by Leila Sales
“Sure, but—”
“ONLY POSSIBILITIES,” he repeated.
I pulled up my “how to be a better person” list and jotted down “save somebody’s life” as item number one.
“If you want,” Mackler said, “you could, like, push me off a cliff and then rescue me at the last minute, and then you’d have saved my life.”
“Sometimes I want to push you off a cliff,” I told him. “So I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Do you want to adopt an orphan?” Corey suggested.
“I like that idea,” I said, writing that down as well. “They could sleep in Emerson’s room once she heads back to school.”
“John Yancey is adopted,” Mackler pointed out, “and I don’t think of his parents as being, like, redeemed because of that.”
“What if Winter adopted two orphans?” Corey asked.
Mackler shook his head, unimpressed.
“Fifty orphans?” Corey said.
Mackler nodded. “Now you’re talking.”
“I don’t want to be, like, an orphan hoarder,” I objected. “Can you just picture those headlines? ‘Racist Teen Operating Illicit Orphanage from Sister’s Bedroom’?”
“I would read that story so hard,” Mackler said. “That is front-page Reddit material.”
“Maybe I could donate parts of my body to people in need,” I said. “My hair and blood and liver and kidneys and … What else do people need? My pancreas? What does the pancreas do?”
My friends were both looking at me like I was crazy. Like this was somehow crazier than pushing Mackler off a cliff. “You might need those body parts someday,” Corey pointed out.
And of course he was right, but there was still something in the idea that appealed to me, of cutting apart my body piece by piece, my skin and my brain and my lips and my tongue, giving it all away until there was nothing left in me for anyone to object to. Until I was just a pathetic collection of fingernails and veins, and everyone would feel guilty for their roles in tearing me to scraps.
“I know this is hard to believe, but you might be asking the wrong people,” Mackler said. “The most charitable thing I’ve ever done was give Therese Marcos a back rub this one time when she was having a rough day.”
“You didn’t even do that,” I pointed out.
“I know,” Mackler agreed. “But I thought about it.”
Give Therese Marcos a back rub, I wrote down on my list.
“Perfect,” Mackler said. “Problem solved.”
Then I saw Jason show up on the other side of the bonfire. He was holding hands with a girl a year younger than us, Trina Somebody. When he sat down on a rock, she crawled into his lap, curled herself into his chest, and gave him a lingering kiss on the neck.
So apparently the reign of Caroline was over. Now, it seemed, we were on to Trina. I wondered how long it would take Trina to turn out to be crazy.
“Will you guys please make up?” Corey asked, observing my glaring at Jason. “That would make you a better person, I bet: not being in a feud with Jason anymore. I need you to stop fighting by my birthday, because I want us all to road-trip to Disneyland together, and that’s going to be terrible if you and Jason aren’t speaking. You guys are going to ruin my birthday.”
“Your birthday’s not until next March,” Mackler reminded him.
“So what? At the rate those two are going, they probably won’t even make eye contact before March.”
“You’re going to be at college in March,” I reminded him. “You guys are all going to be at college in March.”
“Well, I’m going to come home for my birthday,” Corey said, like this was obvious.
I shrugged. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. Emerson hadn’t.
“Yo, I’m not trying to take sides, but have you tried apologizing to Jason?” Mackler asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “and he completely threw it in my face.”
“You could try again,” Corey suggested.
“He could try,” I pointed out. “I’m not going to beg.” I pulled my cardigan around me. “I’m going to go for a walk.” Being near Jason just made me feel sick. I tried to cling to anger, but mostly what I felt when I saw him was so much shame, and sadness.
I walked away from the crowds and settled myself in the dark, on a bed of leaves under a tree. I sat there for a long time. I had developed a real skill for being still and doing nothing. Some part of me fantasized about Jason coming after me, explaining, reconciling. But that didn’t happen. I waited and waited, and that was never going to happen.
When I finally returned to the bonfire, an hour or more had gone by, and I was weirdly proud of myself for not having noticed the passage of time. The singing had stopped, and the air was now charged with drunken drama. Somehow we’d gone from a hangout to a full-on party and I’d missed the transition. The night had gotten away from me. Corey and Mackler were nowhere to be seen—and thankfully neither were Jason and his new lady friend—but Emerson’s friend Jenna grabbed me as soon as she saw me.
“You should talk to your sister,” she said, clutching my wrist. “Something is going on.”
Jenna was a drama queen and a gossipmonger, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this. “What happened?” I asked.
She shook her head and widened her eyes. “She won’t tell me. She won’t talk to anyone. But she’s really upset.”
I didn’t blame Emerson for refusing to confide in Jenna. That girl could create drama out of thin air. One time she used a change in the cafeteria menu to spread the rumor that the principal was pregnant out of wedlock. (She wasn’t.)
Nonetheless, I was concerned. “Really upset” was not usually in Emerson’s repertoire. She’d seemed as chipper as ever when she’d brought me here tonight, and I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her since then.
“Where is she?” I asked Jenna.
She led me to a large rock. The ground below it was swarming with Emerson’s girlfriends, who were all buzzing among themselves about what had happened to their queen bee. And curled into a ball atop the rock, her golden hair dangling off it, was my sister.
I shoved the older girls aside and scrambled up.
“Go away,” Emerson said, her voice muffled. “I said I do not want to talk about it.”
I could see how this had scared off her minions, but it didn’t have the same effect on me. “I couldn’t care less what you want,” I said. “Scooch over.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at me with heavy-lidded eyes. “It’s you.”
She flopped sideways and I sat beside her.
“Ughhhhh,” she said. “I hate life.”
“You only hate life because you’re drunk,” I said. She stank of booze. It was an incongruous smell for my sister.
“Or am I drunk because I hate life?” she asked. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The drunk or the hatred?”
“The drunk,” I responded. “Definitely the drunk.”
“That reminds me…” Emerson looked around. “Where’s my beer? Bri said she was bringing me a beer. Brianna!”
“Hush,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you finished the beer Bri brought you, and then twenty other beers on top of that. What is going on with you?”
My sister was not a big drinker. She partied, obviously: when you’re as popular as my sister is, you’re obligated to party. Gatherings don’t even really count as parties until Emerson shows up. But she wasn’t usually in it to get drunk.
Or, at least, she hadn’t been. Maybe she got wasted every night at college and she just didn’t tell me about it.
“Everything is terrible,” Emerson said simply.
I was struck by the realization that I had no idea what was going on in my sister’s life. Ever since the moment she’d gotten home, she had comforted me and babied me and asked for nothing in return. Because surely what had happened to me was more dramatic than whatever was happening to her. But what that meant was that I had no clue what she needed now. A
ny of her friends down on the ground would probably do a better job than her own sister.
“Can you be more specific,” I said, “about what, exactly, counts as ‘everything’?”
“What?” Emerson said. She burped.
“Can you give me some examples of what all these terrible things are?”
“I don’t want to go back to school,” she said.
This was the ridiculous ranting of a drunk-out-of-her-mind person. Emerson’s life goal had always been to make it on Broadway. The way to get there, she’d told me from a young age, was to attend a college with a top-tier musical theater program. And that’s what the University of Oklahoma was.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t loving every minute of it. I knew she had gotten very small roles in their productions this past year, and that would have to be a letdown after starring in every high school production ever. I knew she thought one of her professors played favorites and did not count her among their number. I knew it was a lot of work. I knew she’d had a weird relationship with her assigned first-year roommate, and after the first few weeks at school they’d given up on even trying to talk to each other for the rest of the year. And probably other stuff had gone imperfectly, too, stuff I didn’t know about because when someone is leading a whole new life fifteen hundred miles away, there are some things that never come up no matter how many messages you exchange.
So maybe Emerson was thinking about any of those issues as she lay crumpled in a heap. But I also knew that she would gladly suffer through all of that and more if that’s what it took to make it on Broadway.
“Why do you think you don’t want to go back to college?” I asked.
“Because I like it here,” she said simply.
“Here, on this rock? It’s pretty great, Em, but it’s not exactly college.”
“I mean here here. I miss it here. Look at all my friends down there. They’re so amazing. I love them. Look at our city!” She flung her arm out, and I did look, down the hills and over the lights in the valley below. It was beautiful. She went on, “Being home is like: oh, yeah, I forgot, this is great. Why do I have to leave here again?”
I wanted to have sympathy for my sister. I really, really wanted to. She was clearly sad, and I hated to see her sad.
But as hard as I tried, my sympathy kept being drowned out by my jealousy. She had the options to go back to college or to stay here or to do something else entirely, and I didn’t. I had no options. And I would take a weird roommate and a biased teacher in a heartbeat if it meant that I could go somewhere and do something with my life again.
I didn’t want to feel jealous of my sister. I wanted to be on her side, and really find out what her issues at college were, and try to help her through them. How do you make yourself feel something different from what you feel?
Emerson rubbed her eyes. “I need to pee.”
“Do you want to go home? I can drive your car.”
“You failed your driving test,” she reminded me.
“Only technically,” I said. I had put off taking driver’s ed until after the SATs and after I’d been accepted to Kenyon. When everyone else in my year was working toward getting their licenses, I had been single-mindedly focused on getting into school, and I hadn’t had a minute to spare for such pleasure pursuits as driving.
It hadn’t occurred to me that by the time I took my driving test, it would be two weeks after The Incident and the officer would take one look at my name and fail me. She’d claimed it was because I hadn’t stopped for long enough at a stop sign, and I couldn’t prove that she was lying, because I hadn’t been timing myself, and anyway, she was the expert.
But she was lying, and denying me the driver’s license I knew I’d earned was simply the one way that a DMV agent could use her little bit of power to punish me.
Emerson swayed slightly, and I pointed out to her that, license or no, we’d be safer with me behind the wheel than her.
“Wowza.” She widened her eyes. “Look at you, Miss Lawbreaker. When did you turn into such a little rebel?”
Since I realized that there’s no point to trying to stay out of trouble. Since I realized that you can do the right thing and abide by the rules a thousand times, and people will notice only the one time when you don’t.
“We’re not going to get pulled over,” I told her, and then we both said together, “Kina hora.”
“Okay,” Emerson said. “I’ll let you drive, but only ’cause I trust you.”
“That’s your first mistake right there,” I told her.
“Wrong,” she said, beginning her wobbly descent down to the ground. “I never make mistakes.”
12
I steered a stumbling Emerson through the gauntlet of her friends, out to the street, and down the road until we came to her car. After I’d settled her into the passenger seat, I said, “Wait here for a second. I want to say bye to my friends.”
“Ooh, you mean Jason?” Her head flopped sideways to look at me.
Emerson harbored misplaced fantasies about me and Jason falling in love. These fantasies were not based in fact, which meant it was irrelevant that dating Jason sounded to me like a nightmare wrapped in a fancy bow. All Emerson could really see was that Jason was hot—which was, objectively, true—and she liked the idea of my finding true love with a hot person. “Jason and I aren’t speaking,” I reminded her.
Tunelessly, she chanted, “First comes not speaking. Then comes marriage. Then comes the baby in the baby carriage.”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t move. I’ll be back in a sec.”
I locked her in the car and headed back up the hill. I wanted to tell Corey and Mackler that I was leaving and then get the hell out of there. I didn’t know why I’d let Emerson talk me into going out tonight, or how I’d fooled myself into believing that hair and makeup could magically transform me into the sort of person who felt at home here—or anywhere, anymore.
I walked as quietly as I could, hiding in the shadows, so as not to attract the attention of any of Emerson’s friends. They would want to know what was going on with her and if she was going to be okay and if there was anything they could do to help or, barring that, any confidential information about her that they could use to make themselves seem important. Emerson’s friends exhausted me. I was not here to navigate them: I was here to find my friends, and then escape.
I saw a cluster of guys lounging on a felled tree trunk. One of them checked his phone, and his face was briefly illuminated. Jason. Not who I wanted to talk to, but if Jason was in that group, then maybe Mackler and Corey were, too. I sighed to myself and slowly edged closer—but stopped when I heard one of them say my sister’s name.
“Did you hear Emerson Halperin was having some kind of breakdown tonight?”
“Such a drama queen,” one of the other boys responded. They laughed, and I wanted to stomp forward, kick dirt at them, and tell them that they didn’t know my sister, didn’t know what she went through or how she felt, they only knew how she presented herself to the public—and that was them, they were the public—and how dare they judge her based on that incredibly limited understanding of who she was?
But I did not stomp forward; instead, I pulled back farther into the shadows, because I’m just as bad as everyone else and I wanted to hear what they would say.
“Drama queen or no, breakdown or no, she’s still the hottest thing to ever go to our school,” someone else said, and the rest murmured their agreement. I almost gagged. Are we seriously still in the twenty-first century referring to human beings as things?
This was one of the annoying parts about Jason. Corey, Mackler, and I hung out with one another, and sometimes with other people who were basically like us. But Jason hung out with us sometimes, and with his girlfriend of the month sometimes, and with his aggressively masculine sports bros sometimes. And who Jason was shifted depending on who he was surrounded by. When he was with us, there seemed to be no question that making weird, artsy videos was the
best and most important part of his life. But when he was out on the basketball court or in a group of guys like he was now, I felt silly for ever believing that.
It wasn’t like Jason changed completely every time. It was more like he just kept getting put through different filters.
“I’m so glad we’re out of that place,” one of the guys with him now said. “On to college girls!”
“Dude, if you think any college girls will have anything to do with you, you’re out of your mind.”
“What about you, King? You going to stay with your jailbait girlfriend even once you’re at Cal State?”
“I don’t know, man. We’re going to see how the summer goes. Figure it out then. How hard it is to do the long-distance thing. And anyway, Kate’s not jailbait.”
“Jailkate.”
“If that’s a joke, I don’t even get it.”
“Because you’re slow.”
“Because it’s not funny.”
“Admit that King’s girlfriend is basically a child.”
“They grow into themselves, though, don’t they? Even if it takes a while. Like Emerson’s little sister.”
My breath caught in my throat. Yes, I’d been eavesdropping, but I hadn’t known I was going to be eavesdropping about myself.
“Oh, yeah! Did you see her tonight? When she first showed up and it was kind of dark, I thought she was Emerson.”
“That’s dumb. They don’t have the same hair color.”
“You’re dumb. Have you ever heard of hair dye?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, Chase is right. Their faces and bodies and whatever are, like … well, like sisters, yeah.”
This was nothing I didn’t know. Emerson was like me 2.0. Me, only with clearer skin and shinier hair and a tighter stomach. Me, only eighteen months older and with a hundred percent more effort.
“Jason, you’re friends with her, right?”
There was a pause. I dug my fingernails into my palms.
“Not really,” Jason said at last. His voice was richer and more confident than the other guys’. Or maybe I just thought that because his voice was so familiar to me.