Because she was a good person, or not bad yet, Alyssa didn’t suspect a thing when Dom said he could get good weed in the city but didn’t have a car or any money. She offered to drive my old Jetta, which she’d inherited after I moved to Philly for college. The heater was completely busted, and gas was more expensive than ever, but that was Alyssa’s problem now.
Dom and I had graduated two years prior, but he never left town. Just like Sarah, he’d decided to stick around his dad’s house for a few more years, which would turn into a few more. Still, Dom could charm anyone. If only he weren’t so beautiful, so clever. He talked to you like you were the only person. Everyone who met him fell in love with him—dealers, old women needing help across the street, young girls, still in high school—and, okay, me too. I’d done things I never thought I’d do, nothing sexual. I made fun of the two overweight goth girls who sat behind us in math class. One pulled a hair off my t-shirt and took it home to hex me. I only made fun of them when Dom was around. When he wasn’t, the girls, Elizabeth and Becca, asked me why I was friends with him, but I bet they’d be friends with him, too.
I knew Alyssa wanted him to like her so badly, because he was older, and because he was my friend, and, as much as I didn’t believe, could not fathom, because she looked up to me. That’s what little sisters do. I guess that was also Alyssa’s problem.
The whole plan revolved around what she’d do to hang out with us. It was a very bad plan and I was a very bad sister for going along with it. Dom said it would be easy because she’d been hitting him up on Facebook. “I think she’s got a crush,” he said. Of course she did. I knew she wouldn’t give me the money she earned from working at the stable near our old elementary school, but figured Dom might be different, and I was right. He’d flirted with her just enough to get her to agree to drive him up to the city, where they’d pick me up.
I called him an hour before they arrived. “Do not, ever, never ever, tell her we’re buying heroin,” I said. I hadn’t done it since I moved away—from Pete, Sarah, Dom, home. But two years is a long enough time. When I thought about dope, I thought about Dom. He could always score without suspicion. He looked vaguely Puerto Rican, and had a scar above his left eyebrow. I’d seen some guys at college shave slits into their eyebrows just to look that cool, but it was a barber shop shave, and it always grew back. Dom’s dad threw something at his face when he was little and he got stitches; his was permanent. He said, “Do you think I’m new at this? Come on, I know what I’m doing.”
Like clockwork, a text from Alyssa: I’m excited to visit you! She must have thought that we were suddenly friends, like I hadn’t spent my formative years ignoring that I even had a little sister. Maybe she thought we’d go to a frat party, most of which I would soon be barred from.
They picked me up in front of the dorms. There was a new dent in the passenger’s side door that looked like someone had opened it into a boulder. The windows were too tinted, and I was embarrassed to be seen getting in the backseat of my own car. Alyssa was silent, but that wasn’t new. She’d always been shy or, if not shy, quiet. Dom turned around to kiss me on the cheek, and I had to lean forward and face the side of her face. She’d gotten a third ear piercing, or maybe she always had it.
——
The plan to rob my sister didn’t sound like robbing at all, not how Dom said it. We’d just use her money to buy heroin and give her a bag of oregano and some crap I put together in the cafeteria. If she noticed, so what? She knew nothing about the city, people got ripped off here all the time.
She probably didn’t even plan to smoke the weed. She spent her weekends mucking stalls and brushing horses. It didn’t sound conducive to ripping fat blunts. Hanging out was the currency.
But once we turned off campus, it felt shameful. Most people don’t see the moment they turn bad, but I did. I got in the car anyway and felt a little relieved, like, okay, decision made.
There was a soggy McDonald’s bag on the floor, and I was trying to kick it under the seat, but every time I did, it popped back out. It was like the whack-a-mole game. I had a grease stain on the toe of my sneaker, which I wore for years after, never thinking again about this night.
Alyssa kept changing the radio station and looking over at Dom, then at me, to see if she should keep going. I didn’t care what we listened to. Tonight, we listened to Dom. When he said stop, we stopped. When he said wait at the corner for five minutes, then drive around the block and wait again, we did it. If you didn’t listen to Dom, he’d make fun of everything, from how you said a word like Oh,—maybe you said it too much, or with a weird accent—to how you were always looking out the window, like, brainless. He would make fun of your last name, too many syllables, then he’d give you a new one with the same amount of syllables, but it would suck even worse. Everyone would laugh, and when it wasn’t your turn, you’d laugh, too.
A hex. A magic spell made to fuck you over. I knew anything Elizabeth tried on me wouldn’t be worse than what I’d do to be liked or loved by Dom. In sixth grade, I wrote a note to my best friend stating who I had crushes on, in order from most to least. Next to Dom’s name, I wrote: He’ll always be my number one. Imagine how ashamed I was when, twenty minutes after recess, after my friend had let Dom’s friend, Jeff, borrow her jacket, all the boys were chanting: He’ll always be my number one!
Jeff had been out of the picture for years. He got into sports. Golf, actually, but they took a team picture and got it in the same yearbook section as football and soccer. My old best friend played soccer, and they probably thought they dumped us, but really, they were lame as fuck. So dramatic over balls! It was embarrassing.
I tried to catch Alyssa’s eyes in the mirror, to see if she was scared, or second-guessing her decision to come down here. If she’d wanted weed, I’m sure there was someone at her school who’d get it for her. I wasn’t guessing; I’d waited two years to give in to the dope itch. I’d told myself to give it time, and if it didn’t go away, I knew who to call. Not Pete, who was too complicated. Not Sarah, who was a flake. Dean’s number was dead.
———
Once, I had my name on a certificate, all seven syllables. This was before I was a sister, in the first grade, when I received the Friend of the Year Award for speaking for Diana Rupert, who was too shy to talk to the teachers or anyone but me. I’d tell them what she needed and report back. There was a school assembly for my good deeds.
Now look at me. I could say, Alyssa, let’s do anything but drive around North Philly to find weed because weed is not really what we’re finding. Don’t you know that by now? Don’t you know your big sister by now?
As we pulled onto Somerset, past an elderly woman eyeing us from behind her curtain, past the blue light bulbs over her door, I didn’t say a word. Alyssa let Dom out and I didn’t move. I let her taxi me around the block, and we waited where Dom said to wait. He’d already been gone for at least fifteen minutes when it usually took five. Another reason you listened to Dom: He’d been doing heroin forever. He was the only one who knew where to get it and what to say and who didn’t look like a dork asking. I knew it had something to do with his older sister, who died, but he never talked about her. I only knew because when it happened, he told me through AIM and didn’t come to school for two weeks. That was middle school.
“How’re the horses?” I asked.
“I actually started training with Jen at the farm. She says she thinks we can get the one I trained to auction soon.”
“Cool. Are you going to buy it?” Not if your sister keeps stealing your money, I thought.
“No. But since I broke it, I might be able to keep working with it if it’s sold somewhere local. Auctions are really competitive.”
I could tell she was scared because she was talking fast. As far as I knew, she’d only been to the city once with Mom to drop me off with all of my college stuff. I hadn’t even let them come up when they dropped me off. She’d never seen what I did with my side of the room or met my roommate, who was the opposite of me in many ways, including having enough money to buy magazines and lie around the room all day.
“Can I smoke in here?” I asked.
“Mom will bitch.”
“Mom smokes.”
“Yeah, but I don’t.”
“Tell her it was me.”
“She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“You’re just afraid of rolling down the window.” I was mad at how terrified she seemed because we were in a poor black neighborhood. It wasn’t like anyone in our white neighborhood was rich. I’d seen how much money she gave Dom. I wondered how many shit-caked horse stalls she’d had to clean to make a hundred twenty dollars. Also, why not tell mom she was visiting? Was I not allowed to spend time with my own family?
Dom was taking forever and when I asked Alyssa how long she thought it’d been, she shrugged, and we both looked back and forth like dogs in the car. I wasn’t exactly calm, either. I hadn’t been able to pass him the oregano. It was still in my purse, smelling nothing like weed. We waited, we waited, we waited. It might’ve been the longest any two sisters have spent alone together in a lifetime.
It was too dark to see his face when he returned, slammed the door, and told her to drive. He’d been robbed. The guy who was usually there wasn’t. It was this different guy, and he took all of his money. “Your money, fuck. I’m sorry,” he said. He’d been trying to find him, which is what took so long. I knew by the sound of his voice he was high. Alyssa was just glad he was okay, but I was pissed. This big fake story, all so he wouldn’t have to share.
———
I’d been nervous to stand on stage to receive my Friend of the Year Award. The truth was, I had the same thing Diana did; a pathological shyness that shook me mute whenever I had to speak to anyone who wasn’t her. But I beat it out of myself: don’t be a baby, don’t be a wimp, speak up speak up SPEAK! The day of the ceremony, Diana said she’d stand beside me. No one else heard her say it, and when we walked up together, I looked like the one who’d pulled her up on stage, my little pet. There’s a photo somewhere that my mom took, or maybe a home video. Diana and I would kiss on the lips at the end of every day. See you tomorrow. My mouth was her mouth.
Soon after, I developed a blister. It’d appear in the left corner of my mouth when I was sick or stressed. It itched, then it burned, then it bled. There were scaly skin flakes I couldn’t help picking. “Stop that,” my mom would say, “you’re making it worse.” She blamed Diana. “It’s because of that little girl you’re always kissing. She has cold sores.” They’d get so bad it hurt to open my mouth, to eat, or even talk. I’d have to cake them with Vaseline and dig into the raw red cracks with a Q-Tip. I prayed to God that they’d go away. It was my only prayer, please make it stop. They were disgusting, which meant I was.
By middle school, they were gone. That’s when Dom approached me in the cafeteria and told me he loved me. We’d never even spoken; he was dating Pam, the most popular girl in school. I’d AIMed her once to see if she wanted to chill, and she wrote back ha ha ha ha ha loser. Now her boyfriend was asking me if he could kiss me. I knew he was joking. He was with Jeff and the other boys who’d sung he’ll always be my number one. They were laughing, but he wasn’t. He’d said the only thing I’d wanted to hear and it hurt more than the cold sores, more than anything in the world.
After he’d asked to kiss me in front of everyone, I went to the guidance counselor and changed my lunch period. It wasn’t until we’d started doing our schemes that it was clear he wasn’t lying.
———
We took Alyssa to a frat party at the house across the street from my dorm. On the walk over, Dom went on and on about what an asshole, what a shithole part of town. I said nothing. I’d have to drink double to feel what I’d hoped to feel that night, and even that wouldn’t work. At least it seemed like Alyssa had forgotten about the money. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal. She was asking me all these questions about school that I couldn’t answer, like my favorite subject. I was thinking about what I might be able to get from the frat guys—probably some shitty coke, definitely Adderall—when Dom grabbed my hand and dropped two tiny bags in it.
That was the last I saw my sister for a while. She and Dom fell asleep on my dorm room floor and left before I woke up.
The next week, Dom was back. He’d charmed the security guard into letting him into the dorm lobby without a student ID. When I asked him how he got to the city, he shrugged. Another day, he was in the cafeteria, asleep at the table. I hadn’t figured he’d stick around, and in this new place, where I’d planned on becoming new, too, he was beginning to embarrass me. My roommate and her friends didn’t understand why he always carried around a nearly empty water bottle with a melted cap. They said he might be kind of cute if he shaved his beard and took a shower. Ha ha ha ha ha loser.
I started stealing from frat parties. Shampoo, hair pomade, a kitchen knife, whatever wasn’t too disgusting to put in my bag. Once, I failed to return the coke spoon of a higher-up brother. The guys never noticed, and my roommate thought it was funny, especially because we shared the hair products. But then I would tell the guys that I could get them good coke, not college baby powder crap. I’d take their money and leave. I had all kinds of excuses. My roommate didn’t know this part.
One night, after I left a party, I went to visit Dom. He’d found a room in a boarding house close to campus. He was selling heroin, very low on the list of important people doing it, and he was still broke. I had fifty dollars of some guy’s money I’d never see again. I gave it to Dom, and he handed me the bags and asked if he could borrow one. He’d get me back. We watched a grainy bootleg video called Bum Fights in his room, a tiny cell whose windows had no curtains. He showed me a BB gun, which I thought was real until I held it and felt only the weight of plastic. The plan was he’d walk to the 24-hour McDonalds down the street in a long blonde wig. All he needed from me was an alibi, just in case. Would I do that? I tried to picture it. Why a blonde wig, why not a hoodie, or why not me? “I don’t know. It sounds like a bad plan,” I said.
“All good. I’ll ask Alyssa.” He took the gun I forgot I was still holding.
Dom rarely talked about himself, but a few nights before, he’d told me he loved me. I was puking off the railing of the North Philly train stop. We’d gone up there for the view. I’d done more than I could handle, and said it back. I had no problem telling him anything when I was high, like where the money came from and how it was so easy, it didn’t feel like stealing.
Maybe he was lucky. His dad’s perfect aim, the scar—two lines, straight through the left eyebrow—made him look dangerous. Famous rappers, FedEx drivers, whole regions of people were doing it now. He said we could probably get the whole school doing it if we started with the frat parties. Then, he wouldn’t need to do the thing with the wig and the gun.
The person I was when he was not around was better. Still not great, but I could stand her. And she was almost real. One more year and I think she could’ve been. But he was never far away. I could’ve gone to college across the country, he’d have found me—or if not him, someone else, or if not me, her. It didn’t matter who. This thing had etched itself so permanently on me. The scar no one wanted. No one could even see. No, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
***
Nikki Volpicelli is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her writing has been featured in Nylon, Neutral Spaces, Glamour, X-R-A-Y, Entropy, Expat, and Vice. She lives in Philadelphia with her two chihuahuas, Gene and Bones, and her human, Eric.
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image: Thomas Riesner
Rejection Letters 