We are the thing that makes Eleanor imperfect. We are the smudge on the clear, clean window.
I’m hot with fury.
I don’t say anything. But I walk with stiff limbs and a tight chest and angry, shallow breaths. I’m light-headed and aching and don’t even really want ice cream anymore.
When we get there, the first thing Eleanor does is lean across the counter.
“Hey you,” she says, in this voice I’ve never heard that is too husky. Marla rolls her eyes.
The boyfriend tucks some of Eleanor’s hair behind her ear and she kisses his cheek.
He’s not as cute as I’d hoped. His arms aren’t the right size for his body; they are a little too long and a little too skinny. He has braces and squinty eyes. But the way those eyes look at Eleanor is good.
I am torn between letting her have him and ruining it all.
I’m fighting back some evil side of myself that I didn’t know I had. The evil side is winning. It’s like I’m so tired from trying to be good that I’ve worn myself out and don’t have it in me anymore.
“I’m Priscilla,” I say, popping up next to Eleanor. I’m pumping with energy. Everything that’s been wrong and confusing and frustrating is gathering and focusing in on this one moment. “One of Eleanor’s sisters.”
I hate myself for doing it. But I also hate Eleanor for making me want to do it.
She coughs. She blushes. She steps on my foot so hard the pain screeches in my body.
“Hey, cool,” the secret boyfriend says. “I had no idea you had sisters. I would have made sure to send you home with extra ice cream every day.” He winks at me.
“Maybe I wanted all the ice cream for myself,” Eleanor says. She’s saying it to both him and me, and I wonder how much damage this is all causing. I’m desperate to be close to her and dying to hurt her the way she’s hurting me, all at the same time.
“I like raspberry chocolate chip,” I say. He scoops me and Eleanor overfull cones and loads on the sprinkles. Eleanor’s isn’t bigger or sprinklier than mine, and I can see her noticing that. She licks the cone halfheartedly and doesn’t take her eyes off her secret boyfriend as he gets cones for Marla and Astrid.
Marla nibbles at her boring vanilla and we sit, all four of us, at a table in near silence.
“You couldn’t let me have one thing?” Eleanor says when the secret boyfriend is busy helping someone else.
“You still have him.” I take a huge bite of ice cream and it freezes my teeth, gives me a monster shiver.
“I’m sharing him now, I guess. I’m going to have to tell him about the family,” Eleanor says. Something terrible has taken over her face. “I’m going to have to tell him why he can’t come over and visit with all my adorable sisters. You know, you never used to be a huge brat. You used to get it. You used to—”
“You used to do a lot of things differently too,” I say. I pull my shoulders down and back. I stick out my chest and wipe ice cream off my chin. I don’t look away from her gaze, even though it hurts so much for her to hate me in this moment. I care and don’t care.
Eleanor goes back to the counter and makes a big show out of playing with her secret boyfriend’s hair. He feeds her a bunch of different flavors from tiny plastic spoons, and I get it, she has something special and new and lovely and we don’t.
“I’d have done it if you didn’t,” Marla whispers in my ear before we head home. She bumps her hip against mine, and I know she’s saying it to make me feel good, but it feels so, so sour.
We walk like that, me and Marla side by side and Eleanor and Astrid a few steps in front of us, and even though I was so close to being one of them, I’m now on a team with Marla, and I know for sure that I am one hundred percent incapable of doing anything right.
“We should have gotten a cone for Mom,” Marla says, like it wouldn’t have melted on the walk home. “She loves Oreo ice cream. That would have made her day.”
None of us say anything.
Marla looks from me to Astrid to Eleanor and back again. She starts kicking stones when she realizes we’re not going to respond.
Everything about the walk home hurts: My flip-flop breaks, so I have to hobble with one shoe on and one off and pebbles keep sticking their sharpest edges into my bare heel. The sun is strong this time of day, and my scalp hurts from the beginning of a burn there.
Marla shifts into a terrible mood, and she keeps moving her bracelets around, repositioning them over and over. There’s still a patch of wrong-colored skin underneath them. Every step closer we get to the house, the more groan-y and impossible she gets.