by Cj Omololu
“Maybe I’ll see you around sometime,” he says, pushing himself away from the table and shooting me a smile.
“Right,” I mumble, my eyes on the wooden tabletop, embarrassed, as if he could read my mind.
He pauses as he turns to go. “Must be fun having other people who look just like you,” he says, studying me. “I bet you could have a great time with it, you know? Sitting in each other’s classes, taking each other’s tests—fooling people into thinking you’re the other sister.”
I watch him as he wanders over to the crowded table across the deck, pulls out an empty chair, and flips it around before sitting down with his friends.
“You poor dumb bastard,” I say into my keyboard, trying to get his face out of my head. “You really have no clue.”
“What are you muttering about?” Zane Romero asks, pulling the chair out and flopping into it. Despite the fact that it’s still freezing at the end of March, he must have gone out surfing, because the ends of his curly blond hair are still wet and his hands are red. Zane cups his hot chocolate in both hands and takes a big swig, his brown eyes on me.
“Nothing,” I say, staring at my keyboard. Whenever I see Zane now, I miss him. Not this six-foot surfer version of Zane, but the little kid with the unruly hair and killer train set complete with hills and tunnels and little tiny people placed carefully in the painted landscape. Before his mom and dad got divorced, we lived next door to each other and spent hours playing with the train set that took over his entire garage. Until his parents decided it was weird for a ten-year-old boy to hang around with a ten-year-old girl all the time and they started finding other things for him to do. Soon after, Zane discovered surfing and I discovered studying—eventually, when we saw each other in school, we didn’t have much to talk about anymore. This year he ended up in my Spanish class, and it’s been nice having him back, even a little bit.
“Who’s the guy?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the crowded table.
“I don’t know,” I say, not looking over there. I feel stupid for letting myself get all worked up over some band boy. I glance up at Zane and know he’s not going to be satisfied until he hears the whole story—besides Maya, he’s the only one who’s in on it. “One of Alicia’s rejects.”
He raises his eyebrows without saying anything. But he doesn’t have to, because I’ve heard it all before. I shrug my sweatshirt higher onto my shoulder to make sure Casey’s bite mark doesn’t show. No way can I explain that right now. “I know, I know. I just told Ava that we should quit.”
He takes a slow sip of his drink and watches me squirm. “You know you’re better than that.”
I look him straight in the eyes. After all this time, what does he know? I can hear the guys at the other table talking and laughing. “Maybe I’m not,” I say quietly.
I can tell by the look on his face that he’s not going to take the bait. As much as he would disagree, Zane doesn’t know everything. Just because we were neighbors once upon a time doesn’t mean he can pass judgment now. It’s not like we’re still running through the sprinklers in our underwear. Times have changed.
Zane glances at the guy. “So, what’s wrong with him?”
I shrug. “Knowing Ava, his car is probably more than three years old. That’s enough to make him un-dateable, as far as she’s concerned. He thought I was Alicia.”
Zane laughs out loud. “How could he possibly think that?”
He doesn’t actually look at my sweats and grungy boots, but I get what he means. “Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t be like that.” He leans the chair over on two legs and gives me a wet, sloppy kiss on the cheek. I get a whiff of the sea and sunscreen. No matter what the weather, Zane always smells like summer. “You’re much hotter than Alicia.”
“Not working,” I say, wiping my face with exaggerated movements.
He laughs. “Remember the time you cut your hair really short? And blamed it on Alicia?”
“First grade,” I say, nodding. The moment was immortalized in our school photos that year. I did it when Ava got invited to Vanessa O’Neill’s birthday party without me—an attempt to finally make myself different from her. Except it felt so weird, like I was the one being punished. Once my hair grew back, I never did it again. “I looked like a boy for months.”
“Didn’t Alicia pour some live goldfish into the pool once?”
“The hot tub.” I scrunch my eyes shut with the memory of the colorful fish bobbing to the surface like carrots in a giant bowl of chicken soup. “She thought they were cold. Cecilia was so mad.” In my mind it’s almost like there was actually a third twin with us. Even when we were kids, Alicia was fun and daring and not afraid to get into trouble now and ask for forgiveness later. “Even though she was imaginary, Alicia seemed so real then.”
There’s big rolling laughter from the table in the corner, so we both look over. I catch the guy’s eye as he quickly looks away from me with a sly smile. He’s exactly the kind of guy Alicia would go for.
Zane looks from the table back to me, and for a split second, I’m sure he can tell what I’m thinking. “Good thing you’re not doing Alicia anymore,” he says softly, so no one else can hear. “That girl was nothing but trouble.”
“I’m out of here!” Dad shouts, his voice echoing through the two-story entranceway. “The car service will be here any minute.”
Ava rushes him as he walks into the kitchen. “Bye, Daddy!” She gives him a hug and then pulls back to take a better look. “That’s what you’re wearing?”
He looks down at his jeans, which are cuffed and just a bit too tight. “What’s wrong with these? I just got them.”
Ava looks over at me because “I just got them” is code for “a new girlfriend took me shopping.” We know that Dad dates—with his full head of dark hair just starting to get gray around the edges, his height, and his money, he’s a catch—but he never brings any of the girls home. “You’re not even wearing socks!” she says with a wrinkled nose.
Dad looks down and waves a loafer at the two of us. “I’ve been told I have sexy ankles.”
“Gross,” I say.
“Anyway,” Dad says. “I’m going to check out the new school building in Soweto, not walk the runways in Paris. Nobody cares what I look like as long as I bring the money.”
“Fine. But when you get home, we’re seriously going shopping,” Ava says. She reaches over and grabs the flat cap off his head. “And this has to go.”
“Like I said, as long as I bring the money,” Dad says, running his fingers through his disheveled hair. He walks over and gives me a quick hug around the shoulders, the kind you’d give a teenage son if you had one. “Have a good week without me.” He winks. “Heard anything?”
I pretend to glare at him, but I know he’s as anxious to get the Stanford email as I am. “You know I’ll call you first.”
“That’s my girl,” Dad says, giving my shoulder one last squeeze. “Keep your eyes on the prize. Even if you can’t reach me right away on this trip, keep trying. I want to be the first to hear the good news.”
“I will,” I say.
“And how about you, my baby girl?” Dad asks Ava. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
Ava shrugs. “I don’t know. Hit the beach if it gets warmer. After this summer, I won’t have any time to lie out anymore.” Which is ridiculous, because she applied only to state schools that are less than twenty miles inland. She purses her lips into a pout, and Dad laughs, gathering her into a big bear hug.
“Somehow I think you’ll find the time, no matter where you end up,” Dad says.
He turns to Cecilia as she walks out of the pantry, her arms full of ingredients for dinner. “Now, you have the credit card?” he asks.
“I do,” she says, as if she hasn’t been through this routine a hundred times. Dad is constantly flying off to far corners of the world, checking on this orphanage in Guatemala or funding that school for underprivileged children in
Africa. Apparently adopting two needy babies wasn’t enough for him—he has to save the world.
“And I left some cash in the envelope on the hall table.” Dad’s phone buzzes, and he checks the display. “Car’s here. Cell service is awful in that part of South Africa, so I may not be very reachable, but I’ll check in as often as I can. Be good,” he says, and with a wave, he heads toward the front door.
Cecilia grabs a cutting board and starts chopping onions vigorously as Ava checks her phone, Dad’s departure barely causing a ripple in our routine.
“What are you making?” I ask Cecilia.
She doesn’t look up from her chopping, even though I know that she could do it blindfolded and still make tiny, perfect pieces. “Chicken parmesan.”
“With homemade sauce?”
Cecilia glances at me but doesn’t bother with an answer. The only time jarred pasta sauce sees the inside of one of our pans is on her night off. Before she was with us, she was a cook in Dad’s restaurant, and she more than knows her way around a kitchen.
“Can I help?” I ask.
She answers by putting the knife down and moving to the sink to wash some tomatoes. She knows I’ll do it right, because I do it her way. Over the years, she’s taught me everything she knows in bits and pieces, and I like to cook.
Ava’s fingers fly over her phone. “A bunch of us are going to the movies later,” she says, her eyes on the screen. “Want to come?”
I glance up from the onion, my eyes already stinging. “It’s a school night.”
Ava pretends to slump forward onto the granite countertop, her hands up in surrender. “Seriously. It’s Sunday,” she says, her voice muffled. “You have got to get out more.”
“Seriously,” I repeat. “I’ve still got, like, two hours of homework to deal with.” I lean sideways, away from Cecilia. “I wasted a ton of time on Friday night, thanks to you.”
Ava pulls herself back into a sitting position and shakes her head. “Hey, if it weren’t for me, you’d have no social life at all. Don’t blame me if you end up living alone with twenty cats someday. You know what happens when you die in a room full of cats? They eat you.”
Despite pretending not to listen, Cecilia laughs out loud. “Good Lord, Ava,” she says, shutting off the water in the sink. “Leave your sister alone. You should be grateful that she wants to make something of herself. Gets you off the hook.”
Those are fighting words to Ava. “Are you saying that I’m not smart enough to be some stupid business person? That Lexi’s the only one who can get into Stanford? I could do that too if I wanted to.”
Ava’s played right into Cecilia’s hands, just like every other time. “Stop being such a poonch,” I say, using the word we made up when we were kids.
Cecilia glares at me. She hates the word “poonch” but can’t do anything about it because it doesn’t actually mean anything. “I’m not saying that at all,” she says as she bends over to look for another cutting board in the cabinet. “You’re plenty smart enough. You just don’t make it a priority. Maybe if you actually stayed in from time to time instead of running all over town from one party to the next, you’d be able to get into Stanford too.”
Listening to the two of them have their standard argument only reminds me of the one part I’m not looking forward to—going to college alone. Ava might be smart enough to get into Stanford, but she wasn’t dumb enough to apply, not with her grades the way they are. At this point, we’re going to be hundreds of miles apart. Even in this big house, we shared a room until seventh grade, when Ava decided she needed her own space. When Dad finally broke down and bought a new bedroom set for the room down the hall from mine, I snuck in with a blanket and my pillow and slept on her floor for weeks, just to hear her steady breathing at night. As crazy as she makes me, I can’t imagine not seeing her every day—it would be like a piece of me was missing.
Ava’s arguing back now, but I tune them out, concentrating on making little perfect onion squares like Cecilia does. I glance up at the screen of the small TV that Cecilia had Dad install below the cabinets, where it squawks away most of the day. I’m always trying to get her to use the tablet we bought her so she can use the movie apps, but she says the TV is good enough for her. It’s just the news on now, but as I’m starting to look away, a familiar image flashes onto the screen.
“Lexi!” Ava insists. “Will you please tell her—”
“Shush!” I say, waving my hand at her, even though the reporter’s talking so fast, I can barely catch a word.
There it is again—the red car from the parking lot Friday night, although now it’s daylight and surrounded by yellow crime tape. The reporter stands several yards away from the car, but I can still see a dark puddle on the ground by the open driver-side door.
“Shhh! What is that? What are they saying?” The whole scene looks surreal. Did someone call the cops after all? Did they find out what happened?
Cecilia looks up from the sink and frowns at the screen. “I saw that story already. A boy was found dead early this morning in the parking lot of the Cheesecake Factory.” She waves the knife in my direction. “I bet it was the gangs. Drugs and gangs.”
“We don’t have gangs,” Ava says, oblivious to the truth that’s starting to dawn on me.
“Dead? How? Did they say what happened to him?” I scan the screen, but all I see is the reporter talking, and my heart is beating so fast that I’ve totally given up trying to figure out what she’s saying.
Cecilia focuses back on her tomatoes. “With a knife.” She makes a slicing motion across her throat with her finger. “That’s how they do it with the drug cartels.” She looks at us both with a shrug. “I saw it on Nightline.”
I glance over at Ava, and her mouth is hanging open as the conversation catches up with her. “Wait—The Cheesecake Factory? Is that …”
“I think so.” Any doubt is erased as a grainy photo of the guy from Friday night is flashed on the screen. His hair is longer and he looks a little younger, but that’s definitely him.
“Oh God. It’s Casey,” she whispers. She grabs me by the arm and pulls me into the laundry room.
I suddenly feel hot all over, and my skin prickles like it does just before I’m going to be sick. I slide down the wall on top of a pile of clothes. “Do you think he’s dead?”
Ava’s concentrating on her phone, and she settles in beside me. “They wouldn’t have it on the news if he wasn’t. And I know he works closing on Saturday nights,” she says. She scrolls down on the screen for a few seconds, her eyes darting back and forth as she reads. “Holy shit.”
“What?” I say, leaning over to get a look.
“There’s a bunch of news reports, but there’s not much in any of them.” She looks up at me, her face expressionless. “The short version is that someone stabbed him and he bled to death sometime overnight.”
I can feel my mouth go dry. Someone I was with just the day before is dead. “Oh my God.” I grab the phone from her, but she’s right, there are just a bunch of short articles, and they all say the same basic thing: that he was found at dawn and police estimate that he’d been dead about five hours. They’re withholding his name pending notification of next of kin, but one of the reports has a photo of his car. The very same car I bolted out of on Friday night. There’s no doubt it’s Casey. A jolt runs through my body as I reread the story. “He was killed in the very same spot where we were parked.” I stand up and start pacing in the tiny room, needing some kind of physical motion to go with my racing thoughts. “What if whoever did this was in the parking lot that night too?” I take a deep breath and try to calm down. “What if they were watching? I might have ended up the same way. Jesus, Ava, we have to call the cops!”
She looks at me, and I can’t believe how calm she is. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling lost, like I should do something, but I have no idea what. “I guess I was some kind of witness or something. Maybe I saw something
and didn’t realize it.” I pause, picturing a figure emerging from the shadows and attacking Casey.
“You didn’t see anything Friday night,” Ava says. “You weren’t out with him. Alicia was. The last thing we need is to have to explain Alicia to the cops.”
“Why would they care?”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Hello? Fake ID?”
I glance back at a news photo of the black pool of blood next to the car. More blood than I thought a body could hold. Just the thought of it makes my stomach turn. “What is wrong with you? Casey is dead!” Ava frowns, as I’m practically shouting at her, so I lower my voice. Yelling at Ava only makes her shut down completely. “Look, someone killed him … murdered him … the night after I was with him. In the very same spot. The cops aren’t going to care about some stupid fake ID.”
“You don’t know that.” Ava stands up. “Besides, this has nothing to do with us. Maybe Cecilia’s right and it had something to do with drugs, and no way do we want to get involved with that. Calling the cops will only drag us into something that is none of our business.”
I picture Casey’s shadowy figure leaning against his car under the streetlamp. “Oh my God! What if they got my license plate number? What if whoever did that to Casey thinks I know something? They might be able to track us down here!”
“Stop it!” Ava says, grabbing me by the shoulders. “For the last time, this has nothing to do with us.” She shrugs. “I know Casey smoked a lot of pot—was probably dealing it too. Maybe he had it coming.”
I can’t believe she said that so calmly. “He was a total asshole,” I agree. “But did you see the photo?” As the image pushes its way back into my mind, I wonder if he knew what was happening. If he was killed instantly or if he lay on the ground, helpless, as the life seeped out of him. “Nobody deserves that.”