by Alex Flinn
“We’re here,” she informed them.
“I thought you sat there.” One of the girls pointed to the little table.
“Does it look like we’re there? Duh. People are so stupid.” She sat and gestured for Lisette and me to spread out. “Leave room for Tayloe and Midori.”
The table for four sat empty. No one dared sit at it. I bet it would be empty all year.
Midori and Tayloe showed up then, Midori obviously feeling better. They glanced at the table but didn’t dare comment. Courtney leaned toward Lisette. “Sooooo, how do you know Emma?”
“She’s my stepsister.”
“Stepsister?” Courtney looked at me. “Did your parents get divorced, that I don’t know about?”
“They were always divorced,” Lisette said. “My dad married Emma’s mom when Emma and I were three, but I’ve been living up in Palm Beach with my mother.”
“That’s so weird,” Courtney said. “I always thought he was your real dad.”
He was!
“So, Palm Beach.” Midori did a bit of hair-ography with her dark hair. “Do you play polo and hang with Tiger Woods?”
Dad had told me Lisette was from Lantana, which was in Palm Beach County, but not rich Palm Beach, where the millionaires lived. But Lisette didn’t correct Midori. People didn’t. “Well, not polo, but the shops on Worth Avenue are totes to die for.” She did some hair-ography of her own, fluffing her blond curls back.
And that’s when I noticed them. Shell-shaped earrings with aquamarines on top. They were beautiful.
And they were mine. Daddy had bought them on a cruise we’d taken for my birthday last year. Aquamarine was my birthstone.
“Wow, great earrings,” I said. “I have a pair just like them.”
Lisette reached her hand for her ear, as if trying to remember what earrings she had on. “Truly? They were my mother’s. Her birthday’s in March. How weird that you’d have the same ones.” She grinned. “It must be fate, to show that we’re truly meant to be sisters.”
Courtney rolled her eyes, and I exhaled. It sounded like something from a novel, like the locket in Oliver Twist. Of course there was an explanation. Lisette wouldn’t steal my earrings and wear them right in front of me. Still, I’d go find mine when I got home. We could even wear them together.
“How cute,” Courtney said. “You always said you wanted a sister, Em.” She went back to Lisette. “So what’s your schedj for the rest of the day?”
And neither she, nor her friends, talked to me the rest of lunch.
When the warning bell rang, I started gathering my stuff. I didn’t want this. I was over Courtney. I didn’t want to be back in her web.
Courtney said, “We’re walking to Starbucks after school. There’s this hot barista Tayloe’s lusting for.”
“Not lusting,” Tayloe protested.
“Ahem. You don’t even like coffee.”
“Okay, he is cute.”
“You should come, Lisette,” Courtney said, “and bring Emma.”
I knew I’d go.
I didn’t get to sit by Lisette in chorus. Even though we were both sopranos, Miss Hakes put her in back because she was taller. I sat by—who else?—Kendra. Miss Hakes announced that, next Monday, she’d have auditions for a solo. Kendra nudged me. “You should try out.”
“Oh.” I turned to see if she was kidding. “Really?”
“You have a beautiful voice.”
I wanted to return the compliment, but it seemed like Kendra usually just mouthed the words. I’d actually been planning on trying for the solo. I’d been practicing at home for weeks. I’d even gotten Mother to pay for some voice lessons with Miss Hakes. I thought I had a good voice, but no one had ever told me I did.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Show of hands if you’re trying out,” Miss Hakes said.
“Put up your hand,” Kendra urged.
I did. Three other hands went up, but two were seventh graders. I saw Lisette nod her approval at me.
Since everyone cool went to Starbucks after school, I never went. Now I was there with the most popular girls in the class, and Courtney was regaling Lisette with the details of our friendship, leaving out the fact that it had ended two years earlier. “Do you remember, Em, how we met because we wore the same outfit the first day of kindergarten?” she’d say. Or, “Do you remember when we took the limo to Kendall Ice Arena for your birthday in fifth grade?”
I did remember. It was Courtney who hadn’t seemed to. But I didn’t say anything. I wanted Lisette to think I had friends. Courtney wouldn’t give me away. Obviously, she wanted to hang with Lisette, and I was part of the deal. The other two girls had never really known me.
“What do you think of la bruja gorda?” Courtney asked Lisette.
“That’s what we call the Spanish teacher,” Lisette explained.
We? She’d been there a day.
“Fat witch,” Midori translated.
“She speaks zero Spanish,” Tayloe chimed in. “I asked her a word once, and she looked it up, real sneaky, in this dictionary under her desk.”
“And she’s so fat,” Courtney said, “that I heard last year, she had a baby, and she didn’t even realize she was pregnant.”
The four of them started giggling, and I felt like Lisette was the one who’d known them since kindergarten. I searched for something to say, something funny and evil.
“Some people call my German teacher The Nazi,” I said.
Everyone stared at me.
“Because he’s really hard,” I added.
They kept staring. Then, Midori said, “That’s not funny, Emma. My grandmother was killed in a concentration camp.”
I felt my face start to burn and my vision blur. “Omigod, Midori. I didn’t know.” I was so stupid. I wasn’t even the one who called Herr Webb that, just heard other people say it.
Tayloe laughed. “She’s messing with you, Emma. She’s not even Jewish.” She rolled her eyes. “And I’ve met both your grandmothers.”
“Good one, Midori.” Courtney raised her latte in a toast.
I stared at my frappuccino, not daring to look at Lisette, who said nothing.
“I was kidding, Emma.”
“You never could take a joke, Emma. The girl literally has no sense of humor.”
I wanted to protest. I could take a joke, just not a joke about people’s families being gassed to death. Why did I even want to hang with people who thought that was funny? I said none of it, though. If I said something, I might start to cry, and then it would be worse. I sipped my frappuccino.
Midori turned to Lisette. “You should hang with us Saturday. We’re going to Adventura Mall.”
“Sure,” Lisette said. “Emma too? I mean, if you want to go, Emma.” Her earrings sparkled in the fluorescent light.
Midori frowned. “Um, I’d say yes, but my mom’s taking us, and her BMW only fits five.” She smiled at me that fake way girls do to show how much they enjoy destroying your soul. “Sorry, Em.”
Lisette said, “Oh, well, maybe we could go another time.”
“You can go,” I said. “I don’t care.”
“Of course not. We’re sisters.” She looked out the side of her eyes at Midori, and I could see it was a challenge. “Unless someone’s mom has a minivan, maybe?”
Midori glanced at Courtney.
Courtney said, “Um, doesn’t your mom have a big SUV, Emma?”
My mother did have a Suburban. She’d gotten it to drive around the loads of friends I didn’t have, but now, it mostly towed Dad’s boat. At this point, I didn’t really want to go to the mall with them. They obviously didn’t want me. But if I said no, I’d look like a brat.
“I guess,” I said, “if my dad isn’t using it for his boat.”
“I’ll tell him I want to go out Sunday,” Lisette said.
“Then it’s settled,” Courtney said.
Just then, I saw Kendra Hilferty walking outside. “Oh, look, it’s Kendra
,” I said, then regretted it.
Midori made a disgusted noise. “Oh, I hope she doesn’t come in here.”
“She’s a friend of yours?” Lisette said.
I shook my head. “Not really. She just sits next to me in language arts. And chorus.”
Courtney made a face. “Poor you. She’s weird.”
“And what’s with the outfits?” Midori pointed, obvious enough that Kendra could see. “Look what she’s wearing now. Halloween isn’t for two weeks, dear.”
“Weirdo,” Courtney agreed. “That hair!”
Suddenly Courtney’s latte dumped over. The weird thing was, it actually seemed to jump up, then down, without anyone touching it. “Oh!” She looked at me, but since I was nowhere near it, she turned to Tayloe. “Spaz.”
“I didn’t touch it.” But she went to get napkins.
I looked out the window. Kendra was gone.
When I got home, I went to tell Mother she was driving us to Adventura Saturday. I expected her to swallow her tongue with joy. Instead, she said, “You’re going with Courtney?”
“I guess she really likes Lisette.”
“I suppose that’s to be expected, with all those expensive clothes your father bought her.”
“I have expensive clothes,” I pointed out. “They don’t seem to help.”
“You have greater depth, Emma. Not everyone can appreciate quality. Sometimes intelligence is off-putting.”
It was close to a compliment. But then she added, “And, of course, Lisette takes care of her hair and skin.”
I was sorry I’d brought it up. “Lisette’s nice,” I said.
“I’m sure she is. She’s happy, getting everything she wants.”
This didn’t seem totally fair, considering Lisette’s mother had just died. Still, I decided to drop it. I knew I’d never change her mind. “I have homework.”
“If you want, I could get you one of those Brazilian keratin treatments,” she said.
“Yeah, Mom, that’s exactly what I want.” I left the room.
I didn’t remember to check my jewelry box for the earrings until just before dinner. Of course they were there. I put them on, planning on showing Daddy the coincidence that we both had them. But when Lisette came to dinner, she wasn’t wearing them anymore.
After dinner, Monday through Thursday, Dad and I had a tradition. No matter how much homework I had, we always stopped to watch Jeopardy at seven-thirty. But when I went to sit down that night, Lisette was on one side of Daddy, the end table on the other.
“Oh.” I stopped.
“Plenty of room for everyone.” Daddy pointed at the loveseat. At least I was pretty sure I’d be smarter at the game than Lisette. I usually knew answers even Daddy didn’t get. I sat up straight, ready to show off.
The first question was about birds. “This is the largest living species of bird.”
Knew it.
“What is an ostrich?” Lisette shouted before I got the chance.
“This bird is the only one that can fly backwards.”
“Hummingbird!” Lisette screamed before I could. I resisted the urge to complain that she hadn’t phrased it as a question.
Lisette also knew the name for a group of ravens (a murder) and which bird turned its head upside down to eat (the flamingo). I was abnormally stupid about the other categories too. When they broke for commercials, I sat there, not having opened my mouth once. Daddy said, “You sure know a lot about birds.”
Lisette tilted her head to one side. “Oh, well, Mom was really into ornithology.”
“That’s right,” Daddy said, like he’d just remembered. “We used to go bird-watching when you were a baby.”
Lisette nodded. “I know. Mom used to take me to this place where they’d dress you up as a scarecrow, and the birds would land right on you.”
“You remember that?” Daddy said. In the background, there was this stupid car insurance commercial with an animated pig. Lisette stared at Daddy.
“Yeah,” she said. “Did you go there?”
“I was the one who took you there first. You were so little. It was right before…” He stopped. “Those were good times.”
“Oh my God.” Lisette shook her head like she was trying to conjure up the memory. “I can’t believe you were there. I really remember you now. I can see you. You had on a blue polo, and it had a bird on it too. Right? Did you have a shirt like that?”
I knew he did. It was his college shirt. I wondered if he’d been wearing it in one of the photos with his face cut out. The TV had switched to a commercial about a bear using toilet paper.
“The University of Kansas jayhawk,” Dad said. “How’d you remember that?”
“I didn’t know I did. I thought I’d forgotten everything.”
“Oh, look,” I said. “It’s starting again.”
Mercifully, they stopped talking about their wonderful past together. On TV, Alex asked the next question, the thousand-dollar question in the bird category.
“This bird destroys eggs in other nests and replaces them with her own.”
“What is the cuckoo?” Lisette and Daddy both said at the same moment.
“You know, I have a lot of homework,” I said, and excused myself. Neither of them protested, even though I always watched Jeopardy with Daddy, no matter what. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t like what I was feeling either. I knew I shouldn’t feel competitive with Lisette. It sounded petty, like something Mother would do, and Lisette had been so nice. Yet, I kept thinking that Mother was right. Lisette was my father’s real daughter, and I wasn’t. What if he loved her better, and I lost the one person who’d liked me just as I was?
7
All that week, I walked to school with Lisette, ate lunch with Lisette, walked home with Lisette. Being Lisette’s sister was like being in a spotlight, the center of attention. That was something I’d never wanted, but now that I was there, I found out something about spotlights. They’re really warm. For the last two years, I’d been telling myself I was a loner, happy to hang out at the library with the March girls or Harry and Hermione as friends. I’d lied to myself. With Lisette, I was suddenly part of the real world. Like, one day at lunch, the school turned on the Electric Slide over the P.A. system, and everyone got up and danced around. Normally, I’d have buried my nose in the latest dystopian novel and reflected upon the evil of all human beings, everywhere. But that day, I’d forgotten to bring a book to school at all (First. Time. Ever.).
When everyone started dancing, Lisette tugged on my arm. “Come on!”
I tried to wave her off. “I can’t dance.”
“It’s the Electric Slide. Little kids do it. It’s so lame it’s cool.”
“Really, I can’t. Little kids ridicule me when I dance.”
Courtney and Midori were tugging Lisette’s arms, and I figured she’d go then. Instead, she said, “You know, Emma, sometimes you need to get out from under yourself.”
With that, she grabbed my arm and whisked me into the sliding, writhing, boogie-woogie-ing mob of teendom, then kept holding my hand, whispering the steps in my ear.
Finally, it all clicked into place, and I had it. Me!
That’s when Lisette moved away, and I found myself dancing beside a boy. And not just any boy—Warner Glassman!
I moved left, with everyone else.
Warner moved right and crashed into me.
“I’m sorry!” I said.
“My glasses! I lost my glasses!”
Just as he said it, I felt my foot come down on something.
Oh, no!
I was on the floor, surrounded by sliding legs, trying not to get stepped on. Warner was with me. I reached, groped for the glasses, praying I hadn’t shattered them. I handed them to him.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
He took them and pushed them onto his nose, which was long, longer than it should be, but still cute.
“They’re fine.” He looked at me through them. “I can’t
believe I tried dancing again. I’m such a geek. I attempted to learn for my bar mitzvah last year, and I couldn’t.”
I shrugged. “You know, I couldn’t either, but a friend of mine said, ‘Sometimes, you need to get out from under yourself.’” I reached for his hand, like Lisette had with mine. “Let me help you.”
Then we were dancing along with the others, and Warner was actually following me.
Too soon, the music ended, and it was time to go to class. I figured that was the end of that, but as he turned away, he said, “Hey, I’m Warner, by the way.”
“Emma.”
“Nice dancing with you, Emma.” A long pause. “Uh … maybe…”
“Maybe?”
He looked down. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
I walked to class, Lisette teasing me about having a boyfriend. For the first time, it seemed sort of possible.
Every day that week, Lisette and I sat in my room and did homework. I read through her essays and short stories, correcting her spelling and grammar. She said she’d help me with math sometimes, but so far, she hadn’t. Thursday night, Dad looked in on us. “It’s been so quiet in here, I thought something was wrong. It’s so nice, you girls getting along.”
“Of course we get along,” Lisette said. “We’re sisters. I was just helping Emma with her math.”
She hadn’t been, but I let it slide.
“I’m having so much trouble learning the music in here,” Lisette said the next day after chorus.
“You know, I have it on my iPod. Maybe you could listen to it.”
“Really? That would be so cool. You’re so sweet.”
“Of course you can borrow it.” You just couldn’t not be nice to Lisette.
That afternoon, Thursday, I had to study for a German test, so Lisette and I didn’t do homework together. But when I finished, I went to my nightstand drawer to get her my iPod. It wasn’t there.
I went down to her room. She was sitting on the bed, texting.
“Hey, you didn’t take my iPod to listen to that song, did you?”
Lisette adjusted her position on the pillows. “Of course not.”
“I just, you know, couldn’t find it.” Now I felt like I needed to explain that I wasn’t accusing her of stealing or anything. I just wanted to let her know why I didn’t have the iPod, even though I promised it to her. That was all. “So I thought maybe, since I said you could borrow it, you might just have taken it. I mean, gotten it.”
