Free Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault

generation is too enlightened to ever be so domestically dysfunctional as all of that.
    And I believe I thought this once. I was indeed a child for having that thought—or at least incredibly naive. To think one could love and marry and maybe start a family and never feel any of these sorts of things that Tammy always sings about so pitifully and so beautifully.
    I really was a brat to think that once. “I don’t want to play house.” To think I could have everything I want and not have to play at all. A really clueless, insufferable brat, playing entirely outside of the house.
     
    —Tammyland

Chapter 11
    “Bedtime Story”
    78 Durham Road
    Emerson, New Hampshire
    I sit outside my mother’s old house on a weekday, when no one’s home to feel creeped out to see the ghost of Shelly Brewer lingering on the side of the street in a Toyota. The little bungalow seems a bit prettier now than when Shelly rented it. The dark brown paint has been switched to a gentle blue. It still has thick white trim—brighter now, it seems to me. Gone, though, is the adorably lopsided window box where Shelly used to plant her marigolds.
    My last visit to Shelly’s was in March 1985, a few days before she died. It was during a school vacation, and I went to see her before the weekend because I had a kiddie party that Saturday that I desperately wanted to go to. Shelly understood and accommodated.
    If I’d been there on the weekend, I would’ve been there when she was killed. Maybe I would’ve been killed, too. Or she wouldn’t have been killed at all. There’s that to think about.
    Anyway, there were a few things that were memorable about the visit. One was that I brought her a drawing I had done. I thought she might like it better than a ditto with a red “100” scrawled across the top.
    So I drew her a picture of a crow. I loved crows, loved drawing them—pressing the crayon hard into the paper to make it dark and shiny, giving it the oily look of a real crow’s feathers. And birds were easy, if you did them from the side and didn’t try to make them too fancy.
    When I was finished, I wasn’t sure if Shelly would like it. Maybe a crow was too dark and gloomy. I had a friend at home who said so when we drew together. So I put a pink bow on the crow’s neck and had it holding the string of a big, blue balloon in its claw.
    When I presented it to Shelly, she said she loved it, and really seemed to mean it. She brought me to the drugstore and we picked out a plastic frame for it—black, to go with the crow. The pharmacist even admired it. When we got home, Shelly propped it up on her coffee table and said later she’d find a spot for it on the wall and hang it.
    And then—I remember it being within minutes of her propping up the picture—Shelly decided to have a serious talk with me. She said she wanted to tell me that she’d made a decision about something. And I might hear people talking about it, and that it might upset me or my mom. But that she wanted me to know that she loved me, no matter what happened.
    My first reaction was that she didn’t really like the crow so much, after all, but was just trying to be nice, knowing that a serious conversation was coming.
    Shelly continued. She said that the most important thing she wanted me to remember was that if someone was ever hurting you, it was important to do something about it right away. To either hit back or tell someone who would help you. Whatever you decided to do, the important thing was to do something immediately. Not wait and see if it would happen again. That was what she wanted me to remember from this.
    I told her that no one was hurting me. And she said that that was good, she was glad. It didn’t seem to me we understood each other, about her plans or about my crow. The conversation ended there, as Shelly suggested we make ourselves a little lunch.
    That evening, though, I felt I understood a little better. There was a knock on the door, and my heart