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Annie
Summer, 1994
At first, it was just the three of us. Jill, her sandy hair falling in thick, wet locks down her bare back, her smile and dirt smeared across her face as she chased our little sister Tegan around the backyard. There was me, Annie, barefoot in a pile of mud, the cold shaking my tiny bones as I soaked the ground at the end of our long yellow slip and slide with the pale green hose. The knuckles of my small hands were turning a slight blue. I barely fit into my new purple bikini, my breasts barely starting to fill in then. Jill always teased me about that, but Jill couldn’t even wear bikinis since she was a little fat so she usually shut up about it. I pressed my thumb over the opening of the hose, spraying the icy water in huge arcs of rainbows across the lawn and onto our white deck. Jill caught Tegan by the two pink straps of suit that made at X across her pale back and dragged her over to the far end of the slip and slide.  I tossed the hose over towards the garden, stepping into the deepest part of the mud.  I felt the ooze of the earth squeeze between my toes, filling in even the tiniest crevices and pores. Bending my knees, I jumped highq, the mud splashing specks of brown and black across my thighs and pale stomach.

“Ready?” Jill shouted.

I gave her the thumbs up and dragged my ankles out of the deep mud. Tegan had never faced the mud bath before but now it was time in that sharp white heat of the mean, afternoon sun.

“You know the rules,” I yelled down to them, “Whoever gets the dirtiest wins. You get two shots to do it or else me and Jill are gonna give you a real mud bath as punishment. Ready?”

I watched Tegan’s tiny body blow up like a balloon. She tiptoed backwards, trying to gauge the perfect angle or speed or whatever it was. Instead of softball like Jill and me, Tegan ran track, and before running she’d always do the same thing. She bent her right knee forward and I watched her arc her toes and coax all the angles of her body into the perfect shape, concentrated intensely like a dancer, all the force and power building up at the tips of her toes.  She finally found her spot, a good fifteen feet away in the neighbor’s yard. She was still as a statue for a moment except one that spontaneously burst into life, her elbows swishing back and forth gracefully across her chest and feet never touching the ground. Whenever I watched her run, I’d always concentrate on her feet to see the sole, a toe, anything touch the ground, but never, I never could. Right before the slide she pushed the front arcs of her feet deep into the ground and jumped.

That was the thing about Tegan. Jill and I had to turn our heads up to even see her: God the blaring white sun beating down on us, and Tegan’s silhouette against that huge white ball like a fucking angel sent down for us from Heaven, to save us, to complete us, just the three of us. Three parts god, the three parts us, Annie, Jill, Tegan. It was like the world had come together for a second, all the crooked edges of the pieces of the universe slipped into place. Then there was the explosion of mud, pieces of wet dirt that rained from the sky and streaked across our shoulders. Jill would run for five feet before falling on her ass and I’d dive after her. Tegan won but we’d smash mud into each other’s hair and across our bare legs anyway, feeling the warmth of the sun on our backs drying the mud onto our skin. Nothing was impossible with the three of us. We could fly.

Jill
Summer, 1999
The summer was how we measured things. Some summers went fast, faster than others, and each time they were more fun. My little sister Tegan wasn’t scared of anything. I wasn’t scared of anything either really, and neither was Annie.  We had an older brother, Jason, who had dark hair and dark eyes like Tegan, but was five years older than me. I don’t know what it was about us, but Annie and me were always together. I was taller than her, and a little chubby, but we were always wearing the same green velvet dresses in the Christmas cards, our golden hair falling perfectly down our shoulders. Our cheeks were pink and our eyes bright and green. We were in the middle, right in front of the tree. It said “Happy Holidays from Susan, Roger, Jill, Annie, Jason, and Tegan.” There were always two smiling sunny daughters in the middle, with Tegan and Jason just shadows of smoke from the fake fireplace.

But Tegan moved fast, faster than Annie and I ever did.  The summer she broke her finger riding horses the whole world sped up. At first things went slow. Annie and I still played softball during the days and Tegan ran track, but afterwards we’d float in our pool balanced on pink noodles, lining ourselves up with the sun as it set in lazy June afternoons. I always rescued drowning June bugs from the top of the water, gently scooping up the purple beetles into my palms and laying them on the pool ledge, where they could dry up and crawl around until they flew away. Each day I’d scoop out two or three beetles; sometimes they would die, or their legs would be curled into a crumpled dead mess before I even found them. Those days there was a sad, wet kind of wind that smelled like dead, crushed worms. Wet death in the summer air. Wet death in the swimming pool, in water that ironically made up all of life. It’s funny how things happen sometimes, how time can start to slow down so much that it seems like forever. But then, suddenly there’s a bump in time and you’re going so fast there’s no way you can stop. 

Tegan started riding horses, at a small stable fifteen minutes from our house. I watched her at a competition once that summer, my mind filled with the sweet smell of hay and the sharp lines of her red and white uniform. It was at a Midwestern farm with a lot of corn, but clean stables and horses. It smelled like cow shit though, now that is the typical rural Midwestern scent. (Whenever I went to downtown Milwaukee, it always smelled like horse shit). Me and Annie climbed up on the white fence, pieces from our lazy braids flying against our faces along with sweet swish of red and black of Annie’s uniform and almond, honey horse. Afterwards we’d all float in the pool on yellow noodles, trying to melt ourselves back into water as the sun pressed the repetitive, boredom onto our foreheads. Our dad gave us giant plates of watermelon and we’d spit the seeds high into the hair, but they’d always fall right back down. The pink fruit dissolved on our tongues. The constellations stayed the same.

Tegan fell during a small competition and broke her finger and her thumb, and the doctor gave her forty vicodin for the pain. But Tegan never slowed down and that just made things go faster. One day I found them in the medicine cabinet, brought them over to Tegan’s room and asked her if she had taken them before. I knew the rush Tegan loved from running, the rush she loved from riding but probably wouldn't feel for awhile, and I knew she had smoked with Jason before. Jason loved her a lot. When she was twelve I walked by Jason’s room and smelled a huge wave of ganja. They weren’t paired together just because they looked alike, the fact of the matter was Jason loved Tegan, more then Jill and me, and Tegan loved Jason. It didn’t matter he was 19 and she was 12 to anybody, especially them. Tegan was mature and acted older than she was. I smoked with Jason before too, and I usually caught a whiff of that smell around the hallway outside his room and occasionally the kitchen, but this time I knew Tegan wasn’t in her room or anywhere else in the house. She told me that night anyway, it was the first time she smoked weed.

Tegan looked up at me from her computer desk. I saw the heavy white splints wrapped tightly across her hand and down her wrist twitch on the mouse. Tegan  was dark but she was still pretty, she looked like our Polish grandpa Zubrycki. I kept this old picture of him, his long thin nose, small lips, big dark eyes, and round cheeks exactly the same as Tegan’s. Her lips quivered a little bit, her eyes slightly sad, hungry with pain. Usually she loved it when she knew everyone was focusing on her, that second when all the parts that made her up would come together in her brain, when she knew every person who had their eyes on her then truly loved her, even if just for that brief moment. She lost that race. She told me it was like church, when she won, it was communion, when Jesus’ body was melting on her tongue, and everyone loved her for sacrificing her body. And then she was reborn, that was the best part she said. She always won.

“No but I was talking to Annie and she said you could get pretty fucked up on them.” I smiled.

Yeah, I knew Tegan. I figured she’d been smoking weed since that time with Jason, and I knew that now especially she wanted to feel good, to feel some kind of fast. We spread ourselves across her bed, popping off the pill top and counting out the pills.

“Do you think Annie will want some?”

I gave Tegan six of them, taking six for myself.

“She already took some.”

“Oh.”

We took the pills and put on a movie. Tegan pushed the rest of the pills back into the clear orange bottle and into the top drawer of her desk. We fell back onto the pillows of her bed. I felt the warmth of the television glowing against my body. My eyes fell shut and I was driving, it was a warm summer day, the windows were down and I could smell the grass and corn and cows and the green leaves were brushing paint strokes across the clouds.

“I feel good.” Tegan said after awhile.

“Yeah, me too.”

I felt her scramble off the bed, shuffle over to her desk and pull out the drawer. She pushed it back in and popped off the white top.

“Here, Jill.” She was standing across from me on the other side of the bed, holding out her hand to me, the clear orange bottle sitting on the desk. I held out my hand and she dropped three white pills into my palm. I ate them and I saw her take some more and put them back in the desk. She walked over to her window, pushing up the heavy gray bottom, and falling back on to the bed.

“What kind of moon is it tonight?”

I twisted my neck to see out the window, but the stars and leaves were all swirling together really fast.

“I don’t know, I can’t really see, it’s all going too fast.”

I scrambled over to the widow, twisted my knuckles over the sill out into the warm night. The night was a swirl of colors, mostly whites and yellows, painted on a huge black canvas. I sucked the sweet summer air up into my lungs, thick with the scent of rain and worms and grass. I turned back to Tegan, but she was still, lying across her bed with her eyes shut, her chest going slowly like a runner controlling their breathing nice and deep.

“I feel good,” she mumbled, “my body’s going really fast.”

Later that week Annie and I searched through Tegan’s room for that prescription, but it was gone. We finally found it under the sink, in the very back behind old boxes of shaving cream. There were none left.

Annie
Spring, 1997
The first time I smoked pot was with Jill. We were with her old best friend Tara at her mom’s house. It was the spring and the sun was setting. In her kitchen Tara guided us through the beginning process, smoking a small bowl with us so later we could smoke again and it would actually work. We stood in the kitchen, me, Jill, Tara, Tara’s sister Katie, her friend Sarah, each of us pressed up against a different appliance: me the stove, Katie the sink, Jill the dishwasher with the leaky bottom, etc. Their house was old. The whole foundation was old and the middle of the kitchen floor was sinking in. Jill was nervous with the bowl and had to have Tara light it for her. Tara was careful to step around the middle of the kitchen, lighting the bowl for me next. There was something strange in the air; no one walked across that sinking tiled floor, as if somehow you got too close to that black hole of pure want, you would be sucked in forever. Jill put her foot in that hole first, then me not soon after, and Tegan.

In the long stretches of boredom in the summer we’d start to disappear. The leaves of trees would blur together, everything seemed to be made of water and green and corn. When I’d drive down the roads the gray smudges would melt off the sides into the corn fields, the yellow lines slipping down off the sides. The top of the sky would melt into the trees, blurring the whole Earth together.  We’d swim in Tara’s old above ground swimming pool, mostly making laps around the fourteen-foot circle, hopefully swishing the boredom into a whirlpool so that it might disappear.  Tara’s house was wild and old.  Her mom barely lived there, Tara said they were more like roommates. The trees were the tallest I’d ever seen. There was no driveway, just two long streaks of concrete and the thickest green grass and weeds that ran wild over it. In the pool we caught mosquitoes sucking our blood and pulled them out of our skin between our fingernails, squeezed their blood-filled bodies until they exploded. We played truth or dare and watched the blood drip down our wrists and dared each other to lick it. Once our fingertips had turned into wrinkles and our ears and necks were red from itchy bites we laid our huge beach towels out on the squishy lawn. Laying back Jill and I watched Tara crunch up a nugget of green leaves. Once she pushed the last of the green into her bowl, she flicked the lighter and ran it over the top.

“Look at what I’m doing with my thumb,” she told us, showing us how to hold it and release the choke. In the dark Tara sucked and sucked and the weed looked like a firefly.

Jill took it next, Tara lighting it for her, telling her to pill her thumb up and down. Jill let out her hit in a huge cough of smoke, weed streaming out of her nose enveloping her head like a ghost. She passed it over to me. I made a perfect kiss with my tiny lips, perfect around the mouthpiece. I was a little nervous, I could feel the tiny bones in my fingers shaking again. Tara guided my thumb over the small hole, steadying my hands, and asked me if I was ready.

“Sure.”

She lit the lighter, and I started sucking. I could feel the smoke burning tiny holes into my lungs, burning away at my body and cells but I kept sucking anyway.

“Good, good, now suck in more air without letting out any smoke.”

I breathed in a cool stretch of air, feeling the smoke burning  all the way down to the bottom of my lungs. I blew out the smoke in a long stream up towards the bright sky, (it was late at night but it was a strange, white summer night since it was a full moon Jill told me), lying back on my towel. Tara and Jill were talking about space, about stars and parallel universes and black holes. Their minds were always going so much quicker than mine and I could usually never keep up. I looked up at the trees, their heavy branches sweeping against each other like brooms. Back and back forth, back and forth across the flat sky. I felt the grass with my fingers, running the huge blades across my palm.  My body felt light and airy, and I realized that I was only just a part of the ground I was laying on. I closed my eyes, listening to the night, the cicadas hot breath brushing in the leaves. I began to feel myself melting back into the earth. I felt the worms and beetles and ants crawling beneath the ground and the world moving, slowly, but always moving.