by Stacey Kade
Actually, if I were being honest, it was even worse than that. Getting rejected without knowing why was one thing. But I’d been in the light for nearly a month before they’d decided to boot me. Like there was some flaw with my character that was visible only upon closer inspection. Or someone had decided I needed a further taste of karma, and offered acceptance only to yank it away, just as Misty and I had done on occasion to those petitioning for first-tier status. At the time it had seemed almost a kindness to at least let them believe they had a chance when most of them didn’t. But now…now I saw things a little differently.
I didn’t think the light was vindictive like that—it kind of went against the whole principle of what the light was supposed to be—but who knew for sure?
Everything since my return had been one big guess, including saving Lily last month when she was dying in that broom closet and I was disappearing.
And what did that get me? Nothing but more trouble.
Whatever.
It took me a while to find my grave again. I hadn’t spenta lot of time here since my funeral. To be honest, graveyards are kind of, well, dead. The only people who come here are the living, and they are always respectful and fairly boring when here. The dead who are stuck in between have only each other and watching the living as their entertainment, so they aren’t sticking around places like this. Cemeteries are, in that respect, a good place to go for some alone time, for those on both sides of the great divide.
The other problem, I eventually realized, was that I was looking for the temporary placard they’d put up immediately after the funeral to mark my grave. But when I found the right spot, it was only because I recognized the headstone my father had special-ordered. It had finally come in.
Made of Italian rose marble with weeping angels on top, the stone was big and beautiful and a little obnoxious, standing about six inches taller than the stones on either side. But that was my dad for you. He’d given me the headstone he thought his princess deserved. Which was pretty much the last thing he’d done for me, by the looks of it.
The marble was dirty with clean splotches from the last rain, and the built-in vase was empty, without so much as a dried leaf hanging around. The grass had finally grown in over the bare dirt, but it was a tough old summer green rather than the baby stuff of spring, and it was starting to rise above the base of the stone.
Had my dad even been here since they’d put up the stone? It didn’t appear so. He’d been busy with Gigi, my step-Mothra, and the new baby on the way. His replacement daughter.
Tired suddenly and my leg aching, I knelt awkwardly at the edge of the new grass, careful to avoid sitting above any portion of my former body. That would be just too weird.
Neglect I would understand—had understood for years—from my mother. She was not capable of focusing on anyone other than herself, even now that she was trying to get better. Maybe even especially now that she was trying to change. She needed every bit of willpower she had to keep herself on track, and I’d seen all too well what happened when she went off the rails.
But my dad? I was special, his favorite. The one good thing that had come out of his marriage to my mother, or so he used to say. He spoiled me, and I would have done anything for him. And I had done plenty—corralling my mom into resembling a reasonable human being when he needed her for legal meetings or whatever, not complaining when he’d left me to manage our bills and the money we received from his monthly check, keeping my mom from pestering him every thirty seconds, taking the calls from the neighbors when my mom was parked halfway on the front lawn again so my dad wouldn’t have to interrupt his staycation with Gigi, etc.
He was always grateful, quick to tell me he knew he could count on me. That I was a “team player.”
Except I wasn’t. Not really. Because no matter how grateful my dad claimed to be, no matter what he bought me to say thank you…he never did anything differently. To be a team player, there had to be an actual team, people working toward a common goal. And all I’d had was one parent making a mess of everything while the other avoided acknowledging said mess, leaving all the responsibility to fall on me.
I cleaned up after him.
I froze, the realization ringing through my head loud and clear. Yes, my mother had needed me to take care of her alcohol-induced messes…but my father had needed me to take care of her so he’d have the luxury of avoiding it. He’d used me, every bit as much as my mom had.
I felt sucker punched. He’d dumped his responsibilities on me and then forgotten all about me as soon as I was gone. Buying one pretty headstone was all it took for his guilt to be assuaged, apparently.
My mother had long accused him of always chasing after the newest, shiniest object in the vicinity without feeling or regret, be it the latest car, gadget, or wife. I’d thought being “special” had exempted me from that. Guess not.
With effort, I leaned over and yanked some of the too-tall grass away from the base of my ridiculous headstone, my eyes stinging suddenly.
This is why people shouldn’t stick around after they die. It’s lonely and miserable, and it makes you think too much. Or, if you have to stick around because of unresolved issues, then you sure as hell shouldn’t be sent back after you’ve addressed them. I mean, what is that about?
I tossed the loose blades of grass away, but the breeze caught them and sent them fluttering across my grave, just as it would the leaves in a few months and then the snow after that.
I pictured my former self snug in the white casket in the ground below, immune to all the drama and chaos going on up here. And for a second, I wished I was with her. Just gone.
“Why am I here? Why did you send me back?” I asked for probably the millionth time in the last two months, this time aloud instead of in my head.
But the answer was the same. Silence.
Of course. Because that was so helpful these days.
I spent longer at the cemetery than I meant to and had to hurry to get back home before Mrs. Turner and Tyler returned. Still, hurrying or not, I should have known something was wrong the second I reached my bedroom window. If I’d stopped and thought about it, I would have remembered that I’d left the window open, and it was now closed. I might have checked things out before barging in.
But my brain was on a constant loop of unhappy thoughts, and I was in a rush. So, it was only after I’d pried the window up from the sill—it’s much harder to do that from the outside than you’d think—and stuck my head into the room that I realized two very important things.
First, unless I wanted to end up on my face, it would have been better to start with my feet.
Second, Tyler Turner, Lily’s younger brother, was standing in the middle of the room and glaring at me, his arms folded over his skinny chest.
Busted. “I went for a walk,” I said weakly.
Tyler was the second hardest thing about this gig, coming in just behind Mrs. Turner. It wasn’t his fault, exactly. I had no idea how to be an older sister, any more than I knew how to be his older sister, specifically. He was three years younger than Lily (four years younger than me) and a complete and utter mystery to me.
Sometimes he seemed to hate all the attention his parents, particularly his mother, put into me. He constantly pointed it out when I answered their questions incorrectly (“No, purple is your favorite color”) or I didn’t “remember” something I should have (“But you hate mustard!”).
Other times, like when I had a headache (or found it convenient to say I did), it seemed to send him into a panic. He would sneak around to check on me every fifteen minutes, while pretending not to, or bring me a glass of water and Tylenol with an anxious frown.
I couldn’t figure him out.
But Tyler was the one who’d first noticed that something was different about Lily, the day that I’d first taken over, even before I’d grabbed his wrist. He saw it somehow. He knew his sister well.
And sometimes I wondered if he knew I wasn’t her.
That would be trouble. Big trouble.
Tyler shook his head at me. “You went out for a walk through the window?” he scoffed. “Right. Better not try that one on Mom.”
This is what I’d been missing by not having siblings? No thanks. My only experience with younger brothers came from being around Misty and her family. But her half brothers were still in diapers, and the worst they ever did was steal a lipstick to use as a crayon.
I sighed and backed out of the window, preparing to climb in properly. If he was going to sound the alarm, I wanted to be inside, at least.
In an awkward motion, I swung my bad leg and then my good one over the sill. I grimaced, bending my head to fit beneath the frame, and let myself down in a barely controlled fall to the floor. The impact sent a jolt of pain through my injured leg, and I stumbled forward a step, bumping into the desk. The desk lamp and a bunch of books and magazines crashed to the ground.
“Shhh!” With a quick glance at my bedroom door, which was half open, Tyler edged closer to me. “Do you know how close it was?” he demanded in an undertone. “Mom sent me down here to tell you we were back early. What if she’d come down here herself instead?”
I stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. So he wasn’t going to tell on me? “She would have been pissed?” I felt that was a fairly safe—and true—answer.
Now it was his turn to stare at me. “What is wrong with you? Of course she would have been—” Tyler shook his head impatiently. “Never mind. You didn’t even tell me you were going this time.”
He sounded almost…hurt. I shifted, uncomfortable. I really wanted to sit down, take the weight off my leg, but obviously he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon without some kind of conversation. Great.
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to piece all of this together and come up with some kind of Lilyesque response. Clearly, because Tyler and I had never had a discussion about my sneaking out before, he and Pre-Coma Lily must have. So, wait, Pre-Coma Lily had been sneaking out? Where? Why? I knew she wasn’t perfect, but this went even beyond what I’d suspected. Then again…Lily had “dated” Ben Rogers for a while, and he wasn’t exactly the show-up-at-the-front-door-and-meet-and-greet-with-the-’rents type. Kind of interfered with his whole pillage-and-plunder-the-naive-but-willing plan.
But she hadn’t mentioned sneaking out to meet him in her diary. Then again, maybe Lily was brighter than I’d given her credit for. It was one thing to describe a date you probably weren’t supposed to be on; another to spell out in big bold letters the specific crimes for which you could be punished if a parent went snooping. Besides, everything she wrote about back then was Ben-related. The getting-out-of-the-house part probably hadn’t been all that important to her.
I realized Tyler was still waiting for a response. “Uh, sorry?” I offered.
“Forget it,” he muttered. He plopped himself down on the edge of my bed.
Fabulous. Was there a polite way to say “Get out”? How would Lily have said it? She probably wouldn’t have. For all I knew, she and Tyler had been best buds, blah, blah, blah. You know, it would have been so helpful if Lily had written about this kind of stuff in her freaking diary instead of pages full of her name intertwined with Ben’s in every conceivable fashion.
“So, were you with Ben and those guys?” Tyler asked.
Aha, I knew it!
“Not this time,” I said carefully. “Just visiting some other friends.”
He nodded. “Don’t forget, though, Ben said that one time he’d let me try driving his car.”
Um, okay. I didn’t know what to say to that.
Tyler looked so hopeful…and relentlessly dorky with the cowlick at the back of his head and his oversized polo shirt (orange, this time) and khakis. I had no idea why Mrs. Turner kept dressing him like a middle-aged golfer, or why he let her.
Huh. By comparison, Lily was the cool one in this family.
I straightened up a little as the realization dawned. Wow. That kind of explained a lot. Tyler was a geek and two weeks shy of starting high school. Hanging out with Ben, then, last year, even with his older sister along for the ride, must have seemed like the epitome of awesomeness.
Except…what kind of sister introduces her younger brother to an ass like Ben? And why would Tyler still want to hang out with him after what Ben had put Lily through?
Ben had been part of my crowd at school, but we certainly weren’t friends. He thought way too much of himself, nice body or not. He was slick and incredibly skilled at putting on the charm until he got what he wanted. Which, to my mind, wasn’t fair. Why give people—specifically girls with ridiculously low self-esteem—such hope? It was no challenge. Ben won every time…including with Lily.
From what I could tell in her diary, Lily had still been hoping for some kind of long-term thing with Ben all the way up to the end. Her final entry was about getting ready for that last party, the one where he’d publicly and brutally humiliated her and she’d driven off in tears…and crashed her car.
I bit my lip. Was it possible Tyler didn’t know the full story about what happened with Ben or at the party? I wasn’t even sure if her parents did. So, in Tyler’s mind, maybe Ben was still the good guy Lily had built him up to be. Ugh.
“Maybe next time,” I said to Tyler finally. That was the easiest answer. Telling him that Ben and Lily had broken up would only bring on a barrage of questions that I didn’t have the energy or information to answer in a Lilylike fashion. And since there was no way I was going near Ben Rogers in this body, and even less of a chance of my bringing Tyler…problem solved.
Tyler looked at me strangely. Probably because it was taking me about two minutes too long to respond to everything he said, but, hello! I had no idea what he was talking about most of the time. He should have been taking it easier on his potentially brain-damaged sister.
“You still owe me twenty bucks,” he said after a long moment, his head cocked to the side in evaluation.
“Yeah, right. Twenty bucks for what?” Feeling my patience evaporating along with my strength—God, who knew siblings were so much work?—I limped my way over to the desk chair, turned it around, and lowered myself into it with a sigh. It was wooden, old, and hideously uncomfortable, but still better than standing.
“For playing lookout? For keeping Mom away?” He threw his hands up in exasperation. “I had to tell her you were in the bathroom.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a terrible idea. What if I hadn’t shown up when I did? You were going to tell her I was in the bathroom for hours?”
He popped up from the bed, face all red with fury. “Well, if you’d told me you were going to be gone, like you’re supposed to, then it wouldn’t have happened that way, would it?”
Oh, so there we go. The final piece clicked into place. Lily used him as her cover when she sneaked out, and she paid him. Got it.
“Twenty bucks to cover for me when I’m gone, and all I have to do is tell you I’m leaving. That seems fair,” I said cautiously. I could really use a setup like that when I went to Misty’s. And yet, looking at Tyler’s wary expression, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something—everything—wrong. You’d think I’d have been used to that sensation by now, but I wasn’t. “I don’t have any money right now, though. Can I owe you or—”
He made a frustrated sound and looked away, seemingly close to tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed. Somewhere along the way I’d stepped in it again, apparently.
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, his voice breaking and his fists clenched at his side. “Who are you?”
I froze. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s like you don’t remember anything. You’re not even the same person—”
I gritted my teeth, feeling my grip on my temper start to slide. “Look, I said I would give you the money, but—”
“When have you ever given me money?” he shouted, flinging his skinny arms out wide.
“You always tell me no! Just like you always tell me that Ben was only being nice and didn’t mean it about driving.”
I gaped at him. “Were you testing me?” The little creep!
“No!” He swiped the back of his hand against his face. “I was just—”
“Then why were you asking when you know I always say no?” I asked, starting to get angry. This was hard enough without someone deliberately setting me up.
“Because that’s what the two of you do,” Mrs. Turner said from the doorway.
Tyler and I jumped in surprise, and it took everything I had not to look back at the window, which was still open, and the desk in the wrong place. It all screamed “unauthorized exit.” And how much of our conversation had she heard?
“You argue back and forth over silly things. That’s what you’ve always done,” she said to me. Then she turned her attention to Tyler. “Ty, baby, remember we talked about this?” She stepped into the room and pulled him to her in a sideways hug. “Personality changes, memory loss, it can all be part of your sister’s condition. We need to accept the differences until she finds her way back.”
But looking at me over the top of his head, she frowned, seemingly less than convinced suddenly.
Great. I felt a swell of frustration. This was all I needed: one more person watching my every move, holding it up to the Lily standard, a level of imitation I would never be able to attain.
Tyler pushed away from her, sniffling loudly, and fled the room. Mrs. Turner watched him go, with a sigh. After a second his feet thudded up the steps, and the door to the upstairs creaked open and then banged shut.
Mrs. Turner turned back to me, looking weary. “I know things are difficult for you,” she said. “But we’re trying, Lily…Ally. It would be nice if you could, too.”
I jerked back as if she’d slapped me. “I am trying,” I said through gritted teeth. In fact, all I ever did was try.
She shook her head. “You don’t want to talk to us.”
Because I kept saying the wrong things, which only upset everyone even more.