“My lips are sealed,” I told Ellie as we sat cross-legged in her closet, the edges of her dresses draping over our heads. We usually laughed at how the fabric framed our faces like a nun’s habit. Nothing was funnier to us then. At almost thirteen, the world was spread out all around us, new and untried. Give that up to shut ourselves away and pray? Hilarious. But that day there was no laughter.

“This isn’t a baby secret like when I had a crush on Andrew West,” Ellie lectured, “This is real. Cross your heart, hope to die—”

“Stick a needle through my eye,” I finished dutifully.

Together we’d weathered the horrid pixie cut Ellie got in fourth grade and the time I tripped and fell on stage during the sixth grade assembly. We weren’t strangers to gossip and ridicule. But this. This was something new.

We emerged from the dark of the closet into the honeyed light of late afternoon. The sudden brightness made me sneeze, and I watched the force of my breath push dust motes violently through the sunbeams. Everything was the same. Ellie’s shoes still sat neatly stacked next to her desk. My backpack and lunch box still rested in a jumble where I’d dumped them on our sprint to the closet. But now I noticed the crumpled tissues on Ellie’s nightstand. The books pushed off her desk in a heap. The cracked Precious Moments figurine whose praying hands looked as though they were trying to hold up the fallen books. Nothing was the same.

“What’s your brother think?” I asked.

Jacob was fifteen. Practically grown. Surely he had some wisdom for us.

“He won’t talk about it,” Ellie said as she picked up the books from the floor. “He just plays his music louder and slams his door in my face. It’s like he’s leaving me too.”

Her voice wavered at the end, and I wrapped her in a hug before she finished speaking.

“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” I said, my voice shaking as much as Ellie’s.

Before I could say anything else, we heard yelling down the hall. Ellie’s parents’ room. The door was locked when we tried the handle, but the floorboards groaned and creaked under someone’s tread. We heard her mother’s voice, but it was quiet and we couldn’t make out the words. There was other shouting, but it sounded farther away. Outside, maybe. We ran back to Ellie’s room and pushed open the window that faced the front lawn. Her dad was blinking up into the sun. A snowstorm of shirts and underwear rained down on him.

“Damn it, Mercedes. Don’t be like this. You agreed to the terms last week.”

He didn’t notice us.

If I could walk back through the warm sunlight of the past, I’d gather the girls at that window in my arms. I’d tell them the world falls apart on you again and again. You wake up on an otherwise normal morning to find a gaping hole in the middle of what you thought was solid. And you cry and you rage and you think this empty space will live forever inside you. But it doesn’t. It mends. Every inhale and exhale a flash of the needle.

In and out.

Stitch by stitch.

Thread by thread.

Until one day you find yourself standing on firm ground again. Because as good as the world is at falling apart, it’s also terribly clever at putting itself back together again.

But back then?

I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I shut the curtain. I squeezed Ellie’s hand. And we headed back to the closet, where the sound from outside was muffled and the world still waited for us, unbroken and whole.

– Alexandria Faulkenbury