by Joy Preble
DEDICATION
This one is for Jennifer Rofé, who always knows what
I should be writing even before I know it myself.
CONTENTS
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
MY SISTER LEANS OVER ME AS I AM TRYING TO SLEEP.
“Tobias and I broke up,” Paris says. “I need pie.”
“Go away,” I mumble, face half jammed against my pillow. I squint at her in the darkness. “It’s late.”
“Leo.” She lingers on the o like an echo. Clicks on my lamp. I turn my head. A sputter of light blinds my left eye. I blink.
Something stabs my hip as I sit up. SAT prep book. Retakes in two weeks. Paris graduated from Las Vegas High a few weeks ago. She does not care about SAT prep.
“I’m studying.” I gesture vaguely to the book.
“No you’re not. Let’s go.” She tugs my arm.
“I have work tomorrow.” I rub my nose with the back of my hand. I smell like raspberry frozen yogurt from tonight’s Yogiberry shift.
“Leo. We broke up.” My sister lifts her arms with the last word, like one of those preachers on TV. She leaves them raised, fluttering her fingers.
Last year when she broke up with Gunner Skillings—who was nice enough when he wasn’t drinking, which wasn’t that often—she moped around three days straight, eating dry Puffins and listening to an endless loop of Pearl Jam and R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails, because who wouldn’t be cheered up by that?
Eventually, I made her eat some protein and do her homework and basically get on with things.
“He’s a loser,” I told her. “You know that.”
Now I sit on the edge of my bed and ask, “Which one is Tobias?”
My sister is private about boys until she’s sure things will last—which they rarely do. Tobias is supposedly six foot five and works as a trainer at the 24 Hour Fitness in Silverado Ranch. Which is weird because Paris dates boys like Gunner or Cooper Daniels, who has ink under his nails from drawing, chain-smokes Kents, and plays guitar badly and off-key with a garage band that covers the Cure.
Paris grins but says only, “Pretty, right?” thrusting a hair clip at me: tiny flower petals fixed on the flat surface, glossed to a smooth sheen. A dried glop of translucent glue sits at the tip of her index finger.
My sister’s an artist. Not like Cooper Daniels and his amateur comic books that will never go anywhere. She sells her stuff at gift shops—clips and necklaces and rings and pins and slicked-up collages of words and fabric and metal. She doesn’t make much yet, but she could. Her room is filled with odds and ends that she turns into something.
I make a noncommittal noise, and she fastens the flower to her long auburn hair. In the shadowy amber light, she looks thin and hollow eyed, like she might blow away with the slightest of winds.
“I need pie,” she repeats, foot tapping the carpet. “Breakup pie. Adventure pie.”
Her face shifts. She presses a hand to her concave belly. “It’s true,” she says. “I’m sad, Leo.”
I let her haul me from bed.
“I need to sleep,” I say, but I’m slipping my feet into flip-flops and combing my fingers through my hair, which used to be shoulder length until last month when I chopped most of it off in this short, angled cut, one part sloping almost over my eye. I streaked that piece purple.
My sister—all smooth perfect skin and cotton sundress and dark-green eyes with golden flecks—looks at me sharply, brows drawing together. Her lips part, like she’s going to say something. Then she presses them shut and taps a finger to the oblong metal charm hanging from a knotted black cord at her clavicle. It says Dream. She repurposed the metal pull thingie from some old piece-of-crap purse she found at a thrift shop and etched letters into it.
Her gaze scans my shorts and a ninjas vs. zombies T-shirt. Paris is not a fan of my fashion sense.
She nudges with her shoulder. “Pie. Now. Hurry.”
I need to sleep. I need to study.
I need a lot of things, actually: a fun summer (slim chance). An über high SAT score so I can get into Stanford next year (decent chance). The money to pay for it if I do. A life anywhere but here.
But we are sisters. I watch out for her. That’s the way it is with us.
We tiptoe through the dark house on the balls of our feet, not even whispering, headed for the back door. Past the bathroom. Down the hall. Through the family room, skirting around the brown recliner and the big leather sofa, into the kitchen. Stupid cat clock ticking loudly over the stove. It meows every half hour, tail swishing. Who invents things like that?
“Where you two going?”
I jump. Tommy Davis. The fresh-start stepfather who moved us to Vegas from LA three years ago. He won the cat clock as a consolation prize at some small-stakes poker tourney off the Strip. Sitting at the kitchen table sipping what smells like bourbon, feet propped on a chair, biker boots still on. Not that he’s a biker, but it’s not like they check your authenticity before they sell you the boots.
Paris breezes by him. “You know you’re sitting in the dark, right?” she says, also breezily. Tommy mopes when he’s on a losing streak. Sits in the dark, elbows on the table, holding his head like it might tumble off.
Lately there’s a lot of that.
“Wait,” he says, voice raspy.
“What?” I say, still moving, then not.
Tommy huffs a breath. Shifts, bringing feet to floor, one heavy boot clomp at a time. He digs in the back pocket of his jeans—cowboy tight even though he’s over forty and has the receding hairline to prove it. His bicep flexes under the short sleeve of his T-shirt. He’s caught us leaving other times. As far as I know, he hasn’t told Mom. What we do while Callie Hollings deals blackjack on the night shift at Vegas Mike’s off the Strip is our business.
“Here,” he says, pushing a fifty-dollar bill at Paris. “You girls be careful out there. Buncha crazies, you know.” Tommy’s big on cash—always has a money clip full even when he’s mostly broke.
“Thanks,” Paris says, not looking at him. But she doesn’t take it.
“Mad money,” Tommy says. “Just in case.” His gaze slides to me and he eases the bill into my hand.
Paris swings the door open, desert heat hitting like a wall.
“Bye now,” she says, reaching for my free hand and lacing her fingers through mine.
But Tommy says, “You could hang out here, too. Order pizza or something.” He massages the back of his neck with two fingers. “I’m in the mood for a movie.”
Tommy likes those old black-and-white movies. The ones where detectives talk in witty banter and wear fedoras and a femme fatale with red lipstick pumps people full of lead from the tiny handgun hidden in her purse.
I almost stop, but Paris says, “Let’s go,” and we keep on walking.
Someday I will be gone from this house and I’ll be at Stanford—my first choice. My only choice—and eventually I will be something, a doctor, or maybe even a surgeon. Surgeons don’t hesitate once they’ve decided what they need to do. You can’t st
and in front of an anesthetized patient too scared to cut.
“Pie,” says Paris, just to me.
“Pie,” I tell her, the door slamming behind us.
TWO
EAST OF THE STRIP, A GROUP OF GIRLS IN SHORT, BRIGHTLY COLORED dresses wrapping their skinny bodies like bandages pose in front of the Hard Rock Hotel as we cross Paradise, a naked blow-up man doll hoisted over their heads. Our ancient Mazda chugs noisily behind a stream of yellow taxis and limos and regular cars, too.
“Look,” Paris says, pointing, her face half lit by the orangey glow from the dash. The blow-up doll is crowd-surfing—unshapely plastic torso grazing the girls’ heads. Something inside me tightens: at the icky peachy-pink of the fake man, at the tightness of the dresses—each girl’s long tan legs scissoring from underneath tiny swaths of jewel tones like pairs of spider limbs.
My back is sweating against the Mazda’s cheap vinyl seats. It is one thirty in the morning. Prime time. Normally, we would be singing with the radio, but last week it decided it would only play this one country station. Not even AM, which at least we could listen to and mock the crazies on the call-in shows.
Paris slows to watch the blow-up doll’s progression, fingers drumming against the steering wheel. Tonight her nails are different colors: thumb and index bloodred, middle finger navy, ring and pinkie a greenish khaki. A thin braid of leather she’s studded with tiny sparkling gems snakes up her arm like a vine.
“He needs a hat,” she pronounces, meaning the blow-up doll. I don’t grace this with a response.
On the sidewalk, a tall guy strides hunched over, wearing a gas mask. We’re headed up Harmon. Unless Paris changes her mind, we’ll hook a right near the Cosmopolitan. But directions are fluid in Las Vegas. Tomorrow they might blow up the hotel to build a new one.
I’m still holding Tommy’s fifty, balled up in my fist. The edges scrape the inside of my palm like a callus. The AC is on full blast, but we’ve opened the windows so the heat rushes in, too. It’s a powerful sensation—my legs goose bumpy with cold air leaking from the vents, my face warm. I reach my arm out, desert wind racing hot over my skin.
“I could make little ones,” Paris says. “Necklaces shaped like blow-up dolls,” she clarifies, casting a brief look in my direction. “You could pop them with a pin if you got tired of them. Or if they looked like someone you hate.”
“Huh,” I say. We hit a pothole and the Mazda rears up, bouncing down hard. My arm slams against the not-quite-fully-open window. Tommy’s money flies into the night.
“Shit! Stop.” I stick my head out, craning around. The raggedy bill lifts in the air, riding the breeze back toward Paradise.
Paris stomps on the gas and we jerk forward, almost rear-ending a Lexus sedan.
“Fuck,” I say. “Whatever.”
“Mad money,” Paris says, maybe trying to sound like Tommy. She does not turn the car around, and I don’t ask again.
And then we’re laughing and turning onto the Strip, inching down Las Vegas Boulevard, the Paris Hotel to our right, Bellagio across the street, fountains swaying to classical music blasting loud.
“Tobias first asked me out right there,” Paris says, flapping her arm across me toward the Flamingo, all purple and orange and neon glitz.
“Seriously?” I ask, but her eyes are on the road so it’s impossible to tell. “How do I not know this? You tell me everything.”
I bat her hand away and she puts it back on the steering wheel. Paris likes to drive in the classic 10 and 2 position, sitting up straight like an old lady.
“I was with Margo,” she goes on. Margo is her friend from school. “Tobias was talking to the valet and drinking an Arnold Palmer. You know how I love Arnold Palmers.”
Actually she does—heavy on the lemonade, lighter on the iced tea. The rest is possibly bullshit. Or possibly true. She supposedly went out with Cooper Daniels because he said he liked the tiny rose tattoo on her shoulder.
“Margo knew him from work. When she used to hostess at that IHOP, remember? He was a line cook,” Paris says. “For like a few weeks until he got tired of it. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I echo.
“I mean it, Leo. I thought he was cute.”
“I thought he was a trainer at 24 Hour Fitness.”
She glances at me now, sticking out her pointy tongue. “He was, after that.”
We inch another few feet, stuck behind a Hummer limo. Someone waves a hand from the moonroof on top.
“Guess where we broke up,” she asks cheerfully. “I’ll give you three chances.”
The Hummer lumbers forward. So do we.
“On the phone?”
Paris makes a raspberry sound. “You’re not trying, Leonora. You guess. And then we’ll get pie. Or fried Twinkies, maybe. That place downtown on Fremont. You know.”
“We could go home,” I say.
“Pssh.” Paris toots the horn. Beep. Beep.
I think about the fifty-dollar bill—briefly. I think longer about my savings—stuffed in an ancient pencil bag at the top of my closet where I stash all my old school stuff: perfect math tests and not-so-perfect paintings and my old report cards like the one from second grade where the teacher had written, Leonora gets flustered if she doesn’t achieve perfection. As if that was a bad thing.
I have $5,780, bills neatly stacked and rubber-banded. Job money and birthday money and the money Grammy Marie sent me when her sister in Tacoma died—Great-aunt Agnes who I never met but who put me and Paris in her will anyway. Too much to keep at home, but I don’t have a bank account anymore. Why? Because my mother was raiding it every time she got low on cash. Which she never did until Tommy. “I’m feeling flush with cash,” he likes to say. Flush it down the toilet is more likely.
“Guess again,” says Paris, even though I haven’t answered. “Where did Tobias and I break up?”
Something about the way she sounds, her voice thick, makes me lift my gaze from the street. In the wash of neon flooding the windows, her cheekbones look sharper, her face more angular.
“What?” I say.
She sighs and we lurch forward another car length. The Hummer is rocking now. A guy, shirtless but wearing a cowboy hat, rises through the moonroof and waves at us, his skin pale under the neon haze. He stares up and over at the giant new Ferris wheel someone’s built in the middle of the Strip, bigger even than that one in London. Idiot.
Paris honks the Mazda’s tinny horn again. The heat is pressing in on us, and my face feels sweaty.
Shirtless guy is throwing kisses.
“Toby kept pushing me,” Paris says. “You know.”
My pulse flickers. I guess she means sex. I don’t know why she won’t say it out loud. My sister is no puritan about these things.
“So did you?” I look out the window again. Shirtless guy lifts his arms like he’s riding a roller coaster.
“Told him to go to hell,” she says. “Bye, bye, Toby. That’s what you need to do, Leo. That’s what you would do, right?”
She says this like I’m the one who was going out with Tobias the jerk.
“Maybe.” Or maybe this whole conversation is really about something else.
“Oh screw it,” Paris says, loud enough that I jump. “I need pie.” She careens the corner at Sands sharp enough to make the tires squeal and heads us back east. “Heartbreak.”
Heartbreak is the Heartbreak Hotel Diner. Paris hostesses there two nights a week. Sometimes more. Sometimes she teases her hair like Priscilla Presley.
“We were there last week,” I say.
“Best pie,” Paris says. “Absolutely.”
“Pie House,” I say. “Chocolate cream.”
“Closes at midnight.”
“Gold Coin, then. Apple-berry.”
“Heartbreak,” she says, voice chirpy even though my sister is not the chirpy type. Her eyes stay trained on the road. She knows I’ll give in. That’s what I do.
I wait a few beats, just
for show.
“Heartbreak it is,” I say.
“We gotta stick together,” Paris says, speeding through a yellow light that turns red while we’re still in the middle of the intersection.
Only for some reason my stomach knots and I think that maybe she means the opposite. She’s signed up for art classes in the fall at CSN, right here in Vegas. Registered a few days before she walked across the stage, spiky purple platform sandals clomping the wooden floor as our mother clapped and cried and Tommy blew an air horn even though they weren’t allowed and I snapped pictures from too far away.
“Till you graduate,” Paris said a few weeks ago as she clicked the laptop keys, registering online. “One more year.” And then she lowered her voice, tightening her gaze on mine. “We could go back to LA now, Leo,” she said. “We really could.”
I felt something stir—warm and hopeful, like the sun.
Then reality hit: I had senior year left. My teachers knew me—at least as much as they needed to. Mr. Lippman in physics had already promised a stellar rec. After all, I’d aced that class. One more year of straight As and AP classes.
I wasn’t going anywhere but our too-small house that was supposed to be temporary. A rental until my mother and Tommy figured out where they wanted to buy.
Sometimes in bed at night, I pretend I can smell the Pacific, its salty scent riding the air currents from the coast.
“If you needed to go, I would take you,” Paris continued, looking at me intently. “We could totally do it.”
My sister has this grand sense of how the world works. Misguided, but grand.
Me? I am a math-and-science girl. Rules are everything in math and science. One of them is this: life is untidy and ugly. People mess up. Boys named Tobias break up with you because you won’t screw them. Or maybe you break up with them because you did. People hurt each other and make mistakes and shatter promises. Even people we love. Not to mention the ones we don’t.
Maybe Tobias really is the reason we’re driving around in the middle of the night. The reason why my sister’s eyes shine fierce and distracted.
It’s not like I have a vast resource of experience in these matters. It’s not like I can count Buddy Lathrop, who aced every test in our precalc class. We went out twice this year. Both times he ordered a Coke with no ice because “you get more Coke that way,” and his eyes, when we were talking, never left my boobs. When he called a third time, I told him I was busy.
