At the corner where two street signs have had their names nearly washed away with rain and time, I faintly make out the letters that say Locust and Thorn. Beyond this is the feed store, the dentist, the café, a dozen houses, a crazy huddle of vacant lots. You can use them as a shortcut to get home. I used to take home gravel stones and broken bricks from those vacant lots—to paint and sell by the roadside. I was still looking for a magic wishing-well stone back then, and I always fixed my eyes on the ground, while Josie eyed the distant horizon.

We thought we were close. We walked with our arms around each other sometimes. We scribbled our initials on the dusty ground and kicked around in the junkyard puddles. On the day I had to walk past the lots and avenues and side streets alone, I kept focusing on a gray patch of sky above the bony thrashing of winter trees. I squinted at that tiny light in the gray shred of sky like it would tell me where to go. I was afraid. So afraid I would get lost.

You’d better pray that Jesus will rapture your soul, my mother had said. You better fall to your knees and pray. Better fall to your scabby, childish knees and pray and cast your good deeds on the tide of God. Better weigh up the costs of the choices you made. Soon enough, the day will come when you won’t be content with junkyard stones and broken roller skates anymore. And on the day you think you can try to run away, you never know what will catch up with you.

If you squint hard at the rain, it beads on your nose, splashes your eyes like kisses. If you squint hard at the rain, you don’t have to wonder where you’re going. You can’t see the town swimming by. Everyone seems to speak a new language, or else I can’t find my address among the signs that line the street I once thought I knew so well.

Mother says I’m going crazier all the time. She says she can’t keep me at home. She wants me to talk and tell her all about school.

“Nothing is wrong with me!” I shout at her, not wanting to talk. Grownups don’t understand, anyhow.

Now inside our tiny, tiny town, I feel like an only child. As I look down the sidewalks that are just for walking now, I think about the doors I once imagined on the sidewalk. Doors that would lead me to portals of paradise. I think about jump rope lines, hopscotch lines, all the meaningless lines we used to scribble on the sidewalk with chalk.

I pass by the same route every day, but life’s not like it used to be. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand in the cold and think about Josie. The memory of Josie is like a gravel stone in my hand and I can’t drop it.

The first time I saw Josie, it was raining, just like today. Only the rain was in soft flecks. She was walking backwards along the hopscotch lines. At first I thought she was walking toward me, and I called her name, wanting to go up to her and ask her to play. And she taunted me and said, “Go home, Rachel Ann, you’ll be late for supper.”

“I don’t have any supper tonight,” I muttered down at my ragged shoes, hating the fact that this was true.

Josie Ellen and Rachel Ann, two sets of footprints in the sand. I felt the words crawling through my mind. Josie Ellen and Rachel Ann set off together for the Promised Land.

Josie Ellen and Rachel Ann, two girls crossing the vacant lots together, wondering who used to live there and why and how come the town decided to tear it down. Rachel Ann, picking late dandelions, stubby bits of crocuses, kissing the leaves of sidewalk-choked weeds.

Josie Ellen and Rachel Ann, two girls in two different houses, two different ways to go. At the corner of Thorn and Locust, each girl went her own way, to a different enemy.

I remember the day Josie first put her arm around me. I had seen other girls in the schoolyard doing this, and lately, the girls and the boys had begun slipping away from the crowds with their arms tight around each other. She put her arm around me and dragged me to the street sign and started asking me in a rough voice how come I didn’t want to be friends anymore.

“I do want to be friends,” I sobbed. “What makes you think I don’t want to be your friend? Who would I ever eat lunch with except you? Even though you made fun of the first day I saw you, I still wanted to be your friend so bad that I wouldn’t stop bothering you. And so we became friends. What’s gotten into you?”

She was gnawing on the same stub of gum she’d had in her mouth for weeks. And she didn’t answer. Suddenly, she looked about ready to cry.

Josie fading.

In school, when we had to do reports about our best friends, I buried my head in my notebook, unable to write Josie’s name down. I just couldn’t. I imagined her across the room, in exile, muttering under her breath as she struggled to string sentences together, Rachel Ann, Rachel Ann, Rachel Ann…

Why did we decide to stop being best friends? Why did she suddenly fall into dark moods and lean up against school yard fences and breathe hard? Why did she suddenly try to fight and argue and tear me apart and say I liked all the boys better than her—boys I wouldn’t even look at? To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Josie’s friend. But something about her sucked me in.

I don’t even remember what I did to her. Or else I can’t tell the whole truth. It’s something so awful I can hardly confide it to you…

Josie came by one day while I was reading a book and yelled at me, "You're a little dumbhead, don't you know?"? You’re so stupid. You don’t know nothing about the real world. So just go on home. I don’t want to look at your face anymore. You can’t come to my house. I’ll let all the other girls in our class come to my house except you.”

Springing to my feet, I smacked Josie’s face with my book. Suddenly, we were fighting each other furiously, like cats. I stopped when I realized she wasn’t really, truly fighting back. She was crying like a toddler, rocking back and forth on hands and knees, tucking herself into a ball. The book was ruined and I would have to pay for it. I picked it up and ran as fast as I could all the way home, my torn school skirt flapping in the wind.

Say you’re sorry, Rachel Ann, say you’re sorry, Rachel Ann, my little sister teased me. And soon, it seemed, everyone on the block knew what had happened between us, and they decided I was to blame. Disgusted, I hid myself away from the world and tried to erase Josie from my mind.

The last time I saw Josie, she was stepping carefully over the sidewalk cracks. And where every other day she’d made sure to walk away from me, this time, she was coming towards me. My heart seemed to be in my mouth. Say you’re sorry, Josie, say you’re sorry, my heart begged. And then time froze.

I pulled a piece of chalk from my pocket and scribbled on the sidewalk just before her feet as hard as I could. Josie looked down at me like she was a disappointed queen, and I was her sad subject. And then, not knowing how to interpret my scribbles, she walked home, trembling.

I didn’t want to hear Josie say she was sorry. I only wanted to hear that I wasn’t to blame.

Now it’s six months after Josie and I first started avoiding each other. I like to watch rain from my weary windows. I envy the sky for being able to cry so hard and fast. Me, I’ve never been able to cry. Crying is for babies, everyone tells me.

But the rain cries all over the world. All over the faded street signs and the ugly school and the chalk lines and the telephone poles. All over the stones and the gray forsaken shapeless things. All over the world, the rain is beginning. And I can lift my face to the rain now and hear it whisper dim, impossible things to me.

I don’t think sad thoughts. I just walk. Sometimes, I remembered. Like that time I passed the fence and found the tissue-box I made for Josie, in all those fancy crepe-paper colors, lodged in the wires and overgrown with weeds. The colors seeping and bleeding into each other. We wrote our names on a paper heart and put them inside the tissue-box and we intended to make a boat of it to float down the river.

Why?

It all seems so childish and silly now, that empty box bobbing down the river.

Everything is slowly being transformed as I walk around town. Slowly, the old wooden businesses are closing down and creaky moving vans leave. And little kids are growing up and old people are being lifted from their houses in stretchers, being taken to hospitals or hospice centers. Belongings thrown to the curb. Churches still open and close and spit out mouthfuls of worshippers, and I wish I could be one of them.

Sometimes, I think the rain begins inside the trees and spreads the shocking color of spring and summer and pain ever and forever outwards. My own self hurts like branches growing. I can feel bits and pieces of my last-year’s self breaking and falling to the ground. People know me too well now.

“Isn’t that Rachel Ann?”

“She looks like she’s haunted.”

“Maybe she went somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.”

Only bits and pieces of Josie remain now, little relics everywhere of the world we used to pass by every day. The world that didn’t seem so special at the time but now means absolutely everything to me.

There’s our rain-soaked tissue box. Here’s the string of the house key she wore around her neck to let herself inside her empty house after school.

And then there’s a piece of a spelling test lost from her notebook she dropped on the sidewalk.

A bit of stale gum from the pocket of her backpack. The rubber doll she kept in her pocket. The leaf she glued to a Styrofoam cup for a “nature project” in third grade.

It’s not your fault, Josie Ellen.

Looking into a moldy junkyard puddle, I see only reflection, only one skinny girl, one puzzled face. I stir the vacant water with my stick and watch one more raindrop ripple outward. Kick an old beer can aside with my aching foot inside my still too-small shoe.

I guess I don’t really know what happened to Josie. She went home from school one day as usual and didn’t come back the next day. Some people were talking about in a morbid little huddle in the schoolyard, saying something about how she had to stay in the hospital. Complications from a simple little tonsil surgery that went tragic very quickly. They said she went into a hospital one day and never came out. But maybe not. Personally, I don’t think she could die all of a sudden. I refuse to believe it or investigate the rumors further.

Some other people were muttering and saying Josie’s mother had had lung cancer all this long time and Josie had to go live with a distant relative, maybe even a foster family, while her mother was taken away to die.

I guess I don’t really know what she was rambling about…I don’t even know what I was rambling around all this long time. But Josie knew something about death that I didn’t, and she knew it was a season to die, and she started coming apart at the seams of her soul. She wanted me to understand in her mute way what was happening inside her, and I just struck out in my own blinding rage. Together we met only in silence.

Like today. Josie, I’m writing this to say I’m only Rachel Ann after all. I did write my report about you, and I’m lonely, and I wish you were back. The sidewalks will never be the same again.

Josie, I still refuse to believe you’re gone. At least for today, I don’t believe it. I’m going to watch for you in the vacant lot one more time. You made me hurt inside, but I love you still. And I’m not the same.