“She’s happy, I suppose,” my sister said. “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m, like, an awful person, but I’ve decided I hate sharing her attention with someone else. You’ve been gone for so long, it’s become very Gilmore Girls around here. But Mum and I haven’t gone out for frappucinos in ages. We used to go almost every day.”
There was a note of apology in her voice. Shelby had been too young to really remember what it’d been like when my father left us for his new family in America. My years-long refusal to talk to him had struck her as a ploy for attention. (Looking back, I can say that it definitely was.) She didn’t have the same memory of him that I did; it mattered a lot less to her either way how often he called or if he remembered to send us cards on our birthdays. Weren’t all dads just a voice on the phone? Weren’t optional once-yearly visits across the ocean just the way things went?
I wasn’t enjoying the tables being turned on her. She and Mum had always been close, and if I could spare my sister anything, it would be taking a starring role in my own teen drama—My Parents Are Dating Other People Burn It Down.
“Tell her,” I said. “Tell her you miss her. Ask for Shelby-time. She adores you, she wants you to be happy. It won’t be an issue.”
Shelby flopped down backward on her bed. The camera wobbled, then steadied. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because—no. Hold on. I meant to tell you this. I—he like, scolded me last night. He told me to go back to my room and change.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Ted did? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I was wearing these shorts—kind of high-waisted, with tights, nothing that I hadn’t worn loads of times before, and he asked if I was going out to see a boy in those, and maybe I shouldn’t wear it if so, and he was ‘kidding’ but he wasn’t. Mum shut him down quickly.” She pursed her lips. “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, you know? Like, he doesn’t have any kids. Maybe he’s trying it out, the dad thing.”
“He’s doing a gross job of it, then,” I said, making a mental note to follow up with Mum. “I hate that shit. It makes it sound like he’s looking at you, and finding you—”
“Attractive. Or whatever. I know. It’s horrid. And he’s not even that old.” Her voice went steely. “He better not try it again.”
I had that feeling I got every now and then, that I was missing out on something pretty significant, not seeing my sister grow up. “Or else?”
“Or else,” she said firmly. “Anyway, it might not matter, I’m not going to be around. I’m going to school in America.”
I sat up so quickly I hit my head on the bookshelf above my bed. “What? No. Absolutely not. Not Sherringford.”
At that, she laughed. “Not Sherringford. I refuse to go to your weirdo murder school, no matter how much money they offer me. No, there’s this, like, other boarding school in Connecticut that Mum dug up. It’s close to yours. But this one has a one-to-one student-to-horse ratio.” She waited for that to sink in. “Jamie, I know you’re awful at maths, but seriously. One-to-one. Everyone gets her own horse. And it’s an all-girls’ school, which is great.”
It wasn’t really all that surprising, when she put it that way. Shelby had spent our childhood begging for riding lessons, but Mum could never afford them. Instead, she’d given Shelby a Shetland-sized stuffed pony that my sister dragged around behind her on a lead. “I knew you were shopping around for a school, but I always sort of thought you’d stay in England. Isn’t this place expensive? How can she afford it?”
“I think they offer, like, gold-plated financial aid. Or maybe her new boyfriend is feeling generous. I don’t know.”
“And you’re okay with all this?”
“I—” She chewed her lip, thinking. “Mum has her own life here now. And I sort of feel like I’m in the way. This place sounds better than staying in London, slowly making myself invisible.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” Shelby blinked quickly, rubbed her eyes. “Anyway, I’m not going without looking at it first, I’m not stupid. That’s what I wanted to tell you, that Mum booked tickets to come out so I could see the campus, and if I like it, I can start right away. She was talking about wanting to see Dad. I guess she hasn’t seen him since—since—”
“Since last winter. Since he came to pick me up after Sussex.”
Past the phone in my hands, I could see the snow falling thickly out the window. Just this morning the weather was clear.
“Are you okay, Jamie?”
Shelby had sat up on her own bed. I didn’t like the pitying look in her eyes. “Fine,” I said, too sharply. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she sang, the way she’d do when we were kids. “You’re being a jerk, such a jerk, such a jerk—”
“Don’t you ‘Jerk Song’ me—”
She went up an octave. “You’re the biggest jerk in Jerkfordshire—”
“Shel, oh my God,” I said, trying hard not to laugh. It’d been a good instinct, to call my sister. “I hope you like that horse school. It sounds perfect. We’ll talk more about it when you’re here.”
“I miss you too.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “Bye, Jamie. See you soon.”
I stood and pulled the curtains closed. Enough light still snuck through to speckle my bedspread, like I was living underwater. I watched it for a while, lying down on my bed, the shimmer of it against my wall. Thought bleary thoughts about the ocean in winter. I wanted to see it again, I decided. Maybe the North Sea up in Scotland, instead of the southern coast. I’d go once I was in uni. I’d take the train up alone. Watch the sheep out the window, the rolling hills. Stop a night in Edinburgh to tour my father’s old stomping grounds. I wanted to relearn what it was like to be me, in places that I loved, to remember what it was like to be enough. Pretend there wasn’t anyone out to get me.
Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe I had made some kind of mistake, had saved over the file for my presentation, named it something stupid and lost it in a folder. Maybe, after the last two years, my instincts were just shot to hell. None of this had ever been about me, after all.
The exhaustion rolled up and over me like a blanket.
In the dream I had, I’d been an orphan living in Holmes’s house. Her father had been chasing me, had the two of us terrified, hiding together in a basement. We were alone down there in the dark, but I could hear a crowd murmuring around us, someone stutter-coughing, the beginnings of applause. When I turned to tell Holmes we were being watched, a spotlight drew down over her face. Her eyes went fluorescent.
Just say your lines, she said.
The basement’s dark edges bled out beyond us. Footsteps, above, on the ceiling. We would be found. They were an audience in search of a play.
I don’t know them, I whispered back. Do you?
I watched her mouth, the site of every bad decision. She’d light a cigarette and put it between her lips. She’d take a fistful of pills. She’d kiss me. She’d say something unforgiveable, she’d do any of the wretched things she did, this girl who existed only to be in opposition to the world, and she’d wait for me to tell her to stop and I never would, ever, I would have myself shot in the snow before I told her to stand down.
You wanted it both ways, she said, so you get nothing. No. You get to spend the rest of your life waiting for permission. The spotlight flickered. It did that when she told the truth. When it steadied, it was so everyone could watch us. The audience had arrived, but it only made her that much more intimate. Her hand stole up to my cheek. She whispered, Even now, you want permission to be a victim. It’s all you’ve ever wanted. Someone to come and save you.
She said it like she was reading a love letter.
Charlotte, I said.
That isn’t my name. The light flickered. Jamie. Jamie. Jamie—
“—WAKE UP.” SOMEONE WAS FLICKING THE LIGHT ON AND off, on and off. Were we still in the basement? Where were the windows? The exits? I’d been taught to look for the exits. I’d had it drilled into me.
No. I was in my room. I sat up so quickly I saw spots. “Who’s there?”
“Wow, you’re really out of it.” Elizabeth was leaning against my closet door. Her red blazer was startling in the dim light. Was it nighttime? Was it even still the same day?