by Ariel Kaplan
“So what you’re saying is you want me to do less with him?”
“I want you to remember that he needs his main caregivers to be the people who aren’t about to move out of the house!”
“Oh. Great. Well, might I suggest, then, that you and Dad actually step up a little?”
“That’s not fair.”
“It is fair. You’ve always let Delia and me take point with Kit because you’re too busy. And now you’re complaining about it?”
She took a deep breath. “Your dad and I have probably relied too much on you and your sister. I’ll admit that. But in the past year, you’ve gone a little too far. I don’t know if it’s because Delia’s away or because you’re mad at her, but you need to realize that it’ll be easier on Kit if you start pulling back now, instead of just disappearing next August.”
“If Kit likes me better than you, maybe that’s because I’m the one who actually cares about his feelings.”
“Are you talking about the cat again? I can’t put his feelings before his health, Aphra!” This, I suspect, was because Kit’s face was still rashy, but it was weird….It would get better for a day or two and then get worse again, but the cat was there the whole time. It didn’t make sense.
“Mental health is health! Isn’t that why you’re spending all this money to send me to Dr. Pascal?”
“Ugh!” she exclaimed. “You’re impossible!”
“You’re just mad because I’m right.”
“No. I’m frustrated because this is what you do. You can talk your way out of anything, so you never have to confront the idea that you might be wrong. Because in your mind, you never are! Why consider the thought that someone else might have a point when you can win any argument?”
“I don’t win every argument.”
“You do. The truth is, Aphra, you’re too smart for your own good.”
“That is not a thing,” I said. “That’s not a thing that exists. So what you’re saying is that you want me to stop taking care of Kit now, because you think having me ignore him while I’m living here is going to be less confusing for him. What am I supposed to tell him? Sorry, bud, I’d like to help you with your homework, but it might have psychological consequences for you later, so get out.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Well, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying…I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“There’s your problem right there.”
She huffed. “Kit needs you to be his sister. Not…not a third parent.”
“If Kit thinks I’m his third parent, that’s on you. Not on me.” I went out the front door and slammed it behind me, only to realize that I was outside with no shoes. “Shoot,” I muttered. But there’s nothing worse than spoiling a dramatic exit, so I walked off to Bethany’s house barefoot.
I remembered, once I was about halfway there, that Bethany was having brunch with Greg and might not be back yet. It hit me when Colin opened the door.
“She’s not here,” he said, scratching his head.
“Uh,” I said. “Can I wait for her?”
“What, they don’t like you at your house, either?”
“Not at the moment,” I said.
“Huh. Sure, come in,” he said. He went back into the kitchen and sat at the table with a copy of Otaku magazine.
“I didn’t know you liked manga,” I said.
“Huh? Yeah,” he said.
“My sister used to get that,” I said.
“Okay.” He went back to reading. I went back to really wishing my phone weren’t dead.
“So,” I said, trying again. “What’re you going to do when you have to move out next year?”
“I’m going to move out,” he said, without looking up.
“But specifically.”
“I specifically don’t know.”
“I’m going to take a couple of classes at NOVA next year,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Am I supposed to be impressed with that?”
“I just meant, I could show you the catalog. If you want to see it.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
He stared at his magazine. I stared out the window. Finally, I said, “Do you have any gum?”
He got up and went back to the basement, leaving the magazine, which I happily commandeered. I proceeded to read the included bonus chapter of My Hero Academia.
* * *
—
Bethany came home about half an hour later, after I’d made liberal use of the Newmans’ Keurig. There’s something so obliquely wonderful about coffee any idiot can make, like, you don’t even have to wait for it. You just plug the thing in and away you go. And go. And go.
It does make it a little too easy, perhaps, to overdo the caffeine thing.
Bethany came in and saw me sitting at her table and pulled up short.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hi,” she said. She had her Cake Baby apron folded over her arm, which was when I remembered that she’d had an early shift at work and must have gone straight to brunch from there. She put the apron on the back of Colin’s vacated chair. “Am I late? For something?”
“No, I just kind of stopped by. I was hanging out with Colin. You know. He’s cool.” I held up the copy of Otaku. “He lent me his magazine and everything. I think he just stepped out for a minute.” Down the stairs I called, “Are you coming back up?”
He roared back, “Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?”
Bethany sat down next to me. “How was brunch?” I asked. “Did you get pancakes?”
I realized, belatedly, that I wasn’t supposed to know about the pancakes. She said, “Yeah, they were good. They were good pancakes.”
“So did you tell him?” I asked a little more forcefully than I meant to. “Did you say I love you? Did he say it? Did you both say it?” I sounded, I knew, a little manic. More than a little manic. I needed to care about a thousand times less.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t say it.”
“You didn’t?” I scooted closer. “So what was the key for? A diary? Al Capone’s vault?”
“What?”
“Oh, it was this whole thing in the eighties. They found the key to Al Capone’s secret vault and opened it on live TV, and guess what was in it?”
“What was in it?”
“Nothing. It was empty, and thirty million people watched them open it.” When she gave me a look, I added, “It was a better story when my dad told it.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. So what was the key for?”
“It was a box.”
“And in the box was…”
She pulled a silver pendant out of her shirt. It was a compass rose, pointing north toward Bethany’s face. “It’s engraved,” she said.
“I see that,” I said, flipping it over. It was engraved with Cyrillic letters. “He had it engraved in Russian? Did he tell you what it said?”
“I was too embarrassed to ask.”
“What?”
“I kind of…told him I loved it, and then I kissed him and then I bailed. I don’t know.”
“What? Why?”
“I thought I’d look stupid.”
“That literally makes no sense.”
“I just. I don’t know.”
“Ugh. So what does it say? Did you figure it out?”
She looked at me darkly. “I don’t speak Russian.”
“Google Translate,” I said. “Is your friend.”
“I tried that. What it spat out didn’t make any sense.”
I pulled out my phone and opened Google Translate.
“I already told you,” she said. “That doesn’t work. It’s just gobbledygook.”
She sat and wat
ched me enter the letters one at a time. “How do you have a Russian keyboard app on your phone?” she asked.
“Uh,” I said. “School. Thing. School thing. We were, uh, comparing Russian declensions. With Latin.” I have no idea whether she believed that. It made no sense. But neither did accepting a gift and then running away because you don’t know how to read the inscription, so Bethany seemed like an expert in things that make no sense. I finished typing and hit enter.
I lost you silently.
“I lost you?” I said. “That’s weird.”
“I told you,” she said. “But you got closer than I did—I didn’t even get the I part. I got ‘R lost you.’ ”
“You must have typed an R instead of an Я,” I said, and then realized I’d typed a character wrong, too—there was an o instead of a ю. I recopied the inscription and tried again. This time, the words did make sense, kind of. They were just in the wrong order. “You loved silence?” I muttered. “No, it’s…” And I didn’t finish because I suddenly saw what the inscription was.
I loved you wordlessly, without a hope.
She was right. It was perfect. It was the perfect gift for me.
* * *
—
That night, I was going through Sophie’s Instagram, looking at pictures of the party, while the sounds of Kit and Sebastian watching videos of other people playing Minecraft wafted up the stairs. There was Bethany, in my red dress, looking flawless and shiny and beautiful. There we were together, smiling, her with her colorless lip gloss, me with my matte red mouth. And then there was one of her and Greg together. They looked so perfect next to each other. He wasn’t looking at the camera; he was looking at Bethany, like he couldn’t quite believe this girl was tucked up against him. Bethany, on the other hand, was looking off to the side and laughing at someone else. That someone else, I’m sure, was me.
Delia, who’d somehow snuck up on me, snatched my phone out of my hands and flipped it around to look at the screen. “So that’s him, huh?” she asked. “Wow.”
I grabbed for my phone, but she held it out of my reach. “Looks like he’s really into her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
She handed me my phone and I turned it off. “Looks like you’re really into him.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Come on, you were mooning over that picture so hard you didn’t even hear me come in.”
“I was thinking about something,” I protested.
“Yeah, like how much you’d like to make out with him.”
“Whatever,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “If that’s your best retort, I must’ve hit closer to the mark than I thought.”
“I’m tired,” I said. “Some of us had to do something besides hang around and watch videos all day. I thought you had an internship.”
“It’s half days until next week,” she said. “Which you know.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Jeez, you really are off your game. How long you been crushing on this guy?”
“Shut up, Delia. And feel free to go back downstairs and get your creepy boyfriend away from my brother.”
“Our brother. What is with you?”
“I’m sick of you,” I said. “That’s all.”
“You know,” Delia said, “there’s no reason you have to go on like this. There’s nothing…honorable in keeping a face you hate. You’d meet someone in five minutes if you fixed it.”
“Oh!” I said. “Gee, you’re right! I, too, could turn myself into Frankenstein’s monster just so some guy will follow me home and do me in my parents’ basement!”
“You’re disgusting!”
“You’re a complete fake! Does he even know what you really look like? You think I didn’t notice you put away all your old pictures down in your room?”
“Those were high school pictures. I’m in college now.”
“Bull. Shit. You put them away because you didn’t want him to see them. You want to pretend you were born like this, because you know what’ll happen if he ever finds out the truth.”
“What? What do you think is going to happen?”
“He’s going to dump you!”
“No he’s not! Why would he?”
“Because you’re a fake! Because…because you look like me!” I waved at her face. “This is…it’s false representation!”
“Of what? This is what I actually look like now!”
“Yeah, now. But what are you going to do if you have a daughter who looks like you? I mean, how you really look. Are you going to start a trust fund to pay for her plastic surgery? How old will she be when you tell her she’s too ugly to exist the way she is?”
“I never said that. You’re being completely unfair because you know a hundred percent that if you were prettier, that guy wouldn’t be out with Bethany right now instead of you.”
“I hate you,” I said.
“Hate me all you want, but you know it’s the truth. I was never going to get what I wanted from the world looking the way I looked, so I changed it. And you can act holier-than-thou all you want, but deep down, the reason you’re mad is that you know I’m right. Your face is always going to be the thing that holds you back.”
“Get out,” I said. “Get out get out get OUT!” And I grabbed Delia by the shoulders and shoved her out of my room, slamming the door once she was on the other side. Then I flopped backward against the door and slid all the way down to the floor.
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true.
It was totally true.
I was kind of not in the mood for therapy on Monday afternoon.
Things were weird with my mother. I was not speaking to Delia, perhaps ever again. Greg, in Latin, looked toward me and then away so fast he might have given himself whiplash. He’d messaged me right after I’d thrown Delia out of my room, and I’d said I can’t talk, I’m in the middle of the 12th round with my sister, and by the time I’d typed I mean, brother, he’d already typed OK see you tomorrow and logged off, and that was bothering me, too.
Then I ended up five minutes late to therapy because I got stuck behind a garbage truck for three blocks. Every time I tried to pull around to pass him, he moved to the left, so I couldn’t. I hate when that happens. Hate it.
I flopped down on Dr. Pascal’s couch and took my mints. Four this time, because I felt like I deserved an extra after the day I’d been having. The week, I guess, would be more accurate. Or longer. I don’t know.
“So,” said Dr. Pascal. “That mood hurricane looks like it’s back.”
“I think it’s a typhoon now. Wait. Which is worse, a hurricane or a typhoon?”
“Same thing, different ocean.”
“Really? I thought a typhoon was stronger.”
“You’re extra cranky today, in other words.”
“Yeah,” I said, chomping my first mint. “Pretty much.”
She waited for me to elaborate. When I did not, she said, “Are you really going to make me work for this?”
“Fine. I had a fight with Delia. And my mom. And, uh, I think I kind of made a move on Bethany’s boyfriend, but it was an accident because he was teaching me the tango.”
“That sounds like a lot to deal with all at once.”
“Yeah, and I’m pretty tired now, to be honest.”
“All right. Tell me about it.”
I told her how my mother had accused me of overstepping my sisterly role with Kit, which was totally not my fault. And how I’d had a fight with Delia because she’d pushed and pushed on that Greg button until I’d blown up on her, which was mostly not my fault. And how I was annoyed at Bethany for not even being able to ask about her stupid birthday present, which was a hundred percent her fault. And how I was frustrated with Greg for not figuring out that I’d b
een the one with the Deanna app. I wasn’t sure whose fault that was. I mean, I guess it was mostly mine for not telling him. But maybe not completely.
“Hm,” she said.
“That about sums it up. So I assume you’re going to tell me I need to work on my anger issues.”
“I actually don’t think you have issues with anger. I think you’re feeling very hurt.”
I frowned. “I don’t hurt. Why are you saying I hurt? I’m not hurting.”
She tsked at me. “All that anger you’re feeling? You’re mad at Delia. You’re mad at Bethany. You’re mad at your mother. You’re mad at Greg. What do you think that is?”
“Anger is anger,” I said. “That’s why they call it anger. Because it’s anger. Did you ever think maybe I should be angry at the way things are?”
“If your anger was getting you to do something constructive, I might say yes. But it’s not. It’s just keeping you from dealing with the root of your problems.”
I ate another mint.
“Think of your emotions as a band. Right now, anger’s your front man. But your drummer? That’s hurt.”
I sure hoped she wasn’t feeding this bullshit to little kids. I picked up Cookie Monster, but she grabbed him out of my hand and said, “Leave Cookie out of this.”
“I’m not hurting. I would know if I was, and I’m not.”
“I think you do know. I also think you’re terrified to admit it, because your hurt is something you can’t control, so you like to pretend it doesn’t exist. But as long as you keep pretending, I cannot help you, Aphra.”
“Maybe I don’t need help,” I said. “Maybe you’re trying to plumb the depths of something that’s not there—did that ever occur to you?”
She sighed.
Well, great. Now in addition to being mad at everyone else, I was also mad at Dr. Pascal.
“Look,” I said. “This was not my idea. It was not my idea for me to come here.”
“No, but you’ve kept coming for all these months, and we both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be, Aphra. You want to get to the bottom of this. That’s why you’re still in that chair.”
“Or maybe it’s because I like getting out of school early. I mean, who knows, really?”