Enchanted Islands by Allison Amend Page A

skirt every day. My money was always with me then. It would be too risky to hide it in the small apartment, where there were many hands that might discover it. I felt bad about the deception, but justified it as a penalty for the slap. I told my mother that with my free afternoons, I was looking for work downtown.
    Then, on the last day of May, there Rosalie was, carrying a large carpetbag. I’d nearly forgotten that’s why I sat there every day. Yet it was so natural to see her finally approach me, as if we’d been meeting there for years. She threw her arms around me, and I let myself lean into the hug. I wanted to tell her everything, and then I understood how lonely I’d been without her.
    She held me at arm’s length and then we hugged again.
    “Oh Fanny, I’ve missed you so!” she said.
    “Me too. Awfully. Please say you can be my friend again.”
    “I’m going away.” Rosalie stared over my head out onto Lake Superior. The large barges were just arriving from Canada to discharge their loads of coal and fish and textiles.
    “What? When?” I sputtered. “I’m going away too. I have thirty dollars saved. We’ll go together. As soon as I have a hundred.”
    “You can’t come with me. I’m ruined.” She spoke so softly, her voice was almost too small to hear.
    “No, Rosie.”
    Rosalie continued to look out on the water. A breeze came up and the harbor grew frothy. “It’s true, I’m damaged, worthless.”
    “It’s just pictures. It’s not—”
    “I’ve done other things too,” she said. “Not everything, but most of it. And once I bled, so I don’t think I’m…intact.” She turned to me. Her face was eerily blank, the bruising around her eye a mauve that blended in to her ashen skin.
    I slumped, examining the worn sleeves of my coat. Rosalie’s life was worse than I could ever have imagined. And I had been feeling so sorry for myself for having to quit school to work. Rosalie in pictures, with boys, with objects, doing things…it was too horrible.
    “We’ll start over, somewhere else,” I said. “It doesn’t have to count.”
    Rosalie noticed I was crying. “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She stood up. “Goodbye, Fanny. You’ve been a true friend. My best friend. I love you. Try to forget what you saw. Try to forget me.”
    “Please,” I begged. “Please let me come with you. We can go to Hartford, I have it all planned out.”
    “Hartford?” Rosalie asked. “Why on earth would we go there? Chicago. It’s closer.”
    I heard her say “we.” I didn’t care where we went.
    “I’m going today,” Rosalie said. “If you want to come with me it has to be today.” She pointed to the carpetbag, which I could see now was stuffed with clothing. I began to protest. I couldn’t leave today. I didn’t have my things. I needed to write a letter to my family, give notice to my job…Rosalie just sat in front of me saying nothing and I saw how feeble my excuses were, how they were just fears.
    Finally I said, “Yes, all right, today.”
    “You get paid today, right? It’s Friday. Then ask for an advance on next week’s pay.”
    “They’ll never do that.”
    “Try. Tell them your mother has to see the doctor, or your baby sister needs medicine. Meet me at the station at five fifteen and we’ll catch the five thirty. It’ll be busy at the train station then; no one will notice us.”
    “But my clothes—” I began. Rosalie gave me a stern look. It was one of the things she teased me about, the horrible state of the hand-me-down rags I wore. My mother made them out of discarded fabric or forgotten washing. Surely I would not need any of this for my new life.
    And then I said the easiest word in the world, the word I was to say so many times without thinking through the consequences. I said, “Yes.”
    *
    I waited nervously for four forty-five, when they handed out pay for the week. When the senior secretary called my name, I garbled the sentence I’d been