Page 18

I’ve never been a cowboy in a western before, but I imagine a showdown in it is something like this: all three Brighton sisters standing around the kitchen table, Hadley armed with a box of tissues, Marley with the same large pack of bubble gum chewed throughout the mostly silent drive back home, and me with the last functioning brain cell in my head after this long week.

I know what I would have done a few weeks ago. I would have lowered my voice into a calming, easy lilt and suggested we all sit down. I might have suggested we all have some tea. I would have neutralized everyone’s feelings and laid out some constructive talking points and offered advice.

“You know what?” I say instead. “Fuck it. Backyard.”

Marley’s brows raise in surprise, and Hadley blurts “Why?” before seemingly getting mad at herself for breaking her vow of silence.

“Because we’re taking this to the haunted house.”

Among my dad’s pet projects that should perhaps have never seen the light of day is his attempt at building us a playhouse in the backyard. “Playhouse” is a generous word for what is more like a condemned pile of loosely constructed planks that looks so haunted that ghosts have probably looked into leasing it—hence, the haunted-house moniker it got ten years ago, the first and last time any of us bothered to go inside.

Meowtwo looks very miffed to be disturbed from his perch when I open the “door” (also a generous word) to let us in. I do a quick scan and decide that despite looking like the scene of a crime in a show about a suburban murder, it is structurally sound enough for us to sit.

“Park it,” I tell them.

I can tell Hadley wants to complain but is still stubbornly freezing me out. Marley dusts off a plastic chair and gingerly sits.

“First order of business: Hadley, you’re pissed at me and Seb. Have it out.”

Her cheeks go pink, and she crosses her arms, stubbornly tilting herself away from me. I take a step toward her so I’m directly in her eyeline again.

“Nope,” I tell her. “You’ve got about ten seconds before I get the ghost that haunts this place to start rattling it out of you instead.”

She blinks, stunned by either the bluntness, the ridiculousness, or both.

“Sadie’s in bad-bitch mode now,” Marley explains. “I’d listen to her if I were you. She’s not fucking around.”

Hadley scowls, turning to me and then Marley and then back to me before blurting, “You lied to me. You let me think you and Seb were best friends when you hated each other the whole time.”

“Oh, please. They didn’t lie,” says Marley. “People living on space stations could see their mutual hatred from orbit.”

“Helping or hurting?” I ask pointedly, before turning back to Hadley. “Seb and I don’t hate each other. We had some— issues with each other, and we’re working on them. But you know what? I’m not going to be sorry about not telling you, because we didn’t tell anyone, and what goes on between me and Seb is frankly nobody’s business but ours.”

“Ooh, spicy,” Marley says.

“How is that not my business?” Hadley demands.

“Because not everything is your business, Hadley,” I tell her firmly, refusing to yield. I know her well enough to know that whatever is going on with me and Seb isn’t the real issue here, and the less I entertain it, the faster we’ll get to the heart of it. “And not to give a cliché ‘child of divorce’ talk here, but we both love you very much and that will never change, even if one of us ends up banishing the other in a rocket to that space station.”

Hadley’s scowl is still fixed on her face, but wobbling. “I just don’t like not knowing things,” she says.

I let myself soften, plunking myself into the plastic chair next to her, which by some mercy doesn’t crack in half and drop me on the ground.

“I know,” I tell her. “High school is a big change, and jumping onstage for the first time probably feels like an even bigger one. But you’ve got a whole lot of really great things in your life that aren’t going anywhere.”

Hadley finally looks at me again, and this time I can tell the near tears are genuine. “What if Seb does?” she asks in a small voice.

“Oh, Hads,” I say, wrapping an arm around her. She leans into it all at once, like she was just waiting for an excuse to let her guard down all week. “I promise you. If there was something I could do to scare Seb off this family, it would have happened a thousand times over by now.”

She lets out a sniffling laugh. Marley surprises me then by shifting her chair to be on Hadley’s other side, wrapping an arm around her and settling it on top of mine.

“Can confirm,” she says. “When they were in middle school I watched her direct Christina to change his laptop settings so any time he typed the letter ‘n’ it automatically spelled out the words ‘NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP, NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN’ right before their final papers were due.”

“Aw,” I say fondly. “He was humming that song against his will for a month, poor little dude.”

Hadley pulls in one of those breaths that’s on the verge of a sob and leans into us both. “It’s weird with both you and Seb gone.”

I use my free hand to push her wild curls out of her face before they get snotted up. I know a big cry coming when I see one. But before I can say anything, Marley gives Hadley a little squeeze.

“Yeah, well. You’ve still got me, pipsqueak,” she says.

Hadley cuts a doubtful glance at me, one that Marley doesn’t miss. Marley takes it on the chin and doesn’t let Hadley go.

“I’m not full of nuggets of wisdom like Responsibility Barbie over here,” she says. “But I’m here to listen. And/or help you get revenge on enemies.”

“Maybe we table that for now,” I cut in.

“Bethany called my flower jeans babyish,” says Hadley.

Marley nods solemnly. “Bethany’s on notice.”

I decide to brush past that mildly concerning development for now and turn to Hadley. “Text Seb, okay? He’s having a rough week and he misses you, too. All of us, for some reason.”

Hadley nods, sitting up at attention at once like a girl on a mission. “I’m gonna call him right now before dinner.” She bounces up to her feet. “Am I excused from the haunted house?”

“Class dismissed,” I confirm.

Hadley leans in to hug me, squeezing me hard. “You know, I don’t mind bad bitch Sadie,” she says into my ear.

“Um…”

Marley shrugs. “She’s fourteen. She’s allowed to say ‘bitch’ in the haunted house.”

I nod. “Fair enough.”

Hadley exits through the “door,” but neither of us makes a move to get up.

“So you knew about me and Seb the whole time, huh?” I ask.

Marley leans back in her chair, a little rueful and a little smug. “Yeah. I also knew the two of you were going to come to your senses and start making out eventually. How’s that going?”

I wince. “Oh. It’s not. Going, I mean.”

Marley leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees and making a “come at me” gesture with her hands. “Okay. I don’t know how well I’m gonna do this whole ‘sisterly advice’ thing, but hit me and I’ll give it a shot.”

I want to. I really do. The guilt of my revelation about Seb has been hanging over me like a heavy curtain all through the drive home and this entire talk. But it feels too raw to say it out loud. I have a feeling that whatever answers I need, they’re the kind I have to find on my own.

“Actually, I think—I’m good on that front.”

Marley nods, blinking fast but not fast enough to cover up the quick streak of hurt. I’m used to her being so distant that in my eyes, she was always bulletproof. It’s strange to be here one-on-one with her, close enough that I can see the cracks in her, that she can see mine.

“But I was wondering—there’s this thing with Christina.”

Marley’s eyes are back on mine fast, the relief in them as quick as the hurt, but unmistakable. “Yeah?”

“I’m part of this movement on campus to try and restructure the budgets for student activities—better resources and more transparency for the athletes, and more money for student-run things in general. Christina’s really upset because she thinks it might affect the scholarship students.”

“Well, will it?” Marley asks.

“I really don’t think so. But it’s more than that. She’s just—so stressed. And I think if we manage to get this restructure, it’ll help her in the long run. But I don’t know how to help her right now.” My hands are practically in a knot in my lap, I’ve been wringing them so much. I imagine my face looks every bit as tangled when I look over at Marley and admit, “What’s worse is we kind of got into it before I left. And I guess I was wondering—well, you were a scholarship student, too. And I know things were rough for you. So if you had any thoughts about how I could help without—shoving my foot in it again, I guess.”

Marley is quiet for a long moment, considering.

“Well, I hope your budget thing works out. Because I would have appreciated having people in my corner when I was going through this,” she says frankly. “I mean, I don’t regret quitting school. I love running my own business. But shit. They worked us to the bone. Sucked the fun out of the whole thing until it felt like I didn’t have a choice but to leave, or I’d just hate making art forever.”

My memories about that time are hazy. I was busy trying to adjust to freshman year of high school the same time Marley started her art classes. Or maybe it isn’t that my memories are hazy, but that she just plain wasn’t around much for me to remember. Even living together, Marley’s presence has always been a punctuating one—rare and loud and striking, then gone again.

But I do remember when my parents let me and Hadley know that Marley decided to drop out of school and that she didn’t want to talk about it. I remember being surprised, maybe even a little jilted, that something so monumental happened in the family that quietly—that it was fully handled without me even knowing about it.

“I think the best thing you can do is just listen and be there for her, and not offer too many opinions on the whole thing. Give her some space to decide what she wants to do without worrying what you’ll think.” Marley hesitates. “And maybe like, not mention the budget stuff for now. At least not until they’ve actually managed to do something.”

I bite my tongue before I say what I’m thinking, which is that I have been listening. I have been there for her. It’s just plain not enough.

She seems to see it in my face, though, because she adds, “Trust me. It may not seem like it’s helping, but it is. At some point or another she’s going to have to evaluate this whole thing for herself, separate from you or anyone else, and she’s just going to need you to support her either way.”

I nod. “Yeah,” I agree. I hadn’t gotten that far down the line in my head—to the part where Christina might have to make a choice. I’m so used to being able to fix things in the moment that it’s unfamiliar territory, trying to lay the groundwork for something that I can’t have a direct hand in. “I just wish…”

Marley claps an abrupt hand on my back, like she’s not going to let me follow the thought down. “I know. But you can’t go trying to hold the whole world up for everyone, you know?” she says. “You can just be in their worlds while you’re holding up your own. That’s enough.”

It isn’t lost on either of us that we haven’t been much a part of each other’s world. The understanding goes unspoken but not set aside. Our eyes meet meaningfully, and she twists her lips to the side, a quiet kind of apology. I twist mine back. Something feels settled between us then in a way it’s never been, in a way I didn’t realize was missing until I had it. In a way that feels more like being someone’s little sister than I ever have.

We retreat to the kitchen after that, where my parents horrify and delight us with a full-on cheesy-pancake casserole as an homage to the mug version. It’s terrible enough Hadley spits it out on the first bite, and when the mouthful lands on the floor even Meowtwo, notorious food snatcher, refuses to acknowledge it.

“Someone please save us from ourselves and get the pizza place on the phone,” says Marley.

I bounce up to get the coupons we keep on the fridge, but the landscape of our fridge magnets has changed again. It’s not just my Newsbag article on there anymore, but clips from our high school newspaper. Specifically clips from Jerry.

“How did you…?”

My throat tightens, because I know how. The clips are folded in a precise way that I’ve seen Seb fold study guides a thousand times. At some point either before or after Marley’s party he must have told them and then given them these clippings.

Clippings I have another version of in my dorm, tucked away in my desk. Clippings I had no idea Seb was keeping, too—that go far enough back that there was no way he didn’t know I was Jerry from the start.

“Oh, those?” my mom asks, a gleam in her eye. “Have you heard of Jerry, too? Very funny writer.”

“Went to your school!” my dad chimes in.

My mom grins, ribbing me as she keeps up the bit. “I think in your year? You might have had some friends in common.”

For a moment I’m too overwhelmed with a strange blend of relief and pride that I don’t know what to do with it. Even then I’m bracing myself, waiting for the inevitable—the Why didn’t you tell us about this before? I no doubt deserve. But my parents just come up to the fridge and start quoting all their favorite lines in a froggy-sounding “Jerry voice” they’ve clearly adopted in the past week until Hadley says, “Oh, god, please make them stop, I can’t listen to another whole night of this,” and Marley calls out, “If someone doesn’t order pizza soon I’m going to eat Meowtwo,” and then, as if on cue, Meowtwo leaps onto the nearby counter and scatters my mom’s Lego flower bouquet into a zillion pretty pieces.

We spend the rest of the night on the kitchen floor eating pizza and reconstructing new Lego flowers, talking through Hadley’s lines for her play and whether Marley wants to expand her photography business into weddings, cackling over our backstories for Jerry that get more and more bizarre with each iteration. It’s loud and it’s messy and it’s wild, and it’s imperfectly, perfectly mine.