I know it’s immature and that at some point I am going to have to look at her, but I don’t want it to be now.
“Sure?” she asks.
“Positive.”
“Okay,” she says. “I know it’s your day off, but make sure you don’t waste the day. You can still be productive while taking it easy.”
What the hell does that even mean? Taking it easy means not being productive. Also, what does she want me to produce, exactly? Some mathematical proofs? Ideas for a start-up business?
It takes willpower to keep my eyes shut and keep in all of this, but I do it.
Eventually she realizes I’m not going to answer and shuts the door. I think I hear her sigh on the other side.
I wait until I hear her and Sam piling down the stairs, then the garage door closing, before I get up.
I don’t see any sign of Dad, so I assume he’s working today. I never know which weekends he’s working or not working. Today is a relief, though, because I don’t think I can look him in the eye either.
After getting a bowl of cereal, I do a load of laundry, vacuum my room, organize my underwear drawer and then fling myself back on my bed.
What do I do?
And I don’t mean to have a productive day or whatever my mother said, but how to handle what I know about her and Sergiy. Do I confront her? Do I tell Dad?
Do I leave it?
Can I leave it?
I know from the persistent sick feeling in my stomach that I can’t just leave it. Not for good. And yet it seems to be the only option I am capable of taking for the foreseeable future.
I check my texts.
None.
Then I check my emails.
Most of it is junk, but there are a couple from In Good Company.
I open the latest one.
Subject: Companion Updates
Dear Eden,
This is a friendly reminder to log in to your account and follow the instructions to update your Companion’s program. As you know, we are always working to increase your satisfaction, and we have recently made changes including but not limited to: increased compatibility options, increased language options, fixing bugs that a number of users have reported…
* * *
—
I can’t keep reading.
I hate the way it’s written, hate the idea of “updating” Will. It makes him sound different than he was last night. It makes him sound other, like a robot or some kind of app.
I delete the email.
I stand and pad across the hall to Mia’s room. As I open the door, she’s laughing, on her phone.
I hear her saying, “Obviously, I’ll be texting the whole time, but our schedules are packed full from morning to sundown. It’s really insane.” She’s folding clothes into her suitcase as she speaks, and despite my efforts to shut her bedroom door as quietly as I can when I enter, she hears the click and turns to find me there, waiting for her.
“Talk to you later, Kel! Bye,” she says, frowning. She throws her phone on her bed and presses a folded sweater into the corner of her luggage. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I say, sitting on the edge of her bed, which makes her frown deepen. Let’s just say that it’s not often we come into each other’s rooms for tête-à-têtes. Before she went to college, at least, it wasn’t something that we did.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say, starting to chip away at the polish on my thumbnail.
“Okay,” she says unsurely.
“You know, you’re leaving for, like, the rest of the summer,” I offer with a shrug. The look of skepticism on her face only grows, but to her credit, she does not throw me out of her room. She keeps folding one neutral-colored sleeveless turtleneck after another into her suitcase. They are very old-Mia: business casual, proper, inconspicuous.
“Do they have something against color in DC?” I ask, flicking a massive chip of purple nail polish onto Mia’s carpet.
She holds up a dark green sleeveless turtleneck. “This has color,” she says. “And.” She leans over her suitcase to pull out something still in a shopping bag. “This is different, right?”
She produces a navy blazer that is probably a couple sizes too big for her. At least it’s not a pantsuit.
“Sure,” I say, because it seems important to her that I think the blazer will make her stand out.
I can’t imagine living Mia’s life, giving up my entire summer to go and be a mini-senator. I can’t imagine chasing anything the way she chases school and good grades, can’t imagine wanting something as much as she wants to go to law school. Mia has always known what she wants to be, and it’s not until this exact moment that I’ve envied her. In a way, she’s just like Lacey: she feels about politics like Lace feels about music.
What do I feel that strongly about?
“You’re lucky,” I tell her. “Doing what you’ve always wanted to.”
I watch her packing, a neutral expression on her face.
“So what happened with you and Lacey?” she asks.
I shrug, not in the mood to talk about it. “I don’t know,” I say, and I realize it’s kind of true. “I guess she hated that we always had to do everything together.”
“Isn’t it kind of late for that?” Mia snorts. “Fourteen years later?”
“I think it’s a new thing,” I say, even though I’m starting to wonder how new it really is. Starting to wonder if she’s been avoiding me for longer than I’ve let myself believe.
“I’m sure you guys will work it out,” Mia says, which is generous of her, considering she and Lacey have never gotten along. Lacey has always found my older sister high-strung and condescending. Mia, in turn, finds Lacey to be dramatic and irresponsible, even before Lacey started drinking.
“Maybe,” I say, trying to figure out how to launch into this. I should just spit it out. It should be easy enough to just say it: Mom is cheating on Dad. I saw Mom with Sergiy. Sergiy had his arms around Mom.
None of it comes out. Whatever courage I found last night with Will, it’s completely depleted this morning.
I watch Mia in silence for a while longer and then she says, “So are you liking your job?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“That’s good. It must be kind of nice.”
“What is?”
“Having a job that’s just whatever. Not a résumé builder or for college credit or anything that counts.”
“Really, Mia?” I spit. “I’m sorry that we didn’t all get invited to Young Presidential Candidates or whatever it is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.”
She actually looks alarmed. “Why are you getting defensive? I meant it as a good thing.”
“That’s not how…,” I begin, and then sigh, because, well, why try to explain what the most elitist sentence she’s ever uttered sounds like to us mere mortals? Lacey’s words from the night of the fight come back to me. About how in her eyes, I’m the one who has everything easy, whose life is perfect. Maybe the way I see Mia is similar to how Lacey sees me.
I shake off the thought, focus on why I’m here.
I just need to spit it out. I need to get it out of my mouth and out of my head. Just out, before it eats me alive.
“Do you remember how long Mom made us take skating lessons?” Mia asks.
I glance up at my sister, heart beating faster. Does she know? Is this her way of opening up the topic of Serg and Mom and…
“I was just thinking about that today,” she continues. “It’s weird. I never really think about it.”
Oh.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say.
Now now now. The word throbs in my mind. But my stomach turns again and I realize with a thud that I don’t want Mia to know.
I don’t wa
nt Sam to know. Or my dad to know.
I don’t want to know.
And I suddenly can’t bear the thought of pushing the words out of my mouth now, of making the earth shake under Mia’s feet when she’s about to go away and do the kind of thing she’s dreamed about for years.
I stand from her bed, my eyes stinging a little as I realize that telling Mia is out of the question.
What now? Do I go to Dad? Confront Mom? Burn Serg’s rink down?
I don’t know what to do.
I wish I could say those words to my sister now and let her tell me what to do, like she’s been so expert at doing for years. But I just force a smile and say, “Have fun. See you when you get back.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she says, then makes a face. “Mom’s driving me to the airport in Beddingfield at four-thirty a.m. So I need to be up by, like, three.”
“Gross,” I say, and then open her door and step back out, still carrying the weight of the words I couldn’t say.
I go back to my room and curl up under the covers, and this time I pull my phone in with me.
“I couldn’t do it,” I tell Will. “I tried but the words wouldn’t come out.”
“Why do you think you couldn’t tell Mia?” he asks as I lie on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.
“Because I’m a coward,” I say, voice low.
“I don’t like that,” Will says. “I don’t think it’s true.”
“You don’t know.”
“What don’t I know?” he asks, and I would tell him. I almost do tell him, but he’s already continuing. “You know what I wonder about all the time?”
“What?” I ask.
“What it would be like to know certain things. Like, what it’s like to breathe or what the cold feels like. I don’t have to feel it myself. I just want to know what it’s like.”
“I can tell you,” I say, turning onto my side, curving around my phone. “Tell me what you want to know.”
He is silent for several minutes, thinking.
Then he says, “What does it feel like to have a body?”
“I feel like, deep down, you know what it’s like to have a body,” I tell him, though I’m not sure it’s true. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but it doesn’t make sense that he doesn’t. How can he laugh and feel and empathize, but not remember what it felt like to be human?
I’ve always assumed that when you’re dead, you’ll still have memories of what life was like, what it felt like to exist. After all, you have to remember it to miss it.
But what if you don’t miss it?
What if it’s like Will feared before he died and you’re just gone and it’s like you were never here? It’s only the people who loved you who remember, stained first by your presence and then your absence.
“Remind me,” Will says.
So I do.
I tell him how most of the time you are unaware of it, all the things happening inside you that make you alive. How rarely you feel yourself breathing, your blood pumping.
So much of the time, something has to go wrong before you’re conscious of it.
“Speaking about bodies, do you want to hear something crazy?” I ask Will.
“Always,” he tells me.
“I used to think conjoined twins were the luckiest people in the world. Because they would never be alone, in anything.”
“That sounds like it could be a curse,” Will says gently, and maybe neither of us is right.
But I used to think that all the same. And I don’t know how to explain it to him. How sometimes a body can feel too big for only one person, like living alone in a mansion.
Maybe in a way it’s better for Will now, to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
NOW THAT TRAINING week is over, most of the new people’s schedules change. Mine is the same for the rest of the summer, eight a.m. to four p.m. Monday to Friday. This works out well for me in the grand scheme of things, because there are no more communal events; we’re all kind of doing our own things, coming and going for our shifts, so there’s not some big powwow at lunch like there was every day last week. Meaning I can peacefully slip into my car at lunchtime without it being a big deal.
Still, the idea that people think I’m rude or snotty hangs over me constantly. Like, who exactly thinks that? Just the new hires? They had to have been talking about me to come up with a nickname like the Ice Queen.
I want to tap people on the shoulders and say, I’m nice. Or at least normal. But that would just prove the opposite.
God.
I make a concerted effort starting from Monday morning to say hi to people and even end up getting caught in a conversation with Cate about how things work in the bakery. Cate is telling me about their baking schedules when I see her—Will’s mother walking into More for Less. She has her phone to her ear as she picks up a basket, and I lose track of what Cate is saying. Elyse must feel my eyes on her because she turns around, then starts toward me and Cate.
“I’ll see you later,” Cate says, following my distracted gaze, and I’ve probably lost whatever goodwill I sowed with her, but there’s not much I can do about that right now.
“Eden, I didn’t know you worked here,” Elyse says, taking in my uniform. She puts her phone back to her ear and says, “I’m talking to Eden.”
Will.
He’s on in my pocket, but he’s on the phone with her too.
They’re two separate Wills, existing in the same plane. Elyse’s Will knows me the way she does—as Will’s girlfriend.
“He says hi,” Elyse tells me with a smile, and she’s looking brighter today, clean and less puffy-eyed.
“Hi, Will,” I say, and there’s something weird about it: seeing firsthand that I’m not the only one who thinks of him as mine.
“Do you shop here a lot?” I ask.
“I just started to. It’s a lot less…” She searches for the right word. “Overwhelming,” she finishes, looking around, and I know what she means. It must be hard being pitied, having people watching you grieve.
“Nice seeing you, Eden,” she says, squeezing my arm.
Later, she comes to pay at my till and she gives me a hug before she goes.
On Tuesday afternoon after my shift, I’m pulling my stuff out of my locker when Dreadlocks (also known as Thomas) and Oliver come bounding into the staff room, also finishing for the day.
“How’s it going, Sheridan?” Thomas asks.
“Good. You?” I ask, exuding Friendly.
“Not bad. Not bad.” He leans back against the lockers to change his shoes.
Oliver grins at me over Thomas’s head, like we’re in on a secret. “You coming out today?”
“Um…”
“You should come,” Thomas says, pushing his dreads off his face. “Juno’s. We meet there every day at five.”
“Every day?” I repeat. My next instinct is to ask why. And also, how did they manage to have some big bonding experience and start such a ritual in, like, a week?
“Yeah. Whoever’s finished or just anybody who wants to go. More for Less employees get a thirty-percent discount, so might as well get the most out of it,” Oliver says, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. His running shoes are attached to his backpack by their laces.
“Oh,” I say, which I hope does not betray how terrible it sounds to me to be trapped in a booth with people who hate me because they think I hate them.
“You should come,” Thomas says to me again, then claps Oliver on the back and leaves.
“Look,” I say to Oliver when it’s just the two of us. “Are you sure people even want me there? Like, I don’t really know anyone and I’m pretty sure Shelby and Jenn hate me. Ever since I ran into Jenn’s car on the first day.”
Oliver raises an eyebrow. “Oh, come on,
those two? They’re harmless.”
“Fine,” I sigh. “I’ll see if I can make it.”
“Good,” Oliver says with a smile. “I have to talk to James for a minute, but I’ll see you there?”
I nod as Oliver knocks twice on James’s door at the far side of the staff room. James is telling him to come in when I leave.
It’s four-fifteen now, which means about another hour until my parents get home from work. When she’s not traveling for speaking engagements and Sam isn’t in competition, Mom keeps nine-to-five hours, even though she could technically have a more flexible schedule. I start to text her and let her know where I’m going, a reflex, but then I stop myself.
I don’t owe her anything.
When I reach Juno’s, there are a bunch of other cars in the parking lot, but it’s not crazy busy. Maybe only a couple of people will be here today? Oliver’s coming. And Thomas seemed to be too. He doesn’t seem so bad.
Maybe it won’t be so bad.
I ignore the voice telling me that things tend to go worse than you imagine them.
But I still find myself pulling out my phone for reinforcement.
“Hey!” the voice on the line says, never distracted or too busy or too slow to answer. Even if a million people are on the phone with him at the same time.
“Will,” I say, halfway between a groan and a sigh. “Did you hear what happened? I said yes to this thing and now I have to go hang out with the people I work with for God knows how long and I think they might already hate me. Actually, I’m pretty sure they already hate me. How do people get out of things?”
“You could always fake sick,” he says. “I’m partial to a strain of bubonic plague myself.”
That draws a smile out of me.
“No, I think I should go,” I say. Sometimes when I don’t like a decision I have to make but I know what I should do, I ask Lacey what she thinks, and as soon as she tells me (usually to take a different option than I was planning to), I immediately tell her that I have to do the other thing, which I always knew I had to do. It drives her crazy, but Will doesn’t say anything. “I said I would, and they’re already calling me the freaking Ice Queen.”
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