Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day

you go?”
    We’d stayed out past my curfew that night, passing a bottle of something terrible from her stepmother’s liquor cabinet back and forth, parked in her old car in a cornfield. I was going to get into trouble for being late, and I wasn’t sure I’d brought any mints to hide the booze on my breath. But Maddy hadn’t wanted to go home or go to my home, or go anywhere. She’d had more than I had, I guess. She didn’t seem to mind the taste of whatever we were drinking. “I mean, a real place, where you can touch things, and have a dog, and eat chocolate?”
    When you died, she meant.
    “Did you ever have a dog?” I’d asked. Supposing that to have a dog in heaven, you’d need to have had one in life. It all made sense in my mind. A lot of things made sense that night.
    But I didn’t think I’d really answered her question, even then. Now, I knew I hadn’t. I understood now what she wanted to know. Did you get a chance to get it right? Or was this it?
    I didn’t know. I didn’t have to wonder, though, if Maddy had been scared to find out.
    She’d put up a fight here, a real fight. Things aren’t always what they seem , she’d said to me in the bar. But this messy room was the opposite of what I’d first believed about her death. She hadn’t wanted to die. She’d wanted to live, badly. And she must have known that she wouldn’t.
    Beck’s stare weighed on me.
    I turned and went back to the scratch on the wallpaper. Above it hung one of the cornfield landscapes, the one with the dark tree. I pulled the picture off its hook and turned it over. Nothing.
    “What are you doing?” Beck looked behind him nervously. “Put that back.”
    I put it back, then cut carefully back across the sea of torn sheets and blankets to the other side of the room. The frame hung over the bed, almost true, the only thing that might have gone untouched in the room—except it was on the wrong wall.
    Lu and I hated these prints. They not only bored us, they defied any cleaning method we’d devised. Bugs somehow got stuck under the glass. The frames grew mysteriously sticky, and even a blast of Shinez-All couldn’t take it off.
    But we knew exactly where they belonged in each room. These two frames had been swapped in the last two days, since I’d last flipped the room.
    That couldn’t be a mistake.
    The second print was the cornfield cut by a lonely road, the dust kicking up behind an unseen car getting the hell out of there.
    I grabbed the frame from the wall and held it up. A white square of paper had been tucked into the back. I lay the frame upside down on the bed and peeled the paper away.
    “Oh, what did you do?” Beck said quietly. At first I thought he meant me, but then I knew he didn’t.
    It was a photo of me and Maddy, Coach, and Fitz after the Southtown regional tournament our senior year. A girl in Southtown black and white stood at the edge of the photo with a grim expression of disappointment. In the center, Coach was picking up his Indiana High School Coach of the Year trophy and medallion. At the moment the photo was taken, he was shaking the hand of an official mostly off camera, and the three of us, me, Maddy, Fitz, are being jostled against him in the chaos of congratulations.
    Maddy and I carried our regional trophies against our hips like infants, and Fitz squeezed Maddy’s shoulder, gazing upon us like a proud father. But Maddy’s face is serious, determined. Her eyes cut to the left of the cameraman, away from the festivities. She was already thinking about the state finals. She was already way ahead of everyone else.
    In the photo, I’m living in the moment. My smile is a thousand-watt beauty, all that orthodontia finally paying off, all those chewy vitamins and two vegetables at dinner and access to vaccinations and fluoride in the water radiating from me. I looked like a corn-fed State Fair dairy princess reigning over my subjects.
    It was a great photo of a great day. I studied it,