Her name is Amelia. I’ve known her for years, and I really think this will be good for both of you. See, she lost her daughter about, I don’t know, close to five or ten years ago. Leukemia. They didn’t catch it fast enough, and there were complications. They didn’t know until she had all these weird bruises on her arms, and they took her up north to the University to get looked at, and they diagnosed the cancer. So they immediately started the treatment, and for a few days everything seemed okay, but then she got an infection and died within one night. Just overnight, and Amelia and her husband were devastated. I know after there were issues between them, and they got a divorce. Amelia’s kind of been on her own since. She’s got this big house about twenty minutes from here, away from the school, away from town, on a hill in the woods. You can stay there, honey, until everything dies down, and people realize it’s not your fault and stop harassing you. I’ll visit you every day, okay?

Edi’s purple sweater was Harper’s favorite of the bunch. She put it on and looked in the mirror. She wondered what Edi would think about her wearing her clothes. All Harper knew about her was that she went to college for English, she wrote a lot of, like, nerdy Dungeons and Dragons style books, and was kind of introverted. Amelia kept a picture of her on the wall. It was her senior picture from school, most likely. She had thick, black, and curly hair. She looked a lot like Amelia. She had a bit bolder features than the wispiness Amelia seemed to have, but the same serious facial expression. She had very well-defined, thick eyebrows, and wore cat-eared eyeglasses.

It’s less of a picture of someone and more of snapshot. She imagined Edi in the same sweater she was wearing now. Probably a little taller, a little bigger. Harper imagined her as a bit bookish, a bit shy, and a bit standoffish to people. Harper imagined her as reacting coldly to male attention, and then later complaining to friends that boys simply didn’t like her. This was all projection, of course. Harper was painting a portrait of Edi in her mind, and the more vivid the image got, the worse she felt for Amelia.

She’s been so nice to me, Harper thought, and I’ve been such a bitch. She’s tried so hard. I should try harder.

Harper sat down on the floor in the purple sweater. She smelled it. It still smelled of laundry detergent. Some kind of floral scent. That meant Amelia had cleaned them all before packing them away. After Edi had died.