“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he says, his voice dropped yet another octave in an attempt to secure a cone of silence around what he’s realizing might be a breakup conversation.
“No,” I agree, with a nonchalant shrug, “it doesn’t have to be like anything. Do you want to be with me or not? Make a list, pros and cons, whatever you feel is appropriate. Then get back to me.”
I get up to toss my trash as the bell rings, feeling lighter than I have in years in comparison to the black hole opening up behind me. What used to be—and maybe still is—someone I’m supposed to care about.
“Dude, that was totally badass,” Brooke says from the backseat of my car.
“I know,” I say, still flying a little from the high of quasi-dumping Heath. The plodding nature of our relationship, like a calendar planner that goes five years into the future, had always felt like safety. With safety comes comfort, but also mind-numbing consistency. I feel the newness of my life right now, down to a tingling in my fingertips as I drive. My sister said it wouldn’t be easy, but that had been.
“Fun, too,” I say aloud.
“That’s a bit much,” Lilly says, glancing up from her phone as she sits in the passenger seat. “You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” I shoot back.
“Yeah, it comes natural,” Brooke agrees.
“Not quite what I was saying.” I give her a dark look in the rearview mirror as I pull in to Lilly’s driveway. “Make it quick,” I tell her as she hops out to grab her spats. “Even I won’t be able to talk Hunter out of busting our butts if we miss pregame.”
Lilly doesn’t have to pretend to shiver. Punishment in band means lining the practice field before early rehearsal, a cruel job involving flashlights and heavy layers in the dark morning hours of the late-autumn Midwest.
“So?” Brooke prompts me once Lilly disappears inside her house.
“So what?”
“Don’t give me the doe eyes, Stone. You suddenly ditch the one guy you’ve let up your shirt and don’t think I’m going to ask you about it? Spill, and don’t try to tell me you’re just on the rag, because you and I have been synced since sixth grade and I’m sporting whities tonight.”
“TMI.”
I turn in my seat, but Brooke just stares back at me. She once stared down a tuba player for a straight hour on a long bus ride, so I might have to concede this one.
“Fine,” I give. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s the deal with you and Harver?”
“No deal,” I half lie. As far as I know there is nothing going on between Isaac and me. That’s all my sister.
“I call bullshit. I’m not saying you guys have, like, long philosophical conversations about nature versus nurture. You probably don’t even talk, but there might as well be a highway of fire drawn between the two of you for all the hot looks that go back and forth.”
“Nice. So you think Isaac and I are friends with benefits?”
“Friends? Don’t know. Benefits . . . well, I’m just going to say that your complexion has never been better. Like, you know, blood flow has increased to certain parts of the body. Maybe you grew a heart.”
“Maybe I did,” I snipe back, alarmed at how close she is to the truth.
“Whatever. I was just curious.”
“Curious about what?” I drop my voice as I see Lilly shut the front door behind her, waving her spats triumphantly.
“If Sasha Stone found out how good it feels to be bad,” Brooke says, and tips me a wink.
The truth is most of me doesn’t know how it feels to be bad. My sister feels so vibrant inside my body now that I’m aware of her; it’s like everything else about me—skin, hair, teeth, arms, legs, toes, and eyes—are merely part of the vehicle that was made for her, just waiting patiently for the takeover when they got to live too. I’ll fight it as long as I can, my mind the last holdout once everything else has abandoned itself to this new experience.
I ignore my phone during the football game, squeezing out the fight song like it’s the best sixty-four measures that ever existed and avoiding eye contact with the brass section. They don’t even make it into my peripheral.
I drop off the girls, ignoring a weighted suggestion from Lilly that I check my texts and a knowing nod from Brooke when she gets out, shutting the passenger door with her butt and then smearing her face all over the window as I try to back out of her driveway. I laugh, my mouth making the right shape and my throat producing the sound it’s supposed to, but the truth is I can’t wait to get home.
I can’t wait to stop being myself.
Hands that don’t fumble or hesitate, no waiting for permission or asking in the first place. Tree bark scraping across my skin as I slide down to the ground, knees a weak mess of desire. But I don’t feel the pain, don’t feel the hard ground underneath me or the pressure on top now. I can’t feel these things, because it’s not me. Not my body curled in ecstasy, toes pointed at the moon. Not my nails slicing red ribbons down his back. Not my blood rising to the surface of my neck, something I’ll have to hide later, when I am myself again.
There are no words, only sounds, as if my clarinet were jammed down her throat, every breath passing unintelligible sounds that compose a song of victory. She is a feral thing, my sister, long denied and now unleashed. She takes what she wants, scratching, pawing, tearing at him. She’ll have bruises, but so will he.
The three of us will study them later, and remember.
I wake sore, lips swollen as if I’d played for hours. My fingers stray to my face, brushing aside hair somehow laced with dead leaves. The rising sun catches a note taped on the footboard, lined paper bearing a message meant only for me.
Told ya it’d be fun
And underneath me, a smear of blood on my sheets.
ten
I. Things I Know
A. This has gone too far.
1. My sister had sex with Isaac.
2. My sister lost my virginity.
3. I can’t control myself.
II. Things I Don’t Know
A. How to stop
B. If I want to
My mom is always begging me to talk to her more, and that could be kind of a problem. If I open my mouth, all kinds of things are going to come out: accusations, admissions, confessions. I can tell her about my sister, her heart pumping away inside of me, and I imagine my mother’s will respond, picking up a rhythm it believed it lost years ago. Now that I know about my twin, I wonder how I could have discovered her only recently, never spotting her in the perpetual dark circles under Mom’s eyes, whoever the woman is on the other end of Dad’s mysterious calls, the long silences between my parents that stretched out longer over the years.