by Ella Berman
I put the toothbrush down and walk into the bedroom. When I’m sitting on the bed, I take my phone out of the drawer, turning it over in my hand like it’s a relic of a different time. I turn it on, and the messages start to come through, but there is nothing from either my sister or Emilia. I don’t read any of the others. Instead, I type out a number from memory and hold the phone up to my ear, my chest already tight.
“Happy New Year,” I say softly, when he answers.
“Grace,” Dylan says, and his voice causes a ring of pain to burn through my chest. “Are you okay?”
“Do you remember when we made a pact to name our children after famous movie villains?” I ask, ignoring his question.
“Yeah,” he says, and I can hear that he’s smiling. “You were pretty excited about little Leatherface, from what I can remember.”
“I don’t know why I just thought of it.”
“I’m fucking sorry, Grace.”
I don’t say anything back, and after a moment he speaks again. “I wish you’d killed him. Can I kill him?”
“I think I have to go,” I say, because my throat is closing up and the feeling is too much for me right now and it’s making me want to take another painkiller, or maybe three.
“Everyone’s acting like your life is another one of his movies,” Dylan says. “Like it’s a miracle you’re both still alive.”
“I really need to go, Dylan,” I say, waiting for the familiar shame to seep through me once again.
“Can you just tell me something . . . ?” Dylan asks, desperation in his voice.
I wait for him to speak again, but he pauses for long enough that I figure he doesn’t actually know what he wants to say to me.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asks after a moment.
“I have no idea,” I reply, and because it’s the truth, I already know it’s not what I’m supposed to say.
I hang up and my eyes sting with tears.
* * *
• • •
I’m still trying to fall asleep when the unmistakable scent of weed slips underneath my bedroom door. I walk into the living space and then through the unlocked door into the backyard, where Lana is sitting on a deck chair, smoking. She opens one eye and holds the joint out to me, but I shake my head, sitting on the damp chair next to her instead.
“Apparently it’s going to rain,” Lana says after a moment. “Can you smell it?”
I sniff the air to humor her, and it does smell slightly heavier than usual.
“Everyone says it never rains here, but that’s a lie,” I say. “It’s like collective amnesia or something. A pact the locals make with each other to preserve the myth that it’s perfect in LA, you know?”
Lana smiles. “I like it when it rains here.”
“Me too.”
She takes another drag of the joint and then holds it out to me again. I take it this time and inhale, feeling the burn on my lips. I have to try not to choke when it hits the back of my throat.
“This one’s a tickler. I don’t smoke often, but we’re all allowed our vices, right?” she says, holding her hands out in front of her and then turning them over as she starts to laugh.
“Hey, who am I to judge?” I say. “I once did crystal meth with the guy who did the voice for Scooby-Doo.”
Lana laughs harder but I’m feeling a little nauseated already, light-headed, and am about to go back to bed when I remember something Laurel said.
“I just want to say that the other night, when Laurel . . . relapsed, it was entirely my fault. I didn’t know, but I should have . . .” I say, but the words are eluding me. “I haven’t been a good friend to her for a while.”
Lana smiles at me gently, and in her smile I can see her affection for Laurel. I’m about to turn inside, satisfied that my friend is luckier than most people, when Lana puts her hand on my arm to stop me. I stare down at it because it’s the first time anyone has touched me so gently in a while.
“Can I say something now, Grace? I don’t want you to think that I’m being patronizing, but I know how important you are to Laurel, and I think I’d feel bad if I didn’t say it.”
“Go ahead,” I say. She drops the joint into an ashtray, and it sizzles under the water she pours onto it.
“I don’t exactly know what’s happened to you, but I know that sometimes you can’t change other people, you can only change how you respond to them, and that has to be enough. Does that mean anything to you?”
“That’s what I figured,” I say as I stand up. “But it turns out they control that too.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Laurel walks into my bedroom the next morning, her iPhone pinned between her ear and her shoulder. “No, I know, of course. Olivia, naturally, I think that’s totally normal given the situation.” She mouths sorry at me, and I understand that she’s on the phone with my mother. I shake my head violently and wave my hand at her, but she perches on the end of my bed.
“Tell me about it, I had to learn that the hard way too,” she says, holding her hands up at me as I scowl at her. She mouths what? at me before speaking again.
“No, I’m with her. Like I said, she promised me she would call you the minute she felt better. She didn’t want to have to lie and pretend that she was okay when she wasn’t, you know. Although, she’s actually looking marginally less deathly than she was, so it’s perfect timing. Okay, I’m handing you over to her now. I know, okay, bye.” She passes the phone to me as if it’s burning hot and shakes her head, mouthing Jesus to me as she leaves the room. I scowl at the back of the door and take a deep breath.
“Mom.”
“Oh, so you do remember me,” my mom says, her voice high and charged with something. She must have been gearing up for this phone call for a while. “You’re going to have to jog my memory, though . . . your name is familiar . . .”
“Grace Hyde. You gave birth to me. I ate my twin sister in the womb and my head was in the ninety-eighth percentile for size in the country?” I say, because this part has always come easily to us both.
“We don’t know that it was a sister,” my mom replies instantly. “It could have been a boy twin. Your father would have been so pleased.”
“I’m fine, Mom, thanks for asking.”
“I know you’re fine, but do you know how I know that? E! News. And Kim Kardashian tweeted to say how relieved she was to hear it. I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for a week.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I wasn’t allowed visitors, and then I just . . . switched my phone off. Wait, are you on Twitter now?” I ask, already exhausted.
“Can I just ask you one thing?”
“Go ahead,” I say, waiting for the coins to clatter into the gutter like they always do.
“What have I done to deserve this treatment?” my mom asks, and her voice has a rawness to it that it didn’t before. I squeeze my eyes shut, my forehead throbbing with the extra exertion of sparring with my mother.
“Mom, come on. I was going to call.”
“No, please. Tell me exactly what I did wrong.” My mom’s voice is getting louder again, and I feel safer, because at least her indignation is familiar ground. “First I lose you, and now Esme doesn’t want anything to do with me. How either of you can be happy in that city, breathing all that smog, talking about what a dreadful mother I am, how I always ruin everything . . .”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “What about Esme?”
“What?”
“Where is Esme?” I ask slowly, fear rendering me stupid.
“I wouldn’t know, Grace, because she’s with you,” my mom says after a pause.
“When did you last see her?”
“New Year’s Day . . . She spent the night with a friend from school, and when she came home she told us that you’d asked her to stay with you for a couple
of days, before school started up again. She just texted me yesterday, saying she was with you at Laurel’s.”
I don’t respond. New Year’s Day was three days ago. My mom starts to speak again, and her words tumble out, overlapping, grappling with each other for space.
“She’d been in such a good mood since she started visiting you, but she was a complete nightmare again over Christmas. We didn’t know what to do with her. It was like having you back, at your very worst. She didn’t want to be here, and we thought it couldn’t hurt for her to stay with you, especially as we knew you were out of action. How can I stop her anyway? You try telling a sixteen-year-old anything. You should know better than anyone how imposs—” She breaks off.
I rest my head in my hands and try to understand what my mom is telling me. Three days. Esme’s been by herself for three days.
“Maybe she went to stay with a friend instead,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. There is silence on the other end of the line.
“Grace?” my mom asks eventually, her voice barely above a whisper. “Where’s your sister?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
I put Laurel’s car keys in the ignition and take a deep breath. I didn’t consider when I asked to borrow it that I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car since Christmas Eve. I stretch my knee out carefully and then turn the engine on with a roar, pulling the hand brake off quickly, before I can change my mind. I ignore my heart rattling in my chest and the deep, glowing pain in my knee, and I keep my eyes focused on the road ahead, taking one stop sign at a time, just like my mother taught me.
* * *
• • •
I pull up outside my parents’ house, which has been painted a pale blue since I was last here, and make my way to the front door as fast as I can in my incapacitated state. I ring the bell and my dad opens the door within seconds. When he sees me standing there on my crutches, with my battered face, he takes a step back, gripping the wall to steady himself.
“Grace,” my mother says quietly from over his shoulder. She’s standing behind him in a purple velour tracksuit. “You look awful.”
I shuffle toward her, every single bone in my body still sore. She hugs me for longer than usual, and I try not to pull away too early, even though all I can think about is finding my sister.
“How are you feeling?” my dad says, patting me on the shoulder. I try to smile reassuringly and then end up shrugging instead.
“Still kicking,” I say, and it seems to be enough for them.
I turn to my mother. “What exactly did Esme say before she left?”
“I already told you. She said she was going to stay with you for a couple of days. You weren’t answering our calls, but there isn’t anything out of the ordinary there,” my mom says, but her heart isn’t really in it. She seems even smaller when she’s frightened.
“Mom, please.”
“She’d been staying with a friend in Ojai, and then she came home in the morning and just started packing.”
“How did she seem when she got home?” I ask my dad. He looks at my mom, but neither of them seems to know how to answer.
“I think she seemed fine,” my mom says helplessly. “But maybe I don’t know her anymore. Do you really think she’s at a friend’s house? Do I need to call the police? How am I supposed to tell them we just . . . lost her?”
We all stand in silence, and I can hear my dad’s watch quietly ticking on his wrist, each extra second a reminder that Esme is missing, until I can’t take it anymore. I turn back toward the front door.
“Where does Blake live?” I ask, and my mother looks up at me in surprise, as if she forgot I was even there. Her cheeks are flushed, and I think she’s about to start crying. I can’t remember ever having seen her cry before.
“Five houses down on the left,” she says dully instead.
I hobble out of the house and down to a bungalow that is identical to my parents’, but a pale yellow. I ring the bell and it plays “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A small woman with blond curly hair opens the door.
“Grace Turner!” she says, her delight palpable. She is wearing a pearl necklace, drawing attention to her sun-damaged décolletage.
“Hyde,” I say, forcing a smile through my impatience. “My parents are your neighbors? The Hydes?”
“Oh, I know. Esme’s parents,” she says, nodding with recognition. “What can I do for you?”
“Is Blake in?” I ask, peering past her into a house filled with taxidermy and American flags. A framed copy of the Second Amendment hangs on the porch next to me. I’m having trouble picturing Blake anywhere near this house.
“By the pool,” Blake’s mom says, shaking her head. “He’s always by the pool.”
I follow her through the house, trying not to touch anything, and I step through the screen door leading out to the backyard. Blake is sitting in a baggy black T-shirt and khaki shorts, with her legs dangling in the pool, even though the sky is now a threatening shade of dark gray. I think Lana was right, that the drought might be about to break.
Blake’s mom hovers by the inside of the door, and I smile at her politely even as I slide it closed, shutting her back in the house.
“Wow,” I say.
“I know. Meet Anaheim Blake,” Blake says, pointing to something next to me. Resting against the glass window are two pro-life placards, one of them showing an unborn fetus in the womb, and another filled with the words SMILE! YOUR MOM CHOSE LIFE! in hot-pink letters filled with gold glitter.
“My mom’s really thrown herself into this pro-life campaign,” Blake says. “It’s almost like she’s trying to make up for something.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I rest on my crutches and squint at her. My knee is throbbing in the damp air, sending waves of pain up to my hip and down to my ankle.
“What can I do for you?” Blake asks, as if she’s just realizing how weird it is that I’m at her house.
“Blake, do you know where my sister is?”
Blake looks at me sharply.
“Like right now? I thought she was with you?” Blake asks.
“What happened at the party?” I ask, not really wanting to hear. I feel exposed when I think about Esme, about that short tuft of hair in front of her ear, as if my chest has been ripped open and my heart is on the outside.
“It was bad,” Blake says, shaking her head.
“Blake, come on.”
“It was a dumb plan. I wish she’d told me about it first,” she says.
“I knew about it,” I say, and something in my voice makes Blake start to talk. As she does, fat drops of rain start to fall down onto us, but neither of us moves.
“Everything was going how she thought it would, like she spent ages setting the room up—finding the perfect angle so that she couldn’t possibly miss the shot of Jesse without any clothes, and then the time came when they were supposed to meet. Esme went into the room, and Jesse was in there, only it wasn’t just him. All of the girls from her school were there, too, hiding under the bed and behind the curtains, and they were livestreaming her. She didn’t get the chance to tell them what she was doing. They made out like she was so crazy to have thought he wanted to hook up with her again, and she ended up running out of the house and hitchhiking all the way back to Anaheim. When she got here, we talked about everything and I thought it was okay, like maybe she had calmed down and was going to be able to forget about it? I even dropped her at your place in the morning,” Blake says, looking at me hopefully. “Are you sure she wasn’t with you?”
I’ve already turned around, my hand on the screen door.
“Thanks, Blake,” I say, looking one more time at the placards propped against the window and Blake’s drab clothes. “How much longer have you got before you go to college?”
“Two hundred forty-three days, seventeen hours and”—Blake checks her
watch—“twenty minutes.”
* * *
• • •
The rain tumbles down as I leave Blake’s house, making up for months of baking sunshine. The sky is a thick blanket of charcoal gray, and I am already soaked by the time I get back into Laurel’s car.
It’s the first rainy day in months, and we are all sliding across oil-slicked lanes that shimmer like rainbows in the car headlights, but I drive as fast as I can. I wish I could communicate to the other drivers that I’m not just another person on the road racing to a spin class or a lunch meeting in Santa Monica, but I know it doesn’t work like that. Everything feels like it’s the end of the world until you’re actually faced with the end of the world.
I pull up outside my house at Coyote Sumac, the wheels of the car skidding across the sludgy dust. I swing myself over to the porch on one crutch, holding my other hand above my head so that I can see through the pounding rain. When I reach the top of the steps I freeze, horror spreading through me.
The front door is wide open.
I drop my crutch and run into the house, ignoring the bolt of pain in my leg. An empty box of Lucky Charms has been knocked over onto the kitchen table, surrounded by garish, brightly colored marshmallow shapes and cereal loops. My clothes are everywhere, covering the floor and the kitchen counters, my black Valentino dress hanging from a light fixture over the sofa. The TV is on and showing an episode of Friends at full volume. Flies buzz around an open bottle of Coke, and a slice of half-eaten pizza rests on the back of a DVD case on the floor.
“Esme?” I shout, running to the bedroom. It’s empty. I push open the bathroom door, and a turquoise wash bag with a cartoon of a cat on it saying You’re PAWfect is open on the floor. I try not to think about my sister’s solemn face, the way she takes everything so literally, her infuriating honesty, and the weird noises she makes when she’s embarrassed, or frustrated.
I limp out onto the porch, scanning for any signs of when she was last here. When I get down onto the beach, I stop in my tracks and the world flickers around me for a moment. My rose gold slip dress and Dylan’s Ohio State sweatshirt are in a wet heap on the sand in front of the house, the waves already licking them. When I get closer I can see Esme’s phone resting on top, raindrops skimming off her glittery Union Jack case. I run toward the ocean, fear like I’ve never known it propelling me through my pain.