I stuffed my feet into shoes and picked up shiny, glinting earrings and carried around shopping bags, while my grandmother ran a never-ending monologue about clothes and the changing nature of fashion. She asked me questions, so many questions it made my ears throb. Do you like to wear shorts, Jersey? Oh, Jersey, what do you think of this shirt, aren’t the hearts cute? Jersey, try this one on. I think that’ll look great on you, Jersey. What kinds of things did you wear at home, Jersey? I wanted to plug my ears, to slap my palms over them and start chanting la-la-la to drown her out.

At my other grandparents’ house, I’d been able to shut myself down, bit by solitary bit. But here it was impossible. I felt under a microscope, heated by a spotlight, poked and prodded and analyzed. Day after mind-numbingly normal day, my grandparents dragged me places, talked to me, showed me things, introduced me to people, made me participate, even though doing so meant I felt like an open sore, too roughed over to ever develop a protective scab. I began to feel like an exposed nerve.

“You hungry for lunch, Jersey?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, that same mechanical response I’d been giving her all day long.

“You like nachos?”

“Okay.”

I sat at a food court table, surrounded by shopping bags full of things I couldn’t remember choosing, much less caring about, while my grandmother ordered a plate of nachos to share. She came back and we ate mostly in silence.

Finally, as I picked up the last nacho, she said, “How would you like to go to church with me on Sunday, Jersey?”

I paused, the nacho dripping most of its ingredients back onto the tray. “No.”

She tipped her head sideways. “But there are so many kids there your age. I thought you might like to get to know some of them before school starts in the fall.”

I felt a headache begin to pang on the side of my head. I didn’t even want to think about school—about starting senior year as a new kid.

“No,” I said, dropping the nacho and wiping my hands on a napkin.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Because I’m tired of everything being new. Because I just want something familiar. Because making new friends might mean getting rid of old ones. Because I can’t think when you keep saying my name like that. “Because I’ve never been to church.”

She frowned. “You mean Christine didn’t ever take you?”

I shook my head, trying to look self-righteous about it, as if my mom had a great reason not to take me to church and how dare she, my grandmother, the woman who hadn’t even known my mom for over a decade, question it.

She pressed her lips into a tight line. “Well, that surprises me. She loved church. She came to church every Sunday before she got mixed up with that Clay Cameron. I’d have thought once he left her, she’d go back to her church home.”

“Her home was with me,” I said. “She didn’t need church.”

We ate in silence for a few moments, me trying to picture Mom in a church. It was getting so hard to remember her with all these new versions coming at me every time I turned around. Clay’s version, my grandparents’ version, my version—they were getting muddy, competing, blurring her memory. It felt like trying to recall someone I’d never met.

“Would you be willing to try it once?” my grandmother asked. “If you hate it, you’ll never have to go back. But it was very important to your mother at one time. You can see where she grew up.”

I rolled my eyes, but my resolve was weakening. I imagined walking into a stuffy church and hating it, feeling looked down upon by everyone inside. I imagined myself tipping my head back and railing at God—How could you? How could you do this to me?

But I could also see me walking in there and feeling enveloped by Mom, by Mom’s past, a past I didn’t know about. I could see me learning about her there.

“Will I be going to the same high school she did?” I asked, trying to buy myself time to think.

“Yes.” My grandmother wiped her mouth, letting me change the subject. “Waverly Senior. You guys are the Tigers.”

“We used to be the Bulldogs,” I said, as if that mattered. Barking Bulldogs, I heard Marin’s voice sing out in my head. Barking Bulldogs, Barking Bulldogs.

“Yes, I heard you had quite the football team. Did you know any of the kids on the team?”

Of course I did. I knew them all. We’d grown up together. I wondered how many of them would be playing next season. How many of them wouldn’t be playing at all? “I was in theater,” I said.

“Oh! Fun! What plays were you in, Jersey?”

I couldn’t blame her for asking. I actually got asked that a lot. People never assumed someone who loved the theater would love being behind the lights the most. But still, her asking irritated me. It wasn’t the fact that she didn’t know, it was the fact that… she was my grandmother and she didn’t know. I gritted my teeth against the irritation, but it was useless. This was all too much. Too fast, and too much. I pushed my chair away from the table, and it made a loud squeak that echoed through the food court and made people turn and look.

“I need a new cell phone,” I said, abruptly changing the subject. “Mine got cut off.”

“Oh.” She thought it over. “Okay. But we can just pay the bill on your old one, get it transferred over to our names. That way your number won’t change.”

“That’s fine. Then I’m ready to go home,” I said, suddenly too pissed at all the changes in my life to feel the relief I wanted to feel over not having to get rid of my old phone and the precious photos on it.

My grandmother didn’t say anything. She followed as I huffed it to the parking lot, my legs fueled by the weird anger that had begun following me around like a ghost.

Two weeks had passed since my grandmother’s church invitation, and I’d been hoping she’d forgotten. But on the third Sunday after our trip to the mall, she stood in my doorway, having swapped her trademark khakis and pastel sweater-and-tunic combo for a dress and stockings, the lined toes peeking out through a pair of rattan sandals. Her knees were knobby and her calves were covered in varicose veins that the hose did nothing to hide.

I sat cross-legged on my bed, playing cards, and pretended I didn’t notice my grandmother standing there. They seemed to have introduced me to everyone and taken me everywhere and were finally, blissfully, leaving me alone. I’d become an expert at being invisible; now if I could just become an expert at making them invisible.

She knocked lightly on my doorframe. “Jersey?” I squinched my eyes shut to keep from yelling at her for once again saying my name in a question. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to church?”

I didn’t look up. “Nope.”

But instead of getting her to go away, my short answer only seemed to move her to try again. She stepped into the room and sat gingerly on the edge of my bed, making the cards slide. I scooted back and scooped them up into a deck again.

“It could help,” she said, and if I hadn’t hated her so much, I might have been touched by the soothing tone of her voice. She acted as if she really cared. The same as when she left plates of home-baked cookies on my dresser or bought me a new set of headbands or a shirt or a little trinket to help me build my life back up again.

I felt sorry for her in those moments, because she didn’t know that Mom had raised us to see her as the enemy, that it would be a betrayal for me to love her. She didn’t know how broken I was on the inside, that I couldn’t have let her in even if I’d wanted to, because the part of me that had once loved was now gone. She didn’t know that while I found her house a somewhat acceptable place to hang for the time being, I was only waiting for the time to come when I could leave it. And that when I left her house, I would also leave her forever.