Lily only shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. People do bad things to themselves. It’s their own fault. Let’s go do a cartwheel race on the lawn.”
They hadn’t done cartwheel races for a few years, and Beth didn’t really want to go near the edge of the drop right now, when she was thinking of David down there, his bones broken. But she went, and she cartwheeled close to the edge, the cold air and the excitement making her breath come short. After a while, she forgot about David again.
That night, the half sisters sat in Beth’s new room—she’d graduated a few years ago from her little-girl room to a teenager’s room down the hall, though the little-girl room was still intact—and listened to records on Beth’s record player. Lily sat cross-legged on Beth’s newer, bigger bed, her legs slim and flawless in her tight jeans, her breasts obvious beneath the fabric of her striped turtleneck, making the black and blue stripes bend into wonky shapes. “I’ve got something for you,” she said.
Beth looked up from the Neil Diamond record she was putting on the player—Lily said she had atrocious taste in music, but Beth disagreed—and saw that Lily was holding her hand out, and there was a small white pill in her palm.
“Take it,” she said.
Beth looked at it warily. She and Lily regularly stole from Julian and Mariana’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, and had for years, but Beth had no experience with pills. “What does it do?”
“It makes you high, silly,” Lily said. “Like really high. It’s better than anything else I’ve tried.”
Beth didn’t want to get high. She wanted to play records and get drunk when her parents weren’t guarding the liquor cabinet. Being high with Lily sounded like something that wasn’t terribly fun. “I don’t know.”
Lily’s gaze went darker, flatter. “Take it.”
Saying no to Lily was always a tricky proposition. You had to do it the right way. “It would probably destroy me,” Beth said. “Obliterate me completely. You know what a lightweight I am.”
Lily laughed—she was susceptible to compliments, but you had to use the right tone so she didn’t suspect you were lying. “You are,” she said. “You’d probably be halfway to California before you came down.” She put the pill away, and Beth breathed a silent sigh of relief.
She didn’t think Lily should be taking the pills, either, whatever they were. But she wasn’t going to start nagging her half sister. That would be pushing things too far. With Lily, it was all about balance.
A few hours later, they took Beth’s bicycle out of the garage in the middle of the night. They went to a neighbor’s house, where the girl who lived there had just left for college, and broke into the unlocked garage. Lily took the absent girl’s bicycle, and they went for a ride, pumping up the hills and coasting down in the wet, freezing-cold neighborhood, flying by the dark houses while the rich people inside slept.
Each girl had brought a bottle of wine—Lily red, Beth white. “Which girl is bitter, and which girl is sweet?” Lily said, mimicking Mariana’s old game when she saw the wine Beth had picked. “Little girls can’t be both, you know. They have to be one or the other.”
“We also have to be eaten, apparently,” Beth said. “It’s all we’re good for.”
The wind was cold on Beth’s cheeks as they rode, cold enough to hurt and make her eyes water, but she loved it. She loved that the drizzle soaked her wool hat and the ends of her hair, and that her fingers went numb on the handlebars right through her mittens. In those hours in the middle of the night at Christmas, the girls had the world to themselves. They could be anything, do anything, and there was no one to stop them.
“What do you want to be?” Lily asked her when they paused, leaning their bikes on a wet park bench so they could take swigs of wine. “An actress? A singer? What?”
Beth shrugged. Her future was a blank. She was pretty enough, but she had no particular talent in one thing or another. She couldn’t sing or dance or write. Hollywood had exploded with movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider, but those movies were about men. She’d read a copy of On the Road that she’d swiped from the library, looking for the glamour and forbidden excitement, but all she could see in it was a bunch of boys driving around, showing up at their girlfriends’ when they needed a place to stay. Beth didn’t want to be a girlfriend who took in a broke boy and fed him, gave him money, and had sex with him before he went off to other adventures and other women. That didn’t sound like freedom, like free love. It sounded like a bore.
“You need to be something,” Lily said.
“Why?”
“Because otherwise your parents are going to marry you off by the time you’re nineteen, and you’ll have a baby by twenty. And that will be it.” She gave Beth a flat stare. “Then again, maybe that’s what you want.”
That made Beth briefly furious, a flash of anger that made her see red. “I won’t,” she said. “I won’t end up like our mother. And I won’t get pregnant like she did, either.”
“Yes, you will. You’ll even get a husband, a man who makes a lot of money and will take your virginity for you, though I guarantee you won’t enjoy it. It won’t be any fun at all.”
There were no words to describe how terrifying that thought was, how it made a black hole of panic open up in the pit of her stomach. She had so many feelings for Mariana—love, desperation, disdain, anger—but she did not want to end up like her. Repeating Mariana’s life was the worst thing that could happen.
But Lily wasn’t completely wrong. Beth took a long swig of wine, hoping it would dampen the terror.
“We need to talk about money,” Lily said.
Beth frowned. “What?”
“Money,” Lily said again. She took a sip of her wine, but she didn’t seem drunk, while Beth felt her head start to spin. “I’ll be eighteen soon, and I’ll be out of the foster system. How much money will Mariana give me, do you think?”
Beth wasn’t following. “Mariana is going to give you money?”
“Of course she is,” Beth said. “She has to. She feels bad about me, remember? I’ll have to figure out how much I’ll need. She has plenty.”
“Mariana doesn’t have money,” Beth said.
“Sure, she does. She goes shopping all the time and her wallet is always full of cash.”
That was true. They’d seen the money come out of the wallet plenty of times. “That’s my father’s money,” Beth said. “He gives her an allowance.”
For the first time in a long time, Lily actually looked surprised, and the surprise wasn’t pleasant. “Beth, what are you talking about? Mariana’s family is just as rich as Julian’s.”
Beth took another drink of wine. “That’s true, but Mariana is the only one left. And her mother left all of her money to Julian.”
“To Julian?”
Beth nodded. “I heard them talking about it. Our grandmother thought it was best that her husband look after all of it because our mother doesn’t know how to handle money. So he got all the money, and he gives Mariana an allowance.” She had never really thought about this before; her parents had never argued about it, both of them accepting it as the natural order of things. But she could tell by Lily’s face that something was wrong. “What is it?”
Lily looked off into the darkness, her breath pluming, her skin pale against the night. “Damn it,” she said softly to herself. “I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking tragic.”
Beth felt her jaw drop at the word. Lily had no problem swearing, but even she rarely used the f-word. “Lily?”
“God damn it,” Lily said.
Beth was starting to get scared—drunk and scared—so she said, “Can we talk about something else now?”
Lily’s eyes had that cold look that made Beth want to get back on her bike and flee. “Of course you don’t want to talk about money,” she said. “You have all the money. From Julian, from Mariana. I bet you have a trust fund, don’t you?”