Between

by Jessica Warman

  I frown at him. “I thought you hated them.”

  He scratches the side of his head in mock contemplation. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want to see them half-naked.”

  Caroline is the only one who seems to have any reservations about what they’re doing. She stares at the carefully organized rows of clothing, hung neatly in contrast to my otherwise messy room, and reaches out with a perfectly manicured fingertip, barely touching the sleeve of a red cashmere sweater.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” She gives Josie a worried look. “It feels strange. What if your mom finds us in here?”

  Josie. My stepsister. My best friend. As soon as I look at her face, I can see that she’s upset, too. “It was my mom’s idea,” she says, tugging a black linen dress from its hanger.

  She stares at it for a few seconds. Then she holds the fabric to her face and inhales deeply, smelling it. Searching for me. When she pulls it away, there are tears in her eyes.

  “Josie?” Caroline’s tone is gentle. “Are you sure you want to do this right now?”

  My stepsister takes another deep breath. She has a faraway look on her face. “Every morning when I wake up, I expect her to be home,” she murmurs. “I open my eyes and look at my alarm clock and think, ‘Liz is probably back from her morning run already.’ Then I remember that she’s … not here.” She holds the dress in a crumpled ball, staring at it. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the idea. We knew each other all our lives, you know?”

  Mera and Caroline exchange a worried glance. Caroline moves to Josie, puts a hand against her back. “I know, Josie. It’s awful. Seriously, let’s save this for another time. We can do something else right now. We won’t leave you alone today, okay?”

  Josie frowns. She shakes out the dress, holds it up to stare at it for a moment before pressing it against her body, almost like she’s hugging it. “No. I want to do it now. I want to get it over with. Besides, what else will we do with everything? Give it to the Goodwill? This stuff cost a fortune.” With one hand, she wipes at her eyes. She blinks rapidly a few times. Forcing a big smile, she looks at Caroline and Mera. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

  She’s right about my clothes, anyway. Even though it pains me to see my friends going through all of my earthly possessions, I know it’s better if they take them. Practically everything looks like it came from high-end boutiques. Even my running gear is top-of-the-line, the latest technology in spandex and microfiber.

  “What about Liz’s dad?” Caroline asks. “What would he think? I mean, would he be okay with us doing this?”

  I already know that my dad probably wouldn’t care. Unlike Nicole, he is the complete opposite of a flake: he considers himself a very logical person. He doesn’t believe in ghosts or the afterlife or anything like that. So to him, it’s likely my clothes don’t have any meaning anymore.

  It’s funny—you’d think he and Nicole would be a poor match. But they’re not. My dad is amused by her fascination with spiritualism. He thinks it’s cute and harmless; at least, he used to. I don’t know what he might think of it now.

  Josie gives Caroline a sharp look. “What do you mean, Liz’s dad? He’s my dad, too.”

  “Oh.” Caroline looks like she’s swallowed her gum. “Right.” I see her exchanging another Look with Mera. But neither one of them says anything.

  “She thinks he’s her actual dad?” Alex asks.

  I try to wave the notion away, like it’s nothing more significant than a pesky fly. But it’s still here, out in the open now, and I know I don’t have a choice but to explain a little further to Alex. “I told you, we didn’t talk about it much. She thinks … yeah, I guess she thinks he’s her dad. She’s wrong. But Josie’s real dad is a deadbeat. He couldn’t hold a job. He never really visited Josie after he and Nicole got divorced.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you that she thinks your dad and her mom were fooling around for all those years?” Alex seems incredulous. I realize that he’s kind of right; it’s quite an assumption on Josie’s part, and it seems strange that I never tried to convince her differently.

  I look at my stepsister, who lets her fingers trail over my wardrobe with a bleak, sad expression on her face. She cries every day now. Glancing down the length of her body, I see that she’s still wearing her “best friends” anklet.

  “It seemed impossible,” I tell him. “I never believed it. I don’t know, Alex … she wanted a dad. I think that, deep down, she knows it can’t be true. She must know. It was like this ugly rumor that had followed us all our lives. None of us liked to talk about it. We certainly weren’t going to ask my dad or Nicole if it was true. It’s like there was no point in discussing it.”

  His tone is doubtful. “I guess so.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I say. “Pay attention. Let’s watch.”

  Once my friends have each gathered a pile of clothes, they start trying things on, standing in the center of my bedroom, tossing whatever items they reject carelessly onto the floor.

  “You’re way skinnier than all of them,” Alex points out. “I wouldn’t think your clothes would fit.”

  “Richie said I lost a lot of weight quickly,” I remind him. “It makes sense that there’s plenty of old stuff that’s a couple sizes larger.”

  Josie slips into a pair of jeans and a black one-shoulder top. She gazes at herself in the mirror.

  “It doesn’t look as good on me as it did on Liz,” she says, biting her bottom lip in a half smile. She holds out a piece of her long blond hair and frowns at the ends, which I happen to know are almost always split, no matter how often she gets it trimmed. All those chemicals from the bleach that gets applied every six weeks—plus all the heat she uses to style it—really do a number on her tresses. “Liz looked great in everything. Everything always fit her perfectly.”

  Mera takes a seat at my vanity and rifles through the drawer. She emerges with an unopened pair of false eyelashes. “Well, what do you expect? She was built like a game show hostess,” she says. She digs around in the bag of mascara for a few seconds before turning it over to dump the contents onto the floor. “You can’t compare yourself to her.”

  Josie nods. I notice that she grits her teeth for just a second, her jaw muscles tensing visibly at her cheek, almost like she’s chewing on the sentiment. “I know.” She turns to the side in front of the mirror, gazing at her profile. “She could have made a paper bag look good.”

  “Yep.” Mera continues to rifle through the makeup. She picks up a tube of lipstick, opens it, and stares at the maroon color absently. “But she was different over the past few months.” Her tone is cautious. “You noticed … right, Josie?”

  Josie nods. “She was wasting away. Everyone knew that.” And then she adds, “It’s like she couldn’t escape her history. She was just like her mom.”

  I can’t believe what she just said. The feeling of coldness that is always with me is suddenly sharper somehow.

  What is she talking about? I was not just like my mother. I was not anorexic. I just liked to run. All the time. Every day.

  Caroline shrugs, unfazed by the comment about my mom. “I didn’t think she looked bad, though. You know what they say—you can never be too thin or too rich, right?”

  My stepsister seems like she wants to cry again. She stares at my ceiling, which is a light shade of purple. And looking at it, I remember: She and I painted it together, just a few months before I died, on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Before we used rollers on the surface, we took paintbrushes and wrote our names in swirly purple letters. We wrote: JOSIE AND LIZ BFF. I wrote LIZ + RICHIE 4-EVER. Even after two coats of paint, if I squint at the ceiling, I can still see the faint outlines of the letters beneath the color.

  “There’s something I need to tell you both,” Josie says quietly.

  “Oh yeah?” Caroline is only mildly interested, choosing instead to study the hand stitching on a houndstooth jacket that I used to love.

  “Yes.” Josi
e’s hair is pulled into a tight, smooth ponytail. As she’s gotten older, her hair has grown in darker and darker. As a result, her highlights—which are chunky and so light they’re almost platinum—look unnatural and harsh.

  Right now, she pulls her ponytail free and shakes her head so that the waves fall over her shoulders. “It’s about Richie,” she says. She pauses. When she speaks, her voice is shaky, unconfident. “We’ve been dating.”

  Mera almost stabs herself in the eye with a mascara wand as she jerks her head in Josie’s direction. Caroline—who has put on the houndstooth jacket and is struggling to squeeze her wide foot into one of my narrow shoes—trips and falls in a tan, toned heap onto the floor.

  “You and Richie?” Caroline says, sitting upright, tugging the jacket back into place across her chest. “Since when?”

  “Since a few months ago.” Josie hesitates. “He was going to break up with Liz.”

  “I’ve already heard this,” I say, covering my ears. “I don’t want to hear it again.”

  Alex pulls my hands away from my head. “You have to listen,” he insists. “What else are we here for?”

  But I ignore him. I shake myself free from his grasp, go into my bathroom, and sit in the shower. For the moment, it seems I’ve managed to distance myself from Alex, at least by a few yards. But I’ve only been in the bathroom for a minute or so when Caroline comes in by herself.

  She locks the door behind her. She stares at her reflection in the mirror.

  “Hey, Caroline,” I say, even though I know she can’t hear me. “I’m right here.”

  She turns on a faucet. Slowly, quietly, she begins to open the drawers on my bathroom vanity and look through their contents.

  As I’m watching my friend, a handful of new memories about her seep into my consciousness. This is Caroline Ann Michaels, whom I have known since preschool. She is outgoing, friendly, and sharply smart. Like I said earlier, she’s a cheerleader—I remembered that much. But now I recall details of her personality, facts about her family. She expresses her excitement in frequent bursts of clapping and spirit fingers. She smiles so much that it’s almost shocking to see her wearing a frown. She is the youngest of four girls in her family, each of whom has been an icon of sorts at Noank High. Her sisters, in order from oldest to youngest: Charlotte, Corrine, and Christy. Her parents are Camille and Colin. The whole family is devoutly Catholic. They are the portrait of the American Dream. Every year, they send out a Christmas card with a photo of their family dressed up like characters from a popular book or movie. Last year, they were all from Harry Potter; the year before that, it was Star Wars. Caroline’s mother does a ton of volunteer work, and her dad is some kind of finance wizard who works in Manhattan during the week and is only at home on the weekends.

  Caroline is a good person—I’m sure of it. So I’m more than a little surprised to see her rummaging in my drawers like this, so secretly. It doesn’t make a lot of sense; Josie has already given them permission to go through all my stuff.

  In the top drawer of my vanity, she finds an almost-full bottle of prescription painkillers. They’re leftovers from my concussion. She slips them into her purse. She’s about to turn off the water when she stops, peering closely into the drawer.

  I can tell from the way she’s looking that all she wanted were the painkillers; she’s obviously stumbled onto something else.

  It’s money. Cash. She reaches into the drawer and removes a fistful of hundred-dollar bills. Her hands are shaking a little bit.

  I have no idea what I might have been doing with so much money. I had a bank account and my parents deposited my allowance into it each week. They never gave me cash.

  But the money she’s holding was obviously for something—why else would I have hidden it in a bathroom drawer? Slowly, her eyes glazed in “look what I found” fascination, Caroline begins to count the bills. One … two … three … four … it’s five hundred dollars.

  I gasp. What was I doing with all that cash? I can’t imagine. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to focus, struggling to remember something, anything. But nothing appears.

  There’s a tap at the door. “Caroline? Sweetie, are you okay?” It’s Josie.

  “Um—yeah, just a second!” She stares at the money. For just a moment, I think she’s about to put it back in the drawer.

  But she doesn’t. Instead, she rolls it into a ball and stuffs it in her bra.

  Once she’s out of the bathroom, Caroline starts gathering up her stuff. “I didn’t realize how late it was getting,” she explains, slipping on her shoes. “I have to go home right now.”

  “But we aren’t finished.” Mera frowns. “And we were all supposed to get lattes after this and then sleep over.”

  “I’m sorry, guys, I have to go. We’ll do lattes another day, okay?” Caroline grabs her purse. Josie and Mera give each other an unsteady look.

  “What’s the matter? You’re being weird,” Josie says. “You’re not going to take any clothes? I told you, my parents want us to have them.”

  Caroline inhales a deep breath. She looks around my room for a long moment. Her gaze lingers on my pile of old running shoes. For just a moment, she looks like she might cry.

  “I’ll keep this jacket,” she says, gesturing to what she’s already wearing, “but I don’t want anything else. Taking one thing is okay, but digging through her stuff like this … I don’t know, Josie. It feels wrong. It feels like we’re stealing from Liz.”

  Mera looks down at her own hands. She’s clutching no fewer than five of my old purses. Her grip on them loosens a bit—but she doesn’t let go.

  Josie stares at Caroline quizzically. “You look great in that jacket,” she offers. “Liz would have wanted you to have it.”

  It’s true; she does look great in the jacket. And this time, Josie is right. I want Caroline to have it. I know she’ll take good care of it.

  “I’ll call you later, okay?” Caroline blows my friends a kiss. Then she’s gone.

  When I tell Alex what I saw in the bathroom, he says, “Well, your boyfriend is a drug dealer. Maybe you were holding some cash for him.”

  I frown. “I doubt it. I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Your memory is full of holes, Liz. It seems like a decent explanation.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would he need me to hold money? And I already told you, I hated that he sold drugs. I don’t think I would have done anything to help him.”

  Alex raises his right eyebrow. “But you’re not sure. Are you?”

  I hesitate. “No,” I finally admit, “I’m not sure.”

  He gives me a satisfied look. “Hey, Liz—if you hated him selling so much, why didn’t you do more to stop him? You’ve told me yourself that you did drugs, too. That’s sort of hypocritical, don’t you think?”

  I shrug. “Not really. I only did them sometimes. But nothing too bad—nothing heavy.” And I take a deep breath. Any memory of Richie—anything—is painful to recall. “And Richie didn’t like me doing drugs. He was always trying to protect me.”

  “Huh. He did a great job.”

  “Shut up. He’s just a boy, Alex. Just like you. He isn’t really famous. He’s just Richie. But you’re getting off topic. I’m telling you, there’s no way I would have had that much cash lying around. For anything. I only remember using plastic.”

  “What other explanation can there be, Liz? People don’t walk around with cash like that anymore. Why would you be hiding it in your bathroom?”

  “I don’t know.” I watch Mera getting ready to leave. She carries an armful of my clothing out to her car, then comes back for another pile.

  “And you’re sure Caroline wasn’t specifically looking for the money?” Alex asks.

  “Yes.” I pause, replaying the scene in my mind. “She was surprised to find it. She was obviously there for the pills. And even that’s weird. I don’t know what Caroline would possibly want with my old painkiller
s.”

  He looks around my room, observing the mess and disarray. “It’s funny,” he says. “I always thought you guys—everyone in the upper social echelon—I assumed you had such simple, perfect lives. Everything seemed so easy for you.”

  I gaze out my window. My bedroom is at the back of the house, facing the water. I can see the Elizabeth resting alone at the dock, quiet and empty.

  The memory begins to slip over me before I can even close my eyes. As it descends upon my consciousness, I feel a sense of calm comfort.

  It’s the middle of the night; my alarm clock reads 2:14 a.m. For a few seconds, I watch my living self asleep in bed. I’m obviously dreaming, or else having a nightmare. My legs twitch in my sleep; I reach into the darkness with my skinny arms outstretched toward the ceiling, trying to grab on to something, anything. Then I sit up so quickly in bed, gasping for breath, that as a ghost, I’m startled. In the dim room, my wide eyes flash in the moonlight that spills through my windows.

  When my younger self turns on my nightstand light, I realize that I’m seeing myself at ten, maybe eleven years old. My bedroom is still decorated the way it was before Nicole redid the whole house: a border of ballet slippers is stenciled along the top edges of my cream-colored walls; my posters are all stills from shows like The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. This was before I started running; in the corner of my room that is now reserved for sneakers, there are a few scuffed ballet slippers and a pair of shiny black tap shoes. The decor, along with the footwear, are the last remnants of my mother’s influence after she died. She loved to watch my recitals. She rarely missed so much as a rehearsal. But I was never that good of a dancer, even though I took lessons from preschool up until the end of sixth grade. I was always forgetting the steps in ballet, and I could never master the complicated tap choreography.

  It’s incredible to see myself as such a young girl. I wear a fitted white tank top and pink pajama bottoms decorated with—what else?—ballet slippers. There’s a softness to my facial features that is long gone now, replaced in my teenage years by an angular jaw and hollowed cheeks. My chest is nonexistent; I probably didn’t even own a training bra yet. My long blond hair is all one length, spilling over my shoulders without any hint of layers to frame my face. I watch myself as I look silently around the room before placing my bare feet on the floor, pressing my palms to my flushed cheeks. I can’t help but smile when I notice that my toenails are all intact, and painted a deep shade of dainty pink.