Chapter 35

"Do you think Ryan's cute?"Chelsea asks me later on the back porch, as Mila and Emily look on with interest.

I nearly spit out my gemonade—raspberry lemonade with a splash of gin. It's a bad habit, I know. I took my first curious sip when I was maybe around ten. I noticed that when I snuck a wine cooler from the fridge, the world around me blurred a little, and that included the quiet people. Fuzzy, like static. I asked my parents if I could drink a small glass of wine at dinner. I was careful never to have too much. Just enough to blur the edge of the world. But sometimes, in this house, that line begins to move further and further away.

Chelsea is staring at me, and I shake my head uncomprehendingly. No, I don't think Ryan is cute, and I don't think she's cute for asking when she still hasn't admitted to my face that they were together when I considered us to be on hiatus. Then I realize that the question is for Mila's benefit. The guys have gone off on a walk to "talk shit out" while the rest of us showered and settled down for snacks and decompression. My parents are busy upstairs getting ready to head up to Albany for some bar association dinner my father has to speak at. I'd hate to be important. It carries so many obligations. It's cumbersome enough being the perennial mediator. For once I'd like to be the impulsive one like Chelsea or live out one of Emily's romantic melodramas. I never get to misbehave. Even when we break the rules, I'm the one who sets the rules for the rule breaking. Okay, guys. No sex in my parents' room. No drinking and driving. Keys in the key basket. Empties in this cardboard box. No stray bottle caps! If you're too drunk to remember your bottle cap, you've had too much. Bottle caps, guys. Bottle caps.

"Not cute," I say with a quick look to gauge Mila's interest in the conversation.

But Emily is watching me closely. This whole conversation is for Emily. I know that Mila did consider Ryan and it was a definitive no. But in friendship, you commit to the part. I suddenly feel so exhausted. The lengths we go to protect one another's feelings exceeds the bounds of normalcy.

"He was cute five years ago," I add. "He's too intense to be cute now."

"True. Too mature for cute," Chelsea says, missing the ever so slight edge in my tone. "Chase is cute, though," she continues. "You know how some people are still cute even at eighty years old? Like they never grow up. Ryan is an old soul. I feel like he knows things." I hum a nonresponse. Ryan isn't the one who knows things. And his intensity has nothing to do with maturity.

"My mom always says he's an old soul," Emily says shortly. I raise an eyebrow at Chelsea, and she makes an oops face. It's a sore spot with Emily. She has a sort of inferiority complex where their mother is concerned. She'd lose her shit if she ever learned the truth about me. Emily turns to Mila. "Old souls or new souls? Which do you go for?"

"It depends," Mila says. "Is it a sexy old soul?"

"Good luck finding out. Ryan keeps his girlfriends secret. For all I know, he's a sex god." I take another sip and avoid Chelsea's eyes.

"He doesn't keep secrets from me," Emily says coldly.

Fuuuuuuuuuck. "Not from you," I say quickly. "And not because there's anything wrong with them. I'd probably choose the exact same lineup," I finish awkwardly.

Now everyone is staring at me. I finish my drink and look Chelsea in the eye, thoroughly annoyed. She doesn't look happy either. "To answer your question, I think he's sexy as fuck," I say. I shouldn't drink when there's tension in the air. There's no reason to believe it will ever make things better.

Mila looks back and forth between the three of us. "Did I miss something?"

"Not at all," Chelsea says. She pauses for a moment and then opens her mouth, and I just know that what comes out is going to lead to disaster. "Actually, no secrets between friends. You're our friend, now, right? Here's the thing. We all love Chase. He's the best. But we don't want to see you get hurt."

Mila laughs. "I'm not going to."

I eye her carefully. So far, she's presented herself as shy, timid, and kind of clingy. Now she seems pretty laid-back and confident.

"Chase and I are just having fun. You guys seriously have nothing to worry about. You're so sweet, though." She smiles and again, I feel so guilty.

"We're not at all," Emily says.

Worried. Sweet.

"Not at all," I repeat, the guilt approaching my breaking point, and refill Mila's glass with a quarter cup of ice, the rest of the tea, and a fresh sprig of mint.

Before dinner, Chelsea corners me in the bedroom. "What was that comment about Ryan the sex god and his secret lovers?"

"Nothing. It was out of line." One weekend. This talk can wait one weekend, until we're out of this house. Asking Chelsea about Ryan right now would definitely ruin everything. Because we are a powder keg about to blow—Chelsea and Ryan and me, Ryan and Mila and Chase, Emily and Chase and Mila. I am the one standing between the match and the gasoline. One wrong move, one wrong word, and boom. I feel the quiet ones watching, waiting for a mistake. There is anger in this house, and I can't contain it. But there are consequences when I don't. I've learned the hard way.

I was six the first time I angered them, when I brought Chelsea to the lake house, to her first tea party. There were more of them by then. The blue lady had introduced me to the backward girl, whose head was twisted around behind her. Then there was the woman on the stairs, who wore her hair in a long, dark curtain over her face. The crushed man rarely came to tea, but he was nice too. They all were, except for the dripping man. And we were safe from him inside the house. I thought Chelsea would see what I saw. That we could share my secret, that it could become our secret. That I would no longer be the one who knows. The knowledge was becoming heavy already. The funny way my parents had looked at me and questioned me when I talked about my "imaginary friends." The doctors and social workers they made me talk to. I learned to keep them secret. I learned that knowing was a weight to carry. I was sure that once someone else saw, when someone else knew, the weight would lift.

When we got to the attic, the backward girl stood by the window, her face turned toward the lake. The woman on the stairs hovered behind Chelsea. I was filled with dread. They were my friends. We shared the same spaces. They lounged upstairs while I played in the living room. They strolled in the garden while I roasted s'mores. I was sure they would want to be Chelsea's friend too. But the blue lady pointed angrily to the ladder.

Chelsea couldn't see, but she felt them—the blue lady's anger, sadness from somewhere else, another feeling I couldn't pin down. Her teacup rattled in her shaking hands as proof. Then in a blur, I felt arms hook around me and yank me to my feet. Chelsea screamed and scurried down the ladder, and I teetered dizzily for a moment, and then turned furiously to face the blue lady. I threw a teacup to the floor and shattered it. I smashed, stomped, destroyed, until there was nothing left of the set, and there would be no more parties and no friendship between us. My parents were furious. Chelsea cried all night, convinced that I had blown up at her unprovoked.

And in the morning I woke up to a headless Kennedy doll at the foot of the bed.

I didn't know it at the time, but my real mistake wasn't bringing Chelsea to the party. It was getting angry. They don't like anger. It's dangerous to test them on that. They began to fade after that night. I figured out the wine trick eventually, and they faded faster. I knew the blue lady had forgiven me when she began leaving me gifts and doing chores for me again.

But I never did find my doll's head.

"Can we just agree to let it go?" I avoid Chelsea's gaze now as I unpack my socks into the drawer. Tennis socks on the left, whites in the middle, brights on the right. A drawer for delicates, and one for denims, a closet of cottons, a shelf for wools. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Book, puzzle, doll. Eating, sleeping, towel arrangements. There is a harmony to the way we conduct ourselves. A way the hosts of the lake house find acceptable. It falls to me, and it's an intense amount of pressure. I rely on order. The rules. The way we have always done things. The balance that has made everyone happy. I follow routine because if something goes wrong, blood is on my hands. The rules of the house matter. Stick to the familiar. That way I don't forget one little thing and ruin everything.

"No." She folds her arms over her chest. "Not talking about it isn't the same thing as letting it go, and this is your grudge, Kennedy. Not mine."

The cold spills over me as the words vibrate through me. Your grudge. I feel ice in my veins, and even through the buzz of my drink, the walls of the room seem to stretch. Chelsea seems to fade backward somehow and I reach for her, but I'm already rewinding. I squeeze my eyes shut. It isn't my grudge, I think to myself. It isn't my grudge. I keep my eyes clamped shut as I feel layers of the present peel back like the skin of fruit, until I hear footsteps creaking toward me.

"Chelsea?"

"What?" She sounds irritated. Not quite angry. Not yet. They're becoming less forgiving.

The girl on the stairs walks between us as if we aren't there. Chelsea looks straight through her, and every hair on my body stands on end. The girl's long, tangled mess of hair covers her face as it always does, and I watch, spellbound as she pauses in front of the magic mirror for a moment, raising a hand slowly to her face to touch her hair with her pale, slender fingers. Her pinkie is obviously broken, stuck in an awkward, useless position, and I curl my fingers into a fist, phantom pain shooting through my hand. She bends down with a loud, knuckle-cracking sound and reaches for the drawer where I keep my hairbrush, and my breath freezes in my throat. I don't want to see her face. The long, dark hair always seemed like a protective curtain. As a child, I lay awake at night imagining what was beneath. Maybe it was a bare skull, or a mass of worms, or layers of exposed muscle like in an anatomy book. Now I can't imagine anything at all, and that's somehow more frightening than maggots or bones. The unimaginable is always the most horrifying. The thought of parting her hair and seeing nothing, the absence of anything, is the quintessence of my deepest dread. That is my fear of death described in one word: nothing.

This is the first time one of them has appeared to me, actually appeared in person, in years. They're getting stronger. But just as her hand touches the drawer, she suddenly turns to face me and vanishes. I stumble backward into the open balcony door, the handle digging painfully into my back, my heart hammering in my chest.

Chelsea steps between me and my suitcase and folds her arms, her brow furrowed. "Are you okay?"

I rub the small of my back. "Yeah. I'm fine."

She frowns. "Seriously, Kennedy. What was all that about Ryan's secret girlfriends?"

I shrug, deflecting. "Nothing. I was talking him up."

She glares at me. "The whole comment was passive-aggressive."

"You take his side in a conversation he's not even party to. Shocking."

"Because it's not just his side." Her cheeks are beginning to flush pink.

"No, to you, any comment about Ryan is a comment about both of you. Honestly, if I just met us, I'd think you and Ryan were together and I was the outsider." It slips out before I can stop it.

Chelsea's eyes widen and her mouth drops open. "I cannot believe you just said that."

I shrug one shoulder uncomfortably. "You act like you're better than the rest of us. Like our lives are trivial. I know Ryan calls me a spoiled brat. But he's the brat. He isn't as smart as Chase, as clever as Emily, and doesn't have as many friends as I do, and he acts like if he doesn't have something, it's morally deficient."

"And money, right? You and Chase are the stars and we're the nothings. Even Emily." She sits on the bed and pushes her hair back from her flushed face, her eyes bright.

"I didn't say either of those things."

"But they're true. Did it ever occur to you that that's what Ryan and I have in common? That maybe it's hard being dragged around by special people and being known as the guests all the time?"

"You're not…" I trail off. That's exactly what Ryan and Chelsea are. "But you're all guests here." Even me.

"But we're guests at Chase's in the Hamptons, too. And at Emily's art shows. At the games where Ryan is stuck on the bench. We are always the guests. And you know what? I'm not pretending to like Mila anymore. I do like her, and I do think Ryan is a better match. Because I love Chase, but I also love Ryan, and Chase already has Emily."

The words I also love Ryan are the only ones that register, and they slap me in the face. I take a moment to gather myself.

"I like her too. I don't know why we play these games, and I don't want to fight. But Chase doesn't like Emily and he's never going to. She's never going to give it up. It's pathetic."

Right then, the door swings open and my stomach drops. Emily and Ryan are standing there. Emily steps in and closes it behind her, leaving a stunned Ryan alone in the hallway. Her eyes are brimming, but she doesn't look sad. She looks absolutely furious. I push the sock drawer closed behind me. I should have locked the door. That's one little thing I could have done to prevent ruining everything. But some things can't be kept out, and an unimaginable cold sweeps into the room with Emily.

She looks at Chelsea and then at me. "I'm pathetic?"

I take a hesitant step toward her. "No. That's not what I meant."

"It's what you said," she hisses in a low, vicious voice. She takes a breath and lets it out shakily, the ghost of a cloud forming in the air before her lips. "I'll stay here tonight, but I'm leaving in the morning. But before I go, I want you to know that I think you are both terrible people. Chelsea, you went behind Kennedy's back for four months with my brother."

Chelsea's face turns white. "That's not true. Nothing actually happened. You're twisting things."

"You can paint it any way you want. You were together and you hid it and now you're lying about it. You kept it a secret, maybe because you were ashamed of my loser family, maybe because you wanted to wait around for the better catch and dump him the second she came around. And look what happened."

I study Chelsea. Her hands are clutching her knees to her chest, and her lips are trembling.

"That's not true. You have no idea what my personal life is like."

"Nothing is personal between twins." She turns to me. "And you lied about the heirloom. You specifically told me it was stolen, and Chelsea—"

"I never said Chelsea stole it!" I shout over her.

"Yes, you did!" She gets up in my face, and Chelsea scoots backward on the bed. "You can't change what already happened, Kennedy. You made me do it, and then you punished me for it because you always get away with everything since you know everyone is going to believe you over me."

"Liar. You're a liar," I say calmly. But I feel a rage swirling inside me that terrifies me. She is lying, and nobody should be allowed to get away with a lie like that. A friendship-breaking lie, a love-destroying lie. The kind of lie that takes people away from you forever. "Tell Chelsea you're lying right now."

She shakes her head, and the room seems to grow even colder. "No. I'm not letting you win, Kennedy. I'm not the pathetic one."

I place my hands on her shoulders and turn her toward Chelsea, but Emily whips around and shoves me backward into the dresser. It bangs hard against the wall and the mirror topples down, smacking me in the back of the head and shattering. Chelsea screams, and I crouch down under an explosion of pain. I'm afraid to move, afraid that there are shards of glass in my skull and neck, but I don't feel any blood or sharp slices, only the dull ache that you feel when you slam a body part into something hard. Chelsea lifts the mirror off me, the fairy carvings grinning impishly from the intricately carved heavy wooden frame, and helps me onto the bed as my parents rush into the room. The cold lifts, and just like that, our invisible friends have left us. Or maybe stopped caring. It's hard to tell sometimes.

"What happened?" my mother shrieks, combing her hands through my hair. She's a pediatrician and remains calm in every medical situation except the ones involving me.

"I fell into the dresser, and the mirror came down on my head," I say.

Chelsea looks at me, surprised, then nods. "It was an accident."

"You should be more careful," Emily says before she slips out the door. Chelsea stares after her, mouth agape.

I don't know why I lied about it. It just came out. I don't want Emily to get in trouble, but I think the bigger thing is, I don't want World War II. World War I was hard enough. We've already had shots fired, and I want it to stop. If this is what it takes, a little lie, even a lie about a mirror smashed against my head? I guess I didn't even have to think about it. Anything to avoid another battle.