The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni

whip!” Sheila would
     taunt through the checked wires of the badminton net, and her dad didn’t care at all
     when she threw her racket into the air to celebrate their victory, even when it got
     stuck in the branches of the sycamore tree, although Sheila’s mother thought this
     behavior illustrated poor sportsmanship. But lately, when she tried to crack a rare
     joke with her father, even the idiotic sort of joke dads are supposed to love, Sheila’s
     dad would give a forced snicker and look back at the television.
    “Are you making it a point to spend as little time here as possible? We haven’t seen
     you for dinner,” her father said.
    Sheila looked at the carpet on the floor of her room. She understood how she looked
     to her father—like a girl without a brain in her head, without a sense of place, of
     pride, of respect for her roots or thought for her actions. But she sometimes felt
     that she thought too much, that she considered every option too deeply, took every
     half-thought of a possibility too seriously.
Bloom, bloom, bloom where you’re planted
, the choir from the church where Sheila’s mother had taken her as a child used to
     sing. But what about cross-pollination? What about those shockingly colored hybrid
     plants you sometimes saw at the farmers’ market? No one ever sang about them. She
     said nothing.
    “I guess it’s your life,” her father said finally. “You’re going to do what you want
     with it.” Then he turned to walk down the stairs.
    “That’s right,” said Sheila, and she backed away from the door and willed herself
     not to cry.
    She sat on her bed for only a few minutes before deciding to leave the house for the
     day. Sheila sometimes spent her Saturdays at Andrea and Donny’s, sifting through the
     newspaper, painting her toenails, writing out French flashcards. Today, she dressed
     as fast as possible and went to Andrea’s without eating or brushing her teeth or hair.
    “Hello?” Sheila called as she opened the door to her sister’s house. She could already
     hear the whirring sound of early spring landscape maintenance—the neighborhood determined
     to take back the lawns frost had destroyed—and through the sliding back door of her
     sister’s split-level house, she saw Donny in a sleeveless undershirt, pushing a lawnmower
     in slow diagonals across the yard. “Andy?”
    She found her sister sitting on the couch in the living room, hovering over a needle
     and thread that she moved between two hands. “In here,” Andrea called out, but she
     didn’t look up from her lap. Sheila went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water.
     Then she sat down next to her sister.
    “Hey,” she said.
    Her sister smiled.
    Andrea had recently joined a cross-stitching circle, and she was working on a throw
     pillow that was going to say LOVE MAKES THIS HOUSE A HOME , but so far it just said THIS H , because you were supposed to start from the middle and work out to the ends to make
     sure it came out even.
Love Makes This H. a Home
, thought Sheila,
Love Makes this F-ing H. a G.D
.
Home
.
    “What’s the big difference supposed to be between a house and a home?” she asked.
    “Who knows?” said Andrea. “The words are really just decorations.”
    The cross-stitching group that Andrea had joined called themselves the “Stitch-n-Bitch.”
    “I’m not going to lie,” Andrea said. “The bitching is more fun than the stitching.”
    They met every Wednesday evening in somebody’s basement.
    “It’s a good hobby,” Andrea said. “You could use one.”
    “I have my own hobbies,” said Sheila.
    “Yeah, like what?”
    Sheila cleared her throat and pulled a French flashcard out of her purse.
    “Words,” her sister nearly spat. “They don’t mean anything. What if you needed to
     actually say something?”
    “Like what?”
    Her sister frowned at the needle and thread in her lap. “How should I know?” she said.
     She seemed to think about this for a