What does a person wear to the funeral of her sister?

That was the question that tumbled helplessly through Wilhelmina's mind as she stood in front of her shared closet, the doors pulled back fully to give her an unobstructed view inside. It seemed a very important thing for her to determine, the only thing that she could focus on. Not her first return to the hometown she had fled so gladly, not seeing her mother once again. Not the looks of judgment and pity that were sure to greet her from those she had left behind, or the invasive questions she might encounter. Not even facing up to her sister's suicide, to the heavy knowledge that Desdemona's choice may have been different- if Wilhelmina's choice had been.

No, what mattered, of course, was what to fucking wear.

Wilhelmina continued to stare at the hanging shirts, skirts, and dresses in front of her, not even bothering to reach out to rifle through. As different as they were in appearance, all seemed to blend and merge together in front of her eyes. Hadley's brightly colored clothing with their tailored lines and expensive name brands suddenly seemed no different from her own cheap, more subdued t-shirts and hoodies, and even the darker, more serviceable colors of Noreen's clothes didn't seem right. What exactly was the right thing to wear, or the right thing to do, when there was no longer a sister there to see it take place?

Desdemona had hardly been someone up to date with fashion and styles. Wilhelmina herself had hardly cared about the latest trends, but even she had bothered to make sure her hair was somewhat neat and that her clothes fit her well. Desdemona had either not seemed to understand the difference, or else could not bring herself to bother to try. So why was it, exactly, that Wilhelmina cared so much now? What was it that made her feel like she was dressing for Desdemona, or that she was somehow waiting for Desdemona to guide her in selecting?

88

As her bedroom door creaked open, a sliver of light shining into the darkened space of her room, Wilhelmina didn't need to look up to know who was peeking inside. She didn't have to hear the whispered questioning tone of her name spoken aloud or to analyze the sound of the footsteps padding across the floor. It was far from the first time that Desdemona had come to her in the night, and she knew that it was very unlikely to be the last.

Sighing inwardly, but careful not to let the noise escape and hurt her sister's feelings, Wilhelmina braced herself, not pretending sleep, exactly, but delaying the moment of her response until she felt the cool air hitting her back as her sister pulled back her blanket. She waited until she felt the dipping of her mattress with her sister's added weight, the tentative touch of Desdemona's hand on her back, before she rolled over to face her.

"What's up, Mona?"

Desdemona bit her lip, her dark eyes shifting somewhere past Wilhelmina's face, rather than directly meeting her eyes. Wilhelmina noticed that her lips, always somewhat ragged from the worrying of her teeth against the skin, looked even more damaged than usual.

"Mom's passed out," she mumbled, reaching up to scratch absently at her neck. Wilhelmina reached automatically to stop her hand, seeing that already, red lines marred her sister's skin.

"She usually does," she said flatly. "That's nothing new."

It had been a typical pattern of their lives, for as far back as she could remember. Maxine Archer always seemed to need some sort of liquid or chemical help to sleep, if intoxication into unconsciousness could be considered sleep. It had long ago seized to truly bother or concern Wilhelmina. It was Desdemona who always worried that she would stop breathing, or that her heart would stop, without their watching over her and checking in. Many of Wilhelmina's nights of sleep had been disrupted not so much by her mother, but by Desdemona's fretting and insistence on involving her in checking over her. It might not matter to her sister that they had school the next day, but Wilhelmina's grades mattered to her. Next year was high school, and if she was going to get into college, she would have to keep up her GPA then more than ever.

"Her breathing sounds funny," Desdemona was saying to her, her thick eyebrows knitting with her concern. "I tried to push her so she was sitting up a little, to ease the pressure on her lungs or something."

"Good for you," Wilhelmina muttered, a trace of sarcasm in her voice. "I'm sure that solved all of Maxine's problems."

She couldn't remember when it was, exactly, that she had stopped referring to their mother as their mother. Maybe it was around the time that she had consciously recognized that she had never thought of her as such, that Maxine was, in fact, little more to her than an obnoxious roommate, causing more problems than she helped solve. It always irritated her to hear Desdemona refer to her as Mom, though she didn't voice it. Why did her sister continue to give her even that level of respect, that kind of title, that she had not earned?

"That guy that was here with her left," Desdemona whispered, not seeming to hear, or maybe choosing to ignore, Wilhelmina's tone. She hesitated, then her hand crept forward, her cold fingers resting over Wilhelmina's. "I hate how she brings them in, Mina. I didn't like how he looked at me."

Wilhelmina's eyes opened wider, drawn fully alert, and she gave her sister her full attention then, her voice sharpening. "Did he do something, Mona? Did he say something to you?"

"N-no…" Desdemona said slowly, reluctant, and Wilhelmina couldn't quite trust that her answer was fully true. "Anyway, he's gone now."

And yet, here she was, crawling into Wilhelmina's bed- not to simply share unneeded and unnecessary information, but for comfort, for security from a threat now gone. Wilhelmina bit back her frustration and instead squeezed her sister's hand, choosing not to challenge her, if she happened to be telling a lie.

"Well, next time, if they bother you, come tell me before they leave. I'll take care of it."

"You don't have to," Desdemona said, but Wilhelmina could hear the relief in her voice, the lack of conviction to her protest. "It's okay."

"I'm going to check that the door is locked," Wilhelmina told her, disentangling herself from her sister's grasp. Desdemona gave a groan of protest, making a motion as though to grab again at her arm.

"No, don't go, Mina- stay here with me."

But Wilhelmina pulled away, turning to leave the room. It wasn't that she cared about the door, although she did suspect that any of Maxine's men, while leaving, wouldn't bother to lock the door behind them. She took a deep breath, using the time it took to walk slowly into their living room to settle her irritation, to bring herself into the calm, firm state that Desdemona needed. Checking the door, then her mother, indeed as Desdemona had reported on the couch, she took her time in returning to her bedroom. But by then she was able to give her anxious sister a smile, to slide back into bed with her and tolerate her touch without any visible signs of anger.

"I locked it. It's fine now."

But it wasn't fine. Nothing in their lives was fine, and she knew that they both knew it, even as Desdemona cuddled closer to her.

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Mina. You're all that I have, you know?"

Wilhelmina did know. But how badly she wished that it weren't true.

88

"Are you trying to decide what to wear? You can totally borrow something of mine, if you want. Anything at all, you name it, it's yours. Well, not like, literally yours, but you know what I mean. Actually, if you like it enough, you can have it, why not?"

Wilhelmina startled slightly, not having expected to hear a voice at all, let alone so close behind her. She hadn't even realized that her roommate Hadley had joined her and Noreen in their bedroom, let alone that she was standing quite so close behind her. Shaking her head slightly, she wondered just how long she had been lost in her own thoughts, standing in front of her closet door without really seeing any of the clothes hanging there at all.

She had better watch the morbid memories and thoughts. That had always been Desdemona's problem, to get stuck in the past, and look where that had gotten her.

Wilhelmina stiffened, horrified at herself for her own thought. How disloyal and callous could she be, to think that sort of thing about her sister when she was not yet even in the grave?

"I'm pretty sure there would be a problem with Wilhelmina borrowing anything that belongs to you," Noreen said dryly from her position on her bed, barely glancing up from her laptop. "For one thing, you're about three sizes smaller. For another, I'm not sure that platforms or crazy neon cheetah print would work for a funeral."

"Well, still, she can if she wants to," Hadley persisted.

Wilhelmina gave a slight jump when she felt the other girl's hand reach to touch her back. Hadley rubbed between her shoulder blades in a gesture that Wilhelmina was sure was supposed to be soothing, although it didn't have the intended affect, and continued to address her.

"I know we weren't invited, Mina, and I'm not really sure what's exactly, like, proper funeral etiquette when it comes to bringing guests, but if you want me to come then who cares about etiquette, I will totally be there to support you. Noreen too, right, Noreen? I mean I know we didn't know your sister, and the thought of dead people sort of creeps me out, but that's okay, I'll still come with you. Plus we haven't ever met your family, you know?"

"Not meeting my family isn't some sort of honor that I'm denying you, trust me," Wilhelmina muttered. "It's more like a gift or saving grace."

Another flicker of guilt twitched in her chest even as she spoke. Desdemona had been part of the family she had kept away from Hadley and Noreen. Now, their meeting her had gone from a 98% of never happening to a positive 100%, and there was really nothing funny about it. Still, she couldn't seem to stop herself from retreating into the sarcasm she was so accustomed to using as a shield of coping. It was how she got by in life, perhaps what saved her. If Desdemona had had more of a sense of humor, if she had been able to lighten up and laugh at herself and her life, maybe…

"Oh, it can't be that bad," Hadley protested. "Really, Mina, we will definitely come with you."

"Speak for yourself, Hadley," Noreen raised an eyebrow, briefly lifting her gaze from her screen. "Besides, it should be up to Wilhelmina to decide what she wants here."

Wilhelmina swallowed back a sigh, turning to face the taller blonde and giving her a forced smile.

"Thanks, Had, but I should go on my own. I won't be there for very long, there's no point in me dragging you guys along and messing up your schedules."

"No, no, we would want to go," Hadley started to assure her. "Just say the word-"

"I said no," Wilhelmina cut her off, her tone a little harsher than she had intended. "I'm going by myself, all right? She was my sister. You didn't even know her."

Hadley blinked, a mist of hurt coming into her eyes, but she gave a quick smile in response, as forced as Wilhelmina's had been.

"Okay. Okay, sure, Mina, that's okay. Just, you can call or text us any time you want, you know? We're here for you."

She walked out of the room, mumbling something about needing to do laundry under her breath- an obvious excuse, as Hadley was notorious for leaving piles of clothing in need of being washed until one of her roommates harassed her into doing so. Wilhelmina's sigh of relief at her exit must have been louder than she had thought, because Noreen spoke up quietly but with some understanding from behind her.

"She means well. She just doesn't get it, and she never will, until something like that happens to her. Hadley's idea of trauma has been having to go to Starbucks three times a week instead of three times a day to save money. She's not going to understand, so just look past her screwing up in trying to."

Wilhelmina turned towards her, regarding her. Something in Noreen's tone seemed to be implying that the other girl believed that she, if not Hadley, did understand some of what Wilhelmina was experiencing. Perhaps seeing and understanding her unspoken question, Noreen closed her laptop, giving Wilhelmina her full focus as she spoke up again.

"Look, I can't say that I know where you are either right now. I never had a sister. I have brothers, but I haven't seen them in years. Two of them are in jail now, though, so I know a little about what it's like to love and hate and worry about someone all at once and feel everyone else judging them for what they did, and you for what you didn't do, like you can actually control a person when they set their mind to do something. I know that much, but I don't know what it's like to have one of my brothers gone, forever. But I think that if that happened, no one could do or say anything that would be right. So I'm not gonna try for you, you know?" She took a breath, unsmiling, and held Wilhelmina's eyes. "Just know that we both care, Hadley and me. She tries. And we'll be waiting for you, when you're ready to come back."

It was the first time that Wilhelmina could remember anyone saying such a thing to her- anyone, other than Desdemona. It felt strange, almost wrong, as though the words and feeling behind them were something she should not accept. After all, Desdemona had cared too, and Desdemona had always tried.

But it had never been enough. Somehow, it had never been enough.

88

Wilhelmina had realized from the moment she saw her sister getting on the school bus that something was wrong. Desdemona never exactly stood tall and with confidence in how she moved, but this day, she had her head down so far Wilhelmina couldn't even see her face behind her dark curtain of hair. Her shoulders were slumped, and she moved in an awkward, careful way that looked almost as though she were in pain. Not to mention that she had been so late getting on the bus that the driver had been seconds away from leaving without her, with only Wilhelmina's interference persuading him to give her sister a few more minutes to show.

She had watched, eyes narrowed, as Desdemona stood motionless and silent against the bus driver's lecture for her to be more considerate and responsible, on how she affected the schedule of everyone else on the bus by her lateness. She continued to watch as Desdemona shuffled down the aisle, stumbling over feet that were probably intentionally placed in her path more often than not. She noted too how her sister deliberately avoided sitting beside her, although Wilhelmina had saved her a place. What had happened that would cause her to prolong her sister's confrontation?

The moment they had both stepped off onto the gravel driveway of their home, the bus barely beginning to pull away, Wilhelmina turned towards her, trying to get a better look at her sister's face. Desdemona started to walk faster, turning her head away, but Wilhelmina quickened her pace to catch up to her, grabbing her arm to slow her down.

"What happened, Mona? Why are you avoiding me?"

"I'm not," Desdemona mumbled, trying to pull her arm away, but as she moved, part of her hair fell aside, and Wilhelmina saw for the first time the bruising lining her jaw and beginning to swell around her eye. She stopped walking, stunned, and reached out, faster than Desdemona could move away, to take hold of her chin and turn it more fully towards her.

"You're hurt," Wilhelmina proclaimed the obvious, tightening her grip on her sister's face without quite realizing it. Not until Desdemona flinched did she understand that she was hurting her and quickly let go of her, allowing her to take a step back. "Someone hit you, Mona. What happened?"

She swallowed back the anger that choked her throat, but it was not her anger that unsettled her. It was normal, expected, to be angry that her sister had been hurt, yet again. Almost stronger than her anger at the people who had hurt her, though, was her irritation with Desdemona herself.

She shouldn't be upset with Desdemona. Desdemona was the victim, the one who had been hurt. She knew that she should feel nothing but sympathy and understanding for her, a desire to help and protect her. Desdemona had not asked to be hurt, and she did not deserve to be.

But even with this self reminder, a hardened, insistent part of Wilhelmina contradicted this. Because Desdemona didn't have to be the victim, not if she didn't let herself be. She didn't have to do things to provoke people, and she didn't have to refuse to fight back. How could she give her understanding, when the truth was that Wilhelmina really didn't understand? How could she feel nothing but sympathy, when a tiny, terrible part of her had some understanding for the people who had hurt her too?

Desdemona was older than she was. She was in high school now, while Wilhelmina was just starting off at middle school. She should be elevated to a higher status, with a sister in high school. She should have Desdemona to help her and protect her.

But it wasn't like that. Instead, Wilhelmina was expected to protect Desdemona, and that didn't seem fair to her at all.

"What happened, Mona?" Wilhelmina repeated, not quite succeeding this time at holding back the irritation in her voice. "Who did it?"

"Just some girls," Desdemona said finally, her answer very slow in coming. She combed her hair back in front of her face with shaking fingers, turning herself so Wilhelmina couldn't see her eyes. "I didn't know who all of them were."

Wilhelmina thought that was pretty unlikely that a bunch of strangers would choose to hurt someone they didn't know, but she also knew by now that challenging her sister never did anything but get her more upset, and any answers she wanted would be that much lesser in number. She let Desdemona's lie pass, focusing on the bigger picture.

"What happened? Why did they do this?"

Desdemona took a shivering breath, biting down on the inside of her cheeks hard enough that Wilhelmina could see it even through the curtain of her hair. Her answer was difficult to hear and understand.

"They said…they said I was looking at them, in the locker room. They said I'm a dyke, that I'm…a, a lesbian. They said they were teaching me to keep my eyes to myself."

Wilhelmina considered this, accepting that this answer was likely truthful. It sounded like something cruel ninth grade girls would think and do. She had only recently even learned what a lesbian was, and although it wasn't something she had much understanding of and thought it sounded vaguely disgusting, it was also true that she thought sex between boys and girls sounded pretty disgusting too.

Perhaps her sister being a lesbian would explain what had made her so different, for all these years. Maybe other people knew it before Wilhelmina did, and this was why they were so mean to her. It wouldn't make it right, but it would be an explanation.

"Well…are you?" she asked finally, tentative, but genuinely curious.

She knew right away that this had been the wrong question from Desdemona's shocked, wounded look. But what she didn't know was whether the implication of being gay was that terrible, or whether Desdemona felt betrayed that her sister seemed to be viewing it as a possible excuse for her attacker's behavior.

"What? No! Do you really think that?" Desdemona sputtered, turning to face her at last. "You too?!"

"No, not really, just…you never date anyone," Wilhelmina tried to explain her reasoning hurriedly. "And you don't even talk about boys, so, I don't know. People can be mean about things like that."

She herself didn't date or think about dating boys, but then, she was eleven, in the sixth grade. Desdemona was almost fifteen. Everyone Wilhelmina knew who had older sisters talked about them dating boys and having boyfriends; even some girls her own age were already into that kind of thing. But Desdemona never seemed to think about boys. At least, she never talked about them around Wilhelmina.

Desdemona released a noisy, irritable sounding breath, shaking her head. "I'm not. Okay, Mina? I'm not a lesbian. I don't care what they said, I'm not."

She swiped at her face, and Wilhelmina didn't miss the tear that had escaped the less bruised eye. Feeling bad for having even asked, Wilhelmina took a step towards her, reaching to touch her arm.

"Well, even if you were a lesbian, it would still be wrong. I just wondered….you just don't date, so I wondered." She paused, then took in voicing her final question. "Don't you want to date?"

This time, Desdemona didn't shake off her sister's hand. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked as tired as her voice sounded when she answered her.

"Of course I do, Mina. But no one wants to date me. It isn't me not wanting boys. It's no one else wanting me."

Wilhelmina squeezed her arm, unsure of how to respond to the despair she heard in her sister's voice. She didn't know much herself about boys. How was she supposed to tell her sister what to do?

"I want you," she said, knowing even as she said it that it wasn't the same thing. Still, she hoped her sister would give her a smile.

Desdemona didn't. Instead she made a bitter scoffing noise in her throat, shaking her head. "Yeah? Well, you're the only one."

It would have been right, Wilhelmina knew, for her to deny Desdemona's claim, whether it was true or not. Truth was not what her sister needed to hear now, at least, not truth that was painful to bear. Her sister needed encouragement and love, support and strength, not acknowledgement and agreement with her own shortcomings.

But Wilhelmina was in the sixth grade, mature for her age, yes, but still far from adulthood, and further still from perfection. She could not let her knowledge override the flare of anger at her sister's helpless words, and so she pulled her hands back from her, crossing her arms as she fixed a look even she knew showed disgust in her sister's direction.

"Stop it, Mona. This is why they act like that toward you, because of how you get like this. You let them do that, Desdemona! You practically ask them to."

She took a breath, trying to calm her own anger, and held it, somewhat shamed by the way Desdemona cast her eyes down and hunched in her shoulders in response to her. Somewhat more calmly, she tried again to get her point across, more gently than before.

"So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to let them keep being like that, or what?"

Her words were an obvious challenge, at least to Wilhelmina's ears. Clearly, Desdemona was supposed to shake her head and say that she would not, that she would at least attempt to change her response, to make some effort at standing up for herself. But it didn't seem as though Desdemona had received the intended message. She just looked back at her younger sister hopelessly, her shoulders rising and falling in a slow shrug.

"What can I do, Mina? I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I can't make them stop if they don't want to."

"There's plenty you can do!" Wilhelmina exclaimed, her voice lifting higher in spite of her earlier efforts at calm. "You can go tell a teacher, or the principal, or somebody, if you're scared. You can get someone to walk with you if you need to. You can join a club or something so you don't have to be alone, so there's people who get to know you and like you. Or you can do what I would do and stand up for yourself, tell them to back the hell away from you and leave you alone! You can show them you aren't scared of them, that they're just a bunch of stupid kids like you are!"

But her sister didn't seem encouraged at all by all the options thrown out at her. In fact, she seemed to shrink smaller, somehow younger and more fragile in appearance than her middle school sister.

"But I am scared of them," she almost whispered, her lower lip chewed between her teeth. "I can't do any of that, Mina, because I am scared of them."

Wilhelmina stopped, trying and failing to understand. She had seen the kids in Desdemona's school, and some of the kids in her grade. It was true that the boys were big and muscular, at least the ones who were seniors or sports players, and some of the girls were fairly large too. But for the most part, they weren't much taller or heavier than Desdemona was. If her sister would stand up straight, with her shoulders back, she would in fact be of fairly average height for a girl of her age.

If it wasn't their size or strength that made them scary to Desdemona, what else could it be?

"They're just kids, Mona," she said finally, unsure of what else to say. "They're just girls. They aren't any better than you are. They're just meaner."

But even as she said it, she knew it didn't matter, not to Desdemona. It wasn't really about who the girls were; it was about who Desdemona was, or rather, who she was not, to her own self. Her sister did not like or have confidence in herself, so how could she show it to anyone else?

If theirs was a normal family, none of this would be happening. Desdemona would not turn to her little sister with her problems, and if she for some reason did, Wilhelmina could happily pass the problem along to their mother, confident that she, and not Wilhelmina, could take on the responsibility. But the Asher family was not a normal family, and so this would not happen. Maxine Asher barely seemed to remember, most of the time, that she had daughters, let alone that they may have a problem she would be expected to solve.

On the few occasions she had stopped to think about it, Wilhelmina couldn't understand what, exactly, had happened to her mother to make her the woman she was now. According to Maxine, and the yearbooks and pictures she had in her possession to back up her claims, she had once been considered a girl and teenager with tremendous potential for her future. She had been one of the top ten students in her class, participated in several sports and clubs, and was one of the more beautiful and popular girls, even taking part in the homecoming court her junior and senior years. She had talked about her life before, on the few occasions she had been still sober and aware enough of her daughters' presence to address some sort of conversation towards them, and each time she had asked, as though they could give her an answer, just what it was she had done, where she had gone wrong, for her life to turn out so differently than everyone else would have thought it would be.

Once, Wilhelmina had pieced together, her mother had been happy, in a way that she and Desdemona never had been. Back before she had any real responsibilities, before any real disappointments or lasting choices had marred her life beyond her ability or will to change, she had been another person entirely from the one that Wilhelmina had always known. Because the girl who had married her high school sweetheart, straight out of high school, the girl who named her daughters after characters from Dracula and Shakespeare, the girl who had been adored by her parents and well regarded by all her friends, was not a person that Wilhelmina could envision as the Maxine Asher that she knew at all.

Desdemona said, once, that she could remember that person, just a little, in the faint, not quite real way of a person's memories from early childhood. She had said that Maxine had been different, before Wilhelmina was born, and Wilhelmina had been left with the uneasy impression that maybe her sister thought that it had been her birth, her very existence, that had taken away from her the loving, focused mother she had once known.

But Wilhelmina knew that was not the truth, at least, not in part. The truth was that although, from what she had heard, her parents' first few years of marriage had been uneventful, Maxine's parents had both died in a house fire, only months before Wilhelmina was due to be born. Between the loss of her parents and most of the physical mementos and photos left from her childhood, Maxine had gone into a deep depression, only made worse, according to Desdemona's memory, after Wilhelmina's birth. She had either been unable or unwilling to care for the girls most of the time, a task that had quickly fallen on the very young shoulders of Desdemona. Their father, not the sweetheart that Maxine had once thought him to be, had found it to be too much for his bother to remain with a depressed wife and two young children, all needing more from him than he wanted to give. Before Wilhelmina had turned one year old, he had left, and neither she nor Desdemona had seen or heard from him since.

She and Desdemona had learned from an early age that they could not depend on others to care for or about them, with the exception of each other. How, then, could she expect that Desdemona could have somehow learned to care for herself?