For Real

by Alison Cherry

  We’re already halfway across the lawn when Miranda whips around. “I am done talking to you, Samir, about this and everything else. I hope you and your friend have a super-awesome, happy little life together!” She lets go of me and takes off down the block, and I jog to catch up.

  Samir stays where he is, his arms crossed over his bare chest. “You’re gonna regret this, you know,” he calls after Miranda. “Wait till you’re stuck in some sad corporate cubicle, looking at pictures of me walking the red carpet with a supermodel on each arm. You’re gonna think, ‘That could have been me, if I’d just gotten over myself before it was too late.’ ”

  Miranda doesn’t respond, but by the time we reach the car, tears are streaming down her face. When I put my hand tentatively on her back, it only makes her cry harder. I want to say something comforting, but I’m at a total loss—nobody has ever soothed me after a breakup, since I’ve never had anyone to break up with. What finally comes out of my mouth is an extremely unhelpful “What the hell?”

  “I know,” she sobs. “I went upstairs to find him, and he was in bed with … with that stupid bitch, Janine … and I can’t … and he didn’t even …” Now she’s crying too hard to speak in coherent sentences. When I glance back toward the house, Samir’s still on the porch, leaning jauntily against the doorjamb and watching us.

  Come on, Claire, I tell myself sternly. Your sister’s falling to pieces right in front of you. You have to do something. “We need to get you out of here,” I say.

  “I don’t think I can drive.” My sister swipes furiously at her eyes, obviously enraged to be showing any weakness. Her mascara smears across her cheeks like zombie makeup.

  “I’ll drive. Where are your keys?”

  Miranda hesitates, like she’s not sure I should be driving her beloved car. But her desire to leave wins out, and she hands over the keys. I unlock the door, and she slumps in the passenger seat like a marionette with cut strings.

  I’m not certain which way to go, but I head in the general direction of the hotel where my parents and I are staying. After a few minutes of riding in silence, Miranda takes a deep, shaky breath. “I almost moved in with him,” she says quietly. “I really thought I was going to end up with him. How could I have been that stupid? You saw right through him, and you only met him for, like, six seconds.”

  I feel awful for her, but I can’t help being slightly pleased that she’s given me credit for being right—that isn’t exactly a frequent occurrence. “You weren’t stupid,” I say. “You loved him. There’s no way you could have known that he’d, um, do that.”

  “The worst part is that I’m pretty sure he’s done this before, to other girls, but I thought—I mean, he told me that he—I don’t know, I just thought I was different or something.” She swallows hard, and two more tears trail down her cheeks. “God, he sucks so much.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mira,” I say. “I wish there were something I could do.” She sniffles in reply.

  When we stop at the next light, my sister seems to become aware of our surroundings for the first time. “Where are you taking me?” she asks.

  “I was heading back to the hotel. Is that okay? There’s an extra bed in my room … maybe we could get some ice cream and watch a terrible movie or something? It might help take your mind off things.”

  She gives me a weak smile. “Thanks, Clairie, but I’m just going to go home.”

  “Do you want me to stay with you in your apartment tonight? Maybe you shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  “No, I mean home home. Back to Braeburn.”

  “You want to drive to the Catskills now? It’s eleven-thirty.”

  “So?”

  “What about all your stuff?”

  “It’s packed. I can load up the car and be on the road in an hour. There’s no traffic, so I should make it home by four.” Miranda sits up a little straighter, and before I know it, she has total control of the situation again. “I’ll drop you at the hotel on the way, okay? Can you tell Mom and Dad what happened?”

  I wish she’d give me a chance to take care of her a little; Miranda’s so self-sufficient that I never get a chance to do anything for her. But I guess she doesn’t really need me now, either. “Do you want company?” I ask in a last-ditch effort to be helpful. “I could come with you.”

  I’m sure she’s going to tell me no, but instead she says, “Really?”

  “Sure. I can help you load the car, too.”

  “That would be great, Clairie. Thanks. I assumed you wouldn’t want to. I know you like to stick to the plan.”

  “I don’t care about the plan,” I say. “I want to help. I’m totally here for you.”

  “Thanks. Turn right at the light, okay?”

  It isn’t exactly the evening I imagined, but in a terrible, warped way, it’s actually better. I obviously wish Miranda’s whole life hadn’t crumbled, but part of me is glad I don’t have to share her with a hundred other people tonight. Instead, I get hours of one-on-one time to bond with her, plus whatever time she spends in Braeburn making new plans for the future. My sister wants me with her as she starts to heal, and the image of me hiding out on the back steps with my phone won’t be the one that lingers in her mind until the next time we’re together.

  I have another chance to prove myself, and it starts right now.

  * * *

  I call my dad as soon as we’re on the road and tell him Miranda and I are headed back to Braeburn. He’s disappointed that we’ll have to cancel our family brunch at the Mangy Moose in the morning, but I explain what happened at the party, giving as few embarrassing details as possible. He asks to speak with Miranda, but I can see she’s not in the mood, so I tell him she’s driving and promise to text him when we get home.

  Unfortunately, Miranda doesn’t seem to be in the mood to talk to me, either. She’s in her own world, and as we get farther away from Middlebury, I watch her withdraw into herself more and more. Within twenty minutes, I’m bored out of my mind and wondering why I’m even here. I try to turn on the radio, but my sister switches it off immediately. “I don’t want to form associations,” she says. “I’m going to hate whatever songs I hear right now for the rest of my life. That asshole doesn’t get to ruin any music for me.” For a second I consider pulling out my phone and watching the rest of MacGyver Survivor, but Miranda would probably toss me out on the side of the road if I did that. So I settle for texting my best friend, Natalie, to tell her I’m on my way home, then silently watch the road signs tick off endless identical miles of highway.

  But after an hour, my desire to reach out to my sister becomes unbearable, and I can’t stay quiet any longer. In one of my less eloquent moments, I blurt out, “I don’t want to, like, force you or anything. But do you want to talk about it? ’Cause I can listen. I mean, if you want.”

  Miranda heaves a soul-deep sigh. “There’s nothing to talk about. He lied to me, he cheated on me, all my plans are ruined, and my life sucks. End of story.” Her voice is totally flat, and it scares me. My sister has always had a certain wild spark to her, and I can’t find even the slightest trace of it now.

  “You could go to Brooklyn without him,” I say.

  “I don’t have anywhere to live. Samir and I were going to stay at his uncle’s while he was in India for the year. He said he’d let us live there rent-free in exchange for dog-sitting. I’m still waiting to hear back about a bunch of publishing internships and stuff, and I can’t pay rent until I have a job.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know about the internships or the dog-sitting, and it makes me wonder how many other things Miranda hasn’t told me. “Maybe Mom and Dad could help you out at the beginning? You could find a roommate on Craigslist or something, right? I could help you look. I could help you look for apartments, too, if you want. And you could always get a job as a barista at—”

  Miranda squeezes the bridge of her nose, like this conversation is giving her a headache. “Can we not talk about this?” she says.
“I know you’re trying to help, but I can’t even think about it right now.”

  “Sure. Sorry. I was— Sorry.” I scramble for something else to say, something that will prove to Miranda that being with me is preferable to being alone right now. Finally, out of desperation, I say, “Want to play the Limerick Game?”

  I have no idea where that came from. We haven’t played the Limerick Game in years. But when we were younger, we used to play it all the time to entertain ourselves on long car trips. One of us would name a person, and the other would have one minute to come up with a limerick about that person. But as I’m cursing my stupidity—of course my distraught sister doesn’t want to play the Limerick Game—I’m surprised to see the corner of Miranda’s mouth hitch into a semi-smile.

  “Wow. I haven’t thought about that in forever.” She shrugs. “All right. It’s better than thinking about my stupid life. You want to go first?”

  I smile, thrilled this is working. “Sure.”

  “Okay. Do Mr. Trevor. Your sixty seconds start … now.”

  Mr. Trevor is the ancient PE teacher at our high school. I suffered through his class sophomore year, and Miranda had him twice. He wears fluorescent tracksuits and is always blowing this horrible, shrieky whistle—he no longer has the lung capacity to yell all day, since he’s spent forty years chain-smoking behind the gym.

  “And … go!” Miranda commands one minute later. I dramatically clear my throat.

  “There once was a man named Ron Trevor,

  Who swore he’d teach high school forever.

  You’d think he’d aspire

  To someday retire,

  But if you asked when, he’d say, ‘Never!’ ”

  Miranda laughs. “Well done. Give me one.”

  “Okay, do Joss Whedon.”

  My sister’s eyebrows furrow. “Who?”

  “Really? You don’t know who that is?”

  She shrugs. “An actor?”

  “Buffy? Firefly? Angel? The Avengers?”

  “What, he was in those?”

  I have to forcibly restrain myself from smacking my forehead. “No, Mira, he wrote them. He’s really, really famous.”

  “God, sorry! Not everyone has watched every episode of every TV show ever. Just give me someone else, okay? Someone real?”

  “Screenwriters are real!”

  “Someone we know, Claire!”

  Considering how popular Miranda has always been, you’d think she’d care at least a little bit about pop culture. I’m about to make a comment to that effect, but I remind myself that my sister deserves to be let off the hook tonight. “Fine. Do Barack Obama. You know who that is, right?”

  She rolls her eyes. After I time out a minute, she recites:

  “There once was a guy named Obama,

  Who met the esteemed Dalai Lama.

  They talked about Zen

  And the purpose of men,

  Then traded bad jokes ’bout yo mama.”

  We fly through the dark, tossing limericks back and forth for nearly an hour, and I watch my sister’s tight shoulders start to relax. The rhymes become increasingly ridiculous as we get tired, and every time Miranda laughs, I feel a warm glow of satisfaction deep in the center of my chest. Finally, around two in the morning, she announces, “I want to do one for Samir.”

  “All right,” I say. Maybe she’ll open up and talk to me about the breakup if I don’t make a big deal out of this. “Your sixty seconds start … now.”

  When her time is up, Miranda recites in a steady voice:

  “There once was a jerk named Samir.

  If he drowned in the ocean, I’d cheer.

  He hopped in the sack

  With that ho Janine Black,

  And I hope someone poisons his beer.”

  I smile. “Nice. Excellent poetic use of ‘ho.’ ”

  Miranda’s quiet for a minute, and then she says, “Hey, thanks for coming with me tonight.”

  “Of course,” I say. “I’m always here if you need me. But I know you’re going to be fine. You’re so strong, you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she says.

  “I am. Trust me. You always bounce back so fast. Plus, the worst part’s over. Things are going to start getting better now. All we need is the right revenge.”

  I mean it as a jokey, offhand comment; I’m just trying to get Miranda to smile again. But as the oncoming headlights sweep over my sister’s face, I see the spark in her eyes reignite.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” she asks.

  We brainstorm revenge ideas the rest of the way home. Should we put raw seafood under the hood of Samir’s car? Photoshop pictures of him in women’s underwear and send them to all the major casting agencies? Hire someone with an STD to seduce him? But none of those ideas seems quite right, and we still haven’t come up with a winning plan by the time we pull into our driveway at four o’clock.

  I get into bed with complicated, heist-style scenarios swirling through my head, and I vow to stay awake until I come up with a dazzling plan to surprise Miranda with in the morning. But tonight has worn me out, and against my will, I fall asleep almost immediately.

  The chime of a new text wakes me from a dream about rappelling through the skylight of the Louvre and stealing an Impressionist painting of Samir’s face. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly be morning already, but sunlight is streaming through my curtains. I grope around for my glasses so I can read the message.

  NATALIE: Everything ok? Why are you back early?

  ME: Long story. Miranda’s here too.

  NATALIE: ?!?!? Must hear everything! Coming over.

  ME: If you expect coherent sentences, bring coffee and muffins.

  All my other friends have already left town for their jobs at camps and theater festivals—our town’s so tiny that there’s nothing to do here over the summer. It’s going to be deadly boring next week when Natalie starts her internship at Paparazzi Press, a small publishing house in New York City. She and I had originally planned to spend the summer in the city together, and I’d applied for production assistant positions at pretty much every major TV network. But it turned out that even the fetch-and-carry jobs were supercompetitive, and everyone turned me down. So instead of delivering coffee to famous directors and producers, I’ll be spending the summer behind the counter at Jojo’s Joe, serving the extremely nonfamous population of Braeburn.

  Natalie arrives fifteen minutes later with three takeout cups and a paper bag full of muffins. This morning she has on shiny, bubble-gum-pink combat boots, tights printed with skulls, and a black tulle skirt that was probably born to be a petticoat. Her glossy black hair is up in a ponytail, revealing long earrings made of pink feathers. Nat has lived in Braeburn all her life, but her fashion sense belongs to a much larger city. Her parents, who both grew up in conservative Vietnamese families, are completely mystified by the way she dresses.

  “Double cappuccino, banana nut,” she says by way of a greeting, shoving a cup and the bag into my hands. “I got cranberry pecan for Miranda.”

  “Perfect, thanks. That’s her favorite.”

  Natalie flops down on the green leather couch in my living room, and a small cloud of cat hair poofs up from the cushions and settles back down on her tights. She grabs the remote and deftly flips through channels as only an expert television watcher can until she finds a marathon of Speed Breed. Like me, she thinks better with some ambient noise.

  “Ooh, is this the episode where Amber seduces the tattooed plumber?” I ask.

  Natalie considers the TV carefully. “It could be the one where Jakarta does twelve pregnancy tests in a row—”

  “—and then smashes the mirror on the medicine cabinet when they all come back negative!”

  “Yesss! I love this one.” She takes a long sip of her coffee, then grabs the soft yellow pillow my grandma crocheted and nestles into it. Since Nat and I met three years ago, she’s spent so many hours snugg
ling with that pillow that I think of it as hers. When she’s settled, she says, “So what happened? Tell me everything.”

  I repeat the story of Samir, and Natalie reacts with appropriate gasps and exclamations. “What a douche,” she says when I’m finished. “But I guess it’s good she found out before they were living together, right? Is she moving home?”

  “For a little while, I guess, until she figures things out. She didn’t want to talk about it last night.”

  “God. What are we going to do about Samir?”

  This is one of my favorite things about Natalie. It’s never “What are you going to do about your problem?” It’s “What are we going to do?” “We came up with some revenge ideas last night,” I say. “But it was really late, and I think they were pretty stupid. Just pranks, mostly.”

  “No, it can’t be a prank. Miranda lost someone she loved, so we have to find something Samir loves and take it away. What does he care about?”

  “Besides himself? I have no idea. I met the guy for three seconds, and that was three seconds too long. You should have seen him gazing at his own reflection in the window. It was nauseating. And I literally saw him sign a cocktail napkin, tuck it in some girl’s bra, and tell her it would be worth a ton someday.”

  “Okay, so he’s an egotistical fame whore. We can work with that.” Natalie chews meditatively on her coffee stirrer. “Miranda has a finished novel, right? Would it piss him off if she got published before he accomplished anything big? If she got famous first?”

  “Yeah, absolutely. But she’s been trying to sell that book for a year already. She’s gotten enough rejections to decoupage her entire kitchen table.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  I stuff some muffin into my mouth as I try to remember exactly how I’ve heard Miranda describe it. “It’s a ‘lyrical exploration of love, loss, and coming of age in a 1930s West Virginia coal-mining town.’ ”

  Natalie bursts out laughing. “Ooh, nice one. That’s funny. But seriously, what’s it about?” Then she sees the expression on my face, and her smile collapses. “Oh. You’re not— Oh.”