Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
The living room is cramped, even for two people. A beat-up love seat we found on Craigslist sits against one wall, with a TV that’s more static than picture half the time against the opposite. There’s barely enough room to throw your feet up on the coffee table. I’d take the “party” to my room if Solina’s warnings about crumbs and ants weren’t still etched deep into my brain.
Old habits don’t die with the people who instilled them.
Tiffany and Dede head out at a quarter to ten. They leave me behind with kisses on the cheek and well wishes for the new year. All I give back is a mumbled “Drive safe” before I collapse onto the couch with my unopened tequila.
When it comes to television, the pickings are slim. An old-school sitcom marathon is the only thing that holds my attention for longer than a minute. It’s the type of stuff they’d play on repeat in the rec room at the group home. No one could be bothered to pay for cable, so we were stuck with endless reruns of The Nanny . Not that any of us complained. Fran Drescher was the closest thing we had to a mom the six months we were there. The group home wasn’t comforting, and I’d sooner choke than call that place a happy time in our lives. But the thought of Solina—blood warm and pumping through her veins—is enough for it to be one of the good memories.
Even the good memories make me feel sick. At a quarter to eleven, I stop fighting my conscience and pop open the cap on the tequila. Mother Goose Tiffany made sure to leave me mixers in the fridge, sodas and fruit juices, but I don’t bother. Why sugarcoat it?
Tequila comes with its own sour memory. I brush my fingers against the ink on my wrist. On our eighteenth birthday, we’d piled into Tiffany’s car with a handle of Casamigos and an appointment at the cleanest tattoo parlor we could find within twenty-five miles. With how plastered we were by the time we got there, it’s a miracle the tattoo artist didn’t kick us to the curb. The tequila did the trick, though. All we felt was the taste of lime and salt on our tongues as me and Solina sealed our bond with ink. A crescent moon on her left wrist. A sunset on my right.
So we could always be together.
It doesn’t take long for me to remember that tequila smells like trouble and goes down smooth. By eleven thirty the bottle is almost empty and dangling from my limp fingertips. Alcohol makes me see the world the way Solina saw it—colorful and bright and the edges never that sharp. Whatever sitcom is on becomes the funniest shit I’ve ever seen, and I laugh along with the audience until tears well up in the corners of my eyes, but never spill. Alcohol wasn’t Papi’s vice, but I can see why he fell so hard and so fast. It took thirty minutes for me to not be able to hold on to thoughts long enough for them to pull me down. Heroin would’ve done that in five.
With ten minutes to midnight, a broadcast from the fireworks show in Seattle takes over.
“Coming to you live from the Space Needle in Seattle, we at KIRO 7 News Seattle want to wish you a very happy new year!” A pair of newscasters in matching blue suits clink their plastic cups together, shivering against the wind and giggling as the crowd around them goes wild.
Wimps. Luster winters make Seattle look like an island paradise. I’d kill for a day where I didn’t have to wear three layers of socks to go outside.
Bitterness aside, I follow their lead. Lifting up my bottle in a toast, I down a shot’s worth of tequila in honor of the new year. The newscasters banter about resolutions as the countdown clock barrels closer and closer to midnight. He resolves to exercise more regularly. She decides to quit ordering takeout.
I wish resolutions worked the way we make them sound. That I could wake up tomorrow a new person, this awful year packed and shoved out of sight like clothes I’ve outgrown. Maybe then letting go wouldn’t feel so impossible. I could be the person people are always hoping I’ll become. The one who knows how to smile. Who can pretend my past was just a bad dream.
All the talk of resolutions brings on a wave of shame. Or maybe that’s the tequila. I don’t believe in resolutions, but if I did, I’d know where to start.
I want to find the person who killed my sister. I want to sink my nails and teeth and that dull switchblade into them until they feel what she felt, until they feel all the pain I’ve carried since that night.
Since the night I told her to leave.
Every year I have plenty of regrets. People whose food I’ve spit in, even when they deserved it. Stuff I’ve swiped when the cashier wasn’t looking, even though we needed it. It’s easy to justify not being kind when the world treats you like shit under a boot. But I can’t justify what I said to her.
Pieces of our last conversation ring in my ears until it feels like it’s coming from the TV, the pink-cheeked announcer sounding more like Solina with every passing second.
“I don’t want to go back there,” she said the day she was supposed to head back to campus. She was leaving early for an apprenticeship with her biology teacher, she’d said. We’d all been so proud, we didn’t mind the ache in our chests at the thought of celebrating the holidays without her.
There was a strange paleness in her always-rosy cheeks. I’d brushed it off as a cold, maybe the flu. She was wearing a sweater I’d never seen before. Cream with gold buttons.
“Where, the diner?” I replied absentmindedly, too focused on making dinner to pay her much attention. The heat was busted, so she’d tagged along with me to work every day that week for the sake of warmth. She spent my shifts tucked into her usual corner booth, nose buried in a book she had to read for an English class next semester. It’s still sitting on the nightstand, a Burger King receipt marking the place she left off. Reading isn’t for me, but someday I want to finish it. So I can tell her how it ends.
In the blink of an eye, she was beside me, squeezing my wrist until I dropped the knife I’d been holding. “I mean Kingswood.”
“What?” I snorted out a laugh, pulling my wrist out of her hold and flicking the tip of her nose. Our special, infuriating way of teasing one another. “Chickening out at the last second?”
But her jaw was set, her eyes as dark as the thin skin beneath them. “I’m serious, Lu.” When she inhaled I swore I could hear her heart rattling against her ribs. “I don’t want to go back there. It’s just been … a lot lately.”
Compassion hadn’t crossed my mind. I’m a lot of things, but empathetic isn’t one of them. I remember frowning, leaning up against the counter and crossing my arms. There was no world in which she was going to change my mind that night.
“So, what? You’ll skip your last semester and hang out here? Work the shifts I can’t cover for a buck fifty an hour?” I hadn’t meant to sound that angry, but we were so close. The possibility of everything we’d done—that I’d done—being for nothing made me bitter. Well, bitterer than usual.
“I’m gonna figure something out,” she mumbled. “Get a job. Maybe finish school from home. Or not, it doesn’t matter as long as—”
“Doesn’t matter ?” I scoffed, pushing myself off the counter, crowding her space. “Kingswood is all that matters, Sol. We’ve busted our asses for years for this school, and you wanna give up in the final stretch?”
“I’m not giving up, I’m just—”
“What is it, then?” My hands flew up in the air as I cut her off again. “Because it sure looks like giving up to me.”
“It’s taking a break.”
I don’t get to take breaks sat on the tip of my tongue, but I had enough sense to swallow it down.
Instead, I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing my anger to cool down before I let it get the best of me. “You can’t just take a break now. We already paid for the semester, and you know those stuffy assholes at the financial aid office would rather eat dirt than give out a refund.”
That didn’t deter her, but it kept her from meeting my eyes again. “Then I’ll pay you back.”
Wishful thinking. In my two-plus years of working full-time, I only ever had just enough to get by. Just enough for the rent, just enough for Kingswood, sometimes not even enough to pay for groceries. That’s where luck came in—generous people like Dede and Tiffany who gave and gave and didn’t ask for anything in return. I’d never ask Solina to pay me back for Kingswood, but that didn’t mean I’d let her waste it either.
“It’s one semester, Sol. If you leave now, you probably won’t qualify for that Hightower scholarship.”
Graduation meant another set of bills—heftier, this time. Kingswood was no joke, but neither were the kinds of colleges I had in mind for her. Ivy leagues, universities with locked doors that Kingswood could open. If she wanted to become an oncologist, like we always said, she’d need to be the best. Stay the best. Fields like science and medicine aren’t welcoming to people like us. Girls whose childhoods left them with scars and without family or money to make up for what our resumes lack.
The Hightower Fellowship was a bright spot in the darkness. A $250,000 scholarship awarded to one graduating senior courtesy of the Hightowers, a Kingswood legacy family as old as the limestone buildings. From the second I’d found out about it in the Kingswood quarterly bulletin, I’d hounded Solina about it. She was brilliant, a model student. Perfect grades even without all the privileges that come with a trust fund. More deserving of that fellowship than anyone at Kingswood could be, I was sure. All she needed to do was prove it.
“Just get it over with and you can figure stuff out afterward,” I pushed, unwilling to let this golden opportunity slip away from her—from us.
“Please, can you just listen to me?” Solina pleaded, tears gathering in her eyes. We stood toe to toe, almost nose to nose. Her cracked exhale was warm against my lips. “Can you act like you care for one goddamn second?”
Act like you care. All it took was four words to break me.
“No,” I growled, stepping impossibly closer to her. “After everything that I’ve done, that I do every day for you—this job, this town, this fucking life.” My voice echoed against the popcorn ceiling, making her shoulders tremble. “You don’t get to say that I don’t care.”
I’d never held my choices against her, because they were exactly that— my choices. There were still parts of our story that she didn’t know—the reason a social worker wound up on our doorstep six months after Mami died and Papi relapsed—because I was too afraid to tell her. To admit what I’d done, how stupid I’d been.
I did all of it for her—moving here, dropping out, becoming a parent because we’d lost ours—but none of it was her cross to bear. Because I was the reason we lost everything in the first place.
My response said everything she needed to hear. She grabbed her boots and jacket and stormed off without putting either on. We’d lived through enough Luster winters to know going outside without them was a mistake, but neither of us cared.
“Great, leave, so mature,” I taunted, because I was hurt. Hurt by what she’d said and that it hadn’t taken much to make her leave.
The next morning, she was dead.
If I were half the person she was, I would’ve gone after her. I would’ve seen the pain in her eyes and the fear I hadn’t noticed since she’d been home. She wasn’t the girl I knew anymore. She was pale and quiet and afraid. We’d had fights before. She had even stormed out once, too, when I told her I was dropping out of school to work full-time at the diner. But she came back that night.
She would’ve come home. I know that the way I know my own name—deep and unshakable. She didn’t come home because someone didn’t let her.
And I led her straight to them.
“Seattle, let’s make some noise!” a woman with an electric guitar and neon-green hair shouts before a massive countdown takes over the screen. Ten seconds left of the year, and I feel like I’m falling apart.
That doesn’t stop me from taking another swig of tequila, though, stumbling as I lift myself off the couch. The bathroom spins as I brace myself against the sink, nothing steady but the drip from the perpetually leaky faucet. The air is thick, so wet it makes my breath come slower. The radiator beside the sink spews steam at all hours of the day—our very own sauna. I take one last sip, polishing off the bottle. The clear liquid dribbles down my chin and burns its way down my throat. Nothing goes down smooth anymore.
“Five …”
My reflection lets out a belly laugh, mocking me for following in Papi’s footsteps so easily. Three weeks after Mami died, he turned to old vices for comfort. It only took me two. I wipe my chin with the back of my hand. The mirror doesn’t stop laughing. I hate how much I look like her.
“Four …”
Tequila holds my tongue and grief clogs my throat. It was that school, someone from that school did this to her. They were the reason she didn’t want to go back. And I was too caught up in my dreams of who she could be to see that.
“Three …”
Solina’s voice washes over me, her words wrapped around my windpipe. Act like you care.
That’s the problem. I cared too much. Now my sister is dead, and I need to know who killed her because I can’t live in a world where it might’ve been me.
“Two …”
She could’ve been great— should’ve been great—but I ruined everything. Long before that night I slammed the door in her face. We wouldn’t be here if I knew how to keep my mouth shut. If I hadn’t learned the hard way that you can’t trust every person with a kind smile.
My vision blurs, the edges of the world bleeding together. I lean against the cool glass of the mirror until the world stops swimming. When I pull back, a new reflection looks back at me. Was my face always this bloated? My teeth so rotten? My skin so bruised?
“One …”
The crackle and hum of the TV bursts into a symphony of cheers, party horns, and the opening chords of a rock song I don’t recognize. Seattle swells with excitement, and somewhere miles away, Tiffany and Dede will take shots to the future. Here, there’s silence. No one around to hear the crash when my fist hits the mirror. No one but me to hear the screams.
And when I blink down at my reflection in the glass scattered across the bloodied sink, it hits me.
Maybe what’s haunting me has been the answer all along.