Shayne arrives in her illegal indulgence mobile and we head over to Billy Jenkins’s house because his parents are out of town and they left the liquor cabinet unlocked. The regular crew is there and it feels good to be back among them. Speaking their language, laughing at their jokes, valuing their values. It all comes so easily to me, it’s almost as though I never even left. I guess some things are just in your blood. Some things you never forget.
And when Shayne and I walk through the front doors of the school together the next morning and begin our familiar catwalk down the main hallway, people notice. Heads turn. Lips murmur. Eyes stare. With Shayne’s hand hooked into the crook of my elbow, bringing me up to speed on all the gossip that I’ve missed over the past few weeks, telling me how much she loves my accessories and whatever creative thing I’ve done with my eye shadow that morning, I feel safe. I feel content.
I feel like I’ve come home.
At first the deletion of my blog seems to upset people. Everyone has a theory about why it suddenly vanished. Some even go so far as to speculate that BB4Life has been assassinated, but after a few days people seem to forget all about it. Or at least they stop lamenting its disappearance. Plus, DishnDiss.com posted some site where you can play matchmaker to a bunch of cartoon characters and after that I’m pretty much old news.
Not that I mind in the slightest.
Hunter asks me to the winter formal again and this time I don’t hesitate. I just say yes while Shayne claps ecstatically next to me and gushes about how perfect it will be for the four of us to go together: Hunter and me and Shayne and Jesse.
She assures me that I’ve made the right choice. That Hunter is a guaranteed stock booster. Beautiful and popular and highly sought after by every girl in the school. And according to Shayne, “What else could you ask for in a guy?”
I tell her I can’t really think of anything.
But the truth is I don’t really try. With Shayne, it’s always a rhetorical question. It’s never meant to be answered.
After that, Hunter starts to sit with us at lunch every day. And every time he leans over and whispers flirtatious things in my ear or plants delicious kisses on my cheek, I notice Shayne nodding in approval out of the corner of my eye. And there’s always this comforting sense of satisfaction and relief that accompanies Hunter’s displays of affection. Like a weight has been lifted. Like after so many detours, my life is finally back on track.
The struggle is over.
By the time school lets out for Thanksgiving break, I’ve managed to assimilate seamlessly back into my old life. I’m reinstated as Shayne’s second in command. I’ve reclaimed my coveted seat next to her at the center table. Recovered my high-ranking status at our school.
And you know what? I’ve never been happier.
Life is more glamorous at the top. People respect you. They move out of the way when you walk by. They talk about what you’re wearing and what you were seen doing the night before.
Things are much simpler here, too. There are fewer choices to be made. Shayne and I go to the mall and she picks out my next favorite pair of jeans. We go to the food court and she tells me what I can eat and still manage to fit into those jeans. We cruise the makeup counters and she tells me which colors bring out my eyes and which ones make me look dead. We see a table full of hot guys and she decides whether or not they’re worth talking to.
There’s less to think about. And I like it like that.
Maybe I was never meant to be a leader. Maybe I was never meant to tackle huge decisions all on my own. Maybe I’m just a natural-born sidekick.
And if I try hard enough, I can almost make myself believe that the past six weeks never even happened.
The Toast of Harvard
Brian is the exception.
Thoughts of him are like ghosts from my former life—my temporary life, as I’ve come to call it—returning from the dead to haunt me. To remind me of what I left behind. In ruins.
No matter how hard I try, I still can’t seem to fully erase his presence. His voice lingers in my ears. His face appears around every corner. The pain in his eyes is still fresh in my mind.
“I think we both know that kiss was more than just a dare.”
That sentence follows me wherever I go. Taunting me. Provoking me. Challenging me to refute it. Challenging me to debate the other side of the resolution. And as much as I want to, I can’t do it. I can’t find one convincing argument to support a contrasting point of view.
It’s Truth or Dare all over again. Except this time, I don’t want to play the game. I don’t want to choose either one. The truth is too destructive. But the dare is too exposing.
And now all I’m left with is an answered question.
My sister’s flight arrives at eleven a.m. on Wednesday morning and my mom insists the whole family be there to greet her when she steps off the plane.
Izzie looks so different, I barely even recognize her. She used to have this kind of bland, dishwater-colored, stick-straight hair that did nothing except lie there like a dead appendage. She wore barely any makeup and her clothes were always straight out of a JC Penney catalog. It never bothered me before because at least I never had to worry about her raiding my closet.
Now her hair is dyed honey blond and cut in cute layers. Her eyes are dramatized, her lips are lined, and her clothes are actually somewhat fashionable. She has this kind of hip, East Coast preppy look. And as soon as I see her walk out of the security doors, the only thing I can think is Great. Now she’s smart and stylish. What’s left for me?
“Did you join a sorority?” I ask as she wraps her arms around me and pulls me into a hug.
She laughs and ruffles my hair like I’m five years old. “Don’t be preposterous, Brooks. When you go to Harvard, you don’t have time for sororities.” The way she pronounces the word makes me cringe. Like she just stepped in dog poo.
I want to say something to the effect that I would never go to college and not join the Greek system since Shayne and I have been planning to pledge the same sorority since we were twelve, but I’m not given the opportunity. Izzie starts blabbing the minute she steps off the plane and doesn’t stop the entire ride home. Seriously, the girl can’t shut up. She’s like one of those creepy talking dolls…on steroids. She uses words you’d only see in the verbal section of the SATs, and she switches subjects so rapidly I almost want to pop open the back of her head and check if she’s running on batteries.
She yaps about how her art history class has given her such an in-depth appreciation of some French painter I’ve never heard of. She gripes about the socioeconomic climate of our country and how we’re all to blame for global warming. And then she claims that her Judaic studies class has inspired her to take a tour around Eastern Europe to visit the concentration camps.
“But we’re not even Jewish,” I point out.
She turns toward me with this pitying look on her face and says, “Nie wieder, Brooklyn. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Did she just speak to me in German?
But before I can fully digest her last sentence, she’s already chattering about something else entirely.
Her energy level doesn’t falter for an instant. Even after we’ve arrived home. For a day and a half I don’t think I see my sister sit down once. She’s like a bee buzzing around from room to room. One minute she’s helping my mom in the kitchen with food preparation, the next she’s carrying firewood into the house with my dad, and then she’s wandering around my bedroom, fidgeting with stuff and asking me questions about boys and life as if we’re best friends.
If there’s one thing my sister and I have never been, it’s friends. Never mind best friends. I see all those movies where two sisters are inseparable and share everything, including their hearts and souls. Well, that’s about as inaccurate a description of Izzie and me as you can get. We’ve been fighting for as long as I can remember. Now that we’re older, we’ve matured a bit. Meani
ng that we no longer roll around on the ground and try to pull each other’s hair out. Our fighting consists of shallow jabs and manipulative head games.
That’s why I find it incredibly suspicious when she comes into my room on Thursday morning and bounces onto my bed while I’m trying to get through the first act of Twelfth Night.
“Hey, sissy. I’m bored. Let’s go somewhere.”
I give her a strange look. The lighting in my bedroom is making her pupils look huge. And kind of scary. This is definitely feeling like a trap. “That’s okay,” I say, shaking my head. “I think I’ll just hang out here. I need to finish this.”
“Oh, Brooks,” she says, ruffling my hair again. I really hope this doesn’t become a habit. “You’re so obdurate sometimes.”
“Whatever,” I mumble, refocusing on my book.
She tilts her head to get a better look at the cover. “Are you reading that for school?”
I roll my eyes. “No, I’m reading it for fun. Of course it’s for school.”
She jumps off my bed, grabs my iPod from my desk, and starts scanning through my playlists. “That’s so funny because that BB4Life girl was reading it, too.”
Suddenly, Twelfth Night is no longer of any interest to me. It falls from my hands and plops onto the bed. “Who?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of that blog! MyLifeUndecided.com.”
“Oh,” I say, chuckling weakly. “Right. That.”
“Everyone on campus was so into it.”
“At Harvard?” I ask in disbelief.
“Yeah. When it got shut down, people went crazy. They were so pissed. Everyone on my floor was taking bets about who she was going to end up with.”
“What do you mean?” My voice comes out almost in a whisper.
I watch as my sister discovers an underwater basketball game on my desk and becomes obsessed with trying to flip the submerged ball through the hoop.
“Rhett Butler or Heimlich,” she says, as though it’s obvious.
“Heimlich?” I choke out. “Why would she end up with Heimlich? She wasn’t even dating him. I mean, she didn’t even really like him. Not in that way, anyway.”
Frustrated, she shakes the game and makes another attempt to steer the orange ball into the basket. “Yeah, but you know how girls can be. The guy you’re really supposed to be with can be standing right in front of you and you don’t even notice because you’re too distracted by the one you think you’re supposed to be with. It happens all the time. Sometimes the most obvious choices are the hardest to see.”
I swallow. It hurts. Like a chicken bone pushing its way down my throat.
“They are?”
She sticks her tongue out in deep concentration and finally, with one swift jerk of the plastic, water-filled container, she gets the little orange basketball to sail through the red hoop. She throws her arms up in victory. “Score!”
“Izzie,” I start, trying to sound as conversational as possible. “If you met BB, I mean, if she was your friend or something. What would you tell her to do?”
She places the game down on my desk and bounces back over to the DVDs. “I’d tell her to put her stupid blog back up so I’d have something to read during study breaks.”
“No. I mean, about Heimlich and—”
“Oh my God!” she exclaims, yanking a DVD from the stack, causing the rest of them to topple over onto the floor. “I haven’t seen this movie in ages! Remember how we used to watch it over and over again?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I remember. But—”
“I’m going to go watch it now!” she resolves, hugging the case to her chest and waltzing out the door, leaving me with nothing…except a mess of DVDs to clean up.
Thanksgiving dinner in our house hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s always the same motley assortment. Me, my parents, my sister, my senile grandparents on my dad’s side, and my crazy, middle-aged, and bitterly divorced aunt Linda.
By four o’clock, everyone is assembled around the table and the familiar sounds of a holiday meal fill the room. Silverware clanking against the good china. Slurping of wine. Bad jokes being told. Polite laughter.
It isn’t until my plate is nearly empty that I notice that Izzie hasn’t touched hers. And she hasn’t said a word since she sat down either. She’s been too busy fidgeting with her napkin holder. Sliding it on and off her fingers like a giant wooden ring.
“Izzie?” I ask, watching her questioningly. “Are you all right? You seem kind of restless.”
“Of course I’m all right,” she snaps, causing everyone at the table to halt their conversations and look up. This seems to piss my sister off even more. She groans and gives me an evil look. As though it’s completely my fault that everyone is now staring at her. “Jeez. Chill out, everybody. I’m just stressed. Harvard is really hard, okay? Finals are starting as soon I get back to school and you have no idea how much pressure is on me right now.”
“Izzie?” my mom begins tentatively.
“What?” she roars back. “What is everyone’s problem?” Then, out of nowhere, she starts rubbing obsessively at her hands, as though she’s trying to scrape dirt off. “And what’s with all the bugs in this house? They’re crawling all over me.”
If the room wasn’t silent enough before, now it’s deadly still. My dad scoots his chair out and starts to come over to our end of the table. “Izzie,” he says tenderly. “Maybe we should go get some fresh air.”
But she’s too quick for him. She violently pushes her chair back with a loud scrape against the hardwood floor and leaps to her feet. “I don’t need fresh air,” she insists. “I need everyone to stop nagging me.”
I’m assuming from the way she throws her napkin down on the table that her plan is to make a dramatic exit from the dining room, but she doesn’t get very far. She takes one step and collapses onto the floor.
Then I hear my mother scream.
The Price of Perfection
Since having children, my mom has had to endure three ambulance rides to the hospital. The first was when I was rescued from the abandoned mine shaft after having been stuck down there for two days. The second was when I was eight years old and a neighborhood kid dared me to take a swig from a bottle of 409 cleaner. And the third was two years ago when I stopped eating for three days so I could fit into a pair of size zero designer jeans that Shayne had handed down to me because she’d decided they were “too big” for her.
The common denominator in all of these tragic events, of course, is me.
I’ve always been the one lying on the stretcher. I’ve always been the one making the near fatal mistake. I’ve never once been in the car behind the ambulance.
Not until today.
My dad drives in silence, following the flashing lights in front of us. The large red and white van that holds my mom and my unconscious sister.
It’s an entirely different experience sitting in this seat. The regret has been replaced with paralyzing fear. The shame for once again having disappointed my parents has been replaced with a mind-numbing panic. And the uncertainty of whether I’ll be forgiven has been replaced with whether I’ll ever see my sister alive again.
I’m not sure which side of the equation is worse.
The EMTs weren’t able to tell us much. Except that her heart was beating abnormally fast and somewhat erratically. She has a fever of one hundred and two and her pupils are heavily dilated. We’ve been promised more information once we arrive at the hospital.
It feels like we’ve been driving for hours and I don’t understand why they’re taking her so far away. It isn’t until I see the signs for Parker Adventist Hospital up ahead that I realize it’s only been a few minutes. Time slows down in the shadow of sirens. I guess that’s something I should know by now.
My sister is wheeled in through the emergency entrance and I follow her stretcher with my eyes until it disappears through a set of double swinging doors. My parents follow behind her while I wait in
the lobby with my grandparents and my aunt. They try to talk to me, to keep me distracted, but I don’t hear anything. They’re like characters in a silent movie. I stand very still and watch the doors for signs of life.
I wonder if this is how Mrs. Moody went. If her last moments on earth were frenzied and chaotic like this. Doctors fighting to save her. Nurses running to and fro. Or if she just drifted away peacefully in her sleep.
I hope, for her sake, it was the latter.
My dad emerges a half hour later and I search his face for a hint of my sister’s condition. For some reason I can’t wait for him to speak. I need some indication of what to expect before the words start flowing. I have to have that extra split second to prepare myself.
“She’s okay,” he says, and I hear the sighs of relief from the rest of my family envelop me like a warm blanket. “She’s going to be just fine.”
But I can’t exhale yet. I need more than that. “What happened to her?”
My dad collapses into one of the waiting room chairs and motions for me to sit down next to him.
“Your sister has been under a lot of stress at school,” he explains. “Harvard is a lot harder than she expected—definitely harder than high school—and the pressure ended up being too much for her to handle. She started using a drug called Adderall.”
My forehead crinkles. “The one they prescribe for ADD kids?”
He nods.
“I didn’t know she had a prescription for that,” I say.
My dad sighs. “She didn’t. But according to the doctor, it’s a very sought-after drug on Ivy League campuses. People manage to get prescriptions and then sell it to other students. They use it as a study aid. It helps you focus. And with the competitive landscape at Harvard, Izzie just found it too hard to resist.”
“So what? She overdosed?”