Not that I’ve ever been in that position. I’ve never lost a challenge.
I head back to the cages and spot Charity Newell huddled in a corner with her friends, practicing deep-breathing exercises like there’s a baby on the way. I’ve still got moonlight and back muscles on my mind, so I haven’t put it all together until I spot Lilly standing with the Charity supporters. Our eyes meet and she makes an oh shit face like I just caught her on a couch with Isaac.
I mean Heath.
“Nice,” I say, loudly enough for her to hear. I don’t need Shanna’s foul mouth to shred people; kind words said nastily are sufficiently sharp.
Lilly immediately ducks her head and comes to me as if I called her to heel, but Charity says her name in a way that sounds like she’s half drowned already and needs all the buoying she can get. Lilly stands in between us, a piece of unthinking metal stuck between polar opposites, her eyes loose, swiveling marbles.
“I’m telling you, his dick is the width of my gear shift, and I’ve had my hands on both enough to kn—” Brooke drops the penis lecture she’s delivering to some poor freshman when she sees us, putting together what’s going on much more quickly than I did.
I’m slipping.
I swing my cage door shut at the thought, pinching my index finger hard enough to pop a blood vessel. “Dammit,” I yell, going down on one knee to assess the damage, clarinet case clattering to the floor.
“Not bad,” Brooke says, hovering over me. “You’ve got the tone right, but when it’s pain a nice solid one syllable is the way to go for a swear. Much more satisfying.”
I cradle my hand to my chest, letting the pain sweep up my arm so I can pretend that’s why there are tears in my eyes. Not because I know I’m about to lose first chair, and definitely not because Lilly left with Charity’s entourage. I’m not even going to acknowledge the possibility that tears are pooling because Brooke is still here, offering a hand to help me up, keeping up a steady stream of useful swears for any situation. I’ll pretend the pain is what’s making me cry.
That way she can too.
thirteen
WTF sis? I’m the one who loses things. Your virginity. Your min(e)d.
It’s not funny anymore.
(I never was) kidding.
I close out the Notes on my phone as I walk in the front door. My whole day at school was spent either pretending not to cry or pretending I didn’t want to kill Charity Newell, and do serious structural damage to Lilly as well. Heath did his best to comfort me, which means that he kept rubbing my shoulders in a platonic way that only made me want to drive a pencil in between his ribs just to get some kind of passionate response out of him. Brooke would usually offer to mortally embarrass whoever the problem was, but since Lilly factors into that equation, she was oddly silent about balancing it. Judging by the exchanges with Shanna on my phone, she’s completely unapologetic about her part in making me lose first chair.
The only good thing about my day was when a text came in from Isaac that read, Found a better chair, and had a pic of something designed so that the user could get into all sorts of weird sex positions. I wasn’t even really sure if you were supposed to sit in it or what, but I was smiling when I deleted the text.
Mom is coming down the stairs as I close the door behind me. “Sasha?” she asks.
Usually the question in her voice would mean she’s asking who just came home, and technically I suppose it still does. But we both know there’s more to it.
“It’s me,” I tell her, silencing my phone in case Isaac tries to cheer me up with anything explicit.
“Okay,” she says, but the smile on her face stretches a little too tightly, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s disappointed. “We need to talk,” she says.
I follow her into the living room, ignoring the buzz of my phone in my jeans even though I’m highly curious about whatever perverted furniture Isaac may have found.
“Your dad,” she begins, and I’m already rolling my eyes in reflex. Years ago we silently agreed to ban each other in some way, a revolt of one of the five senses; his ears don’t work when I’m around, and my eyes roll at the mention of him.
“Your father is worried about you,” she goes on.
“A nicer way of saying he doesn’t believe me.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” she says. “You have to understand how Shanna’s—”
She hesitates, as if saying death might stop the heart patiently beating inside of me. I stare at her, whatever chamber of Shanna’s heart that has mother written on it hardening as we wait to see how she’ll finish. Mom goes on, skipping the word entirely, leaving a blank space in her sentence like the one that sits across from me at the dinner table every night.
“—affected us. We’d already bought two cribs . . .”
Mom fades out again, her face collapsing inward like there’s a vacuum in her throat. At the rate she’s producing words it’s a distinct possibility. I watch, wondering where the other crib ended up. Later, on my phone I’ll find:
on the c( )b (ur) (ri)
“Your father,” she says, and I’m starting to think we’re just going to keep identifying family members all afternoon, which honestly might have avoided a lot of confusion if it had happened sooner. My phone buzzes in my pocket again, and Mom’s eyes cut to it.
“Could you turn that off so we can have a conversation without interruption?”
She’s barely finished a sentence yet and my phone isn’t the reason, but I slip my hand into my pocket anyway. “Dad’s worried about me,” I prompt her.
“Yes.” She nods. “He’s afraid that the issue isn’t with your heart so much as your mind.”
More like the problem is with my mind being sharp enough to know he’s been stepping out on Mom for the last two years, and his heart not catching on to the whole monogamy thing. Or maybe his heart doesn’t factor into it at all and it’s just his . . . ew.
“And what do you think?” I ask, rerouting my mind away from that particular thought. Getting Mr. There’s a Sense of Calm to Be Found in Numbers on board with my twin sister living inside me was always a long shot, but with Mom I wonder if I’ll see that light of hope that flashed so brightly when she first thought maybe . . .
“Well, I know that you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”
She says it delicately, as if maintaining a polite tone while inferring insanity will soften the blow. It’s the inverse of my approach of saying nice things in a horrible way, so I give her the benefit of the doubt and let it settle in my ears, slipping into my possibly unstable mind to be absorbed by the bloodstream, the course of my veins carrying it to my heart.
Which revolts.
It stutters at first, fluttering like eyelashes in a sharp wind, then drops the beat completely, leaving my body empty, waiting for something that doesn’t come. I’m still, not breathing, hoping it will pick back up. When it doesn’t, my hands go to my unmoving chest, no rise and fall of breath, no deep thrum of a pulse.
“Sasha?” Mom’s hands join mine, our fingers interlaced over my sternum. “Sasha?” This time the concern has elevated to worry, and the last reiteration of my name comes at a full-blown panic, but I hear only the first syllable as darkness fills my vision. It’s not a fade to black, but an explosion of dark pinwheels that burst across my mother’s face. My whole body is liquid and it’s so soothing, I give in to it. I slide from the couch to the floor, pooling into the form of a bass clef before Mom smacks me across the face.
I pull in a breath reflexively, lungs telling heart the point has been made. It picks back up, the steady beat in my chest Shanna’s silent agreement.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Mom says, hands on both sides of my face, the hardwood floor pressing my bra clasp deep into my back. I take another gasp of air, this one so deep I hear vertebrae popping. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I’m okay,” I tell Mom. “I’m okay now.”
“What happened?”
/> “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I’ve blacked out a few times lately. I don’t think Shanna—”
“Please don’t.” Mom raises a hand to stop my words. “Let me talk to your father,” she says as she helps me from the floor, a protective hand on my elbow. “I don’t want him upsetting you, or honestly you upsetting him either. Bringing up . . .”
“Shanna,” I supply, and her hand tightens on my arm.
“Bringing up your sister isn’t going to be easy.”
“Being her isn’t easy.”
fourteen
I disentangle myself from Mom with a little difficulty, making an excuse about homework so I can go upstairs and check my texts. There’s a string of apologies from Lilly, more mundane kindness from Heath, and a few pile-of-poop emojis from Brooke.
And one from Isaac.
Want to see something?
I definitely do. Preferably not my parents’ faces. I text him in the affirmative.
Cool. Come out to the glif.
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying, since spelling is part of our communication barrier. The petroglyph is one of our little town’s dubious claims to fame, a wall of granite out by one of the streams that an ancient tribe of forever ago carved pictures on. There’s definitely a fish, a couple of concentric circles, and if you look hard you can make out little stick men. The historical society ran a fund-raiser when I was a kid to get a shelter of sorts built over it, and occasionally some stuffy types wander out there to do charcoal rubbings. But in general the glyph is relegated to school field trips, the painstaking effort of someone from thousands of years ago explained to little kids who try to spit in the dead center of the circles.
I head out to the glyph, leaving Mom and Dad behind me, Shanna tucked safely inside, ready to see Isaac. I can feel her quivering, her anticipation sending electric shocks into my fingers and toes. The parking lot is empty in the dying fall light, except for Isaac’s bike, which I park next to. Apparently we’ve got the glyph and the surrounding woods to ourselves, which can only bode well. I smile as I take the path down to the stream, ready for whatever he has in mind.
Which, it turns out, is a picnic.
“Hey, what’s . . .” I fade out, taking in the improbable image of Isaac Harver setting out food on a blanket. “Food” might be stretching it, since it looks like we’ll be dining on gas station subs and Pringles, plus a couple of cans of the cheapest beer in the world. But it’s nice. A weird kind of nice that makes my heart—her heart—stutter as we come closer.
“This is different,” I say, coming up behind him.
“Thought I’d try it.” He smiles at me and pops his can of beer. I sit down next to him, and he opens the other one before handing it to me. All the medical and social reasons not to drink beer leave my mind the second I drink it, leaving me with the most obvious drawback. It tastes awful.
“Cheap stuff, sorry,” Isaac says when he sees my face. “I had to choose between cheap beer and cheap wine, so I thought we’d go with the one that’ll make you piss before the one that makes you puke.”
“That’s lovely,” I tell him. It was supposed to be sarcastic, but it doesn’t come out that way, because the image of him standing in the gas station and trying to decide which crappy drink will cause me the least damage is oddly endearing.
“Do you have a fake ID or something?” I ask him, tearing the plastic wrap off my ham and cheese sub.
“Nope, my cousin was working.”
“Hmmm,” I say around a mouthful of food.
“So I don’t know, I thought . . .” He takes his own swig of beer, then another before finishing his sentence. “I know you had a bad day with the band thing, or whatever. And I thought, maybe this would help.”
It does help; I don’t even want to admit how much. Brooke encouraged me to fight for my spot back, Lilly laid low, and Heath . . . I can’t really remember what he did, other than say things that sounded like there was a teleprompter over my left shoulder. Isaac did something real, broke whatever this twisted routine between us is and took me on something resembling a date.
And I like it.
“I did have a bad day,” I tell him, popping open the Pringles can. “The weekend was, amazingly, even worse.”
He takes half the sleeve of chips from me. “Why’s that?”
“I told my mom about Shanna. I think she kind of . . . saw us.”
Isaac stops midchew. “You shitting me? What’d she say?”
“About you? Not much.” I shrug. “After I told her about Shanna, that kind of took precedence.”
“How’d that go?”
“Like a bull in a china shop,” I tell him, tossing back another swallow of beer.
“Whatever it don’t break, it shits on,” he says, somehow sounding wise.
I laugh. “That pretty much sums up my dad’s reaction.”
I tell him about throwing my dinner, how my parents were fighting when I left. “And my dad’s having an affair,” I add, which wasn’t supposed to come out. The beer might be cheap, but I’ve never been a drinker.
“Sucks,” Isaac says.
“Yeah,” I agree, finishing the last warm drops in the can. “He sucks.”
“My dad would never do that.”
“Why? Because your mom would kill him?”
“Uh, no, because he’s a good guy,” Isaac says, tossing his beer can into the plastic sack. “That so hard to believe?”
“No,” I say carefully, watching him as the shadows of the trees around us lengthen. I have never met his parents and don’t intend to because I can’t imagine a future for us. One where we have to get into an argument when we move in together because my antique bed won’t fit through the door of his trailer.
“My parents like each other,” Isaac goes on. “So much that I’ve gotta be careful not coming home unexpected, you know?”
“Nice, that’s . . . great,” I say, trying to summon enthusiasm for his sexually active parents. If I can get them out of the picture though, I mean, we do have a blanket. “So, your text said you had something you wanted to show me?”
I say it just right, so that he knows what I mean. He smiles and picks up the rest of the trash first. “Littering is bad, remember?”
I smile and lay my head back to see the first of the stars coming out, pinpricks of light. My head swims a little, and I know it’s going to be very easy to let Shanna have her way this evening. When Isaac comes to me I’m surprised when he pulls me up instead of joining me on the blanket. He leads me down the glyph, where the shadows have already fallen.
“All right, so. Before I show you this . . .” Isaac takes a deep breath. “What you said before about your dad having an affair, how do you feel about it?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Bad, I guess.” And I think I did at first, before I realized I could use it to my advantage.
“Bad,” Isaac latches on to that. “So, I’m kind of feeling the same way.”
“Why?”
“Really? Sasha, I walk past you in the hall every day with him, and it’s like, yeah, I’m banging the valedictorian and her dick boyfriend doesn’t know it. And I should feel good, like he’s the system and I’m fucking his girl, so, whatever. But really I just feel like shit. Like you’ll hold his hand and let people see it, but me, I’m the guy you screw in the dark and don’t tell anyone about.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that. What am I supposed to do, Isaac? Tell everyone about how Shanna needs you? They won’t understand.”
“I don’t understand,” he yells, his voice bouncing back at us from the glyph wall.
I don’t like being yelled at. Sasha Stone does not stand in mud and get yelled at by Isaac Harver. “You said that if I told you that was the deal, then that was the deal. That I’m smart, and if I say Shanna is real, then she is.”
“What about this?” Isaac asks, his voice softer now, his body coming closer to mine, his hands capturing my fingers so that I
don’t know where my sister ends and I begin. “You’re saying this isn’t real? Because this is you here, right now, with me.”
“I don’t know,” I say, those words always bubbling to the surface when he’s around, my voice losing conviction in his presence.
“Know what I think?” Isaac goes on, his hands now crushing mine. “I think you want me to be stupid, do whatever you say and believe whatever you want. Me for the night, him during the day.”
“Isaac . . .”
“What about what I want?” he says, letting me go and fumbling in his pocket for a lighter. “Maybe I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t like cheating. Maybe I’m a better person than you thought. Maybe I’d like to hold your hand in the hallway and have people see us together. Maybe I want to try being good.”
“That’s just . . .” I don’t get to finish my sentence, because he flicks his lighter and I see what he wanted to show me.
ISAAC & SASHA is scored into the rock, right under the fish glyph. I wipe my hand over it, once, twice, frantically. But it’s no use. He used a knife, scratching deep into the rock and leaving something permanent and profane alongside the ancient and sacred.
“What did you do?” I seethe, cupping handfuls of water and tossing them over the letters. It only makes the rock around them darker, throwing our names into bright relief.
“I put it out there,” he says calmly.
My fingers trace our names, running over the fin of the fish left behind by another hand from another time. “This is bad, Isaac.”
“I guess that’s just what I am,” he says, and turns to leave.
I spend a few more moments trying to undo what he’s done, but it’s no use. As the moon comes out and I hear him start his bike and drive off, I’m left staring at the new carving. A boy and a girl, etched in stone, together forever.
It would be so sweet if he had gotten her name right.
fifteen
When I get home I collapse onto my bed and stare at the clarinet case jammed under my desk. Last Christmas Mom and Dad sprung for a second one so that I could have one at school and one at home. It was the most exciting thing to happen to me since they redesigned The Phantom of the Opera stage, but now it’s resting beside a lone sock I can’t find the mate for and a pamphlet from a second-rate music school I wouldn’t go to even if they offered me a lifetime supply of reeds.