The first thing I heard when I opened the front door was the sound, and I didn't know what it was.
It was a small sound. A crisp, chewing sound, like somebody biting into celery two rooms away, and then a pause, and then the sound again.
I had my work polo on under my hoodie and my name tag still pinned to it, MARLO in white letters on a black plastic bar with a little cartoon bowling pin at the end, and my hands smelled like the blue disinfectant we sprayed into the rental shoes.
I'd worked the Saturday birthday-party shift at Starlite Lanes, eleven to three, which meant four hours of nine-year-olds and pepperoni grease and a machine on lane six that kept eating balls.
I was tired in the good way, thinking that there were exactly twenty days until graduation and that my dress was hanging upstairs on the back of my closet door in its plastic bag, paid for, every cent of it, and that tonight I was going to try it on again just to look at it, which I'd done every night for a week.
Snip.
Our living room is the first room you walk into, there's no hall, and so I saw it all at once, the way you see a car accident through a windshield, everything at the same time and none of it in order.
My sister Hadley was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the TV. She was fifteen, a freshman, still in the gray Bramwell Softball shorts she slept in, her hair in a knot on top of her head. She had something white across her lap, a lot of something white, spilling off her knees and across the rug in a long pale river. She had Mom's sewing shears in her right hand. They were the good ones, the orange-handled Fiskars that lived in the wicker basket by the couch and that nobody was ever allowed to use on paper because it would dull them. Mom had told us that a thousand times. Paper dulls them. Use the kitchen scissors for paper.
She wasn't cutting paper.
My mother was on the couch. She was on her end of it, the left end, the end with the dent, with her feet tucked under her and a mug of coffee held in both hands against her chest. The TV was on and muted, some home renovation show where a couple was knocking down a wall with sledgehammers and laughing about it with no sound. My mother was not watching the TV. She was watching Hadley.