0 days before.

I can pinpoint the exact moment Lindy and I stopped being friends. She had her fairy lights plugged in, and the box of tissues she kept on her bedside window was missing. After seven years of being best friends and neighbors, I'd learned that the lights and tissue box were her Bat-Signal. Under other circumstances, I would've played Rosie the Hero, come to her rescue with cookies stolen from the glass jar on top of my fridge and a book of poems she'd always leave on my coffee table. The pages of This Way to the Sugar remained uncrinkled by Lindy's tears, and the snickerdoodles unswallowed by our ravenous mouths. I pulled my blinds shut and let her cry until her fairy lights drowned in daybreak.

One week before.

My nine-year-old brother, Marky, was the only person in the Carmichael household willing to talk real with me about the Lindy Situation because Lindy was part of the family. Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn't badmouth Lindy in case she came back into our lives, but I didn't know what Marky thought about it. He'd grown up with Lindy's constant presence. It took months after her family, the Truongs, moved fifteen minutes from Cato to St. Brooks, home of the most Babes, Wilburs, and Gordos in Peewee County, for Lindy and me to realize we were neighbors. Before Lindy started riding home from school with me, she took a Dial-A-Ride to Happy Nails, where she'd spend four hours every school day‒ten hours on weekends‒cooped up doing homework and reading in the break room. She'd occasionally wander about the tiny strip mall in the commercial district of St. Brooks, flipping through brochures at Campus Tanning or buying chocolate mini muffins from the bagel shop, both on either side of Happy Nails.

Marky saw me hide under the burgundy throw on our couch and promptly handed me a sheet of our select-a-size paper towel roll. "Here," Marky said, poking his skinny arm under my blanket. I peeked out and saw Marky's dark, gangly body looming over me. For someone with such a round baby face, his body was ridiculously long. He wore one of Dad's old St. Brooks High School sweatshirts. "Tissues are no match for your fat tears."

"Thanks, Marky."

"If it makes you feel better, she smelled weird."

I stuck my head out, adjusted my thick tortoise-shell glasses, and tucked the slippery blanket tighter around my body. I stuck my upper lip out and nodded, my messy, brown bun flopping up and down. I didn't know if I wanted Marky to leave me wallowing or to try to cheer me up via insults. Throwing me paper towels was the second nicest thing my brother had ever done for me, the first being a brown-bag valentine he'd made me that said, "Ur ok" in red Sharpie.

"Mom thinks you should go talk to her."

"Like I haven't tried," I mumbled, scrolling through our single-sided conversation. The last text Lindy had sent me was three days ago. "Can't talk," it'd read. I knew how isolated Lindy could be, but she was never just Lindy Island. Always the Rosalind Peninsula.

"Try harder," Marky said. "When I'm mad, Dylan always punches me until I push him and then we're friends again."

Friendships were more complicated at seventeen than they were at nine, but I didn't expect Marky to understand that. "Yeah, maybe." I was tired of trying. Singlehandedly keeping the Rosalind Peninsula afloat was exhausting. Lindy was draining.

Marky padded across the room and up three carpeted steps before turning back and adding, "And, Rosie? If you go over there, take a shower. You stink."

That was when I knew I had to get my life back on track. If your kid brother tells you your hygiene sucks, you've went beyond rock bottom. You've buried yourself beneath rock bottom, only to be crushed by layers and layers of other people who hit rock bottom. Lindy and I used to make fun of those people‒we called them St. Brooks deadbeats. They were the idiots who skipped class to smoke or fuck in the high school parking lot, got busted for running basement meth labs in their twenties, and died tragically because they broke into a gun owner's house or overdosed in a Walmart bathroom. Was that how I was going to go? Overdosing in a public restroom? At least nobody'd have to clean up my excrement.

One month before.

Lindy had her Bat-Signal on two weeks after our high school graduation. I tucked Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls and a yellow package of Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough under my arm. My parents were cuddled up on the living-room couch watching CNN and ignored me as I crept out the back door in my pajama bottoms and an extra-large University of Minnesota t-shirt. Barefoot, I padded across my backyard into Lindy's and checked to see whether the kitchen lights were turned off or not. They were. The Truongs usually retreated into their bedrooms by ten o'clock, an hour ago, leaving Lindy to her dark-night thoughts. I reached up into the hanging potted ivy for the spare key, unlocked the door, and returned the key to its dirtbed.

The layout of Lindy's house was similar to mine, except her stairs were made of silky cherrywood. I made sure to count the steps as I ascended, skipping the thirteenth because it creaked. I softly knocked on the first door I came to, which was decorated with Lindy-esque crafts‒pop-up orange kites and clouds and her initials made from fabric flowers, thin cardboard, and sky-blue acrylic paint. My door looked a lot like hers. I waited ten seconds, then opened the door to find Lindy on the rug by her bed with her knees to her chest. Her fairy lights cast a warm golden glow around the room, and, unlike the rest of the house, which smelled of green onions and marinated beef, Lindy's room smelled like warm sugar.

Lindy looked like a sunburnt giraffe. With her pointy ears and her thick black hair sticking to her narrow, splotchy face, she offered a wave, and I closed the door gently. Lindy always whispered when she was her other self. Lindy had two selves: the Lindy who hysterically laughed during inappropriate situations such as the time we had to go to a snorefest seminar on picking the right college or during pre-dinner prayers, and the Lindy I met when I was ten. Ten-year-old Lindy didn't speak to anyone but her parents and her older brother, Lewis. That Lindy was a tortoise swallowed by her own shell.

Dropping to my knees, I wrapped my arms around Lindy, letting the book and the cookie dough tumble down with me. Her neck smelled like Japanese Cherry Blossom, and I knew she'd cried in her bubble bath earlier that evening. Stable Lindy smelled like coconuts. Emotional Lindy smelled extravagant.

The first step in helping Lindy out of her shell was to rub her back and read to her. I learned that after yelling "I don't wanna your friend anymore" at a thirteen-year-old Lindy and watching, mesmerized, as Mrs. Truong plucked The Mouse Bride from the shelf below Lindy's bedside table and started reading in Vietnamese. Listening to Lindy's mother read was like watching curling winds counter deep ocean waves.

I flipped to the middle of Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls and read "A Day in the Life of a Woman" by Sonya Renee:

"There will be no bathing today.

Just the cayenne musk of thighs, arm pits

the unmade bed of me;

how creases of belly, fold and wrinkle like laundry,

ignoring the demand that I make myself up.

There will be coffee, the gasoline stain of my teeth,

The whitening the world will ask me to do later.

Computer screens will beg me to shrink, purge,

change to sell you cars and beer,

to sell you parts.

A request to perforate, to better facilitate my shredding.

All this before the dust of sleep

surrenders properly noon. All this,

before I get to name myself.

But name myself I will, with sharp letters,

with tools weighty enough for this planet

constructed of salvaged things. Truth is,

It never mattered what they gave us.

Only what we made out of it. We have always made light.

This planet with so many suns.

So many suns."

If I weren't a believer in science and knew the human body is 65% water, I'd think Lindy was made of melt-in-your-mouth sugar. Cotton candy was the best way to revive her, but it was only available in August when the fair came to town. Mrs. Truong insisted on feeding Lindy clementines or mandarin oranges, but sometimes processed sugar was a superfood. The slippery Toll House package crinkled as I tore it open, snapped a raw cookie square off, laid it in Lindy's palm, and folded her fingers over it. Some nights Lindy would let the cookie melt in her hand until I left; other nights she'd open the package hungrily while I read.

Lindy, still folded into herself, stared at her unpainted toenails and her wider-than-average feet. She was insecure about the size of her feet, wrists, fingers, waist, and neck, and constantly compared them to mine or her mom's or her prettier-thinner-but-not-as-smart cousin, Wendy. Who could I blame for Lindy's precarious self-esteem? Mrs. Truong for her careless comments? Wendy for having an impressive number of Instagram followers? Me for just existing? I didn't know.

"I saw him again," Lindy whispered, her voice scratching at the silence. "I don't know why he's still here. Mom said he'd be gone by now."

The week after Lewis died, Lindy had come into my room and told me her brother had visited her family for his final farewell. Lindy's family was extremely superstitious when it came to death. Ghosts apparently had a limited time before they were called away to their final resting spot. He came to Lindy on the third night. "We were at this temple," she'd told me, nibbling on a sugar cookie, "but it turned into a shopping mall halfway through. There were so many people around, but it was just me and Lewis in the gazebo. Everything was so ordinary. We were just talking, and, all of a sudden, I just started telling him everything I'd wanted to tell him when he was alive. Stupid stuff, mostly. I confessed to driving his car around the block when we were fifteen and told him how sorry I was for sabotaging his relationship with Jane and for not picking up his phone calls when he called. It was just so nice, you know? But then he was, like, 'I was getting better.' I asked him what he meant, and then he just said, 'I don't have much time.' And he told me to make him proud, and I was, like, 'How?' and he was, like, 'Just doing what you're doing. You got this, em.'"

Lindy explained "em" is Vietnamese for younger siblings.

"And I told him that I loved him, and he said, 'I know,' then he just disappeared. Just like that. God, Rosie, I've never missed anybody so much before."

I wrapped my right arm around her so her head fell onto my chest. "Shh, it'll be okay. You're going to be okay." I felt as lost as Lindy did. I didn't know how to help her. Marky was too young to overdose on heroin. Marky was too young to for me to worry about planning his funeral, too good to be a St. Brooks deadbeat.

One year before.

Lindy and I were still outside at eleven p.m., lazily pushing ourselves on my porch swing and talking about Danny Schafer when the ambulance came blaring down Eastpointe Drive, a street lined with two-story houses and basketball hoops, and slid to a halt in front of the Truong's house. Lindy's brown-almost-black eyes widened enough so I could see the white moons hiding above her irises. Before bolting down the porch steps and the ten feet to her house, she squeezed my hand. The evening breeze carried the siren's echoes through the half-open window into my living room, drawing my parents outside. I found myself in the middle of my front yard, watching as the paramedics wheeled a body from the happiest house Lindy had ever lived in to the ambulance. The body was limp and quiet. I knew it was Lewis from the alien-green hoodie and the hair‒thick, wavy, and black, almost like a spray-painted, crinkle-cut potato chip.

Lewis was four years older than Lindy and I, and the legacy he left for me was nicknaming us Rosalind. It was only after ninth grade English that I understood how he so cleverly had come up with Rosie + Lindy = Rosalind. Lewis had mostly been a shadow in my adolescent days. When I was younger, Lewis always played League of Legend or practiced the piano, and when he came home from college for the summer, he didn't seem like a heroin addict. He took Lindy to the bakery every Sunday afternoon for a slice of cake and woke up by eight each morning to work as the receptionist at Happy Nails. Until it was too late, nobody knew about the needles or the orange bottle of methadone hidden in his dresser drawers until it was too late. No one could've predicted that Lewis' death would drive Lindy back to her ten-year-old self to the point that sugar and poetry couldn't fix her. No one could foresee her silence swallowing the entire Rosalind Peninsula until there were only ocean waves.