Sally loved to eat, she ate everything. Her mother’s nose, the rhinestones off a pair of sunglasses. Animal seeds. Thick blue pills. The rattling husk of a starfruit. Sally loved to wax: she knew thirty-seven different ways to rip tape off someone’s body. To leave nothing behind. To carve her initials into you: a hairless S.M. against all that underbrush. Skin was always being taken away from us in little moon-shaped slices.
You and Sally. Us and her.
Nobody waxed Sally. She loaded us up with cash, we trinketed her things into boxes when she died. Ate a cold dinner in her honor, faux lamb steaks dripping with red. Sally would’ve eaten the snow peas, palmed them, gummed them. Masked up her eyes with them wiped through all the tear tracks. Spread them all over the walls and called it an art installation. Her hair coming out of its ponytail, not in a cute way. Instead, we tucked the peas into a fridge that didn’t work because nobody wanted to pay the power bill. We tried to avoid her love and fantasized about having her trust fund, stole her dresses and modeled them together in front of her full-length mirror, a plunging mass of fabric. Each of us brandished cell phones with the flash on, Lacy in blue and Jenna in fuchsia and Quincy in silver and me in red. Sally’s dresses were too big, they swallowed us, gobbled us up, we tied the cords too tight and they left these great, swooping Xs across our bodies. The day was drawn, frigid, there were goosebumps running across our arms. But Sally wasn’t there and couldn’t say anything. Sally was dead.
That night we had gone out on a different day than usual. Late on a Wednesday. It threw us all off our meal plans, so instead of picking at stringy chicken and broccoli, we messed around in Sally’s closet trying on dresses until Jenny started complaining about bloating and Quincy started talking about intermittent fasting and suddenly everyone was going on about keto and gluten and honey-lemon water in the mornings, and I saw Sally’s lower lip began to tremble, and before I could tell them to stop she ran out of the closet on quick feet like a gazelle. I’d never seen a gazelle run except on cologne commercials. After that the mood was ruined and we all abandoned her dresses in favor of jeans and tanks. Sally was nowhere to be found and the bathroom was dark, but when I went to get extra tampons I found the door was locked. I didn’t listen, didn’t knock. We weren’t big on privacy except for when it mattered. That night we went out without her and didn’t talk about what had happened. Secretly we all liked it more when she wasn’t there.
The weekend before had been rough: rough night, rough going. The downpour had come from nowhere. We all slushed around for a taxicab but could find none. When we saw her, she was drenched in rain, crouched halfway down Fifth Avenue. The entire city hunched against the cold. Taking in her pale body: wrapped in a yellow shearling jacket, tassels curling like tails, stilettos sinking into a sewer grate. We were hand in hand, an entire sidewalk away, yelling her name, Sally Sally Sally hurry up catch up. Don’t wait up. As the water pounded down from the sky, Sally shimmied onto her belly, aimed her nose at the sewer, and nuzzled. Nuzzled all the way in. Came up soaking wet, her hair spiked thin, eyeliner spread all over her cheeks. For days after, we’d talk about it whenever she left the room. Who’d gotten her drunk like that. Who’d gotten her sad like that. How she could’ve done something so odd, so pathetic. What we never mentioned: how Quincy grabbed my elbow the next morning and pointed at the balcony we shared with our neighbor, a man with a mohawk. We never went out there, there was always someone from his parties throwing up or smoking or smearing around residue. I followed her finger. Crouching on the floor was Sally, hunched over a blue plastic washtub, hands moving slowly, the yellow jacket thrusting in the water like a dead fish. I took in her hair: roughly chopped, green at the roots like a lawn. She had her back to me. Her knees were almost touching the floor. I stood up. I couldn’t bear the sight. None of us could look at each other. Everyone felt grim and somehow dirty, like someone had dunked us all in suds and rubbed us raw and suddenly we weren’t clean anymore. Like something awful had touched us. After a while, someone made egg sandwiches and turned on the TV. On it a bald man was discussing unusual weather patterns. He was saying things, lots of things, sorry everyone, sorry for saying it would be sunny yesterday then you all got wet. The rain just came down, I didn’t…I didn’t know. He looked around, sheepish, until someone offscreen made a kind of gesture. I didn’t know. Then he just stared blankly into the camera, doing nothing and saying nothing, keeping his nose bundled in his coat.
Abigail Chang is a writer currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work appears or is forthcoming from Fractured, Salamander, Quarterly West, Los Angeles Review, Room, Cortland Review, the Shore, and elsewhere. Find her at twitter @honeybutterball or at https://abigailchang.carrd.co
Image credit: Yves Monrique