything from the last ten years.

She was staring at her own grave.
The names beside it read the five names of her brothers and sisters, one of which was the boy’s. And there was one last name, her mother’s. Her name was to the left of the boy’s, where it ought to be, she felt. She had let him down the most.
She gazed at them for a while, until she realized what exactly she was looking at. The sun beat down on her neck. The summers never did change here, even after she was dead. She was finally back to stay, just like she had promised him that summer before, over the telephone while he tried to pretend the shouts were coming from outside, and that his grunts and pauses weren’t coming from the blows of a frying pan. Just like she’d tried to pretend her phone hadn’t been working for the last nine years.
She still couldn’t find her family in the house, and she hoped they had gone on without her, to a higher up place, maybe. She hoped she might go there too someday, but she was doubtful.
She decided it was best she look away. She would have next summer, and each summer after that to stare. She was finally back home, just like she had promised all those years ago when she had left. The golden girl was now sleeping eternally in her backyard’s brown abyss. Even if she wanted to, there was nowhere for her to run to anymore.