She pushed her sunglasses back up. “That was in New Jersey. Across from the first rental house.”
“Really?” I sat next to her and traced a small scab on my knee with my thumb. This all felt so strange. And wrong, like trying to pull on a jacket I hadn’t worn since preschool. “So I should probably mention that you were right,” I blurted.
“About the restaurant?”
“No.” I tucked my hair behind my ears. “About Dad. I called him yesterday to ask if I should come to Paris and he reacted—exactly the way you said he would.”
A check-mark-shaped crease appeared on Alison’s forehead. I waited to see what she’d do. Gloat, maybe. Or give me a lecture. About betrayal and lost childhood and Sylvia Plath or something. I braced myself for it.
“You know the girl who broke up with me last year?” she asked.
“No,” I said, surprised. “Of course I don’t. You never talk about her.”
“Well, shut up, then. Because I’m talking about her now.” She tilted her head back and sighed. Her hair was so long, it brushed the sidewalk. “The girl in question was named Cate. She broke up with me because she had another girlfriend. An ex-girlfriend at some bumblefuck university in Indiana.”
I took off my sunglasses and played with the earpieces. Music was blasting out of an open window above us, something yelly and French. “So they weren’t really broken up?”
“Nominally,” she said. “Nominally, they were broken up. But they spent the whole year talking to each other and thinking about each other, and they were in love. That’s how Cate explained it—they were so in love.”
I wanted to hug my sister, but I knew she would kill me. So I just put my hand on the slab of sidewalk between us. “Do you want me to beat her up for you?”
Alison guffawed. “Yeah. Be my guest.” She picked up a pebble from the ground and started rolling it between her palms. “You know what, though? I knew she would dump me. I didn’t know when, exactly, but it was inevitable. Letting people get close to you, it sucks. That’s why I’ve been MIA all year. Because it hurts a hell of a lot less than trying to stay in touch.”
“I understand,” I said carefully. “I feel that way all the time.”
The corner of my sister’s mouth lifted slightly. “Nice try, baby sister, but you’re not like that. You give people a shot.” She nudged my side. It was almost like it was when we’d only had each other. She was the shoulder I’d slept on during countless international flights. She was the person I’d hid with during Dad’s wedding reception, eating cheese smuggled in napkins and griping about how everyone kept calling us les petites Américaines.
“Here’s the truth,” she said abruptly. “It wasn’t dumb that you wanted to go to Paris.”
“Don’t mess with me,” I said. “I still feel like my head might explode.”
“This isn’t a joke. I can’t stand what he said to you, and I still think he’s a self-centered bastard, but I get why you’d want to be there. I get why you’d want that life.”
I stretched out my feet, sliding them down a dip in the cement. After everything else that had happened last night, the stuff with Dad seemed better somehow. Manageable. “Maybe it’s supposed to be this way,” I said. “I don’t want to leave Mom yet. I’m not sure I can lose her, too.”
“I don’t hate him,” she said. “But I hate how this feels. I hate that we’re not good enough for him.” She still sounded angry, but less angry. Like she was conceding something. She glanced up at the building. “And I mean, it’s not like our lives would have been perfect if he’d stuck around.”
“You were right about that, too,” I said, following her gaze. “It was kind of a crappy apartment.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we agree. Because if everything gets shot straight to hell, you’re the one person that I… You’re my person. You know?”
She was wearing sunglasses so I couldn’t see her eyes. But I could see her.
Alison was almost seven when Dad left. He used to pick her up and hold her upside down by the ankles. He used to call her Christopher Robin. After he left, Alison crawled into my bed every night for two years.
“God, Alison,” I said, “you’re my person, too. You always have been.”
She snorted. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew she was rolling them. “Obviously.”
CHAPTER 32
SATURDAY
MOM WAS IN OUR ROOM when we got back.
It took approximately twenty seconds before I broke down and told her the whole disreputable tale of my alcohol abuse. I hated doing it. Disillusioning her. Making her realize that I was just like all the other Bad Teenagers out there. Not that she hadn’t figured it out already.
“You look like you have food poisoning and the plague,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Is this my fault? Is this about Paris?”
That made me cry. No, I told her, this wasn’t about Paris. But also, I didn’t want to go. Even if Dad had told me to move there, it wouldn’t be home. Not the way I’d always imagined it would be. And I couldn’t leave her behind—I just couldn’t.
She was upset. Mostly because I was hungover. Mostly because she thought moving me away from my friends at the start of my senior year was a cruel and unusual punishment. She said she couldn’t even ground me, because the move itself was basically an extreme form of grounding. I sat on the bed and cried and said she could ground me until I was forty because I deserved to be locked away from humanity. She hugged me, and Alison sat next to us and leaned her head against Mom’s back. We were messy and emotional, and it was wonderful. It was home.
“This week has been crazy,” Mom said, tucking my hair behind my ears.
“Yeah.” I sniffled. “No shit.”