By Caroline Koopford

A Friday afternoon, late March of 1990, suburban New Jersey. A second-floor apartment in a series of two-story brick buildings. In the living room there is a slumped brown couch, a scarred coffee table, and a television with dial controls and bunny-ear antenna that stick out garishly from a lop-sided wicker shelving unit strewn with artificial flowers. Beside the shelves is an unshaded window. Outside, the branches of a close maple tree bud neon green. It is almost evening. The light is warm, crepuscular.

Two girls laze on either end of the couch, sleek as seals on a dock, stretched out as far as they can be without touching one another. The television blazes. Cassie is ten. Franny is eight and has been suspended from school. Not for the first time.

Since kindergarten, Franny has gotten into trouble for fighting. But this year—the one in which Cassie and Franny’s parents got divorced and they moved here with their mother and began Catholic school (a settlement requirement of their father’s)—has been worse. The principal and both teachers Franny has tried have been, as they put it in this afternoon’s conference, “understanding.” But they have used up all their resources. Their mother had to rush away from her new job at the bank to hear this. And also this, from sweet Ms. Nunnely, who wears long flowered skirts and has half the school half in love with her:

“The other children are afraid. Not just second graders, but the whole school. They never know when she might strike. They’re afraid of being hit when they’re in line, at lunch, at recess, waiting for the bus—any time Frances might be unattended. We’re a big school. We simply can’t

have eyes and ears on her all the time. And even when we do… Well, you see what’s happened here.”

What happened was that Franny hit Ms. Nunnely. Their mother is skeptical. She says the school is biased against Franny (and her) because of their family situation, but Cassie knows Franny did it. She can see her little sister in her mind’s eye as clearly as she sees Franny now, staring at the screen and chewing on a lock of perfectly braided, perfectly straight, perfectly blond hair.

High on the energy of recess, her cheeks glowing, Frances Ellen McDonough whips a tight corner around the monkey bars. She has been knocking into other students for some time now, lying in wait at the bottom of the slide’s ladder until the yard mother’s back is turned. At first she plowed into boys who would be too ashamed to tell and too slow to catch her. But toward the end of the period she knocks the wrong person, a straight-A student, an altar boy in training. A rule-follower. Franny watches the report from underneath the slide, burrowed into a squat, the back of her jumper brushing the ground. Ms. Nunnely arrives. The group peers toward the slide. Ms. Nunnely walks onto the playground, through a game of freeze-tag, smiling tightly to signal that nothing is wrong. But before she is close enough to talk instead of shout, Franny runs. She circles the chain link fence, turns sharp corners, goes faster, faster. Ms. Nunneley is before her now. She turns to face Franny, raises her arms, opens her mouth to say, “Stop!” But Franny has already decided. She knocks head and hands into Ms. Nunnely’s hip, into the thick wool of her long burgundy coat. The teacher stumbles, but she doesn’t actually fall, which is probably what saves Franny from immediate expulsion. The rest of the class has twenty minutes of extra recess while Franny is brought to the principal’s office.

And now, devil that she is, Franny is lazing on the couch the same as Cassie despite her behavior. Their mother isn’t doing anything. She is tired. She is asleep. Not that this is out-of-the-ordinary either. Since the days grew shorter in late fall and Cassie showed she was capable of making cereal or microwave dinners, their mother has been in bed more and more, not caring how much TV they watch. It’s not ideal, especially when Franny is doing something she’s not supposed to or being annoying on purpose. But TV has a calming effect on them both. Cassie has to admit that the afternoons when her mother leaves them alone are the better ones.

When she has energy, she has plans, new routines or “a fun thing to try.” Cassie doesn’t like them either but she knows her mother needs a break, that she needs compliance. Franny is willfully unaware. She always resists. There will be a fight. Screaming for sure. Hitting, holding down, shoving, pulling if an object is involved or Franny won’t go to their room. Before they moved they had their own.

They have a neighbor downstairs who can hear them, Mrs. Devine, a squat old lady hardly taller than Cassie who encases her swollen legs in thick tan stockings and plants a strip of garden in front of her apartment every spring. Statues of a solemn angel with closed wings and a tonsured St. Francis with open arms live there all year long.

Mrs. Devine knocks her ceiling with a broom handle when they get loud. When they pass her on the sidewalk, she and Franny scowl at one another. “You keep in line,” she says. “I never heard such a racket. In my day, we knew how to be ladies.” Cassie pinches the fabric of her skirt and gives a hidden curtsy, looks respectfully at the ground. She resents Mrs. Devine lumping them altogether.

Their mother nods approvingly, as if to say, yes, in my day I was a lady, too. Of course, this is a lie. Or if it is not, she is certainly not a lady now. Now, she is face-down on her bed in turquoise underwear and a pink sweatshirt mussing up her newly-permed hair. It will be up to Cassie to make Franny understand the severity of her situation and to get together a dinner without meat. She hopes there are fish-sticks in the freezer though chances are slim.

It is Lent, and empowered by what she has learned in school, Cassie is trying to do everything right. Even her father, who is supposed to be the Catholic one, doesn’t take it seriously. Last Friday, he ordered pepperoni on their pizza and shrugged. “I don’t think that’s actually the important part,” he said. She thinks it is a bad idea to take religious advice from someone who got divorced. She picked her pieces off and threw them away.

“Giving up is an important part of it. You’re supposed to give something up, not eat meat on Fridays, and do good works.”

“Good works?”

“Duh. Like being nice to people. Helping.”

She waves her hand in front of Franny’s face.

“Stop.”

“It’s dinner time.”

“Leave me alone.”c

“We have to turn it off. You don’t deserve to watch it anyway.”

Franny presses her lips together and stares as if, with effort, she might teleport into the screen.

Already Cassie wants to push her, drag her off the couch, but she knows she’ll lose. Franny isn’t stronger but she’s crazier. More experienced. So Cassie simply turns off the TV. The image closes in on itself like an object sucked into a whirlpool.

“Hey! Turn it on!”

“It’s about to be the news anyway.”

Franny lunges to turn it back on, but Cassie yanks the power knob out of its socket.

“Give me that!”

“No. You shouldn’t be watching it. You’re in trouble.”

Franny reaches for the knob but Cassie is taller by a head. She wraps her arms around Cassie’s waist to pull her down, lifts her legs so Cassie is forced to carry her. Cassie lumbers to the couch, swinging her hips, whisper-yelling: get off, stop, you’ll wake her up!

But Mom hears anyway. She bursts through the doorway, roaring and swatting at the walls. “What the hell do you think you’re doing! There are neighbors!” She points emphatically at the floor. Her thighs are dimpled and tracked with veins that make Cassie feel it must hurt to live in a body like her mother’s.

Franny turns her righteous, squinched-up face to their mother and points at Cassie. “She took the knob!”

Mom turns her flaming mascara-smudged eyes on Cassie. “Put it back.”

“But—”

“Put it back.”

Tears balloon beneath Cassie’s ribs. She holds them there, gently, painfully. She presses the knob back into its hole like the completion of a ritual, as if she is submitting to a great, ultimately worthy sacrifice.

What to do? Oh, what to do?! She did nothing wrong! She was helping her mother! She was following the rules! Yet she is in trouble, she is unloved, she is alone. She is the one trapped in the bedroom while Franny sinks into the comforting rhythm of sit-com reruns.

She spies her backpack sitting with its top open in the trough between her bed and the wall. It is a sign. She pulls out her binder and flips to the Religion section, a purple tab at the back. Inside is her Lenten Path worksheet, a space for each of the forty days. Earlier today, she wrote “no meat” and “be nice to Franny”. She erases “be nice to”. She writes “make” in front of her sister’s name and “be good” after. Then, because she has no idea how she will do this, she kneels to pray, crosses herself, and folds her hands on her bed.

There is a mirror on the opposite wall, and she can see her reflection in profile when she veers her eyes in that direction. Her face is tear-streaked, her ponytail askew. She adjusts her hair until the errant locks look arranged, appropriate to the striving and humility in her heart. She thinks she looks like one of the doe-eyed religious figurines she covets. She tries not to be too pleased. But while she knows vanity is a sin, God does seem to appreciate the efforts people make in church—the gold, the pathetic statuary, the suits and ties, the heels and dresses and hats.

She is just beginning on an Our Father when she hears Franny and Mom in the living room. “You will behave!” and “No!” and something (a lamp?) knocked to the wood floor. Then, they are knocking into the hall, Mom’s effortful grunts, Franny’s maniac laughter. They burst into the room as a single body, Franny’s legs kicking the door in, Mom holding her like a naughty toddler too big for its age.

Mom drops her. She falls to the floor with a thud. Out of breath, Mom points down. “Stay,” she says and slams the door behind her. Mrs. Devine’s broom bangs up through the floor.

Cassie refolds her hands. “I was praying for you.” She glances at her proper self in the mirror, proud of her composure.

Franny gets up and shoves her. “Stop looking at yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re ugly anyway.”

“I’m praying. For you! Do you know how much trouble you’re in? Dad’s gonna kill you.”

Franny lunges onto the bed and swats Cassie’s hands down, holds them there with her knees. She draws Cassie’s middle finger back toward her wrist until Cassie thinks it will break. She tries to pull away but Franny is too strong.

“Don’t pray for me! I hate you. I hate you so much I’ll kill you!”

Cassie is weak in the face of threats and pain. Criticism of any kind, really. She begs for mercy, sinks to the ground.

Franny lets go and pushes her top half off the bed. “I hate you,” she says, but her voice is calmer.

Cassie curls up on the floor and weeps quietly, tasting the salt of a tear when it reaches her mouth. She prays in earnest, nurses her sore finger. She’s sorry, she’s sorry, she says to God. What did she do? How can she fix it?

The answer comes back in the voice of the priest she likes, the young, enthusiastic one who has come from Nigeria. “Stay calm, my child. Keep trying!”

Refreshed by her tears and prayer, she sits up. Franny is pulling the blankets and sheets off of her bed.

“What are you doing?”

“None of your business.” Franny sniffles and wipes her nose with the back of her marker-streaked hand. It leaves a bluish mark beneath one nostril.

“Put it back. Seriously. You’re already in so much trouble. Don’t you get it? They’re going to kick you out of school.”

Franny stops piling bedding on the floor under the window, looks at Cassie, and cants her hip to one side. “Don’t care.” She is mimicking a cool girl they saw on a show. Cassie rolls her eyes.

“Dad pays a lot for that. He’s gonna lose his money because of you. You might not be able to go to any school now.”

“Good. School sucks.”

“Franny, you have to graduate. Or you can’t get a job and you won’t have any money and you’ll be homeless and have no food.”

She cants her hip again and flashes a toothpaste-commercial smile. “Don’t care.”

Cassie squeezes her prayer hands together and her eyes shut to keep from knocking Franny over. She slides into the space between her bed and the wall with The Lives of the Saints, a book given to students with perfect report cards, and begins to read.

Her favorite is Saint Catherine because the picture is most beautiful, a woman with big eyes and long blond hair falling to her waist. Her dress is red. She wears a golden halo and an expression so beatific it is impossible to believe she ever felt anything but holy and illuminated by the attention of God. The book says she gave up her beauty and cut all her hair, but Cassie doesn’t want to picture her that way.

She flips idly, stopping at the saints who look kind or who are girls she might imitate—Saint Anthony, Saint Cecilia, Saint Benedict in his cave, Saint Lucy with her big eyes, which were taken from her as torture.

She looks up when she hears the window open and feels the room grow cold. Franny’s mattress is bare, blue and shiny with skull-sized roses, its own surprising kind of beautiful. Franny’s back is to her. She is standing at the dark window throwing something out.

“What are you doing?”

Franny doesn’t answer, but reaches down to pick up some of the blankets and sheets. She puts them over the windowsill and lets them down carefully like a stream of fish into the sea. Cassie rushes over and grabs Franny’s arms, but she doesn’t drop the rope she’s made. “Stop. Or Mrs. Devine will hear them.”

She has this way sometimes. Cassie can recall it even when she was three or four. She’d get shut in her room during a tantrum or finally be satisfied after sinking her teeth into Cassie’s arm and she’d get very quiet and intent. She would use up an entire crayon coloring a section of wall until it looked like paint, take apart her bedside clock down to the gears, rip every page out of every book on her shelf. She didn’t cry at first if someone tried to take her away, just struggled to get back to her task. When she realized it was hopeless, she’d bang her head until she had bruises.

So Cassie tries to use reason. “You can’t actually go down there when it’s done,” she says. Franny keeps calmly feeding rope out the window.

The branches of the maple tree are black against the navy sky. The streetlight across the apartment complex road has come on, highlighting three precise rectangles of concrete.

“It’s dark. At least wait until morning.”

Franny reaches out the window and pulls on a tree branch, testing its strength.

Cassie can’t look. She runs to the bedroom door, whispers that she’ll tell mom, that she could die, that she can’t. The last thing she sees is Franny with her knees and hands on the windowsill, her straight bangs jostling over her eyes and obscuring them so Cassie can’t tell if she’s scared.

She turns away and closes her eyes, squeezes both hands around the doorknob. “I’ll tell,” she whispers to no one in particular, to the part of herself that refuses.

She hears a knock and shudders, opens her eyes and turns. Franny’s gone. The window is empty, shows the night, Franny’s pink polka-dot sheets twining over the sill.

She rushes to it and looks out. She was prepared to see her sister’s unconscious broken body below, a bloody head, unnaturally angled limbs. But Franny is standing in the grass behind the maple tree smiling and waving like a beauty queen.

Cassie throws her hands up and scowls. She’s glad Franny isn’t hurt, but why, why does she always get what she wants when Cassie is the one who follows the rules and must wait her turn and ask permission for everything?

Well, she has to tell now, even if she doesn’t want to. Personally, she doesn’t care what happens to Franny now. She can’t control whether she gets kidnapped or run over by a car or attacked by a wild animal. Of course, she’ll pray for Franny’s safety, (she thinks a quick prayer and crosses herself), but she can’t control God.

She creeps to the hall where she can see her mother sunk in the middle of the couch, a bag of potato chips Cassie’s never seen before on her lap. She reaches in and stuffs her mouth with several, licks her fingers. Cassie can smell the sour cream and onion powder, her favorite.

Little House on the Prairie is on TV. One of the daughters is sick with scarlet fever. Music swells as the father grooms his horse and the girls’ sister asks, Is she gonna be alright, Pa? Cassie rolls her eyes. She doesn’t like the Little House show with its old-fashioned costumes and life-and-death risks. Someone is always almost dying.

But Mom likes anything that makes her cry. And she likes the actor who plays Pa, his feathered hair and bare chest. He reassures his worried daughter. Her sister is strong.

Cassie steps into the room.

“Mom?”

Mom shakes her hair back from her face again and looks at Cassie coldly, challenge in her eyes, like this better be good.

“Franny’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“She climbed out the window.”

Mom closes her eyes and exhales like a person trying to be calm.

“I saw her. She’s outside now, running around like a crazy person in bare feet.”

She opens her eyes and looks back at the TV. Her face is very still like someone asleep with their eyes op

On TV, the sick girl wakes. Pa holds her as she lifts her head from the pillow and opens her eyes. She screams. Pa! Help me! I can’t see!

Mom’s chin trembles and gathers into a pitted knob. She starts to cry.

“Mom?”

Her mother moans and rocks back and forth, hugging herself tightly.

“Mom?”

“That,” she says gesturing at the screen. “I never had that. Nobody ever loved me like that. Never!” Her breath comes short and fast.

Cassie pats her bare leg. It’s hot and big and alive.

“I do. I love you.”

“Oh!” She cries like she’s being poked with a needle. “Oh! Oh, sweetie.”

She grabs Cassie’s face and looks at her gravely. “You are such a good girl. But you don’t ever have to take care of me. I’m your mother. It’s my job to take care of you.” She draws her into a tight, sweaty embrace. “I will always take care of YOU!”

Cassie twists her neck, and, finally, her mother releases her.

“What about Franny?”

Mom wipes the tears from her face and shakes her head. “It’s fine. She’ll come back.”

“But—”

“But what, Cassandra? You know how tired I am.”

Cassie takes a deep breath and looks at the soap commercial on TV, the grass and ketchup stains that disappear, the blinding-white t-shirts. She snuggles into her mother’s side. “Can I have a chip?”

“If you go to your room.”

Cassie nods eagerly, and Mom tips the bag toward her. She grabs a handful, three-and-a-half she discovers in the hall, instead of one. She eats them one at a time, letting the flavor powder dissolve on her tongue, the fried potato softens so she hardly has to chew.

The bedroom is freezing when she goes back in. She might as well be outside like Franny who is probably risking hypothermia without shoes or a coat. It might rain.

She paces, her side to Franny’s and back again, wondering what to do. No one cares, it seems. No one’s watching but God. Probably. She isn’t sure she has that right, whether God sees everything or is everywhere or both.

She thinks she should clean up, but when she goes to pull the sheets inside and close the window, she thinks Franny might need the rope to get back. Mom has locked them out before.

A summer night when they first moved here and were screaming. Franny had pulled some of her hair out and she sat against the warm brick and consoled herself with the diamond-like flecks in the concrete that flickered in the dark. The memory is, first of all, humiliating—that they had been so bad together they’d been shut out of the house. But beneath embarrassment and anger lies another more troubling truth: it was nice there. She heard Franny around the corner running on the grass, kicking the trunk of the maple tree, jumping to hang onto its branches, and felt peaceful, like they were both safe.

She leans out and draws in a branch of the maple tree, damp and rough and flexible. She touches a bud. It is hard as a pebble. Franny appears streaking in from the right side of the building, her hair out of its braid and streaming behind her. She jumps and calls to Cassie, waving both her arms. “Come out! I dare you!”

Cassie shakes her head. As if she would ever. She could break her neck.

“Come on! It’s easy! You just slide, and drop.”

Mrs. Devine’s broom handle knocks up from the floor. Cassie can hear her muffled voice shouting something.

Franny points toward her garden and giggles. “I knocked her angel down!”

Cassie sighs. “Come in now. I’ll open the door for you.”

“Okay. It’s cold.”

But before going to the door, Cassie grips the windowsill and reaches her head and neck as far as they will go.

She breathes the cool night air, smells damp and car exhaust, clutches the wide base of a branch of the maple tree where it splits from the trunk and reaches its own way toward the sky.

It’s like praying.

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Caroline Koopford is a New Jersey-native who has made her home teaching and writing in Oregon. Her work has been published in Washington Square Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her on substack.com/@carolinekoopford