by Sarah Gailey
The first time I told my dads about Uncle Trev, they exchanged a long look and then had a talk with me about Red Flags and What to Watch Out For and Adult Men and Grooming Behavior. And I’ve watched out for all the red flags—but honestly, Trev is just a nice guy. I talk to Marcelina about it all the time: how much it sucks to have to be suspicious of a grown man just because he’s kind and thoughtful and listens. But then again, Marcelina and I also talk a lot about grown men we were right to be suspicious of. The kinds of grown men who pretend to be interested in our lives and then start texting us late at night. The kinds of grown men who ask for hugs. The kinds of grown men who say they want to be our friends, who try to tell us secrets because they think we don’t know what it means when a grown man tries to tell a teenage girl a secret. Uncle Trev isn’t like them, and I know that, but it’s awful to be constantly watching just in case he turns out to be that kind of guy.
It’s exhausting.
Anyway.
I go through the mudroom to get out, because Handsome and Fritz would never forgive me if I left without saying goodbye. I sit down and let them bombard me with dog-dreams and news and sheer unbridled affection. They both try to shove their noses into my backpack. Even though they listen when I tell them to leave it alone, I get up and go pretty fast. It doesn’t feel right, sitting there with Josh’s head and his all-wrong heart and letting the dogs tell me how great I am.
Nothing feels right.
I walk home. It’s only about a mile, and the fresh air is nice. It’s early enough that not many people are awake. I pass the places where Marcelina and I used to ride our bikes around when we were kids, before we knew that magic was more than just a game we played. Houses that we’d decided were haunted, or where we said a murderer probably lived. Sidewalks that we dusted with chalk rainbows before rainstorms, so that when the weather started to turn, we could watch the colors run.
I wonder when the days stopped feeling endless. It was definitely long before I had a backpack full of body parts to dispose of.
My house is just like all the other houses on the block. It’s squat and square and has a big window in the front and a little yard next to the driveway. It’s light blue, and the one on the left of it is white and the one on the right of it is brown, and that color pattern repeats over and over for about eight blocks in every direction.
The only thing that makes my house stand out is my dads’ garden. It’s one of the many Couples Hobbies they’ve taken up together over the years in an attempt to stay “connected.” It’s not that their relationship is bad or anything—it’s just that they’re both trial lawyers, which means that they’re both always busy. I guess when you’re that busy, it doesn’t matter if you’re madly in love with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with—it’s still easy to drift apart. So my dads have golfed and tennis’d and biked and run marathons, and now they’re gardening. The front lawn is a patchwork of garden beds that are exploding with flowers—mostly orange and pink ones right now, although they put some blue hydrangeas in for me.
I feel weirdly guilty whenever I see the hydrangeas, even though I know that they planted them to make me happy and it’s not a big deal. I don’t like feeling like I disrupted their color scheme. But then, if I ever told them I felt bad about it, they’d make a big deal about how it’s not a big deal. So I don’t say anything, and I tell myself that it’s not something I should feel guilty about.
I walk inside as quietly as I can, thinking I’ll be able to sneak into my bedroom without getting noticed or talked to, but as soon as I step inside, I’m thwarted by my little brother. Nico’s wearing his soccer uniform and he’s got his cleats on, even though he’s not supposed to wear them in the house and Pop will definitely kill him if he sees.
Nico looks nothing like me, which makes sense since we were adopted from entirely different families. Where my hair is brown and curly, his is black and straight and stands up in every direction even when he doesn’t put too much gel in it. We both have brown eyes, but mine are dark and his are light in a way that I’m sure girls his age think is dreamy. He’s two years younger than me, and he goes to a STEM magnet school that’s annoyingly close to my school. He’s getting taller every half hour or so, which means that his elbows are pointy and his neck is weirdly long and he’s developing horrible posture because he doesn’t know how to be tall yet. He’d be really good-looking if it wasn’t for the slouch. And if he wasn’t my little brother. And if he wasn’t constantly underfoot, like he is now.
“What are you doing up?” I ask. He looks down at his soccer cleats and then raises his eyebrows at me like I’m ten cents short of a dime, which … fair.
“Dad said you weren’t coming to my game today because you’d probably be hungover from prom,” Nico says.
“He did not say that,” I snap back at him. I want to yell at him to stop slouching, just to annoy him. I don’t have that many months left to be an annoying older sister who yells at my kid brother.
He rolls his eyes and heads toward the kitchen, his cleats pulling at the carpet.
“Whatever,” he yells over his shoulder. “Dad, Pop, the prodigal daughter has returned!”
I love my little brother, but he’s at an age where he thinks he’s clever. Normally I would say that I want to kill him, but … that’s a little close to home right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say that again, to be honest. I turn down the hallway that leads to my bedroom, hoping against hope that I’ll be able to get there without interruption, but apparently, it’s not a good morning for hoping.
“How was prom?” Dad pokes his head out of the bathroom. He looks a lot like Nico, which he swears wasn’t intentional, but which makes people think that Nico is his son from a previous marriage or something. He has the sticking-up-everywhere black hair and the lighter-than-mine brown eyes and the altitude. But his black hair is starting to become salted with white, and his brown eyes have a web of laugh lines around them, and he’s what people call “olive” where Nico is just vampiric.
He’s my dad, and he’s got toothpaste foam on his chin, and he’s kind of the best. And I would give anything to not have to talk to him right now, because I’m tired and I have body parts in a bag and what if I get mad at my dad and hurt him somehow? I wasn’t even mad at Josh when I killed him, but it still happened.
You weren’t mad at him, something in me whispers. You were lying to him.
“Prom was fine,” I say, and that lie doesn’t kill my dad, so I push away the thought that it might matter.
“Just fine?” he asks, and I want to scream.
“It was great,” I answer, forcing a smile. “I’m just tired.”
“Okay, well, we didn’t even know that you’d be back this morning, so you’re free.” He sticks his toothbrush back into his mouth and makes a series of unintelligible noises. I decide to interpret them as “By all means, go lie in the dark in your room and try to figure out how you’re going to dispose of that nice boy’s head.”
“Love you,” I say, and he waves at me, and his salt-and-pepper head disappears back into the bathroom. I walk into my bedroom, shut the door, and allow myself an all-out dramatic sigh, complete with a slouching lean against the door.
I think I’ve earned some melodrama.
I pull out my phone before I’ve finished crossing the room to flop onto the bed. I have a million notifications, and I dismiss all of them except for the text messages. I don’t have the energy for social media yet.
I have a bunch of texts from Maryam.
She’s doing that thing where she’s anxious, but she doesn’t want to put what she’s anxious about in writing, so she’s over-explaining and being vague at the same time. She wants to know if everything’s okay, and if everyone’s on the same page, and if there’s anything she should know about, and if we can have a phone call, or maybe a phone call’s a bad idea, and maybe we shouldn’t even be texting, and can I delete her texts just in case?
I he
sitate, then delete all of the messages she’s sent in the last twelve hours. There are nineteen of them. I send a thumbs-up emoji, and nothing else, because I don’t know what I could possibly say that wouldn’t make her worry even more. She replies immediately with a message that says simply I love you no matter what.
She loves me no matter what. Even if I’m a murderer. Even if I’m a monster—because, let’s face it, the kind of person who does what I did? That’s a monster. It wasn’t on purpose, but that doesn’t really feel like it matters.
Something is wrong inside me, something I don’t understand and can’t control, and Maryam wants me to know that she loves me anyway.
The group text thread is pretty quiet. I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what to say. I can’t blame them—I don’t know what to say either. I draft and delete nine messages before chickening out and sending a string of heart emojis.
The only texts I haven’t read yet are the ones from Roya.
My mouth is too dry for me to read the texts from Roya. When did my mouth get so dry? It wasn’t like this until I saw her name on the screen.
I hate seeing her name on the screen. I wish I saw it more.
I slip out of my room, hoping no one will ambush me in the hall to ask if prom was just fine. I can hear Dad and Pop and Nico making leaving-noises in the front entryway. I stand at the sink, drinking water and trying to get my heart rate to settle down a little. I open the texts from Roya.
Hey did you get home ok?
Marcelina says you’re staying at her place, lmk if you need anything
Man, this duffel bag I’m thinking of buying is an ~arm and a leg~
I let out a long, slow breath that would be a laugh if I wasn’t so dizzy. Of course Roya’s got jokes. She’s always got jokes.
“Well, go find them,” Dad says from the entryway, and I catch a note of exasperation in his voice. It’s always like this, trying to get Nico out the door—a thousand loose ends, everything last-minute and forgotten. Dad’s pretty type-A, and he tries hard not to expect Nico to be as organized as he is, but it definitely drives him up the wall.
“I think they’re in Alex’s room,” I hear Nico call back behind him, and then his cleats are tearing up the carpet in the front hallway, and—
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping my glass into the sink hard enough that I have to check to see if it’s cracked. It isn’t. “Shit, shit, shit.” I run for the hall. My bedroom door is ajar, and when I walk in, Nico is rummaging around my desk. No no no. The head is in here. The heart is in here. He can’t be in here.
“What are you doing?” I shout. I’m a caricature of a pissed-off big sister. “Get out of my room!”
“I need my headphones,” he says. “I can’t find them. Didn’t you borrow them yesterday when you were doing your hair or whatever?”
“No,” I snap. “You probably washed them again. Take shit out of your pockets next time.”
“Don’t swear at me or I’ll tell Dad and he’ll make you do Conflict Resolution,” Nico says. I scowl because he’s right—Dad would totally sit me down to go over the rules of engagement. No swearing, no yelling, no specious allegations, no hearsay. We are not a yelling household, and other totally normal things to say during an argument.
Nico looks something less than smug but more than satisfied. He runs a hand through his hair, which he does whenever he knows he’s winning. I hope the gel leaves his hand gross and sticky. “I know you borrowed them. I just need to find them before I go, or else I won’t have anything to listen to during warm-ups.” He turns around and his eyes land on the backpack.
He reaches for it.
“No,” I say, but he’s not paying attention.
He’s holding the backpack and ignoring the hell out of me.
“Nico,” I shout, “give me the damn bag!”
“I just need my headphones. God, don’t be such a bitch.”
I snatch the bag out of his hand just as he’s reaching for the zipper. “Don’t call women bitches,” I snap. “I don’t have your headphones.”
“I wouldn’t call you a bitch if you weren’t being a bitch,” he snaps back, and we would probably devolve into a shouting match, but Pop calls from the garage.
“Are you coming to the game, Lex?”
Nico and I stare at each other hard. He smiles. I shake my head. His smile broadens, and he calls over his shoulder.
“Yeah, Pop, she’s coming! She’s just getting her shoes on now.”
I growl at Nico and push him out the door so I can change into clothes I didn’t sleep in. I shove the backpack under my bed as far as it’ll go. When I pull my arm out from under the bed, my fingertips brush across something that feels unfamiliar. I grab it and pull it out.
Nico’s tangled headphones dangle from my hand.
“Ah, shit,” I mutter.
* * *
Nico gloats for the entire drive to his game. I should have just tossed his headphones into his room and let him warm up with no music, but I’m not that cruel of a sister. Pop is on a call with his assistant for the first half hour of the forty-minute drive, but the second he hangs up, his eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
“So!” He does the bright, excited voice that means “I’m sorry for taking a work call on the weekend, it won’t happen again, except actually it definitely will and I’ll make up for it by sending you to a nice college someday.” “Prom, huh? Was it the best night of your life?”
I swallow an incredulous laugh, and his eyebrows go up. “Uh, no,” I say. “I sure hope not. It would be a bummer to peak this early.”
He smiles, rolls his eyes. “Did you have a good time, though?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“Just fine?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve died and gone to a special section of hell where people won’t accept “fine” as an answer.
“It was fun,” I revise. “The music was great. I felt like a princess the whole time.”
Pop doesn’t laugh. His eyebrows come together, which isn’t hard, since they almost meet in the middle anyway. They’re the only hair on his entire head, but they kind of work overtime. When he frowns, they form one long, worried line. “Did something happen?”
“No,” I say, sharper than I intend. “Nothing happened, Pop, it was just—it’s a dance. Everyone thinks it’s more than that, but it’s not. It’s just a dance. And it was fine.”
“I think she had a fight with Roya,” Dad whispers. “Roya went with Tall Matt.” Pop keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. When Dad says “Tall Matt,” Pop’s eyes get wide and his eyebrows rocket around like they’re motorized.
“Why does everyone think that?” I retort. “I didn’t have a fight with anyone, I had a good time, I don’t even care about who Roya went to prom with, it was—”
“ ‘Fine,’ we know,” Nico interrupts. He’s texting someone, probably about how he was right and I had his headphones all along. “If you didn’t have a fight with Roya, you must be on your period or something.”
“Nico,” Dad says in a warning tone. “Don’t do that.”
“What?” Nico says, not looking up from his phone. “All I said was—”
“Nope, don’t even try,” Dad interrupts, examining his stubbly chin in the pull-down mirror. He’s being the stern one this morning, since Pop is all guilt-ridden from his long work call. “You’re deliberately pushing her buttons. I know you don’t talk to Meredith that way.”
Nico’s ears turn red and he doesn’t say another word until we get to the soccer field. Meredith is his girlfriend—his first real one—and Pop’s right. Meredith would never let Nico talk to her the way he talks to me. I mean, Nico shouldn’t talk to me the same way he talks to his girlfriend. That would be weird. But I could learn a thing or two from her about silencing glares.
It’s hot outside in that threatening way late-spring mornings have, where you can tell that it’s going to be unbearable in the sun by noon. Gina Tarlucci waves at me from the
bleachers. Her little brother is on the soccer team too, and she’s another senior, so it’s kind of strange that we’ve never hung out. We’ve always had classes together, although this year we only share study hall. I like her fine—but I’ve always had my friends, and she’s always had hers, most of whom are in the photography club and way too intense for me. She’s one of those girls who’s super serious about becoming a photographer. She carries around an old camera and rolls her eyes when people take selfies on their phones. She verges on being annoying about it, but she’s also really good. Or at least, she always takes a lot of pictures that get into the yearbook. She’s tall and broad and wears super-shiny lip gloss and bright, patterned dresses that I think she makes herself.
I should probably talk to her, but I can’t deal with the slightly awkward why-aren’t-we-better-friends conversation right now. I can’t make small talk after the night I had. I wave back at her, then head for the shade behind the bleachers, where hopefully I won’t have to talk to her.
I could stay out on the field and just pretend that I have to stick by my family, but if I did that, I’d have to talk to all of Nico’s friends’ parents. It’s not that I don’t like them—they’re nice people. But I can guarantee that they’ll all have the same five questions. How’s school? Where are you going to college? What do you want to major in? What’s your five-year plan? How was prom?
The answers are fine, State, I don’t know, (screaming internally), and fine, respectively. I can deal with answering the first two questions, which nobody actually cares about unless they went to State, in which case they’ll start giving me all kinds of advice about professors I might have and classes I might take. The last three questions hurt in ways it’s hard to articulate. Before last night, the last question was always Are you excited for prom?, which also hurt in ways it’s hard to articulate. It’s like every adult I talk to has some weird combination of expectations. They want me to be living in the now and enjoying “the best years of my life,” sure—but at the same time, I’m supposed to know what income I’ll need to afford the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage I’ll be signing up for in ten years.
