My Sister Rosa

by Justine Larbalestier

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Let me finish, Rosa,’ David says. Rosa’s bottom lip sticks out. ‘They’re still friends.’

  I thought David had agreed Rosa was dangerous. Hadn’t he?

  ‘She’s not normal,’ Leilani says.

  ‘I agree. Rosa’s not normal. She’s at least five years ahead in mathematics. Even further ahead as a chess player. Two or more years behind socially. Apparently those often go hand-in-hand. I don’t agree with your diagnosis.’ He cuts a look at me. ‘Neither has any professional who’s examined her. There have been many. I know Che wants to be a doctor, but he isn’t one yet.’

  I can feel the burn on my cheeks. ‘No one’s ever examined her to see if she has antisocial personality disorder.’

  Sally glares.

  ‘David, why didn’t you tell my parents any of this? Don’t you think they should have known she’s not normal before letting her near the twins?’

  All the adults speak at once, but Lisimaya cuts through the noise. ‘They did, Leilani. We’ve known about Rosa for years.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell us?’ Leilani demands.

  ‘Because we didn’t want you to judge her,’ Lisimaya says. ‘Rosa has enough trouble fitting in. I think we erred.’

  ‘Seimone stopped talking to Maya because Rosa made—’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Seimone says. ‘You make me sound like a baby, Lei-Lei. I’m not a baby. Maya knows why I stopped talking to her.’

  ‘Can you tell us why?’ Gene asks gently.

  ‘Because Maya called Rosa an evil robot.’

  ‘Did you, Maya?’

  Maya nods. Gene suppresses a laugh. No one else is amused.

  ‘I want you two to talk to each other again,’ Lisimaya says. ‘Can you promise me that? Maya?’

  Maya nods again.

  ‘Seimone?’

  ‘Not unless she stops being mean to Rosa.’

  ‘What about Rosa being mean to me?’ It’s the first time Maya’s spoken.

  ‘Rosa,’ David says, before anyone else can speak. ‘Will you stop being mean to Maya?’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘Rosa?’

  Rosa nods.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ Rosa says, drawing the word promise out a fraction of a second too long, so that it almost sounds sarcastic.

  ‘Will you stop messing with your brother?’ David gestures at my phone. ‘What you said is not funny. Don’t ever joke about death.’

  Rosa looks chagrined. ‘I didn’t mean it. I didn’t think Che’d take me seriously.’

  ‘Seimone, will you talk to your sister now?’ Lisimaya asks.

  ‘I promise,’ Seimone says, pronouncing it exactly as Rosa did.

  The family walks home together. I can’t call us my family. It doesn’t feel like they have anything to do with me. Yet here we are. I have bits and pieces of both of them: David’s hair and nose, Sally’s eyes. But right now it feels like we have nothing else in common.

  Rosa’s half smiling. I can see she counts tonight as a victory. She’s right. It is.

  ‘You said you believed me,’ I say to David. We’re less than a block from the McBrunights, but I can’t hold it in.

  ‘I do,’ he says. ‘I also told you I have to keep this family together.’

  ‘How could you?’ Sally says, turning to me. A vein twitches on her forehead. ‘How could you say that about your own sister? How could you record her?’

  Rosa giggles. Sally turns on her. ‘It’s not funny, Rosa.’

  Rosa’s giggles stop instantly.

  ‘This is not a game. Why do you think your brother thinks such ill of you? Because you don’t take anything seriously, Rosa. I know it’s hard. I know you struggle. I know you’d prefer everything were numbers. But it isn’t. You need to try to fit in better. You need to stop laughing when it’s not funny. You need to stop saying scary stuff like that. That you want Maya dead! Why would you say that?’

  Rosa’s face is as expressionless as David’s. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be, Rosa. Wanting people dead is never funny! You can’t talk like that.’

  David puts his hand on Sally’s shoulder. She shakes it off.

  ‘How did we get here? Thinking the worst of each other? Spying? How is this us?’

  I don’t know who she’s asking. She’s not looking at any of us.

  David puts his arm around her. This time Sally lets him, resting her head on his shoulder. I think she might be crying.

  They cross the street to the park. Rosa and I follow. We walk the rest of the way home in silence. Rosa’s face is blank.

  More than anything, I wish I was with Sojourner.

  PART FOUR

  I want to go home

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  —It’s so cold today, Georgie texts. —I’m wearing mittens!

  —Boiling here.

  Summer’s finally arrived. I’m in shorts at the gym waiting for Sojourner to show up for our sparring session. I’m sprawled on the bench in front of the change rooms, guzzling water and two protein bars, and catching up with Georgie.

  —You’d love it. The clothes are every style you can imagine. Every colour. Pastels, neons, candy colours.

  —You’re paying attention to clothes now? You know what pastels are all of a sudden? NYC has changed you.

  I don’t tell her I’m quoting Leilani.

  —I saw these people in short red jumpsuits skating down the bike lane on old-fashioned rollerskates. One of them had her hair in rollers.

  This I had noticed. Everyone had. The skater in front had a vintage boom box balanced on his shoulder, blasting music as old as the rollerskates.

  —So cool. One day I’ll see shit like that. Is the little devil still away?

  —She gets back tonight. I thumb through the photos Rosa’s sent from dance camp and send Georgie today’s one of Rosa posed in a Bo Peep costume with Seimone in her ballet gear.

  —Cute. Had we learned to do selfies at ten?

  —Kids these days.

  —So no dead animals?

  —Funny. Not that I know of. How’s your major?

  Georgie’s major project for textiles is a ballgown. While she texts me about it, including images of the latest calico dummy, I run through my list.

  1. Keep Rosa under control.

  2. I want to spar.

  3. I want a girlfriend.

  4. I want to go home.

  1. Rosa hasn’t done anything scary since Seimone almost died and we had the family conference. She’s stopped talking to me. Not talking talking. She’s pretending she’s normal. She hasn’t snuck into my room again. She hasn’t said who she wishes is dead. She hasn’t said a single thing that makes the hair on my arms stand on end.

  If Rosa doesn’t make any trouble for the next ten years will I believe she’s changed?

  David is more optimistic than I am. But David says different things about her in public than in private. He’s forgiven me for telling the McBrunights. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him. He reiterates that our family’s survival is at stake. That all a label for Rosa will do is destroy her life and our family. He sees the darkness in her, but he won’t admit it to anyone but me.

  There are millions of people like Rosa around the world, he says, who live their lives without killing anyone. Rosa’s smart. She wants to live a normal life. Look at how well she’s been behaving.

  James the therapist doesn’t diagnose Rosa with anything. He doesn’t think Rosa and Seimone’s friendship is unhealthy.

  He’s wrong. But at least a professional is talking to her. She’ll slip up and he’ll see. Between David and James, it feels like she’s less my responsibility than she was.

  Seimone is talking to Maya again, but not like they used to. Maya continues to sleep in Leilani’s room. Rosa and Seimone continue to be thick as thieves, inventing their own hand signals. Holding up different arrays of fingers, tapping their elbows, waving
their hands around and laughing their arses off whenever anyone asks them about their secret language.

  Leilani and Maya believe me. Before, I only had Georgie. I could never bring myself to tell her how terrorised I felt, how Rosa consumed almost every minute of my life. Being able to talk about Rosa with Leilani has changed everything. I feel like I’ve been breathing with one lung for years and now I have two.

  2. I’ve sparred. My boxing is a thousand times better than it was before I sparred. The parentals don’t like it. But they’re not stopping me.

  3. I have a girlfriend. Sojourner is everything. I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like, which would be every minute of every day. She has two jobs, she fights, she teaches Sunday school. If I didn’t box too, I’d see her at most twice a week.

  4. I don’t want to go home to Sydney. It’s starting to feel like home here.

  Because of Sojourner and Leilani and Maya and even Elon and Jaime.

  But Sojourner is the biggest part of my happiness. She’s more than everything.

  When she walks into the gym, her hair pulled back, her bag slung over her shoulder, my heart beats faster. I smile, stand up, draw her into my arms. Her bag slides to the floor. We kiss.

  ‘Get a room,’ Meathead snarls, but we ignore him.

  Sojourner kisses me again, then disappears into the change room. I’m smiling as I text Georgie.

  —Sparring now. Your project looks amazing.

  We grab pizza on the way home. It’s our ritual now. Sojourner pays. She knows my parents are having what they call cashflow problems and that I’m afraid to overuse Papa’s credit card even though he said it was okay. Mostly because Papa loves writing I told you so to David as many times as he can.

  Usually I walk Sojourner home before going back to my place, but not tonight. Tonight her moms are at a church conference in Charleston in South Carolina. It’ll be just me and Sojourner in her tiny flat until morning. When I’ll have to go home and see Rosa for the first time in two weeks. I wish her moms were away for a week so I could put off seeing Rosa longer. A month would be even better. When I’m with Sojourner I don’t think about Rosa.

  I’m not thinking about her as we fall into Sojourner’s room, peeling off our clothes and landing tangled together on her bed.

  We sleep in. I wake to a phone full of missed calls and urgent texts and Sojourner doing her equivalent of swearing her head off, which switches back and forth between gosh and oh no. She’s going to be late for the self-defence class she’s teaching over the holidays.

  —Can you look after Rosa and the twins this am? Take them to their tennis lesson?

  Suzette, the au pair, is sick. Leilani’s busy with Neophyte. The McBrunights don’t fly in from Tokyo until tonight, and the parentals are in meetings all day, which leaves me, because the McBrunights’ staff have more important jobs to do than babysit.

  Maya greets me at the McBrunights’ door. ‘They’re coming to tennis too.’

  Maya has on a white tennis shirt and shorts and flip-flops. I assume her tennis shoes are in her enormous bag, which is by the door.

  ‘Rosa doesn’t play tennis.’ As far as I know she’s never held a tennis racquet.

  ‘Neither does Seimone. But now they’re coming to my tennis school to get beginner’s lessons.’

  In a week Maya goes away to tennis camp in Florida. No one’s admitting that the timing of the two different camps gives Maya as much time without Seimone and Rosa as possible.

  ‘She’s never been interested in tennis. She says it’s stupid. Tennis is not stupid.’

  I nod, though I have no opinion. Other than boxing I’m not much into sports.

  ‘It’s Rosa’s doing,’ Maya says. ‘You know what she said? Rich people play tennis. Then Seimone says, I’m a rich person, and Rosa says, I’m going to be a rich person.’

  I devoutly hope not.

  ‘She’s the worst.’

  We sit down on the couch furthest from the door.

  ‘Where are they?’

  Maya directs her gaze to the gallery above, where the girls’ bedrooms are.

  ‘How long do we have to get to your lesson?’ I stretch out on the couch, look up at blue sky and white clouds beyond the insane skylight. I don’t feel like scrolling through a million texts. I think about last night, about Sojourner.

  ‘An hour,’ Maya says. ‘But I want to warm up first. If we take the L we’ll be there in twenty minutes. I told them we should go as soon as you get here. They know you’re here.’

  —Come downstairs, I text Rosa. —We’re ready to go.

  ‘I wish they weren’t coming,’ Maya says. ‘Seimone hates tennis. I wish their camp lasted all summer long.’

  I can’t help agreeing.

  ‘They’re going to make us late.’

  ‘Not yet.’ I wouldn’t put it past them.

  ‘They ruin everything,’ Maya says.

  ‘They’re not going to pull anything. If they make us late or do anything else they know I’ll tell your parents.’

  Maya nods, but she doesn’t look convinced.

  —Thinking of you, I text Sojourner. I wish she was here.

  The lift chimes. Seimone and Rosa step out wearing matching outfits: red shirts and blue skirts, red and blue runners, red and blue ribbons in their braids. They even have matching red and blue backpacks. As if they’re trying to say we are the twins now.

  ‘Hello, Che,’ they chorus. ‘Hello, Maya.’

  Maya doesn’t say anything.

  Seimone’s hair is almost as long as Rosa’s. I wonder when she started growing it. They look like tiny members of a psychopathic cheerleading cult.

  ‘Can we choose how to walk there?’ Seimone asks. ‘Tennis is Maya’s thing, so we should get to choose.’

  That sounds like Rosa logic to me. Who cares how we walk there? Maya gives an exact replica of Leilani’s minimal eye roll.

  ‘We’re walking to the First Avenue L stop, not the whole way,’ I say. ‘We’re not walking on tiptoe or balancing chairs.’

  ‘Funny,’ Seimone says.

  Rosa stares. ‘We meant that we want to pick the route.’

  I wonder if she’ll ever understand sarcasm.

  Maya’s already at the door, shouldering her bag.

  ‘I can carry that if you’d like, Maya.’

  ‘Coach says—’

  ‘Lugging your bag around will toughen you up. You told me. I’m not sure about your coach’s logic.’

  Maya pokes her tongue out at me. ‘She’s great. So nyer!’

  ‘Let’s go across on Ninth,’ Rosa says.

  ‘Fine.’

  Outside the sun is shining, and even though it’s a weekday plenty of people are ambling, looking like they have no particular place to go. There are birds in the trees, sparrows. Sojourner says there are hawks too, but I’ve never seen them.

  As we walk, Rosa and Seimone dart around Maya and me. Then they switch again and then again. Their hands flutter in their sign language.

  ‘Quit pushing,’ Maya says.

  ‘We’re not pushing. We’re dancing,’ Rosa says. ‘We have to practise fluid movements.’

  ‘We’re gliding,’ Seimone says, but to Rosa, not Maya.

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re bumping me. Che, tell them to quit it.’

  ‘Save the gliding for the tennis courts.’

  They switch positions again. I see Seimone hold four fingers up, with her thumb to the base of her little finger. They both giggle, bouncing from one foot to the other, as we wait for the lights to change.

  —This blows, I text Leilani. —Maya’s miserable. Rosa and Seimone are insufferable.

  We cross. I’ve decided it’s easier to keep an eye on Maya than to watch for transgressions from Rosa and Seimone. Maya walks fast, sticking to my side.

  —Insufferable? Leilani responds. —When did you decide to relocate to a ye olde British kids’ book?

  Maya mutters something that sounds like I hate them.

&
nbsp; I pat her shoulder awkwardly, hoping she remembers I’m on her side.

  ‘Let’s stop at the dog run,’ Rosa says. ‘I want to watch the dogs.’

  She’s somehow managed to keep her fake dog alive. Email alerts on its status go to me and the parentals. She probably thinks there’s a chance the parentals will get her a real one.

  ‘We’ll be late,’ Maya says. ‘There’s no time to watch dogs.’

  ‘Straight through the park, girls.’

  ‘Yes, Che,’ Seimone and Rosa say simultaneously in singsong voices, then giggle. I’d like to ban them from giggling.

  I know there’s no chance I’ll run into Sojourner – she’s teaching – but I still look around. The park is where I first saw her outside the gym, it’s where we had our first real kiss.

  I’m pretty sure it’s too early for me to be nostalgic about how we got together. I’m not going to ask Leilani or Georgie, and certainly not Jason. Especially as his response to my having a girlfriend was —Gettin laid at last. Orsum. Was worried yer dick wld fall off. Sometimes I worry he means that shit.

  Maya switches her bag from her left shoulder to her right.

  ‘Will you let me carry it for a bit? I won’t tell your coach.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Maya says. ‘It’s not as heavy as it looks.’

  It looks very heavy. ‘Any time you want a break.’

  More giggles from the red-and-blue twins.

  ‘We could play chess,’ Seimone says. Rosa nods. They change places again. This time I see Seimone bump into Maya.

  ‘Stop that. Don’t bump Maya. There will be no stops for anything. There will be no dog-watching and no chess-playing and no bumping into Maya.’

  We’re out the other side of the park and crossing Avenue A.

  ‘Yes, Che,’ they sing, and skip slowly and profoundly annoyingly. They’re humming, too, adding to the annoyance.

  —Would it be wrong if I killed them both?

  Leilani’s response is immediate. —Isn’t that a Rosa kind of question?