Page 36 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

“Therein is the thing by which we’ll kill our King.”—Shakespeare, probably.

CHAPTER 7A Walk to Remember

Connor’s not the only one I kept my writing from.

I never told Harper I was writing When in Rome either.

It was hard keeping the secret, but it felt necessary. Ever since we were kids, Harper wanted to be a writer. No, she was a writer. She wrote short stories and poems and even a novel, all before she graduated high school. It was her senior superlative—she was the girl most likely to write a New York Times bestseller.

That was Harper, not me. I was, to put it bluntly, the family fuckup. The girl who didn’t try hard enough in school because I got good enough grades to get by.

I mean, why bother studying when there were better things to do?

I don’t remember what those “better things” were right now, but you get the picture. I was the one my parents shook their heads over, wondering what they were going to do with me. “Why can’t you be more like Harper?” they’d ask when they found me doing something bad, lazy, or incomprehensible to them. “Harper would never…”

Sometimes it made me hate her, but that wasn’t her fault.

Sometimes I hated them, too.

Then they died in a senseless accident, hit by a car while they were crossing an intersection near our house. The driver had pulled an all-nighter and fallen asleep at the wheel. My parents were on their way to their anniversary dinner. I was home “babysitting” Harper, though she wasn’t a baby, she’d always say with a pout.

She was the one who answered the door when the cops came to tell us. She called my name, once, in a kind of primal scream, and when I got to the foyer, I knew. I just knew.

Everything was different after that.

I had to be an adult if we wanted to stay together. So that’s what I did. I became in loco parentis, childhood gone overnight.

One night, a few weeks after they died, we were sleeping in their bed, hiding under the covers, scared of the sounds the palm trees were making as they scratched against the side of the house in the Santa Ana wind. I was trying to soothe Harper, and myself, too, to be honest, and we decided to come up with a code, a word that only we’d understand.

We chose “pineapple” because we both hated it, even though it was Mom and Dad’s favorite fruit. We agreed: If one of us said that word, then the other had to stop whatever she was doing and put the pineappler first.

It was a simple rule. One I knew I’d violated by writing When in Rome. So I hid it. I hid it until I couldn’t hide it anymore.

No, wait. That’s not true.

The truth is I hid it until I couldn’t do anything about it. Until I couldn’t take it back.

The book had started as a simple exercise—trying to make sense of what I’d seen and heard and done. Trying to get it all down straight. Harper was away in Iowa getting her MFA, and I was alone in the house for the first time. I was supposed to start an entry-level marketing job at my dad’s company after I got back from my trip, but I never turned up. Instead, I sat at my mother’s old laptop and wrote twelve hours a day, barely stopping for meals.

When I finished it, I showed it to my best friend, Emma, because it felt odd just putting it in a drawer after everything I’d poured into it. Emma’s an actress who’s represented by a big agency, and without asking my permission, she showed it to her agent. Then her agent showed it to a colleague on the book side of their business. When Stephanie called me to offer representation, I didn’t even understand what she was saying at first. But then she started raving about Connor, and I got it.

She’d fallen in love just like I had.

It all happened quickly after that. The book sold at auction in what publishing calls a “major deal,” and how was I going to say no to that? I didn’t have a job and I’d spent the last of my inheritance on Italy. The house was paid off when my parents died, but there were still property taxes and running costs. All this to say, I needed the money.

But I also wanted my book to be seen and read. I thought it was good. And all the excitement around it felt good, too. So right before the advance reader copies were sent out, I took Harper to our favorite restaurant on Abbot Kinney, ordered all our comfort foods, and told her. I watched her face react to the news as realization hit that I’d done it.

I’d stolen her dream.

“Pineapple,” she said when I’d told her the half of it.

And then, for the first time, I broke our pact. I didn’t stop. Instead, I shook my head and said I was sorry and made a bunch of empty promises about how it would be good for both of us.

But she knew better because, like I’ve told you before, she’s always been the smart one.

I’d stolen her dream, and that meant she couldn’t get it back.

That was the first time I realized I’m not as nice a person as I thought.