The cathedral overlooks a hobo park, where art students paint and fly kites on humdrum Sunday afternoons. Sometimes lovers set out old-fashioned picnics there, with a wicker basket and red tablecloth. But tonight it is empty, devoid of all the usual associations. I stare at the moon as my sister pushes an archaic microwave into the trailer our parents towed down from home. The moon cackles at the grunting girl with Tweety bird eyes. It always takes my side.

“Need help?” I mumble. I don’t really mean it. I’m standing in front of Sacred Heart, wondering how I can stuff the silver night clouds into the trailer. I, the greedy, nostalgic girl that I am, want to take everything.

My sister growls, not even bothering to face me, and hauls a beige television set from the moving cart she wheeled from her dorm to the street. The TV reminds me of one of the Jurassic computers on which I first practiced typing “Ariel Heart Love” back in kindergarten. I would print out ten sheets at a time and scribble pink crayon hearts all over. 

My sister drops the giant box on the trailer floor and then fishes out a navy and white plaid bedspread from the moving cart. 

I immediately stand up straight and ask, “Hey, where’d you get that?”

“Huh?” She flashes me her trademark ‘I’m studying Film at the best public art school in America and therefore holier than thou’ look.

I asked again, “Where’d you get that?”

“This bedspread?” She picks it up again from where she’s dropped it. “The trash. I was just going to wash it and use it. It looks almost new.”

“Almost.” I bend over and finger the majestic blue paint stain shaped like a castle. That’s where we were supposed to live one day. I trace over the tiny torrents I had overblown in my mind.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that stain,” my sister murmurs. “Whatever.” She scrunches up the bedspread and pushes it into the trailer. Then she reaches into the moving cart again, this time for a box brimming with glittery, ceramic fairies. They carry Celtic crosses and crystal balls, the sacrilegious sprites. I try to ignore the fact that they smell like wet rubber cement because of what rubber cement triggers in my head.

“Are you sure you still want it?”

“The bedspread?” My sister stares at me, those fairies still in her cut-up hands. “Yeah, I mean…look at it.” She points at it with her pixie chin. “It’s fine. What difference does one little stain make?”

It makes a royal difference.  “No, you’re right. No difference at all.” I pause. “You’re not going to sleep with it, are you?”

“It’s a bedspread. What else would I do with it?”

I gulp through all the B.S. sloshing around my skull. A good answer has to exist in there somewhere. “Use it as a drape in one of your films. Or lie out your equipment on it instead of on the ground.”

“I hadn’t thought about that, but, no, I’m going to sleep with it.”

“How about that torn-up corner?”

I immediately seize the bedspread, pressing it close into my body, remembering how it felt the first time my skin touched it. It still feels soft and welcoming. I almost draw it up to my nose, but stop when my sister starts talking.

“What tear? Is it serious?” She steps closer to me.

My hands skims over the mass of cloth until they stumble upon what my heart hoped I would meet again. “Here. See?”

“That’s weird. It looks intentional.”

Forgetting my censorship, I blurt, “That’s because it is.” My mind jumps to those sturdy wrists trembling with the opening and closing of kitchen shears. He had needed the scrap of cloth for another one of his flamboyant collages. It was supposed to fill in a gap of his stormy sky.

“How do you know?” She scrunches up her round face and licks her upper-lip. It’s a habit of hers. I picture his lips and the way a fleck of gesso always managed to cling to his moustache back when I still knew him.

“I…I mean,” I say, stumbling for a valid response, “It looks so intentional, like you were saying. It couldn’t have been accident.”

My sister shrugs her shoulders. “Yeah.” Then she grabs a bouquet of wilted purple flowers from the bottom of the moving cart. “I can’t believe how much crap I had in my dorm. I should just throw it all away.”

I cringe when she says that, as if memories were so disposable. When I went up to help clean my sister’s dorm, I was so upset to see the discarded bits and pieces of student’s lives crumpled up in the hallway trashcans. Perhaps I am too sentimental. Evan was the opposite, always focusing on what was to come instead of what was before. My watering eyes jump to the ground and then back to his bedspread, still pinched by my sister’s grip. 

“Mixed media’s the art of the future,” Evan explained the day my back first lied on that navy and white bedspread. He was hunched over a massive board of foam core, slicing out the contours of a silver knight. The knight, tall and brawny, held a shield that barely concealed his big body. On the shield was a neon green peace sign, just like the one painted on the city book mobile where Evan and I first met seven months before college began. I couldn’t tell if Evan was alluding to our first encounter or not.

I sat on his dirty floor, trimming strands of gold wire Evan would twist to form briar bushes to frame his noble knight. The television hummed with the voices of Biblical scholars as a punk song played from his computer, but everything was turned down too low for me to make out the words. I couldn’t tell Amorite from anarchy. I glanced up at the beads of sweat growing on Evan’s bare back. My gaze returned to the coils of wire before bouncing to the damp blue paint smeared on Evan’s jeans.

“What about multimedia?” I asked him, a couple minutes delayed. I always did that, treating conversations like I lived underwater where everything was stretched out for too long and words arrived too slowly for landlubbers’ tastes. In the end, that’s why Evan broke up with me. I was too distracted for his quest-oriented lifestyle.

“Mixed media, multimedia—same thing.” He paused and then set down the X-acto knife. “Ah, done!” Evan flashed at the knight at me and smiled. “It looks better than I thought.”

I grinned. “It looks great. Why—”

Just then Evan started to sit down on the bed. I tried to stop him but he had already brushed against the spread when I cried, “Stop!”

“What?”

“Look.” I pointed to the blue stain he left on the cloth.

“Ha, it looks like a castle.”

I smiled. “Yeah, but won’t your mom get mad?”

Evan suddenly clasped my face and pulled me toward his puckered lips. First I tasted the saltiness of his tongue and then I tasted the gum I hadn’t realized he’d been chewing. He ruffled my hair and told me he loved me. I cooed in his ear. We continued that way until he climbed on top of me for my first time. His first time. Our first time.

My sister snaps her fingers in my face, snatching me from my reveries. I hop a little and catch my breath in a way I haven’t done since that night with Evan. “Yeah?”

“How many times do I have to repeat myself? I know it’s a full moon, but, really…you’re acting dreamier than usual.”

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

“Ugh.” My sister rolls her eyes and places her hand on her hip. “Could you watch my stuff while I go back to the dorm for the aquarium? It’s the least you could do.”

I nod, only then aware that I’m petting a small, white splotch on the bedspread. Somehow the bedspread found its way back into my grasp.

My sister wrinkles her nose, squints at the splotch and covers her mouth. “Eww! Is that what I think that is?”

“I…” I know it is but that confession will remain unspoken. I lock it up in a chest and feed the key to one of the ink dragons lurking around my brain. I love and hate how his illustrations still linger.

“That’s seriously disgusting. No wonder they threw it away. Some poor girl would rather toss it out than wash her ex-boyfriend’s…yuck.” She shuddered. “You know, you’re right. I’m putting this back in the trash where it belongs.” 

My sister yanks the blanket away from me, but holds it far from her body as she walks back to her dorm. For some reason I can’t move. I feel like she is throwing away one of my memories, just dumping it into the trash with all of the other freshman castaways. I stand by the moving cart, wishing I had insisted on keeping it. Wishing Evan had never discarded it, even if the blue paint stain would have angered his mother. 

I close my eyes and let the breeze caress my lips and tousle my hair, imagining the sight of Evan’s empty dorm room. The only trace of him is a tiny tinge of blue paint on the corner of his desk. And maybe a thread from his bedspread floating through the air, moments from falling to the floor.