The Secrets We Keep

by Trisha Leaver

  “Alex has a cousin your age. He thinks—”

  “You mean our age,” I interrupted.

  She shrugged that off and steered me toward a table in the back of the cafeteria. “I think you’ll like him. From what Alex says, you two have a lot in common.”

  Which translated to: he was smart, quiet, and too quirky for his own family to acknowledge. Apparently, so was I.

  “He’s starting an anime club,” she continued, fingering the notebook I had tucked under my tray. It was covered with manga drawings I’d been working on during History class. Some of them were good; most of them were doodles. I had the one I wanted to show her on top. I’d ripped it out of my notebook, thinking I’d give it to her at lunch.

  Maddy took the tray from my hands, not once looking at the drawing underneath. “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

  She was a good five steps ahead of me before my feet started moving. I tucked the drawing into my notebook and followed her over. The two kids sitting there looked up when she dropped my tray onto the table. I recognized both of them from Honors English but had no clue who they actually were. They were two guys with longish hair and Mountain Dew T-shirts eating their food and minding their own business until my sister interrupted them.

  I swung my head from them to Maddy. Her food, if she had any, her books, and her phone were at the other table.

  “It’s Ella, right?” I turned toward one of the boys at the table and nodded, wondering how he knew my name. “I’m Josh.”

  “Yup, her name’s Ella,” Maddy offered up when I remained silent. “She’s into that Japanese-cartoon stuff you guys like.”

  Maddy nudged me closer, and I stumbled into the corner of the table. “Right, Ella?”

  I nodded, still confused, still mute. Until five minutes ago, she was into my “Japanese-cartoon stuff,” too. Last I checked, she had an entire bulletin board dedicated to my drawings. Now she was talking about it like it was some noxious side effect of having an identical twin sister. I followed her gaze to the other table and watched as her entire personality changed instantly in front of my eyes. She shook her head, tossing her hair as she smothered a giggle. Alex winked, and I swore she blushed.

  “You’re good, right?” Maddy asked over her shoulder as she danced away. I didn’t bother to answer. I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  “You gonna sit?” Josh asked.

  “What?”

  “I said are you going to sit?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  I pulled out a chair a safe three seats away from him and sat down. I didn’t speak, just focused on my food, confused and hurt that I’d been dumped—literally dumped—by my own sister.

  Three years later I was still sitting at that same table with Josh, but now my sister’s exclusion didn’t bother me.

  3

  I parked as close to Alex’s house as I could, which was still fifteen cars away. I could hear the music now, the faint thump of the bass echoing through the windows. Out of habit, I locked the car. Not that anybody would think to steal it. My sister’s ten-year-old Honda was nothing special compared to the shiny new toys parked around it. That, and nobody messed with anything that belonged to Alex Furey. And my sister most definitely belonged to him.

  I followed the music up the walkway. The front porch was littered with plastic cups and empty pizza boxes, the occasional soda can tossed in between. I made my way up the stairs, careful not to look at the two kids making out on the railing, and opened the door to the house.

  I don’t know what hit me first, the music or the smell, but both sent me in search of clean air. Three steps and the stench of perfume, pot, and sweat finally cleared. The pounding in my head … well, that dulled to a tolerable level. I hadn’t been to a party like this since I was a freshman and Mom paid Maddy to take me out with her. Something about me needing to make friends. Since then, I’d spent plenty of time running pick-up duty but had done my best to avoid ever having to enter into this social scene again.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?”

  His voice echoed over the drumming in my head, and I looked up to see Josh coming out the front door. I thought about asking him the same question—he wasn’t exactly top man on his cousin’s list—then I remembered his parents were away, Alex’s with them. A family vacation that didn’t include kids.

  Surprisingly, both sets of parents thought it wiser if Josh and Alex stayed together while they were gone. My guess was that that had nothing to do with Josh’s parents and everything to do with Alex’s father wanting to make sure his son didn’t trash his house while they were gone. Josh would stay to make his parents happy, but there was no way he’d run babysitting duty for his uncle.

  “Looking for Maddy,” I said. “She called and said she needed a ride home.”

  “Stay for a while and hang out with me. I brought some movies from home. We can watch them upstairs.”

  He’d been bugging me for weeks to spend more time with him, but I’d been obsessed with my art school application and passing AP Physics. Plus, he had Kim now, and she was more than willing to occupy every second of his time.

  “Can’t,” I said. “I’m beat and we have a Physics test on Monday. Kinda hoping for something better than a B on this one.” More accurately I needed an A to make up for the F Maddy scored me last week.

  Josh shrugged, the slight bit of hope I’d seen in his eyes fading away. “Sent my application in this morning. You finish yours?”

  “Yup. I submitted it before I left. Now we wait.”

  Josh laughed. We had planned this since the middle of freshman year. We’d submit our applications on the same day, to the same schools, then start obsessing about it four weeks out. When the e-mails finally came, we’d meet up and compare them. We’d go together or not at all. If one of us didn’t get in, then, as far as we were concerned, neither of us did.

  “Yeah, now we wait.” He held the door open for me, and we walked in. It took a minute, but once I got used to the smell, it wasn’t so bad. The house wasn’t overly crowded, but that didn’t make it any easier to get around. Nobody got out of our way, and we had to weave around people, furniture, and the occasional nasty glare to make our way through the living room.

  “No Kim?” I asked, smirking. She’d been clingy lately, complaining that he spent too much time with me and not enough with her. I didn’t see the problem; neither did Josh, but then again I wasn’t the one dating a sophomore.

  “Nope, seniors only, according to Alex,” he said, and I gathered from his tone that Kim’s absence wasn’t bothering him. He’d spent the entire day with her while I was holed up in my room finishing the sketches for my RISD application. Knowing him, he was probably looking forward to some time without her.

  I made my way through the house, irked when I saw some kid point in my direction and scowl. I could look and act exactly like my sister if I wanted to, had done it for years. But here, when I was being myself, I was a nothing.

  “She was in the kitchen last time I saw her,” Josh said as he pointed to the far side of the house. “But that was a while ago.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Why didn’t you offer to bring her home?”

  “She never asked,” he said, and I heard the inference in his voice. He would gladly have given Maddy a ride home … had she asked.

  I couldn’t help but look around as we made our way through the house. My sister had been dating Alex since freshman year, and I’d never once set foot in here. I’d picked her up at the end of the driveway plenty of times, had made it as far as the front door to ring the bell. But not once, before tonight, had I been invited in.

  I scanned the room, wondering what made this kid so special. If it was there, I didn’t see it. His house may have been bigger than ours, but the furniture looked no more expensive. The iPod docking station on the table looked to be a few years old. Mine was better.

  I s
potted the shadow of a girl curled up on the couch. She looked vaguely familiar, like someone I would’ve recognized instantly had the lights in the room not been so dim.

  She sniffled and ran her sleeve across her nose. I followed her gaze to the far wall, wondering what had her so entranced. The wall was blank except for the giant flat screen mounted halfway up, and that was off.

  “She okay?” I asked Josh.

  “Who? Molly?” he asked. “I guess so. I talked to her earlier, asked her if she wanted a ride home or something. She said she was fine and wanted to be left alone.”

  I thought about confirming that for myself. As soon as I found Maddy, I was leaving anyway. I could drop her off. I made a mental note to check and see if she was still there before I left, then headed into the next room.

  The kitchen was at the far end of the house and doubled as beer central. There was a keg on the floor, tucked into a brown trash barrel that I presumed was filled with ice. Two coolers stood by the sliding door and what was left of several pizzas littered the counter. There were people everywhere—jammed into the small corner between the refrigerator and the pantry, sitting on the counters, leaning against walls. They’d dragged the dining room chairs in so that they could fit twelve people around the table that housed a bunch of plastic cups and what looked like a Ping-Pong ball.

  I scanned the room twice looking for Maddy, listening for the sound of her voice. Placing my hands on Josh’s shoulders, I hoisted myself up so I could see, and still no sign of my sister.

  “She’s not here,” I said as I glanced at my watch. So much for my back-in-bed-in-less-than-a-half-hour plan.

  Josh looked around the room himself before moving toward a kid by the door. “You seen Maddy Lawton around?”

  The kid looked at us, then opened the cooler. He dug around in the slush before pulling out a hard lemonade. His eyes met mine and he smirked, no doubt too drunk to figure out that I was not my sister. I remembered him from Maddy’s Spanish class. Keith something or other. He sat next to her and had asked if “she” wouldn’t mind sharing the answers to the oral exam I’d taken. I batted my eyes, and in my best Maddy voice said, “Absolutely, darling. Anything for you,” then wrote the wrong answers down and slid them toward the edge of my desk. He winked and quickly memorized them, never once questioning who I was. Idiot.

  Josh caught Keith’s look and clarified. “This is Ella,” he said. “We’re trying to find Maddy.”

  “Ha! Well, that explains why she looks like crap,” Keith said as he walked away, not offering to help.

  I glanced down at myself, thought maybe I was wearing mismatched shoes or had a big pizza stain on my sweatshirt. I had on an old pair of jeans, a plain gray hoodie, and an equally dull jacket, and nothing was grossly wrong with any of them. Sneakers matched, too, so maybe it was my hair. I’d quickly tossed it into a ponytail before I left, then tucked it up under my hat. Perhaps I should have actually brushed it.

  Josh caught my hand as I went to smooth my hair. “You look fine. He’s just being a jerk.”

  Not wanting Josh to know how much the drunk kid’s comments hurt, I tried for a smile. I doubted I had pulled it off.

  “I wasn’t lying, you look fine,” Josh said again. “You always do.”

  I shook my head and watched as Keith stopped a few feet away and bent down to whisper something into a girl’s ear. She turned around, her gaze raking over me. Crap, Jenna.

  She walked over, a beer in one hand and the drunk kid’s hand locked in the other. The disgusted scowl she reserved for me was firmly in place. “What are you doing here?” Jenna asked. “I strongly doubt you are on the guest list.”

  “Where’s Maddy?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

  “She’s gonna flip when she finds out you’re here. God, it is bad enough she has to deal with you at school, but here…” She shook her head and trailed off, unable to find the exact words to describe her hatred of me.

  “Whatever. Where’s Maddy?”

  I followed Jenna’s eyes to the ceiling and groaned. It would be exactly like my sister to call me in a tizzy, then suck down two more beers and forget about everything. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jenna giggled, her hand playing with the blond hair at the back of the drunk kid’s neck. She was amazing, could go from mean girl to flirt at a staggeringly impressive speed. Yeah … me, I didn’t find it amusing.

  “You want to check upstairs?” Josh asked, motioning toward the stairs.

  “Uh … no,” I said, remembering the one time I walked into Maddy’s room unannounced to retrieve the calculator she’d “borrowed” from me. Mom was out at book club and Dad still wasn’t home from work, otherwise I doubt Alex would’ve even set foot in Maddy’s room. Dad made sure both Alex and Maddy knew the rule—no boys upstairs if my parents weren’t home and even when they were, the door had to stay open. Wide open. That night the door was closed, and I got more of a view of Alex than I ever wanted.

  “Let’s look outside. If she’s not there, I’ll check upstairs,” Josh said.

  I nodded my thanks and followed Josh onto the deck. What the house lacked on the inside, it made up for out here. It was quiet, the huge lawn sloping down toward the lake. I could see a shape I thought was a dock, but without a light, I couldn’t be sure.

  But what I could see clearly were two Adirondack chairs off to the side of the deck stairs. And if my eyes were right, someone was sitting in one of them.

  “Maddy?” I said as I approached. She was huddled into herself, curled up in a ball, her shoes dangling from her hands.

  “Maddy?” I repeated, shaking her gently. I’d never seen her like this—quiet and distant—and it was beginning to freak me out. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked up, and the fear that had struck me when I first saw her had nothing on the pain that lanced my heart now. The tears I’d heard on the phone were still there, streaming down her face as she struggled to compose herself. From the looks of it, she’d been sobbing long and hard, hidden away back here.

  I shot Josh a glance, hoping he could fill me in. He’d been here the whole time, was sleeping under the same roof as Alex. He had to have some idea as to what was going on.

  Josh shrugged, hunched down in front of my sister, and stared into her eyes. He waited a second for Maddy to silently acknowledge him before asking, “Where’s Alex?”

  “Inside.” She hiccuped.

  “Do you want me to get him?”

  “No,” she said, and stood up.

  She was soaking wet and shaking, her lips nearly blue. From the dampness of the grass and the puddle next to the deck, I gathered it had rained here, too. And by the looks of it, Maddy had been sitting outside, alone, when it happened.

  I doubted she was drunk. She got up without any help and didn’t seem to have a problem following my questions. She didn’t stumble or cover her mouth and swallow down beer-tinged bile threatening to come up. I knew what drunk Maddy looked like, and this wasn’t it.

  My guess was that the glaze covering her eyes was from her tears and nothing more. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She stared at me for a long minute, then shook her head. “Nothing. Can we go?”

  I had a thousand questions for her, but I knew she wouldn’t answer any of them. I thought about searching each room of the house until I found Alex and asking him what was going on. Somehow I didn’t think that would help. If Maddy didn’t want me to know, then she wouldn’t tell me. I’d hear about it on Monday at school, then get a completely different version of the story the following day. By the end of the week, I’d have fifteen versions of “What Happened to Maddy Lawton?” to sift through. But before I listened to any of them, I wanted the real story from her.

  I let it slide for now, more interested in getting her shivering body into the warm car than anything else. Tomorrow … tomorrow I’d start asking the questions.

  4

  I didn’t bother to take us through the house. I figured my sis
ter was out here by herself for a reason—a reason that probably involved her friends not seeing her like this.

  “You want me to follow you home?” Josh asked.

  I shook my head. His car was blocked in five deep, and if I didn’t get home soon, my father, and not my silently miserable sister, would be my biggest problem.

  “Call me when you get home,” Josh said, and pointed toward the house. A few people had found their way out onto the front lawn and were busy setting off car alarms. “I’ll be up for a while.”

  Yeah, he’d be up for the rest of the night working cleanup duty while Alex passed out on the couch.

  I got in the driver’s seat and looked over at my sister. She was slumped down into her seat, staring straight ahead. Her hair was damp, stringy, and hanging limply around her shoulders, and what little makeup she had on was now smudged.

  “Your mascara is messed up,” I said as I handed her a tissue from my pocket. It was damp from the rain, but that didn’t matter; it’d work better that way.

  She tossed the tissue aside and opened up her glove compartment, pulling out a small package of baby wipes. In three swipes, she had her face clean, every trace of her made-up face gone. Like this, natural, with no pretenses and no image to maintain, she looked a lot more like me.

  A shiver racked her body and she drew her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled, the faint tilt of the lips the closest thing to a thank-you I would get. My eyes shifted to her feet. They were bare. She was holding her flats when I found her. She’d probably dropped them when she stood up. I toyed with going back to get them, grabbing a coat of Alex’s for her while I was at it, but I didn’t want to waste any more time.

  I took off my coat and tugged my sweatshirt up over my head, then gave it to her along with my coat and hat. I was quite sure I was going to freeze my butt off until the heat kicked in. But she was pale and she was shivering. I didn’t know what else to do.