Tuesday, 10:12 a.m. After.

What good are pennies anymore? 

Opal lies on a beach towel bleached pink from the sun, separating the coins by size on her thighs. Quarters can barely buy a piece of gum unless paired, and even if she can get a crunchy, expired gumball for twenty-five cents from the boardwalk on the Shore, the broken molar outweighs the cost a thousand times over. 

When Opal hands a vendor a handful of quarters for a Red Bull, she receives the ugliest look. God you’re gonna make me do math? Pennies are pointless, grimy artifacts from a time long passed; the time of teenagers drinking pink milkshakes at the drive-in and smoking cigarettes without the conscious threat of cancer. They cost more to produce than they’re worth—fifty cents to press one penny into a memento on the boardwalk, fifty cents to lose it in the wash and be completely unphased by its loss. What good are pennies if the cheapest thing in the grocery store is a Hershey’s Kiss? Do away with them all together and make every price round to zero or five, tax included. Make life easier for everyone.

Police cars roll by, down the quiet suburban street toward the Trudy house on the corner. Opal heard Mrs. Trudy screaming not too long ago, something about Trevor. Someone called the police. Opal keeps counting her coins. 

Opal separates all the change into their designated sections on her legs, collects the stacks of perfect dollars, and folds them into the paper sleeves her grandmother picked up from the bank. The sun beats down through a blossoming white tree in the neighbor’s yard, speckling shaky light over the steaming driveway. 

Nana’s inside wrestling with the newest stack of coupons from the Sunday paper at the kitchen card table, balancing milk crates of scraps on top of each other, floor to ceiling. Boxes of salvaged artifacts from roadside garage sales, blankets from the lifetimes of children and grandchildren, and garbage litter the hallways and vacant bedrooms of Nana’s ranch house. A hoarder’s delight is an organizer’s defeat. Opal escapes to the front yard with the shoebox of change to get a breath of dust-free air that doesn’t weigh thirty pounds. 

Mackenzie Kendall from across the street comes out to join Opal at about nine-thirty that morning, twenty minutes before the police cars come rolling down the street. She rests beside Opal, lounged out on a beach towel. She soaks in the early morning sun in her swimsuit with her arms crossed under her head and her blonde pigtails splayed out around her like a discarded Barbie. Her jaw sits out of alignment with the rest of her innocuous face. Someone who doesn’t know her might not notice. Her nose is swollen red. Mackenzie exists beside Opal in the simplest of silences. The police sirens don’t scare her even slightly. 

“Something must’ve happened,” Mackenzie says dully. 

“I wonder what,” Opal says. 

“God, it’s so humid. The rain really screwed us.” 

Opal sits on the steaming driveway; so far, she has sixty-seven dollars and fifty cents in quarters, twelve dollars and thirty cents in dimes, and six dollars and fifty-nine cents in pennies. The calculator next to Opal’s sandwich says that makes eighty-six dollars and thirty-nine cents. Take the grocery store coin-counter’s operation fee of 11.9% into account and that earns Opal seventy-nine dollars and thirteen cents to play with until the first of September. Nana takes care of the groceries, the house payments, the utility bills, gas for the Volkswagen; whatever money Opal counts from the shoebox is hers to do with what she wants. There’s still a collection of coins unaccounted for. More to come, more to go. The gauze taped around her pointer finger and thumb collects the grime from the coins, turning the white cloth mucky. 

An ambulance follows the police and stops in front of the Trudy house. A crowd begins to gather on the street. What a nosy town. 

“You have no idea what happened?” Mackenzie asks Opal. 

“Don’t know,” Opal responds. “Now shut up, I keep losing count.” 

“You’re like a little dragon with your horde.” 

“Shut up, I’m counting.” 

The dogwalker stops outside the yellow tape with his mob of yapping, barking, pacing, jumping mutts to the sidewalk before Opal’s house. A small brown weasel with a long thin muzzle snuffles at Mackenzie’s foot, and an oversized dust-mop leaves slobber trails over the edge of the driveway. Opal and Mackenzie know him. His name is Wesley Harmon, and he walks Mackenzie’s family dog on Saturdays. Today is Tuesday, so Mackenzie doesn’t pay him more than a nod of acknowledgement. 

“What’s going on?” he asks, his voice squeaking as he tries to make it sound deeper. “What happened to your nose?” 

“Something at the Trudy’s,” Opal responds, shifting her dark bangs out of her eyes to keep counting. “Don’t really know. I think someone’s hurt.” She doesn’t mention Mackenzie’s nose. 

“Wait, seriously?” Wesley turns toward the Trudy house. “Who?” 

“Trevor,” Mackenzie says. “Heard his mom yelling earlier.” 

“Oh god,” Wesley ushers his collection of dogs toward the growing crowd at the house on the corner. 

Mackenzie rolls her head to the left and Opal rolls hers to the right before diving back into their respective silences. Opal counts the remaining pennies. The grimy copper makes her fingers sticky. She should wash them before she counts next time, scrub them down in the sink until the brown becomes orange again. Nobody cares where they go, so no one cares to keep them clean. How many diseases are on these? Opal drips water from a plastic bottle onto her hands and rubs them until all the grime drips onto the asphalt or soaks into the gauze on her fingers. 

“God, it’s so humid out here,” Mackenzie repeats. 

Opal looks at Mackenzie, and then the siren at the end of the street, and then her coins. 

Tuesday, 7:38 a.m. After.

Cereal for breakfast. With an aching nose and a stiff-lipped grin, Mackenzie sits at the kitchen table with a white bowl of white milk and soggy, yellow cornflakes. She likes them best this way, mushy like oatmeal and easy to swallow. She never liked crunchy or sticky things; they scratch and pull on her partial dentures on the left side of her mouth that she got after an incident with a softball bat as a child. When she takes her dentures out before bed, she observes the gaps in her mouth. Her skull will look so strange when she dies. Until then, cereal for breakfast. 

The household pup, an old, red hound with an aged white face called Arnold, rests in a sunbeam that graces the fake linoleum on the kitchen floor. All four paws hang limp in the air, twitching occasionally in a dream-filled sleep. Mackenzie rubs her foot against its exposed belly. So vulnerable. How could it trust someone so wholly that it can sleep in a house of strange, large creatures and expose its most vital organs so haplessly? It feels nothing but instincts of hunger and thirst. Does it love her? Does she love it? She rubs her foot up Arnold’s chest to the throat and thinks about stepping on it. 

Mackenzie’s mother Rose descends the stairs into the kitchen. “Mackenzie.” 

“Rose.” 

“How was your party?” 

“A real good time,” Mackenzie responds. “Underage drinking, a potential wildfire, normal stuff.”

“Normal stuff,” Rose answers as she moves downstairs and into the kitchen. She reaches for an apple from the bowl on the table. She washed them yesterday but runs them under water again. Not a speck of dirt, dust, filth, or scum in the whole house. Even Arnold has clean paws. Rose bites into the apple, and the crunch echoes. 

“What happened to your nose?” Rose asks.

“Trevor Trudy elbowed me.”

“And what did you do about it?” 

“Employed a convenience.” 

Rose smiles at Mackenzie, and Mackenzie mirrors her, tightlipped and uncomfortably stiff. For a moment, eighteen years of tension flashes through them; Mackenzie is both a high school girl with a bad jaw and a toddler that never cries, and Rose is a master of mimicry and the most perfect mother. 

Arnold snuffles in its sleep. Its fur-lined jowls peel back and reveal yellowing teeth. Its tongue splinters through the jagged enamel, pink and drooling. Mackenzie runs her tongue over her own teeth, both the real and the fake. Nothing comes out of it. Cereal for breakfast. 

Tuesday, 1:03 a.m. After.

Opal straddles the edge of the bathtub in Mackenzie’s upstairs bathroom and holds a lighter to a polaroid. Opal’s dry leg rests on a pile of Mackenzie’s sticky clothes. The other leg sits in the tub: a pleasant warmth down her leg, a chilly bite on her exposed shoulders, a burning on her fingertips. The flame is the only source of light in the bathroom; she can only see the burning polaroid and a void of darkness until the air-conditioner puffs air under the window and shuffles the curtains. Polaroids don’t smell like paper. They smell like plastic film and burnt popcorn in a microwave. 

“Why do you do that?” Mackenzie asks from the other side of the bathtub. She submerges herself in the rising water, tapping her fingers against a shampoo bottle. Mackenzie brings a handful of water to her face and washes her puffy red nose free of blood. 

“Because I’m not a hoarder? Like, what?” 

The photo begins to disappear—not just by flame, but from existence entirely. It folds, flakes, crumbles into the water. It moves down the drain when she lifts the plug as nothing more than some grime in a pipe. She once kept a box of photographs, but that’s a long time gone. 

Nana started hoarding when Opal was nine. Shehad been collecting things before then, dragging Opal around to thrift stores to find interesting knick-knacks for the bookshelves. Opal found her camera in a glass display case on one of those trips. It’s a single-shot, pink polaroid with a worn floral sticker on the base that some other girl must’ve owned. Opal took hundreds of photos, anything that struck her: squashed dandelions, Styrofoam cups, spiders, even a rabbit hung from a tree once. Nana found them one day and threw them in the garbage. 

 “If I see you taking photos like this again, I’m going to throw the whole damn camera away.” 

The box of photos is the last thing Nana ever throws away. It starts small: paperwork, bills, school reports. After the child protective services stop coming around to check on Opal’s progress, the organized filing cabinet devolves into trash bags of newspapers, baskets of fabric scraps, collections of non-perishables. The air gets heavier. Opal starts burning her photographs in the bathroom when Nana isn’t home. 

Mackenzie stretches out, sliding the handle of the shower down until the water drips. 

“I should get home,” Opal says and lifts her leg over the edge of the tub. She dries it with a loose towel, and her fingers sting from holding the burning polaroid. She slips her socks and sneakers on in the darkness, leaving Mackenzie to soak in the bathtub alone with what’s left of the water. Her dark blue raincoat jingles, and the camera feels smooth in her hands. 

“You’re my favorite convenience,” Mackenzie says. 

“I hate you.” 

“I hate you too.”

In the hall and down the stairs, Opal revels in how easy it is to maneuver Mackenzie’s home. The frames on the wall glow in the blue light from the front door. There’s no dust on the glass or archways of cardboard to dodge. She doesn’t have to duck under archways of boxes or pull tacks out of her feet. Opal likes this house in the dark but not the light—it’s too bright with the white walls and white floors and pale furniture. The dog is the only part that makes the Kendall house feel real. Arnold rests at the bottom of the stairs. She kneels next to him, and his thick tail thumps against the carpet. She brushes the shedding red fur onto the clean floor just to do it. 

The street that separates Mackenzie and Opal’s houses is silent and stagnant in the humid summer night. Rainwater fills potholes and other neglected damages, perfect for mosquitos. Cicadas scream from the tree in Mackenzie’s front yard. A truck squeals by so closely that she smells the rust from the back and the alcohol, campfire smoke, wet leaves, mud. Opal jumps back, and her heart jumps too. She clutches her camera to her chest. 

“Is that Opal?” a voice from the truck shouts as distance swallows the sound. A frenzy of voices follows. 

“Hey Opal, where’d you go?” 

“You totally disappeared on us!” 

“Trevor’s fucking wasted.” 

“Yo, is Mackenzie okay?” 

Opal decides that she would rather be dead than speak to drunken teenagers. The truck, a big red Ford meant for working in the farms on the outskirts of town, is filled like a clown car. Six or seven boys flop out of the truck-bed like bags of jelly, laughing and shouting and whispering to each other. She keeps walking.

Trevor’s head is caked in mud so Opal can’t tell if he’s still bleeding. His buddies carry him with his arms over their shoulders, crucified. He’s a drunken, concussed Jesus. Opal, now jogging over the sidewalk and onto her front porch, prays he won’t remember a thing. 

The rain muddles the bloody ground, and the branch disguises itself among the others. Those boys drag Trevor from his own crime scene. Nobody knows, nobody cares. 

They carry him to his front door and Trevor stumbles inside his dark house as Opal enters her own. Her heart pounds when she shuts the front door behind her and disappears into the darkness inside. Opal trips over a bag and kicks it hard against the wall. The coins in her pocket thud on the hardwood as she throws her jacket to the floor beside her bed. She sees her fingers in the brief glimmer of light coming in from her window; they’re burned, red-ripped, and raw. 

Monday, 10:13 p.m. 

Time skews in the summer; tests and sports dissolve and meld three months into one endless stretch of June-July-August. No days numbered, no weekends. Those lucky enough to have no extracurriculars or jobs spend their time in the woods at night with cheap beer and stolen shopping carts. A bonfire on a Monday feels wrong to Opal, like those things are specifically meant for Saturdays, but Mackenzie convinces her that the spectacle is worth the hike up the trails to a rotting, rusting shed in the woods.

“This is the most normal I have ever wanted to be,” Mackenzie says as they round a corner on the trail. 

The way the trails snake up the hill reminds Mackenzie of a trip she once took with Rose; she still called her Mama then. She doesn’t remember the trails themselves but instead the snakes they found on those trails. Wriggly little things, sliding over gravel like spilled water on a countertop. Mackenzie spilled water on the countertop once doing dishes with Rose. Rose tried to grab the cup and dropped the knife in her hand, slicing Mackenzie’s arm. That was the day Mackenzie learned blood doesn’t disappear when you wash it like dishes. Only hydrogen peroxide can do that. 

Opal asks, “Do you even like being drunk?” 

“No,” Mackenzie answers. “But pretending to be makes life easier.”

Mackenzie watches Opal dance around loose stones on the path. The camera in Opal’s hand never falls loose no matter how close Opal’s careless feet take her toward disaster. When Mackenzie first found Opal in elementary school, her body was even less under control: loose gangly limbs too long for her little body; uneven black bangs; and a pink cat backpack. She had her camera then too. 

“If you stare too much, someone will notice. Normal girls don’t stare,” Rose said to her young daughter, who dragged a stool to a nearby window to watch her neighbor. “Never let them know you’re watching.” 

“Mama, I’m going to try something.” 

“Sure, just don’t get caught.”

“I won’t. I learned from you.” 

Rose curled her fingers in Mackenzie’s hair and yanked her backward, letting her hit the floor. Mackenzie only stared upward, beating back tears as her mother stood over her, smiling sweetly.

Mackenzie caught a rabbit from the yard and hung it by the neck, a point of experimentation. Opal did exactly what Mackenzie hoped she would. 

Rainclouds speed by the few flickering stars. The only guides Opal and Mackenzie have to follow are Mackenzie’s cell phone flashlight, the milestone markers on the trail, and the distant sound of other voices. A fire brews between the trees ahead. Before they arrive among the rest, Opal spins around and snaps a photo of Mackenzie. The camera flashes and prints a false rendition of the person standing there. Opal shoves it in her pocket to burn later. 

“Opal!” Trevor Trudy shouts from beside the fire. “Mackenzie! You actually came?” 

Mackenzie pauses and a forced smile pushes through out of habit. “We were bored.” 

“Aren’t you always? No offense but you always look kind of dead.” 

Mackenzie smiles even harder. “It’s because I am.” 

Opal joins in, “Aren’t we all?” 

His face looks wrong in the campfire light. The bright orange illuminates the side of his nose and brow but neglects the dark pit that is his eye. He looks like an abstract painting, until he shifts back on his heels and turns toward a paper bag on the ground. 

Mackenzie follows Trevor, giggling with perfect mimicry and touching his shoulder. Opal watches Mackenzie’s fingers push Trevor off balance. Trevor thrusts his drunken body backwards with drink in hand to save himself from face-planting in the dirt, and his elbow collides with Mackenzie’s face. Mackenzie stumbles back and clutches her nose. Warm blood oozes through her fingers. Inconvenient. 

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Trevor says with wide puppy eyes. “I was going to fall and I didn’t realize you were right there—”

Mackenzie turns to Opal with cold, dead eyes. She doesn’t have to say it. Opal already knows; worthless, what good are worthless things? Does he deserve it? Does it matter? Opal looks at Mackenzie’s jaw, unaligned and twitching with streams of pained tears down her cheek. 

“Oh, no, it’s totally fine,” Mackenzie says, squinting and catching the blood in her hands. “Total accident. But is there something I can use? It won’t stop.” 

“Yeah,” Trevor says. “God, how hard did I hit you?” 

“Hard.” 

Mackenzie tilts her head back to try and drain all the blood back into her nose. It stains her shirt, hands, and the loose strings of her blonde hair. Trevor sheds his dark blue flannel and presses it to her face. The party continues around them. The door of the rusted shack is propped open by a few dislodged bricks. Cans of spiked seltzer rest on fallen trees, collecting the few raindrops that escape the foreboding storm clouds overhead. Dozens of drunken children dance around the fire, kiss in the flickering flames, and miss the fact that Opal fades back into the trees. She’ll wait for him to be alone. She stands in the shadows with a thick, discarded tree branch, circling around the same thought a hundred times over.

Mackenzie watches everything else. She sits on a damp picnic bench with Trevor’s shirt at her face. She doesn’t have to pretend to smile behind it. It’s exhausting to pretend to be what she is not, but her very presence at a party like this does a better job of convincing the others that she is just like them. Social manipulation is a survival tactic: make them think you’re the same, and they’ll leave you alone. They’ll never know you’re smarter than them. They’ll never know they’re not worth a damn. They’ll never know you orchestrate every aspect of them until you write the final chord, and they fall flat. It’s better this way. It’s going to rain soon. Convenient.

Most of them will never leave this town. Some will go off to a university somewhere with hopes of becoming a star athlete or business mogul. It won’t happen. They will come home defeated and with insurmountable debt, working retail and fast food until they drown in their own uselessness. People like that cost more than they’re worth. Mackenzie, she is smarter than that—than all of them. She thinks of Opal and her coins. 

The sky snaps, and rain falls heavy on the fire. Girls shriek, boys slide in the mud, and Mackenzie moves to the inside of the shack. The walls are dark and reek of damp mildew and mushrooms. Drinking continues. Mackenzie takes none. 

“Where’d Opal go?” one of the many unimportant voices inside the shed asks. 

“Home, probably,” Mackenzie answers. “Not really her scene.” 

“Oh, lame. Wait—Trevor, where’re you going?” 

“I gotta take a piss.” 

Trevor walks off into the woods. The rain muffles the crunch of leaves, the crack of a tree branch, a cry for help, a camera flash followed by lightning. Mackenzie slides her tongue over her teeth and remembers what a softball bat against her skull feels like. 

Monday, 3:53 p.m. Before. 

“What makes something worthless?” Mackenzie asks, tapping her fingers on the laminated placemat on the checkered tabletop. The boardwalk diner is alive with families visiting the Shore, reeking of drugstore sunblock and hotdog grease. Opal never liked the boardwalk or the Shore—so much money thrown away on rigged crane machines and novelty t-shirts. There’s not a better example of unconcerned middle-class consumerism than a New Jersey boardwalk in the summer. Why not go down to Delaware? At least they’re tax-free. 

“Things that cost more to produce or maintain than they’re inevitably worth.” 

“What does that even mean?” 

“Like a penny.” Opal pulls out a penny from the abundance of coins in her pocket. “It costs two cents to make something worth one. Nickels are the same way; they cost eleven cents to make when they’re only worth five. There’s literally a negative profit. It just doesn’t make any sense.” 

Mackenzie pauses and leans forward, resting her elbows on the table. “God, you’re right. That’s so dumb.” 

“Right? There’s already a wealth disparity in this country, so why do we waste time on stupid little things that literally mean less than nothing?” 

“The climate crisis is the fault of people with stupid amounts of money trying to get even more stupid amounts of money,” Mackenzie adds.

“Right? Some guy with stupid amounts of money is paying money to make worthless money. Like, why?”

Mackenzie smiles, “God, like, why don’t we just burn everything down?” 

Opal sips on a lemonade and watches Mackenzie’s lip twitch. “I mean, they’re just assholes making everything worse.” 

“Totally,” Mackenzie says. “They’re literally putting more bad into the world than good. Like, a negative profit. I wish we could redistribute the wealth of people like we could with money, but we refuse to do that too.” 

“I know what you’re doing,” Opal says quickly and glares at Mackenzie. 

“Do you?” Mackenzie prompts as their food arrives. Mackenzie turns to address the server, “Thanks, Trevor.” 

“No problem, guys,” Trevor Trudy responds. He looks so stupid in his paper hat and apron. Who decided on that uniform? “Oh! Bee-tee-dubs, there’s a party tonight out on Devil’s Trail. Come by, it’ll be a good time.” Trevor smiles and heads back into the choppy sea of incoming customers.

Mackenzie’s voice raises above the rest of the flood of voices. “So what makes someone worthless, then? Negative profit?”

Opal fidgets with a fry, sweeping it around a pool of ketchup; “Anyone who throws shit at the fan and then gets mad when shit stinks.” 

Mackenzie leans forward and takes Opal’s hand. “Wouldn’t the world just be so better off without people like that?” 

“You mean people like us?” 

Mackenzie sets her jaw more off-center, talking through the side of her mouth. She crushes Opal’s hand in hers. “You mean people like you.” 

Worthlessness, Opal is surrounded by it. The day Opal picked up the softball bat on the schoolyard playground was the day she became worthless. One crack. One bloody face. The costs of lawyers and child protective service check-ins—the hours and hours of therapy for her uninitiated outburst of radical violence on another girl who said one thing, one word, worthless—all outweighed the cost of even feeding her for a year.

Opal slams Mackenzie’s hand into the table, smearing ketchup from her fries over Mackenzie’s knuckles and lets her go. Mackenzie wipes the ketchup off with a napkin, but Opal stares, letting her fingers smear in the red. 

“I’m only teasing,” Mackenzie says. “God, lighten up.” 

“I’m sorry,” Opal says. “Did I hurt you?” 

“You wouldn’t dare,” Mackenzie says and smiles. 

Oh, but she could; she’s done it before. New Jersey playgrounds had never seen so much blood. The occasional skinned knee or bloody nose from a rowdy game of football, sure, but spatter from a furious, repeated backswing striping asphalt is different. Opal watches Mackenzie smile, and Opal smiles back. She could. 

——————

Leah Skay is a writer from rural Delaware currently writing to you from her desk in Miyagi, Japan. She works as an English Language teacher with the JET Programme in the public education sector. She received her BA in Writing from Ithaca College and hopes to pursue an MFA somewhere in the U.S. in the near future.