“But she hates holding hands.”
“She knew she was responsible for you and wanted to be a good big sister. She guided you in and out very carefully and was so worried you might get hurt that she marched you quickly through and right back to us.”
“Huh,” I said. “I have no memory of this.”
Most of the time, when I’m opening the refrigerator, the photo is just part of the background—I don’t even notice it. But every once in a while, I stop to look at the two little blond girls, holding hands, a tiny team facing the world together.
Ten
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I’m curled up on my bed binge-watching a nineties TV show when Ivy comes into our room and says, “We should go.”
I check the time. “It’s too early. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes to get there.”
“There could be traffic.”
“On a Saturday? Unlikely. Is that what you’re planning to wear?”
“Yeah.” She’s got on her usual: stretch pants (black today) and a short, worn cotton tee (yellow today). She looks not un-bee-like.
Ivy doesn’t like clothes that are tight or uncomfortable or have a lot of buttons, hooks, or zippers. She also hates shirt tags and long sleeves and necklaces, watches, and rings. That leaves her with a pretty limited wardrobe.
“Maybe change first?” I say. “You have a gray skirt, right? You could wear it with that blue top I gave you for your birthday. That would look really nice.”
Her hands start vibrating at her sides. “I don’t like wearing skirts. I can feel my legs too much.”
“Okay. Then how about you keep the pants but change your top?” The one I gave her is longer and looser, and will cover up the lumpy elastic waistline of those pants.
“Why do you want me to look nice?”
“It’s just nice to look nice when you’re meeting a friend.” Okay, I sound like an idiot. I don’t know what else to say, though. I don’t want to make her more nervous . . . but I want her to look decent. For her sake.
“Okay,” she says, but you can tell she’s not happy about it, and once she’s put the top on, she keeps plucking nervously at the gauzy fabric.
She starts pacing around our bedroom. “We should go,” she says. “Why aren’t you ready?”
I tell her again that it’s too early, but after about twenty minutes of enduring the exact same exchange every thirty seconds, I give up. “Fine, let’s go. We’ll be early, though.”
Joke’s on me—a lane of Sunset is blocked by a moving truck, and traffic’s backed up, and once we get past that and down to Montana, I can’t find parking close to the yogurt place.
“It’s three-oh-four,” Ivy says when we finally get out of the car and start walking. “We’re late. It’s bad to be late.”
“It’s okay. You’re allowed an extra five minutes to show up somewhere before you’re considered late.”
“Five minutes late is late.”
We reach the shop. I open the door and follow her inside. “I bet he’s not even here yet.”
“Yes, he is.” She points across the shop, halting so abruptly that I bump into her.
“Don’t stop,” I say, and give her an impatient little shove toward Ethan, who’s slouching by the frozen yogurt machines, his hands stuck deep into his pockets. There’s a guy next to him whose back is toward us; he’s reading the yogurt information above the machines. “Come on,” I say, because Ivy is hesitating again. Her hands are snaking at her sides, and any second she’s going to start slapping at her hips. I grab her by the wrist and tug her over to Ethan, who regards us gravely.
“Hi, Ivy,” he says.
Ivy looks down at the floor and mutters a barely audible “hi,” and I try to make up for her apparent lack of enthusiasm by practically shouting, “Hey, Ethan!” The guy next to Ethan turns around, a polite smile on his face, which fades the second he gets a look at me.
It’s David Fields.
“Chloe?” he says. “What are you doing here?” He looks back and forth from me to Ivy. “Oh, my God. Is she your sister?”
“Just for my whole life.” Now I know why Ethan looked so familiar: he’s a thinner, more-hunched-into-himself, and less-savage version of David. “Ethan’s your brother?”
“Just for my whole life.”
“Huh.” I don’t know what else to say. If he were a friend, it would be a cool coincidence. But if he were a friend, we’d probably have figured out a long time ago that we both had siblings in the same special needs class.
“We need to get frozen yogurt,” Ivy says, shifting nervously.
“Right,” I say. “But isn’t it funny that I know Ethan’s brother? He goes to my school. Ivy, this is David. David, Ivy.”
“Nice to meet you,” David says, and shakes her hand. He then introduces his brother to me, even though I said hi to him already, and we shake hands.
It’s strange how much the two of them look alike and also don’t look alike. Ethan is thinner and more slope-shouldered, and his light brown hair is longer and bushier than David’s, which is pretty short. But there are subtle differences too—there’s all this awareness and calculation and judgment in David’s brownish/grayish eyes, and Ethan’s just look innocent and uncertain.
I separate a couple of paper bowls from a stack and hand them to Ivy and Ethan, who wander down the row of yogurt machines, checking out the different flavors, not consulting or even acknowledging each other, but sort of together anyway.
“Are you staying?” David asks me.
“Yeah—Ivy wants me to. How about you?”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
He just shrugs. “You and your sister look a lot alike.”
“I was going to say the same thing about you and your brother. He looked familiar when I saw him before, but I didn’t know why.”
“It’s such a weird coincidence.”
“So weird.”
There’s an awkward pause. Then we both start to speak at the same time and stop.
“Sorry, what?” he says.
“I was just going to ask if you were going to get some yogurt. What were you going to say?”
“Just that I almost didn’t recognize you without James at your side. I thought you two were permanently attached at the hip.”
Ugh. His brother may be my great hope for Ivy, but David’s still a jerk. I don’t even bother to respond—what do you say to something like that, anyway?—just grab a bowl and stalk away to the other end of the row of machines, where I splurt some chocolate yogurt into it.
Ivy’s moved on to the toppings bar and is ladling a ton of colorful sprinkles onto her yogurt. Ethan’s waiting for her to finish—apparently he likes his yogurt plain.
“I’m going to pay for yours,” he tells her when she’s done. She looks at me uncertainly. I nod, and she lets him take her bowl and put it on the scale next to his.
The cashier is a smiley young Asian American woman. She’s keeping up a stream of patter, either oblivious to the fact that Ivy and Ethan aren’t really responding or savvy enough to sense that they need some help making conversation. She counts out Ethan’s change and then Ethan picks up both yogurt cups and says to Ivy, “Come with me,” and leads the way to a table. She looks back at me, but I gesture to her to follow him, and she does.
“Excellent,” David says. He’s come up next to me. “We talked about how this would go, and he remembered everything I told him to do.”
“You guys close?”
“I mean, yeah.” He puts his cup on the scale.
“Are you together?” the bubbly cashier asks.
David and I say no at the same time. She tells him the price, and he pays before heading over to an empty table.
While the cashier is weighing my cup, I say, “Hey, any chance you’re hiring?” Seems like a decent place to work—she certainly seems to be enjoying herself.
“I think we’re set right now,” she says, “but you can fi
ll out an application, and we’ll keep it on file in case something opens up. I’ll bring one over to you. Three forty-seven, please.”
I pay, then turn and hesitate, wondering whether I should sit with David or not. I don’t really want to have to make conversation with him, but sitting a few feet away and ignoring each other for the next half-hour or so seems even more awkward.
I decide to let him decide. “You want company?” I ask, approaching his table.
“Up to you.” He already has his phone out and is flicking at it with one hand while he shoves spoonfuls of yogurt into his mouth with the other.
I sit. He just keeps looking at his phone, so I pull out mine.
I text Sarah about the situation and get back a Holy crap, David Fields???????
David and I both look up from our phones at the same time, so I nod toward the other table, figuring I might as well be friendly—it might make things more comfortable for me, even if he doesn’t care. “How long do you think they’ll last?”
“As a couple?”
“No, I mean right now. I’m guessing not more than half an hour. Ivy’s never been much of a sit-and-chat kind of girl.”
“Ethan can sit and chat all day long. It’s listening that’s hard for him.”
“How long has he been in that class at Vicente?”
“This is his second year.”
“It’s Ivy’s third—and last. She turns twenty-one this summer. No more school after that.”
“Just the big bad world.”
“I wish she could stay in high school forever.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s safe for them there.” He shifts in his seat. “How about you? What’s in the future? College, I assume?”
“Definitely. You?”
“I don’t know.” He swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, which he then wipes on his jeans. “I don’t want to leave Ethan all alone.”
“All alone? What about your parents?”
“Divorced. Dad lost the custody battle, so we live with him.”
“You mean he won it.”
“Do I?”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“Anyway, Mom moved to another state and sends us postcards of some lake at sunset. And Dad’s all about the new wife. She just had a baby, so . . .” He trails off, then shrugs. “Whatever. I’ll make sure Ethan’s okay. You going to take AP English next year?”
It takes me a second to catch up with the change in subject. “Uh . . . yeah. Planning to. You?”
“I’m taking as many APs as I can.”
“But why, if you’re—”
He cuts me off, his finger raised. “Shhh—listen.”
Ethan is talking more loudly than he needs to in such a small space. “I like the X-Men movies but not Wolverine Origins or X-Men: The Last Stand. Those are the worst ones. A lot of people think the best one is X-Men: First Class, but I think X-Men: Days of Future Past is better. What’s your favorite?”
Ivy’s voice is quieter; I have to strain to hear her response. “I’ve only seen the first one. It was on TV. I watched it with Chloe and my mother and my stepfather.”
“The first one’s pretty good,” Ethan says.
“It was okay.”
“Wolverine is the best character. He’s played by Hugh Jackman, who’s originally from Australia. He was also in the movie that was called Australia, but it’s not very good. A lot more people saw him in Les Misérables. Some people really liked that movie, but a lot of people didn’t. I didn’t. Did you see it?”
“No.”
“She doesn’t go to a lot of movies,” I whisper to David.
“Too bad,” he whispers back. “Ethan lives and breathes movies. I told him he could talk about them if he didn’t know what else to say.”
“You should have told him to talk about TV shows. Ivy’s strong on those.”
“I’ll remember that for next time.”
“Do you think they’re having fun?”
“Ethan looks pretty happy right now. What about her?”
I study my sister, who’s gazing down at the table, her hands twitching by her sides. She doesn’t exactly look ecstatic, but she might just be nervous. “I don’t know. I hope so. I really want this to go well. She needs friends.”
“Ethan has friends—or says he does—but they’re all online. He’s probably being catfished by half of them.” David fidgets in his seat. He’s devoured his frozen yogurt, and seems restless without it. He picks up his phone and flips it in his palm.
“We don’t have to talk,” I say. “You can use your phone.”
His neck kind of retracts at that—hard to tell if it’s relief or annoyance. “Yeah, okay,” he says. He slouches in his seat and stares at his phone screen as his thumbs skim over the keypad. I curl up in my chair with my own phone.
A minute later, the cashier comes over with the promised job application, which she hands to me. “Drop it off whenever you want,” she says with a friendly smile. “No rush.” She goes back to the counter.
“What’s that?” David asks.
“Job application.” I put it in my purse to fill out at home—I don’t have my social security number with me, and she said there was no rush.
“You looking for work?”
“No, I just have a job application collection. Don’t you?”
He doesn’t respond, just studies me uncertainly, like something doesn’t make sense to him.
Eleven
IVY CALLS AN END to the date about five minutes later. She gets up abruptly—Ethan’s in midsentence, still talking about the X-Men franchise—walks over to our table, and says, “I’m done.”
“You sure you don’t want to hang out a little longer?” I ask.
“No, I’m done.”
“Okay, then . . .” I stand up. “It’s been real,” I tell David flatly.
“Yeah,” he says. “Later.”
Ethan has leapt to his feet and joined us. “I’ll walk you guys to your car,” he says.
“That’s really nice, but you don’t have to,” I say. “We’re parked a couple of blocks away.”
“My brother said I should.”
“Yes, I did.” David gets up, jamming his phone in his pocket. “Come on. Let’s accompany these two lovely ladies to their car.”
I catch a whiff of sarcasm, but the other two are oblivious to it. Ethan resumes his X-Men discourse, but the rest of us are silent, and the walk feels endless. We come to a halt at our Subaru hatchback.
“This is yours?” David says, like he’s surprised.
“My mom’s.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Nonexistent?”
“Seriously? I pictured you always cruising around in some hot girl car like a Porsche or something.”
“A ‘hot girl car’? What does that even mean? That the girl is hot or the car is?”
He flushes. “I don’t know why I used that word. I never do.”
“Hot or girl?” I ask sweetly.
“Come on,” he says to Ethan. “We have to get home.”
“Wait.” Ethan turns to Ivy and holds out his hand. “I’ve had a very nice time,” he says politely.
Ivy stares at his hand.
“Shake it!” I hiss.
“I know!” she says, annoyed, and puts her hand in his.
He bends forward and kisses her quickly and lightly on the cheek, then rocks back on his heels, glancing over at his brother.
David nods his approval. “Well done. You ready to go?”
“First you have to say goodbye to Ivy’s sister.”
“Right.” David holds his hand out. “Goodbye, Chloe.”
I pump his hand, as aware of our audience as he is. “Goodbye, David. It was nice to see you.”
“Let’s do this again sometime,” he says gravely.
“Yes, let’s.”
We release each other’s hands and step back. Ethan studies us for a moment, his grayish eyes
flickering back and forth quickly between our two faces.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say he’s waiting for David to kiss me on the cheek.
That’s not going to happen.
“Well?” I ask Ivy once we’re safely in the car.
“What?”
“Did you have fun?”
“It was okay.”
“Ethan seems really nice.”
“I guess.”
“It’s funny that I know his brother from school.”
“Are you guys friends?”
“Not really.” The goal is to get Ivy to like Ethan, so that’s all I say. “But we do have a class together.”
“That’s like me and Ethan—we’re in the same class, but we’re not friends.”
“Even after today? You don’t think you’re friends now?”
“Maybe. We went out for frozen yogurt, and that’s what you and Sarah do, and she’s your best friend.”
“Yeah.” I dart a sideways glance at her as I brake for a light. “It’s also what James and I do, and he’s my boyfriend.”
She doesn’t respond to that, just slumps in her seat and chews her lip for a while.
Back home, I shower and get dressed to go out.
“What do you think?” I ask Ivy, twirling around for her in our bedroom to show off my circle skirt and short, tight sweater. “Will James like this?”
“You look great.” She always says I look great—I accidentally trained her to give meaningless compliments. A few years ago, Mom put on a dress for a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, and Ivy said, “You look like you’re pregnant, but you’re not pregnant, right?” Mom tore the dress off and said she was just going to stay home. I lectured Ivy for a while about how it’s important to make people feel good about themselves, and now when Mom and I get dressed up, she always says we look great.
I’m able to slip out of the house without running into Ron. I don’t want to go through the whole “James needs to come inside” thing with him again.