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KARMA
I wake up every morning to Janis Joplin.

My sister, Denise, has a life-size poster of Janis—
mouth open in a scream around the microphone,
arms raised, hair frizzed out wildly,
an anguished, contorted look on her face—
thumbtacked right above her desk,
which is directly across the hall from my bed and one hundred percent dead ahead in my direct line of sight.
Janis is the first thing I see when I return from sleep and reenter reality.

In a normal house, the simple answer to this would be:
close the door. But I do not live in a normal house. I live in a tumble-
down, three-story, clapboard Victorian where the rooms get smaller as you climb the stairs,
mine being barely larger than a closet and having—
like all the other rooms on the third floor—
no door (Dad says the former owners, who went broke,
used them for firewood before they moved),
across the hall from my sister, who's nineteen and who believes anyway that walls and doors "interrupt the flow" of her karma,
and so of course this leaves me no choice in the matter of Janis.

When I pointed out to Denise that my future mental health was probably in jeopardy because of it, she just sneered and said:
"Get over it, Lyza—you're already a Bradley,
so mental health is out of the question for you anyway."
Whoever said "the baby of the family gets all the sympathy"
was clearly not the baby.

JUNE 1, 1966
It's been almost two years since that day,
when our family began to unravel like a tightly wound ball of string that some invisible tomcat took to pawing and flicking across the floor,
pouncing upon it again and again,
so those strands just kept loosening and breaking             apart until all we had left was a bunch of frayed,
chewed_up bits scattered all over the house.
Mom had left twice before,
after she and Dad had a fight over money. She stayed away overnight,
but both times she came back, acting like nothing had happened. This time, the three of us thought,
would be the same...it just might take a little longer.
Days became weeks. I finished sixth grade.
Dad, who already taught math full_time at Glassboro State, started to teach at night.
We almost never saw him.
Denise tore up her college applications,
got hired as a waitress at the Willowbank Diner,
started sneaking around with Harry Keating and his hippie crowd.
Still, we hoped Mom would come back.
For the entire summer,
Dad left the porch light on and the garage door unlocked every evening around the same time
Mom used to come home from her art_gallery job in Pleasantville.
I'd lie awake until real late,
wondering where she could be,
if she was OK, if she might be hurt, lost, or sick.
Denise sent letters through Mom's best friend,
Mrs. Corman, the only one who knew where Mom had gone.
Mom answered them at first, but she never gave a return address. Then, for no reason,
her letters to Denise and to Mrs. Corman stopped.
Even so, I had hope.
Every evening, I set her place at the dinner table and bought candy on her birthday, just in case.
When September came, I started seventh grade.
I kept my report cards and vaccination records in the family scrapbook so that when she came back, she could pick up mothering right where she'd left off.
Long after Dad and Denise had made their peace with the reality of our broken family, I still believed
Mom would come home.
I believed the way I had once believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Then one day last year, I was walking home from Willowbank Junior High when I noticed the library flag flying at half_mast,
so I asked
Mrs. Leinberger, our town librarian, why.
"Charley Prichett, Guy Smith, and Edward Cullinan were killed in Vietnam," she said.
I knew them all their families lived on our end of town.
Charley, Eddie, and Guy had graduated from Willowbank High with Denise.
Mrs. Leinberger put her hand on my shoulder. "They're not coming back to Willowbank, Lyza I'm sorry..."
Not coming back...Not coming back...

Her words thrummed against the inside of my head like the machine guns I'd seen and heard on the evening news.
Not coming back...Not coming back...
Like the blades of choppers lifting half_dead men from the swamps and jungles,
the phrase sliced through any shred of hope I had left.
That night, I threw the scrapbook in the trash,
set the dinner table for three,
and gave Denise a large heart_shaped box of chocolates,
which she took down to the record store to share with Harry and the rest of their hippie friends.

KALEIDOSCOPE EYES
Some nights, before I go to sleep,
I look through the lens of the one Mom gave me for my tenth birthday, just to see how, when I
turn the tube slowly around,
every fractured pattern that bends and splits into a million little pieces always comes back together, to make a picture more beautiful than the one before.

MALCOLM DUPREE
He's thirteen like me.
He lives in a three_story clapboard Victorian on Gary Street like me.
He's an eighth grader at Willowbank Junior High like me.
He's in Mrs. Smithson's homeroom,
Mr. Bellamy's Earth Science,
and Mr. Hogan's Math like me.
He roots for the Phillies like me.
He's the younger of two kids in his family (but his brother, Dixon, is a LOT nicer than Denise)
like me.
You see, Malcolm and me,
we've been friends since we were little,
since the day I finally got tired of trying to tag along with Denise and her girlfriends.
That afternoon, according to Dad, I looked out the window and saw Malcolm playing in the street.
I went outside, told him my name, then rode my tricycle down the block to his house,
where we played every outdoor kids' game we could think of:
Cops and Robbers
Red Light, Green Light
Jump rope
Hide_and_Seek
Dodgeball             Hopscotch until it was time for supper and my father came to take me home.
"You'd never thrown a tantrum,
but that night you and Malcolm hid under the Duprees' front porch,
where none of us could squeeze in and reach you. You refused to come out unless we promised you could play again the whole next day, just the same.
Of course we promised...and ever since,
you two have gotten along like peas in a pod."